The shortest distance to the Mother is within yourself.

[Guest guest]

THE MOTHER GODDESS

Anne Lowenkopf

 

Anne Lowenkopf is the author of American Indian Religions, The

Hasidim: Mystical Adventures and Ecstatics, and several other

nonfiction books. This article originally appeared in Living Wisdom:

Vedanta in the West. She teaches writing in Santa Barbara,

California.

 

 

We catch the Godhead much as we catch light. The very structures

that enable us to experience both limit how much of each we can

experience. Since we catch God with our human hearts and intellect

and will, since we reach out to the Godhead because of our human

need and desire, it is not surprising that what we catch—our

visions of God—have both points of similarity and points of

difference.

 

We experience anything—everything—through ourselves. It is

all we have to experience with. And so, not surprisingly because we

humans are gendered life forms, often our experience of the Godhead

has gender.

 

God the Father is familiar to those of us who have grown up in the

Judeo-Christian tradition; round the globe and in the past various

peoples have perceived and worshiped father gods and other male

deities in love and terror, hope and dread.

 

Though no statistic count that I know of exists, abundant evidence

makes it safe to estimate that we humans have " caught " goddesses as

often as gods. Some of these goddesses like the Navaho's Spider

Woman and the ancient Greek's Athena have specific functions: you

would not go to Athena for aid in childbirth nor to Spider Woman for

strength in warding off enemies.

 

But some of us have caught a Mother Goddess who is all-encompassing,

beyond role: " I am all alone in the world here. Who else is there

besides me? See these goddesses who are but my own powers entering

into my own self! " a flat announcement of monotheism from the Great

Goddess herself in the famous Sanskrit hymn Devi Mahatmyam, Glory of

the Divine Mother. Again and again the Devi (Goddess) of the Devi

Mahatmyam is described as the one without another: ultimately no

duality of any kind exists, no division between matter and spirit,

no division between created and creator. The Great Goddess contains

within herself not only all other deities but existence itself. Her

children and all things reside within her, are of her substance, and

she indwells inside them. The shortest distance to the Mother is

within yourself.

 

This vision of the Mother is exciting attention today when for the

first time in history so many young adults live alone, outside

family and organized peer groups. As the constrictions of

paternalism break down and are replaced by the bewilderments of

choice and lack of structure, the concept of a Mother deity who all

alone creates and sustains begins to feel right; young people are

feeling they can understand such a deity and such a deity can

understand them. A nexus of empathy radiates support, comfort, and

understanding in a two-way flow.

 

This concept of the Mother first attracted me as a young woman who

was rebelling against the notion of being born in the need of

redemption for the actions of others. I still remember the thrill of

excitement at my discovery of a Goddess who did not punish the

created for what went wrong in her creation, who took the heat for

evil and death and yet was untouched by both.

 

Empathy for a deity who exists alone and copes alone grows stronger

as more and more young people have been raised by single parents,

and more are coping with the difficulties of being a single parent.

The Devi of the Devi Mahatmyam could and did act as a warrior queen

even though she was the monotheistic deity. Its hymns are part of an

exciting story in which the Goddess is approached by gods who are

being harassed by bandits and neighbors, and she agrees to help them

fight off their enemies. No question of damnation and eternal

punishment here but of will against will, skill against skill, with

the Devi, as one who plays chess with herself, taking all the parts.

 

The layering of abstract philosophy and dramatic personification is

molded into the story itself. Its monotheistic concepts are

unwavering even while the battles and their equipment are described

with all the ferocious glee which you would expect from a poet of

raiding peoples. And the Goddess, though described as young and

beautiful and caring, was savage and intent when she threw herself

into battle.

 

An American brought up in the climate of Victorian notions of

maternal behavior asked a contemporary devotee of the Devi how he

could be drawn to such a fierce deity and was told, " Ah, but you

need a strong mother who will go to battle for you when you are in

trouble. " Single parents who find themselves battling for survival

in their work worlds, battling traffic to get home at the end of the

day, battling to feed their kids and educate their kids and keep

their house reasonably sane resonate to the concept that one can be

both and at the same time nourisher and warrior.

