Height: 1,416 m (4,646 ft) District: Nashik Region: Vani, Sahyadri
About The Mountain
There are mountains in the Sahyadri that you approach quietly, with a feeling of entering something. Saptashrungi is one of those mountains. It rises about 65 kilometers from Nashik, near the town of Vani in the Kalwan tehsil, and from a distance it announces itself not as a single peak but as a long, broken ridge, a wall of basalt with seven distinct summits pressing up against the sky. Seven, in Sanskrit, is sapta. Shrung means peak or horn. Saptashrungi: the mountain of the seven peaks.
The ridge is dramatic in a way that is hard to prepare for. The rock faces are near-vertical in places, dark and streaked with the marks of a thousand monsoons. The forest clings to the lower slopes and the gullies between the peaks, and in the rainy season the whole mountain turns the kind of green that seems almost unreal, as if someone had painted it that way deliberately. Waterfalls come to life on the cliff faces and fall in long white threads down the basalt.
On the face of one of those cliffs, in a natural cave at a height that requires either a long climb or a ride in the ropeway that now carries pilgrims up the mountainside, sits the temple of Saptashrungi Devi. The goddess here is not a small icon in a sheltered shrine. She is an eight-foot-tall image carved directly into the living rock of the cliff face. She has eighteen arms, each carrying a different weapon or sacred object. Her face is painted with sindhoor, that deep red powder, and she wears a gold crown. She looks out over the Sahyadri from her cave in the cliff as if she has always been there, which, in the belief of the people who come to her, she has.
This is one of the three and a half shakti peethas of Maharashtra, the sacred seats of the goddess’s power across the land. The full three are Tuljabhavani at Tuljapur, Mahalakshmi at Kolhapur, and Renuka at Mahurgad. Saptashrungi is counted as the half, ardha peetha, not because she is lesser, but because there is a tradition that the goddess here is still in the process of manifesting, still emerging fully from the rock. She is becoming. She has not yet fully arrived.
Twice a year, during Navratri, the nine nights dedicated to the goddess, hundreds of thousands of people come to this mountain. They come from across Maharashtra, from neighbouring states, from distant cities. The queue for the ropeway stretches for hours. The steps carved into the cliff face are thick with people moving slowly upward. At the top, in the cave, the air is close and warm and heavy with incense, and the goddess in her red sindhoor looks down at all of them with the same still expression she has worn for centuries.
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The Name
The name Saptashrungi is a description as much as a name. Sapta, seven. Shrung, peak or horn. The mountain with seven summits. Stand at the right angle below the ridge and you can count them: seven distinct high points breaking the skyline, each one a little different from the others, together making a silhouette that is unlike any other in the Sahyadri.
But the name carries more than geography. In Hindu tradition, the number seven is woven through the sacred world at every level. There are seven sacred rivers, the Saptanadi. Seven sacred cities, the Saptapuri. Seven great sages, the Saptarishi, whose stars wheel around the pole of the northern sky. Seven worlds above and seven below. Seven notes in music, seven colours in light. The number is complete in a way that other numbers are not. It closes a circle.
So a mountain with seven peaks is not simply a mountain with seven peaks. It is a mountain that participates in that completeness. It is a mountain built on the number that the sacred world runs on. The goddess who chose to make her home here did not choose just any ridge. She chose the one that carried seven.
The goddess herself is known by many names. Saptashrungi Nivasini, she who dwells on the seven peaks. Saptashrungi Mata, the mother of the seven peaks. In the surrounding villages and across the Nashik district she is simply called Saptashrungi, or Devi, or Amba, the mother. She is a form of Durga, it is believed. She is also identified with Mahalakshmi, with Mahakali, with the universal feminine force that these names all point toward. The mountain gave the goddess her name, or the goddess gave the mountain its meaning. After this many centuries, the two have become inseparable.
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The Stories
Saptashrungi holds many stories, and they reach across more than one sacred text. The Devi Bhagavata Purana, the Markandeya Purana, and the local oral traditions of the Vani region all have something to say about this mountain and its goddess. Here are the stories as they are told.
The Goddess Who Fought the Buffalo Demon
The most ancient story connected to Saptashrungi is one of the great stories of the goddess in her warrior form. It is told across several versions of the Devi Mahatmya, the great text celebrating the power of the feminine divine, and it is the story from which Navratri itself is said to draw its meaning.
It is believed that there was once a demon called Mahishasura, whose name means the buffalo demon. He had performed such severe penance that Brahma granted him a boon, and what Mahishasura asked for was this: that he could not be killed by any man or any god. He had seen how the gods fought, and he trusted in the boon he had been given. He conquered the heavens. He drove the gods from their own realm. The gods, humiliated and helpless, had no answer.
It is said that in their desperation the gods gathered together and from the combined force of their anger and their grief, a great light emerged. From that light, a woman was born. She had the beauty of all beautiful things and the power of all powerful things, and she carried in her eighteen arms the weapons that each of the gods gave her, Shiva’s trident, Vishnu’s discus, Indra’s thunderbolt, Varuna’s conch, Agni’s spear, and many more. This was Durga. This was the goddess in her most powerful form.
