The Kamakhya Temple and the Rite That Needs No Image

Kamakhya, on Nilachal Hill above Guwahati, is counted among the Shakti Peethas, the network of sites tradition holds mark where a part of the goddess Sati fell as Shiva carried her body across the sky in grief, and Kamakhya is honored as marking the yoni, the embodiment of the goddess's generative power. The sanctum holds no image at all, only a natural rock fissure kept moist by an underground spring and worshipped directly as the goddess herself, a form of worship distinct from the anthropomorphic icons that dominate most Hindu temple ritual elsewhere in India.

The temple standing today was rebuilt in 1565 under the Koch king Naranarayana, replacing an earlier structure destroyed in Hussein Shah's 1498 invasion of the Kamata kingdom, and the reconstruction fixed Kamakhya's present architecture, a beehive shaped shikhara distinct to the Assamese temple style. Each June the temple closes for three days for the Ambubachi Mela, observing the goddess's menstruation as a season the earth itself is held to become fertile, and reopens to enormous crowds of pilgrims and tantric practitioners drawn by a festival built around a bodily reality most temple traditions treat as ritually impure rather than sacred, marking Kamakhya as one of South Asia's principal centers of tantric practice.