"Any evolutionary vision reflects the mystery of the unknown, and no one can forsee the splendor of the human potential as it unfolds. Are we to become superintellectual creators and achievers free to avoid moral responsibility to secure our ends? Or are we to learn that conscience is not free at all but is rather a reverberation of a divine ethic to which we are forever bound? If the latter, then the unlocking of our human potentials in science, art, and the humanities may depend on retraining our insatiable desire for evermore sweepings forward drives of human intellect largely dissociated from moral issues....

When a spiritual awakening emerges, as now, out of the omnipresent darkness of moral imperfection, religions may need to portray the human divine relation in terms of the evolution of universal moral enlightenment. In paradise the tree of knowledge was solely concerned with good and evil, and to taste it was to become godlike. We in the twentieth century certainly bear no resemblance to gods who can do no wrong, but spiritual wisdom perhaps more ancient than Biblical story is said to reveal that we are indeed to become more godlike because the whole of humankind is on an evolutionary pilgrimage back toward the spiritual Source of all things. When we perceive this Source as the transcendent Good, we will know that our further evolution depends upon fuller participation in Earthly goodness. If every human being is destined to return to the Source, everyone has at his or her disposal a long succession of Earthly lives whose trials and tribulations, successes, errors, and omissions all serve as necessary learning experiences in the understanding of virtue. Retaining its cumulative spiritual insight after the death of the body, the immortal part of each individual thus possesses at each incarnation increasing knowledge of the interaction of divine Good and Earthly good — and all human endeavor gradually becomes limited and sustained by righteousness.

In this view it is an illusion to expect that the further realization of human potential will mean increasing freedom from all restraint. Only in the short term do we have the freedom to be morally apathetic or ignorant and to conduct our lives accordingly, but as higher beings, such freedom will be denied us. In awareness thereof we have no choice but to try to conform in our successive lives to an evermore perfect alignment with the divine ethic. Spiritual determinism, interacting with absolute moral law, restricts our evolutionary freedom most mightily.

In this new era let us, then, rid ourselves of secular misconceptions about the increasingly free unfolding of the human potential, accept the spiritual inevitability of our moral self-transcendence, and redefine the human race as evolving beings slowly but surely becoming more godlike because of our sacred Source and the latent divinity within us."
                                                                           

"The Saktas worship the Universal Energy as Mother; it is the sweetest name they know. The Mother is the highest ideal of womanhood in India. When God is worshiped as mother, the Hindus call such worship the "right hand" way, and it leads to spirituality but never to material prosperity. When God is worshipped in His terrible aspect, that is, in the "left hand" way it leads usually to great material prosperity but rarely to spirituality; and eventually it leads to degeneration and the obliteration of the race that practices it.

Mother is the first manifestation of power and is considered a higher idea than father. The name of mother brings the idea of sakti, Divine energy and omnipotence, the baby believes its mother to be all-powerful, to be able to do anything. The Divine Mother is the Kundalini sleeping in us; without worshipping Her we can never know ourselves. All merciful, all powerful, omnipresent - these are attributes of the Divine Mother. She is the sum total of the energy in the Universe. Every manifestation of power in the universe is Mother. She is Life, She is Intelligence, She is Love. She is in the universe, yet separate from it. She is a person, and can be seen and known- as Sri Ramakrishna saw and knew Her. Established in the idea of Mother, we can do anything. She quickly answers prayer.

She can show Herself to us in any form at any moment. The Divine Mother can have form (Rupa) and name (Nama), or name without form; and as we worship Her in these various aspects, we can rise to Pure Being, having neither form nor name.

The sum-total of all cells in an organism is one person; each soul is like one cell, and the sum of them is God. And beyond that is the Absolute. The sea calm is the Absolute; the same sea in Waves is the Divine Mother. She is time, space and causation. Mother is the same as Brahman and has two natures; the conditioned and the unconditioned. As the former She is God, nature and soul- the triangle of existence. This is the Visishtadvaita idea.

A bit of Mother, a drop, was Krishna; another Buddha; another was Christ. The worship of even one spark of Mother in our earthly mother leads to greatness. Worship Her if you want love and wisdom."       
                                                                           

"If God did not exist, said Voltaire, it would be necessary to invent him. Elsewhere he rounded out his statement by saying: "If God made us in His image, we have certainly returned the compliment." This echoes an insight, expressed already by some ancient Greek skeptics, that our gods look suspiciously like ourselves.

