Most Hindu festivals are celebrated with light, noise and feasting. Maha Shivaratri is the exception. It falls on the fourteenth night of the dark fortnight of Phalguna, usually in February or March, when the moon is a sliver about to vanish, and it is kept by staying awake, eating little or nothing, and chanting through the night in temples lit by a few oil lamps. It is less a celebration than a long, deliberate act of attention.
Every month has a Shivaratri, "the night of Shiva", on the fourteenth night of the waning moon. This one is the maha, the great one, and tradition holds it to be the night when Shiva's presence is closest to the earth. Devotees from Nepal to Tamil Nadu to the diaspora temples of London and Toronto treat it as the night on which a wakeful heart is most likely to be heard.
Who Shiva is
Shiva is at once the ash-smeared ascetic of the Himalayan snows and the householder married to Parvati; the destroyer who ends each age and the dancer whose steps begin the next; the god who drinks poison to save the world and the god too absorbed in meditation to notice it. He is worshipped mainly in the form of the lingam, a smooth upright stone set in a basin, which represents the formless source from which everything arises. The lingam is not Shiva's body. It is the mark left where form meets formlessness.
Three stories for one night
Different traditions explain the night in different ways, and most devotees hold all of them at once.
The marriage of Shiva and Parvati
Parvati, daughter of the mountain, loved Shiva, but he was deep in meditation and indifferent to everything. She undertook years of austerity, standing in cold rivers and summer fires, eating only leaves and then not even those, until Shiva, moved, came to her disguised as an old brahmin and tried to talk her out of it. She refused, and he revealed himself. Many communities, especially in Kashmir where the festival is called Herath and lasts for days, keep Maha Shivaratri as the night of their wedding. The marriage matters because it is the union of consciousness, which is Shiva, with energy, which is Shakti, and nothing in the world moves until the two are together.
The churning of the ocean and the poison
When the gods and demons churned the cosmic ocean for the nectar of immortality, the first thing to rise was not nectar but halahala, a poison so potent that its fumes began to kill everything. Shiva drank it. Parvati pressed her hand to his throat to stop it going down, and the poison lodged there and turned his neck blue, which is why he is called Nilakantha, "the blue-throated one". The gods, it is said, kept him awake all night with hymns so the poison would not spread while he slept. The all-night vigil repeats their watch.
The lingam of light
Brahma, the creator, and Vishnu, the preserver, once argued over which of them was supreme. A column of fire appeared between them with no visible top or bottom. Vishnu became a boar and dug downward; Brahma became a swan and flew upward; neither found an end. Vishnu admitted it; Brahma lied, producing a ketaki flower as witness to a summit he had never reached. The column opened, Shiva stepped out, and he cursed Brahma to have almost no temples, and the ketaki flower to be excluded from his worship. This Lingodbhava, the appearance of the lingam, is said to have happened on Shivaratri.
There is a fourth, humbler story. A hunter, lost in the forest at nightfall, climbed a bilva tree to escape the animals. To stay awake he plucked leaves and dropped them one by one, not knowing that a forgotten lingam lay at the foot of the tree. By dawn he had unknowingly kept the whole vigil, fasted, and offered a night's worth of bilva leaves, and was freed from his sins. The ritual works even on someone who has not understood it, which is a comfort to the rest of us.
The four watches and the fast
The night is divided into four prahars, watches of roughly three hours each, and in temples the lingam is bathed at the start of each. This bathing is abhishekam, and the substances vary by region, but a common sequence is milk in the first watch, curd in the second, ghee in the third and honey in the fourth, each followed by water and a fresh dressing of leaves and flowers. Between the watches the priests recite the Rudram, the great hymn to Shiva from the Yajurveda, and the devotees sing or simply sit. The last abhishekam ends as the sky lightens.
Many devotees keep a nirjala fast, without even water, for the full day and night. Others take fruit and milk. The fast and the vigil go together: hunger keeps the mind from drowsing, and the long night without food is meant to loosen the usual grip of the body, so that whatever is left awake is closer to what Shiva is. The fast is broken only after the morning bath.
Bilva leaves and other offerings
The one offering Shiva is said never to refuse is the leaf of the bilva or bael tree. Its leaves grow in threes on a single stem, and the three leaflets are read as his three eyes and the three prongs of his trident. A short hymn, the Bilvashtakam, says it plainly:
Three-leaved, holding the three qualities, like the three eyes and the three-pointed weapon, destroying the sins of three births: one bilva leaf I offer to Shiva.
Other offerings are things most gods would decline: the intoxicating dhatura fruit, bhang made from hemp leaves, white akanda flowers and plain ash. Shiva takes what is bitter and wild, which is why people who feel they have nothing acceptable to give bring it to him.
Om Namah Shivaya
Through all of this runs one mantra. Om Namah Shivaya means, roughly, "I bow to Shiva", or "salutations to the auspicious one", since shiva as a plain word means auspicious or kind. The five syllables after Om, na-mah-shi-va-ya, are the panchakshari, the five-syllable mantra, and are associated with the five elements of earth, water, fire, air and space. The phrase appears in the Rudram, which makes it among the oldest living prayers in the world, and on Shivaratri it is repeated countless times over, in temples, in homes and under the breath. It needs no priest and no initiation, and it is the entire liturgy of the night reduced to something a child can say.
Keeping the night at home
- Fast in the way you are able: no grain, or fruit only, or water only if your health allows.
- Set up a lingam, even a small stone one, or simply a picture of Shiva, and bathe or anoint it four times through the night, at roughly three-hour intervals, with milk, curd, ghee and honey, then water.
- Offer bilva leaves if you can get them, and otherwise whatever green leaf or white flower you have.
- Keep a lamp burning and chant Om Namah Shivaya, aloud or silently, in the hours between.
- Tell the stories to whoever is awake with you. Children are surprisingly willing to stay up for Shiva.
The darkness is the point. When there is no moon, no feast and nothing to look at, what remains is a lamp, a stone, a name, and the person saying it.