The Dread Seven

Shitala is the goddess of smallpox. Sister Nivedita presents a charming account of Goddess Shitala’s personality and her worship, in this write-up titled ‘The Dread Seven’ which appears in her Studies from an Eastern Home. This selection from ‘The Dread Seven’ is taken from the second volume of The Complete Works of Sister Nivedita, p .381

- SISTER NIVEDITA

Beneath the Neem they sit, as did the Norns of old beneath Yggdrasil—those seven dread sisters, of whom Shitala, goddess of Smallpox, is the first. All the rashes and eruptions they share amongst them, and the youngest of the seven is the old friend of our childhood, no less a personage than Measles herself. It is strange, we feel, this element of fear that seems so often associated in ancient mythology with the idea of femininity. Head of the Fates is she who cuts the thread of life, and all the three are womankind. Ate, the sleepless doom that pursues after the shedder of blood, is a woman. The Harpies and avenging Erinys are daughters, not sons, of the gods and of Night. And here in India the power that is seen in the burning of fever and the wasting of disease is conceived as the presence within a man of the Mother Herself.