Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies Volume 8 Article 9 January 1995 Book Review: "Mother of the Universe: Visions of the Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment" Arti Dand Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/jhcs Part of the Religion Commons Recommended Citation Dand, Arti (1995) "Book Review: "Mother of the Universe: Visions of the Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment"," Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies: Vol. 8, Article 9. Available at: https://doi.org/10.7825/2164-6279.1114 The Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies is a publication of the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies. The digital version is made available by Digital Commons @ Butler University. For questions about the Journal or the Society, please contact [email protected]. For more information about Digital Commons @ Butler University, please contact [email protected]. Dand: Book Review: "Mother of the Universe: Visions of the Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment" Book Reviews 43 the context of enculteration in India. The further research. The poet Bharati's works attempt is praiseworthy, where the need for are very well analysed and documented - a prophetic critique is admitted. But the probably for the first time from this change of metaphors cannot happen in a perspective. It is interesting to mention that vacuum. First of all the socio-cultural Bharati himself, a Hindu poet, composed a factors that condition the thinking pattern of poem on Jesus Christ, which is quite a believing community are to be examined significant while comparing Christian and to see whether such a change of metaphors Hindu images of God as feminine. The is feasible. That is not done, since the scope poem concludes thus: of the book is limited to convergence and Magdalene is the Eternal Feminine, divergence in the vocabulary and images Jesus Christ is unending dharma, designating God in both the traditions. Draw we close to the symbol; Secondly, one has to go into the theological look, an inner meaning glows. implications of these metaphors before (Cf. Prema Nandakumar's article in this introducing feminine images of God into the volume.) Christian tradition patterned on the Hindu model. That is not done either. Anand Amaladass But the book serves as a good source for Madras Mother of the Universe: Visions of the Goddess and Tantric Hymns of Enlightenment. Lex Hixon. London: Quest Books, 1994, xiv+223 pp. LEX HIXON'S BOOK Mother of the about language and meaning" (p.xi) Universe can loosely be called a (whatever that may mean). "reworking" of the reflections and songs of Mother of the Universe can best be the eighteenth-century Bengali Mystic situated in the larger schema of Goddess Ramprasad Sen. Ramprasad was a poet and literature if one reads the preface to the saint, famous in Bengal for his devotion to book carefully. There Hixon confides that he the great goddess of Hinduism. Hixon's was attracted to the Hindu Goddess tradition poems are not based on the original Bengali by what he feels is the natural power of the of the poet, but rather on a translation of feminine metaphor, and received a formal them, rendered into English by Judanath initiation at the hands of Swami Sinha. Hixon has then revised and expanded Nikhilananda, a prominent disciple of them, with the aim of explicating Ramakrishna and Sarada Devi. He perceives Ramprasad's verse, with reference to his himself as a committed devotee of Mother own experiences. In this sense, Hixon says, Kali, who can now "approach and envision "rather than ... scholarly footnotes, the the Great Goddess naturally, as if I had been expanded poems themselves contain raised since childhood in the Divine Mother commentary on the esoteric Mother Wisdom tradition of Bengal" (p.xi). His book, as a of India" (p. xii). The resulting result, is clearly a religious exercise, infused "contemplative visions" then are designed with devotional purpose, and his hopes for especially for the English reader who may it are quite ambitious. He says, "This book appreciate Hixon's "Western sensibility can serve as a non-doctrinal, non-official scripture of the Goddess" (p.xi), and his Published by Digital Commons @ Butler University, 1995 1 Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, Vol. 8 [1995], Art. 9 44 Book Reviews recommendation is that the poems, as the poems' "startling imagery and naked "scriptural manifestation", be read each day, honesty belong to Ramprasad. My one at a time, and assimilated into one's expansions have added nothing that diverges daily life. from his spirit" (p.xii), one is given no Hixon's work is a personal meditation indication whatsoever as to where on the divine Mother, which bases itself on Ramprasad left off, and where Hixon's the skeletal work of Ramprasad Sen. This in contemplative commentary begins. itself is not objectionable. All beings are Similarly, Hixon is sometimes so indulgent entitled to such meditations, and seen from to mystical language that one sometimes this perspective, the poems are quite becomes quite lost in a quagmire of sensitively reworked. As a scholarly profundity. Mother of the Universe, in short, enterprise, however, the book is highly is best read as a devotional work, suited for inadequate. It is riddled with generalizations like-minded devotees. To read it with any and absolutist statements, too many to even other aim is to be disappointed. mention. There is an utter lack of self­ consciousness about scholarly method. For Arti Dand example, even though Hixon assures us that McGill University Theo-Monistic Mysticism: A Hindu-Christian Comparison. Michael Stoeber. New York: St Martin's Press, 1994, 135 pp. THEO-MONISTIC MYSTICISM is a subject to a variety of socio-religious thoughtful and challenging study which interpretations. Stoeber is critical of the seeks a middle path between two influential essentialist position for its disregard of vital interpretations of mystical experiences. The differences between monistic experiences, constructivist interpreters, represented here which involve a loss of duality and exclude by John Hick, admit that mystical personal experience, and theistic experiences are different but argue that the experiences, which encounter the Real as differences are explicable by reference to the dynamic and where "some sense of socio-religious framework which the different~ating self-identity is maintained by particular mystic brings to her experience. the participants" (p.24). These important Stoeber is critical of this school for its differences are illustrated by analysis of the inability to account for the transmission of writings of Meister Eckhart and Jan Van new religious knowledge and insight through Ruusbroec. mystical experience, since the information The study of these two mystics leads which the mystic receives is entirely Stoeber to propose a third experiential dependent on the prior conceptual possibility which he calls theo-monistic framework. In addition, the constructivist mysticism. He calls it a theo-monistic thesis cannot adequately account for mystic experience "because although it involves an heresy or for the similarities in mystical impersonal monistic realization, it issues in experiences where there are no shared socio­ a perspective that also reflects an active, religious factors. creative, and personal Real" (p.35). Theo­ The essentialist school, represented by monistic mysticism avoids the extremes of interpreters like Evelyn Underhill, W. T. the constructivist and essentialist schools by Stace and Ninian Smart, see mystical positing that mystical experiences differ and experience as the same everywhere, but that these differences cannot be explained https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/jhcs/vol8/iss1/9 DOI: 10.7825/2164-6279.1114 2.