IINDIIA AND TIIBET :: The GODDESS CREATES,, SUSTAIINS ND A AND T BET The GODDESS CREATES SUSTA NS and DESTROYS

and DESTROYS
Bennett Blumenberg
ANCIENT HISTORY and RELIGION TIMELINE PROJECT 1994, 1996, 2006 Blumenberg Associates LLC 851 S. Kihei Rd, #B212 Kihei (Maui), HI 96753
Phone: 808.891.1075; Fax: 206.984.0595 BlumenbergAssociates@ahrtp.com merlynne6@earthlink.net http://ancienthistory.ahrtp.com

License - This manuscript may not be distributed in any digital or hard copy media without prior written consent from Blumenberg Associates LLC. This license prohibits resale or incorporation of this manuscript into any commercial product in any medium. Document text and content may not be altered or edited. Posting of this file on a web site for either download or browser display without written approval from Blumenberg Associates LLC is a violation of this license. For permission to quote small sections of text, please contact Blumenberg Associates LLC. "When man created language with wisdom, As if winnowing cornflower through a sieve, Friends acknowledged the signs of friendship, And their speech retained its touch." Rg Veda 10.71 "Whatever is happening is happening for good...." Krsna to Arjuna in the Bhagvad Gita 8/18/2012 4:57 AM

Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gnostic Tantra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . History and Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Goddess and Tantra . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Snakes, Venom and Milk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Earliest Goddess in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Taming of the Goddess in Vedic India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Re-Emergence of the Goddess . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Earth Goddess: Blood Sacrifice and Kali . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Mistress of Animals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gaia and Sovereignty: Sri Lakshmi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gaja Lakshmi Travels to Europe 52 2 4 8 10 .... 21 23 29 33 37 45 46

Sri as Giver of Sovereigntly 54 The Goddess of Life and Agriculture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Stallion and the Mare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Doomsday Mare . . . . . . . . . . Denial and Acceptance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mnage a Trois . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Radha, Smallpox, Chaos and Transcendence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tara: Goddess of Tibet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arrival and Settlement of Tara in Tibet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tara: Tantric Cult and Folk Religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 58 64 73 75 78 83 86 93

Homage to Tara . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105


Introduction: Simplification and Complexity

ny discussion of the worship and cult of the Goddess in India and Tibet is unavoidably complex; there is no way to enter into this region of mythopoetics and present a simplified overview which is both easy to digest for the nonspecialist and also true to both historical and present day realities. The evidence is direct experience, direct narrative, textural and archeological. The complexities that India and Tibet present, can be briefly outlined but not simplified. These are cultural regions whose depth can never be exhausted or completely understood. They must be approached with the attitude that they represent the potential for a life-long involvement, never to be completed, yet forever enriching. India is justifiably called a subcontinent, not a single country, and it should be thought of in that manner. It has been home to several hundred kingdoms and languages over the past three millennia. Scholars have long acknowledged the Indian intellectual genius as most profound in its talent for elaboration, ornamentation and exploration of the mythological reality. The term renaissance was coined in the West to label the post medieval expansion of knowledge and research in Europe, and has come to mean in-depth encyclopedic intelligence and creativity. This quality may be said to characterize almost all of India and Tibet from the inception of their recorded history. An encyclopedic approach to creativity is fostered by both Buddhism and Hinduism, which in their ecumenism and acceptance for the broadest diversity of human behavior, were fundamental for establishing the context within which a very large Asian region would become renaissance. The same cannot be said of the Christianized, and often Catholic West, whose central paradigm, equally creative, lay in other directions (although geniuses such as Dante and Leonardo da Vinci typify the renaissance mentality in the West). The detail and complexity of Indian and Tibetan writing, religious or secular, is often overwhelming when first encountered. Overlapping layers of complex metaphor are challenging indeed! However, their beauty and courage quickly win many adherents and ones involvement is always rewarded, although never completed. There is no central thread to finding the Great Goddess in India and Tibet. Her manifestations are uncountable and exist in forms that have both broad geographical range and those tightly restricted to regions as small as single 2

villages. Broad themes can be identified, discussed and compared to those of Eurasia, but the description of the complete whole will forever elude us, even though the evidence tells us it is there. So let us begin. . The central and key ritual in India that must be scrutinized is the asvamedha, the horse sacrifice through which deity power is infused into the king. This all important event bears extraordinary similarity to the horse ceremony that was performed in Celtic Ireland for the same reasons that I discussed in The White Goddess in Ireland, Britain and Wales (Blumenberg 1993, 2006; OFlaherty 1980). Geographically situated on the periphery of the Indo-European culture region, celtic Ireland by virtue of its isolation and India because of the absence of Christianity retained early elements of important rituals believed to have characterized all early Indo-Europeans for a very long time. The emergence of the Goddess in India and Tibet within Buddhism and Hinduism is inextricably tied to the evolution of Tantrism and that circumstance lends an unavoidable additional layer of complexity to the historical record and its interpretation. A formal definition of tantra/Tantrism is given in the glossary, but I shall expand a bit here. Tantrism is not a religion anymore than is shamanism; the two are analogous in that they are bodies of ritual technique that point towards the ecstatic (Eliade 1969, Samuel 1993).1 Tantra does, however, have its boundaries and it is traditionally found only within Buddhism and Hinduism. Tantra is also bound up with the practice of yoga which may be found within both Hinduism and Buddhism. Yoga is a ritual discipline that has found its way to the West in many cartoon variants in the hands of New Age gurus.2 Tantra itself exists on many planes; it is central to the highest of the three paths of Buddhism, that which was latest in development. Written tantras convey the most complex spiritual
1Central

to Samuels (1993) thesis, is the proposal that tantric practitioners within Tibetan Buddhism represent an advanced approach to shamanism because they use their virtuosity in visualization to generate relationships with Tantric deities that are then used to help with the serious pragmatic concerns of the community. Such an approach flourished in the absence of a strongly centralized political state as was the case in Tibet throughout its long history fromr the collapse of its Central Asian empire (c.866 A.D.) to the Chinese invasion in 1950. India saw the development of powerful, political states from the time of Asoka (c.250 B.C.) onwards but the sub-continent is so vast that tantra was never in danger of being extinguished. 2Independently of this simplistic confusion, many of its preliminary physical techniques may be taken out of context and viewed legitimately as meditative methodology. Yoga can then be practiced for an intended secular purpose such as physical and mental relaxation.

messages and can be used by those so adept to enhance spiritual development in a quiet but profound manner. However, active ritual is central to almost all tantric practice and several specific examples central to the goddess will be discussed below. Most, but not all, tantric ritual was esoteric knowledge, deliberately concealed from all but the initiated for very legitimate reasons (see esoteric vs exoteric in the glossary). The rationale for the concealment was the belief, backed up by actual experience, that the specifics of ritual and the knowledge thus imparted, lived on the most extreme boundaries of human experience. While of potentially great spiritual benefit to those who are mature, centered in themselves and prepared, such knowledge could literally destroy the psyche and induce madness in those who are immature, unintelligent and neurotic. Much esoteric tantra was sexual in nature for the timeless reason that sexual relationships are a readily available arena for probing the depths and boundaries of the human psyche. Sexual tantra was always practiced by a small minority and was always controversial, both in its historical time of original and development and continuing into the twentieth century; see the discussion below by OFlaherty (1980) on this subject. Yet the very fact of its existence allowed for a practice in which women could more easily rise to prominence than within the establishment realms of Buddhism such as the clerical and scholastic Mahayana which characterized the majority of the great monasteries. We should also understand that ritualistic sexual relationships that were conceived as a protocol for entering divine realms is hardly a prerogative restricted to Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism. In Blumenberg (1993, 2006), I draw extensively upon OFlaherty (1980) to explore such ritual as it concerned royalty in Celtic Ireland. Sexual intercourse with priestesses of the deity was an ecstatic experience that was well known throughout the Classical World.

Gnostic Tantra

owever, what is less known is that sexual ritual of a type akin to tantra also existed in the West for several centuries within various Gnostic sects (see the glossary for a general definition of Gnosticism). Adhering to the historical record, we see Gnosticism as a variation of mainstream Christianity that flourished in the first few centuries A.D.. Most Gnostic sects, as did many sects of Hinduism and Buddhism, emphasized self discipline, purity and chastity if not outright celibacy. The strongly dualistic context is distinctly Western and serves to define a huge gulf in theology between Gnosticism, Islam, and Judaism on the one hand and the religions of India and East Asia on the other. Clearly defined and forever opposed dualities battle for the salvation and redemption of the human soul in Gnosticism, as they do in Zoroastrianism and the more fundamental sects of mainstream Christianity. This inability to recognize the oneness and ultimate unity of all ten thousand things in the universe fostered upon Western culture a mytho-poetic imperialism that led to the crystallization of hard concepts of good vs evil and the inevitable competition/warfare whose goal is the complete triumph of good, first in the religious sphere and secondarily in secular realms of life. Nonetheless, within the theological framework outlined in the glossary, various Gnostic sects practiced sexual rituals designed to breakdown all boundaries within this world in order to discover the divine spark within humankind that is to be awakened to achieve salvation. The knowledge which awakens the soul is not cognitive, but experience and since the universe is a vast prison created by the Demiurge, active opposition to the moral law of the Old Testament is an obligation and sacred duty. What might define a tantric rite as opposed to any other is the degree of detail and elaboration. Each act in the sequence is loaded with metaphorical significance leading towards a culminating initiatory experience that is ecstatic and transformational. The examples of sexual religious rites mentioned above are not tantric in character because they are comprised of single events rather than elaborate sequences that build towards a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Our information on the sexual tantra of Gnostics comes mostly from reports of bishops who observed the rituals with the aim of identifying heretics and stamping out blasphemy. In a city of the Mediterranean littoral - maybe Alexandria - in the early Christian era, a man and a woman have just finished making love. Theirs is more than an erotic interlude, however: it becomes religious ritual, for they are members of a Gnostic sect that has

turned sexual intercourse to religious ends. At this point according to Epiphanus, a disapproving bishop writing in the 370s, they would hold up their blasphemy to heaven, the woman and the man taking the secretion from the male into their own hands. Gazing reverently upwards, they would pray, We offer you this gift, the body of Christ. Then Epiphanus continues, they consume it, partaking of their shamefulness, and they say, This is the body of Christ and this is the Pasch for which our bodies suffer and are forced to confess the passion of Christ. They do the same with what is of the woman when she has the flow of blood, collecting the monthly blood of impurity from her, they take it and consume it together in the same way. This they say is the blood of Christ. At other times, Epiphanus writes in his antiheretical work The Panarion, such libertine Gnostics would collect and consume semen and menstrual blood after intercourse and masturbation, and believing that the power in the semen and blood was soul, would pray naked. ... Gnostics were not alone in thinking that semen and menstrual blood were somehow the vehicle of that particle of divinity [which upon salvation through gnosis will unite with the true God]. In addition, sexual offerings apparently could be made to the archons, the guardians of the different heavens interposed between this earth and the heaven of the true God. Epiphanus cites several instances of Gnostic leaders who taught the practice, ... ... Irenaeus, a bishop of Lyons who lived c.130-200 C.E. Such men, eager to purify the church of heresy, seized upon accusations of sexual impropriety as ammunition against theological deviants. Irenaeus, for instance was particularly vexed by the activities of a Gnostic teacher named Marcus who also lived in the Rhone Valley, then part of the Roman province of Gaul. Irenaeus denounced Marcus as a self proclaimed prophet and magician whose chief aim, the bishop said was having sex with his female followers ... According to Irenaeus, Marcus performed a sacrament that involved mixing a purple liquid with wine that he said was the blood of Grace. By analogy with other Gnostic groups practices, Marcus and his followers may have been mixing wine with small amounts of male semen and female menstrual blood, viewed as the essence of each gender. ... The late Morton Smith of Columbia University, an historian of magic, suggested that Gnostics carried out such literal reenactments of Jesuss declarations this is my blood to demonstrate further freedom from the restrictive law of the Old Testament which they viewed as part of the false gods attempt to imprison them in the material world (Clifton 1992: 28-30).

Survi ving Gnostic manuscripts, including the famous Nag Hammadi texts, have virtually nothing to say about sacramental sex. But then, monastic libraries seem an unlikely place to find such material, if the rites were ever written down at all. As discussed above, age old tradition consigns the most potent esoteric knowledge to oral tradition in order to maximize its restriction to disciples and initiates. Although many Gnostic sects considered sexuality to be one of the traps laid by the Demiurge, other groups were willing to use sexual rites as a vehicle to contact the sacred and achieve a divine ecstasy, vision and gnosis. No doubt cynical charlatans gathered followers but tolerance was wide spread and allowed for a great variety of practice. When Catholic Christianity became the Roman Empires state religion in the fourth century, Gnostic Christianity faded away although many of its teachings and attitudes survived in Manichaeism, Kabbalah and Neoplatonic philosophy. The possibility for using the sexual rite as a sacrament in Christianity disappeared except for the faintly erotic metaphor of the soul as the bride of Christ. The possibility of sexual pleasure in Heaven reappeared in Christianity during the Middle Ages reinforced by the semi-Pagan ideal of courtly love. In later centuries, the visionary artist William Blake and the scientist-mystic Emanual Swedenborg, among others, forecast erotic love in heaven - a more complete, more understanding, and truer sexual intimacy... Nonetheless, sexual ritual has become a truly underground part of the Western tradition. It surfaces among the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as part of a package of anticlerical and antidogmatic beliefs and practices. These highly individualistic followers of the Free Spirit were themselves found among quasi-heretical Beguine and Beghard communal groups [who] sometimes considered sexual intercourse to be a taste of paradise open to the person who had allegedly united his or her own will with Gods. (Clifton 1992: 33). For most us who live somewhere near the mainstream, we are not the inheritors of Gnosticism or underground movements such as the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit or Neo-Paganism. They are important to highlight here because they establish the historical record of sacramental sexual ritual within high Western civilization. Gone forever is the pejorative view that such matters are the sole territory of erotic and distorted Asian practice. The vast majority of us must however, wrestle with the legacy imposed by Judaism, the Catholic Church and the Reformation and their associated movements to

morally purify, be they Lutheran, Calvinism, Baptist or Puritan. Additional complexity and hypocrisy is added by the double standard morality of the Victorian Period. Rarely before the post-war era could western anthropologists observe sexual ritual in tribal or foreign civilizations and see anything but obscene barbarism that served to define an inferior race. Such an attitude is but one aspect of western cultures infamous methodology of cultural imperialism. Our sexual legacy of these philosophies and theologies is that we now live in a secularized, technocratic culture which all too often views sex as just another marketable, athletic event. Tantri c doctrine has been researched and published by western scholars for over a century. However, the potential audience for such information has been increased exponentially by the decision of the Dally Lama of Tibet to allow public teaching and book publishing of tantric ritual in Western languages. His position does not spring from a re-evaluation of the elitist position which is still believed defensible and sensible. Rather, his perception of the severity of the spiritual crisis in the West induced him to take the chance in the hope that the potential benefits to the planet at large would outweigh the possible dangers of making much esoteric ritual available to the western world. Certainly, the details of the tantric procedures discussed below will shock some readers but perhaps no more so than the record of those Christian Gnostics who chose such a path. Hopefully the larger context can be understood, at least in part, and the dimensions of awareness thereby be widened. One does not need to practice anything; in order to contemplate with an open mind! When viewing the contemporary world, this is the Dali Lamas goal which is strangely congruent with the philosophy of those Gnostics who saw the sexual act as sacrament. Simply by the fact of this presentation, which springs from no motivation other than historical research into mythology and religion, you and I are automatically caught up in this great spiritual experiment. For some of us with open minds and a capacity to suspend judgments of the usual sort, simply taking the lock off the esoteric information base, will expand awareness.

History and Politics

t is imp ortant to realize at the outset of this discussion that twentieth century political/geographical maps of India and Tibet are misleading reference points for this discussion. Today, Tibet is a conquered country, a hostile colony of the Peoples Republic of China who invaded the country in 1950 and had subdued it by the mid 1960s. Chinas claim that that Tibet was always a province of China is revisionist, Orwellian history at its worst. Tibetans are an ethnic group distinct from either the Han or Manchu who have dominated China over the past millennium. Furthermore, in the late seventh and eighth centuries A.D., Tibet, not China, was the imperial power of Central and East Asia. Indeed, Tang China was successfully invaded by the Tibetans at this time and Tibet dictated treaty terms. A more detailed chronology of these events may be found in (Beckwith 1987). Chinese hatred of the Tibetans stems from this humiliation of more than a thousand years ago, but we must remember that the clock runs very differently in the Orient than in the West. This hatred transcends twentieth century politics even as it determines them and serves to justify (in the Chinese mind) current policy towards Tibet. Following the collapse of their empire in the late ninth century A.D., Tibet remained a distinct geo-political entity although at times of greatest weakness, Chinese suzerainty was either imposed or grudgingly invited. Certainly, British policy towards Tibet, as it began to be formulated early in this century, never considered the country as merely a Chinese province. It was always dealt with as an independent nation-state which is a straightforward approach to an accurate reading of the historical record. Furth er back in time during the first millennium B.C. and closer to the first events discussed in this study, both Nepal and Tibet were part of a diffuse region that stretched northward into Central Asia from India. The dominant, progressive, cultural influence upon those areas which in later times would give birth to these two countries were the states of Northern India. Continual travel through the passes and mountain valleys of the Himalayas assured a two way flow of trade, information and religious activity. Several specific examples of such travel will be discussed below. Sakyamuni, later to be known as the Buddha, was born a prince in a northern Indian kingdom and the religious context of his place and time was late Vedic. It took several centuries for Buddhism to spread northward, but once it did, Nepal and Tibet 9

were inextricably drawn into the Indian sphere of cultural influence. It was from this enormous reservoir to the south that the primary influences that were to mold these societies emerged. The Chinese were also present to the north of India at this early time, but in very small numbers and their influence upon these developing regions was small by comparison. Indian Buddhism first became entrenched and reshaped in Tibet by those kings who also built the great Tibetan empire. It is interesting that they are known more to posterity for their introduction and support of a new religion, as opposed to their imperialism, for they acquired the title of Dharma kings. India, Nepal and Tibet were a closely intertwined mytho-poetic, religious sphere until the Muslim invasions nearly extinguished Buddhism in India.

The Goddess and Tantra

n understanding of the Goddess in India and Tibet is inextricably tied up with an exploration of Tantra. While the Goddess may be propitiated by anyone as a powerful deity able to grant boons to her supplicants, an exploration of her higher mytho-poetics requires us to leave the village and journey with wandering yogins and visit with master lamas both within and outside the monastery. We will begin by examining the historical record for what it tells us about the first discoveries of the Goddess in India and Tibet. Many of her manifestations will be noted as we proceed slowly into the realm of tantra. Durg a is the Great Goddess of Fertility and Vegetation in India and is served by a vast troop of yoginis who dwell in kula trees. They are both nymphs and sorceresses, yet they may also be her epiphanies. Her cult was particularly adept at incorporating aboriginal and pre-Hindu religion elements that were strongly shamanistic. Three classes of yoginis evolved, Kulaja, Brahmi and Rudra - white fairies with pink eyes who adore Sugata and favor white color and perfumes. Closely related

10

dakinis are red skinned, exude lotus fragrance, are gentle of face with red eyes and nails and decorate their dwellings with lotus. All of these companions and epiphanies of Durga represent minor deities of vegetation and destiny, death, and wealth while also incarnating forces of Yoga and shamanistic magic. At Udyana, yoginis were tiger women, feeding on human flesh and able to transform into birds when crossing a river. Tibetan paintings show dakinis with a terrible; third eye in the forehead, virtually naked except for a green scarf or red loin cloth and carrying a corpse on their backs. Lamas are similar and indigenous to Tibet.3 All of these demigoddesses were utilized in Tantrism. Accor ding to the philosopher commentator Rasaratnacara, Nagarjuna acquired the secrets of alchemy after twelve years spent in adoration of the Goddess Yaksini. The Yaksas and Yaksinis make up the great class of local divinities into which Hinduism incorporated most aboriginal religious forms. They were tribal agricultural deities worshipped in every village and they were pictured as near giants of large form and proportion. Durga may have originally been a Yaksa. Altars could be anywhere but always included a stone tablet or altar under a sacred tree. Buddhism incorporated this symbolism into the cult of caityas, where the caitya could be a tree or construction nearby. This iconography is pre-Aryan. Yaksas also became the guardians of stupas. The Great Goddess, fertility cults and popular yoga coalesce. Sati, wife of Siva, dies or kills herself due to mistreatment by her father. Siva goes mad and wanders the world with his wifes corpse. To end his madness, the gods decide to reduce Satis body to fragments. They do so, either by entering the body by yoga and dividing it (Brahma, Visnu, Sani); or have Visnu cut it to pieces with his arrows. Wherever the pieces fall become pithas which represent the Great Goddess (i.e. they are fragments of the divne body). Pithas become holy places where ascetics and yogins meditate to obtain siddhis. Durga as Sakti becomes the goddess of yogins and ascetics (Eliade 1969: 343ff).

3Do

not confuse these lamas, which are the Tibetan equivalent of the Indian yoginis, with the term lama as applied in Tibet to a master teacher.

11

On one hand, I see a thinly veiled metaphor for the final and successful domination of the design of the social structures of secular time by IndoEuropean Aryans; and the rise to pre-eminence of their cosmology headed by a male sky god over that of the earlier inhabitants of the subcontinent who followed the Great Goddess. On the other hand, ascetics and yogins adopted pithas as holy places because their mystical tradition followed the Great Goddess and predates the Aryan invasions. Archeological fragments from the Harappan civilization strongly suggest yogic practices were in place in the Indus valley civilizations of the third millennium B.C. (see below). The Great Goddess cannot endure whole but survived by dispersing herself as she did throughout Europe. However, unlike in the West, this dispersal is not the first chapter in a tale of mythopoetic genocide. There is no indicat entourage for such is the custom of princely beings according to their status. Tara assumes a unique position. She may have originated as a hypostase of Avalokitesvara whose chief attributes are the holding of a lotus flower and the will to save all beings. Tara means the the one who saves. As White Tara, she manifests as the greatest of all Buddhist goddesses and becomes, in effect, a feminine version of Avalokitesvara. Both are celibate. She quickly replaced Prajnaparamita (one with white garment - Perfection of Wisdom) as the Mother of all Buddhas. she holds in her hands in a lotus gesture and drinks from herself. Followers of the Great Goddess (Devi or Durga) sought animal sacrificial victims.

The yogins then h

12

FLESH ATTAI
NMENT

human me threefold Vajra (Body, Speech, Mind) feces, urine elephant magical attainments (abhijna) horse ibility magical power (vidjahara)

supre

five

invinc dog

successes (siddhi) cow

ritual

powe r of conjuring, drawing into one If these kinds of flesh are unavailable, one should envisage them all by meditating. (Guhyasamaja Tantra); see Snellgrove (1987(1)). India n goddesses can be divided into two broad groups. Category 1 is the goddess of the tooth or genitals: the two metaphors are linked in the symbol of the vagina dentata. Worship of these goddesses occurs in times of crisis

13

such as disease epidemics and they are dangerous, erotic, powerful and unpredictable. Category 2 embraces the bountiful and fertile goddesses of the breast who are filled with life-giving and linked to the life cycles of humanity and the earth. These goddess of Category 2 are much like the reconstructions of the Goddess of Neolithic Old Europe. Goddesses of the breast and life-giving provide archetypal role models for the perfect wife and they are subservient to the male consorts. Goddesses of the tooth have consorts but they are the dominant partner and often assume aggressive, martial roles which do not fit concepts of femininity. Goddesses of the breast are those of the highest rank even though their power lies with their husbands and they are sexually controlled. The lowest ranking goddesses and witches are sexually free and will attack men (Beck, 1969).4 These Category 1 goddesses are placated with food but they give nothing in return to their human worshippers. They are considered whores, mares and devourers of the male essence, both metaphoric potency and sperm. Category 2 goddesses, whose being is intrinsically situated on a higher spiritual plane, do give back food to their supplicants in the form of spiritual nourishment, prasada. These goddesses are able to form intimate relationships in which there is reciprocity: they are cows and givers of food. The horse symbolism is complex: the mare is placed at the bottom of the hierarchy and an explanation is not easily found. Food symbolism, the cycle of fluids and the sacred mare are intertwined in a complex dance. The archetypal Goddess embodies - incarnates - the archetypal power of the god, which is known as sakti, because as they create Her she comes to contain some of their powers. The androgyny inherent in this creation is realized. Siva is the ultimate creator. It is his dance which creates and eternally renews the universe and he does not require a human-level procreative act. Primary creation deities in many cosmologies are androgynous. The paradigm for the Fall is the creation of opposing dualities: black and white, good and evil, positive and negative, yin and yang, and male and female. The divine condition is totipotency: creative capability is contained within individuals. The human condition is the compelling quest to achieve unity between opposing pairs and thus restore wholeness, so as to once again experience, the primal cosmic truth of oneness. The goal of Taoist practice is achieve 1 + 1 = 1. Etc.

There are some goddesses who do not fit easily into either category. They are unmarried, not overtly aggressive and submit to some degree of male control.

14

Altho ugh the Goddess power derives ultimately from male gods via a cosmic parthenogenesis, Her power is awesome and developed on a grand scale. When human beings engage in a relationship with the Goddess, their lives are at literally at stake. The relationship is exceedingly complex: death may only be temporary and rebirth carries with it new possibilities. Although the Goddess may milk her consort of his strength, or even kill him, she always has the power to revive him. Those in whom the deity rekindles life cannot emerged unscathed or unchanged, yet reciprocity is unavoidable. What can the Goddesss consort, or her male worshippers give Her in return for resurrection? There can be only one gift: the male gift of life-giving - sexual potency. But what a small gift in return for an experience of the One, the blinding flash of Cosmic Unity and a step across the threshold into the realm of the gods, if only for brief moments! Exper ience of the other sex is one path towards developing a higher spiritual power. Siva, or one of his emanations, may turn into a woman in order to siphon off destructive or demonic male powers, after which a return to maleness renders the God renewed. Primary androgynous deities who contain both sexes also have the power to shape shift from one to the other as external circumstances provide experiences that favor one sexual identity over another. Krsna worshippers may become temporarily female and then return to being males - but fuller and better males; this process may be regarded as a kind of serial androgyny. There is a myth in which the Goddess turns all three male gods (Brahma, Visnu and Siva) into females in order to teach them how to create; she then turns them back into males, after giving them their three saktis, Mahalaksmi, Mahakali, and Mahasarasvatai. Shape shifting androgyny works both ways. If one is willing to take the chance of losing ones original sexual identity, one can not only survive but return, stronger than before. Thus , although sexual contact with divinity is dangerous, it holds the possibility of salvation. In yoga thought, duality is death and nonduality is the conquest of death; the merging of male and female immortality. So, too, any contact with divinity - the closer the better - is an experience that promises to taste of immortality. The worshipper willing to risk this doubly hazardous encounter may achieve realizations and powers that can be won in no other way (OFlaherty 1980: 129).

