Mahadevi

There is one aspect of Indian religion which is absolutely remarkable but goes largely unnoticed. That is the fact that India remains the only country where there is any significant worship of the Great Mother Goddess whose worship was once spread over the known world. This is a phenomenon that is nothing short of a major miracle, considering how completely she has been forgotten elsewhere.

There are some covens of pagan worshippers left in Europe and the Wiccans gamely carry on with an ancient connection to the Mother but in real terms, these are recreations of tradition, new religions in ancient garb. Japan has a Sun goddess Amaterasu, but I don't think that she is seriously prayed to within the encompassing folds of a Shinto that has to contend with Zen, Buddhism and Christianity. The Buddhists have a Tara, but that stream of devotion has long become a trickle. Christianity, of course, has a major trump card in Mary, all the old energies of Mother worship in Europe coalesced around her. Nevertheless she is not regarded as God, only his mother and a co-saviour. As I was saying, it is only in India that the old religion remains.

People are not aware of the extent of that faith. If you take all the thousands of Mother Goddess temples and its variants around the country, a rough guesstimate would be around 300 million believers. That makes Goddess worship a world religion in itself, within the larger fold of Hinduism. As in every part of the world the archeological evidence is clear that there was a thriving goddess faith in most parts of India. It was however, never part of the mainstream, except as a grudgingly accepted adjunct. Male prejudices and insecurites could not tolerate a female divinty, and the whole concept is still distaseful for the puritanically traditional. For the Goddess, as befits her ancient origins, is as much a force of chaos as for order and she is too lustily uninhibited in her affirmation of Life and Living for the sour pusses who set themselves up as arbiters of morality and tradition - sanitized, bowelderized and safe.

In reaction perhaps to all of this, a stream of Goddess worship exploded about a thousand years ago that flamboyantly proclaimed her to be the Supreme Diety. These people were having no truck with the usual compromises that the forces of the establishment were offering - respect, and a subordinate status for the goddess, if she agreed to be potrayed as the wife of Shiva, and sometimes Vishnu. They wrote their own Puranas to combat those written by the followers of Shiva and Vishnu, and in them the Goddess or Devi, to be exact, rose to becoming the Mahadevi - The Great Goddess.

This Mahadevi was, and remains, a supreme creatrix figure, independent of and prior to any male diety. In fact so adamant were her followers that they even went to the extent of describing the Great Trinity, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, as the three legs of her foot-stool. She is specificallly described as the Consort of None, and the Shakti of all, i.e the Real power behind the puffed up pretensions of the male gods. This is no Vedic goddess who has her token verses of praise and is set aside. This is the Absolute Reality, the Absolute Truth, the Brahman Itself (or is that Herself?). In the 19th century, the great Ramakrishna calmly said the same thing about his Mother goddess Kali, who is one aspect of the Mahadevi.

The Mahadevi is also the ruler and personification of Maya (see our glossary). In the typical yin-yang approach that characterises such descriptions she is immediately described also as:
"the supreme eternal knowledge (vidya) that becomes the cause of salvation (moksha)".

Mother therefore is a tough cookie, one who can keep you in ignorance or choose to release you from its bondage. What matters therefore is her grace, obtained by devotion. Even Shiva, Pure Consciousness, is Shiva only because of devotion to Her. Otherwise he too would be in bondage to Prakriti (nature) and Maya and be merely Shava (a corpse)! Vishnu, Preserver of Worlds, is allowed his quota of herioics only because She is properly indulgent with him!

This is of course hot stuff, and the various sects had many interesting confrontations about such material. However, the confidence of the Shaktas, as devi worshippers are called, was never shaken. Finally, in an obvious attempt to broker peace, as well as a delightfully sly assertion of the Mahadevi's supremacy, an official, agreed-upon-by-all myth came into being to explain the perplexing reality of the Mahadevi.

This myth became the standard version of the Mahadevi and sparked off an unprecedented wave of creative output in India's artisans and sculptors. An Asura demon named Mahisha gained unprecedented powers by the force of his austerities. He was now invincible and immortal and forthwith proceeded to give the gods a torrid time. However, his boons had a fatal flaw in them, one that his misogynistic pride had overlooked. He was immune only to men. So what? He was the great Mahishasura - the shapeshifting buffalo demon - and what could a mere woman do to him? One can almost sense the glee with which the myth was being formed, the male arrogance being castigated here is not just Mahisha's.

The great trinity of Gods got together to help the lesser dieties who were fighting a losing battle againt Mahisha. As they listend to the tales of woe of the devas, their faces became filled with a rage that shone and gleamed and then burst out in fiery beams of light. These beams merged together with the energies that instinctively poured forth from that of the lesser gods, and a great refulgent mountain of light was created which gradually took form and shape. This cleared itself upto into the twenty-armed form of the Mahadevi, popularly known as Durga. Of course, in this myth is clearly vindicated her claim to be the power behind all the gods.

Mahisha gets his lumps in passages of bloodletting that seem to have been written by Sam Peckinpah. Significantly, after wiping Mahisha and his armies out the Mahadevi is not reabsorbed into the gods. She vanishes, the text says, a cosmic diffusion that underscores her constant prescence in the world, her unwavering upholding and support of creation. She thus becomes very literally the breath of the world; omnipresent, not remote and incompetent like the other gods.

Curiously enough, the Mahadevi herself is rarely worshipped today. She is obviously rather strong stuff to interact with and what we have all over India are shrines dedicated to one or several aspects of her personality. These are all called independent goddesses in their own right, but they are the Mahadevi. These are less challenging of the worshipper and they are consequently the more popular. Also the Consort of None aspect has been discreetly forgotten. Indian social norms deem being married as very desirable indeed and for a devi to be considered unmarried would be unacceptable rudeness on the part of the believer.

The feminist potential in the Mahadevi has been totally overlooked and it is bizarre that more energy is spent trying to revive Diana and Athena than in tapping into a religion that is alive. India has a peculiar relationship with the Mahadevi, a fearful respect that keeps her at arm's length, rather than try to live the hero's life that her worshipper will be drawn instinctively into. However, she remains the supreme example of the Divine Feminine for all who truly wish to find her.