BY TORSTEN SCHWANKE
CHAPTER I
The popular collection of fables and stories Hitopadescha - "Instruction in that which is pious" - a variant of the famous Pantschatantra, which with it has carried Indian themes into world literature in many translations, contains the story of a Rajput who offers himself and his sword to the service of a king for the outrageous price of 400 gold pieces for the day. He is kept for trial. Every day he offers half of his wages to the deities and Brahmins, a quarter to the poor, and the rest to support his wife and son. He stands at the king's gate with his sword in his hand and only leaves his place when the king sends him home.
Then, on the night of the new moon, the king hears a woman's voice complaining and sends the warrior to find out what it is. As he fearlessly departs into the moonless blackness, the king decides to follow him: thus, unnoticed, he becomes a witness to strange events. The Rajput follows the lament and finds a beautifully adorned woman in tears at the gate of the city. It is the king's good fortune: for a long time this deity, like his consort, was sheltered in the shadow of his arm, but now she must leave him - the unsuspecting man has aroused the wrath of the Great Goddess by a mistake and must die for it within three days. His happiness weeps for his end, which robs him of his lord. Can nothing save him? There is a remedy: if the Rajput cuts off the head of his only son with his own hand as a sacrifice to the Goddess, then the king will live to be a hundred years old and his fortune may remain with him.
The Rajput immediately goes home, wakes up his wife and son and tells them about the encounter. The son is immediately ready to lay down his life: this is the spirit of the warrior state; the mother understands the sacrifice as the price for the royal reward of the husband. All three hurry to the temple of the Goddess, "who is adorned with all the signs of good fortune", - the warrior ceremonially cuts off his son's head and offers it to the Goddess: as a price for her returning her favour to the king. Afterwards, however, he cuts off his own head just as swiftly and ceremoniously - he has repaid his lord for the princely pay, but to live on without his son seems empty and vain to him. The faithful wife does not lay behind him, she takes up his sword and also cuts off her own head. A sea of blood flowing from the decapitated steams up as a sacrifice before the image of the Goddess. Then the king, who has been watching everything unnoticed, also takes up his sword: "Little creatures like me are born every day and pass away, - but his like was never before and will not come again; what is my kingdom's glory without him?" With this he also wants to cut off his head, but the Goddess, satisfied with the bloody spectacle of all-round high sacrifice, comes bodily before him and stops his stroke. The king, however, only wants to stay alive if she calls the dead who died around him back to life. She promises this, and he moves away so that those who have come back to life will not see him.
The Goddess brings the three beheaded men back to life, mother and son return home, but the warrior returns to his post under the king's altar as if nothing had happened. Then, just as if nothing had happened, the king asks him from above: "What was it with that wailing woman?" But the hero simply says: "Oh, nothing; when I met her, she disappeared into the darkness". The next day the king publicly praised his deed and gave him dominion over a country.
This bloody story, which takes place nightly in the temple of the Goddess Kali, with a happy ending, because all are equal to the Goddess' bloodthirsty sense of immoderate sacrifice, is one among many. It is also to be found in the famous Kathasaritsagara, in the "sea of streams of stories" in which Somadeva gave a final form to ancient Indian tradition; it is there among the 25 stories of the corpse demon who entertains, fools and tests a king at night, while the king is to fetch the corpse of a hanged man, in which the demon dwells, from the gallows. And close by is a related story, in which one has to accept the version of Schivadasa in order to get a proper grasp of its content.
Two friends go on a pilgrimage to a sacred bathing place of the Kali and see a beautiful girl there. One of them becomes lovesick and thinks he will die if he does not marry the girl. The friend talks to his father, who negotiates with the girl's parents and brings about the marriage. Soon after the wedding, the young couple travels with the friend to the young woman's parents. On the way they come to a temple of the Kali. The young husband tells his wife and friend to wait outside while he pays his respects to the Goddess.
When he sees her bloody, triumphant image inside, crushing raging demons with eighteen mighty arms and holding the lotus foot on the vanquished bull demon, he is struck by enlightenment, as divine fate would have it: "The people worship the Goddess with many sacrifices of living beings, how should I not win her grace for my salvation by offering myself to her?" He found a sword in the silent cell and cut off his own head.
His friend waited outside for him to come out again and finally went into the sanctuary himself to fetch him. When he found him lying in his blood with his head cut off, he was seized with despair and cut off his own head. At last the young woman came to the temple to look after the two, and when she saw the two bodies without heads floating in a sea of blood, she wanted to hang herself from the nearest tree with a creeper out of grief, but the voice of the Goddess commanded her to stop and told her to call the two back to life by putting their heads back on their trunks.
She did so hastily, but in her haste she made a mistake and exchanged the heads: she put the head of the husband on the body of the friend. But to whom did she now belong? The wise king, to whom the corpse-demon puts the question, decides: He who wears his husband's head is her husband, for as the woman is the highest of delights, so the head is the highest of limbs.
Thus, as a wife, she possessed the body of her friend under the visible sign of her husband. Did a secret wish guide the young woman in the exchange of heads? Was the young marriage not happy, and the husband therefore so ready to die and longing for salvation? The story does not hint at this, it only tells what happened, and the strange mishap may rest on its own with its background; the bloody sacrificial haze, the frightening readiness to die in the face of the Goddess are what excite and alienate the western listener of such folk stories of India.
They are as familiar to Hinduism as they are dismaying to us. Cults and myths of the Great Goddess are distinguished in India by the rivers of blood shed in her honour. In Devi-Pattan, the "City of the Goddess", - today a village of the Gonda district in Oudh - the Mother Goddess has one of the oldest places of worship in northern India; remains of buildings from the Gupta period from the end of the fourth century AD testify that her primeval cult was already brahmanised at that time. Mother Earth is worshipped here as Durga, the "unapproachable" and "dangerous" one, or as Parvati, "daughter of the mountain" i.e. of Himalaya. For her great temple festival in spring - that is, at the time of the new fertilisation of nature - pilgrims come from the plains around and from the mountains that enclose her in the north. An Englishman who attended the festival in 1871 reported that about 20 buffaloes, 250 goats and as many pigs were slaughtered daily in the temple. A deep pit was dug under the altar of sacrifice, filled with fresh sand; the sand absorbed the blood of the beheaded animals. It was renewed twice a day, but the blood-soaked sand was buried in the ground as fertility material. Everything was done very cleanly, without bloody remains and bad smells. The lifeblood, the blood, was supposed to give the old Earth Goddess, who gives all nourishment, - the daughter of the mountain, whose earthly power becomes tangible in the towering mountains, - renewed strength and fertility for the new harvest year.
