At the sacrifice, Sati finds that Daksha is taking some petty revenge on Shiva. He has reverted to an ancient Vedic practice of not setting aside a share of the sacrificial offerings for Shiva, as he is a god who operates outside the rules of Society. He treats her with terrible rudeness too, and the public humiliation is too much for Sati. She announces that this life is a burden and she will be reborn again to a father who she can respect and who will respect her husband. Sati then destroys herself in an act of spontaneous combustion. The assembled gods are appalled, they know Shiva only too well and he would not lie down under such provocation. Sure enough, two of his chief bravos, Veerabhadra and Bhadrakali, attack the site and severely wound the gods before chasing them away. Minor figures are slaughtered indiscriminately. Finally Veerabhadra, in an act that symbolizes the contempt for ritual, tears off Daksha's head and throws it into the fire, in a terrifying parody of making a sacrificial offering. This episode has been regarded as the reassertion of the traditional modes of worship as against the hyper-sophistication and contemptuous exclusionist elitism of the Vedic ritual. It has also been interpreted as confirming that Rudra-Shiva is indeed part of the mainstream religion and he is to be ignored or slighted only at deadly peril.

Shiva goes insane with grief, a really touching aspect of the myth really. He wanders the universe hugging the corpse of Sati to him. His frenzy grows until it becomes cosmically dangerous. Vishnu realizes that until the body is removed from contact with Shiva he would not move on and begin grieving in a manner that would heal. He therefore cuts the body of Sati with his Quoit or Chakra into a million pieces. Many of them scatter and fall onto the landmass of India, and all the places they fall at became places of pilgrimage. In one overarching myth, the identification of the land with the Goddess became accomplished. It is a process of sacralization; the entire land has been rendered pure and holy, literally identified with the body of the Goddess. This sort of Cosmic Dismemberment to create Sacred Geography is one of the standard themes in myth. The three most important shrines where parts of Sati fell are considered to be Chottanikara in Kerala, the Jwalamukhi or Flame-faced shrine in Himachal Pradesh, and the single most important of them all, the Kamakhyadei temple in Assam. The last is supposed to be the place where the yoni, or womb, of Sati fell and is regarded as one of the great spots in the world for the Genetrix Power to be manifest. Jwalamukhi has the tongue of Sati, while Chottanikara claims the foot of the goddess. The idol in the temple there, as well as the one in Assam, is supposed to menstruate and all worship is stopped for four days during the divine period! Shiva withdraws into yogic seclusion and awaits the next incarnation of Sati, who proves to be Parvati.

It must not be assumed by reading this narrative that Sati is worshipped at any place. What is being worshipped is a manifestation of the Great Goddess, not Sati. In fact I know of no place where Sati is worshipped, nor is there any iconographic representation of her anywhere. The spots where her body parts fell are sacred, but that is it. Sati only too clearly represents an imperfect assimilation into the patriarchal structure. She retains her freedom of action, independent of both husband and father. In a Manusmirti dominated society where women were supposed to be always subordinate to a male, this was a very uncomfortable position indeed for the priests. Both husband and father are shown to reject her in varying degrees for questioning their judgement. Daksha, because she married against his will, and Shiva, because she acted against his advice. In the next incarnation she is shown getting it right according to dominant male norms. Parvati is determined to have the love of both husband and father, and also that the two men love each other. She will not transgress male boundaries to do so - when Shiva proposes, she immediately sends him to her father to ask his permission! That is of course immediately granted. It is the mother who objects this time; an episode pointedly put in to illustrate the feebleness of feminine intellect and the superiority of the male, which discerns the greatness of Shiva behind his peculiar exterior. That a marriage may take place based solely on personal liking, with no parental permission, has always been a Hindu horror. This myth is obviously rectifying what it regarded as a glaring and intemperate error of the first version. Not only has Shiva been domesticated, the Goddess with her 'bad' example of feminine independence has been 'tamed' too. The relief to the fuddy-duddies must have been enormous.

Realizing the potential in the fact that the Sati myth is so underused, some of the Sakta and Tantrik cults attempted to provide the backstory to Sati. That she was definitely the Great Goddess and yet treated so cavalierly in the main accounts, did not sit well with them. They created the concept of the Mahavidyas, the Great Wisdoms, various manifestation of Sati, who emanated from her furious body when Shiva forbade her to attend the sacrifice of Daksha. They are terrifying and block the ten directions. The myth is very clear that Shiva is no match for these viragos. These seem to be personifications of various forms of magic and power. Kali, Chinnamasta, Matangi, Sodasi and Bhuvaneshwari are the most famous of these manifestations. They have gained an immense currency, thanks to the Tantrik contribution to Indian art. It is again interesting to note that the innate prejudice against Sati holds true even here, and it is her manifestations, not her own self, that is worshipped. Sati upsets the Indian imagination at some deep core and she is resolutely denied. Her name has become a synonym for women who mount the funeral pyre of their dead husbands in a mistaken identification with her death. The word 'Sati' has also come to mean the purest of the pure amongst women and their great spiritual attainments allow them to perform miracles before and after death. But Sati herself is nominally respected and ignored in practice.