experiencing the goddess

2 MANUSHI

Experiencing the Goddess:Notes on a Text, Gender, and Society

Thomas B. Coburn

Mahisasurmardini, late 18th centur red sasndstone

TWENTY-THREE years ago I metthe great Goddess, the Devi, of

Hindu tradition. It was on an AprilSunday morning in Boston. I had, inthe course of my graduate studies,chanced upon a course on the art andarchitecture of India, taught by thegreat historian of Indian art, BenjaminRowland. One of our assignments wasto do some original research on oneof the pieces in the South Asia wingof the Museum of Fine Arts. And so I,who had never before for-mallystudied any art, innocently set off toinspect the India gallery.

As I rounded the corner, there Shewas. A near-life-size female, lovinglyevoked from a slab of South Indiangranite, she stood just to the right ofa doorway. Her body was gently bentin the characteristic and provocativetri-bhanga pose, her face aloof witha matter-of-fact tranquillity. Hersensu-ousness was mysteriouslyenhanced by her many arms. In herhands she held weapons of war: bow,arrow, sword, discus, shield, andconch. Over her shoulders werevisible two quivers and a trident, whileunder her feet lay the head of a freshlyslain buffalo, its ears soft and fuzzy,its horns erect. Never before had Iencountered such a strikingjuxtaposition of the sensual and themartial—of vitality and mor-tality, ofsex and death. Whoever says that artis simply a matter of beauty and styleis wrong, I now know, for there was apower in that image that reached outand laid hold of me un-awares. I didnot then know what darshan was, butthe Devi gave it to me and I took itfrom her without any need for theconcept. In significant measure, whatI have been doing in two decades ofresearch since that Sunday morningis trying to under-stand the nature ofthe power mediated by that image.

My first inclination, reflecting myWestern assumptions, was to seek outwritten accounts that would, as wesay, “flesh out” the visual record.

Having found them, my subsequentinclination was to try to understandthem from an historical perspective,attending to the development of theHindu Goddess tradition over time,from prehistory to the present. Thisapproach has enabled me to write two

books and a number of articles thathave surely helped me, and I thinkothers, understand some aspects ofthat tradition more aptly.1 One of thepurposes of this essay is to sharesomething of this work, that is, of theverbal dimension of that Devi who

NUMBER 80 (January-February 1994)

accosted me in the Boston Museumof Fine Arts. It is an extraordinarilypowerful account of female deity. Butbeyond that I will share reflectionsthat have gradually come into focusas I try to relate my own experience tothat of others, both in India and in thecontemporary West, both women andmen. It is no accident, I now see, thatit was a lithe young female deity whoseized the attention of a young malestudent. Here, as in virtually all otherareas of human life, it now appears,the difference between the sexes iscrucial. This difference, moreover,seems to compound other kinds ofvariation that exist between cultures.Therefore, “what is the basic visionof Devi?” is the first issue to which Ishall address myself here. But afterthat I shall try to draw out some of thelarger issues involved in trying torelate this vision of Devi to a socialcontext and to the experience ofindividual women and men.

At the beginning of my inquiry Iwas helped by a note written for theMuseum Bulletin by AnandaCoomaraswamy, when he wascura-tor, on the occasion of thesculpture’s acquisition in the 1920s.It was, I learned, an eighth centuryPallava sculpture of Durga slaying thebuffalo demon (Mahishasuramardini),the classical account of which was tobe found in the Devi-Mahatmya, apor-tion oftheMarkandeyaPurana. Ifirst sought out an old Englishtranslation of the text andsubsequently read through theSanskrit original. It is this text that Ihave subsequently put at the centerof my study and have been trying tounderstand from an historicalperspective.

