THE YOGI AND THE GODDESS by Nicholas F. Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho ([email protected]) International Journal of Hindu Studies 1:2 (June, 1997), pp. 265-87. Used and linked with permission from the editor This article became Chapter Six of Spiritual Titanism: Indian, Chinese, and Western Perspectives (State University of New York Press, 2000) For endnotes check either the article or the chapter Without you (Rādhā), I (Krishna) am inert and am always powerless. You have all powers (shakti) as your own form; come into my presence. —Brahmavaivarta Purāna. Brahmavaivarta Purāna, Rakriti-Khanda 55.87 [Pāravatī to Shiva]: You should consider who you are, and who nature is. How could you transcend nature? What you hear, what you eat, what you see— it’s all Nature. How could you be beyond Nature? —Skanda Purāna PROLOGUE: THE DANCING GODDESS In the beginning there were disembodied spirits suspended in space, unmoving and fixed in trance. Enter a dancing Goddess, creating solid ground wherever she steps. Her dynamic gestures cause the spirits to stir and gradually, one by one, they begin to dance with the Goddess. As they dance, they take on bodies, and they, too, begin to feel ground beneath their moving feet. Only one spirit named Ishvara the Lord remains fixed and undisturbed. The cosmic dance continues and becomes more complex, creative, and frenzied. Ishvara, however, begins to call the spirits back to their original state. He exhorts them to give up their embodied lives, which to him are sinful and degrading. One by one, the spirits disengage from the Goddess, throw off their bodies, and return to their static state of complete autonomy and isolation. Without partners the Goddess also falls into inactivity. The cosmic dance is finished and the evolution of the world ceases. INTRODUCTION In this chapter I entertain the thesis that Indian goddess worship serves to balance masculine views of individual autonomy and separation from the body and nature. As we have seen, Yoga Titanism does emphasize personal isolation and is similar to Western Titanism in that respect. In the first section I contrast the passive and inert views of the material principle (primarily found in the West) with the dynamic and creative views of Hinduism. The second section traces the philosophical origins of Shākta theology with a focus on some basic problems of Sānkhya’s purusha-prakriti dualism. In the third section I demonstrate that Purānic writers appropriated the Sānkhya principle of prakriti and the Vedāntist concept of māyā to establish a powerful goddess ontology, one that overcomes the alienation from nature and other selves found in Sānkhya-Yoga philosophy. Hindu Tantrics used the concept of shakti to produce the same results. In the fourth section I draw on Stanley N. Kurtz’s psychoanalytic study of Hindu goddesses and present his reasons why goddess worship survived in the Indian subcontinent. The fifth section contains a critique of Kurtz’s view and confirms a suspicion that traditional Shākta theology does not express a genuine female voice. If this is so, then this mitigates somewhat the thesis that Shākta theology is an answer to Titanism. Finally, I sketch briefly some encouraging manifestations of Shākta theology among contemporary Indian women. THE MATERIAL PRINCIPLE: EAST AND WEST Recall Rammurti Mishra’s incredible claim about the yogi’s nature in the previous chapter. Let us now rephrase these assertions in terms of nuclear physics, à la Edward Teller: “Deep inside the hydrogen atom lies hidden a tremendous force which will lead humans to omnipotence and omniscience.” This is not totally fair—physical and spiritual power are being conflated—but the principal point is the conceptual convergence of Eastern and Western forms of Titanism. Even though Yoga Titanism is a benign form of extreme humanism, it nevertheless uses the same language of hubris, power, and conquest as Western Titanism. Let us dwell for a moment on Edward Teller, the Titanism of Cold War militarism, and the cooption of female creative power. The first atomic weapon was called “Oppenheimer’s baby” and the hydrogen bomb was known as “Teller’s baby.” There was some dispute over whether Teller was mother or father, because some argued that is was Stanislaw Ulam who really came up with the original idea. On this account Father Ulam inseminated Teller with the idea and Mother Teller carried the fetus to term. Carol Cohn, who provides a fascinating analysis of this phenomenon of male creation, also finds it significant that all the bombs have male names. Therefore, nuclear scientists, in Cohn’s words, have given “birth to male progeny with the ultimate power of violent domination over female Nature. The defense intellectuals’ project is the creation of abstract formulations to control