Today, the temple of the Kali at the Kalighat in Calcutta is famous as the main place of daily blood sacrifices; it is probably the bloodiest sanctuary on earth. At the time of the great pilgrimages to the annual Durga or Kali festival (Durgapuja) in autumn, about 800 goats are slaughtered during the three festival days - but the temple simply serves as a slaughterhouse, for the animal remains with the sacrificer, the temple only takes the head as a symbolic offering - but the blood flows to the Goddess. The life-blood of all beings is due to her as a sacrifice, it is her gift, - therefore the animal must be slaughtered in her temple; therefore temple and slaughterhouse are one.
In the mud of blood and earth, the heads of the animals are piled up like trophies in front of the image of the Goddess, while the sacrificer goes home with the body of the animal for a feast in the family circle. The Goddess only wants the blood of the victims, which is why decapitation is the form of offering - they bleed out quickly and thoroughly. This is why the characters in the stories in "Hitopadescha" and "Kathasaritsagara" cut off their heads; the head, of course, also means the whole, the complete sacrifice.
In her "horrifying form" (ghora-rupa), the Goddess as "Kali", the "dark one", brings the skull full of steaming blood to her lip; her diagram for inner devotion shows her robed in blood-red, standing on a boat in a sea of blood: in the midst of the flood of life, the sacrificial juice, which she needs in order to give existence to new life-forms in her benevolent appearance (sundara-murti) in ceaseless procreation as the world mother (jagad-amba), to suckle them as the world mother (jagad-dhatri) at her breasts and to give them nourishment as the "fullness of food" (anna-purna).
Ancient view, stone-age beginning: one must help nature in all ways, nothing happens of its own accord. Just as little as the original human being can it do much on its own. Nothing happens by itself, not in the cosmos, nor in man. One must make noise to free the moon from the clutches of darkness and to shoo away her demons, a girl must swing higher and higher in the sky as a young sun, so that the sun can rise higher and higher from its winter impotence in the rising year. The earth-mother wants to be impregnated and watered with the sap of life, should she bear fruit and nourish life upon her. Just as the original human being needs his "rite d'entrée", his little enchantment, for everything: to be a hunter, to play warrior, even to indulge in love, in short: to be stimulated and strengthened for all action, the old powers also want to be awakened and tuned anew, stimulated and strengthened for everything that is their eternal nature to work.
Thus the Khonds refreshed the fertility of the earth with human blood until the English government stopped such things; the Meriah brought a human sacrifice to the earth Goddess Tari Pennu for a good harvest, against plagues and calamities. The sacrifice had to be bought, it was well fed, the offering was preceded by feasts. Anointed with butter, oil and turmeric, it was ceremoniously led around and finally strangled. Its flesh was distributed to the participants of the feast, who buried it in their fields or burned it and scattered the ashes over the lands, thus fertilising the soil. Everything about it, hair and saliva, possessed miraculous powers, it was no longer a man like others, but, consecrated by magic, the bodily genius of fertility.
The chief deity of the central provinces is Dharni Deota, "earth, the deity"; her husband and companion, Bhatarsi Deota, is a god of the hunt, related to Shiva, the lord of wild beasts and the jungle, who wields the bow. A wooden triangular pole represents the Goddess: the symbol of the womb (yoni) and the divine world power (schakti) in the Tantras, sign of the Great Goddess. A stone image at his feet signifies the male god: sibling of the lingam signifying Shiva. The stone is doused with the blood of a buffalo, which has taken the place of earlier human sacrifices. In Kalahandi, a lamb is sacrificed in its place and its flesh is buried in strips in the fields to make them fertile. Bana's "Kadambarī", a 7th century AD Sanskrit novel, hints at human sacrifice in a description of the temple of the "Wrathful Goddess" (Chandika); and Bhavabhuti's pathetic love drama "Malati-Madhava" depicts in Act 5 the attempt of a priestess of the Chamunda - a gruesome aspect of the Goddess - to sacrifice a young girl she has abducted in the temple of the Chamunda. The Goddess as a universal life force is relentless like life itself, feeding on the blood of her own creatures.
Thus the origin of the Goddess lies in prehistoric times, still present in India in folk customs and peasant fertility cults. Her earliest idols have come to light in Mohenjo-Daro, the important site of a long pre-Aryan Indus culture of the 3rd millennium B.C., which contains many things that later became highly significant in Hinduism: the image of a divine yogin, a deer-horned lord of the animals, comparable to Shiva, and the divine cult symbols of the sexes: lingam and yoni.
In the Brahmanic counter-world of the Aryan immigrants, the Goddess makes her triumphant entrance in one of the more recent Upanishads of the Veda, which bring with them a more decisive reconciliation of the formerly exclusive priestly tradition of the immigrants with the ancient good of the Indian earth: a parable there explains the nature of "brahman", the mysterious, all-moving supreme power, on the basic motif of Indian myths, the eternally renewed struggle of gods and demons for the rule of the world Kena-Upanishad 3. The brahman won the victory for the gods, but they were not aware of it and boasted about their ego: "Ours is this victory, ours is this glory!“ Then the mysterious power became visible to them, but they did not recognise it and said to themselves, "What is this unearthly miraculous being?" They sent the fire god to investigate it; he called himself and boasted that he could burn anything, but he could not do anything to a blade of grass that the brahman showed him. Then came the wind god, who whirled everything away with him, but he could not move the blade. Then the gods asked their king Indra to investigate the unearthly miraculous creature; he went, but there in the celestial space he met a magnificent Goddess, Uma, the daughter of Himalaya. He asked her, "What is this unearthly wonder-being?" The daughter of the mountain, "Parvati" - a stranger to the Vedic world of gods, but indigenous to Indian earth from her father - knows the secret of the miraculous being: "It is brahman," she says, "with the victory of brahman you are doing great.
The Goddess alone knows about the all-moving secret world power that helped the gods to victory by being powerful in them without them themselves being aware of it. They thought they were strong of their own accord, but without and against this power they could do nothing to a blade of grass. The Goddess knows about the all-power, which the jargon of the Vedic priests calls "brahman", and which in Hinduism is called "shakti", - for "shakti", i.e. "power", is the essence and name of the Great Goddess herself, therefore she can interpret the enigmatic being to the gods and calmly appears as their teacher, who initiates into its secret: it is her own.
