While Hindus recognize and revere a variety of different goddesses, they also tend to speak of one Great Goddess, Mahadevi, as a singular divine being who is the unity underlying all female deities. In this book, ten scholars reflect on both the diverse depictions of Mahadevi found in textual and devotional environments and the ways that the singularity and multiplicity of the divine Hindu feminine are negotiated. Seeking Mahadevicovers various geographical locations, from the Punjab and Bengal in North India to Kerala and Tamilnadu in the South, and makes use of evidence from ancient texts and contemporary interviews, male-authored documents and women’s possession experiences, myth, ritual, and folklore. Arguing that Mahadevi has multiple, context-dependent identities that are constructed through human interpretive activity, this book highlights the great diversity of ways that those who worship Mahadevi conceive of and portray her.
Contributors include C. Mackenzie Brown, Sarah Caldwell, Thomas Coburn, Elaine Craddock, Kathleen M. Erndl, Jeffrey J. Kripal, Usha Menon, Tracy Pintchman, Andhra Pradesh, and Mark Edwin Rohe.
Inhoudsopgave
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Note on Transliteration and Pronunciation
Introduction: Identity Construction and the Hindu Great Goddess
Tracy Pintchman
1. The Tantric and Vedantic Identity of the Great Goddess in the Devi Gita of the Devi-Bhagavata Purana
C. Machenzie Brown
2. Mahadevi as Mother: The Oriya Hindu Vision of Reality
Usha Menon
3. Ambiguous and Definitive: The Greatness of Goddess Vaisno Devi
Mark Edwin Rohe
4. The Goddess as Fount of the Universe: Shared Visions and Negotiated Allegiances in Puranic Accounts of Cosmogenesis
Tracy Pintchman
5. Waves of Beauty, Rivers of Blood: Constructing the Goddess in Kerala
Sarah Caldwell
6. From Village to City: Transforming Goddesses in Urban Andhra Pradesh
Sree Padma
7. Reconstructing the Split Goddess as Sakti in a Tamil Village
Elaine Craddock
8. Perfecting the Mother’s Silence: Dream, Devotion, and Family in the Deification of Sharada Devi
Jeffrey J. Kripal
9. Goddesses and the Goddess in Hinduism: Constructing the Goddess through Religious Experience
Kathleen M. Erndl
10. What Is a Goddess and What Does it Mean to Construct One?
Thomas B. Coburn
Glossary
References
List of Contributors
Index
Over de auteur
Tracy Pintchman is Associate Professor of Hindu Studies at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of
The Rise of the Goddess in the Hindu Tradition, also published by SUNY Press.
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