15

It now becomes clearer that the path to immortality through death has alternative routes. One can be taken by the god while resisting death: not all of those so killed are reborn. One has to be chosen for speciality and who can know that in advance? Nonetheless, one path to the death which confers immortality is to allow oneself to be devoured by the divine. Such loss of ego and self could lead to a breakdown of the psyche and soul. The danger is real: some acolytes return from their first encounter with divine power with minds forever shattered. But others, suitably prepared and consciously choosing this ritual are transformed by the experience. The Vedas and Upanishads refer to cycles in which the eater is eaten and a god of the universe is also a great devourer. The idea of a cycle of mutual devouring persists in the Ayvurvedic scheme of medicine in which a patient is made to eat the meat of the eaters of meat, thus by participating in the circulation of body fluids (rasa) in the universe, promoting it in the microcosm of his own body. Here it is interesting to note that rasa usually denotes a soup or medicinal decoction made by boiling meat to make a broth. Broth is the form in which the mare is eaten in the ancient Irish ritual, and the broth made from a meat eater (the mare who eats the stallion) is particularly potent in the logic of this scheme (OFlaherty 1980: 266). A well known Puranic myth will illustrate. Sukra had the power to revive demons who fell in battle with the gods. Siva swallowed Sukra so he could not use this power and then gave an epiphany of the universe while Sukra resided in his belly. Sukra is later emitted through Sivas penis and then acquired his name which means semen. [This sentence is certainly confusing to read. The deity named Sukra did not officially acquire his name until reborn through Siva's penis. There is an allusion here, although it is very veiled, to the initiation of a disciple by a master yogin.] The Goddess Devi then intervenes to prevent Siva from doing Sukra further harm by pointing out that since he came forth from Sivas phallus, he is both immortal and her son. As with Sukra, such myths portray devouring as an act of aggression. But the individual eaten is reborn as an immortal, a child of the gods and with a terrible goddess as mother. These myths have elements familiar to the initiation which confer extraordinary powers upon a shaman. As with the transformation into a realized shaman, here death followed by rebirth in a new body with exceptional vision and powers. Perhaps these shamanic

16

overtones come from either a) a distant past when the Indo-European Aryan invaders of India were hunter-gathers whose culture featured charismatric shamans; or b) interactions during the Vedic period between the Aryans and surrounding tribal peoples who practiced shamanism. The unmistakable shamanic element here is the initiatory death followed by rebirth in a new body which possesses extraordinary spiritual powers. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that although a god or demon or demoness is the devourer, it is a goddess who intercedes and prevents a real death from occurring and thus allows the worshipper to acquire immortality. It would appear, therefore, that the Hindus retained a memory of a myth in which being devoured by the mare goddess was a source of religious rebirths. Although in androcentric texts, it was a male god - a stallion (for both Siva and Sukra are powerful yogis) - who was said to do the swallowing, it was still a goddess who made the initiate immortal ... Indeed, whereas in the pejorative mare myths the evil goddess simply devours her son, in these texts, perhaps under Tantric, devotional and Saktic influence, the devotee becomes her son after she devours him - and thus becomes safe from her sexual assaults ... When a male god swallows the devotee, he imitates the Goddess by becoming pregnant, with the child growing in his belly; he then reverts to male status and emits the child through his phallus, like seed. This seed, however, is swallowed by the god in imitation of the mare; it is thus a feminine rather than a masculine form of procreation. ... In this context, the many Hindu myths of male pregnancy may be seen as instances in which a god, in imitation of a goddess, gives rebirth to the initiate by swallowing and disgorging him. The link between swallowing semen and swallowing Soma (the inspirational intoxicant celebrated in Vedic hymns) is implicit in the Vedic myths of Indra and becomes explicit in the myths of Sukra, who is actually called semen as a result of being swallowed and ejaculated by a male god. The concept reemerges in Tantrism, where the seed is called amrta, the elixir of immortality. Tantric ritual holds interesting implications for the development of new attitudes toward the devoured and devouring goddess; for Tantrism retains the ancient yogic concept of the mans need to retain his semen but adds to it the even more ancient concept of rejuvenation through consuming the womans seed (OFlaherty 1980:269).

17

A description of a Tibetan Buddhist tantric rite for sexual yoga will clarify the metaphors. While the ritual may appear shocking or obscene to a western reader, it provides an example of esoteric doctrine that until very recently was never written down because disrespect (i.e. misunderstanding) from the uninitiated and ignorant was very likely. In India and Tibet, context and motivation are all, there is no concept of sin as the Judaeo-Christian west conceives of it, and there is no concept of obscenity as such. A sexual rite would be labeled bad if the participants were coerced or hurt in any way by the practice. First the male adept emits from his mouth a stream of sacred syllables; then he visualizes the goddess before him, the diamond demoness; he then visualizes himself as the god and visualizes the Mother on his lap. The white vajra (phallus) of the Father unites with the red lotus (vagina) of the Mother; then the deities enter into union in the sky and enter the male adept through his mouth or between his eyebrows; they descend, pass through his vajra, and fall and mix into the lotus of the Mother. Then the mantra goes upward from mouth to mouth (i.e. from the womans mouth back to the mans). ... The reverse direction has the seed-mantra traveling up the spine, and out of the mouth of the man into the mouth of the woman, down into her womb and into her vajrao, up through his spine, and so forth as the cycle continues and is continually reversed (OFlaherty 1980: 269 after Beyer 1974: 140-153). The fluid that circulates is primarily mantra; hence its primary locus is the mouth. It is also the substance of deity, which enters through either the top of the head, the spot between the eyebrows, or the mouth; these are also the loci of semen in yogic tradition. The process of circulation begins with the entrance of the deities into the mouth of the adept; this is the devouring of the goddess (and the god). It ends, if a cycle can be said to end, when the power that has left the body of the adept comes back into him through his mouth, where it entered in the first place; that is, he again devours the seed of the goddess, this time directly from his female partner. Thus, he behaves like the asvamedha stallion who swallows his own seed, for the ritual of swallowing seed forms a transitional link between rituals of taking in fluid (the Indo-European mares or the Tantric deitys) and giving fluids (the Vedic stallions or, again, the Tantric deitys). The reverse process is called the fierce recitation. Here the seed-mantra goes directly into the mouth of

18

the woman (the dangerous process of being devoured by the mare). It does not stop here, however, but returns to the man through the Tantric process of sexual reversal; the drawing of the fluid from the womans vagina into the mans penis. This reversal makes the fierce process of being devoured by the woman safe again; there is no ultimate loss of fluid. Indeed, by positing an endless cycle, the system becomes eternally sealed; there can be no loss, only the constant infusion of deity. Thus, fear of sexual death is overcome, as the fear of death in general is overcome through the concept of rebirth. Steady decline and loss is replaced by a self-renewing cycle. In this way Tantric ritual allows the adept to gain immortality by being devoured by the goddess as well as by devouring her ... In many Tantric rituals, the participants eat both male and female seed, or male and female menstrual blood, which are regarded as the site of both male and female divinities. We have seen this in Tibetan texts of a highly exoteric nature; yet Carstairs also encountered it in the folk beliefs of Rajashtani villagers with whom he lived: It was believed that the deity to whom their devotions were addressed made itself manifest in the climax of the sexual act (in the ritual), and in the male and female semen, of which the celebrants jointly partook at the end of the ceremony; this was their prashad (Carstairs 1958: 103). That this is a eucharist is explicit; it is even identified as such by the word used for the same procedure in the orthodox temple Hinduism: prasida. For prasada itself is a cyclic form of feeding and eating; the worshipper feeds the god something that he has sanctified and that is symbolic of his offering of himself, a part of his coded substance; the god eats this and returns the rest, now imbued with the gods substance, to the worshipper who eats it. (OFlaherty 1980: 269-271). OFla hertys use of the phrase coded substance is striking! She has, quite unknowingly, used a metaphor that allows for reference to a basic principle of reproductive physiology; male and female seed are genetic products of the reproductive system. DNA genes code for, i.e. produce translatable genetic messages that are the developmental programs for the next generation and these are packaged within sperm and egg cells as any introductory biology textbook can explain. These cells go through a complicated developmental process in order to arrive at their mature form that is potent. Furthermore, when sperm and egg cells fuse at fertilization

19

to produce the fertilized egg (zygote), they have produced a cell that contains two variations (alleles) of each parental gene, a genetic condition known as diploidy. This zygote, then, contains a complete set of genetic programs for the developmental construction of the new individual from the earliest stages of fetal growth onwards. The tantric devotee, in offering male or female seed, is offering a substance that contains the genetic instructions to build, not a duplicate of himself (clone), but an offspring, a child. One cannot imagine a more complete piece of oneself as a male than the library of genetic programs contained within the nucleus of a sperm cell. Blood is certainly the life force, but by itself it contains no implications for future generations. When the god or goddess accepts the offering of seed, then eats it, and then returns it to the worshipper, presumably the seed has been altered, added to, perhaps redesigned, in a manner that renders it superior to the original reproductive cells. Superior would not be just a metaphorical phrase here, but would refer to the potential of the new seed to produce a next generation that is more attuned to wisdom, compassion and higher spirituality. Here is the molecular biology of sexual tantra! The extraordinary implication in this welding of tantric mysticism to molecular biology is that the action of the god mutated the DNA in reproductive cells in manner that would increase the fitness and adaptation of the next generation along the lines indicated by the definition of superior. However, all of this may only be a theoretical consideration because tantric devotees, if successful in their practice, do not ejaculate and do not have children. The benefits of the new seed, now redesigned by the deity, reside upon its ability to influence the physiology, mental and spiritual activity of the devotee after reabsorption. I am unable to speculate upon any molecular physiology model that might account for that effect! Let us be very clear that we are having a mostly theoretical discussion here about tantric sexual rites, I am not describing sexual rituals there were commonplace. These Tantric rites, the philosophy and metaphors that accompany them are exotic and they do not present a picture of goddess worship that typified either Neolithic Old Europe or India, past or present. There is not a shred of evidence in the archeological remains of Old Europe for goddess rituals of this sort. With respect to India, Tantrism has existed for a very long time, at least two millennia, but is not believed to have been practiced by any but a small minority of the population. The reasons are self evident. Extremes of action and symbolism by definition appeal to small numbers of people, the tails of the statistical distribution of behavioral tastes and capabilities. Most people lead lives in the middle of the normal

20

statistical distribution which encompasses most of the area under the curve. As OFlaherty (1980: 272-272) states Clearly, Tantrism is not practiced by any significant proportion of Hindus. ... In the case of the more extreme rituals, one sometimes get the impression that Tantric cult is like the Indian rope trick: everyone know someone who knows someone who has seen it done, but no one has seen it done himself. ... Yet some form of the Tantric ritual is known on some level to almost all Hindus. ... Through these mythologies - for Tantrism may be a ritual for Tantrics, but it functions primarily as a mythology for other Hindus - it is possible to totter on the brink without actually falling into it and then to come back to the realm of the possible - now a world whose bounds have been extended, if only by a little. There is virtually no [temple] goddess worship in contemporary Hinduism, yet the mare is present everywhere, in roadside shrines and great temple cities, holding sway over most of India, among villagers as well as kings. For she has returned in spirit ... She has returned as the Tantric Goddess, whose presence is invoked by her human male worshipper, whom she invigorates with her own substance through ritual intercourse (just as the cow gives her fluid, milk, and the ancient mare gave her own broth) instead of stealing his substance from him. By reversing the flow of the fluids, reinvoking the Vedic image of the flow of seed from woman to man .., Tantrism reverses the flow of power. The woman is not merely a mortal, however, but a visualization of the Goddess herself, potentially an even greater source of danger. Not so; for the split is reversed even as the fluids are: the erotic goddess is a source of power, the fertile woman a danger expressly shunned by the Tantric philosophy that elevates nonmarital, nonfertile love (paraklya) above conventional married love (svaklya) (Dimock 1966: 202-217). The erotic woman is the immortal whose power flows down to the man, while the fertile woman is the mortal who drains his fluids away. In this world view, mares are safe and cows are dangerous ... Normal life is living death; ritual life, by inverting normal sexual processes, procures immortality (Eliade 1969). The Goddess bestows her immortality upon her mortal consort by uniting with him in the ritual. The Tantric ritual functions in many ways as a simple inversion of classical Indian ideas about sexuality. ... it is dangerous to have contact with someone more powerful than oneself. there is danger in contact of a mortal with an immortal. ... To have sexual contact with an immortal woman thus places a

21

man in double jeopardy; the flow of power from the woman to the man is accompanied by a simultaneous flow of life (fluid) from the man to the woman. This is the negative model of the mare goddess and her mortal consort, the degraded symbol of the hierogamy. Power is released at the moment of the sexual union of a god and a goddess, and ... some of the power thus released becomes available to the devotees of the god ... When any two things are joined (god and goddess, god and devotee, sun and moon, human and ghost, etc.) by copulation, bathing, eating or any other penetrating intercourse, some of their substances - and thus some of their powers - are loosened and transferred between them ... For the sun and moon, powerful but unmatched beings, to conjoin bodies is ambivalent, resulting in the loosening of both power-giving and polluting power-substance; hence the heightening of accessibility of both power and pollution (Stanley 1977: 441-42). ... For the Tantric seeks sexual contact with the Goddess, and in this he revives the stance of the hypothetical proto-Indo-European worshipper [I would say pre-Indo-European] of the fully accepted integrated mare goddess. Clearly, the major flow of power will be between the two partners in the sexual ritual, but this ritual (like the ancient Irish rite of the mare and the king) takes place in front of other people, and these onlookers also participate in the flow of powers. The devotees of the Goddess present at this union experience the heightening of accessibility of both power and pollution that is characteristic of the holy, of the mysterium fascinans et tremendum. [Such is the mytho-poetics behind priestesses who served the Goddess in Neolithic and Classical times and engaged in sexual rituals with male worshippers at appropriate times. At those moments, secular time is suspended and the priestess is the Goddess and therefore may momentarily transfer a small portion of her grace to the male worshipper. Sacred prostitutes also acquired the same identity and the priestess of the Goddess often incorporated both roles.] Sexu al contact with a male god results in the increase of the power of the woman; here there is no conflict. ... Power flows from above; thus the worshippers of Krsna become women in order to let his power flow into them. This power is also transferred by eating (or any other penetrating intercourse): the worshipper eats the prasada, the eucharistic substance of

22

the god, through which the body of the god becomes part of the body of the worshipper (OFlaherty 1980: 262-264). Altho ugh OFlaherty does not discuss Christianity, the symbolism behind communion during Catholic mass is nearly identical. The host or bread represents the body of Christ and the wine his blood. This brief ritual is penetrating intercourse in the sense discussed here; the worshipper is incorporating the eucharistic substance of the god into his/her own body. The potential power of this experience for believers would seem to be awesome.

Of Snakes, Venom and Milk

n the Bengali Manasamarigal, Lakindara is fated to die on his wedding night (the recurrent myth of fatal sexuality); when he flies in face of the prophecy, he is bitten by the snake damsel and dies of her poison. Snakes (often symbolizing women) perform an alchemy that women perform by turning blood into milk. In the village ritual, milk is fed to a snake; the snake then turns this into poison, which in turn is rendered harmless by Soma (or by the shaman, who controls Soma, drugs and snakes). Yogis, the inverse of mothers in terms of fluid hydraulics, drink poison, which they regard as Soma, and thus have power over snakes. A yogi can also drink poison and turn it into seed, and he can turn his own seed into Soma by activating the (poisonous?) coiled serpent goddess Kundalini (OFlaherty 1980: 54). Sever al important themes are referred to here and deserved comment. Most important is the ability of the Goddess to turn blood into milk, the all pervasive nourishment. Here we have the striking rationale for human or animal sacrifice to the Goddess. Her stores of nourishment for all must be

23

renewed, she does not create from nothing, and blood is her essential raw material for the creating of milk. The power of yogis over the venom of the Goddess appears to describe the ultimate superiority of the male god over the female deity. The yogi activates Kundalini and her power. Yet the situation is not as clear cut as the acquisition of that power implies for the yogi is androgynous and partakes of many feminine attributes deliberately. These acquired characteristics are essential to any yogic discipline and increase self-control, self-discipline and spiritual progression; see the discussion of sexual yoga above. In Tantric rituals, where female seed as well as male semen is procreative and magical, the adept drinks not only semen but menstrual blood as well (Tucci, 1969: 62). This ceremony, in which the deity is said to enter into ingested fluids, ... functions as an instance of sexual power entering through ingested food. The iconography of the Tantric rituals also suggests that the fluid drunk from the skull caps held by servants of the Goddess may be menstrual blood (OFlaherty 1980: 52). This is fundamental evidence for the continued power of the Goddess in Hindu India which in overview is an example of an extremely chauvinistic Indo-European society when daily secular life is examined.

The Earliest Goddess in India

lthough the Goddess is alive and vibrant throughout India today, identifying her presence and ritual in early Indian civilization has been difficult and controversial. The earliest village cultures with temples in India are found in the Zhob River valley of northern Baluchistan and, although not precisely dated, are older than 3,000 B.C. (Fairservis 1971). Excavations have produced terra-cotta figurines which are the earliest representations of the

24

Indian Mother Goddess. The figurines of the Kulli Culture, although only two inches high, have a terrifying appearance with high smooth foreheads, eye holes, an owl beak nose and only a slit for the mouth. They seem to represent the Mother Goddess as Death Goddess, concerned with both the buried corpse and the corn seed buried and dormant during the winter (Battacharyya 1977: 147-148; Neumann 1963: Fig. 32; Piggot 1950: 126127).5 A study by Shubhangana Atre (1987), which has yet to be published outside of India, explores the religion of the Indus Valley civilization in considerable depth. What follows in this section relies heavily upon her work.6 The Harappan civilization is Indias first great urban culture and is thus serves to extend the geographical range of the earliest great civilizations. The populations of its two largest cities, Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, have been estimated at 41,250 and 23,544 respectively (Cappieri 1971: 443). The Harappan civilization is often viewed as the Indian equivalent to ancient Egypt or the early empires of Mesopotamia such as Sumer or Assyria. It is, however, strikingly different in one prominent feature; there is no evidence of a strong military or imperialistic tendencies. As to ritual and religion, the Goddess is present in a form familiar to any student of the ancient Near East. This congruence in her mytho-poetics with the Near East in the earliest Indian evidence makes the divergence in succeeding millennia difficult to explain. Atres research (1987) is important for its clarity. The amount of excavation and quantity of Harappan archeological data that can be scrutinized is but a tiny fraction of what is available for Egypt and the Fertile Crescent and important interpretative studies are not numerous.

5 Obviously, the reference here to corn cannot refer to North American maize given the dates of the Harappan civilization. Exactly what crop plant Battacharyya is referring to is not clear. 6 The one criticism of Atres (1987) research that I have is her misplaced identification of a major unicorn deity. Atre (1987: 75-80) summarizes alternative interpretations and then rejects them. Many of the unicorn animals closely resemble bulls of either Bos primigenius or Bos namadicus. Others resemble mountain goats or antelopes as Mackay (1937) pointed out. Atres case for a unicorn in the animal imagery is very weak and the adoption of the term itself creates an unnecessary connotation because the unavoidable reference in most peoples minds is to the unicorn of the European Middle Ages which is a white, single horned, magical equine that could only be captured by a virgin.

25

The Harappan civilization covered an area of 1.3 x 106 km2 and includes sites in India and Pakistan as well as one in Afghanistan. The sites which provide the most information are the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, the latter appearing to have been primarily a religious center. There are many hundreds of sites which have yet to see an archeologists spade or trowel. There are no sites south of 20 north or east of longitude 80 east (Atre 1987: 23). Precise dating of the Harappan civilization is difficult but in the nuclear regions (cf. Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa) the time span is c.2300 to 2000 B.C. while the time range in peripheral regions is c.2200 to 1700 B.C. (Agrawal et al 1978). Harappan culture is not an earliest urban civilization in any world-wide sense. The extent to which Aryan invaders (IndoEuropeans) contributed to the Harappan civilization also remains controversial. While Indo-Europeans had been on the Eurasian scene since late in the 5th millennium B.C., their first noteworthy invasion into India is that of the Aryans, which does not predate 1500 B.C.. The dominance of the Goddess in cult and ritual establishes that the primary population was preIndo-European and had much in common with the Old European peoples of Neolithic Europe. An overview of Harappan religion reveals many resemblances to that of Crete7 and I am tempted to see it as a rare example (as was Minoan culture) of a highly refined urban civilization whose primary mythopoetics were oriented, not towards an Indo-European sky-thunder god, but towards the Great Goddess. Fairservis (1971: 228) using a comparative analysis of artifacts and pottery suggests an origin for the Harappan civilization in migration from southern Mesopotamia, particularly Iran, and Khuzistan. As in the European Old Neolithic, male figurines are very rare and in Harappan culture they are nude and without ornamentation. There are standing figures; seated figures including one with a beard, and a statue often taken to represent a priest king (Atre 1987: 112-115). Atre believes that many human images on seals formerly taken to be males upon closer examination reveal distinctly feminine traits in body proportion and hair styles. 8 There are six seals, three each from Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, which depict a scene usually described as a man attacking a tiger. This composition is regarded as mythical and on one of the Harappan seals, the scene occurs next to a figure
7 See for example seal No. DK8321 from Mohenjo-daro which depicts human figures either tossed over the back of an excited buffalo or somersaulting over it (Atre 1987: 86, fig.3.30). The resemblance to the well known Cretan bull dance is unmistakable. 8 The illustrations of seals is much clearer in Fairservis (1971) than in Atre (1987).

26

sitting on a platform in the lotus position (Atre 1987: 176). Therianthropic deities (part animal, part human) are common on Harappan seals. I also agree with Atre that except for the figure in a yogic posture, there is virtually nothing in the imagery of the Harappan civilization that makes specific reference to Vedic or later Hindu periods. If Harappan civilization is a very late example, as is Crete, of a culture focused almost exclusively upon the worship of a great goddess, such references would not be expected. Furthermore, Aryan (Indo-European) input into Harappan civilization is extremely problematical. Aryan invaders entered northwest India several centuries after Harappan civilization had been nearly extinguished and they are the creators of Vedic civilization. As Sullivan (1964) did previously, Atre (1987: 194) identifies the well known statue from Mohenjo-Daro, which is usually described as a priest-king or the Hindu deity Pasupati, as a goddess of fertility manifested as Mistress of the Animals. Atre (1987: 194-195) identifies a variety of horned figures, with or without long pigtails, as a horned goddess. One seal shows this horned goddess with an unmistakable feminine body form in what has often been interpreted as a fight with a horned tiger. However, as Atre (1987: 194) points out, the fierceness expected from combat is not apparent in the composition. The horned goddess may be engaged in ritual dance with the animal in the sense of Neumanns (1974: 280) observation that in Crete the goddess herself played victoriously with the bull. There is a seal showing a human figure jumping across the back of a buffalo towards its tail. In the background there is a world tree(?) with a platform containing a pillar capped by the horned headdress and pig tail worn by the goddess and her high priestess (Atre 1987: 203). Other animals are depicted surrounding a seated goddess (elephant, rhinoceros, buffalo) and a wild buffalo(?) may be seen standing quietly in front of a feeding trough. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that we see here the Great Goddess as Lady of the Beasts which is an ancient primal manifestation of the Goddess. Later in some Neolithic societies, this function is acquired by a male Master of the Animals (Gimbutas 1989). Dancing figures in front of an owl and a man beating a drum in front of a tiger hint at additional rituals whose complexity we cannot unravel (Atre 1987: 203). Atre (1987: 197) speculates that terra-cotta figurines with an antler-like headdress represented a vestal virgin (cf. the Greek goddess Diana) who served to preserve a sacred fire in Harappan households. These figurines were periodically discarded in a ceremony of renewal and replaced by new

27

ones. Other female figurines with fan-like headdresses were votive figurines to be offered as sympathetic magic to promote fertility. Others which were pregnant might have been offered in a rite of gratitude. In the Harappan town of Kalibangan, evidence has been found for fire altars in private homes which may preview a new ritual in which the vestal fire subsumes the cult function of offering votive figurines. Sacrificial offerings made through fire are characteristic of Brahmanism and have widespread currency throughout the world. There is a small two-sided relief sculpture from Kalibangan which shows a goat being dragged to be sacrificed on one side, and the horned Lady of the Beasts on the other. There is a sacred acacia, possibly a world tree, depicted within an enclosure on the seals from Harappa and structural tree guards have been excavated in front of the pillared hall and annex with the Citadel of MohenjoDaro. Three groups of compositions provide food for thought. A human figure in the branches of a tree may be the goddess residing in the sacred acacia. A deity appearing between two branches or a tree or under an arch composed of two branches might represent the goddess emerging from the Pipal tree, which may have been considered a direct manifestation of the goddess herself. A tree is also seen on some seals forming part of an alter where a pillar is capped with the goddesss three pronged antler head dress with possible pig-tail. There is a seal showing this probable world tree with two single horned animals with serpent-like necks sprouting from its base (Atre 1987: 198-199). There is a seal from Harappan which shows a nude female, head downwards, and legs outstretched and raised upwards with a plant (tree of life?) growing from her womb. Battacharyya (1977: 19-20) sees this figure as a prototype of the later Indian mother goddess. A number of seals show scenes of sacrifices and rituals pertaining to the goddess. A priestess kneels before the goddess who is standing between two the branches of a Pipal scene. The priestess wears the headdress and pigtail characteristic of the goddess as would be the case if she were considered either a manifestation of the goddess or the oracle through which she spoke. Behind her is a gigantic goat with human face whose interpretation is obscure but recalls imagery from Neolithic Old Europe, Egypt and the ancient Near East. In the register below are seven standing figures with plumed headdresses and long plaits. Atre (1987: 201) notes that in the Hellenistic world, there were seven vestal virgins and she implies that this seal depicts

28

the virgin priestesses attendant upon the goddess and high priestess.9 Their backs are towards the ritual scene; perhaps they were not allowed to watch the replacement of the head priestess.10 Another seal depicts a goat between the goddess and kneeling priestess. There is disagreement as to whether the priestess holds a broad-bladed sword, and whether the scene is one of sacrificial offering, or the priestess simply has her arms raised in supplication. There are six standing figures (attendant priestesses?) in the register above this scene. Atre (1987: 201) speculates that this scene shows a new high priestess (formerly one of the attendant priestesses) being presented to the goddess by the theriomorphic goat deity. A new attendant priestess has not yet been chosen and so their number in this ritual is six. Atre (1987: 202-202) believes that female terra-cotta figurines represented these vestal virgins and were periodically replaced in individual households when the high priestess herself was replaced in the temple precinct. The obverse of the seal that shows a prototype of the Mother Goddess depicts a female figure with disheveled hair and raised arms confronting a male figure in a threatening attitude with a possible shield in one hand and a sickle-like object in the other. Battacharyya (1977: 20) quotes Marshalls interpretation that the scene shows a possible human sacrifice to the Goddess. What is the goat symbolism? In the Neolithic Culture of Old Europe as seen on Vinca ceramics c.5,000 B.C., goats often flank a world tree, or life column and are symbols of life stimulation. They were often sacrificed in rituals of death and regeneration and may have been linked to human sacrifice. Goat figures are prominent on Mycenean (c.1500 B.C.) and Minoan ceramics and seals (c.1300-1100 B.C.) where they are also associated with the life tree. They were also moon symbols on Crete. Copulating goats were a metaphor for the renewal of life energy and that of the Goddess herself through cosmic sexual interaction. A Middle Minoan seal c. 1200 B.C. shows a human couple copulating on one side and a pair of goats doing likewise under on a life tree on the obverse. These symbols continued in Europe into the Geometric period of Greece in the 8th century B.C. (Gimbutas 1989: 234-235: see fig. 364-368). It is very likely that some of these associations apply to the Harappan Culture of India: whether or not there was direct influence from the Neolithic Old European Cultures is an impossible question to answer at this time.

