[Editor’s Note: This essay is from the same title, “Goddesses in Hinduism: “All the Mothers are One”‘ by Mary Ann Beavis with Scott Daniel Dunbar included in Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture (Mago Books, 2018).]
Among the world religions, Hinduism is one where Goddesses have been worshipped continuously for thousands of years and continue to be part—and sometimes the most important part—of Hindu spirituality. Indeed, many Hindus consider the very land of India to be a Goddess, depicted, accordingly, in popular iconography, and reverentially call her “Mother India” (see Figure 1). At a macro level, the entire Earth itself is honoured and recognized as a Mother Goddess (known as Bhūmi or Bhūmī-Devī) who gives birth to a dizzying and colourful variety of life forms that are celebrated in Hindu mythology, symbolism, and devotion.
The subtitle “All the Mothers Are One” is from a book by the same title by Stanley Kurtz, who studied the emergence of the Goddess Santoshi Ma in India;[1] her worship has only emerged in the last generation or two and become very popular. Early on in his research, Kurz became frustrated by his inability to discover the Goddess’s “uniqueness.” He says that her worshippers often told him the parable of a farmer who kept begging a priest to give him an image of a deity to worship. Finally, in frustration, the priest gave him a rock to get rid of him. The farmer worshipped the rock without results, until he grew so depressed that he was ready to commit suicide. At the last minute, the deity finally emerged from the rock to save him.[2]
The moral of the story is that the divine is everywhere and cannot be fully captured by any one image or object or deity. In its neo-Vedantic Hindu religious context, the point is theological: the divine is one, and all the deities are expressions of the One. Santoshi Ma (“Mother of Satisfaction”) is a manifestation of the divine in all things, the Universal Mother. Kurtz’s interpretation of that insight is psychological, and framed within the Hindu family system, in which children are traditionally reared by more than one “mother figure” (aunts, sisters, grandmothers, nursemaids, etc.).[3]
There is an immense number of Hindu Goddesses (or female manifestations/expressions of the divine) of different kinds. This chapter will present a typology of Hindu Goddesses from archaic times to the present. However, it should be noted that this presentation of “types” of Hindu Goddesses is not exhaustive, but introductory and highly selective.
Archaic Goddesses
As with every major religion, what is called “Hinduism” has grown, developed and changed throughout its long history. The indigenous people of ancient India, the Dravidians (2500-1500 BCE), built a highly developed civilization in the Indus Valley, and may have worshipped a deity that shared the characteristics of the later Hindu God Shiva, symbolized by a lingam (erect phallus), symbolizing life-giving power.[4]
However, as Mary Pat Fisher observes:
Even more prominent among the artefacts are terracotta figurines that seem to honor a great goddess. Sacred pots, like those still used in South Indian village ceremonies honoring the goddess, may have been associated then, as now, with the feminine as the receptacle of the stuff of life. There is also considerable evidence of worship of local deities by stone altars placed beneath sacred trees. Each tree is still popularly believed to be the home of a tree spirit, and many are honored with offerings.[5]
The foundational scriptures of Hinduism, the Vedas, are associated with the Aryans, Indo-European tribes that displaced the earlier Dravidian culture.[6] The Vedas are held to have the status of eternal revelation (shruti). Goddesses are not central to these texts, but some scholars have argued that the great Goddesses of later tradition are Vedic Goddesses under different names (or in one case, the same name).[7] The Rig Veda, the oldest and most famous of these scriptures (pre-1500 B.C.E.), contains hymns (mantras) of praise celebrating deities, divine presences and powers. The most important and powerful gods in the ancient Vedic religion are male, e.g., Agni, a fire god, sometimes identified as the highest of the gods; Soma, the god of inspiration and speech; Indra, the popular and powerful lord of the heavens; Varuna, a war lord, ruler of the worlds, enforcer of laws.
Of the Goddesses in the Vedic pantheon,[8] the only one on a par with the male deities, Usas, is usually depicted as a beautiful young maiden, a Goddess of the dawn who drives away darkness and demons and brings light to the world.[9] She is the force that impels life, and the breath that enlivens all living creatures. As the recurring dawn, she is associated with cosmic, moral and social order, and opposed to forces that threaten the world. She is an auspicious Goddess, associated with wealth, often likened to a cow, who bares her breast to shine forth light on humankind. She is also a Goddess of the hearth and the eye of the gods. She was invoked to drive away or punish enemies, and to grant long life, since as a marker of time, she is a constant reminder of people’s limited time on earth.
Prthivi is an earth Goddess whose name is usually found in compound form with the name of her male counterpart, Dyaus (Latin: deus, Greek: theos) god of the sky—Dyavaprthivi (bisexual deity).[10] The male and female deities are said to sanctify each other in their complementary relationship and are said to be the universal parents who created the world and the gods. Prthivi is often called mother, and her consort, father. They come together when her consort fertilizes Prthivi with rain. She is praised for her maternal, productive characteristics, as well as for her nurturing, supportive aspects. In later Vedic literature, she is uncoupled from the androgynous sky-god and emerges as a separate Goddess.
Sarasvati is a Vedic deity who becomes a prominent Goddess in later Hindu religion.[11] In the Rig Veda, she is associated with a mighty and powerful river (no one knows which one) that surpasses all others in greatness, a heaven-sent stream that blesses the earth, and that pervades the earth, the atmosphere and the heavens. She is a guardian of the Vedic sacrificial cult, who destroys those who revile the gods and slays the demon of chaos. She is a purifying presence, whose waters cleanse away poison and who purifies those who pray to her; like a river, she bears away defilements.
David Kinsley observes that there is no evidence in the Vedic period of all the Goddesses, or gods, being manifestations of a single, all-encompassing deity.[12] Kinsley’s observation may partially be driven by opposition to what Cynthia Eller has misnamed the myth of matriarchal prehistory, the hypothesis that prehistoric cultures were universally “matriarchal,” peaceful and Goddess-worshipping.[13] However, specifically with reference to Hinduism, Kinsley’s point is cautionary against retrojecting the much later development of the doctrine of the Mahadevi, the Great Goddess, back into Vedic times.[14]
(To be continued)
[1] Stanley Kurtz, All the Mothers are One: Hindu India and the Cultural Reshaping of Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
[2] Ibid.,
[3] Ibid.,
[4] Mary Pat Fisher, Living Religions, Fourth Edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1999), 80.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 81.
[7] See David Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1997), 6-7.
[8] In addition to the Vedic Goddesses discussed in this chapter, Kinsley identifies as significant Aditi (a maternal deity), Vac (“speech”), Nirrti (death, ill luck, destruction), and Ratri (night), in addition to a number of lesser Goddesses (ibid., 9-17).
[9] Ibid., 7.
[10] Ibid., 8.
[11] Ibid., 10.
[12] Ibid., 18. Kinsley does admit, however, that some scholars have affirmed the evidence of such a deity in the Vedic literature, citing as examples J. Przyluski, “The Great Goddess of India and Iran,” Indian Historical Quarterly 10 (1934): 405-30, and Stella Kramrisch, “The Indian Great Goddess,” History of Religions 14,4 (May 1976): 235-65.
[13] Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future (Boston: Beacon, 2000). For an incisive critique of Eller, see Max Dashu, “Knocking Down Straw Dolls: A Critique of Cynthia Eller’s The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory,” Feminist Theology 13,2 (January 2005), 185-216.
[14] Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses, 18.
(Meet Mago Contributor) Mary Ann Beavis, Ph.D.