The Development of Hindu Iconography c19.s6.27

c19.s6.27

The Vajrayāna goddess Māricī, especially her general aspect, can be distantly associated with the Brahmanical Sun god on account of some of her peculiar iconographic traits. Like the god she rides on a chariot drawn, however, not by seven horses but by seven pigs, and is attended by female figures shooting arrows. Unlike Sūrya she is multi-armed and holds all sorts of attributes, and when she has more than one face, the added ones are those of sows (she is described in this aspect as Ubhaya-varāhānanā-Māricī). What sort of esoteric symbolism underlies this predilection for sows and pigs is not clearly understandable. But her very name Māricī shows her solar association (Sūrya is Maricīmālī, i.e., ‘one endowed with a large number of rays’).