Later in Hinduism, the gods also all know about this Supreme Feminine world power and know that their masculine wit and pride can do nothing without her. This is described in a myth of the emergence of the Goddess In Devi-mahatmya of Markandeya-Purana. This time the gods are the losers in the battle against the demons; a bull-demon has usurped all dominion over the world; powerless, the immortals, driven from their places in space, walk to Vishnu and Shiva, the two great ones, who, exalted above the play of the world and its vicissitudes, descend into the struggle of its divine and demonic powers only to help the divine order to victory again. Bright flames of wrath burst from the faces of both when they hear of the triumph of the adversary god; the rage of their impotence also bursts from the bodies of all the other gods in jets of flame; the scorching embers become luminous form, and the Great Goddess stands bodily before all eyes as the union of their deepest powers. She takes the weapons and implements of all the gods into her forest of arms and adorns the body with all her signs and wonders: as the embodiment of all cosmic powers, which, divided into many godly forms, were inferior to the unmeasured violence of the bull-demon, she strides to battle and overpowers him, even though he, protëic as the fullness of life of nature itself, confronts her clothed in ever different bodies.
Here the gods, abdicating their weapons and emblems - borrowed goods that flow home again - confess that all the divine power of the universe, manifesting itself in many ways, is the gesture, ray and form of the one primordial power: the Shakti and World Mother.
The myth cannot actually describe the origin of the great Mother-Goddess, only the way in which she appears sublimely, for it knows of her beginninglessness, which is given in the concept of "mother": that she was maternally earlier than all that has arisen, childlike from her. To ask about her origin seems to the myth as childish and presumptuous as the grasp of that cheeky adept who undertook to uncover the veiled image of the Goddess at Sais, and whose tongue was paralysed for ever by horror and shock. The image at Sais is the image of the Mother Goddess who speaks: "oudeis emon peplon anheile" - "no one has lifted my robe"... It is about the robe that covers her female nakedness, the veil is the attenuating subtlety of later tradition, - no one has lifted my robe and seen my womb, - seen, conquered, impregnated. I am the mother without a man, the primordial mother, all are my children. Whoever misses to take up my robe, desecrates the Mother. (He must atone for it, like Ham, who was cursed because he gazed upon the nakedness of Noah, the archfather).
There is no mention of her origin, her birth, only of her manifold appearances: out of the rage and fervour of all the gods, who stream back their borrowed power, so that it clenches into an all-conquering form, or her sudden appearance in the firmament to initiate Indra and the gods into the uncanny miraculous power that suddenly became visible to them, made them feel their powerlessness and which is basically the secret of the Goddess herself.
Ineffably all-embracing, she holds the all-god Vishnu spellbound as his great Maya (maha-maya) or "Yoganidra", as the dream-drunkenness of his world-sleep, with which, like a yogin, he moves inner visions, the fullness of the world as a dream within himself. On the lotus that springs from the navel of the slumberer, Brahma, the spawn of his purest clarity, is enthroned; he is preparing to unfold the world, but from the two ears of Vischnu emerge two mighty demons, raging passion and animal dullness, whose play will drive the course of the world forward through all splendour and savagery, through battles, horror and destruction. The two want to tear Brahma, their louder adversary, to pieces, but, lest the play of the world end before it has begun, the all-god has to shake off his slumber and save Brahma from the two. To this end, Brahma invokes the dark Goddess to release the sleep-drunk Vishnu and praises her: "Great Wisdom, Great Delusion, Primordial Substance of the Universe and Night of World-Death, Power of all Beings, Supreme Motherly Goddess!" and she emerges from the sleeper like smoke from his mouth and nose, that he may awake to vanquish the two demonic spawns of his all-being.
All gods are married to the great Goddess as their own power, which moves them, without which they can do nothing and by virtue of which they can be what they are. As the female power (shakti) of Brahma, she is the Goddess of flood-rich speech (Vac, Sarasvati), the element of revelation and wisdom teaching; she is preferably called the "Maya of Vishnu" because Vishnu, the Sustainer, dominates the myth of Hinduism in its heyday with his Avataras, until in the last world age Shiva, the Endbringer, overshadows him, and finally the Great Goddess, Shiva's consort, overgrows both.
As "Gauri", the "Bright-White", she rests on "Shankara", the "Peace-bringer" Shiva, the redeeming death, who is spread out death-stiff like a mountain beneath her. In an insatiable embrace she embraces him as his life force (shakti) and enjoys him, just as in the Egyptian myth Isis as a female sparrow hawk squats mournfully and ruthlessly on the dead Osiris and arouses his dead power to new life until she receives the Horos child from him. The eternal intertwining of the divine couple, Gauri and Shankara, is visible in the Gaurisankar, the highest glacier cap, which surrounds the towering peak with its white radiance.
As Kali, the "black one", she stands with the severed heads and hands of her victims garlanded, instead of with chains of flowers, on the dead lying Shiva, an opened lotus blossom, the womb of life, and the sword of death (or the scissors of the parce) in her hands. Without her, Shiva is but a corpse (shava): his power has risen above him, so he lies lifeless beneath her; but her foot touches him, so he may appear doubled on tantric miniatures of this allegory. On the ground a bearded ascetic in rigor mortis: the inward resting of the divine, which does not happen; but above it, turned towards the Goddess, softly animated by her foot, a youthful figure, the eternal youth of the god: she stretches her arm as in a dream and softly stirs her head. In her the death-like eternity of the world-distant god and the eternal vitality of the divine power as the play of the world meet.
Elsewhere, in the myth of Andhaka, the "blindling", the Goddess appears multiplied as the whole ancient chorus of mother Goddesses who give their face to the pre-Aryan Indian folk religion. Andhaka, the "blindling", is an asura, a counter-god or demon, embodiment of blind, unbridled life force (asu) in contradiction to the gods who possess more wisdom and brightness than dull strength. He was black as eye make-up and had attained immortality through ardent asceticism. He once overheard the Great Goddess making love to Shiva and wanted to rob her. A battle between god and demon ensues, but Shiva can only wound the opponent with his magic weapon, the "arrow of the lord of beasts", not defeat him. Each drop of blood from Andhaka's wounds soon turns into another blindling, they swarm around Shiva by the hundreds and thousands, and as he hits them with his arrows, ever new multitudes arise from their blood, hydragically, to throw themselves at him.
Then the god in his distress brings forth mothers in multitudes, that they may drink up the blood of the blind. These terrible mothers, powers of all the gods and named after them - the "boar-headed one" after Vishnu as a boar, the wind-godly one, the sun-godly one and the moon-godly one (the story gives over 190 different names) pounce on the blood and drink it up; but the life-juice they slurp makes them fertile, and new blindlings spring up from them, harassing Shiva anew. Then Shiva turns imploringly to Vishnu, the Sustainer, who brings forth the "arid Revati". She drinks up the blood of all the blindlings in an instant, but the more she drinks of it, the more arid she becomes. She is the death of the scorching drought from which no life germinates. Thus all the blindlings perished except for the first one, who was immune to death. Shiva took him on his trident, he begged for mercy, and the god took him into his wild hosts of spirits.