Clearly, there is some truth to this statement, as anyone who has even a smattering of comparative religion knows. Yet it does not by any means convey the whole truth. Materialism would have us believe that our economic or social experience shapes, if not predetermines, how we think about ultimate things. According to materialist dogma, metaphysics is the product not of spiritual realizations, mystical intuitions, and high intellectual considerations, but of rather mundane factors, such as whether we are hungry, smothered in wealth, or troubled by a toothache.

The truth, it would seem, lies somewhere between the two extremes of materialist reductionism and reductionistic spirituality. In light of this, how should we look upon the age-old tradition that speaks of a divine feminine principle—the Goddess, or Mother?

For psychologists, the feminine Divine is a powerful archetype innate to the collective unconscious, though there is no unanimous opinion about precisely how that potent image was generated and how it is transmitted across cultures and eras.

For the average intellectual, thoroughly steeped in the humanist ethos of our age, the issue is not one of metaphysics or metapsychology, but of misguided knowledge, or delusion, passed from one generation of believers to the next. For "Death of God" theologians, the Goddess is as much a projection as has been the patriarchal God of Deism. This summary dismissal is vehemently contested by those for whom the feminine Divine is not an abstract concept but a living reality—those many who contact Her in their prayers, find solace in Her, and even unite with Her in mystical attunement.

Until a few years ago, I skirted this whole philosophical issue, and wrote about the feminine cosmic principle in purely abstract terms as a metaphysical construct that is as plausible as most others. As an ex-Lutheran (with only a lukewarm religious upbringing) I had never been exposed to the Marian doctrine, which looms large in Catholicism. My intellectual encounter with the divine female was by and large confined to the Shiva-Shakti doctrine of Hinduism. Here Shakti is the feminine pole of the divine reality, whereas Shiva represents the masculine aspect of the same ultimate being, manifesting in the form of particular Gods (deva) and Goddesses (devi) as stepped-down versions of that all-comprehensive Reality."       
                                                                           

"Daughter of the Goddess

An Interview with Z. Budapest
by Susan Bridle

This issue of  What Is Enlightenment? would be incomplete without considering the women's spirituality movement and the contemporary pagan and Goddess religions with which it is closely aligned. Modern paganism, loosely based on prepatriarchal Old European myths and traditions, is one of the fastest growing religions in the United States today. It attracts both men and women who feel suffocated by Christianity and who want an alternative to the patriarchal values of domination which have proven so destructive to our planet's ecology and to many of the world's peoples. Worship of nature and a Goddess or "Great Mother" figure are often associated with pagan practices and rituals, and many women's groups have formed in recent years to celebrate a female deity and to create a new religious culture that empowers women.

Zsuzsanna Budapest, better known as "Z," is a passionately committed feminist who sees Goddess religion as a crucial ideological and psychological support to the work of feminism. She is considered to be one of the founding mothers of the women's spirituality movement, and coined the term "feminist spirituality.""       
                                                                           

"What is the Importance of the Divine Mother?

In predominant Western religions the Divine is worshiped as Father but not as Mother. This heavenly Father is often portrayed as a stern, angry or jealous God, a strict judge and giver of punishment to those of his children who violate his seemingly arbitrary laws. Protestant Christianity and Islam have banished the Divine Mother from their religions. Catholic and Greek Orthodox Christianity have accepted the feminine as The Mother of Jesus, not as God in her own right, though it appears that devotion to the Madonna has been the strongest living mystical force within Christianity.

Sanatana Dharma as a universal tradition recognizes the importance of the Divine Mother. According to Hinduism the deepest relationship that we can have with God is that of The Mother. No human relationship is closer than that of The Mother and child. It best mirrors our relationship with God. India itself is looked upon as The Mother. The Hindu religion itself is regarded as a mother and its teachings are her milk.

In the modern world wherein we are recognizing the equality of the sexes we can no longer reject the feminine aspect of Divinity. The rejection of the feminine aspect of the Divine - which includes loving kindness, tolerance and caring nurturence - has led to much of the religious animosity and holy wars which have devastated humanity over the last two thousand years.

