In Praise of the Goddess

Author:
Publisher: Nicolas-Hays, Inc.
ISBN: 0892546166
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 407

Book Description
About 16 centuries ago, an unknown Indian author or authors gathered together the diverse threads of already ancient traditions and wove them into a verbal tapestry that today is still the central text for worshippers of the Hindu Devi, the Divine Mother. This spiritual classic, the Devimahatmya, addresses the perennial questions of the nature of the universe, humankind, and divinity. How are they related, how do we live in a world torn between good and evil, and how do we find lasting satisfaction and inner peace? These questions and their answers form the substance of the Devimahatmya. Its narrative of a dispossessed king, a merchant betrayed by the family he loves, and a seer whose teaching leads beyond existential suffering sets the stage for a trilogy of myths concerning the all-powerful Divine Mother, Durga, and the fierce battles she wages against throngs of demonic foes. In these allegories, her adversaries represent our all-too-human impulses toward power, possessions, and pleasure. The battlefields symbolize the field of human consciousness on which our lives' dramas play out in joy and sorrow, in wisdom and folly. The Devimahatmya speaks to us across the ages of the experiences and beliefs of our ancient ancestors. We sense their enchantment at nature's bounty and their terror before its destructive fury, their recognition of the good and evil in the human heart, and their understanding that everything in our experience is the expression of a greater reality, personified as the Divine Mother.

Oya

Author: Judith Illsley Gleason
Publisher: Harper San Francisco
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
A celebration in folklore, mythology, music, and art of the African goddess Oya. This expanded edition of an underground classic (Shambhala, 1987) features new artwork, new chapter introductions, and songs with musical scores. The author of six books, Judith Gleason has traveled extensively to Africa and the Caribbean to research the ancient and contemporary Yoruba and Santeria traditions.

Devimahatmayam

Author: Devadatta Kālī
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788120829312
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
This translation combines Western scholarship with an insider's perspective, based on the author's 37 years of spiritual practice in the Hindu tradition.

In Praise of Adya Kali

Author: Aditi Devi
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1935387812
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Book Description
In Praise of Adya Kali details the goddess Kali, and her culture of devotion in West Bengal and South Asia. Different from most contemporary books about this Dark Goddess, this book offers a liturgy of worship—a spiritual practice, the Song of the Hundred Names of Adya Kali, that readers can use to cultivate a direct devotional relationship to Kali. In Praise of Adya Kali is also a context-setting guide, establishing this practice as a general orientation to life. Most compelling, the text of this liturgy and Commentaries contain an intimate revelation of how the goddess establishes herself in her devotees’ bodies and thus intervenes, by unconditional love and acceptance, in their lives. A lengthy Introduction, both scholarly and personal, describes the goddess and the possibilities that these prayers will offer. Aditi Devi guides us in how to build a shrine to Kali, various types of offerings to make to her, and suggests a schedule for how to use this liturgy with a long-term commitment over the course of 108 nights. “This Song of the Hundred Names is a powerful teaching that all forms are her forms,” the author notes. Male, female, or other gendered, readers are presented with the possibility to experience the depths of their own internal feminine energies, and thereby come into greater healing and wholeness, more readily able to express this often neglected part of ourselves.

Encountering the Goddess

Author: Thomas B. Coburn
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791404454
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
Coburn provides a fresh and careful translation from the Sanskrit of this fifteen-hundred-year-old text. Drawing on field work and literary evidence, he illuminates the process by which the Devī-Māhātmya has attracted a vast number of commentaries and has become the best known Goddess-text in modern India, deeply embedded in the ritual of Goddess worship (especially in Tantra). Coburn answers the following questions among others: Is this document "scripture?" How is it that this text mediates the presence of the Goddess? What can we make of contemporary emphasis on oral recitation of the text rather than study of its written form? One comes away from Coburn's work with a sense of the historical integrity or wholeness of an extremely important religious development centered on a "text." The interaction between the text and later philosophical and religious developments such as those found in Advaita Vedanta and Tantra is quite illuminating. Relevant here are the issues of the writtenness and orality/aurality of 'scripture,' and the various ways by which a deposit of holy words such as the Devī-Māhātmya becomes effective, powerful, and inspirational in the lives of those who hold it sacred.

Devi, the Mother-Goddess

Author: Devdutt Pattanaik
Publisher: Vakils, Feffer & Simons Pvt Ltd
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
Takes readers through Shakta imagery, philosophy, beliefs, customs, history, folklore and myth. This book includes tales of Adi-Maya-Shakti, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Parvati, Kali, Durga as well as several village-goddesses such as Kanyakumari, Vaishnav-devi, Bahucharmata and heroines such as Anasuya, Arundhati and Savitri.

Goddess Durga and Sacred Female Power

Author: Laura Amazzone
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761853138
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
"Amazzone's voice is strong and clear. Goddess Durga promises the transformation, empowerment, and dignity that is our birthright."--Marisa Tomei, Academy Award-winning actor.

Goddess of the Sea

Author: P. C. Cast
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440632006
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
New York Times bestselling author P. C. Cast presents the first novel in her Goddess Summoning series... Home alone on the night of her twenty-fifth birthday, Air Force Sergeant Christine Canady yearned for something to cure her loneliness. After drinking too much champagne, she recited a divine invocation to revive her humdrum life. But how was she to know the spell would actually work? When her plane crashes into the ocean, CC’s life changes forever. She awakens, bewildered, to find herself in a legendary time and place ruled by magic—and in the body of the mythic mermaid Undine. But danger lurks in the waters, ready to swallow CC whole. Taking pity on her, the goddess Gaea turns her into a damsel, that she might seek shelter on land. But when a dashing knight comes to CC’s rescue—a dream-come-true she should be falling for—she instead aches for the sea and the darkly sexy merman who’s stolen her heart…

Goddess of Light

Author: P. C. Cast
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440643652
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 434

Book Description
Ancient gods Artemis and Apollo get caught up in a game of love with a mortal woman in this Goddess Summoning novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author P. C. Cast... Tired of dating egomaniacs, interior designer Pamela Gray has nearly given up. She wants to be treated like a goddess—preferably by a god. As she whispers her wish, she unwittingly invokes the goddess Artemis, who has some tricks up her celestial sleeve… Twins Artemis and Apollo have been sent to the kingdom of Las Vegas to test their mettle. Their first assignment: make Pamela’s wish come true. So Artemis volunteers her golden brother. After all, who better than the handsome God of Light to bring love to this lonely woman? It might be a first, but here in Sin City, where life is a gamble, both god and mortal are about to bet on a high-stakes game of love...

The Goddess

Author: David Leeming
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780235380
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
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.