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In Praise of the Goddess
The Devimahatmya and Its Meaning
By DEVADATTA KALI NICOLAS-HAYS, INC.
Copyright © 2003 David Nelson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89254-616-9
CHAPTER 1
A BRIEF HISTORY
The story of the Devimahatmya begins long before its actual composition. Throughout the Eurasian land-mass as far back as Paleolithic times, women and men observed the female's awesome capacity to create new life and identified that power with divinity. They left traces of their beliefs in figurines that display the universal physical attributes of female fertility and motherhood. These mute but eloquent reminders continued into the Neolithic period, reaching a high state of development in the ancient Near East. Fashioned from stone, clay, ivory, or bone, they convey a message across the millennia that our ancestors long ago understood feminine divinity as presiding over the natural functions of birth, growth, maturation, death, and regeneration.
In the winter of 1980, a team of Indian, American, and Australian archeologists and anthropologists uncovered what may be the oldest evidence of religious practice on the Indian subcontinent. Dating as far back as 9,000 BCE, the site is in the Son valley, below the nearby Vindhya mountains — a region that will play an important part in the story of the Devimahatmya. There, the researchers excavated what appears to be a circular shrine, measuring about three feet across and made of sandstone blocks. In the center lay another sandstone block, measuring about 12 by 6 by 4 inches. Its weathered surface reveals harder layers that stand out in relief to form a natural pattern of concentric triangles. Tribal villagers assisting in the excavation immediately recognized the stone as a sacred emblem of Sakti, the Goddess. Such stones, they confirmed, are still sought out today and installed in the local villages, in both individual and communal shrines. According to the archeologists, this dramatic evidence of cultural continuity indicates that the veneration of Sakti in the mountains of north central India stretches back at least 10,000 years.
Reconstructing the Past
The early history of India remains a highly contentious field of study, where there are more questions than answers. Many pieces of the past are irretrievably lost, and attempts to form a comprehensive picture are complicated by nationalistic, ethnic, and religious feelings and the legacy of pioneering European scholars, who frequently injected the prejudices of a foreign worldview into an area where they clearly do not belong. At the heart of the conflict lies the problematic chronology, identity, and relationship of two peoples: those who created the great Indus Valley civilization in the third millennium BCE and the Indo-European-speaking Aryas, who composed the Vedas, India's oldest surviving sacred texts. Even in the light of emerging scientific data, wildly conflicting theories abound, and even the best are not without seemingly irreconcilable anomalies.
Out of this poorly understood cultural matrix the Devimahatmya emerged, encompassing the beliefs and practices of prehistoric agriculturalists, tribal shamans, ancient city dwellers, and nomadic pastoral clans whose early deification of natural forces eventually led to lofty philosophies on the nature of reality. Presently, there is no way to make historical sense out of all the pieces, but the legacy of this mosaiclike past lives on in the resounding verses of the Devimahatmya.
Harappan Religion
Three thousand years before the Devimahatmya's appearance, a civilization as advanced as those of Egypt and Mesopotamia arose on the vast flood plain of the Indus and Sarasvati rivers and flourished in full glory between 2600 and 1900 BCE. Its cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro were among the largest in the world, and there is increasing archeological evidence that this India of the Bronze Age was as culturally and ethnically diverse as it is today. As in most of the ancient world, multiple religious cults probably coexisted there, more or less peacefully.
Long before the rise of the Harappan, or Indus-Sarasvati, civilization, at highland settlements in Baluchistan, north and west of the Indus Valley, the pre-Harappan cultures regarded the Mother Goddess or goddesses in much the same way as other peoples throughout the Neolithic Near East. Predictable for an agricultural society, the pre-Harappan goddess images display themes relating to fertility and the cycles of nature. Made of baked clay, the figurines share common features, such as elaborately styled hair, ornate necklaces, birdlike faces, broad hips, and full breasts. Often they represent the female form from the waist up, as if to suggest an earth goddess emerging from the ground. Some, with hands on their breasts, suggest a benevolent, nurturing mother. Others, often hooded and displaying grim, sometimes skull-like faces, hint at an underworld goddess who is the guardian of the dead and perhaps of planted seed-grain. Their gruesome faces and distorted mouths seem designed to evoke terror, and it is easy to envision the goddess they represent as an antecedent of Kali. Often the images of the terrible goddess have been found in connection with those of an angry and destructive wild bull. That association may express the idea of inauspicious or evil forces being subdued by a higher divinity, and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that this goddess prefigures Durga, who slays the buffalo demon in the Devimahatmya's central episode. Most significantly, the portrayal of goddesses in gracious and formidable aspects is a dual distinction that passed into the Indus Valley and continues to characterize Hindu religion to the present day.
The pre-Harappan images lead directly to the later icons found in the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, which appear to have been centers of goddess worship. Thousands of terracotta female figurines, outnumbering male images by seven to one, display the same wide hips and full breasts to express the theme of female fertility and creative power. Although many represent ordinary women engaged in domestic tasks, those identified as goddesses share a set iconography. Naked but for a girdle and adorned with jewelry and an elaborate headdress, they match another figure frequently found carved on the exquisite Harappan stone seals.