What religion has aggressively promoted a belief in the Divine Mother? What form of religious fundamentalism or exclusivism has ever been made in the name of the Goddess? Who could ever kill people in the name of a God named Mother? What Mother would condemn her own children as sinners, however much they may have fallen? Who could say: "Believe in the Divine Mother or you must go to hell?" Not surprisingly Hinduism, the world's major religion that has honored the Goddess, has seldom promoted religious hostility, and has never created such ideas as eternal damnation.

The female is the form aspect of the Divine. Woman represents the Divine embodied. Her worship requires the creation of appropriate forms in which to revere her. We must once again create images of the Divine Mother to allow her healing grace, which is essential for world peace, to descend. Without acknowledging the forms of the Divine Mother our religions must be imbalanced and lead to various excesses in human behavior."       
                                                                           

"According to the Hindu view, the entrance of God into the strife of the universe is not a unique astounding entrance of the transcendental essence into the welter of mundane affairs (as Christianity, where the Incarnation is regarded as a singular and supreme sacrifice, never to be repeated), but a rhythmical event, conforming to the beat of the world ages. The savior descends as a counterweight to the forces of evil during the course of every cyclic decline of mundane affairs, and his work is accomplished in a spirit of imperturbable indifference. The periodic incarnation of the Holy Power is a sort of solemn leitmotiv in the interminable opera of the cosmic process, resounding from time to time like a majestic flourish of celestial trumpets, to silence the disharmonies and to state again the triumphant themes of the moral order . ..

The descent is represented in Indian mythology as the sending forth of a minute particle (amsa) of the infinite supramundane essence of Godhead — that essence itself suffering thereby no diminution; for the putting forth of a savior, the putting forth even of the mirage of the universe, no more diminishes the plenitude of the transcendent and finally unmanifested Brahman than the putting forth of a dream diminishes the substance of our own unconsciousness."
                                                                           

" "The later patriarchal religions and mythologies," wrote Erich Neumann in a richly documented study, The Great Mother, "have accustomed us to look upon the male god as a creator . . . But the original, overlaid stratum knows of a female creative being." Neumann assumes for the whole region of the Mediterranean a universally adopted religion of the Great Mother goddess around 4000 B.C.E., which was revived around 2000 B.C.E. and spread through the whole of the then known world. In this religion the Great Goddess was worshipped as creator, as Lady of men, beasts, and plants, as liberator and as as symbol of transcendent spiritual transformation.

The Indus civilization also belongs to that tradition in which the cult of the Great Goddess was prominent. Numerous terracotta figurines have been found: images of The Mother Goddess of the same kind that are still worshipped in Indian villages today....

The connections between Saktism, Mohenjo-Daro civilization, and Mediterranean fertility cults seem to be preserved even in the name of the Great Mother: "Uma for her peculiar name, her association with a mountain and her mount, a lion, seems to be originally the same as the Babylonian Ummu or Umma, the Arcadian Ummi, the Dravidian Umma, and the Skythian Ommo, which are all mother goddesses." The name Durga seems to be traceable to Truqas, a diety mentioned in the Lydian inscriptions of Asia Minor. There is a common mythology of this Great Mother: she was the first being in existence, a Virgin. Spontaneously she conceived a son, who became her consort in divinity. With her son-consort she became mother of the gods and all life. Therefore we find the Goddess being worshipped both as Virgin and Mother."
                                                                           

"The question remains as to whether some kind of spiritual evolution is in progress, whether large amounts of people gradually taking up meditation and other forms of inner practice will create a critical mass of global enlightenment, or whether we will continue in what could be called the Brazilian rain forest mode. In the past, this theory goes, a small number of mystics, ascetics, monastics, wandering mendicants, and other followers of the Perennial Philosophy were capable of providing the spiritual oxygen that helped the rest of the world to breathe and that sustained the mainstream practice of religion with all its surface anomalies. These days it seems increasingly questionable whether this approach will be sufficient to redeem a crippled planet; on the whole, the evolutionary theory makes more sense. But how long will it take? The Bolivian visionary Oscar Ichazo said some years ago, "In the past eras the mystical trip was an individual matter, or at least a matter of small groups, but no longer. This is what is new in human history. Everybody can now achieve a higher degree of consciousness... . The vision of humanity as one enormous family, one objective tribe, may once have been utopian. Now it is a practical necessity." "       
                                                                           

