The Mahishasuramardini episode is the founding scene of Shaktism and the reason Durga Puja looks the way it does. Mahisha has a boon making him invulnerable to gods and men; the gods, driven out of heaven, emit their rage as light, which pools and takes the form of a woman, and each god hands over a copy of his weapon. She is not their creation so much as their concentrate, and the text is explicit that she was there before them. The fight runs nine nights, with the demon shifting shape — buffalo, lion, man, elephant — and ends with her foot on his neck. The standard image in every Bengali pandal shows him half-emerged from the buffalo's severed body, which is why he is not a beast in the iconography but a figure with a face, and why the counter-tradition mourning him as an ancestor has something to work with.