The seals, thousands in number, bear brief, still-undeciphered inscriptions along with scenes of animals, mythical beasts, plants, trees, anthropoid figures, and deities. These images offer the richest source of information — and speculation — concerning Harappan religion. The pervasive motifs of pipai (Ficus religiosa) and banyan (Ficus indica) suggest that sacred trees or groves may have been the primary sites of religious observance. Indus Valley artifacts frequently display scenes of worshipers with water jars bowing before a tree, and both the pipai and the banyan endure in later Hindu mythology as symbols of fertility and protection. The deity who is shown standing beneath an arch of pipai leaves on the seals from Harappa corresponds to the one portrayed in the terracotta figurines. On seals from Mohenjo- daro, a deity appears standing in the midst of a pipai tree. Conceivably, the two are regional variations of the same goddess, or perhaps distinct goddesses. In either case, this early conceptualization appears to live on in an epithet of Tara, an aspect of the Devi closely resembling Kali; she is called Vrksamadhyanivasini ("she who dwells within trees").
One seal from Mohenjo-daro illustrates a worshiper prostrate before the goddess in the tree, with seven identically-clad figures standing in the foreground. Some scholars regard these as seven sister goddesses, whose birdlike motifs link them to Neolithic fertility figurines. They will return later in our story. A homed goddess fighting with a tiger appears on many seals, which seem to illustrate a particularly prevalent, but otherwise unknown, myth. Occasionally her hand is upraised in what appears to be a gesture of assurance, possibly foreshadowing the fear-dispelling abhayamudra of later Hindu iconography.
A few seals depict a bearded male deity on a low platform, seated in a yogic posture with knees widely spread and heels touching. Wearing a headdress of curving water-buffalo horns crowned with three pipai leaves, he combines human, animal, and vegetable motifs. Two surviving seals portray this homed god with three faces, looking left, right, and forward, similar to the Trimurti of later Hinduism, which depicts Brahma, Visnu, and Siva as the creative, sustaining, and destructive functions of the supreme God. On the so-called Pasupati seal from Mohenjo-daro, the triple-headed seated figure is shown with an erect phallus and surrounded by wild animals — a rhinoceros, a water buffalo, an elephant, a tiger, and two antelope. Pasupati, the lord of beasts, is an epithet of the later Hindu god Siva, and after decades of debate scholars still disagree whether or not this ancient seal represents Siva in a prototypical form.
Like Rorschach ink blots, the Harappan artifacts elicit widely varying interpretations that are, at this point, only conjectural. That said, it is evident that the Harappan goddess religion represents a continuum of the earlier and widely pervasive worship of female divinity that was connected to the earth and all forms of fertility. Certainly some features of it endure in later Hinduism.
Goddesses in Vedic Religion
European scholars of the 19th and early 20th centuries hypothesized that Indo- European tribes from the north migrated to the Indian subcontinent and founded the Indian civilization around 1500 BCE. With the discovery early in the 20th century that a great urban civilization already existed in the Indus Valley a thousand years before the supposed arrival of the Indo-European Aryas, the theory was revised to present the Aryas as invaders who conquered the Harappan people. There is no archeological evidence to support such a conquest, and the idea itself arose from a misreading of Vedic texts.
On closer scrutiny, the textual evidence actually suggests a much earlier Aryan presence in the Indus Valley than 1500 BCE. The Samhita of the Rgveda, consisting of more than a thousand hymns composed over hundreds of years, is India's oldest sacred text. It is thought by Western scholars to have reached its present form between 1500 and 1200 BCE, although Hindus have always claimed it is much older. There is compelling evidence for that claim in the Vedic hymns themselves: they describe a landscape that vanished hundreds of years before the hymns supposedly were composed. Those hymns describe the Indus-Sarasvati region as the Land of Seven Rivers. Part of that region is known today as the Punjab (from Sanskrit pañca ap, "five waters").
Of the seven rivers, the deified Sarasvati was celebrated as surpassing all others in majesty and might (RV 7.95.2). Since modern scientific data now confirm that the Sarasvati began to dry up around 1900 BCE, the hymns extolling her glory have to date from before then, when the holy river still flowed abundantly and civilization flourished along her banks. If the Aryas arrived on the scene only around 1500 BCE, they would have had no knowledge of the Sarasvati's former magnificence, nor would they have chosen to deify a dying or already vanished river.
A gigantic environmental catastrophe, not an invasion, brought the Harappan civilization to collapse. How the Aryan, or Vedic, people fit into this picture, if at all, is a problem archeologists and historians have yet to solve. The evidence of the Vedic texts, to which we will return, chronicles the gradual disappearance of the Sarasvati beneath the desert sands and at least hints at interaction between the Vedic and non-Vedic peoples and their religions.