"Great Mother Goddess

Great Mother Goddess, in ancient Middle Eastern religions, mother goddess, the great symbol of the earth's fertility. She was worshipped under many names and attributes. Similar figures have been known in every part of the world. Essentially she was represented as the creative force in all nature, the mother of all things, responsible particularly for the periodic renewal of life. The later forms of her cult involved the worship of a male deity, variously considered her son, lover, or both (e.g., Adonis, Attis, and Osiris), whose death and resurrection symbolized the regenerative powers of the earth (see fertility rites). Although the Great Mother was the dominant figure in ancient Middle Eastern religions, she was also worshiped in Greece, Rome, and W Asia. In Phrygia and Lydia she was known as Cybele; among the Babylonians and Assyrians she was identified as Ishtar; in Syria and Palestine she appeared as Astarte; among the Egyptians she was called Isis; in Greece she was variously worshiped as Gaea, Hera, Rhea, Aphrodite, and Demeter; and in Rome she was identified as Maia, Ops, Tellus, and Ceres. Even this listing, however, is by no means complete. Many attributes of the Virgin Mary make her the Christian equivalent of the Great Mother, particularly in her great beneficence, in her double image as mother and virgin, and in her son, who is God and who dies and is resurrected.”       
                                                                           

"The worship of a mother goddess as the source of life and fertility has prehistoric roots, but the transformation of that deity into a Great goddess of cosmic powers was achieved with the composition of the Devi Mahatmya (Glory of the goddess), a text of the fifth to sixth century, when worship of the female principle took on dramatic new dimensions. The goddess is not only the mysterious source of life, she is the very soil, all-creating and all consuming.

Kali makes her 'official' debut in the Devi-Mahatmya, where she is said to have emanated from the brow of Goddess Durga (slayer of demons) during one of the battles between the divine and anti-divine forces. Etymologically Durga's name means "Beyond Reach". She is thus an echo of the woman warrior's fierce virginal autonomy. In this context Kali is considered the 'forceful' form of the great goddess Durga."       
                                                                           

"The Mother

The aspect of The Mother Goddess is probably the most widely known and most widely envisioned in most cultures. Because the Earth nourishes and replenishes us, most goddess cultures did pay reverence to the Earth as the Mother, and therefore the Goddesses that are most prominent and about whom stories are most prolific are the goddesses that are the representation of the Mother.

She is, in virtually every aspect, a divine or celestial representation of our earthly mothers. Everyone has an earthly mother, or at least did at one point, so we readily understand the relationship between mother and child. The Mother is the protector, the care-giver, the kisser of wounds, and the disciplinarian. The Divine Mother is no different.

Many of the most ancient goddess figures that archeology has uncovered are goddesses depicted as round, pregnant women. They feature large breasts and full, meaty hips. Some archeologists (patriarchal, close minded fellows, to be sure) have written these goddess figures off as nothing more than prehistoric "porn" figures. However, the generally accepted opinion is that these figures, found in such places as France, modern day Turkey, and Egypt, are actually representations of a mother goddess. There is some speculation that perhaps these figures are not goddesses at all, but rather figures used in fertility rites to enable women to conceive children. This too is a possibility, but when combined with other information that we have (such as other evidence of prehistoric goddess worship, and the fact that the connection between sex and pregnancy was not made until much later than the dates associated with these figures) leads most scholars to believe that these statues are indeed goddess representations....

Like earthly mothers, the Goddess is fiercely protective of her children, and in order to provide that protection she will often don the face of the warrior. The Warrior Goddess most probably gained popularity among people who had begun to adopt a more patriarchal (or at least patrifocal) structure. It might be presumptuous to say that matrifocal cultures were not particularly warlike, but it is safe to say that patriarchal cultures were more so. In either case, the warrior Goddess did become popular. In this aspect she is Amazon, fierce and strong, and able to take on any man to protect what needs protection."       
                                                                           

"The second aspect of the Goddess is that of Mother. As previously stated among her names by which she is called are the Great Mother and Mother Nature which signifies her worshipers believe her to be The Mother, creator and life-giver to all of nature and to every thing within.