9 Such a comparison is an analogy only. There can can be no influence of Graeco-Roman culture upon Harappan culture because the latter ended more than a millenia before the rise of Classical Greece. Did cultural influence occur in the opposite direction however? 10 Or is this her execution?

29

Devotees are depicted holding a libation vessel flanked by cobras as they face the goddess sitting on a platform. Were cobras in this context seen as a manifestation of the Snake Goddess? Two human figures standing between the goddess holding trees in their hands are difficult to interpret (Atre 1987: 202-204). The iconography of Harappan civilization places it within the ritual symbolism which characterized the Neolithic Culture of Old Europe and therefore Harappan civilization seems to represent the most eastward extension of this cultural region. More specifically, Battacharyya (1977: 150) speculates that cult of the Great Goddess Inanna in Sumer spread eastward and heavily influenced the form of the Harappan Goddess. The origins of these mytho-poetics in northwest India are obscure, yet it seems unlikely they arose de novo considering the detailed parallels with those found in Europe. Several centuries after Harappan civilization gradually declined probably due to great floods triggered by earthquakes, Indo-European Aryans invaded India from the northwest and Vedic Culture quickly evolved after 1500 B.C.. The poorly known cultures which succeed the Harappan during the Chalcolithic (Copper Age) reveal prominent God and fire worship as well as the Goddess (Atre 1987: 212). What makes the evolutionary path of mytho-poetics in India so different from that of Europe and the Near East is that in the first few centuries A.D., the Goddess re-emerged in a revitalized and powerful form co-equal to her male counterparts and she has remained in that powerful position into the twenty first century. She may have gone underground in the sense that she is not prominent in Vedic or Brahman literature, but unlike in the West, she came to the forefront once again as a major deity and universal force.

The Taming of the Goddess in Vedic India

30

attacharyya (1977: 24-26) believes that in early agricultural societies, farm work was performed almost exclusively by women a circumstance that reinforced a priority-dependent relationship between the most economically productive members of society and the Earth Goddess. In truth, we do not know directly which sex, if any, formed the majority of the labor force on the fields. However, circumstantial evidence indicates that this supposition is correct because hunting is officially a male occupation with its own rituals and esoteric lore which is usually never made available to women.11 In hunter-gatherer societies, women typically gathered plant foods often while rearing children. They were the most productive members of the clan in terms of the quantity of calories they made available to the village. Hunting, particularly that of big game, is notoriously unpredictable and the ritual mythic function it serves may be equal or greater in importance to society than the capture of protein calories available for dinner. The early Aryan Rgvedic tribes of India c. 1200 B.C.+ were nomadic pastoralists who had domesticated the horse and had little interest in either a permanently settled lifestyle or agriculture.12 These people did raise crops but accorded agriculture little symbolic importance (see glossary): how could it be otherwise in society of horse mounted warriors?13 They have left no record of their civilization for archeologists which further underscores the impermanence of their settlements and lifestyles. However, they were a highly literate and philosophically complex people and what we know about these Vedic Aryans is based upon an analysis of their literary texts. They are possibly the most spectacular example known to history of a culture that was not urbanized yet possessed a highly complex, literate myth which was
11 The great attention given to female hunters in mythology serves only to further emphasize how unusual they were. Diana, the huntress, and the legendary Amazons make the point. Exceptions to a distinct bias do not nulify the implications of a central trend, they merely illustrate the few who go against the prevailing behavioral norms. 12 You cannot travel very far for very long if several acres of farmland need your constant attention. 13 The same situation occurred throughout Eurasia as several waves of Indo-Europeans poured in starting c.4,000 B.C. This goddess culture of the Old European Neolithic faced a severe challenge from the every-day agressiveness of the new arrivals to subjection of long established mytho-poetics (Gimbutas 1991).

31

written down. Battcharyya (1977) sees in the Rg Veda a distinct Aryan dislike of agriculture, in part because it was the preferred method of food production of the tribes who they conquered and quickly came to despise. The Ausras of the Rg Veda may have been in historical reality non-Vedic tribes who attempted to preserve their Mother Goddess religion, even resorting to warfare to do so. In these poems they are destroyers of Vedic sacrifices (Battacharyya 1977: 271-272). The Laws of Manu expressly forbade agricultural work to members of the Brahman and warrior castes. Given such a cultural and mythic climate, how could the Goddess survive as the major deity above all? Godd esses in the Rg Veda are reflections of the gods to whom they are married and little is known about many of them except their names. The goddess Prthivi remained in the Vedic pantheon as a consort of Dyaus, the sky Father. However, the word go denoting a cow is a synonym for prthivi - the earth - and this language change indicates Prthivis incorporation into a new family in which cattle are all-important and function as economic currency. It is not too far fetched to see in this linguistics the concept of women as cattle, i.e. valuable possessions to be hoarded and bartered: the Earth Goddess has become an Aryan cow. Additional linguistic analysis of the meaning behind the ancient words for woman and widow support this view. Prthivi is usually invoked with Dyaus in the Rg Veda and heaven and earth (Dyaus and Prthivi) are invoked as the universal parents in which heaven is often termed father and earth, mother. Prthivi is derived from the root prath meaning to extend and her attributes are great (mahi), firm (drdha), and shining (arjuni): see Battacharyya (1977: 98, 99). In later Vedic writing, Prthivi is the divine cow giving milk to her children as daughter of Prthu, Vainya and Viraj. She is the divine producer of corn and enjoys giving her wealth to men. She deserts the sinful and treacherous. Mother Earth becomes overburdened by population (!) and Brahman creates Death to relieve her of this burden. In the Mahabharata, she is present as giver of all good things (Battacharyya 1977: 102). In Vedic literature Aditi is the mother of the Gods and, while she does not have a hymn devoted to her alone in the Rg Veda, she is mentioned 80 times. Her sons are the Adityas, one of whom is the all powerful Indra. Some Western scholars interpret her name to express non-binding, boundless, boundlessness and the visible infinite - the endless expanse of space beyond the clouds and sky. In unavoidable competition with the male gods

32

of the Vedic pantheon, poets of the later Rg Veda find it difficult to acknowledge her as mother of the gods. By the time of Brahman ascendancy, a male god named Daksa-Prajapati,who creates all from his body parts,has replaced her. In later Vedic writing her position has visibly declined. In the Mahabharata (finished c.300 A.D.) Aditi is described as the mother of heroic sons (Adityas) and invoked as the great mother of the devout, who is strong, undecaying, a skillful guide, widely extended and protecting. She is identified with the earth in the Brahamanic literature and often spoken of as a cow: in ritual the ceremonial cow is addressed as Aditi. In the Mahabharata, Aditi is present as the ancient mother of the god but by the time of the Puranas, she is simply the daughter of Daksa (Battacharyya 1977: 94-96, 101, 102). The name of the goddess Diti occurs only three times in the Rg Veda. Her conception is vague; she apparently was a liberal giver. By the time of the Puranas, she is the mother of demons and the antithesis of Aditi (Battacharyya 1977: 102). The most important goddess of the Rg Veda is Usas, who is celebrated in 20 hymns and mentioned over 300 times in all. She is the dawn-goddess who by unveiling her charms when appearing in the east drives away darkness, discloses the treasures hidden by darkness and distributes them generously, awakens creatures, sets every being in motion, manifests all beings, drives away evil dreams, opens the gate of heaven, and renders service to the gods by causing worshippers to awake and light the sacrificial fires. She rides in a shining, adorned chariot drawn by powerful horses. (Usas appears to be holding her own against Duaus quite well!) Usas is beautiful, shining white, golden and ruddy. She is the consort of the sun, daughter of heaven and often the lover of Agni. She arouses the gods so that they may drink Soma and bestows wealth, children, protection and long life. In spite of this spectacular opening appearance, Usas does not have the stamina needed for long-term survival. In late Vedic literature, she is hardly mentioned at all and is nearly absent in the Epics and Puranas. In Rg Veda IV, Indra crushes the chariot of Usas, because she was arrogant and ego-centric, then rapes her and she flees. Clearly, the domination of the Aryan Indo-Europeans over a major goddess of the indigenous tribes is the history behind the myth here. Indra is the sky thunder god of the Vedic Aryans and at the head of their pantheon (Battacharyya 1977: 96-98). Ursas does not survive to the times of the Mahhabarata for in that epic she is either the lover of Surya or a mere human being, daughter of Bana and lover of Aniruddha (Battacharyya 1977: 102).

33

Srasv ati is the first river to be anthropomorphized into a goddess, one of reputation. In the Brahmanic literature she is identified with the goddess of Speech (Vac) and has become the goddess of eloquence and wisdom to be invoked as a muse and is often depicted as the wife of Brahma (Battacharyya 1977: 99). The most charismatic animal in the Rg Veda is the stallion. The sun is depicted as a bright bay stallion galloping across the sky; a stallion is sacrificed to ensure fertility and royal prosperity; the image of sacrificial success is the victorious horse winning the race. The popularity of the Vedic stallion can easily be explained: the Indo-Aryans were a nation of warriors whose conquest of much of Europe and Asia was made possible by the fact that they alone had tamed wild horses thoroughly enough so they could be both ridden and harnessed to a chariot. Men, rather than women, are the creators of Vedic life - aggressive, sexually potent men, symbolized by the stallion. The Vedic horse was linked with fire through the rituals of the sun stallion and the sacrificial fire; the stallion symbolized controlled aggression, the taming of violent powers that are curbed as an unruly horse is checked by a strong bridle with a curb chain. The Upanishads and Plato liken the senses to horses which must be either controlled or remain vicious and wild; and a monk said to the Buddha, The senses of others are like restless horses, but yours have been tamed. Other beings are passionate, but your passions have ceased. (Buddhacarita 15. 1-7, 13 as cited in Conze 1959:53). A striking example of the early association of the horse not only with the taming of the wilderness but, with fire and water as well, may be seen in a passage of the Gopatha Brahmana in which the four Vedas compete over the taming of a wild horse. The horse, produced from terrible, destructive water, is referred to as she, but no word for mare is used; the horse is also identified with Agni Vaisvanara (the fire that dwells within the human body in the form of digestive fire) and is said to have fire smoldering within it. The verb used to represent the taming of the horse (sam) is the same as the term for the extinguishing of a fire or a passion (hence santi, spiritual peace): see OFlaherty (1980: 239-240). Certainly, there are hints here that the Vedic stallion has absorbed attributes of a Goddess and thus has characteristics of the mare as well. If so, the taming of the stallion also represents the taming of the Goddess, particularly her passionate qualities. Even more striking, although partially veiled, is the possibility that the Great

34

Goddess gave birth to the horse and thus the mytho-poetics of the IndoEuropeans views the Goddess as an ultimate, first source of the world. The connection between the horse and the ocean is an ancient Indo-European relationship. We have seen the close mythic tie between horses and Poseidon, god of the ocean; in ritual too, the Greeks sacrificed horses to Poseidon (Penzer 1924, 4: 14-16). Celtic mythology describes aquatic monsters known as Gorborchinn (horseheads, which in English is another name for moonfish), as well as horse eels and water horses (the forerunner of the Loch Ness monster). In the Avesta, the star horse, Tir or Tistrya, fights against a black horse named Apassa in the cosmic ocean; here one sees both a splitting of colors and moral qualities and an association with the ocean that remains typical of the mare in later mythology. In the Vedas, the horse is sacred to Varuna, god of the waters (SB 5. 3. 1. 5: 6. 3. 1. 5); the horse is born in the ocean or comes from beyond the sea (RV 1. 163, 1-2); it is also the womb of the family of the horse (VS 13.42). ... And the British, good Indo-Europeans, speak of the foaming crests of the waves as white horses. The ruins of Pompeii contain images of sea centaurs, evidence of the possible Indo-European basis not only of the link between horses and the sea but between semiequine deities (like the Asvins or the Hindu mares head) and the sea. Another Hindu image, the androgyne, is combined with the oceanic horse in a peculiar survival (both in Indo-European culture and in nature): the creature that we call the seahorse is a male who carries the fertilized eggs in his body and gives birth to the young; ... He is an example not only of an androgyne (male equivalent of the phallic mare) but of the yogi who keeps his seed within his own body - the human figure symbolized by the stallion tamed under water in Vedic texts (OFlaherty 1980: 240-241).

The Re-Emergence of the Goddess

35

he Sakta principles find expression in the Devimahatmya section of the Markandeya Purana composed between the third and fifth centuries A.D.) in which the goddess is invoked thus: Thou art the cause of all the worlds. Though characterized by three qualities, ever be Hari, Hara and other gods thou art incomprehensible. Thou art the resort of all; thou art the entire world which is composed of parts. Thou verily art the sublime original nature untransformed ... Thou art Medha, O Goddess, thou has comprehended the essence of all scriptures. Thou art Durga, the boat to cross the ocean of existence, devoid of attachments. Thou art Sri who has her dominion in the heart of the enemy of Kaitabha. Thou art indeed Gauri who has fixed her dwelling in that of the moon-crested god. [Pargiter 1904]. In the concluding portion of the Devimahatmya, the Devi assures the gods by granting them the boon that she will always become incarnate and deliver the world whenever it is oppressed by demons (Battacharyya 1977: 120). (Did the gods finally learn their dependence upon the Goddess after more than a thousand years?) In the Markandeya Purana, the Goddess is formed from the combined wrath of all the great gods gathered in council. A monstrous colossus, named Mahisha appeared in the form of a great water buffalo bull. The gods had taken refuge in Brahma and they swelled with wrath and indignation, even the great Vishnu and Siva. Their great powers poured forth in sheets of flame from their mouths, coalesced and assumed the shape of the eighteen armed Goddess. The gods immediately paid her homage because she integrated all their qualities and powers. Such a complete synthesis indicated omnipotence and signified a return to the original state of allembracing unity. As the cosmos evolved, it differentiated. Life force was continually parceled out into an ever-increasing multitude of life forms and was thereby diluted and weakened. The great Mother Goddess had now reabsorbed the infinite particulateness of the universe into her universal womb and had reconstituted the primal state of infinite life energy. The gods willingly abdicated their weapons, powers and masculine attributes into the Goddess so that she might be all powerful and capable of destroying Mahisha. Siva hands her his trident. Brahma gives up his alms bowl and manuscript of Vedic magic. Kala, the God of Time, offers his sword and shield. Etc. Riding a lion, the Goddess first annihilates the army of Mahisha. She now confronts a powerful enemy who is able to transform himself into a seeming endless array of powerful opponents. Mahisha escapes the

36

Goddesss rope and transforms himself into a lion which she quickly beheads. He then becomes a powerful warrior with a sword whom the Goddess kills with a cascade of arrows. Transforming into an elephant, Mahisha captures the Goddess in his trunk only to have it severed by her slashing sword. Resuming his original buffalo identity, Mahisha uproots mountains and flings them at the Goddess who is sipping from a bowl filled with the divine life force. Her eyes turn red and she shatters the mountains with her arrows. Leaping into the air, she lands on his neck and as Mahisha attempts to once again assume the shape of a warrior she beheads him and he finally dies (Zimmer 1946: 189-193). In spite of the violence of this battle, it may ultimately be nothing more than one of an infinite number of episodes that comprising the dreaming of the universe. Southern India and Javanese art depict the Goddess as calm, serene and detached as she dispatches a submissive Mahisha. Violent emotion is decidedly out of place if one is the hero in ones own dream and also conscious of the universe as a dream play (cf. Zimmer 1946: 196-197). Zimmer (1946) is impressed by this spectacular demonstration that reality is but an endless series of projections from the Absolute whose creativity emanates from the gods.14 These forms and transformation are but temporary, however powerful they may seem at a given moment. The fluidity of reality is all apparent as the gods willingly subsume their powers and sex into the Goddess. Is the world of the ten thousand things, but a series of emanations and projections from ourselves? Is the highest deity Maya, the Cosmic Lord of Illusion? In more historical terms, we see that the Goddess has arisen from the slumber of defeat and subordination imposed by Vedic culture. She has re-acquired her power and flexes her renewed strength in a cosmic conquest with great evil. In its most advanced form, Indian philosophy aims to release humankind from the narcotic spell of its own shakti and the projections that we all ceaselessly generate and then come to believe are real. The tantric adept, and the committed yogin, strive to transform themselves into ultimate divinity - to truly understand the nature of Maya and the reality of individual maya. The complete achievement of this goal would produce a being superior to even the great Siva but that is not the point. The practical realization of this objective is, of course, unobtainable but that also is of no significance beyond the obligation to recognize the impossibility. The process, the search, the journey along the path are what count; indeed they
14Gods

used in this sense is not a masculine noun.

37

define the presence (or lack thereof) of a meaningful human life lived so as to maximize our spiritual potentiality. In Tantra the relationship and dialogue between Siva and the Goddess-as-Consort explore, without ever exhausting, the inexhaustible, ultimate sublimity of Brahman. Do not be confused by the many names of his consort: Kali, Durga, Parvati, Chandi, Chamunda, Uma, Sati, etc. - each is a manifestation of the one Goddess. Siva and the Goddess together comprise a total anthropomorphic manifestation of the absolute, the unceasing creative play of Brahman. To Siva is reserved one of the ultimate acts, for it is he as Krsna who dreams the universe. The Goddess overflowing with boundless creative potential ensures that the universe cannot be static, it is programmed to evolve. From her divine energy emerges our transitory but individual lives which are thereby a manifestation of the divine. Our imperfections are not the point; the Divine Absolute lies within us whether or not we can perceive and make use of it. The realization of Self, as striven for by spiritual disciplines throughout the ages, allows us to make creative use of this truth during a human lifetime. Mortality is in no way inferior to immortality because the maya of a transient individual life is a radiation of the Adamantine Absolute, the Goddess as Shakti - the divine energy of Brahman (cf. Zimmer 1946). In the Markandeya Purana, the Devi is a war goddess who confers victory and success in battle and also participates in the war against the demons who oppress the earth. The Devi as Katyayani comes into existence when the energy from the flames of the gods anger caused by the misdeeds of Mahisaura (who had driven them out of heaven) was nourished by the sage Katyayana to produce the goddess. Certainly this was the tantric practice of a powerful ascetic yogin. In recognition of her power, all the gods gave their most powerful weapons to her: Indra his thunderbolt, Visnu his disc, Siva his trident, etc. It is easy to lose sight of the Great Goddess in the Puranas. The Kurma Purana invokes the Devi with more than 1,000 different names! (Battacharyya 1977: 122-125). In the Devibhagavata, the Sakta goddess is conceived as the Adya Sakti or primordial energy that resides in Brahma as the creating principle, in Visnu as the sustaining principle and in Siva as the destructive principle. This Adya Sakti pervades all space and animates all things of this

38

phenomenal world . The Sakta Puranas also describe the Devi as the goddess of victory (Battarcharyya 1977: 125).

The Earth Goddess: Blood Sacrifice and Kali

And Yea

hosoever eat food, eats food by me; Whosoever looks forth from his eyes, whosoever breathes, verily, whosoever listens to whatever is said, so by me. art thou, O Fairest One! Auspicious One! whose hands hold both: delight and pain? Both: the shade of death and the elixir of immortality, thy grace, O Mother! Are Does Who You

(Sha nkaracharya c. 800 A.D.)15

15

Zimmer (1946: 211-212).

39

By the time of the Ramayana, the Vedic corn goddess Sita has become completely humanized as the heroine of that epic (first centuries B.C.). In the Vedas she was the wife of Savitr or Indra. In the Ramayana, she rises in the field where the plow made furrows. She is called dhanyamalini, corn crowned, and attempts to divert her lords attention to the furrows in the field (Battacharyya 1977: 104). Batta charyya (1977: 40-1) observes that today everywhere in India Devi is mainly concerned with agriculture. In Rajasthan, the Earth Goddess Gaur holds power over agriculture and fertility. Gaur is one of the names of Isa or Parvati, and her name means yellow in the sense of the color of the ripened corn harvest: her rites are almost exclusively reserved to women. Durga, who is a major war goddess, had her origins as a goddess of fertility and vegetation according to Battacharyya (1977: 58) although he does not explain how an earth fertility goddess could evolve into a war goddess: an association with mountains and wild inaccessible regions is his only reference and seems an inadequate explanation. Candika and Kali appear to be terrible, they are fierce war goddesses from their inception. In the Puranas, the Devi is the war goddess who confers victory and success upon her worshippers and also participates in the war which will deliver a world no longer oppressed by demons. Her form known as Raktadantika slew powerful demons and her color is red, the usual color of fertility associated with Mother Goddesses (and the color of blood also, of course). After a drought of 100 years, she reappeared as Sataksi at the request of sages and nourished the whole world with vegetables which grew out of her own body . In this tale we see the intimate connection between a war goddess, agriculture and the nurturing of her worshippers. Several war goddesses in their first incarnation appear to be agricultural deities who in successive incarnations assume the role of warrior. They assume such a role in the Puranas in order to kill demons (i.e. end the drought). This victory restores the gods to their dominions and proper share of the sacrifices (i.e. restores agricultural prosperity to the people which is the proper responsibility of the Vedic nature gods). It is interesting that the final power resides with the Goddess, not the gods. Battacharyya further notes that the Goddess cult belonged to the oppressed and lower classes at this time; it was not accepted in the upper castes of India until medieval times. Yet the upper castes (rulers, priests, landlords) were dependent upon the lower castes ( farmers, craftsmen for example) for labor and survival and so, an

40

accommodation in cult and ritual had to be made first by formal recognition and later by adoption in a new and more sophisticated form (Battacharyya 1977: 59-60). Sacre d mountains as homes of the Goddess may be found in India as lakes, wells and pools which confer miraculous cures. Pairs of hills which are the breasts of the goddess remind us of the Paps of Anu in Ireland and rivers whose waters are the nourishing milk of the Goddess echo universal themes. The Ganges is a Mother Goddess and the most sacred river in India (Battacharyya 1977: 62-64). Altho ugh the twentieth century New Age movement would have it otherwise, the fact is that the Mother Goddess in India, as throughout Eurasia in Neolithic times, requires blood sacrifice as explained above. The rationale is simple and straightforward: Mother Earth must have her fertility renewed - it is not inexhaustible and endlessly created out of a void. Renewal is accomplished only by life blood - from the force of life will spring new life and the fertility of the world is endlessly renewed: death is kept at bay. The documentation is extensive and irrefutable (Battacharyya 1977: 64 - 67) both in terms of literary references, which no one believes to be fictional fantasy, and first hand observations in the 19th century. In some districts there was a class of voluntary victims who were treated as privileged persons because the Goddess had issued a special call to them. Animal sacrifices are generally believed to be a later substitute for earlier human sacrifice. Thus the womb of earth becomes the deadly devouring maw of the underworld, and beside the fecundated womb and the protecting cave and mountain gapes the abyss of hell, the dark hole of the depths, the devouring womb of the grave and of death, of darkness without light, of nothingness. For this woman who generates life and all living things on earth is the same who takes them back into herself, who pursues her victims and captures them with snare and net. Disease, hunger, hardship, war above all, are her helpers, and among all peoples the goddesses of war and the hunt express mans experience of life as a female exacting blood. This Terrible Mother is the hungry earth; which devours its own children and fattens on their corpses; it is the tiger and the vulture, the vulture and the coffin, the flesh eating sarcophagus voraciously licking up the blood seed of men and beasts and, once fecundated and sated, casting it out again in new birth , hurling it to death, and over again to death.16

41

16 One of the most vivid illustrations of this principle occurred in the Mesoamerican metropolis of Teotihuacan which was started c.100 B.C. and completed 200 A.D. and continued to flourish as a high urban culture center until 600 A.D.. Its wealth came from warfare and long-distance trade. The primary deity of the city was a Great Goddess whose image is found throughout the site on monumental sculpture, murals and in abstracted iconography. Exhibiting both creative and destructive aspects, the goddess would seem to have been the physical embodiment of Cerro Gordo, the sacred mountain from which the springs that nourish the valley flow: She is often depicted with a bird of prey as her headress, a well known Teotihuacan warrior emblem. Streams of liquid flowed from her mouth and cave-like womb. With a characteristic open-hand gesture, she scatters precious liquids, seeds and flowers. Her priests bear bags of incense and likewise participate in the scattering rites - their chanting illustrated by flower-decorated scrolls emanating from their mouths. ... In Teotihuacan art, her attendant priests are virtually indistinguishable from the goggle-eyed warriors responsible for providing captives for sacrifice. Cult priests are shown marching in processions with blood-dripping hearts impaled on great obsidian skewers. They also scatter the blood and related offerings as does their patroness, the Great Goddess, as she presides over a religion that justified war and conquest as a source of water and fertility . Even children were sacrificed because their tears were believed to bring rain: Teotihuacan Valley has only 20 inches of rainfall each year. Sacred warfare and human warfare were regulated astrologically by the cycle and observed position of the planet Venus. The great Feathered Serpent of Teotihuacan was a manifesation of Venus, a god of warfare and blood sacrifice. The Feathered Serpent Pyramid, painted in blood-red hematite pigment with decorative bands of blue-green circles representing the goggles worn by the Storm God is nothing less that the Great Goddess herself, the Mother of Waters manifesting as an architectural mountain. Venus related sacrificial practices by the much later Aztecs were documented first hand by 16th century Spanish chroniclers and have been translated from the Florentine Codex as well (Carlson 1993). The parallels with much of the Kali cult and the underlying mytho-poetics which lie behind Kalis ritual are very close. That similarity raises a very difficult question because these cultures are widely separated in space and time; it is unclear if the fully evolved Kali cult existed in India when Teotihuacan went into precipitous decline c. 600 A.D., perhaps due to military conquest by the Cacaxtla. On the surface, it appears that two widely separated cultures, which could not been in contact, each discovered the Great Mother as a Goddess of Death and Regeneration who demanded human sacrifice because only human blood would continuously renew her powers to rejuvenate the fertility of the land.

