The Frame and Its Apparatus

The Devi Mahatmya is not a freestanding poem but a story told inside another story, and the practice built around reciting it added still more material around that frame. Within the Markandeya Purana, the text is presented as an explanation given by the sage Medhas to a deposed king, Suratha, and a merchant, Samadhi, both driven from their homes and both seeking to understand suffering and loss; the sage answers by narrating the three episodes of the Goddess's victories that make up the scripture proper.

Ritual practice added an apparatus around that core: reciters commonly precede the text with the Devi Kavacha, an armor hymn invoking the Goddess's protection over each part of the body, and with the shorter Argala Stotra and Kilaka Stotra, hymns asking for the recitation's spiritual effect to be unlocked rather than left inert. The tradition's count of seven hundred verses, preserved in the alternate name Durga Saptashati, is treated as fixed and significant in itself, recited as a unit during Navaratri and Durga Puja precisely because reciting the whole is understood to carry more power than reading any part alone. The frame story, the auxiliary hymns and the insistence on completeness together turn the Devi Mahatmya from a text read about the Goddess into a liturgical object used to invoke her.