My rationale for adopting such atight focus was the widespreadschol-arly agreement that the Devi-Mahatmya—known also as theChandi (after the commonest name forDevi in the text)—is the earliest,

definitive written accountof the HinduGoddess. There are brief, older hymnsto particular goddesses, such as theSri Sukta in an appendix to the RigVeda, or the Durga Stotra that Krishnateaches Arjuna in some versions ofthe Mahabharata just prior to theBhagavad Gita, or the hymn to thegoddess of sleep in theHarivamsaand other early accounts of the infantKrishna’s birth. But the fifth centuryDevi-Mahatmya is the firstcomprehensive textual account, inboth myth and hymn, of deity asfeminine, the singular Devi,“Goddess” with a capi-tal “G.” Byviewing the text first against thebackdrop of older Vedic and epicmaterial, and subsequently in light ofits commentaries and ongoingfunction in devotional life, I hoped toprovide a sense of how this text andits vision of Devi have lived over thecourse of time. In adopting thisperspective, I deliberately sought to

avoid the structural approach thathas been so popular in epic andPuranic studies, and that seeks tounderstand any par-ticular topic bybringing together pas-sages from verydifferent historical eras—anapproach to the Devi-Mahatmya thatVeena Das employed in the pages ofthis journal several years ago.2 WhatI sought for myself, and others, wasan increased aware-ness of the stagesthrough which the worship of Devihas passed over the course of India’slong history, using the Devi-Mahatmya as a kind of lens. Totranslate the text into a contemporaryidiom would, I hoped, give othersaccess to something like my ownex-perience in front of that vitalsculpted image of Durga.

Although the central story of theDevi-Mahatmya—the account ofDurga slaying the buffalo-demon—is well known, it may be useful topro-vide an overview of the text’scontent. Much of the narrative iswritten in rather ordinary Sanskrit, buton occa-sion this gives way to elegantand powerful characterisations of theGoddess, particularly in the hymns.These moments may be understoodas forming a kind of verbal counterpartto the experience of visually engagingan image of Devi. In order to give asense of both the narrative and thehymnic dimensions of the text, let meprovide a synopsis of its structureand stories, interspersed with threeexcerpts from the hymns.

The text begins and ends with aframe story that recounts the woes ofa king and a merchant, who werebe-trayed by counselors and familymem-bers and so retired to the woodsin despair. After encountering eachother, they came upon a sage, whomthey questioned about the mysteriesof human love and affection: howcould they still feel favourablydisposed to-ward those who hadbetrayed them? The sage replied: “Obest of men, human beings have a

Durga, 9th century red sandstone

4 MANUSHI

craving for off-spring,/ Out of greedexpecting them to reciprocate; do younot see this? Just in this fashion dothey fall into the pit of delusion, themaelstrom of ego-ism,/Giving(apparent) solidity to life in this worldthrough the power of Mahamaya[‘The Great Deluder”]... This blessedGoddess Mahamaya, having forciblyseized the minds/Even of men ofknowledge, leads them to delusion.”3

Understandably, the two supplicantswish to know more, which promptsthe sage to tell three stories of theGoddess’s role in righting the cos-micorder. At the end of the third episode,the Goddess identifies futureoccasions on which she will appearto lend help and promises assistanceto all who call on her in adversity. Theking and merchant then worship herimage and practice austerities. TheGoddess appears to them and grantsthem boons: the king will regain hiscurrent kingdom and be reborn as aheavenly king or Manu, while themerchant is granted release from thecycle of rebirth, as he had requested.

In the first episode, the setting ispralaya, the time of cosmicdissolu-tion between cycles ofcreation. Lord Vishnu is sleeping onhis serpent couch floating on theuniversal ocean. The god Brahma,who sits on a lotus grow-ing fromVishnu’s navel, is tormented by twodemons, Madhu and Kaitabha.Consequently, he invokes theGod-dess in her capacity as yogicslumber (yoganidra), asking her towithdraw from the sleeping Vishnu,so Vishnu can awake and slay the twodemons. He begins with reference toVedic mantras, then goes on tobroader terms of praise.

“You are Svaha, you are Svadha,you are the exclamation vasat, havingspeech as your very soul.

You are the nectar of the gods, Oimperishable, eternal one; you abidewith the threefold syllabic moment(matra) as your very being.

(You are) the half-marra,stead-fast, eternal, which cannot beuttered distinctly.