42

Parvati, daughter of the mountain; i.e. of the Himalayas. Her great temple festival in the spring - for the fecundation of nature - is attended by pilgrims from the surrounding plain and from the mountains that enclose it. An Englishman who attended the festival in 1871 reports that each day twenty buffaloes, two hundred and fifty goats, and the same number of pigs were slaughtered in the temple. Under the sacrificial altar there was a deep pit, filled with fresh sand that sucked up the blood of the beheaded beasts; the sand was renewed twice a day, and when drenched with blood it was buried in the earth to create fertility. Everything was very neat and orderly; there were no bloody remains or evil smell. In preparation for the new agricultural year, the life sap, the blood, was intended to give renewed strength and fertility to the nature goddess, the bestower of all nourishment, the daughter of the mountain, whose gigantic generative strength is embodied in the towering mountains (Neuman 1963: 149 - 152). Toda y the temple of Kali at the Kalighat in Calcutta is famous for its daily blood sacrifices; it is no doubt the bloodiest temple on earth. At the time of the great autumn pilgrimages to the annual festival of Durga or Kali (Durgapuja), some eight hundred goats are slaughtered in three days. The temple serves as a slaughterhouse, for those performing the sacrifice retain their animals, leaving only the head in the temple as a symbolic gift, while the blood flows to the Goddess. For to the Goddess is due the life blood of all creatures - since it is she who has bestowed it - and that is why the beast must be slaughtered in her temple; that is why temple and slaughterhouse are one. This rite is performed amid gruesome filth; in the mud compounded of blood and earth, the heads are heaped up like trophies before the statue of the Goddess, while those sacrificing return home for a family banquet of the bodies of the offerings, hence beheading is the form of sacrifice, since the blood drains quickly away from the beheaded beasts. ... In her hideous aspect (ghora-rupa) the Goddess, as Kali, the dark one, raises the skull full of seething blood to her lips; her devotional image shows her

43

dressed in blood stained red, standing in a boat floating on a sea of blood; in the midst of the life flood, the sacrificial sap, which she requires that she may, in her gracious manifestation (sundara-murti) as the World Mother (jagad-amba), bestow existence upon new living forms in a process of unceasing generation, that as world nurse (jagad-dhatri) she may suckle them on her breasts and give them the good that is full of nourishment (anna -purna) (Zimmer 1968: 74).17 Self mutilation was likely a characteristic of the worship of Durga in southern India during the Pallava and Chola periods c. 550 to 1300 A.D. (c.f. Battacharyya 1977: 164). One of the well known and spectacular Tantric portrayals of Kali depicts her standing upon two Sivas. Hindu gods cluster in awe and terror in the background. Bones and skulls are scattered around, animals feed upon the remains. Kali is black skinned - the color of death - and wears a long garland of severed heads that hangs to her knees. Her teeth are huge fangs, her body lithe and beautiful and her breasts big with milk. In her right hand she carries the sword that not only physically exterminates but symbolizes spiritual decision and cuts through error and ignorance which are the cloud of individual consciousness. Her other right hand holds a pair of scissors which cut the thread of life. In her two left hands, Kali hold the bowl that yields abundant food and the lotus of eternal generation. They symbolism is more complex than would be found in the West in that Kali has qualities we would not easily associate with a Death Goddess. The Blessed Mother in the West as personified in Mary stands in adamantine, pure opposition to the dark forces of death and destruction (Zimmer 1946: 214-216). The lowermost Siva is Shava - a bearded, naked ascetic who is lifeless and dormant because he is a out of touch with Shakti, the life-giving and lifetaking energy. Above him is the living Siva who raises his head and lifts his left arm to touch the Goddess and partake of her shakti.

17 Interesting that one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas - Annapurna - which came to be known as a killer mountain to mountaineers because of the difficulty of its climb and the fatalities on its slopes - carries the name of the Mother Goddess as Kali in her manifestation of the World Nurse.

44

Conte mporary rediscovery of the Goddess too often portrays her in bucolic, benign and pacific terms. The absence of aggression, if not outright pacifism, is emphasized on all levels of relationship from the individual to family group to society at large by contemporary writers shocked at the violence of this age and dreaming of a past they imagine to have been both pacific and gylanic and whose lessons could lead us to a better society. While largescale organized warfare cannot be detected in the archeological record of the Neolithic, the reasons may have more to do with the lack of the appropriate technology (domesticated horse, chariots, cast iron) and the absence of urbanized city states (a development that requires large grain surpluses produced by an engineered, and irrigated agriculture) than any social or philosophical principles derived from the mytho-poetics and politics of the time. By the eighth millennium B.C., Jericho in Palestine was a walled fortified town, clearly protecting itself from nomadic aggressors on the outside. To dismiss the extensive evidence for palisaded and defensive towns throughout the Neolithic of Old Europe as having nothing to do with warfare (cf. Gimbutas 1991) only betrays the extent to which contemporary socio-political fantasies cloud the understanding of the archeological record. We have surveyed the extensive evidence for blood sacrifice and regicide, now witness the myth of the doomsday mare. Upon a moments reflection, the dark side of the Goddess should not be surprising because potential aggression in the human species resides in genetically designed physiology, not intellectually designed social systems. Male aggressiveness derives from genes that control developmental hormones, particularly testosterone, and their behavioral effects are as old as our species. The physiological data are clear: male aggression is closely tied to testosterone levels. But if the appearance of Indo-European society is tied to mutations in testosterone genes, we have a theory filled with difficulties and essentially untestable by the procedures employed by modern science to confirm or falsify hypotheses. To say that Indo-Europeans brought aggressiveness and warfare into the world de novo is very unlikley because it amounts to suggesting that the males of this culture carried new mutations in the

45

human genetic system that had never existed before within the gene pool of Homo sapiens. These imaginary new genetic messages, according to this theory, would have designed a hormone physiology of unusual aggressiveness that conferred a new and superior adaptiveness that had not existed before. Such a hypothesis is a fantasy of human evolutionary genetics that neatly dovetails with current feminist thinking about the origins of warfare but it deflects us from considering the real issue which is how mytho-poetic systems can structure culture. With regard to the matter at hand - the human potential for dangerous aggression is very real. Its basis may be an ancient, genetically driven need to hunt and kill, not for the sadistic thrill (trophy hunting is an aberration), but for essential nutrients packaged in the most energy dense format.18 How ancient this behavior may be is seen by a quick look at fossil and archeological evidence for our earliest hominid ancestors. There is a consensus among palaeoanthropologists that our early hominid ancestors were omnivores, i.e. subsisted on both plant and animals foods (Goodall 1986; Harding and Teleki 1981; Tobias 1985; Wolpoff 1980). The latter was first obtained by hunting small animals and scavenging. Homo erectus evolved in Africa c. 1,400,000 years ago and is not only the immediate ancestor of Homo sapiens but the Gaias first hominid that was
18 There is a common consensus within nutritional biochemistry that animal protein is more energy dense than vegetable protein; there are more calories available per unit weight. It is also the only source for a complete menu of essential amino acids (protein building blocks). One must mix and match vegetable proteins to acquire a full suite of essential amino acids in the daily diet and that procedure presupposes a rather sophisticated knowledge of nutritional biochemistry that was unavailable until this century and still only to an educated elite, granted that preindustrial peoples knew the most nutritious plant foods. There is no example in the anthropological data of a tribal or village agricultural peoples who did not view meat as a priority dietary item. This is not to say that a completely vegetarian diet without nutritional deficiencies and obvious physiological handicaps is impossible for human beings. As with most physical traits, the range of actual variation follows a normal distribution (symmetrical bell shaped curve). The small percentage of the population encompassed by the tail of the curve reveals characteristics not typical of the average. Some individuals are unusually efficient at processing vegetable food and extracting usable molelcules; such is the luck of the genetic draw. They will be healthy vegetarians and may even feel unhealthy when eating meat. Such cases, however, do not establish the usual parameters for the entire population; they illustrate the variation upon the major theme that is possible. This last point is very important and is little understood by those who selectively cull data for observations and conclude we would all be better off as vegetarians.

46

also a big game, hunting carnivore as well (Sigmon and Cybulski 1981). Big game hunting carnivores are also very wide ranging. They have very large territories because their preferred prey is wide ranging and therefore the hunter must travel extensively in order to get dinner (Foley 1984). These preferred, indeed perhaps genetically programmed, hunting behaviors drive migratory behavior. H. erectus exhibited extensive migratory propensities as shown by its presence in Indonesia (Java) shortly after its inception in Africa. But the, why hunt big game at all? Before the big brain was complex enough to evolve hunting lore and myth, the answer was straightforward. If successful, big game hunting is very efficient. One elephant would feed an entire clan for a week. Feeding behaviors are genetically programmed, albeit now plastic enough to be culturally modified. Our drive - need - for animal protein is genetically embedded because it was strongly selected for by natural selection over the untold eons that are ancestors evolved from primates to early apes to hominids to full fledged species of Homo. Our hunting instincts are unavoidably aggressive; killing can hardly be equated with pacifism. Godd ess mytho-poetics constrained human aggression within boundaries that served deity mythopoetics first, not the all too human lust for power and wealth. Blood was spilled and human and animal life taken in a regular and calendrically appointed pattern. But the events that mandated such behavior were ritualistic and solemn, not the fulfilling of the political ambitions of an individual or state. These events were community renewal of the human relationships with the Goddess and her renewal as well. Life and blood were essential to the Goddess well being and her ability to continually renew and nourish life in secular time! It is most difficult for us in the present age to understand and believe that the deity too must be nourished, by human action. We all seem to be either materialistic atheists or continuing the millennia old futile attempt to placate a potentially vengeful, judgmental Father in Heaven - the Indo-European Sky God is very much alive. Reciprocity is the objective reality. Continued good life in this world is not simply a matter of taking from a one dimensional, endlessly altruistic deity. The Goddess is not immortal and not blindly altruistic. Unless nourished and renewed, she cannot create beneficence. Her nourishment does not spring from a vacuum. Nothing could be further from economic or political warfare or the extension of state power. What better use for this unavoidable aspect of human behavior than to renew the deity so that she may continue to do her best for the world as Gaia?

47

 The Mistress of Animals

attacharyya (1977: 51-53) records that the Mother Goddess is variously portrayed as the protectress of lions, tigers, rams, goats fowls, bees and wasps. In the late medieval poetic tale Candimangala, the goddess takes the form of an iguana in order to test the hero. In Jain iconography, the symbol of the Goddess Gauri is an iguana. The Rajputs believe the wild pig is a manifestation of Gauri. Kali is the buffalo in folk belief. The Khonds worship the Mother Goddess as an elephant. Baghai Devi is the Mother Goddess as Tiger Goddess in Berar and Huliamma is the Tiger Goddess in Mysore. In some regions, the Mother Goddess is a protectress of sheep and cattle. Among the Parayans, she preserves the health and vigor of bulls which indicates an extraordinary recovery of the goddess for this should be a power reserved to the Indo-European thunder sky-god. The Goddess is now responsible for male virility, a theme that opposes the central thread of Tantric practice. But then opposites held in the same hand are characteristic of India as OFlaherty (1980) is so fond of pointing out. To further complicate matters, reflect that all over India the cow is regarded as a form of the Mother Goddess. The taboo on eating the flesh of cattle stems from their function in early Indo-European society not as food but as currency; obviously you would not eat your money. The goddess Prithivi who is the divine cow as discussed above explains how the pre-Aryan pre-Vedic tribal Great Goddess came to be associated with the chief economic currency of the conquering Aryan tribes.

48

Gaia and Sovereignty: Sri Lakshmi

n the Vedic Period of India there were two separate goddesses, Sri and Lakshmi, who were quite difficult to distinguish. Their collective characteristics are best considered together for they will merge in the coming centuries. A late supplement to the fifth mandala of the Rg Veda, called the Srisukta, describes incomparable lotus-like beauty and a birth from the sacred flower of India. Delighting in both the trumpeting of elephants and animals for their fertilizing power, she is an earth goddess who specifically promotes the growth of rice. She can also bestow success in many realms: long life, health and offspring (Olsen 1989: 125-126). We see the Goddess as Giver of Life and Fertility with hints of the ability to empower the sovereign. It is important to note the absence of the every-dying, ever-reborn male vegetation god in Vedic India. The articulation of this function by the Goddesses strongly suggests that this manifestation dates from the earliest Neolithic before the male king on earth had acquired semi-divine status as the goddess consort and thereby became the conduit to heaven for his people. Olsen (1989) agrees with this suggestion, as we shall see. 19
19 In ancient Greece, Demeter and Persephone were vegetation deities, goddesses of the corn, the primary agricultural deities. Their mysteries were celebrated at Eleusis. Unbelievably, Demeters veneration continued into the the early nineteenth century at Eleusis. Until 1802, when the statue was carried off to the University of Cambridge, the Christian residents at Eleusis venerated a huge statue of Demeter as the Corn Goddess (Frazer 1959: 356-369). Frazer suggests that the earliest vegetation deities were female because a) so much of the daily substenance of hunter-gather diet was plant foods gathered primarily by women; and b) in so many cultures that practiced a primitive agriculture without the plough, the primary work force in the fields was female. Hunting was a mystery that was both reserved for men and very inefficient in its use of time. Folklorists have collected a wealth of references to the Corn or Barley Mother in the peasant cultures of Europe and Asia and thus documented the extraordinary world-wide persistence of the earliest form of agricultural deity, albeit in a fragmented, disjointed form (Frazer 1959: 401419). In some few cases, a connection can be made with the May Queen who welcomes in the new growing season. In the spring rites on the fourth Sunday of Lent in Libchowic, Bohemia, a young girl called the queen and crowned with flowers, is led to each house in the village by young girls dressed in white and also bedecked with flowers. At each house, she announces the arrival of spring, wishes all good luck and receives presents. A similar

49

Sri and Laksmi were combined during the period when the earliest Upanishads were written. Laksmi originally meant good or bad luck and evolved with connotations of prosperity and well being; the goddess so named was one of wealth and fortune and first appears as such in the Rig Veda c. 100 B.C. (Battacharyya 1977: 156). Sri denotes similar qualities as associated with a complete life, offspring, honor, glory and dignity. The goddess Sri first appears as a distinct deity in the Vajasaneyi Samhita c.900 B.C.. She is a pre-Aryan goddess of fertility and her origin is probably non-Aryan (Olsen 1989: 126). Olsen (1989) also believes her originally to have been a Yakshini, those semi-divine chthonic spirits who guarded wealth, particularly that hidden in the roots of trees. Yakshinis were shape shifters and were closely connected with the life giving power of sacred water. They are often represented holding a lotus, a symbol of the waters of life or a flask to denote abundance. Their male counterparts are the Yakshas who ride the elephants which are often depicted with Sri. Yakshas are deeply connected to kingship, as is Sri, who guarded towns and villages from evil (Olsen 1989: 126). Battacharyya (1977: 134) believes Sri-Laksmi to have originally been an agriculture goddess who developed out of an early fertility cult. Her representations first appear on sculpture and coins in the first century B.C. (Battacharyya 1977: 133. 157). The pre-Aryan Sri needed to be tamed and made submissive by the IndoEuropean Aryans who invaded India starting c.1200 B.C.. At the outset it should be noted that the Vedic Aryans were pastoral nomads who practiced little agriculture and thus a deep relationship to a Great Goddess who is a Mother and Earth Goddess was unlikely (cf. Battcharya (1977: 20). The process of subjugating the Goddess may be seen in the Satapatha Brahmana. Here, her birth is not de novo from that well of endless sacred fertility, the lotus, but from the god Prajapati who creates the world from parts of his body. The gods are jealous of her beauty and power and decide to kill her but Prajapati intervenes. He saves her by allowing the gods to
ceremony was enacted in German areas of Hungary by the Whitsuntide Queen. In southeast Ireland, the Queen crowned on May Day ruled for an entire year during which she could not marry. May Queens were ubiquitous in England and France. However, in the majority of such spring rites throughout Europe, the vegetation deity is male or represented by a king and queen together; the folk-tale fragment of the divine hierogamy. The instances where a May Queen ruled alone speak to the most ancient relationship of deity to spring renewal and human agricutlure.

50

appropriate her attributes leaving her subjugated and powerless. Upon offering a sacrifice to the gods, Sri regains all her possessions but has tragically and in public assumed a subservient role for all time. Olsen (1989: 127) sees a metaphoric gang rape here as Sri is initiated into the Vedic pantheon which is typically Indo-European; chauvinistic and dominated by a male sky-thunder god. By the time of the Mahabharata (300 B.C. to 300 A.D.), Sri is found associated with many male deities in a web of complex relationships. She is associated with wealth, has a fickle nature, remains connected with demonic beings and incarnates herself as the heroine Draupadi, the polyandric wife of the five Pandavas in the Mahabharata. As the daughter of Sakra, she becomes a goddess of wealth taken up by the Buddhist trading class. With the growth of her popularity [Sri] Lakshmi became Nagaralaksmi, the protectress of cities, and then Raja Laksmi, fortune of the king (Battacharyya 1977: 156). The images on coins and stone disk provide a wealth of evidence for the popularity of her cult in the last few centuries B.C. and the first few centuries A.D.. Sri Lakshmi rose from the ocean and is the personification of fortune which was lost by demons although they earlier possessed it as she herself relates in the Mahabharata. In the Ramayana she is the wife of Visnu and is fortune in the form of happiness and wealth, a role particularly favored by Buddhists. Her antithesis is Alaksmi, the goddess of all evil (Battacharyya 1977: 102103). By the fourth century A.D., Sri Lakshmi has become the wife of Vishnu and lost her independent status forever. Her rights are now by virtue of her enthronement beside Vishnu, as the royal queens of the Gupta Dynasty only had rights by virtue of their position in marriage. How ironic! The Goddess of Sovereignty is now powerless to empower the king and the marriage of Vishnu and Sri Lakshmi is a metaphor for the ideal human marriage as depicted in Puranic texts. However, this degradation of the goddess does not last long. Around 600 A.D., Sri Lakshmi emerges reinvigorated in such texts as the Ahirbudhnya Samhita of the Pancarata sect as the shakti - creative power - of Vishnu and the prakrti - material cause of the universe itself. She appears as the supreme being of the entire universe, called the Fourth, in the Saubhagyalaksmi Upanishad which was written in the eleventh century A.D. (Olsen 1989: 128). Radh a develops into an important goddess later than Sri Lakshmi, although her name occurs in the Rg Veda and the Atharva Veda. She appears in the iconography of the visual arts by the fifth century A.D.. The earliest explicit

51

textual reference to her is in the Gahasattasai, a Prakrit work by Hala that might date anywhere from the first to seventh centuries A.D.. In this and other literary sources she is the all-too-human mistress of Krsna. By 900 A.D., she appears in several Puranic texts, such as the Padmic Purana and Naradiya Purana where she is the hladinishakti - blissful energy - of Krsna and it is clear that a fully developed cult existed with many followers. The Brahmavaivarta Purana, (c.750 to 1550 A.D.) documents a transition from a masculine-oriented (Indo-European) theology to the earlier feminine (i.e. goddess) oriented mytho-poetics. It is extraordinary that in India, unlike Eurasia, the Goddess re-emerged in classical and medieval times with renewed strength and potency, but then India did not face a powerful, goddess-hating religion as did Europe. Wars with invading Muslims in the north spoke to other matters entirely. In these texts, Radhas origins are always as a gopi, (?aboriginal, peasant, herdswoman) and she is the creative, life giving, loving and redemptive goddess. In the poem Gitagovinda by Jayadeva, the court poet of Lakshmana Sena who ruled in the late twelfth century A.D., Radha symbolizes the perfection of human love for god and her relationship with Krsna is clearly that of an equal. Such deep contextual evidence, both in literature and cult, establishes that Hindu society saw a strengthened Goddess re-emerge after perhaps a millennia of eclipse during which Indo-European (Aryan) mytho-poetics dominated society. The result of her re-emergence was a hybrid mytho-poetics in which the gods and goddesses were, although adversaries and in tension, ultimately trying to achieve balance; the supreme male deity did not dominate all. The strength of the goddess is seen in many cult practices. Radha was prominent in several Hindu sects. Among the Sakhi Sampradaya founded by Haridas c.1600 A.D., the members of the sect, called sakhis (friends) identify with the gopi companions of Radha and assume female garb and manners in order to share the rasa - emotional mood - experienced by Radha in her relationship with Krsna. Radha eclipses Krsna in importance among the Radhavallabha Sampradaya, founded in 1585 A.D. by Sri Hit Harivams. In this sect, Radha is the ground of being, the eternal power, without form or qualities, and the bestower of bliss. She is more powerful than Krsna because he cannot control his passion for her ... Her devotees are her companions - sakhis - who act as intermediaries for the union of Radha and Krsna (Olsen 1989: 131). It is tragic and mysterious that this masculine-feminine equality that was achieved on the level of theology and cult practice could not be translated into a force that would melt the caste system and so liberate the daily lives of women. Ironically, the devotees of the Goddess in these sects are male.

52

Hindu males were given the opportunity to access their feminine power but the corresponding option was not available to women. Although that fact is usually attributed to extreme chauvinism, it may be due to the belief that all women are incarnated as the goddess on earth. If that is true, what need is there for women to discover the goddess and their corresponding femininity? Subjugation then follows from extreme male fear of female divine power (cf OFlaherty 1980). Sri Lakshmi and Radha are both Goddesses of Life Giving and primal creativity; I will only discuss Sri Lakshmi in what follows. As mentioned above, she is identified with prakti, the material cause of the universe - the fundamental creative ground. She is the life-giving womb, the nurturing mother, and intimately associated with all of life and its rhythms of birth, growth and decay. She is also the eventual tomb of all living things and thus is also the Goddess of Death and Regeneration. Prakti slowly evolves from subtle to grosser material in six stages. The second state is maya, the illusory, creative power. Sri Lakshmi is called Mahamaya in the Lakshmi Tantra for through maya primal matter - prakti - is structured and made fit for human beings. Through this power, the Goddess can conceal her true and transcendental nature, assume other forms at will and perform miracles (Olsen 1989: 132). The initial stage of creation, through the power of the command of Vishnu, manifests the awakening in Lakshmi of her twofold shakti (energy, power): kriya (action) and bhuti (becoming), the former type of shakti appears as the universe and the latter form vitalizes and governs the universe. Thus Lakshmi functions as the instrumental and material cause of the universe. She is also the primal source of the pulsating energy and ominous power of the universe (Olsen 1989: 132). Sri Lakshmis creativity is depicted iconographically by an association with her birthing lotus, either in her hand or as her throne; her appearance is often compared to the lotus as well. The lotus, by virtue of self fertilization, is a metaphor for self-contained procreation. The lotus also symbolizes the divine transcendent yet immanent life, life-giving and life-sustaining waters; its leaf lying on the back of the waters represents the earth. This vegetative

53

symbol of the goddess is indicative of the fertility, wealth, and abundance that she offers to mankind (Olsen 1989: 132). As Gaja Lakshmi, the goddess emerged from the ocean (Vishnu Purana 1.9.102) and was bathed with pure water by elephants of the cosmic quarters. Gaja Lakshmi is often depicted standing or seated on a lotus with two elephants on either side pouring water on her from two jars. The elephant here is certainly not a symbol of war but one of fertility; the pachyderm is a walking rain cloud. Grouped with the goddess, they are rain clouds fertilizing the feminine earth. Gaja Lakshmi is here Gaia, the primeval Earth Goddess. This iconographic motif is found on coins, rock carvings, temple doorways and on the great Buddhist stupa of Sanci. Although Olsen (1989: 133) quotes several authorities as interpreting this group to represent the energy and wealth of the cosmic waters, the interpretation is more complex. Gaja Lakshmi is the Great Goddess of Life Giving, who as Gaia often creates life from the endlessly renewable cosmic waters. Here the ability to continually renew the hearth is being praised. The association of life giving cosmic water with elephants is particular to India; in Eurasia the association would most likely be with the cosmic serpent (cf. Gimbutas 1989). Tantri sm had a profound influence upon the conception of Sri Lakshmi and her renewed strength. The Laksmitantra is a Pancaratra text composed between the 9th and 12th centuries A.D. and it has two objectives. Firstly to establish [Sri] Lakshmi as a philosophical principle ranking, if not higher than Visnu, than at least equal to him. This is achieved by emphasizing the mystic tenet of unity in duality, the two-in-one accepted by the Sakta sects. [Sri] Lakshmi as an integral part of Narayana, the supreme being, is the embodiment of his sovereign will, and the instrumental cause of creation ... (Gupta 1972). From the 8th century onwards, the conception of Sakti acquires more and more prominence in Vaisnavism (the cult of Visnu). A central tenet is that a Female Principle representing Sakti must be associated with ultimate reality. Visnu, or Siva, and this Sakti is responsible for the differentiation of all the objects in the world including human beings. On the human plane, the universe comes into existence because of the association of male and female and thus the philosophical foundation is set for sexual tantrism. At the end of a cosmic cycle, the universe returns to its source when Sakti comes to repose in her lord (Vishnu or Siva). In the Laksmitantra, Sri Lakshmi and Sakti are synonymous. Every manifestation of

54

God (Visnu or Siva) is Saktis manifestation as well for she is inherent in the supreme being. She possesses five functions: tirodhana or delusion; srsti or creation; sthiti or sustenance; laya or dissolution; and anugraha or grace. These are called her five saktisi as they describe the ways in which she may exercise her power (Battacharyya 1977: 216-217). Why and how was the Goddess able to revive and renew her strength from the beginning of the Gupta period c.300 A.D. onwards? The religion of the Mother Goddess was pre-Aryan and Dravidian and quite prominent in the lower castes which were drawn from pre-Vedic tribes. It had achieved upward mobility and insinuated itself into the higher castes which were exclusively drawn from Vedic age Aryans (Indo-Europeans). Battacharyya (1977: 223) believes that the upper caste dependence upon the lower castes was formerly recognized and deliberate compromises made with their dominant cult of the Mother Goddess. The mass strength behind the Female Principle placed goddesses by the side of the god in all religions, but by doing so, the entire emotion centering around the Female Principle could not be channelized. So a need was felt for a new religion, entirely female dominated, a religion in which even the great gods like Visnu or Siva would remain subordinate to the Goddess. This new religion came to be known as Saktism. In its developed form, the Sakta religion became almost identical with Tantricism. A major virtue of this model is that it leaves the caste system intact (which is the historical reality); indeed this model is dependent upon an intact and strong caste system. Obviously the theoretical underpinnings of Tantrism (see above) would strongly reinforce an emerging Saktism. The aim of the Sakta worshipper is to realize the universe within himself and to become one with the goddess. The successive steps of the spiritual ladder are constituted by three stages - pasu (animal), vira (heroic) and divya (divine). ... All women are regarded as manifestations of Prakrti or Sakti and hence they are objects of respect and devotion. Whoever offends them incurs the wrath of the great goddess. Every aspirant has to realize the latent Female Principle within himself, and only by becoming female is he entitled to worship the supreme being (vama bhutva vajet param) (Battacharyya 1977: 225-226).

