Mahur — Mahurgad — is a hill town in the Nanded district of Maharashtra, close to the Telangana border, and it is one of the busiest goddess sites in the state. The stotra of the eighteen names it eighth, in the same half-verse that names Kolhapur seventh, so two of the eighteen sit in Maharashtra one line apart. What a visitor finds at Mahur, though, is not one shrine but a hill with several, and the question of which of them the verse means has never been settled in public. The great temple on the crest is Renuka's, the mother of Parashurama, and it is Renuka that Maharashtra's own regional tradition of three and a half goddess seats names here alongside Kolhapur, Tuljapur and Saptashrungi. A separate and much smaller Ekavira shrine stands below, and its deity carries the verse's word. The tradition has long treated the two as one goddess under two names, or as sisters; it has not treated the difference as a problem. This corpus does, because the corpus's job on this set is to say where a name actually lands.

Claims, and where they come from

• Mahur is one of the eighteen Shakti Peethas of the recited enumeration, named eighth, and the goddess there is called Ekavirika. — Aṣṭādaśa Śakti Pīṭha Stotra (traditionally attributed to Śaṅkarācārya) — Second verse, closing half — kolhāpurē mahālakṣmī, māhuryē ēkavīrikā — so Kolhapur and Mahur are named in a single line and this corpus already holds the first of them. The attribution of the hymn to Shankaracharya is traditional; this corpus writes attributed to rather than composed by. The verse names a town and a goddess and nothing else: which shrine at that town it means is an identification, and it is disputed below
• No limb of Sati is assigned to this site by the enumeration that names it. — The structure of the stotra itself — The eighteen carry no limb assignments. The right shoulder, given for Mahur on almost every page about it, belongs to the separate fifty-one-peetha convention, and no passage from that literature naming Mahur was located from this session. Reported as what circulates, not asserted
• Maharashtra's regional tradition of three and a half goddess seats names the Renuka temple at Mahur, alongside Mahalakshmi at Kolhapur, Bhavani at Tuljapur and Saptashrungi at Vani. — Regional pilgrimage practice in Maharashtra — A living convention rather than a text this corpus can point to a verse in. It matters here because it is the reason most visitors are shown the Renuka temple when they ask for the peetha, and because it names Renuka rather than Ekavira — the same slippage the identification records. Saptashrungi is counted the half; the four are often glossed as the three and a half syllables of AUM, which is a gloss and not an account of how the grouping formed
• The goddess of the hilltop temple is Renuka, the mother of Parashurama, whose story belongs to the Jamadagni cycle and not to the Sati cycle the peetha framework rests on. — The epic and Puranic Parashurama material, and the practice of the shrine — Renuka is beheaded at her husband Jamadagni's order and restored — a story about a son, an axe and an obedience, with no dismemberment of Sati in it. The peetha framework is the Daksha-and-Sati cycle. Mahur carries both and the tradition has fused them, treating Ekavira as Renuka or as her sister; the fusion is recorded here, and no version of it is asserted

Counted among

• The Shakti Peethas — Sati's body fell across the subcontinent — and the tradition has never agreed on how many pieces, or on how many shrines.

Questions to explore

• The verse says Ekavirika and the temple everyone is taken to is Renuka's. Are they one goddess under two names, two sisters, or two shrines that a single line of a hymn has been made to cover?
• Renuka's story is about her son and an axe; the peetha framework is about Sati and a grieving husband. How did one hill end up holding both, and does a pilgrim need to choose?
• Maharashtra counts three and a half seats of the goddess and the fraction is Saptashrungi. What makes a peetha a half?