Twinn Swan

The title for my 5th book, A Thousand Names, comes from the Sahasranama tradition of Sanskrit devotional literature, in which a deity is invoked through the recitation of their 1008 names and attributes. Over the years, I’ve attended many of these recitations—sometimes speaking the names myself, sometimes simply listening—but the seed for this book was planted during a Kala Bhairava Sahasranama I attended.

The Kala Bhairava Sahasranama is performed on Kalashtami, the monthly observance dedicated to Bhairava. The chanting is an alignment with the cycles of time and destruction, but also an appeal for guidance through them. It was in that setting, amid the cadence of names breaking into silence, that this book found its title and its inspiration.

A Thousand Names does not attempt to reproduce a Sahasranama, nor could it. But it is inspired by that tradition: each page an attempt to reveal facets, to allow language itself to serve as invocation, and to acknowledge how naming becomes a mode of remembrance, a way of staying close to what would otherwise remain vast and formless.

In the Shaiva tradition, Bhairava is time itself, the energy of dissolution that purifies the field of consciousness for new beginnings. Each name in the Sahasranama reveals another facet of that presence: protector, liberator from fear, destroyer of obstacles, keeper of thresholds. Reciting the names is said to shield the devotee, to sharpen clarity and to loosen the knots of fear that keep us bound.

The book turns to Bhairava because his Sahasranama speaks to the conditions the book wrestles with: how beings live under the weight of time, how fear shadows the human experience, and how protection can take forms that are ferocious. Bhairava’s litany of names and epithets does not soothe; it confronts. And for that reason, his recitation—not any other deity’s—was the inspiration from which this title came.