55

Gaja Lakshmi Travels to Europe

he long distance cultural influence of early classic civilization in India is little understood but important. In 1992 T. Taylor reassessed the famous silver Gundestrop Cauldron, which was found in a peat bog in Jutland (Denmark) and has long been attributed to Celtic or Thracian craftsman (Megaw 1989),. His new look revealed how far Gaja Lakshmi traveled from her native India. Although appearing in virtually all books about the Celts, this most famous of Celtic artifacts is Celtic only in the sense that it was found in Celtic territory. The original bowl was beaten from a single ingot, a technically difficult feat, and is 27 inches in diameter. The twelve plates that formed the sides of the cauldron were skillfully worked in the repouss manner and covered with mythological and ritual scenes. Two rim pieces also survived. After manufacture, it appears to have been disassembled and repaired more than once and was finally hidden on what was then dry ground in high grass sometimes between 150 and 50 B.C. (Taylor 1992: 84-85). Good photographs of several of the plates may be seen in Taylor (1992) and Megaw (1989). What should have started everyone thinking long ago, is the presence of elephants on the cauldron. Granted traveling Celtic silver smiths could have seen elephants in Asia Minor and wished to portray the great beasts; the impression they would have made would have been unforgettable. This is the usual observation by scholars who give the elephants little significance. Perhaps the smiths made the cauldron in Asia Minor and returned with it to northwest Europe. Or, if Thracian craftsman fashioned the cauldron, so much the better, for they would be familiar with elephants because Thrace was on the western fringes of Asia Minor. Thrac ian silversmiths are involved, as Taylor (1992) has demonstrated and others before him noted, but the story does not end there. A good reconstruction of the original weight (9,445 grams) of the cauldron yields a figure which is an exact multiple (1,666) of the Persian siglos, a coin whose maximum weight is 5.67 grams. Persian metalwork was a major influence on the development

56

of silversmithing in Thrace in the fourth and fifth centuries B.C. and Persian weights continued in use in Thrace long afterwards (Taylor 1992: 87). Other examples of Thracian silver work have been found in western Europe. Bridle decoration (phalera) was used to repair the bowl of the Gundestrop cauldron and examples have been found on the English Channel Island of Sark, and in the lower Don basin which was Samartian territory. The latter phalera contain scenes closely resembling those found at Rawalpindi (North Pakistan) and depict Hariti, protectress of children. A similar goddess is found on a phalera from Bulgaria and on the Gundestrop cauldron. The elephants on the Gundestrop cauldron flank a goddess, the entire scene is one of ritual bathing by Lakshmi according to Taylor (1992: 87). The precise mytho-poetic interpretation is likely that given above; the celebration of the Great Goddess as eternal Life Giver. In 1895, the Danish Scholar Japetus Steenstrup proposed a Central Asian origin for the Gundestrop Cauldron over a wide region that encompassed northern India, Tibet and Mongolia. Furth er analysis of iconography leads to a conclusion that there were networks of craftsmen that transcended ethnic and political boundaries. Silversmiths apparently had contacts that stretched over 4,000 miles from India to the Balkans. Images and iconography would travel over these vast distances within a context dictated by artistic traditions. Once removed from their original models, images would be expected to become modified and stylized in unrealistic ways, although the original model should remain recognizable. Such modifications of original images are unavoidable when artists concerned with mytho-poetics are reproducing images with important mythic content but without access to the real world models or the texts and practicioners of the rites depicted. A good illustration of this process is the depiction of the elephants on the Gundestrop Cauldron. According to Taylor (1992: 88), they have bizarre pointed shoulders and their ears sit oddly high on their foreheads. These unrealistic anatomical features occur because the silversmiths neither worked with real elephants as models nor had the original Indian images before them. These elephants are copies of copies. Three other images on the cauldron indicate strong Indian affinities: an antlered deity (?Celtic Cernunnos) in a yogic pose reminiscent of an oxheaded figure on a seal from Mohenjo-Daro (c.2,000-1500 B.C.); a wheel god calling to mind Vishnu; and the goddess with braided hair and paired birds who is Hariti (Taylor 1992: 88-89). It is extraordinary and important that Gaja Lakshmi traveled so far from her

57

native home because that circumstance demonstrates that an interchange of culture between Asia and Europe in remote times was fact, not fancy, in spite of what seem to be insurmountable travel times and geographical difficulties. Those who find influences from remote mytho-poetics impinging upon the particular region under scrutiny should not be dismissed as perceiving coincidence that has no historical meaning. Joseph Campbell and those who see Asian mythic influence in the New World have uncovered similarities that deserve careful scrutiny. Taylors (1992) report is groundbreaking.

Sri as Giver of Sovereignty

ri Lakshmi who is the Goddess manifest as the Giver of Sovereignty, is one of the Goddess profound and major roles. During the Gupta period (320-540 A.D.), she appeared on countless coins often seated on throne holding a lotus. In ancient Egypt, the goddess Isis was called the throne, i.e. the mother of the pharaoh. The pharaoh Seti I was represented seated on the lap of Isis, who sits on the throne. The same conception held sway in India. The cushion of the throne is called sri, which is essential to kingship and the realms prosperity. Furthermore, there is ancient tradition which established the king as the wedded consort of the Goddess. Sri is the source of the kings power; she is described as residing in the sovereign. In fact, the king refrains from cutting his hair, otherwise he will lose his sri (welfare, majesty) (Olsen 1989: 135). Samsons tragedy after the cutting of his hair is a reflection of this ancient theme. As Giver of Sovereignty, Sri promotes truth, generosity, austerity, strength and dharma. As her elephants pour the cosmic waters of life-giving upon Gaja Lakshmi, part of the consecration of the king involved sprinkling water upon him. This ritual represents his rebirth; his person now acquires sanctity and inviolability, which is only part of the rites significance. With his arms extended towards the sky, the newborn king impersonates the cosmic pillar of the universe. It is around this cosmic pillar, the axis mundi, that the cosmic forces of fertility rotate. 58

Thus he becomes the pivot and the source of the forces of fertility, similar in function to Sri Lakshmi in the form of Gaja Lakshmi ... If he does not possess the qualities of the goddess and attempts to rule without them, his kingdom and subjects will be subject to strife, drought, famine, sickness and death (Olsen 1989: 136). Withi n a still living ritual system, Sri Lakshmi and Gaja Lakshmi appear to be manifestations of the Great Goddess in several of her profound and most important roles as identified in the schemata of Gimbutas (1989). The Great Goddess manifested in other Indian goddesses also as the brief mention of Radha above indicates. The reality of her mytho-poetics reveals much more than a plethora of disconnected goddesses, forever restricted to particular regions and tightly bounded isolated roles.20 In retrospect, the concept of a singular Great Goddess with a plethora of manifestations should not have been controversial. The Indian pantheon counts many aspects and emanations of Siva of which Krsna is the most well known. Siva is the counterpart to the Great Goddess, that divine ground which can assume nearly any form and out of which comes seemingly countless deities specific to the time, place and myth of the cosmic moment.

] The Goddess of Life and Agriculture

S
20 The orginal Sanskrit name for Ceylon is Sri Lanka which can only be interpteted as the name of a goddess. Sri needs no further explantion. Lanka is frequently used in the Ramayana to denote Ceylon or its capital city which was surrounded by high defensive walls outside of which were impenetrable forests. Approach was by drawbridge over moats. Lanka was also referred to as Nagadvipa, Island of the Nagas. Naga literally means snake, although it was applied to both mythical serpents and elephants as well. Snake cults are of ancient Dravidian origin, predating the Aryan invasion; their followers are often called nagas. Vedic hymns mention pearls in the bodies of mythical serpents which could cause rain, a circumstance that hints at a snake goddess (Stutley and Stutley 1977: 161, 198). Sri Lanka appears to be an ancient name for a Snake Goddess.

59

ri Lakshmi often holds bilva fruit in one hand and a lotus in the other. The Brihaddharma Purana (1.10) relates that Lakshmi worshipped Siva by offering a thousand lotuses each day. Upon discovering that a lotus was missing, she offered her breast which became the bilva. The trifoliate leaves are related to longevity and the fruit possesses the power to remove illusion (maya) and all types of misfortune (Gonda 1969: 204, 220). One would imagine that the Great Goddess as Life Giver, whose dominion included ecological fertility, was concerned with agricultural practices in the very early Neolithic before the every-dying, ever-reborn, male Vegetation God appeared. There must have been a time during the earliest stages of plant domestication when the related mytho-poetics were presided over by the Great Goddess who, after all, is Gaia. By the middle Neolithic in Europe, the Near East and Mesopotamia 1) agricultural techniques were refined, perfected and could be relied upon (within the limits of uncontrollable weather patterns); and 2) the connection was made between the erect male phallus which is sexually potent and Spring ecological renewal (which is the result of sexual potency), then the male Vegetarian God appears as working in concert with, and therefore consort of, Gaia. It seems unlikely that this early phase of trial and error experimentation with plant domestication lasted very long. The archeological record reveals a rapid, successful spread of the techniques (Battacharyya 1977; Neumann 1963). The time frame for such developments in India is very difficult to deduce because the invading Aryans practiced little agriculture as noted previously, the economy was that of warring, nomadic, pastoral tribes. Early in time, we have discussed that male deities are uncommon in Harappan Civilization. The association of Sri Lakshmi with agriculture (0lsen 1989: 133) appears to refer to this earliest phase plant domestication before the appearance of the male Vegetation God. Dating this phase in India is nearly impossible, but it must precede and then include the Indus Valley civilization of c.2,000-1500 B.C.. Sri Lakshmi is associated with rice, a relationship that must be ancient. The domestication of rice first occurred in the Ch'ing-lien kang Culture of China c.5,000 to 4700 B.C. (Chang 1983). It is likely that the ability to cultivate rice spread from China into India where we find rice cultivated in the Indus Valley perhaps as early as 3500 B.C.. Sri Lakshmi's association with corn is much more recent, but reveals a retention of her most ancient power relationship with agriculture.

60

In his discussion of ever-dying, ever-regenerating agricultural deities, Frazer (1959) reports several rather spectacular Indian rituals in which the primary vegetation deity is the Goddess. These rituals, which survive into the 20th century, followed an extremely archaic model, one that refers to the earliest phase of plant domestication when the consort of the goddess either played a very minor role or had not yet appeared at all to participate in the rites. Thus in Oodeypoor in Rajputana a festival is held in honor of Gouri, or Isani, the goddess of abundance. The rites begin when the sun enters the sign of the Ram, the opening of the Hindu year. An image of the goddess Gouri is made of earth, and a smaller one of her husband Iswara, and the two are placed together. A small trench is next dug, barley is sown in it, and the ground watered and heated artificially till the grain sprouts, when the women dance round it hand in hand, invoking the blessing of Gouri on their husbands. After that the young corn is taken up and distributed by the women to the men, who wear it in their turbans. Every wealthy family, or at least every subdivision of the city, has its own image. These and other rites, known only to the initiated, occupy several days, and are performed within doors. Then the images of the goddess and her husband are decorated and borne in procession to a beautiful lake, whose deep blue waters mirror the cloudless Indian sky, marble palaces and orange groves. Here the women, their hair decked with roses and jessamine, carry the image of Gouri down a marble staircase to the waters edge, and dance round it singing hymns and love-songs. Meantime the goddess is supposed to bathe in the water. No men take part in the ceremony; even the image of Iswara, the husband-god, attracts little attention" (Frazer 1959: 294, italics mine). At the temple of the goddess Padmavati, near Pandharpur in the Bombay Presidency, a Nine Nights festival is held in the bright half of the month Ashvin (September-October). At this time a bamboo frame is hung in front of the image, and from it depend garlands of flowers and strings of wheaten cakes. Under the frame the floor in front of the pedestal is strewn with a layer of earth in which wheat is sown and allowed to sprout. A similar rite is observed in the same month before the images of two other goddesses, Ambabai and Lakhubai, who also have temples at Pandharpur (Frazer 1959: 295). Sri Lakshmi is sometimes depicted holding a cornucopia which holds life sustaining food. In a wider sense, it represents the universal womb of Gaia

61

where life begins,, is formed, is nourished, and is finally discharged (Olsen 1989: 134). Sri Lakshmi was, and still is, directly concerned with the success of human reproduction. In the Punjab, women give thanks to the goddess by offering colored cards to her in thanks for their fertility, the exact number corresponding to the number of sons they have. 21

The Stallion and the Mare

he Indian ritual of the queen and the dead stallion, while preserving the core myth of the Indo-European mare has a different symbolism which is more complicated than that in Celtic Ireland. Primary Indo-European influence is apparent because the horse in the Indian rite is a stallion, not a mare. Apparently in ancient India, there was a very strong Indo-European influence in matters that structured royal leadership and the governance of kingdoms and that created overwhelming obstacles to rule by queens. As a result, the Goddess could continue to participate in the royal ritual of horse sacrifice only by assuming the appearance of a stallion. She had to go in drag, if you will! Understand that while this chapter relies heavily upon information in OFlaherty (1980), this interpretation is my own. You may well ask, why what we see here is not what we get and isnt this reading of the symbolism unnecessarily complex? Let us proceed slowly.

21

We see the Great Goddess as Weaver of Fate in her power over well being, long life and wealth. During the first day of the Dipavali festival, which is celebrated during the last two days of the month of Asvini (September-October) and the first two days of Karttika (October-November), Lakshmi is worshipped by merchants. They collect their account books, smear silver coins with red lead, and worship the goddess as giver of wealth. The Jains have a related festival in which they also recognize her as the goddess of trade and commerce (Olsen 1989: 134).

62

legs. A commentary on this text adds helpfully that they extend their legs in order to achieve coupling. ... Just as the king in the Irish text ate the mares flesh and blood (to restore his virility, as we shall see), so the queen in the Indian text symbolically eats the stallions seed to ensure fertility and/or pregnancy, the female equivalent of virility. Some texts say that the union with the stallion bestows long life on the queen. The first consecrated act performed by the sacrificer consists of offering the priests gold and a ball of rice, and the texts spell out this symbolism: The Adhvaryu cooks the priests mess of rice; it is seed he thereby produces ... For when the horse was immolated, its seed went from it and became gold; thus, when he gives gold (to the priests), he supplies the horse with seed ... For the ball of rice is seed, and the gold is seed; by means of seed he thus lays seed into that (horse and sacrificer). Food is also given directly to the stallion by the wives of the sacrificer, who offer him rice which is seed. And it is said that the four women participating in the ritual (including the Mahisi) throw grains of fried rice to the horse, as well as barley and milk: She (of the wives) whose food the horse eats (when she throws it) will have a child who will prosper. ... the Vedic sacrificial horse, who is hardly a spirit of the rice but is indeed the spirit of fertility and rebirth (OFlaherty 1980: 154-155). There are many indications of ritual elements that later came to be central to Tantric practice. The correspondence between eating and sexual intercourse is explicit throughout the texts of the horse sacrifice. In the obscene banter between the queen and the priests, it is said When a deer eats the barley, (the farmer) does not think that the beast has been nourished; when a Sudra woman has a noble lover, she does not become enriched. The feeding of the stallion represents a partial transformation from the Irish ritual: in both cases, it is the male participant (the Irish king, the Indian horse) who is actually fed; but it is the human participant (the king or queen) who derives the fertility benefits at the expense of the sacrificed equine (divine) power; and there are two human participants in the Vedic rite. Thus the queen is said to become pregnant, not by eating the stallion, but by feeding him - a symbolic inconsistency in the extant rite; moreover, the true beneficiary in

63

the Indian ritual is the king who takes on the powers of the stallion, rather than the queen, whose increased fertility is of peripheral importance to the ritual. The mantle of immortality passes from a male divinity to a human king; the mare has only a vestigial role, and the human queen acts as a mediary between male figures, human and divine. Thus the king grows strong, not by eating the mare [as in Celtic Ireland], but by having the stallion (his alter ego) eat the seed that must, symbolically be the stallions own - a substance drained from him during his intercourse with the queen but immediately transferred back to the king. These overlapping models suggest the possible loss of an intermediate rite in which the queen ate the flesh, not of the mare, but of the dead stallion (just as the Irish king ate the flesh of the mare); for she feeds him the ball of seed/rice and is, as a result, blessed with a child who will prosper (as one would expect if he gave her the seed), ... On a theological level, since the stallion is the divine alter ego of the king, the woman mediates between the male god and his male worshiper, providing a means by which sexual power may flow from the former to the latter without forcing the worshiper to assume a homosexual attitude (OFlaherty 1980: 155-156). There is evidence beneath the surface supporting the existence of the earlier ritual in which the queen ate the flesh or seed of the stallion. The king and the mare appear to be vestigial, to become involved for no apparent logical reason, as if they had been there before and were kept on, emeritus, even when their roles had been usurped (OFlaherty 1980: 157). Nonetheless, they are there and can be identified, a circumstance that suggests the Celtic Irish ritual is older in origin than the Indian, even though our documentary evidence for the Irish ritual comes from medieval times. Thus one begins to see in the Vedic ritual a conflation of two sacred models, rather than the simple replacement of one by the other (OFlaherty 1980: 156). Can we find the mare? Yes, we can, easily. At the beginning of the Vedic rite a group of mares is shut into an enclosure on the north and kept hidden. Later the mares are shown to the stallion, who whinnies; the mares whinny in response, a sign of desire that is regarded as a good omen (Dumont, 1927: 136, 266, 317). The mares are then set free and disappear from the ritual. The sexual metaphors that follow partake of what I call pre-Tantric elements and once again reveal the Mare Goddess. The kings role in the ceremony is, in at least one important aspect, the mirror image of that of the stallion: while the contact between the stallion and the queen involves (mimed)

64

sexual union, the contact between the king and the queen emphasizes the lack of sexual union (as did the contact between the stallion and the mares, who are kept apart, enclosed, from the stallion and then set free). That is, the ritual protects the king from sexual contact with the dangerous woman, who is, as we shall see, symbolized by the mare (OFlaherty 1980: 157). Sugg estions of early tantric practice are here. Furthermore, I submit that the mare is much more than a symbol, she is an actual epiphany of the Mare Goddess who embodies one of the two major categories of Indian goddesses as described above. For while it is the chief queen Mahisi, who lies with the stallion, it is the favorite wife (the Vavata) with whom the king lies but does not have contact. Not only do we have an early example of the splitting of womanhood into two halves, the good, nurturing mother and the erotic, demanding, sexually aggressive lover, but these two wives of the king are two very different epiphanies of the Great Goddess (goddesses of the breast and tooth, respectively) who enact roles usually reserved for the other: the nurturing wife acts obscenely while the lover acts chastely. Furthermore, the Goddess appears in this earlier ritual in a third manifestation, that of the mare herself. Upon reflection, the relative simplicity of the Irish ritual would appear to be further evidence that it predates the Indian. Batta charyya (1977: 281) believes the earliest form of the empowerment ritual may be reconstructed rather easily from the obscene and abusive dialogue that the queen and her attendants entered into with the priests after the miming of sexual intercourse with the stallion and its immediate sacrifice. These mantras are taken from the Rgveda, the Taittiriya Samhita and the Vajasaneyi Samhita. They reveal an older rite in which a priest, who took the part of the horse, had ceremonial intercourse with the queen and was then put to death. Battacharyya notes Thompsons (1949: 158-159) interpretation in which the every-dying ever reborn Vegetarian God, who is the queens consort on earth, is also the Moon God in whom procreative power is embodied. The queen as an epiphany of the Mother Goddess must conceive, for on that depended the fertility of the earth. The cosmic importance of Her fertility mandated that her consort/lover would be a god and in early mythologies that divinity was the Moon God. The men who became an epiphany of the fertilizing Moon God must die in order that crops would be renewed for by doing so they embodied the annual cycle of vegetation which dies each winter only to be reborn. If further justification is needed for the ritual death, one need only look at the moon itself which

65

dies only to be reborn each month, for the Moon God and the priest or queens consort are one and the same. OFla herty (1980) speculates that the oldest form of the Indian ritual saw the king unite with the mare to gain virility, a scenario very much like that recorded from Celtic Ireland. If this empowerment ritual actually occurred, it contains a straightforward metaphor. The king in his sexual union with the Goddess (as Mare Goddess) is transformed from a mere mortal politician seeking rulership to the semi-divine, anointed representative of the Goddess on earth. As her empowered consort, he contains great power beyond that available to mere mortals (which is what he was before the Goddess accepted him). Having acquired semi-divine status, he embodies the greatest power to do the greatest good that is possible. His kingdom and people can do no better. What must be explained is the dead stallion in the Indian ritual which stands in contrast to the live mare in Celtic Ireland. OFlaherty (1980) suggests two reasons for the change. In India, the role of the stallion is active, it must perform in a mime in which the queen copulates with the deity. No live stallions here, for obvious reasons! Yet remember that in the rite, the stallion is treated as if he were alive. Furthermore, there is an ancient body of myth in which the resurrection of the people and their environment is accomplished by the sacrificial death of the king through sexual intercourse with a dead epiphany of the deity. The power held by the epiphany as corpse has a long history in esoteric doctrine in India and Tibet and surfaces directly in Tantrism. There has been speculation by many scholars that early in the Neolithic, there were kingdoms that practiced this form of regicide on a cyclical basis as a most solemn form of renewal: the king was literally killed after having actual intercourse with the animal epiphany of the Goddess. The barbarism of this rite may have fostered its evolution into a second stage wherein the king did not have literal intercourse - it was mimed - but nonetheless his life was demanded for the continued prosperity of his kingdom. A variant on this ritual is the more well known scenario where the king (or a substitute drawn from the common folk) had his every wish fulfilled for a specified time (up to one year), participated in sexual union with the priestesses who served the goddess and then went to his death. However, good wise, compassionate rulers are rare indeed and from an adaptionist point of view it would best

66

serve the society if they were to live and govern as long as possible. Therefore, these rituals evolved into a form where the king did not lose his life but gained renewed strength and virility through intercourse - now mimed - with the deity (whose epiphany for practical as well as mythological reasons must be dead). The life force (blood) needed by the Goddess for nourishment and the annual rejuvenation of her fecundity would now have to come from animal sacrifice. To this form of ritual (mimed intercourse and physical survival/ re-invigoration of the king) belongs the archaic rites that persisted into the Middle Ages in Celtic Ireland, and also those documented from Vedic India, although we must keep in mind that the Irish rite, although documented later in time, represents the earlier version. The king as consort of the Goddess may be killed (transformed by ritual death and then renewed) either after copulation and ingesting of the seed (broth, flesh) of the deity (Ireland) or through the mediation of the chief wife (Mahisi) who promotes the transference of the seed (power) of the deity into the king (India). Additional ritual complexity evolved in Indian culture where the stallion is forced to be celibate for a year preceding the ritual and may be castrated, in addition to being killed, at which point the metaphor becomes the mutilation of the mortal consort of the Goddess. In the Vedic rite that we know in detail, the stallion may also symbolize the mutilated consort. Overall, we see the awesome power of the Great Goddess exerting herself in a surprising and potent manner within an apparently male dominated Indian society. Hers is a power that is not sadistic, does not kill for pleasure but is a force that overpowers and may extinguish those human lives that partake of it. As has already been discussed twice above, the Goddess must be nourished, she is not a void who can create endlessly out of nothing. The ritual and its products are thus designed for two foci, the Goddess and the greater good of the community. Infusion of deity power into a human being is dangerous, but the rewards are continued prosperity for all, not the aggrandizement of personal wealth by the king. The king and his queen(s) are altruistic and subject themselves to great physical and psychic danger for the good of their people. Not only are the forms of this ritual alien to us, but the altruistic leadership that they are designed to foster appears to be a quality lost in our age as well. EVOLUTION OF THE INDO-EUROPEAN MARE RITUAL Horse InterDeity King

67

Godd ess course power t actual semen queen absen killed

Early

hic alive actual semen Mare

Neolit mare killed

mare dead mimed semen Mare killed

68

dead

reborn

actual semen

mare Mare mare

dead reborn/mimed flesh,broth Mare

stallio n dead flesh,broth, Mare; rice reborn/mimed

Mahisi, Vivata

The Doomsday Mare

f the Goddess can give birth, she can also bring death and the Death Goddess exemplifies this basic reality. One aspect of ultimate death is doomsday, although within that cataclysm is the enormous potential to recreate the world and start another cosmic cycle. The doomsday mare is an extremely complicated cycle of myths that reveals great tension and ambivalence about the Great Goddess. In this complexity, we cannot perceive one culture dominating another, but a fusion of two mytho-poetic systems of very different qualities with the unavoidable lack of final and simple resolution one might suspect. If you still have any hesitation about the reality of the 69

dark side of the Goddess, remember that we still call emotion laden, highly disturbing dreams, nightmares. The Doomsday Mare can visit any one of us as we sleep as the Night Mare. The Indian doomsday fire is the inextinguishable flames that pour forth from the mouth of the Doomsday Mare at the bottom of the ocean. The fire that flows from Sivas eye to burn Kama is the blaze of doomsday, the conflagration that will burn up the entire universe at the end of the Kali age. Siva cannot quench this fire but he has placed it beneath the ocean in the mouth of the Doomsday Mare. The fire of her mouth takes in the oceans waters and lets them out nonetheless. 22 As you will see, the Doomsday Mare and her great fire is not a one dimensional problem in containing mindless terror. Her fire springs from causes and realities that must be recognized and allowed expression. Simplistic repression is neither appropriate nor possible. ... The mare-fire is also associated with Death; in one myth it is said that the mare (vadava) was a river named the Vadava and that the river was given to Death as a wife; in gratitude to Siva for this gift, Death established a great linga known as Mahanala (the Great Fire) at the mouth of the Vadava River (BP 116. 22-25) (OFlaherty 1980: 213). It is important to realize that the doomsday fire in the form of a mare which resides at the bottom of the ocean is not The Goddess; there is no single Goddess here for the Great Goddess appears in multiple epiphanies in these myths. The Mare Goddess is but one of her manifestations. When the Goddess instructs her female servant to drink up the inexhaustible flood of the demon Raktabijas blood, she says, Open your mouth and drink his blood as if your mouth were the fire of the mare (Vam P 30.27). Since the demons blood is seed, the Goddess is behaving like the man-eating, castrating mare; since it is an unending flood, she is behaving like the insatiable fire in the ocean (OFlaherty 1980: 216). After the Vedic Era and the emergence of Hinduism, the connotation attached to the mare as devouring seductress began to tarnish the stallion as a metaphor of noble purity and strength. In terms of the shistorical evolution
22

SP 2. 3. 29. 25; Matsya P 154. 252-2 and MBH 5. 97. 3.

