The story of Durga's birth answers a riddle. A demon named Mahishasura had won a boon through fierce penance: that no man and no god should ever be able to slay him. Trusting in this, he stormed heaven, drove out the gods, and seized the seat of Indra himself. The gods, powerless to defeat him individually, went to the great male deities — Vishnu and Shiva — and poured out their helplessness.

What followed is one of the most striking images in Hindu sacred literature. From the faces of the assembled gods a great heat, a blaze of energy, streamed forth — tejas, the concentrated radiance of the divine. The light of Shiva, of Vishnu, of Brahma, of Indra and the rest converged into a single mountainous flame, and from it emerged a woman of overwhelming beauty and power. This is Durga, "the one hard to approach," and she is no creation of the gods so much as their combined power made manifest. She is their Shakti, their very capacity to act, standing now in her own form.

Each god gave her his weapon: Shiva his trident, Vishnu his discus, Varuna his conch, Vayu his bow, the mountain Himavan his lion to ride. Adorned and armed, she filled the three worlds with her laughter.

The duel that follows is a masterpiece of transformation. Mahishasura, the buffalo demon, shifts shape again and again — buffalo, lion, man wielding a sword, a great tusked elephant — but Durga matches and overwhelms each form, finally pinning the buffalo with her foot and piercing him as he half-emerges from its severed neck. The boon that made him invincible to men and gods had a gap he never imagined: it said nothing of a woman.

The meaning runs deeper than a clever loophole. The myth insists that there is a power the masculine deities cannot supply alone — that the decisive force of the cosmos is feminine, and that she is not a helper but the sum and source of divine strength. In the worship of Durga across India, especially in the autumn festival of Navaratri and the grand Durga Puja of Bengal, this victory of the Goddess over the demon is celebrated as the triumph of order over chaos, light over the brute force that would unmake the world.