 

The Mahatmyam (sometimes called The Chandi), first recorded in

writing around 600 A.D., is by no means the oldest of hymns. But the

concept of the Great Mother is ancient indeed. Anthropologists

believe a vision of a Mother Goddess to have emerged in neolithic

times as early as 7000 B.C. and that her worship extended in a vast

area, at the very least a great arc stretching from parts of Africa

northward to Lithuania and westward to Crete and Greece. Some make a

case that pushes the range of her worship into Italy and Spain and

as far west as the British Isles and Ireland.

 

Stone carvings and pottery figures can resist time, but ideas do not

fossilize. So there is much debate among academics as to exactly

what beliefs inspired those stone and pottery figures of female

deities. Did the neolithic people worship a supremely monotheistic

Goddess like that extolled in the Mahatmyam, or a God the Mother who

holds the whole world in her hands, or was she a specialized deity

in charge of childbirth and the abundance of the foods that sustain

human life? Did the artifacts of female deities our archaeologists

have found all belong to one related Goddess worship, as all the

forms of Christianity today are related and can be traced back to a

single source, or did those artifacts belong to separate and

unrelated visions that were caught by mystics in different tribes?

Academicians argue the point, and will continue to, because the

evidence is scanty and mute.

 

Are the visions those mystics " caught " real? Is there an actual

Mother Goddess, or any deity in human form and personality? Asking

whether the Mother Goddess is real is very much like asking whether

red is " real. " We have discovered that red is a particular vibration

of light and what we call light is waves made up of particles, and

that our experience of them is their impact on our sensory apparatus

together with the subsequent processing of the coded messages of

those impacts by our central nervous system. We are not seeing

particles and waves as such, we see red. But that experience—

red—works for us; it helps structure our behavior; we react to it

emotionally.

 

We cannot truly know whether my experience is the same as your

experience of what I call red. But whatever we experience is similar

enough so that once we agree on terminology—red, for

example—if I ask for something of that color what you bring back

is more likely than not going to be acceptable to me. The same seems

to be true of mystical experience. Details differ from culture to

culture, and they shift from age to age as peoples' own customs and

understanding shift. But within the details a central core of

experience is startlingly similar.

 

I can ask a Buddhist, an American Indian, a Jew, a Christian, a

Muslim to bring me back an experience of God, and what they bring

back meets my needs. Look at Gladys A. Reichard's description of the

Navaho's Changing Woman: " She is the mystery of reproduction of life

springing from nothing, of the last hope of the world, a riddle

perpetually solved and perennially springing up anew. . . . " How

similar to this description from the Devi Mahatmyam: " You are the

origin of all the worlds! . . . You are incomprehensible even to

Vishnu, Shiva, and others! You are the resort of all! This entire

world is composed of an infinitesimal portion of yourself! You are

verily the supreme primordial Prakriti (nature, creator)

untransformed. " China Galland in her book Longing for Darkness tells

of turning her back on her Catholic origins to search for the

Tibetan Buddhist black Mother Goddess Tara only to find herself as

part of that search walking through the fields of Poland in

pilgrimage to the Black Madonna. Every mystic who has experienced

the Godhead, personally, intensely, unmistakably, assures us that

the experience is real and open to anyone who truly reaches for it.

Ramakrishna, that man of God who was the inspiration for the

Ramakrishna Order of monastics, replied when asked if he had seen

God, " As clearly as I see you now. "

 

What Ramakrishna saw so clearly was often a goddess, the Great

Goddess, the Mother of the universe. He called her by more than a

dozen names as if to demonstrate that the particulars of dogma and

tradition were of little importance compared with the vision itself.

(Ramakrishna made this same point in other ways, practicing the

disciplines of many different religions and catching God with each

of them.)

