Jwalamukhi stands in the Kangra valley in Himachal Pradesh, and the hymn names it fifteenth under the goddess Vaishnavi. Like Prayaga, and for a completely different reason, this is a shrine with no image in it. Flames issue from fissures in the rock inside the sanctum and have been the object of worship for as long as the site has been described; they are tended rather than lit, and a small silver-plated pit holds the principal one. The geological reading is that the fuel is natural gas seeping along a fault, and that reading is not in tension with anything the tradition claims — it says where the gas comes from and not what the flame is for. The shrine sits on the Himachal Devi circuit and is normally visited with Brajeshwari at Kangra, Chintpurni, Chamunda Devi and Naina Devi. Checked against this corpus's own member list, none of those four is a member of the eighteen, so a reader doing that route is visiting one named shrine and four unnamed ones. One trap worth naming while we are here: the fourth member of the eighteen IS called Chamundeshwari, and she is not the Chamunda Devi of Kangra — she stands on Chamundi Hill at Mysuru, most of the length of the country away. The famous story here is the one about Akbar, who is said to have tried to put the flames out with a diverted water channel, failed, and sent a golden parasol that turned to a lesser metal when it was offered. It is a sthala legend, carried everywhere and cited nowhere, and this corpus ships it as that.

Claims, and where they come from

• Jwala is one of the eighteen Shakti Peethas of the recited enumeration, named fifteenth, and the goddess there is Vaishnavi. — Aṣṭādaśa Śakti Pīṭha Stotra (traditionally attributed to Śaṅkarācārya) — Fourth verse of the hymn, which pairs the place-word Jwala with the goddess Vaishnavi and places her fifteenth in the sequence, after Prayaga and before Gaya. The half-line is paraphrased rather than transliterated here: nothing in this session could check the wording against an edition. The attribution of the hymn to Shankaracharya is traditional; this corpus writes attributed to rather than composed by
• The name Vaishnavi is also carried by the goddess at Katra in Jammu, and that is a name collision rather than a competing claim to this slot. — The verse's own place-word — Recorded because a reader who searches the goddess's name will meet Vaishno Devi first, and the two shrines are several hundred kilometres apart in different states. The verse names a PLACE, Jwala, and no tradition reached from this session puts a flame shrine at Katra or claims Katra for this enumeration. The corpus therefore does not treat this as a disputed identification; it treats it as two shrines whose goddesses share a name
• The object of worship is natural flame issuing from fissures in the rock, not a lamp that is lit. — The shrine as it stands — An observable fact about the site. The geological account — natural gas migrating along a fault and igniting at the surface — is offered as the physical explanation and is recorded as that; it bears on where the fuel comes from and not on what the site is held to be. The corpus does not use either account to settle the other
• The Akbar story is a sthala tradition, not a documented episode. — Local temple tradition at Jwalamukhi — The story — a diverted channel that failed to quench the flames, and a golden chhatra that changed metal on being offered — is repeated in the accounts of the shrine reached for this entry. No chronicle, inscription or scholarly treatment tying it to this site was reached from this session, and the corpus carries it labelled rather than dropping it, because it is part of what a visitor will be told at the shrine itself
• No limb of Sati is assigned to this site by the enumeration that names it. — The structure of the stotra itself — The tongue is what the separate fifty-one-peetha convention gives Jwalamukhi, and it is reported here as belonging to that list. This is the site in the eighteen where the graft is hardest to see, because a flame and a tongue resemble each other and the identification therefore feels like an observation rather than an inheritance. It is an inheritance, from a later and largely eastern enumeration, and the hymn that names Jwala assigns nothing

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 flames here are tended rather than lit. Does the tradition treat the fire itself as the goddess, or as her sign?
• The fifty-one-peetha convention assigns the tongue to Jwalamukhi, and the eighteen assign nothing. Did the flame suggest the limb, or the limb the flame?
• Of the five shrines usually walked as the Himachal Devi circuit, this enumeration names only this one. What made Jwala the one that was named?