But the army of the mothers cried out in unquenched bloodlust, they wanted to devour all the worlds together with gods and demons; in vain did Shiva cry out: "Your office is to protect all beings, stand back from your cruel beginning!" They paid no attention to him. Shiva again had to take refuge in the Preserver Vishnu to meet the forces of destruction which he himself had unleashed. Vishnu's terrible apparition (ghoramurti) "half-man-half-lion" (narasimha), burrowing with his paws in the body of the slain enemy, From his tongue he brought forth the "Mistress of Speech" (Vac, Sarasvati, the shakti of Brahma), from his own heart the "Maya", his own world-preserving shakti, and from his sex the "garlanded with the floral wreath of the forms of becoming" (Bhavamalinī), but from his bones Kali, the dark one, the all-devouring time, the bone-wreathed mistress of the place of the skull. It is said of her: It was she who drank up the blood of the blind and is called the "arid Revati" on earth. These Goddesses pounced on the frenzied mothers who had sprung from Shiva and forced them to seek shelter with Vishnu, begging for help. Vishnu instructed them, "As men and beasts long cherish what they bear, you shall guard the worlds, protect the pious and fulfil their wishes." Thus the horrors are reconciled and renounce their blindly raging savagery; the process of the myth puts their primal terror into taming relation with the god-preserver: they enter the circle of blessing deities, who are approachable to pious men through cult. A reconciliation, like the transformation of the blood-hungry earth-mothers, the Erinyes, into the "friendly-minded" Eumenides in Greek myth.
Andhaka, however, the demon of inexhaustible life that multiplies with every drop of blood that flows from it, is reminiscent of the Lernaean Hydra, the serpentine-chthonic life force that grows seven new heads for every one that is cut off. Only a fire of that fire which Prometheus stole from heaven, in the hand of Heracles, brings the fury of this earthy growth to wither. In the Indian myth, Heracles does not conquer the blindly proliferating force of life on the course of his miracles from earthly bondage to heavenly-olympic deification, the conquest of the Hydra is only one link in the chain of his deeds, all of which signify the long overcoming of his primordial enemy Hera, the mother Goddess and mother earth, who does not want to release him and already sent him the serpents of the earth in the cradle, on which the infant miraculously proved his superhuman powers for the first time.
The conquest of the Hydra here and the "blind man" there are under opposite signs. In Hellas, the maternal principle is truly overcome; in India, on the other hand, it is spoken to, reconciled and incorporated into the circle of sacred powers. The mothers lose nothing of their greatness and power in the process.
The overcoming of the earthly-maternal principle of life by Heracles (and Theseus), by the victory of Apollo and the heavenly ones, as Bachofen depicted it for antiquity, finds its Christian equivalent in the Saviour whose foot crushes the head of the serpent. This Christian victory of the masculine heavenly principle over the feminine maternal finds its most tender transfiguration, strikingly pictorial, in certain depictions of Mary's homecoming, which are familiar to the art of Siena. Mary, the Mother, is lying on her bed, surrounded by the apostles, but the divine Son has descended in his glory of angels to catch up with her soul. He stands at her bedside and holds her soul in his arms like a little child: the Son holds the mother tiny against his breast, as the mother formerly held the newborn in the stable. The maternal-earthly, which the divine needed as a Son in order to descend from its heavens to walk as an earthly man in the flesh, has become the "Mater purissima", the "Vas spirituale", the spiritual vessel in the Litany of Lauretania; there further "Mater castissima, inviolata, intermerata, Virgo veneranda, Vas insigne devotionis" etc., and is raptured from all earthly demoniacity of greedily rampant and self-consuming life force. Thus the divine Son takes the earthly mother up into his heaven like an innocent child, to crown her there: the maternal-earthly is truly annulled by the masculine- heavenly counterforce, annulled and melted into a higher counter-sphere. The triumphant step with which Kali treads down the corpse-like Shiva is the gesture of India that corresponds exactly to the Christian Sienese Madonna on the arms of the Son who carries her up into heavenly life.
CHAPTER II
The idea of redemption is linked to the cults and mysteries of the Great Mother. How could the soul not turn to the great old Goddess with its highest request and expect from her motherliness in childlike devotion what it does not feel capable of doing on its own? Of course, the omnipotence of the Mother as the Great Maya and inexhaustible womb of the creaturely gives rise to the question: "Who will deliver the world from the Mother?" or: "Who will deliver the Mother from herself? from this mute demoniac of the urge of life to itself? from the raging motherhood, as all-devouring, as all-nourishing?"
Heracles and Christ are two masculine answers of the Occident to this question; yoga, which perceives all gods as maya-involved king of cosmic realms and rises to detachment from the world in complete integration of its bonds and contents (kaivalyam), is the Indian masculine path, enlightening worldwide in the figure of the Buddha.
The myth of the Buddha also hints at the overcoming of the mother: she dies on the eighth day after the birth of the Saviour, and one tradition gives her the name Maya. The Buddha does not emerge from the womb of the mother as a born being like other creatures; rather, like other bringers of a new world state - Indra in the Vedas - he breaks out of her flank and knows about himself from the first breath. He takes the solemn steps in all four directions and speaks: "I am the oldest, I am the highest in the world!“ The primordial mother without a man, as the beginning of all being, is gone, and the venerable womb, which no eye has seen, is gone.
In Pali Buddhism, the female relative who raises the orphaned Buddha-child is called "Maha-Pajapati" - a name that becomes comprehensible when read in Sanskrit as "Maha-prajavati": the "Great Creature Realm", and which only becomes meaningful when, like "Maya", it refers to the mother of the Buddha as the image of the great primordial mother herself, to the mythical primordial and world power that has been overcome: "the Great Creature Realm" is a most natural designation for the Great World Mother, whose spell of giving birth to and taking back into herself the same life for eons in ever new creatures is broken by the enlightenment of the Buddha.
Of course, the Great Mother would not be the all-moving world power (shakti), which is represented by all the figures of the Indian pantheon in the spectrum of all gestures, and which gives birth to itself in every creature and every one of its movements, if one were to see in her only the snarling skeleton with murder weapons in raised hands and the blood-slurping destroyer. The opening prayer of the Kālikā-Purāna dedicated to her celebrates her as "the one who leads out (tarani) of the darkness of the bias in the minds of all yogins as the causal force of self-conquest and salvation", and in the same breath celebrates her as "the one who beguiles and enchants (vimohini) the host of creatures and who is therefore the Maya of the unfolding god who destroys the pure consciousness in the creature". The All-Acting One enchants and entangles as Maya and bias (avidya) and leads out (tarani, Tara) as enlightening knowledge (vidya).