You are she; you are Savitri (theGayatri mantra); you are theGoddess, the supreme mother.

By you is everything supported,by you is the world created;

By you is it protected, O Goddess,and you always consume (it) at theend (of time)...

You are the primordial material(prakrti) of everything, manifestingthe triad of constituent strands(gwias),

The night of destruction, thegreat night, and .the terrible night ofdelu-sion.

You are Shri, you are the queen,you modesty, you intelligence,char-acterised by knowing;

Modesty, well-being,content-ment, too, tranquillity andforebearance are you.

Terrible with your sword andspear, likewise with cudgel anddis-cus,

With conch and bow, havingar-rows, sling, and iron mace as yourweapons,

Gentle, more gentle than othergentle ones, exceedingly beautiful,

You are superior to the high andthe low, the supreme queen.

Whatever and wherever anythingexists, whether it be real or unreal, Oyou who have everything as yourvery soul,

Of. all that, you are the power(shakti); how then can you bead-equately praised?”4

The Goddess then withdrawsfrom Vishnu, allowing him to awake,and he dispatches the demons in shortor-der.

The second episode of the Devi-Mahatmya recounts how the godswere displaced from their respectivespheres by the depredations of thedread buf-

falo demon (Asura), Mahisha.Taking their tale to the great deities

Shiva and Vishnu, those gods becameirate, and from their faces came fortha great fiery splendor (tejas) thatcongealed into a single mass in theshape of a woman. This was theGoddess, whose various bodily parts,ornaments, and weapons werecontributed by particu-lar male gods.In the sequel she then proved able todo what none of them individually, norall together, could do by slayingMahisha. It was scarcely an easybattle because of Mahisha’s drunkenbrute strength and his ma-levolentcapacity to change form. But theGoddess, often called Chandika, “theirrascible one,” was herself flushedwith passion and intoxication, and shecaught Mahisa in the midst of ametamorphosis, decapitating him. Atthe end of the episode, the gods thensing her praises:

“How can we describe thisun-thinkable form of yours? Or yourabundant, surpassing valor whichde-stroys Asuras?

Or such deeds as (you do) inbattles among all the throngs ofAsuras and gods, O Goddess?...

You who are the cause of release(muktf) and of inconceivableausteri-ties, your name is repeated bysages, who hold the essence of truthbecause they have restrained theirsenses,

Intent upon moksha with all faultsshed: you are this blessed, supremeknowledge, O Goddess...

O Goddess, you are insight,knowing the essence of all scripture,you are Durga, a vessel upon theocean of life (that is so) hard to cross,devoid of attachments.

(You are) Shri, whose sole abodeis in the heart of Kaitabha’s foe(Vishnu); you are Gauri, whose abodeis made with the one who is crownedwith the moon (Shiva).

Slightly smiling, spotless, like theorb of the full moon, as pleasing asthe lustre of the finest gold (is yourface).


Wondrous it is that when theAsura Mahisha saw (this) face, hesuddenly struck it, his anger aroused.

But, O Goddess, the fact thatMahisha, having seen (your face)an-gry, terrible with knitted brows, inhue like the rising moon, did notimmedi-ately

Give up his life is exceedinglywondrous—for who can live, havingseen Death enraged?...

Since these (foes) are slain, theworld attains happiness; althoughthey have committed (enough) sin toremain in hell for a long time,

It is with the thought—’Havingmet death in battle, may they go toheaven’—that you assuredly slay(our) enemies, O Goddess.

Having, in fact, seen them, whydo you not (immediately) reduce allthe Asuras to ashes, since you hurlyour weapon at enemies?

‘Let even enemies, purified by (myweapons), attain (heavenly)worlds’—such is your most graciousintent even toward those who arehostile.