The battle between Durga and Mahishasura lasted nine days and nine nights, which is why, it is said, Navratri means nine nights. The demon changed his form again and again, from buffalo to lion to elephant to man, but the goddess met every form. On the tenth day, she killed him. The tenth day, Vijayadashami, the day of victory, is still celebrated at the end of Navratri across Maharashtra and the rest of India.
According to the tradition of Saptashrungi, it was on this mountain, on these seven peaks, that this battle was fought. The goddess rested here after the battle. She stayed. And the energy of that battle, that victory, that divine presence, it is still here in the rock and the forest and the cave in the cliff face where she sits today.
Rama on the Seven Peaks
A second story connects Saptashrungi to the Ramayana. It is said in local tradition that during the years of exile that Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana spent in the forests of the Deccan, they passed through this region. The Sahyadri forests around Nashik are closely woven into the story of the exile, Panchavati, where the three of them built their forest home, is in present-day Nashik city.
It is believed by those who have kept the local traditions of this mountain that Rama climbed Saptashrungi and prayed to the goddess here before the great struggle that was to come. He sought her blessing. He stood before the eight-foot goddess in her cliff-face cave, or so the tradition holds, and asked for the strength and the clarity to do what had to be done.
Whether or not this story appears in the classical Sanskrit texts, it lives firmly in the faith of the people who come to this mountain. For them, the idea that Rama prayed here, that the goddess was already on this mountain when the events of the Ramayana unfolded in these forests, makes Saptashrungi part of a larger story that the whole landscape of the Nashik region seems to participate in.
The Swayambhu Image
The image of the goddess in the cave at Saptashrungi is described in local tradition as swayambhu, self-created, self-manifested, not carved by human hands. This is one of the most important things that can be said about a sacred image in Hindu tradition. A swayambhu image is not a representation of the divine. It is the divine, having chosen to appear in that form in that place of its own will.
It is said that the image was not installed here by any king or priest or craftsman. It was discovered. A devotee, or in some tellings, a sage, found the goddess already in the rock, already present, as if she had been waiting to be found. The sindhoor, the vermillion that coats the face and much of the image, is applied fresh by the priests each day. But beneath the sindhoor, local tradition holds, the rock itself is the goddess. She grew from the mountain. She is the mountain.
This belief, that the goddess is not housed in a temple on the mountain but is herself part of the mountain’s rock, gives Saptashrungi a quality that is different from many pilgrimage places. The site is not a container for something sacred. The site itself is what is sacred. The mountain and the goddess are the same thing, understood in two different ways.
The Adi Shakti
There is a tradition, held especially strongly in Maharashtra, that Saptashrungi Devi is a form of Adi Shakti, the primordial feminine energy from which all creation flows. Not simply one goddess among many, but the source. The original. The one from whom the three great goddesses, Mahasaraswati, Mahalakshmi, Mahakali, themselves emerged.
The Devi Bhagavata Purana speaks of the goddess in her most complete form as dwelling in a place of extraordinary natural power, surrounded by forest and rivers and the wild energy of the earth. Saptashrungi, in the tradition of this region, is believed to be that place. Not one of many sacred sites, but the one that stands at the centre of the goddess’s geography in this part of the world.
This is why Saptashrungi is counted among the shakti peethas, the seats of power, even as an ardha peetha, a half-seat. Because the tradition says she is still arriving. She is still in the process of full manifestation. The rock is still becoming the goddess. And that is not a limitation. In this tradition, it is a sign that the energy here is still alive, still in motion, still completing itself.
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Why It Still Matters
There is a particular kind of devotion that happens at Saptashrungi that you do not see at every sacred mountain. It is personal in a way that is hard to describe. People come here with specific things they are carrying, a wish for a child, a prayer for someone who is ill, gratitude for something that came through when nothing else did. They do not come only as pilgrims performing a duty. They come as people who need something, or who have received something and need to say thank you.
The goddess here is a mother, and people relate to her the way people relate to mothers. With love, yes, but also with need. With the belief that she knows them and that she will hear them. The red sindhoor on her face, the gold of her crown, the eighteen arms with their weapons, all of this is the power she carries. But it is in service of the people who climb the cliff or ride the ropeway to stand before her.
The Navratri gatherings at Saptashrungi are among the largest religious gatherings in Maharashtra. On some days during Navratri, the numbers reach into the hundreds of thousands. People who have never trekked a mountain in their lives climb these steps in the dark before dawn to be there when the first light touches the goddess’s face. That kind of devotion does not need explanation. It simply is.
Trekkers who come to Saptashrungi outside of festival season find a mountain of real beauty, the seven peaks, the cliff faces, the forest, the views across the Sahyadri. They find the cave and the goddess and the quiet that settles around a place like this when the crowds have gone. And often, even those who came only for the climb find themselves sitting for a while in front of the image in the rock, not quite sure why, not needing to be.
Seven peaks. One goddess. A mountain that has been holding people’s prayers for longer than anyone can remember. That is Saptashrungi.