The idea of "tar", i.e. "to lead out" of dangerous bottlenecks and threatening fears, "to bring across" over raging rivers without bridges and over the stream of Samsara, has been attached to helping deities since the Vedas and also denotes the gesture of redeeming beings, such as the "Tīr-thankaras" of the Jaina teachings, the "ford-preparers", who show a ford through the waves of Samsara to eternal salvation, as well as the Buddha figures and Bodhisattvas related to them.
"Tara" is the Great Goddess as protector and redeemer, "tarati iti Tara": "she brings across happily, therefore she is called Tara.“ A relief image of the Tara celebrates her as a helper in all tribulations: she protects from water, fire and wind, from elephants, lions and snakes, from demons and distress on the high seas, from prison, thieves and kings. The Brahmanda-Purana calls Tara (in her appearance Kurukulla) the "Lady of Boats" (Naukeschvari), "able to calm the waters“. She has in service countless boatwomen, like her, who are busy rescuing castaways in barges. In this she resembles the Madonna as "stella maris", to whom the Christian seafarers pray for protection and help. The All-Saviour says of herself: "From the world's sea of many fears I will save the beings, therefore the bulls among the sages celebrate me as Tara“.
In her spiritual gesture as the initiatory wisdom of Samsara's redemption, she is archetypally akin to the Christian Gnostic Sophia. Just as Lakshmi, the lotus-throned Goddess of earthly happiness and prosperity, sprang from the sea of cosmic life-milk when the gods whisked it to extract the potion of immortality, so Tara arose as a quintessence in the whisking of the sea of knowledge: "At the whirling of the sea of knowledge the world-poison Kalakuta arose, then all the gods and goddesses were shaken with great terror; but Shiva drank the world-poison Halahala steadfastly, from which he is called the steadfast one (Akshobhya). With him is the Great Maya, the Saviour (Tarini), ever engulfed in the joy of love (ramate)." The Great Maya as the "Saviour" (Tarini), embraces in eternal love-entanglement Shiva, the "Unshakable One", who, in the crystalline unaffectedness of his yoga immersion, divinely represents the attitude of the redeemed (he has his double in the cosmic Buddha "Akshobhya" of the same name).
As the "perfection of knowledge" - Prajna Paramita, - conferring enlightenment and Nirvana, Tara is the high femininity in the circle of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, especially celebrated in mother-right Tibet - Tara is considered the shakti of the saviour Avalokiteschvara (Chinese Kwan-yin, Japanese Kwannon), insofar as this Bodhisattva bears male appearance. In Tantric Buddhism, she rises to the zenith of the pantheon: as Prajna Paramita, she is the mother of all Buddhas, she means nothing other than enlightenment itself, which makes one a Buddha; "param ita": "gone to the other shore (param ita)", leads her across the Samsara river to the other shore of Nirvana. Her sign as the wisdom of enlightenment is the book on a lotus beside her shoulder, while her hands form the circle of inner contemplation of the true teaching (dharma-cakramudra). Thus, as she is the Great Maya of Vishnu and the shakti of Shiva as all-gGod, she finally becomes the shakti of the Adi-Buddha, the cosmic primordial Buddha, to whom the buddhas and bodhisattvas of all worlds flicker timelessly into the phantasmagoria of impermanence like mirror images of his transcendent reality.
The tantric Buddhist sees the Buddhas in Nirvana in eternal embrace with their shaktis, as the Hindu sees the divine couple Gauri and Shankara. This timeless embrace of love is the highest "fourth" body of the Buddhas, above the other three: the sense world in which the buddhas appear to the outer eye, the inner vision with which the supramundane buddha‘s grace the yoga immersion, and the demantsphere of crystalline rapture that signifies enlightenment and liberation, "Nirmana-kaya", the body of buddhas in the sense world of appearance, "sambhoga-kaya", the body of the visions of supersensible spheres, "vajrakaya", the demant-body of transcendent true reality, and fourth, "mahasukha-kaya", the body of "supreme delight" in the Nirvana of the love-entwinedness of Buddha and Shakti (as a pair, called Yab-Yum in Tibetan). In these pairs of buddhas with their shaktis, the series of stone-age pairs of the ancient Goddess-mother or mother-earth with her male companion (fertility demon, sky god, lord of the animals) finds its transfiguration in transcendent spirituality. But the erotic symbolism of this pair signifies the triumph of the Eternal-Feminine over the masculine-ascetic spirituality of the Buddha doctrine, just as the rise of the Great Goddess as shakti in late Hinduism over Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva and all the male gods of the Brahman pantheon signifies the victory of her archetype over all others in India.
The "perfection of knowledge" (Prajna Paramita) is considered the "white" form of the Tara; another beneficent one is the "green" one, but the "saving" Mother also has three gruesome-terrifying forms: the "blue", "yellow" and "red". Blue-black is the colour of death; the blue Tara rides a corpse, carrying sword and scissors in her hands and a necklace of skulls. With clenched jaws and hanging tongue, short body with hanging belly, she represents the dark, destructive side of the All-Goddess who balances her grace figures. The redeeming light colours are only one part in the spectrum of her being and remain intimately related to her counterpart: to the dark, which is equally worthy of worship as the reality of life and at least as close to man.
The enchantress Great Maya, who captures everyone with pleasure in the terror of the Samsara, cannot be found guilty as a temptress to the multiform-all-encompassing existence, to the ocean of life, from whose horror she incessantly rescues individuals as "boat mistress", while the whole sea of life is the glittering, surging play of the shakti. Out of this flood of life caught up in itself, individuals emerge, ripe for redemption, according to the parable of the Buddha: like lotus blossoms that rise above the surface of the water and open their chalices to the unbroken light of heaven. The rest are trustful in the depths, full of all monsters and dark dullness, glittering with precious things, pearls and corals. The Goddess, who "consists of all beings and worlds" (jaganmayi), is herself the pregnant salt womb of the sea of life, which holds and nourishes all forms of life, washes them away and disintegrates them, and in all innocence builds them up into ever new forms that greedily devour one another. Whoever understands the mother in this way does not ask to be redeemed by her, but rather to be freed from himself, from the conceit of his ego, in intimate surrender to her eternal power.
Vishnu once rode through the air on the sun-bird Garuda, his mount, and both of them, full of self-awareness, saw in Vishnu the supreme irresistible all-being Kalika-Purana. Then they passed by the Blue Mountain, on which the Great Goddess thrones as "Mistress of all desires and pleasures" (Kameshvari or in short form Kamakhya) who has her name from kama, the desires and pleasures. But both paid no heed to her. "Fly to, fly to!" said Vishnu to Garuda. Then the Great Maya poured rigidity on both of them so that they did not move from the spot. Vishnu was enraged at the blue mountain and shook it with both hands, but was unable to shake it. Enchanted by the Maya of the Great Maya all around and made motionless, he had to suffer that they fell into the world sea, he sank to the deepest bottom and tried in vain to work his way up. He could not move a limb and lost consciousness. Since he did not honour the shakti, the world power, which is the faculty of all movement, of the limbs as well as of the spirit, it magically withdrew from him: there he became rigid, defenceless and lifeless.
