For example, Devi Laxmi is the goddess of wealth, Devi Durga is the goddess of power, Saraswati is the Goddess of education, etc. In that form, she is known as Adishakti the eternal power. Devi is worshiped in many sects of Hinduism. Goddess Parvati is considered as the main goddess of Hindus. Most of the other Devis are incarnations of Her. Hence, Devi worship dates back to at least B. In the picture of Ardhanari Nateshwar, the half part is that of Lord Shiva and the half part is that of his wife, Goddess Parvati.
It represents that the feminine and masculine divine powers are inseparable. Durga and Mahisha fought a long, terrible, and bloody battle in which the two opponents changed Devi, a major Hindu goddess, appears in many different forms. This color print shows a man worshiping Devi as Parvati, the beautiful and loving wife of Shiva. Durga finally managed to kill the demon by piercing his heart with her trident and cutting off his head.
Devi also takes gentler forms. As Sati, a loyal wife to Shiva, she burned herself alive to defend his honor and prove her love. Her remains were then cut into 50 pieces and scattered to different places that became shrines. As Parvati, Devi is a gentle and loving wife who went through great sacrifice to win Shiva's love. Parvati has a softening influence on the harsh god and is often portrayed as an idealized beauty or pictured with Shiva in domestic scenes.
Another, and quite different, form of Devi is the fierce Kali. As suggest her bangles, the traditional emblem of marital state, besides a mother she is also a consort. Thus, in her material manifestation, She represents, with absolute motherhood, also the absolute womanhood.
She causes life and sustains it, and is also the cause of life, its inspiration and aspiration, and the reason to live. In its contemplation, the Rigveda, which seems to have conceded to the idea of the Divine Female, takes two different lines, one mystic and the other traditional.
The traditional line was the same as prevailed amongst the primitive Indus community, which perceived the Divine Female as Mother Goddess. The Rigveda calls the Female power Mahimata R. At places, the Vedic literature alludes to Her as Viraj, the universal mother, as Aditi, the mother of gods, and as Ambhrini, the one born of Primeval Ocean.
The Rigveda takes a mystic line, when it perceives the Proto Female as Vak or Vani, which, as the creative speech, manifests the cosmos and all existing things. In Vedic mysticism the cosmos and all things pre-exist but are unmanifest. The Vak, or Vani makes them manifest.
The Proto Female has been perceived also as Ushas, the glowing light of early morning. What the darkness of night makes unmanifest, Ushas makes manifest.
In metaphysical theorization, which Vedic literature enunciates, 'all things exist but become manifest in Her, that is, in the Proto Female'. The Upanishadas elucidate this Vedic proposition with greater clarity. In their contemplation, the Upanishadas identify this Vedic Proto Female as Prakriti, the manifest nature, which is the material aspect of the Creation.
The Upanishadas suggest that She is the all-pervasive cosmic energy inherent in all existing things. The Vedas and Upanishadas weave around Devi a body of mysticism, but, in popular tradition, as suggests Harivansha Purana, a 4th-5th century religious treatise, when it alludes Her as the Goddess of jungle and hill tribes, She was yet the same simple unmystified puritan Mother Goddess. Her ties with the primitive man were emotional and relatively strong.
However, there also emerged, in simultaneity to this worship cult, and obviously inspired by Upanishadas' mysticism, a body of metaphysics, which perceived the Divine Female as Shakti, the guided cosmic energy and the transcendental source and support of all creatures and all created things.
The Mahabharata, keeping in line with the Vedic mysticism, alludes Her as the source of all things, the spiritual as well as material. The epic enunciates that all things, material and abstract, manifest and unmanifest, are only the manifestations of the Divine Female. According to the Mahabharata, this metaphysical Being, the Mother Goddess of the primitive man, is the basis, the root and the root cause of everything.
She is the eternal upholder of Dharma and truth, the promoter of happiness and the giver of salvation and prosperity but also of sorrows, grief and pain. She removes obstacles and worries and renders Her devotees' path detriment free. During the period after the Mahabharata to the emergence of the Puranic era around the 4th-5th century A. The worship of Devi was those days a wide spread phenomenon, yet till her elevation to the status of a Puranic deity, such worship was confined to only, or mostly, around the remoter corners of the primitive world of tribes.
The tribes like Santhal, Bhumia and others of Bihar, Orissa and Bastar yet have a live convention of announcing their lineage at the time of wedding of their sons as well as daughters. Both sides begin with their origin, which is usually from one of the nature gods and commit themselves to Shiva, the Yogi of hills and their protector, and Mahimata, the Mother Earth, as their Dharini, the upholder.
Quite interestingly, it depicts the five thousand year long continuity of the cult of worshipping Shiva, as the Mahayogi, representing the Divine Male and Mahimata, the Mother Earth or Mother Goddess, representing the Divine Female. It was only after She was accommodated into the Brahmanical pantheon, that the Mother Goddess was an object of worship in the world of elite also.
The Devi theme, once it becomes a part of the Brahmanical pantheon around the 5th century A. Here, She not only occupies the thinking mind but also its the altar. For many Hindus, however, Devi's greatest strength is that she embodies all aspects of womanhood. In the vast pantheon, she is in the top tier, as powerful as the male gods Vishnu and Shiva.
Mother goddess of India and local protector for innumerable villages, she can be quiet and nurturing. But she is also a cosmic force, addressing the creation and destruction of worlds.
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