![Kaumari with Chanda Bhairava [Medium]](Covers/21943.jpg)
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| Author(s) : Beer, Robert |
| Publishers Price : £120.00 |
| Wisdom Price : £120.00
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| Availability :
Usually available in 7 day(s)
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| Size : 530 x 422mm | | Publisher : Robert Beer Website |
Category : Newar Hindu Art
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Synopsis:
This powerful oil painting shows the four-armed mother goddess Kaumari, as she offers a skull-cup of blood from a freshly sacrificed buffalo to her four-armed consort, Chanda Bhairava, in order to appease his great wrath. The scene of this bloody sacrifice is set in the courtyard of the Mul Chowk or Taleju Temple in Kathmandu’s Durbar Square. The sacrificial tethering post and blood-pit of the courtyard appear in the foreground, with the gilded doors and torana of this tantric goddess’s temple appearing in the background. Kaumari is beautiful, youthful and red in complexion, with four-arms, a vermilion-adorned forehead, and three kohl-lined eyes. She leans dynamically towards the right, with her fiery feet pressing on the leg and severed head of the buffalo. She wears the embroidered red silk garments and the unique gold and silver ornaments of the Royal Kumari or ‘virgin goddess’. With her first two hands she makes the bindu-kapala-mudra as she offers her skull-cup full of blood to Bhairava. With her second right hand she wields her bloodstained sacrificial sword, and with her second left hand she holds her shield aloft to deflect the intensely blazing mass of fire that emanates from Chanda Bhairava’s ‘fiercely-terrifying’ body. In dancing posture Bhairava stamps his fiery foot on the courtyard, breaking its tiles. He wears many golden ornaments, pearls and dancing bells, a leopard-skin loincloth, a garland of severed heads, and his tawny hair blazes upward above his golden five-skull crown. His forehead, cheeks and chin are smeared with funeral ash, fresh blood and human fat; his bloodstained eyes are liquid and bulbous; his red facial hair blazes like fire, and his bloody tongue protrudes from his fanged and gaping mouth. With his two right hands he rattles a damaru and wields a trident, and with his two left hands he holds a skull-cup and a skull and vajra-topped golden club. |
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