Brahma, the creator, went in search of him and finally found him at the bottom of the sea. He had dissolved and returned to the original substance. Brahma grabbed him and wanted to dive him out, but was unable to do so. Spellbound by the Goddess's Maya powers, he himself froze in amazement under the same spell. The same happened to all the gods who, together with Indra, went in search of the two and struggled in vain to bring them up from the depths of the sea.
Then Brihaspati, the priest and spiritual teacher of the gods, finding their spheres denuded of them, went to the solitude of Shiva on the Himalaya and reverently asked him about the whereabouts of the gods. Mahadeva, the great god, alone knowing the secret of the Great Goddess whose spouse he is, signified the priest of the gods (who are once more the ignorant in the face of the supreme power of the universe): "Lowly esteemed was the Great Goddess, the Maha-Maya, of whom the world is formed; therefore Vishnu and the gods were bound by her Maya and dwell at the bottom of the sea. I will go with you and free them, - without me you would be like them."
Both of them came to the gods at the bottom of the sea and Shiva asked them: "Why are you staying here? How did you become rigid and motionless and like inanimate matter devoid of consciousness?“ Under his question Vishnu, who had sunk to the deepest bottom of unconsciousness, slowly regained speech, indeed he understood what had happened to him and why it had happened to him. He asked Shiva to take them all to the Great Maya, the yoga dream drunkenness that had banished them to the bottom of the sea, so that they might pay homage to the Gracious One and gain her grace.
Shiva promised this, but in order for it to be possible, he first taught all the gods to perform the magical "protection" or "armour" (kavaca) of the "Lady of All Desires and Pleasures" on their own bodies in order to detach themselves from her Maya and imbue themselves anew with her power. It was this armour that protected him from the enchantment of the Maya, so that he did not fall prey to the fate of the other gods, and those who practise it in collected devotion are able to see the Goddess. He helps to make all wishes come true. By laying hands on all limbs and organs from the head down to the heels, by invoking many figures of the all-forming Shakti that is active in them, the whole body comes under her guard, it is handed over to her piece by piece, rather, the power that is all around, that is hidden in it, is called upon, limb by limb, for a beneficial effect. With this ritual of daily devotion, the believer enchants and elevates himself into an aggregate of the manifold divine power of the Great Maya, he transubstantiates his creatureliness into its sanctified vessel.
When Vishnu and the gods had devoutly spread this "armour" all around their bodies by the laying on of hands while murmuring invocations, they rose from the depths of the water thanks to the power of the Great Maya and surged to the blue summit. There, as Vishnu approached the "Lady of All Desires and Delights", he was overcome by the realisation of her greatness and praised her as the Mother of all worlds and beings, the primordial substance and creator of the universe, and the knowledge that confers salvation. Then the Goddess revealed herself bodily and told Vishnu and all the gods to drink from the flood of her womb and bathe in it: "From this you will be without delusion in your Self and filled with supreme heroic power you will move to your place in the zenith of heaven."
This ceremonial of drinking and bathing in the womb of the Goddess does not mean solemn submission to the higher feminine principle, nor an imposed humble acceptance of the overwhelming majesty of the mother's womb, for this submission is already accomplished through the ritual of the "armour" as a devout dedication, whoever puts it on is already enchanted into a vessel of the Goddess, but the complete recognition of the Great Goddess in her overwhelming grandeur has already taken place through the praising words from the mouth of the great god-receiver. It is nothing other than the solemn self-revelation of the veiled image at Sais: the primordial Womb, whose robe no one has lifted, reveals itself with Indian gesture in a sublime act of grace to solemn communion. The gods - and, as always in India, according to their example, the human beings - are dignified to bathe and drink at the divine fountain of all life in the world, in order to receive rebirth and an elevated life in its floods. Thus, all over India, pilgrims draw the water of life from sacred wells or commune in sacred ponds and bathing-places with the miraculous being-power of a god present in them, e.g. the seed of Shiva in the pond of the Gold Lotus of the Great Temple of Madura. They are all a "tirtha", a ford into which one wades in order to reach the other shore over the waves of the Samsara, to bliss in God and salvation from the ego.
Thus Vishnu and the gods bathed in the bosom of the Great Goddess and drank from it; blessed by it, they set out for the highest heaven, released by the Goddess. There they saw the "Mistress of all desires and joys" floating high in space and thousands of blue mountains towering around her, which, touched by her, were littered with wombs on their slopes upwards and downwards. The sacred place of pilgrimage and bathing - the tirtha of the yoni - multiplied myriad times. Incidentally, a Rabelaisian vision. Panurge, the teacher of Pantagruel, once fantasises about a wonderfully fortified, completely impregnable city: the stones of its walls are said to consist piece by piece of pure yonis; it is able to wear down the manliest onslaught of whole armies. This grotesquely dissolute fantasy stems from the ancient mythical imagination of central and southern France; suppressed by the Christian Church during the Middle Ages, it raises its head for the last time with Rabelais' unique work in the freest hour of the Cinquecento under a comic larva, before the Medicean renaissance of the Valois with classicism and humanism on the way to the ideal of the courtly man in the age of Louis XIV, completely excludes such a thing stylisingly. The Valois Renaissance with classicism and humanism on the way to the ideal of the courtly man in the age of Louis XIV completely ruled out such stylisation, as it was at the same time thoroughly repugnant to Calvinist asceticism in Huguenotism and the spirit of the Counter-Reformation. Such animalistic exuberance of „joie de vivre“ is often attributed to the "esprit gaulois", but in fact it is the pre-Celtic, i.e. as in India pre-Aryan, stratum of Old France with a matriarchal structure that speaks out in Rabelais' lonely testimony, as before medieval in the underground of the story of "Aucassin and Nicolette", in which the male childbed (couvade) is attested as a custom of maternal sphere for southern France, as it can be proven in southern India.
The gods climbed the thousands of blue mountains in an instant and, drinking and bathing in their sacred bathing places, happily repeated the communion with the womb of the Goddess. This filled them with incomparable rapture. Devoid of all suffering and full of blissful wonder, they praised the womb of the "Mistress of all desires and joys", thanked Shiva and went on their way.
