Place · Shakta confluence temple · India
Chhinnamasta, Rajrappa
Also known as Rajrappa, Chhinnamasta, Chhinnamastika, Bhairavi confluence
A temple to Chhinnamasta — the goddess who holds her own severed head and drinks the blood from her own neck — at the confluence where the Bhairavi falls into the Damodar. It is one of very few substantial shrines anywhere to this form, and one of the most heavily attended in Jharkhand.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 23.633, 85.710
Worth knowing
Chhinnamasta is among the ten Mahavidyas and is almost never given a temple of this size, because the iconography is about self-offering rather than protection. The site draws Santhal and Kurmi worshippers alongside Brahmanical ones, and animal sacrifice continues; the falls themselves are the reason the place was marked at all.
Connections (1)
- Site adjacencyDeoghar Baidyanāth
Rajrappa's Chhinnamasta and Deoghar's Baidyanath are the two heavily attended shrines of the Jharkhand plateau, a hundred and fifty kilometres apart, and they are opposites: a jyotirlinga on every pan-Indian list, and a temple to one of the ten Mahavidyas that almost never receives a temple at all because its iconography is about self-offering rather than protection.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Rajrappa”. David Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas (1997); Jharkhand State Gazetteer, Ramgarh district.
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