It used to be accepted that the patriarchal Vedic religion looked skyward to its gods and centered on a sacrificial cult directed to a pantheon of mostly male deities for the purpose of maintaining cosmic order. Indra, the chief god, wielded a mighty thunderbolt that rumbled throughout the heavens. He was the awesome lord who caused life-giving rain to fall upon the earth. Other, mostly male, deities had overlapping functions associated with the atmospheric phenomena of wind and storms and with the ordering of day and night. Surya, the sun god, was revered as the source of warmth and light, although he was heralded daily by the lovely Usas, goddess of the dawn. On earth, the celestial light existed as fire, deified as Agni, who delivered terrestrial offerings to the gods on high. The Sanskrit word for god, deva, derives from a verbal root meaning "to shine," and it implies the linkage of light to the concepts of sovereignty and transcendence.
The earliest strata of Rgvedic hymns should reflect features common to the still older Indo-European cultural matrix from which the Aryas emerged. The supreme Indo-European deity was the sky god Dyaus, whose name derives from the same source as the word deva. In India, Dyaus had already lost his supremacy to Indra by early Vedic times, and his name signified little more than the shining physical sky. Not so in other Indo-European cultures, where Dyaus Pitar, the sky father, survived until classical times as the supreme god Zeus Pater in Hellenic religion and as Jupiter in the Roman pantheon. In India, the sky father, Dyaus, and the earth mother, Prthivi, were originally understood as procreative partners, but from an initial relationship of parity Prthivi soon gained dominance over Dyaus. The Rgveda most often links them as Dyavaprthivi, a grammatical compound which means "heaven-and-earth" conceived of as a single entity of feminine gender, and some hymns even present Dyaus without Prthivi as feminine. This process, unique to India, suggests a dramatic reshaping of the fundamentally patriarchal Indo-European religion by a strong goddess tradition.
In reality, the presence of all kinds of goddesses in the Rgveda and the honor accorded some of them raises important questions about their origins and significance. The early Vedic period saw a multiplicity of deities with similar attributes and intersecting functions, and such richness already points to the confluence of diverse traditions. It is important to remember that the Vedic hymns were composed over many centuries by members of loosely related, and not always mutually friendly, Aryan priestly clans. Although no consistent pattern of development emerges from the exuberant, overlapping, and sometimes contradictory profusion of gods and goddesses, the trend was toward the coalescence of deities that closely resembled one another.
The Rgvedic goddesses belong to four broad categories: the weak, poorly- defined consorts of gods, named after their male counterparts; the personifications of qualities expressed by abstract feminine nouns; the deities with a basis in the natural world; and the goddesses who were powerful in their own right.
The goddesses who personified abstractions expressed by feminine nouns bore names such as Dhisana ("intelligence"), Sraddha ("faith") and Nirrti ("decay") and represented both positive and negative qualities. Numerous Rgvedic hymns document the process whereby such deities arose from the observation of physical phenomena and then became philosophical abstractions and personified goddesses. For example, sri Sri ("light, lustre, radiance") appears first as the all-encompassing glory ascribed to Agni, Rudra, Usas, and other deities. Only much later did Sri emerge in her own right as a personified goddess who soon thereafter merged with Laksmi. Initially, Laksmi ("good fortune, prosperity") was probably a non-Aryan agricultural deity; and her negative counterpart, Alaksmi ("misfortune"), suggests a further connection to the older, dual-natured Neolithic goddess. The Srisukta, a hymn appended to the Rgveda in late Vedic times, documents the merging of Sri and Laksmi into a single goddess, whose propitiation grants protection from Alaksmi, her dark aspect.
Some Vedic hymns celebrate feminine power in the beauty of night, the forest, the rivers, and the earth, personified as goddesses who, for the most part, played a smaller role in the pantheon. An exception is the frequently and ecstatically hymned Usas, goddess of the dawn, who in earlier Vedic times figured prominently among the sky deities. Likewise, the deified Sarasvati River figured as a powerful goddess, extolled for annually bringing new life to the farmlands and sustaining the towns and villages along her banks. A singularly beautiful hymn (RV 10.146) glorifies Aranyani, whose name (from aranya, "forest") identifies her as the guardian of the wilderness and the mother of beasts and all sylvan things. This elusive Lady of the Forest, gently rustling like the tinkling of bells, is sweet-scented, benevolent, and protective, giving forth an abundance of uncultivated foods. She slays only murderous enemies, understood by the 14th-century commentator Sayana to mean tigers. Assuming a Harappan-Vedic interaction, could this unique hymn to Aranyani be addressing the tiger-vanquishing goddess of the Indus Valley seals? Whatever the historical reality, the distinguishing feature of the Rgveda's goddess hymns is their joyful wonder at nature's luminous visage. Thousands of years later, their words still evoke the same ineffable feelings that must have stirred the hearts of the seers who composed them.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In Praise of the Goddess by DEVADATTA KALI. Copyright © 2003 David Nelson. Excerpted by permission of NICOLAS-HAYS, INC..
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