 

Catching sight of the Goddess may not come easily. For years

Ramakrishna cried after her—a child wailing for his mother. And

when he first caught her it was as a mother who gave him comfort,

affection, attention, guidance. Later he discovered that " his "

Mother was indeed that monotheistic deity who creates the universe

and holds it within her being, and yet resides within living beings

and objects.

 

The Devi of the Devi Mahatmyam came to us in Sanskrit that was

written by Aryan peoples, who worshiped masculine deities. They had

poured into India from the north, over the mountains, conquering,

and eventually living off, the dark peoples who grew crops there.

The Devi belonged not to the invaders but to the growers of crops.

 

Mystics from each of these two traditions report they have glimpsed

behind the veil of their deities' human forms and personalities, a

formless impersonal Godhead. Aryan mystics called that Godhead

Brahman. Another name is Satchidananda, which is a linking up of

three Sanskrit words meaning Existence-Knowledge-Bliss that

describes as nearly as possible their understanding of Brahman. And

similarly some followers of the Devi have encountered behind the

Mother's form and personality, a formless, impersonal Godhead they

named Shakti.

 

Descriptions of Shakti and Brahman are exactly the same—except in

one particular. Brahman is eternal and unchanging while Shakti is

eternal and always changing. The two actually are one, Ramakrishna

said, " like fire and its power to burn. " According to East Indian

cosmology Shakti's creative force spews out and develops this

universe, which after an " age " draws back into itself to rest in the

blissful, unchanging being of Brahman, only to spew out again

through Shakti's restless power. This model is not so different from

the theoretical model, proposed by some contemporary physicists,

which depicts the universe exploding from a tiny and

incomprehensibly dense core of existence to expand farther and

farther until finally, drawn by gravitational pull, it falls back

upon itself into a tiny and incomprehensibly dense core of

existence, which will once again explode and expand.

 

And come to that, descriptions of Shakti/Brahman are uncannily

similar to contemporary physicists' descriptions of the force field

which creates and comprises all existence.

 

I find it comforting to learn that science, which I absorbed along

with my mother's milk, and the mystics I go to for help in coping

with myself and my world are, at core, in agreement. Nevertheless

force fields, waves, and particles, though interesting, are

abstractions. But the color red, however ultimately unreal, hits my

perceptual and emotional self with mood-changing, behavior-altering

impact. Similarly I find strength and comfort in catching glimpses

of a Mother with a human face and responses reminiscent of my own

human passions.

 

Some of the visions we humans catch in mystical experience may not

be the ultimate reality of the Godhead, whether we experience a

Mother Goddess or a God the Father or some other deity. Perhaps we

lack the physiological equipment to experience that ultimate

reality. Certainly catching any mystical experience however

anthropomorphized or astigmatic takes time and effort and desire

enough to convert to laserlike focus of will.

 

Ramakrishna, who had caught God by using the disciplines of all the

various religious traditions available to him, spoke in his

conversations interchangeably of Shakti and Brahman, Shiva and Durga.

 

Brahman is without change; Shakti, the creative energy, is ever

changing. Both are one: in Ramakrishna's phrase, fire and its power

to burn, or as we put it, two sides of the same coin. Ramakrishna

knew from his own experience that all the different forms of God

were different perspectives of the one unchanging, ever-changing,

formless Godhead.

 

But Ramakrishna spoke most frequently of Mother, because this was

the perspective that he most cherished. And he had no more doubts

about the reality of that perspective than you and I have of the

reality of the color red.

 

Ramakrishna's experience and the experiences of other mystics assure

us that many of the perspectives of the Godhead open up to a Mother

Goddess who functions in the lives of her devotees as protector and

companion and mentor. What is important for us today is that the

ability to " catch " the Great Goddess for ourselves in our own vision

is open to us if we want to reach for it.

 

 

THE MOTHER GODDESS

http://www.vedanta.org/reading/monthly/articles/2001/10.mother_goddes

s.html