During a nine-day period every autumn, Hindus in India and throughout the world worship the Great Goddess, Durgā--the formidable deity who is loved like a mother. One of the most dramatic and popular of these celebrations is the Durgā Pūjā, a rite noted for its visual pageantry, ritual complexity, and communal participation. In this book, Hillary Peter Rodrigues describes the Bengali style of Durgā Pūjā practiced in the sacred city of Banaras from beginning to end. A romanization of the Sanskrit litany is included along with an English translation. In addition to the liturgical description, Rodrigues provides information on the rite's component elements and mythic aspects. There are interpretive sections on puja, the Great Goddess, women's roles in the ritual, and the socio-cultural functions of the ritual. Rodrigues maintains that the Durgā Pūjā is a rite of cosmic rejuvenation, of empowerment at both the personal and social levels, and a rite that orchestrates manifestations of the feminine, both Divine and human.

Explores the contemporary nature and the diverse narratives, rituals, and performances of the Navar?tri festival. Nine Nights of the Goddess explores the festival of Navarātri—alternatively called Navarātra, Mahānavamī, Durgā Pūjā, Dasarā, and/or Dassain—which lasts for nine nights and ends with a celebration called Vijayadaśamī, or "the tenth (day) of victory." Celebrated in both massive public venues and in small, private domestic spaces, Navarātri is one of the most important and ubiquitous festivals in South Asia and wherever South Asians have settled. These festivals share many elements, including the goddess, royal power, the killing of demons, and the worship of young girls and married women, but their interpretation and performance vary widely. This interdisciplinary collection of essays investigates Navarātri in its many manifestations and across historical periods, including celebrations in West Bengal, Odisha, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, and Nepal. Collectively, the essays consider the role of the festival's contextual specificity and continental ubiquity as a central component for understanding South Asian religious life, as well as how it shapes and is shaped by political patronage, economic development, and social status.

Following the lead of a "hermeneutics of surprise" the book identifies, indeed, surprising new material, and offers unexpected new insights essential to the debate on the position of goddesses and women in ancient India.

Now you can find more meaning and joy in your life, journey inward, find the divine, and become transformed, when you read The Goddess Path by Patricia Monaghan. The Goddess Path can be your guide to speed you on your spiritual quest. Think of this book as a signpost on your spiritual travels, designed to help you nurture your own connection to the goddess and share in her boundless wisdom. Call her into your life with beautiful and ancient invocations. Create your own rituals to honor the lessons she has to teach. As you ponder life-changing questions and venture on brave new experiments, you fan the divine spark into flame--and, in that fire, you are transformed. The Goddess Path includes myths, symbols, feast days, ancient invocations, and suggestions for connecting with the following goddesses for these purposes and more: Amaterasu for clarity Aphrodite for passion Artemis for protection Athena for strength Brigid for survival The Cailleach for power Demeter and Persephone for initiation Gaia for abundance Hathor for affection Hera for dignity Inanna for inner strength Isis for restorative love Kali for freedom Kuan-Yin for mercy The Maenads for ecstasy The Muses for inspiration Oshun for healing love Paivatar for release Pomona for joy Asule and Saules Meita for family health In The Goddess Path, Monaghan presents a means to work with the goddess, using ancient and modern techniques that will thrill and amaze you.

Devi, the Great Goddess of India is beautiful, beneficent, terrifying, all-powerful, and glorious. Ubiquitous in India's social and spiritual fabric, she has, over the millennia, been painted, sculpted, carved, and wrought from silver and bronze in a myriad of shapes and forms. Devi: The Great Goddess brings together one hundred and twenty of these diverse examples of Devi and a group of distinguished essayists who explore facets of Devi worship and tradition, including ritual, architecture, literature, history and contemporary issues such as feminism and gender politics. From a terra-cotta goddess figurine dating to 100 B.C. to "At the Hub of Things" (1987), a monumental contemporary sculpture by Anish Kapoor, to twentieth-century folk art figurines, the beauty and diversity of the art of the Great Goddess showcased here testify to her continual and powerful presence in the life of India. "India is a land of stories, " asserts Thomas Coburn, author of "The Threefold Vision of the Devi Mahatmya, " the principle sacred text devoted to worship of the Great Goddess. A land of stories, vibrant history, and extraordinary art, India is home to Devi, the Great Goddess, celebrated in this volume with stories, poems, scholarship, and lavish illustrations. The book will appeal to readers compelled by the exploration and interpretation of the art, religion, and history of India.

For as long as we have sought god, we have found the goddess. Ruling over the imaginations of humankind’s earliest agricultural civilizations, she played a critical spiritual role as a keeper of nature’s fertile powers and an assurance of the next sustaining harvest. In The Goddess, David Leeming and Christopher Fee take us all the way back into prehistory, tracing the goddess across vast spans of time to tell the epic story of the transformation of belief and what it says about who we are. Leeming and Fee use the goddess to gaze into the lives and souls of the people who worshipped her. They chart the development of traditional Western gender roles through an understanding of the transformation of concepts of the Goddess from her earliest roots in India and Iran to her more familiar faces in Ireland and Iceland. They examine the subordination of the goddess to the god as human civilizations became mobile and began to look upon masculine deities for assurances of survival in movement and battle. And they show how, despite this history, the goddess has remained alive in our spiritual imaginations, in figures such as the Christian Virgin Mother and, in contemporary times, the new-age resurrection of figures such as Gaia. The Goddess explores this central aspect of ancient spiritual thought as a window into human history and the deepest roots of our beliefs.