Communion with the life essence of the Goddess washes away all suffering. Shiva, who taught the "armour" of the Goddess and its ritual, proclaims at the end: a person who has bathed in the womb of the Goddess and drunk of it only once will not be born again on earth, but will attain the highest Nirvana. Through this communion an alchemical transformation takes place in him, his transubstantiation into the divine. The womb of the Goddess contains the alchemical essence of the Lapis Philosophorum, but according to Shiva's word, it also contains the red arsenic (manah-shila) as the motherly blood that nourishes the fruit in it, the mineral that sintered out of the rock in the Himalaya and is said to possess the alchemical power of transformation to change copper and other lesser metals into gold, just as mercury as the seed of Shiva possesses the same power and confers divine immortality.
There are initiations on all levels, capable of transforming man. Everywhere there is a tradition and tendency to give the spiritual-sublime practices the same higher rank than the sensual-magical ones, which in the course of the development of cultures the spiritual element has generally gained over the material-feminine. This development has taken place under the dominance of the male principle. In contrast, with the cult of the Great Goddess in later Hinduism, the archaic good of sensual earth-bound consecrations once again overwhelmingly rises to its zenith. The old world mother, on the one hand "redeeming knowledge", "saviour" and enlightening power in the yogin, on the other hand gives away nothing of her power over the tangible world, which in every shape and gesture is the self-revelation of her enchanting world-creating-world-bewitching power. Just as the gods, by worshipping their world-bearing womb, become blessed and perfect, the cult of the pure life powers in Tantric Hinduism is the sanctification of the creaturely as an all-pervasive revelation of the imperishable maternal power in the transiently blossoming creation.
Thus the signs of the two sexes, lingam and yoni, become supreme cult symbols, rather they have retained their rank from time immemorial until late times. Of these, the love life of Hinduism, at least in a Shivaite atmosphere, experiences a sacramental divinisation in contrast to the complete secularisation of eroticism in the Muslim and Western world. The tantras teach that husband and wife should come close to each other in the feeling of encountering the deity. For the woman, the husband - like the initiating teacher for the disciple - is a human form of Shiva; to belong to him without limits forms the epitome of her religious duties in life. The long myth of the Goddess' love and marriage with Shiva, its dramatic vicissitudes of separation and rediscovery over eons, the Goddess' jealousy and sacrificial death, her ascetic struggle for the ascetic offer the Hindu woman the canon of exemplary behaviour up to the voluntary sacrificial death.
The ground for this mythical life ritual of the sexes is that the spouses do not perceive each other as a person and individual, but as a human form of the divine world force, which encounters itself man-feminine in Shiva and the Goddess and in pairs in all creatures. An archaic situation, comparable to the ritual when elsewhere king and queen solemnly unite as embodied sun and moon deity, enter into fruitful conjunction with each other, which blesses their land and people, and above this ceremonial of attendance a possible private element of inclination and play cannot arise at all.
In contrast, it characterises the situation of the later human being, who has become more resolutely conscious, after the actual emergence of the ego, that he is no longer able to transform and enchant himself in this way as a dancer or mime through a ritual into the divine. He knows the boundaries between divinity and man and has experienced them as immovable. This is the great resignation of the newer man to the earlier one, which earns him the expansion of the person: Consciousness and reflection, criticism and the restlessness of inventiveness, out of it the material-technical domination of the de-godifying world, the sentimental ideal of purified humanity from the end of the 18th century and the cold practice of technicised inhumanity from the rise of the 20th, this is the lost paradise of the early full of shudder and horror, with unlimited upsurges and interchanges, full of bloodthirst and innocence.
In this sphere of Hinduism, however, man is obliged to see in everything feminine, from the little girl onwards, the primary self-revelation of the Great Goddess in the realm of appearances. In the esoteric ritual, girl and woman take the place of the cult image of the Goddess in the flesh, and in the secret intoxication ritual of the Tantras, reserved for the initiated, the erotic sacrament of the sexes stands above the consumption of flesh and intoxicating drink as the highest intoxicant for redemption during one's lifetime. As much as it is suspected, rejected and wisely restricted, it remains the actual natural and ancient fulfilment of the cult of the Great Goddess.
Hence Shiva (in a Tantra) speaks to the Goddess: "As the Goddess Speech and Brahma (the epitome of creative Wisdom) are inseparably fused, so is the Called One: vira with his shakti (the wife of his initiation). Nor am I satisfied with thousands of jugs of potions, nor with hundreds of heaps of meat, if they lack the essence of immortality-amritam-from the womb and the lingam. Not Vishnu's throwing ring stands as a sign over this world, not Brahma‘s lotus, not Indra's lightning wedge; lingam and womb are her signs, of which her essence is Shakti and Shiva. Whenever the union of Shiva and Shakti takes place (i.e. the erotic communion of the initiate with his female consort in the sacramental form that makes both of them the earthly image of the divine couple), then that is the true devotional exercise of the initiate sa sandhya kulanishthanam, then the true union with the Godhead is accomplished in immersion samadhi."
The stone-age behaviour of the old earth-mother and her companion has changed from the cosmic down to the valid-esoteric sacrament of initiated human couples, which the high brahmanical tradition must finally give space to in the Tantras. No longer are the weapons of victorious man-gods the dominant signs of the late hour of the world: not Indra's thunderbolt, which preceded the immigrating Aryans, broke the city castles of the established, and paved the way for the triumphant march of the conquerors into the plains of Hindustan, no longer Vischnu's throwing ring of mythical battles between gods and demons, or Brahma's lotus cup, blossoming into renewed creation: Lingam and Yoni, the ancient symbols of the sexes, have risen again after episodes of ages and stand again in the zenith of valid revelation, as once in the Stone Age beginning and in its timeless survival in the lowlands of folk customs.
The ring has closed and can be turned once more in contemplation: The all-bearing, all-nourishing Goddess embodies herself first and foremost in the earth (dharani), hence she is the daughter of her great mountains: of Himavant ("Haimavati") and is her Mistress, she is enthroned on the Mount Vindhya (Vindhyavasini).
But she is also the night of the death of time (kala-ratri), and is the womb of all life, meaning: the rage of growth, which disputes every foot of air and earth, the silent rage of the creature, the rage of rutting and wanting to receive, the relentless urge for ever new fertilisation, which drives the creature on, shape-shifting, with its scourging blow through life and death; the urge of the unborn to the light and the cry of the newborn life for nourishment and warmth, and the discord of siblings and generations, all the silent or pathetically narrated struggle for the pasture of life. The god of war is her son, like the thriving jovial god of rice cultivation, the elephant-headed Ganesha, who is supposed to clear the obstacles from the path of life. As the struggle of life in relentless breathless embrace, the wrathful one (Chandika) is the terribilità of existence with all the weapons of annihilation in many arms, striding with pestilence, hunger and the din of war through the overpopulated giant land in parching heat, dusty wind and steaming sultriness. Beneath her foot, splendid residences, populous cities, flourishing landscapes sink into dust: "A thousand years a city, a thousand years wilderness", says an Indian proverb.
