Manasa (Sanskrit: मनसा, romanized: Manasā) is a Hindu goddess of snakes.[1] She is worshipped mainly in Bihar, Bengal, Jharkhand, Lower Assam and other parts of northeastern India and in Uttarakhand, chiefly for the prevention and cure of snakebite, and also for fertility and prosperity. In Hindu mythology, Manasa is the sister of Shesha and Vasuki, king of Nāgas (serpents), and wife of sage Jaratkaru. She is the mother of the sage Astika.[2] She is also known as Vishahari (the destroyer of poison), Nityā (eternal) and Padmavati.[3]

In regional tradition, her myths emphasise her bad temper and unhappiness, due to rejection by her father, Shiva, and her husband, and the hate of her stepmother Chandi (Shiva's wife, identified with Parvati in this context). Manasa is depicted as kind to her devotees, but harsh toward people who refuse to worship her.[4] Denied full godhood due to her mixed parentage, Manasa's aim was to fully establish her authority as a goddess, and to acquire steadfast human devotees.[5]

Bhattacharya and Sen suggest that Manasa originated in South India as a non-Vedic and non-Aryan goddess and is related to the Kannada folk snake-goddess Manchamma.[6] Manasa was originally an Adivasi (tribal) goddess. She was accepted in the pantheon worshipped by Hindu lower caste groups. Later, Dimock suggests that though snake worship is found in the Vedas (the earliest Hindu scriptures), Manasa - a human goddess of snakes - has "little basis" in early Hinduism.[7] Bhattacharya suggests another influence on Manasa being the Mahayana Buddhist goddess of poison-cure Janguli. Janguli shares his swan vehicle and her poison-destroyer epithet with Manasa. Manasa is also known as Janguli. A theory suggests that Janguli may have influenced by the Kirata-giri ("the conqueror of all poisons") of the Atharvaveda.[8] As per McDaniel, she was included in higher caste Hindu pantheon, where she is now regarded as a Hindu goddess rather than a tribal one.[9]

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According to Tate, Manasa as Jaratkaru was initially recognized as a daughter of sage Kashyapa and Kadru, the mother of all nagas in the Hindu epic Mahabharata.[10][11] According to Bhattacharya, the Jaratkaru of the Mahabharata is not the Manasa popular in Bengal.[12]

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 the earliest 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.[11] Alternatively, Vasudev suggests that the Bengali tale of Manasa reflects rivalry between Shaivism and the goddess-centric Shaktism.[13]