the forces the scientists created, and to participate thereby in their world-creating/destroying power.” The desire to become father of oneself is one of the general features of the psychology of Titanism. By claiming the power of self-creation, the Hindu Titan is able to eliminate the female role and manipulate ordinary reproduction to his own advantage. For example, the Vedic father recreates himself in the mother’s womb or a womb substitute. This theme is most explicit in a late Upanishad, the Yogatattva: “He who was his father is now his son, and he who is his son will be again his father.” For example, in the Kūrma Purāna Vishnu directly enters Aditi’s womb and is conceived as Vāmana, the dwarf incarnation. In the Bhāgavata version of the story, Vishnu first “penetrates” Kashyapa with his “ray” and then his semen his deposited in Aditi’s womb. Stories of the Buddha’s conception in the Mahāvastu indicate clearly the heavenly Bodhisattva is essentially placing a human version of himself in Māyā’s womb. Prajāpati “placed the power to produce progeny in himself” and then proceeded to create the devas and the asuras out of his mouth. Other womb substitutes appear in many stories where Promethean churning (our key root manth again) and giving issue from one’s mind or thigh seem to be the most common form of male procreation. (Mind-born sons, the ten great sages, are sinless and nonprocreating.) The following sons are said to have been “thigh-born” of their fathers: asuras from Brahmā’s thigh, Vaishyas from Prajāpati’s, Kutsa from Indra’s, a long awaited son from King Yuvanāshva’s, Anga (Vena’s father) from Uru’s, and Nishāda from Vena’s thigh. (Prithu, however, is “churned” from his father’s right arm.) We also have the incredible example of Brahmā giving “birth” to thousands of sages from semen prematurely ejaculated at the sight of Pārvatī as bride. In the Hebrew tradition we find a rib-born Eve and Jacob’s thigh- born sons; and in Greek mythology we of course have the thigh-born Zeus giving issue to Athene from his mind. The cooption and exploitation of the creative energies of the female have a long history in the West. Hesiod’s Theogony still preserves the idea of primordial chaos and Gaia the earth goddess as the source of all things, but the power of the Greek goddess was gradually coopted by male deities, starting with Zeus and his self-created daughter, priests, and philosophers. Although there is a more egalitarian human creation story in Genesis 1:26, the Hebrew Zeus of Genesis 2 creates Eve out of Adam’s rib and the “mother of all the living” becomes his subordinate. We now know that many ancient Hebrews worshipped goddesses along with Yahweh, but this practice was of course never condoned by the priests or prophets. See The Hebrew Goddess by Raphael Patai and William Dever, Did God Have a Wife? The last trace of the feminine in Hebrew scripture, a figure called Sophia (Yahweh’s helpmate in Prov. 8:30), was replaced, except for the Gnostic sects, by the masculine Logos by Philo of Alexandria. For Philo the cosmos becomes the mind-born creation of God, whose Logos makes the world out of absolute nothing, not the feminine chaos implied in Genesis 1:1. The final banishment of the goddess of watery chaos is implied in the declaration in Revelation that in the “new heaven and new earth. the sea [is] no more” (21:1). In the new creation, the writer is telling us, the irrational goddesses will not bother us anymore. In pre-Socratic philosophy the idea of phusis (Latin natura), although not identified as female, was a creative and dynamic material principle. This idea was replaced by inert atoms or by Aristotle’s hulē, both passive and inactive material principles. Aristotle’s idea that the female womb was simply a receptacle for self-contained male seed joined similar views of human reproduction in the ancient world. The father essentially recreates himself in the womb of the passive mother. One exception to Aristotle’s theory of conception is this marvelous passage from the Talmud: There are three partners in man . his father supplies the semen of the white substance out of which are formed the child’s bones, sinews, nails, and the white of his eyes. His mother supplies the semen of the red substance out of which is formed his skin, flesh, hair and black of his eye. God gives him the soul and breath, beauty of features, eyesight, hearing, speech, understanding, and discernment. Although sexist and theocentric, this Jewish view does give an active role to the female in the formation of the fetus. The esoteric tradition preserved the coequal partnership of male and female principles until, as Carolyn Merchant has shown, witch hunts and mechanistic science virtually eliminated the idea of dynamic nature in the West and the feminine symbolism attached to it.