This at first may seem confusing to many within the Christian Age where the Father God is claimed to be the creator. What many are not aware of, but more are becoming so, is that the world passed through a matriarchal age before the present patriarchal one. There is amble archaeological, historical and anthropological evidence of this. The previously mentioned findings of numerous female figurines and drawings in many locations supports the fact that during such ancient times the female was very honored. The depictions self-fertilization and women giving birth states the Goddess has been very honored for motherhood....

In The Sacred Book one reads: 

...(She is)...the image of the invisible, virginal, perfect spirit... She became
The Mother of everything, for she existed before them all, The Mother-father [matropater]...

In the Gospel to the Hebrews, Jesus speaks of "my Mother, the Spirit." Again, in the Gospel of Thomas "Jesus contrasts his earthly parents, Mary and Joseph, with his divine Father—the Father of Truth—and his divine Mother, the Holy Spirit." And, in the Gospel of Philip, "whoever becomes a Christian gains 'both father and mother' for the Spirit (rurah) is 'Mother of many.' ... 

Many men have expressed the need to return to the Goddess, indicating that this is not only a woman's search or desire. "English therapist John Rowan believes that every man in Western culture also needs this vital connection to the vital female principle in nature and urges men to turn to the Goddess. In this way men will be able to relate to human women on more equal terms, not fearful of resentful of female power. Perhaps this is how it was in prehistoric times when men and women coexisted peacefully under the hegemony of the Goddess."

To many men in Neo-paganism and witchcraft sexism seems absurd and trifling. If all men were honest they would admit that they would not be here if it were not for their biological mothers. Sexism immediately disappears when this fact is agreed to. All human beings are sexual, and sexuality propagated, although at times it would seem the Christian Church would have liked to dismiss this fact completely. But, the fact cannot be dismissed because, again, according to Jung this biological fact is also imprinted as the archetypes of anima and animus upon the human unconscious. They represent the feminine side of man and the masculine side of woman. As behavioral regulators they as most important; for with out them men and women could not coexist. When the two unconscious elements are balanced harmony exists, but when there is an unbalanced over masculinity or femininity is exerted."       
                                                                           

"The Archetypal Mother/the Great Goddess still holds a prime place in the collective Hindu psyche as well as in Hindu rituals; a phenomenon, more obviously ascribable to the Harappan than to the Vedic cultural traits. There is also enough corroborative evidence to surmise that women did enjoy high social esteem in the capacity of priestesses and high priestesses (Atre 1987).

The decline of the Harappan Civilization left the Harappan people scattered over a large area of the Indian subcontinent with a gradually fading identity and we have no way to measure the traces they might have left of their socio-religious life. These elements did not totally disappear. On the contrary, they are thought to have been subtly modified and synthesized to suit the Brahmanic pattern, which are represented by some of the prominent traits in the cultic practices of various gods and goddesses belonging to many Hindu sects.

The same elements in their pristine form can also be observed to be present in the practices associated with folk cults within the fold of Hinduism as well as non-Hindu tribal cults. These cults are centered mainly around the regional or village deities of tutelary nature. The examples are far too many and obvious to be enumerated here. The religiosity infused in the ritualistic scenario therein is far removed from the religion of the Rigveda."       
                                                                           

"Does anyone still believe in a Goddess?

Yes, many cultures around the world have never stopped worshipping Goddesses. The Hindus of India have a pantheon of many Goddesses and Gods. Today in Japan the great Sun Goddess, Amaterasu is honored as the Divine Mother of the Japanese people. The Goddess of Mercy, Kwan Yin (Quan Yin) has many devotees in China. The Inuit people (Eskimos) still honor the OceanMother Sedna. In South America Ijemanja (Yemaya) the Sea Mother-Goddess is honored with huge public processionals on January 1st each year. In Africa, the Orishas are honored as Gods and Goddesses. Modern Jewish tradition still honors the Shekhina and millions of Catholics honor the Virgin Mary as a Goddess. In the United States and other western countries, for the past twenty-five or thirty years there has been rapidly growing interest in Goddess religion. Many Christian traditions like Unity, have begun to incorporated the Goddess into their faith. The Unity blessing includes a Mother-Father-God. There are also many groups that honor the various forms of the Goddess. Still other traditions honor the Goddess, along with a God."       
                                                                           