Although the eyes of the Asuraswere not destroyed by the terribleflashings of the light-mass of yoursword, or by the abundant lustre ofyour spearpoint,

While they looked at your face,which was like a portion of the radiantmoon, that very thing happened (i.e.,their eyes were destroyed).”5

The third episode begins whenthe cosmic order has once again beendisrupted, this time by the demonbrothers Shumbha and Nishumbha.They have gathered the finest jewelsand treasures from throughout thevarious worlds, and having seen thebeauty of the Goddess, they wish toadd her, the jewel among women, totheir possessions. The Goddessfeigns remorse because of a prior vowto marry only someone who can besther in battle, to which she thus in-vites them, “he description here islonger and more detailed than in the

earlier episodes, and it is filled withfamiliar characters and images frompopular religious lore. The demonRaktabija proves a formidable match,for the drops of blood from hiswounds pro-duce replicas of himself.But the grue-some goddess Kali, withher gaping mouth, lolling tongue,emaciated skin and garland of humanskulls, springs forth from theGoddess’s furrowed brow and lapsup the torrents of his blood. At thepeak of battle, the Goddess prolifer-ates her own forces by calling forthfrom each of the male deities hispoweressence or shakti, a femaleform that has the same appearance

as the god, but is uniquely effectivein the fray. The final encounter in thebattle has Shumbha accusing theGoddess of being falsely puffed upwith pride, for she has relied on thepower of others to win the battle. TheGoddess retorts: “When I wasestab-lished here in many forms, itwas by means of my extraordinarypower. That has now been withdrawnby me. I stand utterly alone. May yoube resolute in combat!”6 This encoun-ter reflects the basic concepts thatinform the Devi-Mahatmya’s under-standing of the Goddess: she is theuniversal fact of power (shakti),which can in her capacity as illusion

Durga from Chidambaram

6 MANUSHI

(mayo) obscure the nature of theuniverse, and in her capacity asknowledge (vidya) reveal its truenature; she is the mate-rial substanceof the universe (prakrti); her formsare both benign (saumya) and hor-rific (ghora). She graciouslyre-sponds to those who call on her.At the very end of this episode, thegods once again sing her praises:

“O Goddess, who takes away thesufferings of those who take refugein you, be gracious; be gracious, Omother of the entire world.

Be gracious, O queen of all; youare the queen, O Goddess, of all thatdoes and does not move.

You have become the solesup-port of the world, for you abidein the form of the earth.

By you who exist in the form ofwater, all this universe is filled up, Oone of inviolable valour.

You are the power of Vishnu, ofboundless valour; you are the seedof all, the supreme illusion.

Deluded, O Goddess, is this en-tireuniverse; you, when resorted to, arethe cause of release right here onearth.

All the various knowledges, OGoddess, are portions of you, as iseach and every woman in the variousworlds.

By you alone as mother has thisworld been filled up; what praise cansuffice for you who are beyond praise,the ultimate utterance?

When you, O Goddess who hasbecome everything, granting heavenand ultimate freedom,

Are praised, what fine wordscould suffice for the eulogy?”7 •

On the one hand, given the factthat the image of deity in Westernreligion is so overwhelminglymasculine—the image ofMichaelangelo’s

bearded patriarch on the ceilingof the Sistine Chapel comes quicklyto mind—it is not surprising thatsome-one with a western background,

who was today looking for a fresh wayof thinking about deity, would bedrawn to the Devi described in thepassages I havejustquoted. Surely itwas partly the contrast with thefamiliar that so arrested me in front ofthe image of Durga. Many others,particularly western women, have alsofound im-portant new andempowering spiritual insights inHindu understandings of theGoddess. Rita Gross,for example, inher often-cited article “Hindu Fe-maleDeities as a Resource for theContemporary Rediscovery of theGoddess,”8 draws upon iconographicmaterial to suggest six images aspo-tentially fruitful for feministtheology or, to use NaomiGoldenberg’s word, “thealogy”:9 theandrogynous/bisexual nature of deity;the combination of strength andbeauty; the coincidence of opposites;God as Mother; the God-dess aspatron of culture; and explicit sexualsymbolism as religious meta-phor.

