Manasa (Monosha) Puja
🌿 Jao Maa Manosha 🌿
Puja Date : 17 August , 2022
Manasa, also Manasa Devi, is a goddess of snakes, worshipped mainly in Bengal and other parts of northeastern India, chiefly for the prevention and cure of snakebite and also for fertility and prosperity. Manasa is the mother of Astika, sister of Vasuki, king of Nāgas (snakes) and wife of sage Jaratkaru. She is also known as Vishahara (the destroyer of poison), Nityā (eternal) and Padmavati. She was also known as Jaratkaru, which was the reason why the sage Jaratkaru married her.
She is the daughter of sage Kashyap and sister of the nagas king Vasuki. Manasa is depicted as being kind to her devotees, but harsh to people who refused to worship her. Denied full godhead by her mixed parentage, Manasa's aim was to fully establish her authority as a goddess and to acquire steadfast human devotees. She is also known as Nagalakshmi and She is Janguli bodhisatva in Vajrayana and Mahayana Buddhism.
Origins :-Manasa first appears in the Atharvaveda. As a Hindu goddess, she was recognized as a daughter of sage Kashyapa and Kadru, the mother of all Nāgas. By the 14th century, Manasa was identified as the goddess of fertility and marriage rites and was assimilated into the Shaiva pantheon, related to the god, Shiva. Myths glorified her by describing that she saved Shiva after he drank the poison, and venerated her as the "remover of poison". Her popularity grew and spread to southern India, and her followers began to rival Shaivism (the cult of Shiva). As a consequence, stories attributing Manasa's birth to Shiva emerged and ultimately Shaivism adopted this indigenous goddess into the Brahmanical tradition of mainstream Hinduism.
