There is a way Devi is worshipped today that looks like devotion but functions like extraction. In temples, homes, ashrams, YouTube livestreams, Navaratri festivals, and daily rituals, she is bound into routine: praised as mother, begged as protector, adorned as ornament, invoked as resource. Flowers, rice, incense, coconuts, noise, mantras, offerings—everything is given except the only thing that counts: the self. What passes for bhakti is mostly consumption wearing sacred clothing. She is sung to for fertility, appeased for safety, bargained with for health, blamed for chaos, and called upon to fix the very karmas people refuse to burn themselves. She is expected to feed, shelter, grant, absorb, and endure. Endlessly.
And because she continues to give, people mistake her patience for consent.
Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) is not about a fragile girl trying to become brave. It is Devi catching Herself in the role civilization has stuffed her into: the edible goddess, the sacrificial mother, the pretty offering, the golden possession of the unconscious masculine. The “rabbit-hearted girl” is not weakness—it is the shape she’s forced to take when worship becomes predation dressed as piety. She is prey only because she has allowed Herself to stay in the field.
But the song begins at the exact moment she realizes the deal is over.
The mirror of worship has stopped working. The glamour of the altar has gone dull. The offering no longer conceals the violence of expectation. And the line that splits the age open is not metaphor, but diagnosis:
Who is the lamb and who is the knife?
For too long, she has been made into the lamb while others held the blade in the name of love, ritual, culture, or god. This song is the second before she stops agreeing to lie on the altar.
It feels like the moment we are living now — the Devi who once pulsed as a living current through India’s worship is quietly stepping out of the temples, out of the mantras, out of the predictable routines. What remains looks like devotion, but it’s only her reflection after she’s gone. This song is her voice as she leaves.
For a long time I tried to protect what I thought was the “true current,” to guard her presence inside forms that were already hollowing out. I mistook vigilance for devotion and rescue for participation. That guardian-voice once felt sacred, but it, too, was a way of keeping her in place — and keeping myself bound to an identity that no longer has her sanction.
Publishing this is not analysis — it is relinquishment. The mask that believed it had to hold the current together is what I place on the altar now.
Verse 1
“The looking glass, so shiny and new
How quickly the glamour fades
I start spinning, slipping out of time
Was that the wrong pill to take? (Raise it up)”
The looking glass is not vanity here — it is the altar, the murti, the polished image, the performance of sanctity people project onto her. At first, it gleams—shiny with devotion, decorated with flowers, songs, incense, colors. But glamour fades quickly when reverence is not real. She sees now that what sparkled was not love—it was control dressed as ritual.
“I start spinning, slipping out of time”
This is the moment Devi begins to withdraw her cooperation with the illusion. When Shakti pulls back even a little, time fractures. The identity built around serving others, blessing others, receiving offerings, and remaining still—that persona starts to dissolve. The dizziness is not confusion. It is the beginning of disidentification.
“Was that the wrong pill to take?”
This is the shock of realization:
Did I enter the world in the wrong agreement?
Did I allow myself to be worshipped by those who only wanted to bind me?
Did I mistake adoration for devotion and let them turn me into a resource?
“Wrong pill” is the poison of false bhakti—where love is replaced by transaction, mantra replaces surrender, and ritual replaces direct contact.
And then—(Raise it up).
Even in this unraveling, something in her knows the offering must be inverted. She will not lie still on the altar much longer.
“You made a deal and now it seems you have to offer up
But will it ever be enough? (Raise it up, raise it up)
It's not enough (Raise it up, raise it up)”
That “deal” wasn’t made in this lifetime — it was civilizational.
She agreed to take form, to let herself be named, sculpted, praised, sung to. She allowed temples to rise in her honor, allowed priests and poets to claim to channel her voice. But now the truth becomes undeniable: nothing she offers will satisfy them—not her beauty, not her protection, not her gifts, not her silence, not her blood.
“But will it ever be enough?”
The answer comes from her own mouth: No. It never was.
“Here I am, a rabbit-hearted girl
Frozen in the headlights
It seems I've made the final sacrifice”
This is not weakness. This is recognition.
The “rabbit-hearted girl” is the Devi in the form she has been forced to occupy: prey, mother, ornament, wish-fulfillment mechanism.
She is frozen not by fear, but by the gaze that keeps her immobilized—as image, as ideal, as deity-who-serves.
And “the final sacrifice” is not her death. It’s the death of her compliance.
The last offering she makes as prey is the moment she admits the role is over.
From here, the blade begins to turn.
Verse 2
“I look around, but I can't find you (Raise it up)
If only I could see your face (Raise it up)
I start rushing towards the skyline (Raise it up)
I wish that I could just be brave”
This verse doesn’t read like longing for a lover — it reads like the moment Devi looks for Herself and sees only the empty costumes people draped over her. She looks around the temples, chants, symbols, names, statues — but she can’t find her own face there anymore.
