Material Culture and Asian Religions Text, Image, Object Edited by Benjamin J. Fleming and Richard D. Mann i Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. NEW YORK AND LONDON11 Goddesses in Text and Stone Temples of the Yoginis in Light of Tantric and Pur&nic Literature’ Shaman Hatley Texts comprise the most significant body of evidence for study of the Tantric Saiva traditions of early medieval India. By “Tantric Saivism,” I refer to systems and communities of esoteric praxis centered on forms of the deity Siva and allied goddesses for which texts called tantras or 4gamas have the status of scripture. The comparatively well-charted art-historical and epigraphic records provide sub- stantial evidence for Tantric Saivism as well. However, establishing correlations between period material evidence and text presents significant historiographic challenges. As Michael Meister (1986: 233) posed the problem: Written evidence rarely fits available images. Dates and the regional distribu- tion of Indian manuscripts—Agamas, Puranas, and Tantras—remain largely so little known, their texts still so little studied, that it seems hardly possible at present to trace with any precision the development and spread of cults or iconographic formulas in pre- and early ‘medieval’ India. Fortunately, our knowledge of the tantric as well as puranic corpora has improved in recent years,? especially through study of Nepalese palm-leaf manuscripts, making this assessment appear excessively pessimistic. Precise correlations between the early-medieval art-historical record and dated, geo- graphically situated texts remain largely elusive; however, recent discoveries in the literary record as well as progress in mapping relative chronologies have opened up new possibilities. My purpose in the present chapter is to bring little-studied as well as recently discovered textual sources to bear on the interpretation of medieval Indian temples dedicated to “Yoginis”—potent groups of female deities characterized by such qualities as therianthropism, shapeshifting, and flight. They are typically organized into clans (kula) and considered guardians of esoteric knowledge. Often they blur boundaries between the human and divine as well, for female adepts were believed to join the ranks of these sky-traversing goddesses (khecart) through perfection in tantric ritual. With roots in ancient Indic cults of the Mother-goddesses (mdr), Yoginis came to feature prominently in the medieval Saiva and Buddhist tantric traditions, particularly from the eighth century.3 My contention is that the tenth- to196 Shaman Hatley fourteenth-century Yogini temples mark the entry of these goddesses into a wider, more “public” religious domain, beyond the confines of the esoteric goddess cults from which they were drawn. I will argue that the ritual associated with Yogini temples bridges the domains of tantra and purdna—the esoteric revelation of ini- tiatory cults, on the one hand, and a scriptural genre of popular devotional theism, on the other. The connections I seek to demonstrate between Yogini temples and the textual record help us to reconsider the degree to which the temple pantheons were formed through absorption of “local” goddesses. After first introducing the temples, I will discuss the roots of Yogini panthe- ons in Tantric Saivism, followed by a review of evidence for the ritual life of the Yogini temple. TEMPLES OF THE YOGINIS: AN OVERVIEW By the middle of the tenth century, if not somewhat earlier, Yoginis became the focus of a temple cult of wide geographic distribution and evident prominence, with the construction of major Yogini temples continuing through perhaps the fourteenth century. Erected in stone from Orissa to Hinglajgadh, on the Mad- hya Pradesh-Rajasthan border, and as far south as Tamilnadu, the predominantly circular, hypaethral (open to the sky) temples of the Yoginis are architecturally unique in medieval India and remain enigmatic in terms of religious history and ritual function. Numerous temples and much loose Yogini statuary have been documented by Vidya Dehejia (1986) and several other scholars.* The consen- sus is that Yogini temples represent, in some manner, a tantric tradition. What precisely it means for a temple to be “tantric” remains nebulous, however. Espe- cially in its earlier and more esoteric varieties, tantric praxis has little formal relationship with temples. Of the approximately fifteen Yogini temple sites and image sets (no longer in situ) identified by Dehejia (1986), at least five—and probably most—were concerned with sets of sixty-four Yoginis. Exceptional are the Bheraghat temple, which enshrined as many as eighty-one goddesses, and two ruined temples of cen- tral India that might have housed forty-two.’ In the remaining cases, the original number of images cannot be determined. With exceptions such as the rectangular Khajuraho Yogini temple, the temples have circular structures and sometimes fea- ture a central shrine in the courtyard with a cult image of Siva. All are hypaethral. Yogini temples do not enshrine a group of deities with fixed individual iden- tities. The goddesses vary considerably from one site to the next, although the well-known Seven Mothers (sapta matarah) appear frequently, as do Mother- goddess counterparts of the Guardians of the Directions (dikpatayah), known as the dinmatarah. While the sites of the extant Yogini temples and those associated with known loose statuary are concentrated in modern Madhya Pradesh and Orissa, the medieval temples were not confined to these regions. One set of Yoginis has been found in northern Tamilnadu,° while inscriptional and archaeological evidence points toward construction of multiple temples in greater Bengal.”