On the other hand, given thecomplex and many-faced nature of theGoddess in the Devi-Mahatmya, it isnot surprising that over the centuriesit has served as a touchstone for thefull rangeofHindu Goddess traditions.Its conception of the Devi as asingular and unique sakti makes itintelligible to the most monistic Tantrictradi-tions, while its correlation ofparticu-lar shaktis with particular malegods converges with the mainstreamdevotional view that every god hashis own consort. Its recognition thatthe Devi is irrascible and her identityintimately wrapped up with her killingof a buffalo is continuous with theway she is often known in village life,particularly in Tamil Nadu, while itsinvocation of her as “Mother” fitsprecisely with the favorite name forher in Bengal. Itis,of course, the natureof great texts, both religious andsecular, to invite engagement overmany centuries from a wide range ofperspectives. On this ground, in spite

of the tedium of some of its battlescenes and the mediocrity of much ofits Sanskrit, the Devi-Mahatmya mustbe judged the classic text of HinduGoddess wor-ship, and one of themajor religious documents producedin the subconti-nent.

But in between these two poleslie a number of critical assumptionsand issues that call for furtherexploration. The first wave ofscholarship on religion and gender inthe 1970s exploded the assumptionthat there would be a correlationbetween cultures in which goddessesare reverenced and those in whichhuman women are highly re-garded.Broadly speaking, it now ap-pears thatthe oppression of women isindependent of the dominanttheology or thealogy of a^ivenculture. India provides vivid evidencein support of this conclusion, fornowhere else on earth has there beenas long and broad a tradition ofGoddess worship and yet thestruggles that Indian women face arelegion, as readers of Manushi wellknow. But there are a number of othermatters pertaining to the nature oftexts and of religious life that bearfurther scrutiny. If we are to come to abal-anced assessment of the Goddessas she appears in the words of theDevi-Mahatmya, and if we wish tobring those words to bear plausiblyand intelligently on the quandaries ofcontemporary living in India andelsewhere, we must identify theseissues and assumptions and begin toaddress their implications. Let mebriefly explore four of them.

First, as is well-known to mostIndians but often unknown outsidethe subcontinent, the Devi-Mahatmya is not primarily a text to beread and understood. It is a mantrato be recited. Its significance lies inthepower of its Sanskrit words, andits chief function for centuries hasbeen to obtain quite mundane goalsfor a patron, who has secured the


services of a reciter. Although the textis viewed as part of the Puranic corpusand therefore as a more widelyaccessible form of esoteric Vedic truth,the fact re-mains that it was composedin Sanskrit, the language of the elite,the “refined” language. There aregood grounds for seeing the Devi-Mahatmya as a vivid instance of howVedic atti-tudes toward sacred soundcontinue in later Hinduism. But theimmediate corollary is that, like Vedicrecitation, the Devi-Mahatmya hasnever been widely understood bythose who hear it. The Sanskrit texthas, of course, been translated intoIndian vernaculars, as the manypopular editions available todaysuggest. Inthesecases the text’smeaning does become more broadlyintelligible, but even in ver-nacularforms, the Devi-Mahatmya functionsprimarily as potent-sound-to-be-recited, and there is widespreadrecognition that the power of theSan-skrit sounds is diluted when thetext is recited in a language other thanSan-skrit. To call the Devi-Mahatmyaone of the great texts of India,therefore, does not mean the samething as calling one of Kalidasa’splays a great text. Their functions incultural life have been very differentindeed. By extrapolation, in seekingto understand the content and role ofthe Devi-Mahatmya, we must notnaively apply a western norm for whata “text” is. Such a norm might indeedapply to some Indian texts, but notall. To call something “a great text”does not mean the same thing indifferent contexts.10 Second, we mustask: whose vision of the Goddess is itthat is presented in the text of theDevi-Mahatmya’? In the strictestsense, of course, we will never know,for like all epic and Puranic material,questions of authorship areimpossible to answer for individualtexts. Also, in the strictest sense sucha question is irrelevant in an oralculture, where it is stories and the

ways in which they get told and retoldthat are central, not the authorship ofa particular, written ver-sion of anyindividual story.

