I recently posted a blog about the Indian goddess Durga (one of the must-know Hindu gods for anyone planning a trip to India) and this the photo I showed:
I didn’t think anything of it. But my father flipped out! Just after seeing it he broke out in a cold sweat – he could not sleep, he could not eat.
For you see, my father is walking weapon, a deadly combination of IT professor and retired Marine Corps “master sniper” who keeps his ultra-long-distance sniping skills very much current indeed. (Aside: he would take me as a small 9-year-old boy to the shooting range, where trained me to hit ping-pong balls and glass marbles at 1’500 meters using a Winchester M1 Garand antique Sniper rifle using metal sights. At 10 years old he helped me make my first Ghillie suit.) It’s those awesome sniper eyes that caused him to flip out.
“She has NINE arms!” he exploded to me on the phone, “NINE of them! That’s can’t be! Eight, ok. Ten – maybe – twelve, if she was a very, very powerful goddess. But the Durga you showed has NINE!”
“Relax, Pops” – actually I never call him pops, but I thought it was a good time to start, “I will look into it and get back to you.
So I rolled up my sleeves and went to work. I surfed and I Googled and I Binged and I “Wolfram Alpha’d” – no references to nine-arm Gods. So I reached out to my network: I have a large network of very devout Hindu scholars as friends. One of my best friends and religious scholar in general, Jim (his real name is Prabir) answered me in Facebook: I think the number of hands have metaphorical purpose. Indicative of some Divine person who has all the skills as denoted by hands. It also symbolizes the effort it takes to destroy evil in this world even temporarily. My response: go stuff a sock in it (or something to that effect), you don’t have a clue! He agreed – he didn’t know.
Here’s what I’ve learned: Durga can appear in any one of nine different forms (Skondamata, Kusumanda, Shailaputri, Kaalratri, Brahmacharini, Maha Gauri, Katyayani, Chandraghanta, and Siddhidatri), and she can have between 8 and 18 arms. But . . . no 9 arm avatar of Durga is known.
According to my friend Jim: Most likely just an artist’s goof.