"Mother goddess It is believed that the foremost amongst the Sindhu pantheons was The Mother Goddess. A large number of terracotta female figures found in the sites represent Mother Goddess. Some historians are of the view that the range of the cult of The Mother Goddess once extended from Indus to Nile. Because a number of such figures have also been recovered from Kulli culture in South Baluchistan and Zhob Valley in the North. According to Sir John Marshall, "in no country the worship of the divine mother is so deep rooted and universal as in Bharat, where she became the prototype of the cosmic energy. (prakriti) and the counter part of the cosmic soul (purusha)

Critics point out that the idea of The Mother Goddess or Earth Goddess was well known to Vedic Aryans. To begin with it appears in the form of Prithvi but later on it is called Aditi, Prakriti, Durga, Gauri etc."       
                                                                           

"The concept of the Great Mother belongs to the field of comparative religion and embraces widely varying types of mother-goddess. The concept itself is of no immediate concern to psychology, because the image of a Great Mother in this form is rarely encountered in practice, and then only under very special conditions. The symbol is an obviously a derivative of the mother archetype. If we venture to investigate the background of the Great Mother image from the standpoint of psychology, then The Mother archetype, as the more inclusive of the two, must form the basis of our discussion."       
                                                                           

"Goddess worship is among the original forms of human religious expression, and it is re-arising today among modern women and men who understand the importance of the feminine in symbol and reality. Thomas Cleary and Sartaz Aziz show how the divine feminine has never really disappeared from religion—in spite of its suppression by patriarchal culture. Whether conceptualized as divine person, saint, mythic figure, archetype, or abstract principle, the Divine Feminine inevitably arises, manifesting in hidden ways, as well as obvious ones. Some examples:

Hinduism: Source of literally thousands of goddesses, including Devi, Maya, and Kali.

Taoism: Characterized by the importance of the feminine yang principle (counterpart to the masculine yin) and by reverence for the Mysterious Female.

Buddhism: Where the feminine is found in the supreme symbols of compassion, perfect intuition, absolute truth: the Bodhisattva Kuan-yin, or Kannon.

Sufism: In which an inner tradition of feminine spirituality and reverence for women was preserved within the outwardly male-centered Islamic milieu."    
                                                                           

"Durga's name literally means "Beyond Reach". This is an echo of the woman warrior's fierce, virginal autonomy. In fact many of the figures associated with her are officially virgin. This is not meant in the limiting sense understood by the patriarchal order, but rather in Esther Harding's sense: she is "one-in-herself", or as Nor Hall puts it, "Belonging-to-no-man". As Harding further observed of 'The Virgin Goddess': 'Her divine power does not depend on her relation to a husband-god, and thus her actions are not dependent on the need to conciliate such a one or to accord with his qualities and attitudes. For she bears her identity through her own right.'

The disappearance of Durga from the battlefield after the victory over aggression expressed one of the deepest truths of the episode, for the feminine action in the cosmic drama is without retentive, ego-seeking ambition....

Indeed The Mother Goddess, it is believed, controls the fate of all. But even though she makes her appearance when the male deities conglomerate their respective energies, she is, in fact, not 'created' by them. All her incarnations are the result of her will to be in the world for the benefit of mankind; she chooses when and how to effect her lilas (play of the Goddess in the world)."       
                                                                           

"It should be remembered that the gods/goddess of Vedic myths and hymns, like those in Homeric Greece represented a superhuman/cosmic order, and were the recipients of prayers, rituals, and sacrifices. (21) In India, however, the notion of the gods/goddess as separate and different deities representing the manifold aspects of the universe developed into an understanding of the one deity that subsumed the various aspects of polytheistic deities into a comprehensive unity. The personification of Justice as a separate deity does not exist in early Vedic mythology. Justice is seen as a function within the role and symbolism of the Great Mother traditions.

