Durga literally means the Remote and Inaccessible Goddess. As with all things Hindu, there is more than a shade of irony in such a description of a goddess who is probably the most popular and most worshipped form of the Mother ever in human history. She is no milksop goddess however. This is the Ultimate Warrior Goddess, "great and terrible as an army with banners." She is usually depicted with multiple arms, wielding a rather dazzling selection of arms from the ancient world and mounted upon a very fearsome lion. Sometimes this animal becomes a tiger, and she is called Amba then. The number of arms and weapons she carries varies too. There are six armed forms, eight armed forms, ten armed forms and twenty armed forms.

These are variations upon a single theme depending upon the artistic and cultural proclivities of the painter or sculptor.

Durga is not formidable; she is stupendous - in the old sense of the word, being a co-mingling of 'tremendous' as well as 'stupefying'.

Her basic function in the popular mythology is to beat up the Cosmic bad guys, especially when the other gods have failed. She is therefore, a weapon of last resort and final appeal, an instinctive feminine answer to the problems of the world, when masculine logic fails.

Vedic India had no demon-slayers in their goddesses, though Saraswati is once described as a great warrior. In fact the traditional Hindu framework had no place for the Great Mother religions. Durga is an amalgamation of many local area fertility goddesses as well as Indian's most significant religious import. For the Indian mind had no such concept to be frank, battle queen goddesses riding animal mounts were just not the part of the zeitgeist. Once this concept had entered the country however - about 2000 years ago, it was quickly assimilated into the collective unconscious and filled up a gap in the emotional life of the people that the too-masculine nature of Godhead could not.

Durga is almost certainly Ishtar, of Mesopotamia, now the Middle East ,worshipped by the Sumerians, Assyrians Babylonians, and even Romans and Egyptians on the sly. She has been around since 2000 BC at least, when an already old tale was set down as the epic, The Descent of Ishtar. This worthy was a very independent and headstrong goddess who roamed the wilds of forest and deserts at will and had many lovers, constantly seeking battle and generally being given a very respectful and extremely wide berth by everybody. Ishtar and Isis were the two opposite polarities of the ancient mother cults, but Isis never came to India, though the Mahadevi is a good enough substitute. Ishtar however, proved the words of the song, "Good girls go to heaven, but bad girls go everywhere," and she became the most popular goddess of the ancient world even if not quite as intellectually respected as Isis.The common man however preferred this wild energy that was no respecter of pretensions and pomposity and cared not a fig for show and class division - Ishtar's lovers being an extremely eclectic assortment of professions and social classes.

India embraced this wilderness haunting, battle loving, multiple armed, lion riding goddess with great enthusiasm, but they could not countenance the promiscuity, and quietly dropped those parts out. Durga was the result of this strange deity being introduced, an Ishtar that has got her act cleaned up and is also, "chaste as the icicle on the temple of Diana."

Durga is, of course, very similar in most ways to the Mahadevi (which we have covered already) and the fundamental myths are the same. She is Mahishasuramardhani, - the slayer of the demon Mahisha, just as the Mahadevi is, but she is not the abstract supreme power that the Mahadevi became. Durga is not transcendent of the divine social order; she stands outside of it, which is the fundamental difference between her and the Mahadevi. Durga is a-social, preferring to haunt mountains and forests and deserts, surrounded by wild beats and wilder attendants, a sort of feminine Shiva. This kind of behavior is extremely offbeat in the Hindu social context, and as such, like all rebels she has become a symbol of freedom for all those who are resigned to their narrow grinds and call it their duty. Durga does what is good and duty is for lesser beings.