70

of myth, the Goddess is re-emerging after a period of submission by IndoAryans but her re-appearance is not entirely welcome and is viewed with considerable ambivalence. Where did she hide during the Vedic period? She resided within village culture on the periphery of the main centers of IndoAryan power. The ancient horse sacrifice, the asvamedha, would soon become the object of ridicule. Brhaspati, author of the Carvaka heresy, mocked the Vedic ritual in which the sacrificers wife takes the phallus of the horse (Sarvadarsanasamgraha 6-7). ... Some aspects of the ritual may have survived in later Hinduism, for medieval friezes and paintings depict ritual orgies or scenes in which a woman is mounted by a stallion. The turnabout also occurs; a man couples with a mare. But the satirical attitude behind these depictions is clear from the gestures of the spectators who cover their eyes or stare in disbelief (OFlaherty 1980: 216). The image of the lascivious, destructive mare appears even in the Rg Veda as the goddess of Dawn. Horse-headed, celestial musicians named Asvamukhas or Kimpurusas (Horseheads or Wrong Men) are depicted with human bodies and horses heads and the reverse, respectively; their women are erotically described (Kumarasambhava 1. 11). Horse-headed women appear on an erotic frieze at Aihole... Buddhist sculptures depict lascivious horse-headed women carrying off terrified men to a fate worse than death, ... A horsefaced Yaksini was in the habit of eating the men she captured until she fell in love with one, whom she then forced to marry her (Padakusalamanava Jataka 432). Another Buddhist Yaksini, a beautiful mare named Valavamukhi (Mare-mouth, the same term used for the underwater doomsday fire), had a white body and red feet; pursued by a king, she plunged into a pond, but he grasped her mane, subdued her, and rode her into battle (Mahavamsa 10. 53-62). Here the mare plays a more positive, controlled role - going back into the water instead of emerging from it like the mare at doomsday; she is pursued and captured, as Rhiannon is [ in Welsh epic] and the king, instead of being overpowered by her, channels her aggression into martial power. ... Indeed, Buddhist sculptures from the second century B.C. and the fifth century A.D. depict men happily mounted on creatures with the heads of women and the bodies of mares, as well as women mounted on creatures with the heads of men and the bodies of stallions. Thes e Buddhist oppositions may be seen as survivals of the two different models of ancient mare myths, one positive and one negative. The changing distribution of head and body may also demonstrate a shift in attitudes

71

resulting from emphasis or de-emphasis of the mare component, for the head of the creature carried its primary meaning in the ancient sacrifice and in later myths of horse-headed gods (Heesterman 1967); thus a creature with the head of a mare and the body of a woman is more mare than woman, while one with the reverse pattern is more woman than mare. The mare headed figure actively attacks and carries off men, while the mare bodied figure is pursued (running swiftly with her equine body) and is passively ridden by men. The mare-headed creature overpowers; the marebodied one is conquered. Significantly, the latter usually has not only the head but the top torso and therefore the breasts of a woman- the element that makes her safe, cow-like. The negative connotations of the mare are tied to her Vedic origins. An explicit link between the ancient horse sacrifice and the mare - fire may be found in the belief that the submarine fire devours the offerings of the horse sacrifice (Hooykaas 1964: 109 citing Kauravasrama 78); in this one may see a transition from the ancient ceremony of eating the mare to the Vedic ceremony of feeding the stallion and finally to the concept of the devouring mare.(OFlaherty 1980: 216-217). OFlaherty does not mean to say that the Goddess first appears in India during the Vedic Period. Rather, she first appears in her epiphany as a mare during the Vedic Period. The domesticated horse was not available to her for manifestation until brought into India by an Indo-European tribe, the Aryans in the late second millennium B.C.. The myths that tell of the origin of the submarine mare-fire are complex indeed and reveal ambiguity, tension and fluidity.23 The sage Aurva was born from his mothers left thigh (i.e. goddess) and burned with an unquenchable anger against the warriors because they had killed his father. He undertook an heroic ascetic practice in order to destroy the worlds and the people. The
23

The submarine fire is often called the fire of Avura or Urva, from the name of the sage whose anger was its source. The Vedic term urva can denote the ocean (RV 2. 13. 7; 2. 35. 3; 3. 30. 19), particularly the part of the ocean into which many rivers flow (Grassman 1955: 277), for the mare-fire arises at the confluence of a river and the ocean. Sayana glosses urva as the mare-fire in the ocean, a metaphor for the fire of lightening in a cloud (RV 3. 1. 16; 4, 50. 2: cf Sayana on RV 2.35. 3) or for unsated desire (Sayana on RV 3. 30. 19). It has also been interpreted as a wide, empty space (Grassman 1955: 277), a yoni (source) of water or of cattle (Oldenberg 1901), and a name of the divine life-source in which the sun and the dawn remain during the night (Luders 1951, 2: 238 on RV 5. 45. 2). All of these concepts are motifs in the cycle of mare myths (cf. OFlaherty, 1980).

72

gods begged him to be merciful and hold back his anger. Aurva replied that if his vow of anger came to nothing and he were forced to restrain it, the flames would burn and consume him. The gods asked him to release his great fire into the ocean (which was the people) and he could then fulfill his vow to burn the people yet not actually destroy the worlds or their inhabitants.24 Aurva did place his great fire in the ocean where it became the Doomsday Mare who belches forth fire even as she drinks the oceans waters (OFlaherty 1980: 226).25 The complexities here are formidable, for these are late myths of classical India and express a lack of resolution between competing mytho-poetics as well as the plasticity of this vital, hybrid culture. The fluid exchange between the Goddess and Indo-Aryan elements never allows for discrete choices or decisions between what to western eyes are obvious dualities. Indeed, as OFlaherty discusses at some length, male and female as discrete, opposing categories seem at first glance, to be absent from both myth and the psychological dynamics that lie behind the metaphors. Yet, upon a closer look such is not the case at all. The familiar categories in many realms are present, but unlike in the West where opposing forces crystallize into rigid dualities, opposing categories are treated as complementary facets of an underlying unity with each category partaking of the qualities of the other. Furthermore, reciprocal transformation of one into the other (in whole or in part) is quite possible if the underlying dynamics of the mytho-poetics are served. In simpler terms, maximizing the fluidity between states of being serves to maximize the possibilities for action and thought and thus set the stage for the greatest of deity and human potential available in any given circumstance. Beings easily flow between sexual categories, be they male, female or androgynous and the horse deity is at various times stallion or mare. What is significant is that the horse deity is primarily, although not exclusively, the mare beneath the sea and that serves to establish the vitality of the Goddess in this turbulence of complexity which also has a priority upon expressing its themes in sexual tantra. There is one version of this myth in which the submarine fire is both stallion and mare (i.e. androgynous) and its parentage is extremely complicated for the it is sired in a mare by a stallion sired (through unilateral male androgyny) by the child sired (through apparent female unilateral androgyny) by the wife of the murdered sage (OFlaherty 1980: 229). (Whew!)
24 25

Talk about the practical value of metaphor! MBh 13, 56. 4-6 and MBh 1. 169. 16-26; 1. 170. 1-21; 1. 171. 1-23.

73

In the Brahma Purana, the myth of Pippilada provides additional ornamentation upon this theme which allows us to plumb the complexities even further. Once again, a great yogin wishes to perform a great ascetic practice in order to generate a killing heat. Pippilada wishes to kill the murderers of his father Dahica as Aurva desired to kill the warriors who had killed his father. Nonetheless one of the majestic themes of these myths about sons orphaned by the murder of their fathers is that great anger, however justified, is usually blind and terribly lethal to the innocent. It is the obligation of the gods, if not Siva himself, to allow these great angers to be expressed in a manner that does not destroy innocent worlds or beings. a deadly tongue. The Doomsday Mare is once again recreated from the anger of a great ascetic. The myth relates that the awesome demon that bursts forth from Pippilada is fire-breathing mare for no reason except that he had been thinking of a mare at the time. This is disingenuous. The Doomsday Mare is fated to continually re-appear when great wrong has been done and uncontrollable anger with the potential for universal destruction is thereby created. The Doomsday Mare is the mythic mechanism to allow an expression of that great anger which is so contained that the worlds existence is not threatened. Justice is thereby served and the great hatred of the orphan is allowed expression. When the fire-breathing mare appeared, Pippilada told her to kill the gods but she began to attack him because he had been made by the gods. Cosmic anger is momentarily out of control when first allowed manifestation. Pippilada fled to Siva who told the Doomsday Mare not to attack anything within a league of that place. She then sent a great ball of fire to burn the universe. The gods were terrified and sought refuge with Pippilada who could not contain the Doomsday Mare. When she reached the confluence of the Ganges, the gods begged her to begin by devouring the

74

ocean. The fire asked How can I reach the ocean? and asked for a virtuous maiden to place her in a golden pot which would be placed in the ocean. Sarasvati at the request of the gods, was called forth. She asked them to join her with four other rivers (Ramuna, Ganges, Narmada, Tapati). The five rivers put the fire of the Doomsday Mare in the golden pot and threw it into the ocean. The fire began to slowly drink the ocean water and the universe is saved (cf. OFlaherty 1980: 231-232). 26 Presumably, Pippilada was satisfied. His great anger, as that of Aurva, was objectively valid at a high moral level but could not be the mechanism to destroy the universe. OFla hertys (1980) brilliant work illuminates the other forces at work here; divine androgyny and the many facets of passion. We are continually reminded of Siva as the primary deity and greatest of gods, the great yogin above all, whose actions create not only many powerful manifestations of himself (such as Krsna) but the fundamental structures of the universe. ... here the fire undergoes a change of gender: it is a mare as long as it is the possession of the sage Pippilada; but as soon as the chaste maiden and the four rivers appear on the scene , the fire is called a fire (masculine), is placed in the golden pot that is the female receptacle of the golden seed of Siva, and, like that seed, is submerged in the Ganges (SP Dharmasamhita 11. 28-35). Pippiladas connection with Siva is also stronger here than in the earlier version; he becomes able to see Sivas third eye and then produces the fiery mare with his own eye; the gods then beg Siva to protect them from the mare created by the fire of his eye (BP 110. 124. 136). Clearly the two eyes function as one, and Pippilada and Siva are one; ... In some texts, Siva engenders the mare-fire with the blaze of his third eye. In the battle between Siva and Kama, the fire of anger that shoots forth from Sivas third eye to burn Kama to ashes is expressly said to be the fire of doomsday; there is therefore but one ultimate resting place for it; the ocean. Whe n Siva burnt Kama to ashes with the fire from his third eye, the fire could never return to Siva; moreover, Brahma had paralyzed the fire in a vain attempt to shield Kama. Siva vanished, and the fire began to burn all the gods and all the universe. The gods sought refuge with Brahma, who made the fire of Sivas anger into a mare with ambrosial (saumya) flames coming out of her mouth. Then Brahma took the mare to the ocean and said, This mare is the fire of Sivas anger, which burnt Kama and now wishes to burn
26

BP 110. 85-210.

75

the whole universe. I gave it the form of a mare; now you must bear it until the final deluge. Then I will come here and lead it away from you; but until then it will devour your water, and you must make a great effort to bear it. The ocean agreed to this, and the fire entered and was held in check, burning quietly with its halo of flames (SP 2. 3. 20. 1-23; MBP 22-23; Kalika P 44.124-36.). The fire that Brahma makes into the mare is the fire of suppressed passion and anger; it is the destructive force of rigid chastity breaking out in lust and hatred, ... That the fire is composed of equal parts of lust and of anger directed against lust is clear from another variant of this episode: Siva reduced Kama to ashes, and the fire from his third eye soon yawned wide to burn the universe. But then, for the sake of the world, Siva dispersed that fire among mangoes and the moon and flowers and bees and cuckoos - thus he divided the fire of Kama. That fire that had pierced Siva inside and outside, kindling passion and affection, serves to arouse people who are separated, reaching the hearts of lovers, and it blazes night and day, hard to cure (Matsya P 154. 250-55). This is the fire that Siva places in the ocean in the form of a mare, the fire of thwarted passion. The interaction of the two supposedly opposed fires-the fire of desire and the fire of asceticism-is clear; ... Siva' s connection with the mare makes good sense on another level of the myth as well. For the mare is born either when a woman violates her vow of chastity and becomes pregnant in an abnormal manner (the myths of Subhadra) or when a yogi (Siva, the greatest of all yogis) violates his vow of chastity, a violation that ultimately results in an abnormal pregnancy and the birth of Skanda. In the first cycle, the submarine mare is a symbol of womans thwarted power; it is the image of resentful, unwilling chastity imposed on the female by terrified males; it is passion denied and suppressed, divinity denied and devalued. In the second cycle, the mare is a symbol of yogic power thwarted and rebounding against itself. The yogi is a positive image of powers held in and controlled ... in contrast with the woman who holds back her milk, the evil Goddess. The myth of the mare

76

implies that a man may voluntarily hold in his powers (though this may have destructive results when these powers break out against his will) but that a woman will do so only under compulsion. Yogi nis, who undergo voluntary self-control, are quickly assimilated to the herd of mares. Servants of the ambivalent Kali, they are very dangerous and highly erotic females ... and, like other forms of the mare are regarded as dangerous because they act like men; they are in many ways androgynous. Inde ed, that is one of the basic reasons for the rejection of the mare and everything she symbolizes: a female androgyne is unacceptable. By straddling polarized categories of female (equated with maternal) and divine/erotic (equated with male)- categories that were once integrated in the figure of the Indo-European mare goddess - the Hindu mare poses a taxonomic problem similar to that posed by the figure of the good demon (OFlaherty 1973: 96-106). Figures that transcend categories or mediate between them are usually sacred in either a positive or a negative way; ... But, if this transcending, mediating character is taken in a positive sense, one experiences the coincidentia oppositorum, the deity who is wonderful because she shatters all categories; that is the theology of the IndoEuropean mare. ... The Indo-European mare was dangerous in her erotic powers precisely because they were untamed; as raw forces of a Goddess, they were overpowering. For this reason, however, the mare was able to bless and make fruitful, not merely because she was both mother and whore, both cow and mare, but because her powers flowed freely down to her mortal consort. The underwater mare, by contrast, is a symbol of angry thwarted sexuality, of power blocked by authority. [The Goddess as thwarted by Indo-European mytho-poetics which are dominated by a supreme deity who is a thundersky god and social hierarchy which is male dominated, both in heaven and on earth.] In the Hindu view, a womans suppressed or repulsed eroticism is as volatile and explosive as nitroglycerin. We say that Hell hath no fury to match this, and the Hindus say this is the Fury that breaks forth out of the Hell at doomsday (OFlaherty 1980: 232-237). The complexity that is apparent is the result of the confrontation of Indo-

77

European culture, structured by the mytho-poetics of the male sky-thunder god and his retinue of aggressive, war promoting deities, and the earlier religion of the earth oriented Great Goddess. The distinct levels in the myth of the mare present a tantalizing appearance of a historical chronology. At first there is one mare goddess, an awesome and dangerous creature ... who was sought by the king, captured, and wooed. She is a source of power who invigorates the aging king by her annual ritual copulation with him; she dies in a sacrifice of her immortality to his mortality. At this period, the mare (and the image of woman) is still whole, integrated; the proto-IndoEuropean goddess of dawn is also simultaneously maternal, sororal, and erotic (Friedrich 1979: 46). In Semitic and Babylonian myths she is manifest in the figures of Inanna and Ishtar, both of whom were said to copulate with horses (Friedrich 1979: 14). In Greece she survives in Leda, herself a bird goddess as well as the victim of a bird god, for the Dioscuri are said to have hatched from an egg laid by Leda after she was raped by Zeus (Rose 1959: 248). Aphrodite too, is associated with the goose or swan or winged horse (Friedrich 1979: 11,33,50) and is both a danger and benefactress to her mortal lovers: [Usu ally] a mortal man who has sexual relations with a goddess is punished by death or castration ... Aphrodite, on the other hand, is the potential lover of any god or hero and, like her cognate, Dawn, is sometimes seized by a desperate longing ... By seducing mortals and providing a transcendent image of such seduction she mediates between the human and the divine in a way that gives man exceptional intimations of the immortality he can never attain (Friedrich 1979: 136). This is the integrated part of the dangerous mare. But under the influence of increasing Indo-European androcentrism (or, to put it more bluntly, male chauvinism) the mare goddess was split into two parts, the good mother and the evil mother. Here we begin to have a proliferation of women in the rituals and the myths; now it is feared the mare will take away her lovers powers, and so the auspicious (albeit dangerous) white mare must be given a malevolent evil black alter ego who can be destroyed because she threatens to kill or mutilate the king (OFlaherty 1980: 212). A compromise between pre and post Indo-European structures is reached when the goddess mates with the mortal king and thus empowers him to rule and confers semi-divine status upon him. However this sets in motion an evolutionary trajectory that will result in that classic image from the

78

European Middle Ages: the helpless females pining away in forlorn hope that her hero (the swan/horse god) will appear on his white horse to rescue her (cf. OFlaherty 1980 and others). The heroines and goddesses of Greek mythology show the intermediate forms of this relationship as they are either taken unawares or raped by Zeus.

Denial and Acceptance

here is a circular pattern at work in the myths of the mare: the goddess is feared because she is fierce, because she is denied worship, because she is feared. ... Thus again, we see a circular pattern: the mare is controlled because she is feared because she is sexually aggressive because she is controlled. ... The ritual produces a special and controlled, highly structured context in which it is relatively safe to have sexual contact with the mare, to drain her fluids or even to be devoured by her. ... The devouring mare/whore gives back to the mature male worshiper who confronts her sexually the powers that the cow/mother took from him when he confronted her as a child - or as a nonworshiper. By reintegrating the split goddess, the Tantric ritual transforms the castrating erotic mother, who holds back milk and saps virile fluids, into the invigorating goddess, who gives life by giving and taking fluid and who gives birth not as a cow, with milk, but as a mare, with female seed. The mare in her degraded Hindu form made her consort grow old; the Indo-European mare made the king grow young again, and so does the Tantric goddess... If one seeks the Goddess, her presence may be a source of power or a loss of power; she may bless or damn, feed or devour. Yet one must seek her, for the alternative is brutally clear: if she is ignored, she will certainly wreak havoc ...

79

Both Siva and Dionysus are phallic gods who appear in female dress or androgynous form; both handle snakes; and both indulge in mad dances with wild uncontrollable women... When Daksa denies Sivas right to worship, Siva beheads Daksa and castrates Kratu, Daksas alter ego. Like Dionysus, Siva employs as the instrument of his wrath an orgiastic woman intimately related to his enemy: Sati is Daksas daughter, as Agave is Pentheus mother. Even the early, pre-Sakta texts make it absolutely clear that Siva himself had no desire to make trouble, that Sati drove him to it by insisting that she was dishonored when her father dishonored her husband, Siva. When Sati commits suicide, Siva has no choice but to destroy Daksa. Moreover, immediately after the holocaust of Daksas sacrifice, Satis body is dismembered (though not eaten), and her sexual organ becomes a shrine. In other words, she becomes a Tantric goddess, a mare. The lesson taught by Dionysus to Pentheus is taught to Daksa by Siva; deny the orgiastic deity and the deity will dismember you. The first corollary is also relevant; deny your sexual nature and the deity will kill you. Daksas hatred of Siva is based in part on his unnatural attachment to his daughter; in this he joins the large company of Greek fathers of mares, fathers who murdered their daughters suitors. ... When the Goddess is worshipped and accepted in her full ambivalence, the worshiper asks her to be present with him always. But if part of her is pestilence and mindless destruction, why should one want her near? Why not merely placate her and ask her to go away? The central feature of the good mother incorporated by every major goddess in the Hindu pantheon and dramatized either in her origins or in her function, is not her capacity to feed but to provide life-giving reassurance through her pervasive presence (Kakar 1978: 84). If the essential function of the goddess is to be there for you, you want her there even when she is in her shadow aspect. The only unbearable harm that the Goddess can inflict on the worshiper is to abandon him, as the immortal mare so often does, fleeing from her mortal consort, abandoning her child. This, not the mutilation, is the source of devastating grief, the terrible longing for the vanished divinity, the cruel pangs of viraha. The only evil mother is the one who is not there. ... To allow the goddess to devour one takes courage; the goddess remains ambivalent, and being devoured is a risky form of worship. Even when she is gracious, to receive her grace is a terrifying and painful form of religious

80

passion. But one has little choice: if that is the way that god is, what can one do? If she is denied, she is certain to be destructive; if she is worshipped, she may or may not be destructive, and the worshiper may become immortal. (OFlaherty 1980: 273-280).

Menage a Trois and the Nature of Love

ne of the great themes of Hinduism is the relationship between (Vishnu) Krsna and both Radha and Sri Lakshmi. The metaphors can be read on several levels. Sri Lakshmi is the ever-devoted wife of Vishnu whose expression of wifely devotion is near perfect. She is forever obsequious and is often at his left side, the position of weakness and inferiority. She occasionally is depicted as forgiving and understanding Krsnas affair with Radha while Radha is, as expected, jealous. In contrast to Radha who is portrayed wearing red garments and red makeup, Sri Lakshmi is often yellow or golden with a dark complexion; occasional red indicates her life giving nature. Yet this relationship is not as chauvinistic as it might appear. The polarity of right and left, as symbolic of a married couple, expresses totality and completeness. In other words, a man and a woman are incomplete without each other. ... Thus the body language of the icon enables one to understand the result of the taming and domestication [by Indo-European Aryans beginning c. 1,300 B.C.] of a once unpredictable and uncontrollable fertility goddess ... Yet their conjugal relationship maintains an element of fondness and tenderness, and their love contains a quality of absolute purity and perfection. Their relationship embodies prema (ideal love, which rises above mere carnal desire (kama) (Olsen 1989: 138). Olsen (1989: 141) believes that in later Hinduism, Sri Lakshmi has become a static archetypal model of the devoted wife.

81

of Sri Lakshmi for her spouse because Radha's love is not circumscribed by the obedience, discipline, and respect evident in the love of a wife for her husband. In a sense, the love making of the two deities results in the cooling of Radha, rendering her more pallid and less dangerous. The cooling of the goddess is an important motif in southern India. If the goddess is not made cool, she represents a danger to human beings. This is especially true of independent, unmarried goddesses who cannot release the sexual heat accumulated through sexual abstinence and must be cooled by ritual means (Olsen 1989: 140). The love of Radha and Krsna commences in the spring, a time of birth and renewal (Olsen 1989: 138). She serves as a model for the souls odyssey in search of its beloved god (Olsen 1989: 141). Radha, whose differentiation as an autonomous deity occurred later than that of Sri Lakshmi as discussed above, appears to have several attributes that overlap with Lakshmi. The many Indian goddesses show overlapping attributes which is another indication that they are manifestations of a single Great Goddess. Over all the relationship between Krsna (Vishnu), Radha and Sri Lakshmi is a complex synthesis in which polarities are finely balanced in a cosmic dance of great tension and passion. The resulting synthesis illustrates a complex balance between a myriad of sexual attributes of both male and female. As an historical metaphor, this relationship expresses the synthesis that occurred in India between the mytho-poetics of the Indo-European Aryans with their male dominated cosmology of the sky god and that of the earlier, indigenous population whose first ritual commitment was to the Great Goddess. But there is increasing evidence of continuity, including linguistic continuity, between the Indus Valley civilization and the Dravidian Culture of the South. The emergence of goddesses as major figures in later Hinduism reflects an ongoing interaction between Aryan and non-Aryan elements (Brubaker 1989: 149). It is important to realize that on the level of myth and ritual in India, the Indo-Europeans did not dominate; they integrated. The mystery that remains is the origin of the extreme chauvinism of everyday Indian society and the resulting inferior status accorded women. OFlahertys (1980) psychological explanations which describe the Indian males fear of, and ambivalence towards, women does not suffice as a

82

mechanism to explain the positioning of women in traditional Indian societies. It is a detailed narrative of symptoms in which the machinery underlying the process remains hidden. supernatural deities could be, and it also ultimately transcendent as the two lovers become one being. The nature of their relationship is not meant to provide a model for the human sphere, for no two humans could assume nearly all roles imaginable within a single relationship. We are forever limited by our real and important needs, desires and historical persona. The gods, who are possessed of extraordinary powers and are free of historicity, may do whatever they wish, whenever they wish, without the consequences which descend upon human heads. This is not to say their relationships are without consequence; far from it as the written record of myth demonstrates. Rather, it is to say that the consequences which accrue to the gods are of a different nature than those that attend humankind experiences. The extreme complexity of the relationship between Krsna and Radha is the key, for it illustrates divine play and reflects the spontaneous generation of complexity that is the hallmark of the big brain we all possess. The extraordinary elaboration of cultural detail on all planes from the merely pragmatic to the most elevated and obtuse myth can hardly be explained by any process of cultural selection for the most adaptive behaviors, nor by the importance of writing a mythological history that is essential to a ruling political elite. It can be explained by the endless, spontaneous generation of complex behavior for no reason or adaptive purpose, that activity being automatic and intrinsic to the activity of a brain possessing the most complex neural circuitry evolution has yet to design. The big brain cannot help but indulge itself endlessly in creative play! Evolution need not be restricted to a process of natural selection and survival via the adaptionist testing of characteristics essential to primary survival. I believe that mathematical models of Chaos, which are extremely sensitive to initial conditions but proceed to generate seemingly endless variations of single theme within broad boundaries, are applicable here. The broad boundaries may well be genetically determined, but they are so wide as to allow for an enormous range of creative play that results in

83

encyclopedic detail as the elaboration is articulated. The genius of the Indian mytho-poetics of Krsna, Vishnu, Radha and Sri Lakshmi has captured this reality in the most wonderful poetic and metaphorical terms long before western science began to perceive these features of the 'world.27

Rahad, Smallpox, Chaos and Transcendence

kno wn of no instance in which a Goddess of Disease has been documented in Old European culture but she is adored throughout India, strange as that may seem at first glance. Understand at the outset that the Goddess of Disease may cause or cure illness. The smallpox goddess in northern India is Sitala Devi who has a white body, is seated on an ass with a broomstick in one hand a vessel of water in the other, is also nude, three eyed and bedecked with gold ornaments and pearls (Battacharyya 1977: 53-54). South ern India is Dravidian (pre-Aryan) country that a family of languages that predate Sanskrit and are not Indo-European is still alive, albeit greatly reduced in native speakers. In this region, in contrast to the North, village goddesses are common and must be suspected to be survivors and descendants, albeit altered, from the Neolithic. These village goddesses are independent and powerful, following what I shall term the Radha Model in contrast to that of Sri Lakshmi. Brubaker (1989:149) senses their manifestation to be Chaotic in the scientific sense used above. In speaking about the relationship between the goddess and the extraordinarily, self contained villages, he says I want to concentrate on South India, where the patterns seem most fully developed and, despite endless variation in detail, most consistent (Brubaker 1989: 149).