The early pre-history of India corresponds in many ways with that of ancient Greece, where, again, the Aryans ("the people of sky") invaded the early matriarchal gynocentric culture of the Dravidians which can be traced back as early as 3,000 B.C. Here we can see the similarities in terms of their matriarchal beliefs and rituals in their Paleolithic caves and mounds. The earliest Great Mother cults of Asia were earth-centered, focusing on fertility and life-giving energy. Their rituals included celebrations of nature and the offering of plants and herbs to the source of creation. With the conquest of the Aryans, the religious focus shifted from that which was immanent in nature to the transcendent sky gods with rituals involving fire and smoke. The early Goddess religions attempted to assimilate the patriarchal gods into their culture and, for some time after the initial invasion, the Goddess was worshipped as one of the primary deities. Yet, as was the situation in ancient Greece, this adaptation soon gave way to the superimposition of patriarchal gods and conception of Brahman as ultimate reality."       
                                                                           

"Shakti means "creative energy," and Shăktism means "Doctrine of the Creative Energy." Shăktism venerates the Ultimate Reality as the Divine Mother-Shakti or Devi-of the universe. Archeologists have recovered thousands of female statuettes at the Mehrgarh village in India, which indicate that Shakti worship existed in India as far back as 5500 BCE. There are references to the female deities in the Rig Veda, including a popular Hymn to the Divine Mother (Devî-sűkta, X.125), which holds special sanctity to Hindus in general and Shăktas (the followers of Shăktism) in particular.

Shăktism visualizes the Ultimate Reality as having two aspects, transcendent and immanent. Shiva is the transcendent aspect, the supreme cosmic consciousness, and Shakti is the supreme creative energy. Shiva and Shakti are God and God's creative energy inseparably connected. Metaphorically, Shiva and Shakti are an inseparable divine couple, representing the male and female principle in creation.

Shăktism greatly resembles Shaivism, but Shiva is considered solely transcendent and is not worshipped. Like Shaivism, the goal of Shăktism is to unite with Shiva. Such unity is possible only with the grace of the Divine Mother, Who unfolds as icchă shakti (the power of desire, will and love), kriyă shakti (the power of action), and j—ană shakti (the power of knowledge and wisdom). According to the Tantra philosophy, the spiritual center at the crown of the head (sahasrăra chakra) is the abode of Shiva. Likewise, the spiritual center at the base of the spine (műlădhăra) is the abode of shakti. Normally shakti is latent in the műlădhăra. Through a spiritual discipline, shakti is awakened and it rises through the spine and unites with Shiva in the sahasrăra. When this energy transformation occurs, the individual attains cosmic consciousness and is said to have realized the Self.

within Shăktism, Shiva is the unmanifest Absolute and Shakti is the Divine Mother of the manifest creation. The Divine Mother is worshipped in both the fierce and benign forms. The fierce forms of Goddess include Kălî, Durgă, Chandî, Chamundî, Bhadrakălî and Bhairavî. The benign forms of Goddess include Umă, Gaurî, Ambikă, Părvatî, Maheshvarî, Lalită, Lakshmî, Saraswatî and Annapűrnă."       
                                                                           

"Since this primordial power of the ultimate is the creatrix of everything we experience, She is worshipped as Mother from time immemorial. In fact Sakti worship in India is as old as man...

In Vedic times mother goddess was worshipped as Usus and Aranyani in Rgveda and as Sri Gayatri in Yajurveda and Durga in other Vedas and in Upanishads as Uma and Hymavathi... . The epic Ramayana of Valmiki has said to be embedded in it Sri Gayatri of 24 letters in the 24 thousand verses of the epic. In Puranas, Samhitas, Agamas and in the Tantras She was worshipped as Lalita, Sri Mahakali, Sri Tripura Sundari and Sri Raja Rajeswari. Thus from the pre-historic times (2000 BC) up to date there is an unbroken tradition of the Godhead being worshipped as Mother for more than 4500 years. Even today it is rare to find a Hindu home where She is not worshipped as Sri Durga, Laxmi, Kali, or Saraswati or at least as a Gramadevata, that is, a small village deity....

She is worshipped with the object of reaching and realising higher and higher levels of consciousness and knowledge with the offerings of flowers, milk, honey and fruits. She is Mahasaraswati aspect of Sakti who by presenting to the Sadhaka the knowledge of the ultimate reality — Atmajnana, sheds his fear and leads him to self-realisation."