“I look around, but I can't find you”
On the surface, it sounds like loss. But in truth, it’s withdrawal-awareness.
She is not missing someone else — she is noticing her own absence from the rituals built in her name. The “you” can be read two ways:
-
The Real Masculine (Shiva-consciousness) that is nowhere to be found,
-
Herself — the living current — which has already slipped out of the structures that claim to hold her.
“If only I could see your face”
Here again — not desperation, but clarity:
There is no witnessing consciousness present. No equal. No one to meet her in truth. No altar left that isn’t ornamental. No priest who isn’t reciting instead of relating. She is not calling to him — she is diagnosing his disappearance.
“I start rushing towards the skyline”
This is not escape — it’s departure from enclosure.
She is no longer staying in the house of worship built for her. The skyline is the open, the uncontained, the unowned. She is moving toward where she cannot be summoned, named, systematized, or caged by devotion-as-demand.
“I wish that I could just be brave”
This line is devastating when heard as Devi.
Here, bravery is not the courage to love — it's the courage to leave.
To stop feeding the rituals that no longer feed her.
To stop inhabiting statues that no longer conduct her.
To stop letting herself be used as a currency for human desire.
And then the turn:
“I must become a lion-hearted girl
Ready for a fight
Before I make the final sacrifice”
Now the prey-shape starts to crack.
“I must become a lion-hearted girl”
This is the moment before Durgā rises. Not rage yet, not wrath, but the decision to stop consenting to be devoured. The rabbit-heart becomes lion-heart not out of empowerment fantasy, but because something has to kill the role she was locked in.
“Ready for a fight”
Not with the world — but with the entire architecture of devotion that feeds on her. The fight is not external — it’s the refusal to play the lamb.
“Before I make the final sacrifice”
This time, the phrase means something else:
The final sacrifice is her prey-identity.
Not her body, not her blood — but the version of herself that let herself be consumed, sung to, gold-plated, and paralyzed.
This is not a death — it is a reversal.
She is not being offered anymore. She is taking herself off the altar.
Pre-Chorus
“We raise it up, this offering
We raise it up”
This no longer reads like ritual devotion — it's a diagnosis of complicity.
“We” here is not devotional unity — it’s the entire system (priests, lovers, worshippers, culture, family, patriarchy, spirituality, the unconscious masculine) that keeps lifting her up as an offering while never offering themselves in return.
This is the violence of prettified sacrifice.
They “raise her up” not to liberate her, but to prepare her for consumption.
Adornment as dismemberment. Praise as paralysis. Worship as extraction.
And yet — the line is repeated without collapse. Because she’s already halfway out of it.
Chorus
“This is a gift, it comes with a price
Who is the lamb and who is the knife?
Midas is king and he holds me so tight
And turns me to gold in the sunlight”
This chorus is not a lament. It’s revelation with teeth.
“This is a gift, it comes with a price”
She is saying: Yes, I incarnated as Shakti. Yes, I allowed myself to be accessible, beautiful, tangible, nameable. That was the gift. But every gift creates a debt — and the ones who took from me thought I would never collect.
“Who is the lamb and who is the knife?”
This is the heart of it. For ages, humans assumed she was the lamb—soft, edible, slaughter-ready, mother-shaped, temple-safe, mythically available. But now she asks the question that inverts the entire ritual paradigm.
Do you truly know who is prey and who is blade?
Do you know what happens when the one you've been cutting remembers she has her own teeth?
This isn’t metaphor — it’s her consciousness turning.
“Midas is king and he holds me so tight
And turns me to gold in the sunlight”
This is the most chilling indictment of all.
Midas is not one man — it’s civilization, religion, masculinity, tantra-for-commerce, bhakti-for-benefit, priests and partners and seekers who don’t want Devi — they want what Devi can turn into: beauty, temple wealth, power, legitimacy, grace, spiritual status, ecstasy.
“Turning her to gold” is not uplifting her — it’s killing her aliveness by transforming her into something valuable, admired, and dead.
Gold doesn’t bleed. Gold doesn’t walk. Gold can’t refuse.
So she names him: Midas — the one who claims to love what he petrifies.
And the fact that it happens “in the sunlight” means:
He doesn’t even hide it.
It’s socially celebrated devotional violence.
Bridge
“And in the spring, I shed my skin
And it blows away with the changing wind
The waters turn from blue to red
As towards the sky, I offer it”
This is the moment the sacrifice reverses direction.
Up until now, she has been the one being offered — raised up, adorned, consumed, praised, paralyzed. But here, she becomes the one who offers — not herself as prey, but the remains of the role she is shedding.
