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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.
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