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The Goddess in Hinduism (excerpts)
By Joseph Campbell
(source :A Joseph Campbell
Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living -edited by Diane K. Osbon
pg 216-218 )
" The goddess alone knew of the all-moving,
secret world energy which has helped the gods to victory; it was the power
within them, of which they were unaware. They believed that they were strong in
themselves, but without this force, or against it, they could not so much as
harm a blade of grass. The goddess knew of the universal force, which the Vedic
priests called Brahman and which Hindus call sakti,
for sakti, i.e. energy, is the essence and name of the Great Goddess herself,
hence she could explain the mysterious being to the Gods, she could teach them
its secret - for it was her own secret." -
Heinrich
Zimmer.
In Hinduism, all power,
sakti, is female. So, the
female represents the totality of the power, and the male is imaged as the agent
of the female. In that sense, the power that a female feels from the male
- the animus, in Jungian terms - is a specification of the female power, a mode
of application of the power.
Every being has a twofold aspect, reveals a friendly
and a menacing face. All gods have a charming and a hideous form, according to
how one approaches them; but the Great Goddess is the energy of the world,
taking form in all things. All friendly and menacing faces are facets of her
essence. What seems a duality in the individual god, is an infinite multiplicity
in her total being...........She is the mute security of life in itself; from
the ashes of burned forests she raises eager fresh flowers whose decay is
pregnant with new life, a new life which all around it sees only life in its
transitions and transformations with no shadow of death, just as we ourselves,
when we sink our teeth into a ripe fruit, or draw a living plant from the garden
are without awareness of death.
Whatever you do, in waking or sleeping, consciously
or involuntarily in the cycle of your flesh to the accompanying music of your
soul; whatever you do as your body builds and destroys, absorbs and excretes,
breathes and procreates, or bestows joy infringing on the limits of rage and
pain - all this is a mere gesture of the Great Mother, jaganmayi
(consisting of all worlds and being), who unremittingly does likewise with her
world body in endless thousands of forms.....To see the twofold, embracing and
devouring, nature of the goddess, to see repose in catastrophe, security in
decay, is to know her and to be saved....She is the perfect figuration of life's
joyous lures and pitiless destruction: the two poles charged with the extremist
tension, yet forever merging. - Henrich Zimmer.
Also, in Hinduism, the sun is female and the moon is
male; he is born of her, dies into her, and is born of her again every month.
Shiva, this great power, is the moon god. Parvati, his consort, is the sun
power. And although the worship in the masculine-oriented action systems in
India is directly to Shiva, it's to the goddess Kali, that the worship finally
goes. So that, actually, in India, Kali is the great divinity.
.....the Hindu goddess Kali...is shown standing on
the prostrate form of the god Shiva, her spouse. She brandishes the sword of
death, i.e., spiritual discipline. The blood-dripping human head tells the
devotee that "he that loseth his life for her sake shall find it." The
gestures of "fear not" and "bestowing boon" teach that she
protects her children, that the pairs of opposites of the universal agony are
not what they seem, and that for one centered in eternity the phantasmagoria of
temporal "goods" and "evil" is but a reflex of the mind-as
the goddess, herself, though apparently trampling down the god, is actually his
blissful dream.
The Goddess
gives birth to forms
and kills forms.
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