At a broader level, however, thequestion of “Whose vision is this?”is both relevant and answerable. Thelanguage in which the text iscom-posed is Sanskrit, and based onwhat we know of traditionaleducational patterns, it is almostcertain that it was a man, not a woman,who served as the author or redactorof the text. The world of Sanskrit

learning was almost entirely a man’sworld. So, too, was the world of theDevi-Mahatmya.

Today, likewise, the world inwhich the Devi-Mahatmya livesre-mains significantly a worlddominated by men. In her study ofthe text and temple of Devi atVindhyachal, Cynthia Humesinterviewed both pilgrims andreciters, and found that men were 40percent more likely than women to befamiliar with the text, and they werethree times as likely as women to recite

Durga-Mahisasurmardini, late 9th century red stone

8 MANUSHI

the text in either San-skrit or Hindi.11

During Navaratra, when thousandscome to recite the text, she saw veryfew women in the groups of recitersin and around the temple. At theautumn Navaratra of 1988 she countedjust 15 women in a crowd of severalhundred atop the temple early onemorning, and 13 of the 15 wereaccompanied by their hus-bands.12

The world of the Devi-Mahatmya,past and present, thus ap-pears to belittle different from the broaderpatriarchal ethos of Indian life.

Third, although the Devi-Mahatmya, narrowly considered, hasindeed become a ritual text that issignificantly the property of men, thestones that it tells are pervasive ofIndian life, unboundaried by genderor social categories. A goddess askiller-of-buffalo-demon, thebloodthirsty Kali, a demon whorejuvenates from blood-seed, avirginal goddess after whomlecherous demons lust—all these arewell-known throughout the Puranasand folklore in regional lan-guages.There are, of course, variants in theway the stories get told, as one wouldexpect in an oral culture. And thereare regional preferences for par-ticularversions of the stories.13 But the talesof the Goddess, their episodes andemphases, are woven into the veryfabric of popular life.

How we shall interpret this fact isa difficult matter. The structuralap-proach to Indian myth that Imen-tioned earlier is one way ofcoping with the complexity andrichness of the material, but some ofus feel that such an approach becomesabstract too quickly, leaving behindthe par-ticularity of individual lives.Engag-ing the subject with the toolsof psy-choanalysis, Sudhir Kakkar hasar-gued that “the ‘hegemonicnarrative’ of Hindu culture as far asmale devel-opment is concerned... isthat of Devi, the great goddess,especially in her manifold expressions

as mother in the inner world of theHindu son.”14 But this line of thinking,like that subse-quently developed byStanley Kurtz, is based on studies ofhow young males develop and sobegs the question of women’s lives inrelation to Goddess mythology.15

Conventional wisdom has it, ofcourse, that a docile and acquiescentSita and a devoted Savitri are thesalient models for Hindu women.Butlam beginning to suspect thathere, as elsewhere, conventionalwisdom is at best a half-truth.

The basis for this suspicion is, inpart, anecdotal, my simpleobservation of andconversan’onswith Indian women over the pastdozen years—to whicfi I might addthe portraits of individual women thatappear so regularly in the pages ofManushi. This sample is scarcelyscientific, but it is sufficient to givethe lie to any facile stereotype. Theideal qualities that Indian womenembody, both by choice and lessdelib-erately, are enormouslydiverse—as diverse as the qualitiesand forms of the Goddess. Toprivilege only one model is tomanipulate the evidence.

The other source of my suspicionis the gradually accumulatinginfor-mation, often ethnographic,a b o u twomen’slivesinparticularcontexts. Ihave in mind here such studies asWilliam Sax’s exploration of the NandaDevi pilgrimage, where women placetheir own distinctive stamp on ritualsand roles while leaving intact thedominant patriarchal ethos,16 andKathleen Erndl’s documentation ofpossession as a predominantly femalemode of engaging the Goddess in thePunjab.17 Other detailed studiespro-vide comparable refinement ofeasy stereotypes about how India’subiq-uitous engagement withgoddesses relates to women’s socio-cultural ex-perience.18 Julia Lesliedescribes our emerging knowledge

well when she says we ought “not toassume that women have aradicallydifferent world view than the oneallocated to them by men or male-authored texts. It is the smalldeviations from the norm which maybe crucial, perhaps the way theapparently negative is transformedinto something positive andpowerful.”19 Here, as elsewhere, thereis no substi-tute for nuance andsubtlety in under-standing thecomplex ways in which culture andmy thology are intertwined. As thestudy of subalterns consistentlyreminds us, power does not alwaystake obvious forms.

