In the goddess' lair

We have spent the past nine days worshipping the goddess in various forms; with the devout engaging in a battery of rituals and prayers and some rigorous dietary discipline. Her omniscient presence in our lives has been suitably reinforced.

In India, the goddess or 'devi' is part of the pantheon as consort of the gods, a fertility icon and as a principle of creation. Goddesses were also worshipped in Sumerian, Babylonian and Egyptian civilisations. The practice dates back several thousand years but scholars are indefinite about a timeline. What scholars do agree on is that the existence of the goddess is far older than the documentation. And her worship was predominant in the East before it moved to the West. Gaia, the Greek goddess, is believed to be a form of the proto-Indo-European mother goddess. James Frazer (The Golden Bough) says the Romans began worshipping the goddess as the mother of their gods in 204 BC towards the end of their long war with Hannibal, because they were told that victory would be theirs if the great Oriental goddess was brought to Rome.

In India among the early devis are Usas, the goddess of dawn, Prithvi, the earth mother, and a set of goddesses called Matrikas. Gradually the pantheon added goddesses of disease, childbirth, misery and dirt and so on. In many primitive mythologies, the goddess was also seen as ruthless, wanton and sexually dominant. Clearly 'mother' was not the only form in which a goddess was worshipped; the category comprised a motley crew.

Possibly, this mix of characteristics gave rise to the goddess's dual form as a generative and a destructive force and to her (later) ferocious and demonic depictions. Joseph Campbell (Primitive Mythology) says, "we find the imagery of the mother associated almost equally with beatitude and danger, birth and death, the inexhaustible nourishing breast and the tearing claws of the ogress". Durga and Kali are examples of the above in India as is Hathor in Egypt. Artemis, in the Greek pantheon, was known as the protector of animals but was also propitiated with human sacrifice.

Goddesses could be mysterious, magical, wilful and demanding. In some goddesses the destructive aspect was uncontrollable rage and in others, a desire for vengeance. Was the worship of goddesses, then, driven by fear, loathing and desire?

Wendy Doniger, in an essay on goddesses, wrote: "In fact, when men as well as women do worship goddesses, as they have done for centuries in many parts of India, the religious texts and rituals clearly express the male fear of female powers…There is generally, therefore, an inverse ratio between the worship of goddesses and the granting of rights to human women."

This is just one view and it may be debatable but, what is interesting is how, in most societies, the nature of the goddess changed as men took control of the social structure as priests, bards and kings. A poem from Indonesia composed sometime in the 14th century is illustrative: It laments the fall of Uma, the wife of Bhatara Guru who was unfaithful to her husband with Brahma. She is cursed by her husband and turns into a demoness called Durga with huge flaring nostrils and patchy skin who is forced to live in the graveyard for 12 years till she is exorcised of her sins by Shiva. For a society that was keen to punish adulterous women, this myth served as an effective warning.

In India, Durga is not demonised but here too, under the gaze of the male authors of the Puranic texts, her powers are not her own. They are derived from the gods of the pantheon. She is an embodiment of Shakti, the primal force of all creation, but to slay Mahishasura, she needs to be armed and adorned by the trinity and other gods. Maybe that is the secret of harmonious coexistence of gods and goddesses in the pantheon.