The death of Satī and the worship of her yoni: the rise of the Yoginī Kaula school in early medieval Assam

A Puranic myth narrates that during the dakṣayajña the goddess Satī burned her body into the sacrificial pyre. Hence, her corpse was dismembered by the gods, and its limbs fell on India, originating the śākta pīṭhas. Her yoni fell on Nīlācala where the temple of Kāmākhyā arose. Its garbhagṛha, indeed, preserves the yoni-stone, the primeval matrix of the cosmos. During the early medieval period the Yoginī Kaula school—which systematized the local cult of the yoginīs within the Hindu religiosity and upraised the worship of the yoni from a local to a supra-regional cult—established itself as a prominent heterodox Hindu sect. Given these premises, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that, throughout the early medieval ages, the development of the Yoginī Kaula school transformed the yoni from a non-anthropomorphic fetish into the “mouth of the Yoginī”, a source for Kaula gnosis.