Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worship in West Bengal

by June McDaniel

Overview

In Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls, June McDaniel provides an exhaustive, accessibly written overview of Bengali goddess worship or Shakti. McDaniel identifies three major forms of goddess worship, and examines each through its myths, folklore, songs, rituals, sacred texts, and practitioners. She traces these strands through Bengali culture and explores how they are interwoven with each other as well as with other forms of Hinduism and other forms of religion. McDaniel also discusses how Shakti practices have been reinterpreted in the West, where goddess worship has gained the values of sexual freedom and psychological healing, but lost its emphases on devotion and asceticism. She takes the reader inside the lives of practicing Shaktas, including religious professionals, hymn singers, philosophers, visionaries, gurus, and even a businessman, and offers vivid descriptions of their rituals, practices, and daily lives. Drawing on years of fieldwork and extensive research, McDaniel paints a rich, expansive portrait of this fascinating religious tradition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195167900
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	08/05/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

June McDaniel is Professor of Religious Studies and Director of the Religious Studies Program at the College of Charleston. She is the author of The Madness of the Saints: Ecstatic Religion in Bengal (1989) and Making Virtuous Daughters and Wives: An Introduction to Women's Brata Rituals in Bengali Folk Religion (2002).

Editorial Reviews

"A well-researched and documented study. ... Highly recommended."—Choice

From the Publisher