Alopi Devi Temple, Prayagraj

The account begins with the frame shared by every Shakti Peetha. In the Devi Bhagavata Purana, Sati, the daughter of Daksha, is married to Shiva. Daksha later insults Shiva, and Sati resolves to give up the body born of Daksha; she burns it in a fire that rises out of yoga. Shiva destroys Daksha's sacrifice, cuts off Daksha's head and sets a goat's head in its place. Then he lifts Sati's body onto his neck and wanders from country to country, until Vishnu cuts the body to pieces with his arrows. Wherever a part falls, Shiva remains there in another form, and the place becomes a seat of the goddess.

The Ashtadasha Shakti Peetha Stotram names eighteen of those seats in a fixed order. Its seventh line pairs the thirteenth and fourteenth: "Hari kshetre Kamarupi, Prayage Madhaveshwari" — and its translator renders the second half as the goddess Madhaveshwari at Allahabad, the former name of Prayagraj. The stotram is traditionally attributed to Adi Shankara; no scholarly source confirming that attribution has been found.

The stotram gives a name and a city. It does not name a temple, and it does not say which part of Sati's body fell at Prayaga. This encyclopedia follows the identification of its Madhaveshwari with the goddess worshipped as Alopi Devi, but that identification is disputed, because other lists place the Prayag seat at a different shrine. The Devi Bhagavata's own list is one of them: it names the goddess at Prayag as Lalita, not Madhaveshwari. That account is told separately, beside this one, rather than merged with it.

The temple's own story — what its name Alopi means to its devotees and what is worshipped in its sanctum — has not yet been found in a written source we can cite. It is left out rather than retold from secondhand versions.

What the stotram explains is the name the Prayag seat carries in the list of eighteen: Madhaveshwari.