27See

also Zimmer (1946: 197-199).

84

The small pox goddess who is worshipped throughout Tamil country is Mariamma or Mari. Her story is worth quoting because of what it reveals about how the Goddess dealt with her Aryan invaders. One of the many stories current about her is that she was the wife a sage called Piruhu. One day, during the absence of the sage, three gods visited her to see whether she was as beautiful and virtuous as reported. Having understood their bad intention, the sages wife, whose name was Nagavali, transformed them into little children. The gods took offense and curse her, so that her beauty faded away and her face became dotted with marks like those of smallpox. According to a second story, Mariamma was the wife the Tamil poet Tiruvalluvar and she cursed her own smallpox by fanning herself with Margosa leaves. When she recovered, the people worshipped her as the goddess of smallpox and hung Margosa leaves over their doors to keep the smallpox away. In the third story Mariamma is identical with Renuka, the mother of Parasurama. Parasuramas father, who was suspicious of the chastity of his sons wife, ordered him to cut off the head of his mother. While doing so he also cut off the head of a Parish woman, who, out of sympathy, had taken the dead woman in his arms. Parasuramas father promised him a reward in return for his obedience: so Parasurama wanted his mother restored to life. The father approved of this and gave him some water in a vessel and a cane and asked him to put his mothers head on her body, then to tap the body with the cane and to sprinkle water on it. In his eagerness Parasurama put his mothers head on the body of the Pariah woman and vice versa, and restored them both to life. The woman with the Brahmana head and Pariah body was afterwards worshipped as Mariamma, and the woman with the Pariah head as the goddess Yellamma (Battacharyya 1977: 55-56). The story ... probably describes the fusion of the Aryan and Dravidian cults in the days when the Aryans first found their way into South India. A Pariah body with a Brahmana head is an apt description of the cult of Siva; while a Pariah head with a Brahmana body might well describe some of the cults of the ancient Dravidian deities, modified by Brahmana ideas and influences (Whitehead 1916: 117). These village goddesses are very specialized and each is linked to a specific epidemic disease. There are goddesses of smallpox, plague and cholera for example. That very specificity demands an explanation and the nature of the

85

relationship reveals profound insights about the relationship between humankind and the gods, particularly the reciprocity involved. A key event to scrutinize is the festival that occurs when smallpox strikes a village. The villages outer boundaries, and the limit of the village goddesses territory and power, are defined by the fields that are cultivated. Beyond lies hostile territory and fierce demons. An epidemic appears suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere and the village is overwhelmed by the capriciousness of the experience and the very real danger; smallpox is often fatal. Clearly demons are on the rampage and the goddess must protect her followers. Perhaps, neglect of ritual is the cause and the goddess is angry? Similar themes echo in Christianity. This outline and superficial interpretation is the usual beginning point to be found in virtually every analysis of ritual and myth in nonwestern cultures. However, what follows reveals a mythic mindset long extinguished in the West and insights that are not the usual fare in such exploratory menus. The Hindu genius at perceiving the contradictory and multiple dynamics that govern both this world and other planes of deities and supernatural beings does not allow for simplistic explanations. Guilt, in the sense we understand it, does not have a major role to play. Furthermore, the deities are not perceived as perfected in any sense. A third and distinctly different image virtually equates the disease with the goddess or sees it as her direct manifestation. This view is expressed especially in individual cases of, say, smallpox, which are often seen as instances of possession by the goddess. Here the disease, far from expressing wrath or punishment, is an act of special grace, however harrowing the experience may be. Around the patients bed, acts of worship are performed and a reverent atmosphere maintained. The patients fever, a prominent sign of possession, also shows that the goddess, too, is in an intensely heated condition; and both may be soothed by cooling foods and ritualized acts of fanning and bathing, offered either to the patient or to an image of the goddess (Brubaker 1989: 153). The goddess defends her people against the disease, inflicts it upon them, manifests herself in its symptoms and is herself its victim. Obviously, she is deeply involved with it - so deeply that it takes at least four descriptions, partly conflicting, partly overlapping to characterize the relationship (Brubaker 1989: 154). Brubaker believes the multiple and equally valid descriptions that apply to this situation exist to give each villager the maximum number of options with which to understand their experience. I

86

believe he has missed the point; the psychic reality of the villagers is not to exercise freedom of choice from a menu of options as a Western context would demand. Each of these descriptions refers to one layer of a multidimensional whole. Language does not allow us to access this unity as a singular wholeness; we are forced to describe layers or dimensions one by one in a linear sequence. The entire experience exists on many planes simultaneously and is experienced multidimensionally; the entirety is forever beyond any linguistics. When Brubaker leaves the individual level, he does understand. Conversely, the typical South Indian village goddess, though she presents many faces, is one goddess. Profoundly paradoxical she is - for so is reality - or at least the human experience thereof. But a chaos of contradictions she is not. The multifarious symbols surrounding her are continually intersecting and weaving a web of connected meanings (Brubaker 1989; 156). The final event in the festival, which is the villages response at the collective level, is the sacrificial beheading of a buffalo. Potters, barbers or washermen commonly perform such tasks as carrying the image in procession, sacrificing sheep or goats, strewing blood-soaked rice to demons, acting as presiding priests. Some of these roles may also fall to Untouchables who handle carcasses, but their primary task is the traditional climactic act of the festival, the sacrifice of the water buffalo. Thus, those most immersed in the defiling actions of a bloody and tumultuous festival are the very ones who most serve purity and order in ordinary times. This is a paradox rooted in the paradoxical nature of the goddess herself (Brubaker 1989: 151). Durin g the festival, the village lives out the myth of the goddess defeating and repelling the disease caused by male demons. Brubaker (1989: 154) compares the experience undergone by the village to rape; certainly the demons are male and driven by lust and aggression. They are transformed into the sacrificial buffalo. In general, demons who attack the goddess in Hindu myths are transformed into sacrificial agents, or other subordinates with whom she may have a relationship that involves violent and erotic sexual encounters that are decidedly ambiguous. In some villages, an untouchable is elected to symbolize this role of the transformed demon. The overall atmosphere of the rituals and final festival that define the villages

87

relationship with the goddess during the epidemic is a turbulent torrent of sexuality and violence, of divine and demonic, of village and wilderness, of attraction and repulsion, of agony and ecstasy, of grace and fury, of pollution and purgation - all this contrasted sharply with the normal everyday state of affairs (Brubaker 1989: 155). To say that life is a sacrifice to life is to express a theme that pervades Indian tradition. But it takes two basic forms as visions of the sacred tend to do. On one side belong human actions of self-denial and self-control in pursuit of virtue, social harmony, and heavenly reward; rituals in which something is sacrificed for a greater good, whether it be material gain or the maintenance of cosmic order; and the deities who receive these offerings, provide these rewards, and sanction these values ... On the other side are those unseasonable irruptions of the sacred that can smash proprieties, overturn ideals, and occasion or force sacrifices of quite different kinds, ranging from shattering experiences of divine power to acts of spontaneous and ecstatic self-abandonment. Our village goddesses obviously belong to this side of the sacrificial theme along with such fierce deities as the great goddess Kali ... Non e of their story can be heard if, demanding that the sacred be exclusively orderly and benevolent, one can see in them nothing more than disorder and malevolence. But the blood thirsty Kali offers an ultimately liberating knowledge; that the bright and dark sides of the sacred are but the human bifurcation of the one holy reality. And on a humbler plane, a village goddess confronts her people with the same transcendent unity. Thus a wise observer has written of smallpox outbreaks in the domain of the Bengali goddess Sitala that they are to be understood as an oscillation from the implicit to the epidemic form of grace... (Dimock 1982). Final ly, why should the deities who most strikingly exemplify this union of what man has put asunder be female? The answer lies in the fact that traditional images of women are polarized in a way that parallels the polarization of the sacred. And in India, this familiar split is found in extreme form.

88

Thus there are two kind of Indian goddesses [as discussed above with Sri Lakshmi and Radha]. One kind is married, subordinate to her husband, under proper control, and so, a paragon of virtue. The other is unmarried, dominates any relationship with a male, and is therefore uncontrolled and dangerous. ... Whil e far from wholly sinister, an uncontrolled goddess is dangerous. And part of her threat, part of her power, derives from a male fear of the female. But the greater part derives from a parallel human fear of the depths of the sacred. For perhaps the greatest danger she embodies is the possibility that human beings, knowing little, wishing to know less, and tending to forget much," will find comfortable categories to which they cling swept away in a flood of divine transcendence" (Brubaker 1989: 158-159, ).

Tara: Goddess of Tibet

n 192 8, Alice Getty tabulated what was then known about the gods and goddesses of northern Buddhism (Getty 1928). This work remains an important reference because of its comprehensiveness: the information about lesser known deities is very difficult to obtain. Let us briefly introduce the major Tantric goddesses of Tibet.

89

lotus and she usually has the third eye of fore-knowledge. In Mongolia, she often has eyes on the palms of her hands and on the soles of her feet. The four armed Janguli-Tara is a Tantric form of White Tara who is the Dispeller of Poison - she cures snake bites. With her normal hands she plays a lute. With her second right hand she makes the mudra (hand gesture) of protection and with her second left hand she holds a snake. Her skin, clothes and snake are often painted white as befits a White Tara (Getty 1928: 122). misidentification by the Tibetans themselves. Her Tibetan name is do-ngon which means original Tara but Getty (1928: 123) believes that ignorant lamas confused ngon with sngo which means green or blue and the attribution stuck. She is the Sakti of Avalokitesvara Divine Energy and her symbol is a closed blue lotus.

Green Tara (Syam

90

1928: 124-128). assisting Green Tara while holding a chopper and skull cup. When independent she can have up to 24 arms, and is usually standing on corpses. She has the third eye, a horrible laugh, big teeth and a protruding forked tongue. She is dwarfed, very overweight, has blue skin and wears a tiger skin and a garland of heads (Getty 1928: 125-126). Ekajata is not a demon goddess from Hell as our Judaeo-Christian reflexes would have it but a fierce protective deity. worshipped by unhappy lovers. Red is the color of love in India and thus is the color of her skin, clothing, lotus and crown. Her expression is ferocious and she is often depicted dancing upon the demon Rahu. She wears a garland of heads and a skull may be found in her crown. Two of her four arms draw the bow and arrow (Getty 1928: 126-127). Saras vati is the Goddess of Music and Poetry and the deification of the river that carries her name. She is believed to confer wisdom and learning upon her worshippers. She is usually seated with her hands often holding a lute
28Amitabha (Boundless Light) is the ruler of the Western Paradise; the Pure Land state of consciousness. He symbolizes mercy and wisdom. Pure Land school of Mahayana Buddhism became very prominent in China and Japan. Amitabha is unknown in early Buddhism and represents a new development. Salvation is now possible, not only through an endless series of rebirths but also due to divine intervention from a buddha. Uttering the name of Amitabha at the moment of death will ensure rebirth in the Western Paradise.

91

(India) or a thunderbolt (Tibet). Her color is white and she is the Sakti of Manjusri29 (Getty 1928: 127). The other important goddess of India and Tibet we must highlight is Prajnaparamita, the Goddess of Transcendent Wisdom. Her color is yellow and her symbols are a book and rosary. She is the Divine Word incarnate and as such in Tantric doctrine is called the Mother of All Buddhas. The book she holds is the Prajnaparamita sutra, which was worshipped in India as early as the 5th century A.D. because it was believed to have been given by the Buddha himself to the nagas to guard until mankind was enlightened enough to understand its Transcendent Wisdom. In one sense, the Goddess Prajnaparamita is the deification of this sutra. In her Tantric form she has eleven heads and eleven pairs of arms, a clear representation of her status and the power of her knowledge (Getty 1928: 132-133).

The Arrival and Settlement of Tara in Tibet

efore the successful implantation of Buddhism into Tibet by the first of the Dharma Kings in the seventh century A.D., tribal shamanism held sway. An origin myth of the Tibetan people from this era states that a devil and an ogress held sway, and the country was called the Land of the Two Divine Ogres. As a result, flesh-eating creatures were born (Snellgrove 1957: 129). These demonic offspring were given the crafts and attributes of civilization by successive generations of mythical, culture hero kings and as a result became the Tibetan people. This scheme for the appearance of the people is a well known global archetype for tribal societies upon which there are many variations. An alternative version of the myth gives the origin of the Tibetans as descendants of the offspring of a rock ogress and a monkey. This account became the official Buddhist version and the monkey underwent mythic transformation, first to become a disciple of
29Manjusri (He Who is Noble and Gentle) appears very early in Buddhism and is the Bodhisattva of Wisdom. Manjusri represents enlightenment as experienced in an intellectual and scholarly life. In Tibet, great scholars are considered incarnations of Manjusri.

92

Avalokitesvara and then a reincarnation of this extraordinary teacher. The ogress, fierce, lustful and lascivious, was seen as in incarnation of Tara by the time Buddhism became established in Tibet. By the time of the Red Annals in 1346 A.D. (Roerich 1949, 1953: vi), revisionist mythological history could easily be written. Then, from the monkey Bodhisattva, an incarnation of Avalokitesvara and the rock ogress, an incarnation of Tara, there sprang the Tibetan people (Snellgrove 1957: 122ff). By the 14th century, Tibetans were determined to relate their origins to Tara at whatever sacrifice necessary to historical evidence, a circumstance that illustrates the popularity and power of her cult. Beyer (1973: 4) believes the reasoning behind the monkeys identification with Avalokitesvara goes as follows. The ogress was threatening to eat up thousands of sentient beings every day unless the monkey agreed to satisfy her lust. His willingness to have intercourse with her, therefore, might be considered a classic act of universal compassion. At the level of folk belief, the monkey is believed to have given the Tibetan people the attributes of hard working, kindness and high religiosity. The ogress gave the Tibetans quick tempers, passion, a tendency to jealousy and fondness of meat in their diet (Wangyal 1973: 59). Samuel (1993: 222) sees this origin myth as a unification of polarities into a cosmic wholeness because it implies that Tibet needs both the wild and the tame, both the celibate, restrained monk and the wild, potentially destructive energy. He also believes this myth represents a formal recognition of shamanic elements and their incorporation without loss of identity into Tibetan Buddhism. The identification of the ogress with Tara, however, Beyer considers gratuitous, a late decision made by the theocratic hierarchy of society that had elevated her to the highest of deities and therefore wished to elevate their own mythical origins by association. Such is the timeless and classic process by which mythological history is written. It is neither silly nor inaccurate, although mythological history is certainly not concerned with the facts as westerners have come to define them. Rather, such history establishes for all time, the mytho-poetics of greatest power and importance and sets the context for the psycho-dynamics of an entire people via an all embracing multidimensional history. That is no small task, beside which the recitation of calendrical dates for the passing of the events in secular time is but window dressing. Nonetheless, it behooves us to sort out the historical origin

93

and subsequent evolutionary development of the goddess Tara in Tibet, if only to satisfy our Western state of mind about the facts that can be known with some certainty and set the mythological history with the usual historical context. The Yarlung kings unified Tibet in the seventh century A.D., creating the first nation state from a collection of warring tribal fiefdoms. The greatest of these kings was Srong brtsan sgam-po who reigned from 628 to 649 A.D. During his rule, Buddhism entered Tibet on a massive scale and the Tibetan script was developed so that a written language would be possible. Supreme Yoga Tantra was introduced and Buddhism was made the state religion in 632 A.D. (Snellgrove, 1987, Vol.2). His wife was the Nepalese princess Tritsun whom tradition credits with introducing Tara to Tibet. She brought with her a sandalwood statue of Tara which she placed in a temple that she had especially constructed for that purpose. This Temple of Miraculous Manifestation was still standing at the time of the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1958 and within it was a sandalwood statue of Tara, although whether or not it was the original statue is unclear. Srong brtsan sgam-pos second wife was Chinese, the princess Wen-cheng kung-chu, who brought an image of the twelve year old Sakyamuni (later to be called the Buddha) which according to the historical chronicles of the court received most of the religious veneration. Tara's image was to the king most likely a piece of political magic, an alien god to be treated with respect for its sacred (and diplomatic) potency, to be put in a special shrine where it could do little harm to the native gods and might perhaps do some good, especially for an imperial policy in the process of consolidating centralized government. The image represented both religious and political forces to be dealt with but not necessarily to be worshipped (Beyer 1973: 6). Tara s origin must, of course, lie in India for she would be one of the multiple manifestations of the Great Goddess on the subcontinent. Dating her origins is difficult. There is a Javanese inscription of 778 A.D. which implies an earlier origin in India (Scheltema, 1912: 181; Shastri 1925: 8, 12). There is one text which supports this supposition and gives us a reference to Tara contemporary with Tritsun in the seventh century. The great Indian writer Subandhu, who was active at this time, indulged himself in an elaborate pun about Tara in his famous romance Vasavadatta. Subandhu described himself as a storehouse of cleverness in the composition of works in which there is a pun in every syllable (Subandhu 1913: 146). Representations of the

94

Buddhist Tara are found in the caves of the Western Deccan which can be dated to the sixth century A.D. and her cult remained strong in India until at least the 11th century A.D. (Battacharyya 1977: 183 - 185). Tara occurs in the Manjusrimulakalpa (Tantric Buddhism) where she is elevated to the position of highest deity and she is described as Vidyarajni, she is full of compassion. From the eighth century onwards, Tara is raised to the mothership of all Buddhas. Her various forms include Bhrkuti, Locana (earth goddess), Mamaki (water goddess), Sveta, Pandaravasini (fire goddess) Sutara, etc. while Tara herself represents air. Creation itself is due to the Sakti or female energy of the Adi Buddha and thus the Goddess is recognized as the ultimate source of everything in the universe (Battacharyya 1977: 210). In this long prose poem, we find the following play on words: bhiksuki va taranuragaraktambaradharini bhagavati samdhya samadrsyata The Lady Twilight was seen, devoted to the stars and clad in red sky, as a Buddhist nun [who is devoted to Tara and is clad in red garments]. The pun centers on the ambivalence of two words: tara as either star or Tara, and ambara as either sky or garment. ... it will be sufficient, to demonstrate that the present instance is indeed a pun on Taras name, if we give a few more examples from the whole series of puns Subandhu uses, as he did this one, to describe the Lady Twilight: varayosid iva pallavanurakta reddened with blossoms, as a courtesan [is devoted to her lover], kamini va kaleyatamrapayodhara having vermilion clouds, as a beautiful woman [has breasts reddened with saffron]. Or again, to show the play on proper names: vanarasenam iva sugrivangadopasobhita adorned with a beautiful throat and bracelets, as the army of monkeys [was adorned with Sugriva and Angada]. ... If we do accept that Subhandu was making a pun on the name of a Buddhist goddess before what was a primarily Hindu audience in his courtly circle - and playing with the name as casually as he played with those of the Brahmanic legends - it seems reasonable to suppose that this goddess was fairly well known by his time, else the pun would be without effect. And if we concede that he might have been showing off an esoteric knowledge of Buddhism, at least he himself was acquainted with some sort of cult of Tara, a goddess whose popular devotion extended beyond the bounds of a minor legend (Beyer 1973: 7,8). The Chinese pilgrim Hsuan Tsang undertook an extraordinary journey for his time and traveled to India between 633 and 645 A.D. Concerned above all

95

with Buddhism and diligent to his dairy, his journey produced an historical document of major importance (Grousset 1971: ch.6).30 He reports on the existence of two different images of a to-lo Bodhisattva, sex unspecified. One of these images, located about twenty miles west of Nalanda, accompanied Avalokitesvara to form a triad with a central Buddha image [Hsuan-tsang 1957: Vol.2I, 11a-b; Beal 1957: 335; Watters 1961: 105]; the other image, in its own temple nearer to Nalanda, he reports as beings a popular object of worship [Hsuan-tsang 1957: IX, 19b-20a; Beal 1957: 388; Watters 1961: 171]. There is every reason to believe that this to-lo is our Tara, and his remarking upon its popularity reinforces the probable validity of the Tibetan tradition (Beyer 1973: 8). Nalanda was the premier university of Buddhist studies at this time in India. Finall y, a classic Tibetan geography text reports one other image of the Goddess from the seventh century. Then to the east is the region called Markam where there are some Sacha and Gelug monasteries, and a temple and image of Tara erected at the time of the Righteous King Songtsen gampo. The people of the region are quite fierce, and they speak something like the Minyang language (Wylie 1962: 41,101).31 Expa nding our view and transcending the narrative details of the historical record, whatever the politics of the time, it is clear the Great Goddess as Giver of Sovereignty had made her appearance in Tibet in two manifestations: as the Nepalese princess Tritsun and also as the Chinese wife of King Songtsen gampo, Wen-cheng kung-chu. By the time of the Red Annals in the mid fourteenth century, and the encyclopedic scholar Bu-ston
30 A handful of Chinese Buddhist pilgrims journeyed into Central Asia, India and Ceylon intent upon observing Buddhist practice in those countries that had brought the religion to China. India, the birthplace of Sakyamuni, held special significance and was often their foremost priority. The journals of these travellers, although still poorly known in the West, are historical documents of great importance for they give us first hand observations of Buddhist architecture and ritual during the height of its popularity in Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. See Legge, J. 1965. A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (New York: Dover); Grousset, R. (J.A. Underwood, trans.) 1971. In the Footsteps of the Buddha.(New York: Grossman); and Yang, Hsuan-chih (Yi-tung Wang trans.) 1984. A Record of Buddhist Monasteries in Lo-Yang. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press). 31Markam is not an imaginary fantasy land. Markam is an ancient province of eastern Tibet in the Dza (Mekong) River basin which was ruled by an official appointed by the central government in Lhasa. It was sparsely populated (Samuel 1993: 76).

96

who lived from 1290-1364 A.D. (Snellgrove 1968: 170), the Chinese wife is identified as an incarnation of Green Tara or Tara without qualification while the Nepalese wife is considered an incarnation of the goddess Bhrkuti, the Lady with Frowning Brows (Beyer 1973: 8). We have here a case study in the origin of an important element in Tibets mythological history. ... we can see taking place an inconographization of the king and his wives, which transforms them into an embodiment of the canonical trio of Avalokitesvara, Tara and Bhrkuti. This iconographic arrangement of the Bodhisattva with his two female companions, is found as early as the Manjusri-mulakalpa, it is found in the Mahavairocana-sutra ... (Beyer 1973:10). These writings seem to predate the seventh century (Snellgrove 1987 (Vol.1): Vol.2I). Later, the Nepalese queen comes to be considered the White Tara, as she is the only available iconographic vessel to replace the little known Bhrkuti (Beyer 1973: 10). Originally Wen-cheng king-chu was believed to have been a reincarnation of White Tara, an identification greatly helped by the likelihood that she wore heavy white makeup (Getty 1928: 122). It is not until the second half of the eighth century that we can say for certain that at least some texts on Tara had been translated into Tibetan, for there is preserved in the Tenjur a catalog from the reign of King Trisong detsen (ruled 755-797 A.D.) [Chattopadhyaya 1967: 212ff] of translations of scripture and commentary in the palace of Denkar, in the Totang ... This list of translations includes only three works on Tara [out of more than 700] ... It is thus impossible to say whether during this period of the earlier spread of the Law the cult of Tara took root in Tibet at all, or whether it exerted any influence outside court or scholarly circles; there certainly seems to be little evidence that the great mass of people in Tibet ever heard of Tara. (Beyer 1973: 10-11). One of the greatest figures in the religious history of Tibet is the Great Scholar Dipankarasrijnana, also known as the Princely Lord (Jo-bo rJe) or Atisa, who came to Tibet from Vikramasila in India in 1042 A.D. and remained there until his death in 1054 A.D. He was born in 982 A.D., the second son in a royal family in eastern India. His life was filled with visions of the Goddess Tara who advised him to forsake his royal position and a life of political power and take up a religious life. He first studied Tantrism and was initiated into Hevajras cycle. He then moved within a circle of tantric yogins until Sakyamuni appeared to him surrounded by a retinue of monks and urged him to take monastic vows. He did so when 29 at the monastery of Bodhgaya and then devoted himself to scholastic studies, particularly of the

97

monastic rule (vinaya), Perfection of Wisdom Literature and the tantras. These three classes of study are common during this phase of Indian Buddhism and still provide the basis for most Tibetan Buddhist practice. Several of his teachers were among the group that came to be known as the Eight-Four Great Adepts. The most famous of his teachers was Naropa, a man whose writings and legendary reputation have survived to this day. Naropa (b.956-d.1040) was a master-yogin who was also the teacher of Marapa (b.1012-d.1096) who founded the many branched order of Tibetan Buddhism known as bKa'brgyud-pa (Snellgrove 1987 Vol.2: 479-480). Tradi tional history relates that a vision of the Goddess Tara induced Atisa to travel to Tibet in 1042 A.D. when he was 58 years old. Tara prophesied that his life would be shortened (he died in Tibet at 70) but that he would advance Buddhism, benefit many beings and cultivate a special devotee (Beyer 1973: 11). The history of secular time records additional facts from the realm of politics and tragedy. Several efforts were made to get Atisa to come to Tibet when Od-ilde was ruling in Gu-ge and Purang assisted by his two royal religious brethren Byang-chub-od and Zhi-ba-od. Their aging grandfather (Royal Lama Ye-shes-od) was in enemy captivity and rejected having his freedom ransomed by the weight of his body in gold. The patriarch urged that this treasure be used to invite Indian scholars to Tibet to promote and solidify Buddhism which was in a second period of introduction and expansion after some years of decline and persecution. However, another chronicle casts doubt on the veracity of this tale for it reports that Ye-shes-od died of severe illness in his own palace (Snellgrove 1987 Vol.2: 480). It is also possible the two stories are both accurate and congruent in that he could have been freed and died after returning to Tibet. In any case, Atisa left Vikramasila in India and spent three years at Toling (the palace of Ye-shes-od) bestowing tantric initiations. He then began a return journey to India, but found the route blocked by local warfare. The famous Brom-ston persuaded him to visit Central Tibet. There, he traveled and taught extensively, never to return to India. Atisa practiced a noncelibate tantrism and may have disappointed his Tibetan patrons who wanted a thorough reformation of the Buddhist practice then current in their country which they believed had become too liberal towards sexual tantra. After Atisas death in 1054, Brom-ston and group of disciples founded a famous monastery at Rva-sgreng and the bKa-brgyud-pa Order (Snellgrove 1987 Vol.2: 481).