Finally, for all of the cautionnec-essary when interpreting texts incrosscultural contexts, a remarkablepower today inheres in the Devi-Mahatmyavihob it is construed inre-lationship to Goddess worship asa worldwide phenomenon and to thecontemporary interest in Goddessspirituality. I sensed this was the casesome 15 years ago, when youngAmerican college students, mostlywomen, with whom I shared portionsof a draft translation of the Devi-Mahatmya, reported a vastly enricheddream life. Some years later, one ofmy friends and colleagues in India,himself a devotee of the Goddess,of-fered an interpretive framework forsuch experiences when he urged meto havepeoplekeep track of thosedreams. They are, he affirmed, themedium through which Devicontinues to speak to us. And justlast fall, in teaching a new seminarentitled “Goddesses,” which soughtto juxtapose the Devi-Mahatmya andother Indian material with selectiveinstances of Goddess worshipelsewhere, I was astonished at thetransformative experiences thatstudents—both women and men—re-ported in their journals and inprivate conversation. They farexceeded the impact to which allteachers aspire in the classroom. Not


all students, of course, were affectedto such an extent, and it is temptingto interpret such experiences as partof the spiritual malaise of the modemworld, to which young people seemparticularly susceptible. But that isnot to dismiss those experiences. Onthe contrary, it is to argue for theirimportance. One of ‘he aphorisms thatruns through contemporary westernGoddess spirituality puts thestudents’ discovery beautifully: “TheGoddess is alive, and magic is afoot.”

Naturally there is lots of work todo, both academically and otherwise,in pursuing this intuition that theGoddess of classical India is—or canbecome—part of women’sand men’sspirituality globally, and part ofun-derstanding Goddesses as a genreof religious expression. Theopportunities for constructiveconversations are apparent at everyturn, but so are the difficulties. Forinstance, can we use the Indianexperience, which com-bineswidespread devotion to the Goddesswith a patriarchal social structure, toengage recent efforts to reconstructthe pre-Christian history of Goddessworship in Europe—ef-forts whichexpect that the social context for suchworship was a nur-turing, egalitarian,peaceful, matrilineal society, quiteunlike its successors?20 S uchconversations then begin to convergewith larger ques-tions: about womenand society crossculturally; about theconnection between feministspirituality and ecological awareness;about the comparability of religiousexperience crossculturally;21 about thetraditionally Indian and increasinglymodern preoccupation with therelation between the One and themany. The enormity of these issues,in both theory and practice, mayappear daunting. But as one of mystudents reminded me on her finalexamination paper, it was only whenthe king and the merchant in the Devi-Mahatmya fell upon agonizingly hard

times that they came to a deeperunderstanding of the mystery andwonder of the Goddess.References1 Thomas B. Cobum, Devi-Mahatmya:

The Crystallization of the GoddessTradition (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass andColumbia: South Asia Books, 1984, 1988)and En-countering the Goddess: ATranslation of the Devi-Mahatmya anda Study of Its Inter-pretation (Albany:Stale University of New York Press, 1991and Delhi; Indian Books Centre, J992).

2 Veena Das, “The Goddess and theDemon— An Analysis of theDeviMahalmy3,”Wa/awA/ 30 (1985), pp28-32.

3Encountering the Goddess, p. 35-4 This translation is ftommy Encountering

the Goddess, pp. 36-37.5 Encountering the Goddess, pp. 48,49,

50.

