प्रतिपन्मुख्यराकान्ततिथिमण्डलपूजिता
pratipanmukhyarākāntatithimaṇḍalapūjitā
“She who is worshiped on/as the sequential lunar days [1-15] and is surrounded/worshiped by their respective goddesses known as the Nityākalā Devīs.” -Lalitā Sahasranāma 610
Worshiping the supreme transcendent changeless reality of the goddess through her successive emanations as individualized goddesses of the fifteen lunar days is a highly developed tantric sādhanā based on an ancient Vedic practice.
The unending lunar cycle travels between the pure emptiness of the new moon and the bright shining expansion of awareness as the full moon. The Mātṛkāśaktis, as the Sanskrit vowels, take on the form of the Nityākalā Devīs [from Kāmeśvarī to Citrā], or the ‘eternal lunar goddesses’ and are syllabically correlated with the vidyā. A deeper understanding of the Nityādevīs reveals their eternal nature as the summation of the expanding qualities of the pañca mahābhūtas.
Their inner worship involves dissolving the particular, contingent, and changing aspects of time into the eternal and changeless plane of the supreme Goddess, or offering a ‘micro’ part into the ‘macro’ whole; a master trope in Hindu ritual. Such cognitive ‘yogic’ sādhanās devour time (the agent of differentiation) through recognizing its correlations and expansions occurring within a single breath.
A closer look at the sādhanā reveals the inseparable union of Śiva and Śakti embodied in everything from the highest principle, to a single lunar day (Śiva [day] and Śakti [night]; a teaching given in our Kāmakalāvilāsa). Extended sādhanā increases inner awareness and reveals the desire of consciousness to expand towards, and create new forms of, completeness through unending cycles of expansion and contraction. This magnetic polarity energizes movement in consciousness and propels awareness into action.
Some of the other related Kaula lineages, such as Trika Śaivism, speak about a state beyond the ‘changeless’ 16th kalā and address it as the life giving “amṛtakalā” that fills the sixteenth with the energy of unsurpassable consciousness. This seventeenth kalā is beyond the objective, cognitive, and subjective worlds, which are spoken of in the vidyā as the energies of the moon, sun, and fire, respectively.
