Durga is the great warrior-goddess of the Devi Mahatmya (Markandeya Purana), created when the assembled gods, unable to defeat the shape-shifting buffalo-demon Mahishasura, pooled their radiance (tejas) into a single blazing form. Each god armed her with his own weapon — Shiva’s trident, Vishnu’s discus, Indra’s thunderbolt — and Himavat, the personified Himalaya, gave her a lion to ride, so that she carries the combined power of the entire pantheon into battle. Astride her lion, a weapon in each of her many arms, she hunts down and kills Mahishasura after a fierce contest in which the demon repeatedly changes shape to escape her; she is Mahishasuramardini, “slayer of Mahisha,” ever after.
Durga embodies Shakti, the divine feminine as active, protective power, understood in Shakta theology as the force underlying and sustaining the male gods rather than subordinate to them. She is worshipped above all during Durga Puja, the great autumn festival centered in Bengal and now celebrated across India and its diaspora, when elaborate clay images of the goddess slaying Mahishasura are installed, honored for days, and finally immersed in the river.
“The goddess struck off his head with her great sword and laid him low.” — Markandeya Purana, Canto LXXXIII.39 (Devi Mahatmya 3), tr. Frederick Eden Pargiter