98

Atisa s personal intense devotion to Tara established her cult on a broad scale in Tibet for the first time. Although little of his writing was devoted to her, only four out of 117 texts, they built the entire structure of her cult for future generations. He wrote a hymn to the Goddess which is included in nearly everyone of her rituals. Atisa translated 77 Indian Buddhist texts for the Tibetans; only six deal with the Goddess. However, three are works by the great master Vagisvarakirti who was empowered by Tara and they are known as Cheating Death. From these three translations derive all of the Tibetan lineages of White Tara. Atisa was not permitted to translate any of the tantric texts that formed the basic foundation of her cult as the Green Tara. These texts describe her appearance, mantras and rites but were deemed unacceptable by the Tibetans who were trying to eliminate the most extreme of tantric practice, particularly sexual tantra, and return to the roots of Mahayana practice. The texts of Vagisvarakirti were considered a personal revelation that was not tantric, and therefore the beginning of White Tara. The translation of these texts into Tibetan, and the physical act of bringing them into Tibet, constituted the sacred act of establishing an unbroken bridge of the lineage (Beyer 1973: 12). (b.1575) that these tantras were widely disseminated. In the second half of the eleventh century, Darmadra brought back from India, and translated, the single most important text of the Tara cult - Homages to the Twenty One Taras. Richendra (b.1040), who had met Atisa when he was fifteen, was translating texts of Tara as was the abbot of Sacha Monastery, Dragpa jetsen (1147-1216). In the late twelfth century, Chochi zangpo translated another central text, Tantra Which is the Source for All the Functions of Tara, Mother of All the Tathagatas. A century and a half later, when the Red Annals were written, Tara had become indisputably the mother of the Tibetan people (Beyer 1973: 13). Three major sects devoted to Tara developed. The Gelug sect, the Virtuous Ones,

99

were devoted to the holy Tara and counted as one of their members the first Dalai Lama, the Omniscient Gedundrub (1391-1475). The Saca sect believed that Tara in her form of Kurukulla, the goddess of subjugation, was their special patron and protector. The Kaju sect, Lineage of the Proclamation, focused upon the White Tara. These sects are not rigidly bounded. A devotee within one sect could seek teachings from another or any form of Tara that might be desired (Beyer 1973: 14-15). Tara is one of the great tantric deities who may be appealed to by anyone, not just those engaged in formal Tantric practice (Samuel 1993: 165).

Tara: Tantric Cult and Folk Religion

ithin advanced Tantric practice, Tara will be generated by the master lama outside himself within a torma - an offering cake. He also will generate Tara within himself as he recognizes the goddess within himself and takes on her identity for the duration of the ceremony. This latter ritual represents one the highest forms of Tantric practice and is essential for empowerment ceremonies. The assembled followers then visualize the lama, who has now entered the room where the empowerment is to take place, as White Tara. They perform the rice-mandala (mendel) offering to him as a fee for the life-empowerment, requesting that he perform the ceremony. They are told to visualize the torma as well as the lama in the form of White Tara, surrounded by lamas, Buddhas, Tantric deities and so on, and to imagine themselves as in her divine mansion. Next they repeat the refuge and bodhicitta verses and visualize that they themselves have the form of White Tara. The scattered life-essence is recalled into the form of White Tara, and then radiated in the form of a stream of nectar into the bodies of the congregation. Similar streams of nectar restore their degenerated life, renew

100

their weakened strength and merit, and repair their broken vows and pledges. All this forms a preparation for their own assumption of the identity of White Tara, which is the center of the ritual. This involves visualizing the deity over their heads, and all the other deities as merging into her, and then imagining a second form of Tara as separating off from her form and merging into them. At this point the torma is placed on the head of each of the recipients of the empowerment. The lama recites a prayer to the lamas of his own lineage, requesting each to join in the empowerment, and visualizes the deity dissolving into each of the participants. Final ly the lama empowers the nectar of life, made from milk mixed with sugar, and the pills of life, made from herbs and potions, mixed with the relics of departed lamas, and gives them to the congregation. The ceremony ends with verses of good fortune for the increasing of life, and with the disciples offering up another rice-mandala in thanksgiving for the empowerment (Beyer 1973: 373-398). real world, the self contained, totally committed world of the monastery and in the profane world of secular time. The pantheon of Tibetan Buddhism is dominated by a plethora of fierce and protective deities to which the loving Tara stands in striking contrast. ...the goddess has no great monastic rituals or dances; her special rituals of protection and life are enacted within the monastery or the house of a devotee only upon the request of an individual, monk or lay, who endows their performance as a thanks offering or when an emergency arises. ... In the morning assembly [in the monastery], among the long series of rituals evoking the patron deities, every Kaju monastery inserts a short Four Mandala Offering, a hidden text of the goddess which had been revealed in contemplation ... To her devotees,

101

however, Tara is an abiding deity, her constant availability perhaps best symbolized by the daily repetition of her ritual rather than by any great ceremony taking place only once a year; I have seldom seen a personal altar, monk or lay, without her picture prominently displayed somewhere, though it may be surrounded by a host of representations of other deities. She is a patron deity in a second sense of the word, a personal deity rather than a monastic patron, a mother to whom her devotees can take their sorrows and on whom they can rely for help; she might appear before one in a dream or bestow other tangible signs of her favor, and many stories are told of her miraculous and spontaneous intervention in the lives of those who follow her. The popular cult of the goddess is one of trust and reverence, of self confident reliance upon the saving capacity of the divine and upon the human capacity to set in motion the divine mechanism of protection (Beyer 1973; 55). Tara is she who in the mind of all Yogis leads out (tarani) beyond the darkness of bondage, [as] the primordial force of self-mastery and redemption. Whereas on the lower plane she is a protectress and redemptress, tarati iti Tara (she leads happily across, hence she is called Tara), on the higher plane it is she who leads out of the world involvement of samsara, which she herself created in her character of Maya. Thus Tara came into being when the sea of knowledge, of which she is the quintessence, was churned. In her eternal loving embrace the great Maya, in her aspect as the redeeming one (Tarini), holds Siva, the imperturbable, who in the crystal unapproachability of his Yogi immersion is the divine representation of the attitude of the redeemed one ... As the perfection of knowledge, - Prajnaparamita - which confers illumination and nirvana, Tara is sublime womanhood in the circle of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas - especially revered in matriarchal Tibet ... In Tantric Buddhism she rises to the very zenith of the pantheon: as Prajnaparamita, she is the mother of all Buddhas - she signifies nothing other than the illumination that makes one into a Buddha, Paramita, i.e. gone (ita) to the other shore (param); she leads the soul across the very river of samsara to the far shore which is nirvana. Her emblem as the wisdom of illumination is the book resting on a lotus blossom beside her shoulder, and her hands form a circle

102

signifying the inner contemplation of the true doctrine (dharma-chakramudra), ... The enchantress, the Great Maya, who delights in imprisoning all creatures in the terrors of samsara, cannot be pronounced guilty in her role of temptress who lures into multiform all-embracing existence, into the ocean of life (from the horrors of which she unceasingly saves individuals in her aspect as boat woman), for the whole sea of life is the glittering, surging play of her shakti. From this flood of life caught in its own toils, individuals ripe for redemption rise from the water's surface and open their petals to the unbroken light of heaven (Zimmer 1968: 84-87). Brah ma himself prays to the Great Goddess thus: Thou art the pristine spirit, the nature of which is bliss, thou art the ultimate nature and the clear light of heaven, which illuminates and breaks the self-hypnotism of the terrible round of rebirth, and thou art the one that muffles the universe, for all time is thine own darkness (Zimmer 1948: 264). Tara' s cult in the population at large is sustained by drama, poetry, folklore and ritual. There is both a formal tradition of Tibetan drama and wandering troops of actors who perform tales - operas about the wonders of Taras patronage. These plays are performed in the open air and sung in a stylized warbling chant with accompanying narration recited at enormous speed. Each character sings set speeches in a long tableau which continually breaks up and reforms to the clash of cymbals and drums. There is much ad-lib buffoonery and dance and a performance may take several days, depending upon the improvisational energy of the troupe (Beyer 1973: 55-56). Poems are composed in her honor simply to praise her or memorialize her intervention. Often these poems are recitations of traditional epithets using a rigid and traditional iconographic catalogue. The literary elite was most adept at transcending the rigidity of form and achieving a true poetic expression (Beyer 1973: 59-60).

103

utterance of her name. An apocryphal story relates how in the 1920s Tara, manifesting as a beautiful girl, put a spell of sleep on a warden and helped a man wrongly accused of murder to escape prison with miraculous strength (Beyer 1973: 241). Images of Tara carved into rock are also believed to possess magical power. One such image, which Beyer had seen personally, has a spectacular record of protecting her followers. Named the Lady of the Goring Yak, it is a so-called thunderstone image which was found fully formed in the late 19th century within the ground. It is a fully formed image of Tara and is three inches high and considered to be a petrified thunderbolt. At one time it was lent by its owner, a Dragon Kaju yogin, to his servant as they set out on a begging trip. In the wild eastern district of Kam they were charged by a ferocious wild yak whose horns bent upon the servants body and did not pierce the skin. This miraculous event was attributed to the thunderstone image which then acquired its distinctive name. Later, it ended up in the hands of a head monk in the Kajegon Monastery in the Kam capital of Dragyab which belonged to the ancient Nyingma sect. During a violent dispute in which a master lama was trying to impose Gelug sect ritual upon the Kajegon monastery with the aid of government police, this head monk was shot. The bullet simply flattened itself against the old monks body, as did the yaks horns upon the yogins servant a generation before. The power and prestige of Tara as the Lady of the Goring Yak was immeasurable! Nonetheless, Kajegon capitulated and the thunderstone image found its way back to its original home where it protected a treasurer of the monastery in its usual fashion when the monk was gored trying to separate two great white divine yaks. The living owner of this image, whom Beyer interviewed, was the third reincarnation of the yogin discussed above (Beyer 1973: 238-240). In 1968, a Tibetan news magazine Sheja ran a story in which an Englishman who had purchased a foot high image of Tara was prevented from taking it illegally out of the country. When he attempted to board a plane for Nepal, his handbag grew so heavy he could not lift it. The Nepalese customs officials then looked into the bag and found the image of Tara.32

32 Shes-bya, Oct. 1968, p.19

104

Homage to Tara
Praise of Arya-Tara You Its lotus roots of aspiration firm In the ground of faith fully developed, able Tara - homage to You! Vener

sit on a lotus seat of strong effort,

sit on a moon seat, cooling with compassion ting beings scorched by the heat of defilements. ess, Savioress of tormented beings, able Tara - homage to You!

You Migra Godd Vener

the two accumulations as chariot wheels e conquered the two veils; established in the Ten Stages,

With You'v

105

stay as a Goddess until samsara is empty, able Tara - homage to You!

You Vener

Your body, unmoved by defilements, is firm like a mountain, Well grown, since nourished by Your perfect virtues, Full breasted, since loving-kindness moves Your heart, Vener able Tara - homage to You! Grace ful Your complexion unstained by samsara; charming apparel, with jewel ornaments, hair blue-green, with a diadem of the five Families, Vener able Tara - homage to You! Your smiling face spreads uncontaminated bliss; of Vairocana, You have compassion and deeds, Born Of Your

106

Wisdoms and Means bow and arrow subduing the Maras, able Tara - homage to You!

With Vener

Right hand giving Refuge, You save from fears; In the form of a maiden of sixteen, You captivate beings; Your blue utpala is for the Action Family, Vener able Tara - homage to You! You are the skillful boatman who carries us over (tarana) rivers of rebirth, aging sickness and death the harbor (potalaka) of loving kindness, with oars of compassion, Vener able Tara - homage to You! Now that I have praised the Goddess so, eight stanzas, with faith in Her, through this In The [To]

107

every migrating sentient being ly win the rank of Buddhahood!

May Quick

The Praise of the Venerable Lady by Master Matrceta is complete33

Matrceta is an enigmatic figure who according to tradition was a brahman who defeated many Buddhists in debate until he, in turn, was defeated by Aryadeva who converted him. He composed two great praises of the Buddha which, according to I-tsing the Chinese traveler who visited India around 674 A.D., were on every Buddhist's lips as soon as they could be learned. There are good possibilities that three Matrcetas existed, in the second, third and seventh centuries A.D. respectively. The tantric references in a long hymn to Tara would seem to rule out the earlier possibilities as authors of the surviving praise-poetry (Wilson 1986: 209-210).

Praise of the Nobel Goddess Tara Sams You To You with mind moist with compassion I forever bow.
33 Wilson, 1986: 212-213.

aras darkness, hard to repel, overcome like the light of the sun.

Tara,

108

Throu gh You, Goddess, angry lions, can slay great elephants wed with mind exceeding sharp, are sacred and run away on sight. With the tip of his spear-point tusks can split rocks or uproot trees; when Your mantra is recited elephant runs away, afraid. the he But who Endo

to bear, it fills all space quarters, overpoweringly, ng ones couch with its blaze; and yet rain of Your praise puts out the fire

Hard and Burni the

109

ng hisses, which arise its whole hood, venomous, snake is frightened by Your praise, ess, as by a garuda's might.

Emitti from A Godd

Thou gh they cut travelers with swords and their limbs are stained with blood, because they hear Your name rs will become powerless. When seized by the hair and bound in chains by servants of an angry king, who praises You, O Goddess saves from prison, will have no fear. One Who Just robbe

110

masses of waves fill up the ten ions and even the sky, servant, in the ocean after reck, reaches the other side.

When direct Your shipw

Smea red with the slime of blood and brains, which they are fond of devouring, as, Goddess, are scared off recitation of Your mantra. Leper s with torn limbs, noses adrip with stinking limb blood and bodily ooze, by gathering before You me like gods of the Realm of Desire. Just beco Pisac by

111

ars resembling hungry ghosts, d, tortured with hunger and thirst, by bowing down to You transformed into emperors.

Begg nake Just are

By the virtue Ive amassed throu gh thus praising You, Pure One, ener-off of the Great Fears, the world gain happiness! The praise of the Goddess Tara by Master Candragomin is complete.34 Fright may

A Praise of Arya-Tara Called the Accomplisher of Vows Appe aring from an utpala and green syllable, n of body, with one face and two arms
34 Wilson 1986: 232-233.

Gree

112

and arms bedecked with many jewels, You, special deity Tara, homage and praise!

Body To

Five Jinas, like Amoghasiddhis, adorn Your Crown. Sixte en years old, You have a smiling face. Your dazzling radiance ever subdues hosts of foes. To You, special deity Tara, homage and praise! Your right hand grants boons; Your left hand holds an utpala. variegated lotus and sun disk sit with right leg out and left leg folded. [To You, special deity Tara, homage and praise!] Forev er You look on beings with eyes of compassion. body emanates Taras who save from the eight fears. Your On You

113

ing from all samsara's sorrows, You, special deity Tara, homage and praise!

Rescu To

Makin g the Calming, Increasing, Subjugating Fierce rites and All Rites be accomplished fast, You carry out swiftly the ocean of [Buddha-] activities; To You, special deity Tara, homage and praise! Savin g complexity from all the eight fears elephants, fire, serpents and robbers, s, the ocean and pisaca demons To You, special deity Tara, homage and praise! [You pacify fully every suffering, such as ns of sickness, plagues, insanity, Demo Lions, Fetter

114

s and other fears of untimely death; You, special deity Tara, I pay homage.]

Yaksa To

Karm a amassed in past lives, and defilements; What ever unbearable evil acts Ive done, Such as the five immediate and ten unwholesome Let all these be purified without remainder!

this my present birth also, let dreams, ill omens, and untimely death, and all ill fortune be cleared away, lifetime, merits and enjoyments grow!

In Bad Foes While

rebirths yet to come, may I ect my special deity, Tara,

In all recoll

115

e all supreme and common siddhis all my wishes, just as I desire, govern each and every divine activity!

Realiz And And

By the merits Ive amassed through praising With intensely striving, longing mind Tara, the compassionate special deity, me, O Worshipful Tara, not part from You! Let

The Praise of the Venerable Tara called the Accomplisher of All Vows is by the great Master Candragomin.35 Candr agomin is well known and there are biographies of him in several Tibetan histories. He was born the son of a ksatriya pandita in the Bengali kingdom of Varendara sometime in the first half of the seventh century A.D. Although completely unschooled, at the age of seven he nonetheless won theological debates with adult masters. He was taught tantra by the master Asoka and saw visions of Avalokitesvara and Tara. He became a famous scholar and married the kings daughter whose name - amazingly enough - was Tara! However, he soon left her feeling great impropriety that his wife had the same name as his tutelary deity. The king became very angry and sealed Candragomin in box and threw it into the Ganges. He prayed to Tara and she created an island in the middle of the river upon which the box landed and he was saved. He spent much time at the fountain head of Buddhist
35 Wilson 1986: 234-235.

116

studies of the time, Nalanda University and there engaged in a seven year debate with Candrakirti. Tara repeatedly came to his aid throughout his life and also to those whom he prayed for. One of his texts on Tara is of great historical importance for it is one of only three concerned with Tara to be found in a catalog compiled during the time of King Tri-song detsen (755797 A.D.): see Wilson (1986: 222-224). finally, from the lips of the great Atisa... Praise of Arya-Tara: Gods bow Liber ator from all problems, er] Tara-homage to You! [Moth And

and asuras with their crowns down to Your lotus feet;

those Avicis fire torments, them with a blazing net,

On filling Your

compassion rains down nectarfurther homage to You! Tara,

those tired of circling long,

To

117

and again, among the six nies, You grant the rest, mely pleasant, of Great Bliss.

again Desti supre

Godd ess who works the weal of others! Just to think of You dispels problems! You, endowed with love and compassion, te from samsaras bonds. libera

ess who at all times is crop of migrators

Godd whole You

rain incessantly - homage to You! Like the sun and the moon, dispeller distress of darkness for of

118

migrating sentient beings, me Goddess - homage to You!

All Supre

On a lotus and moon seat imma culate as an utpala Your body blue-green coloured, graceful, You hold an utpala - homage to You! Three countless eons Youve gathered Merits and Wisdom, off all the hindering obscurations, with the four Means of Attraction attracted migrators, O compassionate Mother - homage to You! Bodil y faults are gone, You have the Marks and Signs; of speech are gone, like the kalavinka's strains; Faults Cast And

119

of the mind gone, You know all knowable things. of fortune and glory-homage to You!

Faults Blaze

the water clearing gem, Goddess, forever clear

Like You The

mud of sentient beings minds and strive for their re - homage to You! Welfa

who do retain Your name, e You, and do practice You, Always do You make fruitful,

Those prais

Unforgetful One - homage to You! The Praise of the Venerable Tara by Dipamkara-sri-jnana is complete.36

36 Wilson 1986: 293-294.

120

Acknowledgments The extraordinary writings of Wendy Doniger OFlaherty have fueled much of my thinking over the past few years. I thank my wife, Leslie, with great appreciation and gratitude, for her insights, meticulous proof reading, editorial assistance and help with the unceasing task to ground mytho-poetic insight within the poetry of humanity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agrawal, D.P. et al. 1978. Chronology of Indian Prehistory from the Mesolithic to the Iron Age. J. Hum. Evol. 7: 3744. Atre, S. 1987. The Archetypal Mother: A Systematic Approach to Harappan Religion. Pune: Ravish Publishers. Basham, A.L. 1954. The Wonder that was India. New York: Grove Press. Battacharyya, N.N. 1977, 2nd ed. The Indian Mother Goddess. New Delhi: Manohar. Beal, S. trans. 1957. Travels of Hiouen-Thsang. Calcutta: Susil Gupta. Beck, B.E.F. 1969. The vacillating goddess: sexual control and social rank in the Indian pantheon. Paper delivered at the 1969 meeting of Assoc. Ind. Studies. Beckwith, C.I. 1987. The Tibetan Empire in Central Asia. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. Beyer, S. 1973. The Cult of Tara. Berkeley, CA: Univ. Cal. Press. Beyer, S. 1974. The Buddhist Experience. Encin, CA. Cappieri, M. 1971. The Population of the Indus Civilization. In Fairservis, Jr., The Roots of Ancient India. New York: Macmillan, Appendix K.

121

Carlson, J.B. 1993. The Rise and Fall of the City of the Gods. Archeol: 46: 58-69. Chang T-T. 1963. The Origins and Early Cultures of the Cereal Grains and Food Legumes In D.N. Keightley, ed. The Origins of Chinese Civilization. Berkeley: Univ of California, pp 65-94. Chattopadhyaya, A. 1967. Atisa and Tibet. Calcutta: Indian Studies Past and Present. Clifton, C.S. 1992. "The Seed of Light." Gnosis No.23, pp 28-33. Conze, E. 1959. Buddhist Scriptures. Harmondsworth, Eng. Dimock, E.C.Jr. 1966. The Place of the Hidden Moon: Erotic Mysticism in the Vaisnava Sahajiya Cult of Bengal. Chicago: Dimock, E.C. Jr. 1982. A Theology of the Repulsive: The Myth of the Goddess Sitala, in J.S. Hawley and D.M. Wulff, eds., The Divine Consort: Radha and the Goddesses of India. Berkeley: Berkeley Religious Studies Series. Dumont, P.E. 1927. L'Asvamedha, description du sacrifice solennel du cheval dans le culte vedique d'apres les textes du Yajurveda blanc. Paris. Eliade, M. 1969. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press. Fairservis, Jr., W.A. 1971. The Roots of Ancient India. New York: Macmillan. Foley, R. Ed. 1984. Hominid Evolution and Community Ecology. London: Academic Press. Frazer, J.G 1959. The New Golden Bough. N.J.:S.G.Phillips Friedrich, P. 1979. The Meaning of Aphrodite. Chicago: Getty, A. 1928. 2nd ed. The Gods of Northern Buddhism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Reprinted by Dover Publica tions (New York) in 1988. The page references in this text refer to the reprint edition. Gimbutas, M. 1989. The Language of the Goddess. San Francisco. Harper and Row. Gimbutas, M. 1991. The Civilization of the Goddess. New York: Harper Collins. Gonda, J. 1969. Aspects of Early Visnuism. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Goodall, J. 1986. The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Grassman, H. 1955. 3rd ed. Worterbuch zum Rigveda. Wiesbaden. Grousset, R. (J.A. Underwood trans.) 1971. In the Footsteps of the Buddha. New York: Grossman.

122

Gupta, S. 1972. Laksmitantra. Leiden: Harding, R.S.O. and G. Teleki eds. 1981. Omnivorous Primates: Gathering and Hunting in Human Evolution. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. Heesterman, J. 1967. The Case of the Severed Head. Weiner Zeitschrift zur Kunde des Sud-und Ostasiens. 11: 22-43. Hooykaas, C. 1964. Agama-Tirtha: Five Studies in Hindu-Balinese Religion. Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Akademis der Wetenschappen no. 60. Hsuan-tsang. 1957. Ta-t'ang hsi-yu-chi. Nanking: Chinese Buddhist Assoc. Kakar, S. 1978. The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India. New Delhi: Kelly, A. 1991. Crafting the Art of Magic, Book I. St. Paul, Mn: Llewellyn Publ. Luders, H. 1951, 1959. Varuna. 2vols. Gottingen. MacKay, E.J.H. 1937. Further Excavations at Mohenjo-daro. 2 vols. New Delhi: Govt. of India. McDannell, C. and B. Lang. 1988. Heaven: A History. New Haven, Conn: Yale UnIv. Press. Megaw, R. and V. 1989 Celtic Art. New York: Thames and Hudson. Neumann, E. 1963. transl. R. Manheim. The Great Mother: Analysis of the Archetype. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press. OFlaherty, W.D. 1973. Ascetism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. OFlaherty, W.D. 1980. Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press. Oldenberg, H. 1901. Rigveda VI, 1. 10-20. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft 55: 316. Olsen, C. 1989. Sri Lakshmi and Radha: The Obsequious Wife and the Lustful Lover. In C. Olsen, ed. The Book of the Goddess: Past and Present. New York: Crossroads, ch.10. Pargiter, F. E. 1904. Markandeya Purana, Eng. tr. Calcutta: Penzer, N.M. ed. 1924. The Ocean of Story. Translated by W.C. Tawney. 10 vols. London. Piggot, S. 1950. Prehistoric India. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Rawlinson, H.G. 1952, rev. India: A Short Cultural History. New York: Frederick A. Praeger.

123

Reorich, G.N. 1949,1953. The Blue Annals. Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal Monographs Series VVol.2. Rose, H.J. 1959. A Handbook of Greek Mythology. New York: Samuel, G. 1993. Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies. Washington: Smithsonian Inst. Press. Scheltema, J.F. 1912. Monumental Java. London: Shastri, H. 1925. The Origin and Cult of Tara. Calcutta: Memoirs of the Archeological Survery of India XX. Sigmon, B. And J.S. Cybuslki eds, 1981. Homo erectus: Papers in Honor of Davidson Black. Toronto: Univ of Toronto Press. Snellgrove, D.L. 1957. Buddhist Himalaya: Travels and Studies in Quest of the Origins and Nature of Tibetan Religion. New York: Philosophical Library. Snellgrove, D.L. 1968. A Cultural History of Tibet. Boston: Shambala. Snellgrove, D.L. 1987. Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. 2 Vol. Boston: Shambala. Stanley, J.A. 1979. Special time, special power: the fluidity of power in a popular Hindu festival. J.Asian Studies 37: 27-43. Subhandu (L.H. Gray ed. and trans.) 1913. Vasavadatta. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. Sullivan, H.P. 1964. A re-examination of the religion of the Indus Civilization. Hist Rel. 4: 115-125. Taylor, T. 1992. "The Gundestrop Cauldron". Sci. Am. 266: 84-89. Thompson, G. 1949. Studies in Ancient Greek Religion. Vol.1. London: Tobias, P.V. ed. 1985. Hominid Evolution. New York: Alan R. Liss. Tucci, G. 1969. Rai-Lila: An Interpretation of the Tantric Imagery of the Temples of Nepal. Geneva. Voight, V. 1992. Sex Magic in C.S. Clifton, ed. Witchcraft Today, Vol. 1: the Modern Craft Movement. St. Paul Mn: Llwellyn Publ. Wangyal, Geshe. 1973. The Door of Liberation. New York: Maurice Gordon. Watters, T. trans. 1961. On Yuan Chwang's Travels in India. Delhi: Munshi-ram Manohar Lal. Whitehead, H. 1916. The Village Gods of South India. Calcutta:

124

Wilson, M. 1986. In Praise of Tara. London: Wisdom Publ. Wolpoff, M. 1980. Paleoanthropology. New York:Alfred. A. Knopf. Wylie, T.V. ed. and trans. 1962. The Geography of Tibet according to the Dzam-glingrgyas-bshad. Rome: Istitut o Italiano per il Medio ed Estreme Oriente. (Smin-grol No-mon-han [Bla-ma-Btsan-po], Dzam-gling-rgyas-bshad snod-bcud kun gsal me-long zhes bya-ba) Zimmer, H. 1946. Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. Princton: Princeton Univ. Press, Bollingen Series VI, ed. Joseph Campbell. Zimmer, H. 1948. The King and the Corpse. Ed. by J. Campbell. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, Bollingen Series XI. Zimmer, H. 1968. The Indian World Mother. In The Mystic Vision. (Papers from the Euranos Yearbooks, 6.) Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, Bollingen Series XXX.

125