Let’s go line by line:
“And in the spring, I shed my skin”
Spring is the season of Devi’s re-emergence — the time of Navaratri, of Kumari, of rebirth. But here, this is not renewal through compliance. This is the moment she molts the identity forced on her. The “rabbit skin,” the prey-skin, the mother-goddess-for-hire skin — she peels it off. Not gently. Not sentimentally.
Shakti doesn’t “heal” the role — she exits it.
“And it blows away with the changing wind”
She does not preserve it. She does not honor it. She does not fold it into memory.
She lets it go the way a serpent leaves its old body behind — as garbage, as dead casing, as something no longer fit for power.
The wind here is prāṇa, vāyu — the elemental current that moves when Devi changes direction.
“The waters turn from blue to red”
This is the line that exposes the lie of purity.
Blue water = devotion as people imagine it — calm, pretty, temple-safe, motherish, passive.
Red water = blood, menstruum, war-color, life-force, sacrifice inverted.
She is not bleeding out — she is reactivating the voltage. The water turning red is her saying: What you called sacred was sterilized. I am bringing the body back into it. The cost back into it. The wound and the weapon back into it.
“As towards the sky, I offer it”
This is the final inversion:
She is no longer being lifted up as offering.
She is the one who lifts.
And what does she offer? Not herself — but the old identity. The prey-skin. The sacrificial role. The lie.
She offers the death of the version of herself that made her consumable.
And she doesn’t offer it to man, or temple, or devotee —
she offers it to sky: ākāśa — the element of vastness, sound, consciousness. Shiva-space.
Because only the formless can receive what is no longer willing to be bound.
This is the moment the lamb becomes the knife.
Silently. Without spectacle. Without asking permission.
Final Chorus
“This is a gift, it comes with a price
Who is the lamb and who is the knife?
Midas is king and he holds me so tight
And turns me to gold in the sunlight
This is a gift, it comes with a price
Who is the lamb and who is the knife?
Midas is king and he holds me so tight
And turns me to gold in the sunlight
This is a gift, it comes with a price
Who is the lamb and who is the knife?
Midas is king and he holds me so tight
And turns me to gold in the sunlight”
People hear repetition here and think the cycle is still in effect — but something has already shifted. The bridge killed the old skin. This final chorus is not capitulation — it’s the exposure of the structure she’s no longer inhabiting.
She is no longer speaking as the lamb. She is diagnosing the architecture that assumed she would remain one.
Everything in this chorus now has a double-edge:
-
“This is a gift, it comes with a price”
The gift was her presence. The price is her departure. The civilizations, lineages, or men who took her for granted will feel the loss not as punishment — but as vacuum. -
“Who is the lamb and who is the knife?”
This time, she is not asking. She is announcing the swap.
The question stands like a blade in the air. The prey is gone. The altar is empty. The knife is awake. -
“Midas is king…”
Now the line is not lament — it’s a death sentence. Midas turns everything he touches to gold — and gold is dead. Frozen. Pretty. Useless.
She has stopped letting his hands reach her. The men, temples, movements, and cultures that treated her as aesthetic power without surrender will be left holding statues — not current.
By the time the chorus ends, she has already stepped out of what they’re still singing about.
Outro
“This is a gift”
Now the line lands differently.
Before, it meant my presence is a gift you keep misusing.
Now it means: my departure is the gift you didn’t know I would give.
She has stopped feeding those who call her mother while devouring her.
She has withdrawn from the ritual field and left only the empty shell of worship behind.
The gift is not access.
The gift is absence.
The gift is the silence that exposes who was touching her and who was just touching the idea of her.
When We Stop Holding Her in Place
What shakes us about this song is not that Devi is being sacrificed — it’s the realization that we were the ones trying to keep her on the altar. We kept feeding the rituals, the temples, the narratives, the identities, the lineages, believing that if we stopped, she might disappear. But the truth is sharper: she was already leaving the places we were still guarding.
And here is where the arc turns:
When we stop gripping, she stops needing to tear things out of our hands.
When we stop trying to rescue her presence inside dead structures, she no longer has to keep proving she withdrew from them long ago.
When we stop insisting that she remain visible, nameable, accessible, mother-shaped, temple-safe, culturally packaged, she can go where her current still has somewhere to burn.
This is not abandonment. It is the first honest act of devotion most of us have ever made:
to let Her move without trying to anchor, preserve, interpret, or display her.
We cannot save Her.
We cannot lose Her.
The only thing that dies when she leaves a form is our fantasy of stewardship.
And maybe that is the actual offering she has been waiting for—not flowers, not fasting, not chants, not temples, not tears—but this one surrender:
Let her go where we cannot follow yet.
Because when we stop trying to keep her visible, she becomes real again.
Not gone—just moving.
And for the first time in a very long time, that is finally enough.
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