6 Encountering the Goddess, p. 71.7 Encountering the Goddess, p. 74.8 Journal of the American Academy ofKeli-

£ion46(1978):269-91, reprinted inabbrevi-Goddess (New York: Crossroad,1983), pp. 217-230.

9 From the Greek thea, “goddess,” inprefer-ence to theos, “god.”

10 I make this observation in the contextof the ongoing debate in American highereduca-tion about “the canon” of Westerncivilisation and the merits of expandingthe canon to include voices other thanthose of “dead white males.” Therelationship between writienness andorality, particularly with regard toreligious “texts”, has attractedconsiderable scholarly attention of late.Thetwo best works I know are WilliamA. Graham, Beyond the Written Word (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1987)and Miriam Levering (ed.), RethinkingScripture (Albany: State University of

Kali, Early Chola period, Thiruvalangadu

10 MANUSHI

New York Press, 1989).11 Cynthia A. Humes, “The Text and Temple

of the Great Goddess: TheDevi-Mahatmyaand the Vindhyacal Temple of Mirzapur,”Uni-versity of Iowa Ph. D. dissertation,1990, Appendix I.

12 Cynthia A. Humes, “Women’sExperience in Ritual Recitation of theDevi-Mahatmya” forthcoming in KarenTorjesen and Karen King (eds.). WomenandGoddess Traditions (Philadelphia:Fortress Press).

13 For a wonderful sampling of the way thisadaptation and accommodation take placewith regard to the Ramayana story, seePaula Richman (ed.), Many Ramayanas:The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition inSouth Asia (Berkeley, Los Angeles,Oxford: University of CaliforniaPress, 1991).

14 Sudhir Kakkar, IntimateRelations: Exploring IndianSexuality (Chi-cago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1989), p. 131.

15 In spite of this limitation,Kurtz’s work is highly engagingand ad-vances the field of culturalpsychol-ogy dramatically: All theMothers Are One: Hindu Indiaand the Cul-tural Reshaping ofPsychoanalysis (New York:Columbia University Press,1992).

16 William S. Sax, MountainGod-dess: Gender and Politics ina Hi-malayan Pilgrimage (NewYork and Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1991).

17 Kathleen M. Emdl, Victory to theMother: The Hindu Goddess ofNorthwest India in Myth, Ritual,and Symbol (New York andOxford: Oxford University Press,1993).

18 For example, Sara S. Milter,Dfiarma ‘s Daughters:Contemporary Indian Women andHindu Culture (New Brunswick:Rutgers Univer-sity Press, 1991),and the articles based on Indianmaterial in Nancy A. Falk and RitaM. Gross (eds.). Un-spoken Worlds:Women’s Religious Lives in Non-Western Cultures (San Francisco:Harper and Row, 1980) and inYvonne Yazbeck Haddad and EllisonBanks Findly (eds.), Women,R e l i g i o n , a n d S o c i a t C h a n g e(Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 1985). See also Humes,“Women’s Experience in RitualRecitation of the Devi-Mahatmya.”

19 Julia Leslie (ed.), Roles and Ritualsfor Hindu Women, (Rutherford,Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh

Dickenson University Press, 1991), p. 3.It does not seem unreasonable to expectthat these studies cumulatively willrevolutionise our understanding asdramati-cally as the work of CarolGilligan and Nancy Chodorow hasrevolutionised our thinking about women’slives in a western context. See CarolGilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridgeand London: Harvard University Press,1982) and Nancy Chodorow, “FamilyStructure and Feminine Personality,” inM. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds.),Women, Culture and So-ciety (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 43-66.

20 These effortsarewidespreadincontemporary western Goddessspirituality. The archeologicalscholarshipon which they often dependis that of Marija Gimbutas, for example.The Language of the Goddess (Berkeleyand Los Angeles: University of CaliforniaPress, 1991).

21 The work of Steven Katz, for instance,has generated lively debate aboutwhether “mystical experience” is ageneric or culturally specific phenomenon.A brief introduction to the debate is foundin “Responses and Rejoinders” in theJournal of the American Academy ofReligion 56 No 4 (1988):751-761 .

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