All beings are two-faced, showing a friendly and a threatening countenance. All deities have a lovely and a fearful face, depending on how close you get to them, but the Great Goddess is the shaping power of the world in all of them. All friendly and threatening faces are facets of her core. What may seem ambiguous in the individual god is incalculable variety in her totality.
Her cruel features are laid apart in the mothers of South India, the plague Goddesses: as you gave life, you bring death. This is the omnipotence of the mother towards her little child, from her face radiates all-embracing love, radiates all anger with coldness and death. She is the inescapable womb. Hence the melancholy of all those bound to the mother: life is as it is in its changing play of light and shadow, with rises and falls, abandonment and preservation.
It is the inexorable reality of life, the flowing ring of its forces and forms, rushing, shooting, transforming, flowing into one another, no one can easily get beyond this. And is its perfect antithesis: the power that rises above it, Tara, the saviour, who leads out of the Samsara, out of the frantic ring into the resting centre, out of the transience of all forms into the imperishability of the eternal power that clenches to them like water to waves, bubbles and foam, is the mute security of life in itself, which from the ashes of burnt forests sprouts fresh greedy flora, to which decay is pregnant with new life, which all around sees only life in transitions and transformations and no shadow of death above it, as little as we ourselves do when we dig our teeth into a ripe fruit or pull a living plant out of the garden soil to eat it fresh.
All that you do, awake and asleep, consciously and involuntarily in the cycle of your body to the accompaniment of the soul, how it builds up and decomposes, devours and delivers, breathes and begets, gives pleasure up to the edge of rage and pain, are only gestures of the Great Mother, who is "formed from all worlds and beings" and does the same thing with her worldly body incessantly many thousandfold. The spirit, however, which comprehends all this and absorbs it as redemptive knowledge, is not her counterpart, only one of her gestures: captivating or liberating, two-faced like all beings, all powers. To see the double being of the Goddess, embracing and devouring, to see the peace in the fall, security in the downfalls, is to recognise her and to be preserved. The complete transience, the bitter taste of oblivion around rubble and ruins, as they glow abandoned in the pitiless noonday silence, taken home by the wild growth, is an enlightening gesture of the Mother, with which the believer drenches himself in recognition. A lustful sense for the bitter, merciless drinks itself reverently full of it in her spirit and spurns reconciliation through spiritual transitions of thinking. Complete pleasure in the lure of life and merciless annihilation: both poles stretched out and flowing into each other in the arc of the broadest tension, that is it. It is a late, immoderate atrophy when it narrows in a modern way to the nationalistic mother-earth "India", which raises its arms warlike-patriotically against foreign rulers and bends over its own "children of the country".
The possible superiority of the feminine over other gestures of life through simple motherhood, through the mother-beast in it, its all-becoming in this fulfilment of nature's trivial central function of renewing life, lifted above the others in tension, exhilaration, pain and intimacy, seen elementally as fulfilling fate, as fulfilled destiny: this function that fires, fulfils and sanctifies is, for late Hinduism, embodied in every female figure, of which child and girl, like matron, has a glimmer of superhuman dignity as the vessel and representation of the supreme force of nature - shakti - the Goddess-mother to whom all owes existence.
This powerful turn to the feminine-maternal impoverishes the melody of life enormously, where are the masculine guiding images and figures in this elevation of the mother above all? in this late rise of early mother-bound world hour? If motherhood is the solution to all riddles, then one has returned home to childishness and has dismissed the masculine, for precisely by growing out of childhood and the masculine rears up violently, one grows out of the mother, becomes a man, becomes a hero and warrior, artist and sage, becomes an overcomer, finds and overcomes the woman who is not yet a mother, but who is to become a mother unexpectedly under the exuberance of the new man.
The cult of the world mother and mother earth rises out of Stone Age childhood; in the pre-Aryan masses of the Indian peninsula this childhood has survived for millennia; the Stone Age, elsewhere the debris of archaeology, is in India the popular present and gains literary language from the vitality of silent folk cults in the writings of the Puranas and Tantras: the world is one big kindergarten. So very democratic; before the motherly cherishing principle the little men are all small, they can prove nothing to him. An emasculated peasant and mass sphere, earthbound, bent to the earth, unwarlike, without the adventure of the spirit.
Here we are again and still before the rise of the great battle of ranks between the sexes, which forms the leitmotif for Bachofen's mythological history of the ancient world, and we are again before the breakthrough of the masculine, which rises up against maternal-feminine supremacy and natural tyranny to do violence to the feminine as it pleases, with the theft of women (the Sabine women, the prelude to the exemplary empire of Rome), with the subjugation of women in the house of men.
The cult of the pure principle of life in the image of the maternal-feminine is democratic, just as spiritual orders of man urge aristocratic ranking. The devoted call for the mother is a democratic abdication of the masculine, a relinquishing of individual values that grow out of man's own depth of development on his way to manhood and maturity and are acquired through achievement and experience, self-preparation and mastery. The call for the mother is the regression to the elementary form of subordination and submission, is the infant's mental clinging reflex, the return home to the infant.
Here all manliness is abdicated: the conqueror in Vedic battles and songs, the bloody warrior nobility in the Mahabharata, the semi-divine hero and bringer of salvation for many in the Ramayana, who helps himself and the world out of the misery of the fiends because the helping powers of the world reach out to him, because what remains alien and dangerous to others: the animals of the wilderness, become his best friends. The spiritual overcomer and enlightened one, the yogin, and his most sublime figure, the Buddha, has also abdicated, or: all these figures and symbols have passed by this world as if on an upper stage, without transforming it. As if they had failed as models of human mastery over life, as if they had not been able to cope with all the dreadfulness of life, which is this mother herself. Or as if no adepts had grown up for a long time who could fulfil the outline of such figures and walk their paths to the end, since the last darkest age of the world has dawned. And as if the glory of the other gods had evaporated and been absorbed again by the old primordial Mother, and her seers and sages gone. A cycle of the ages has closed, as in the prelude to the twilight of the gods, when the rope tears in the hands of the Norns, as the knowing women fall silent in answer to the question "do you know how it will be?" and drive into the depths, embracing each other:
"To the end of eternal knowledge!
Wise men report nothing more to the world.
Down to the mother! Down!"
Everything masculine, always focused on itself, on its uniqueness as a hero, conqueror and master, is here, with its great gestures, resigned as powerless before the jaws of life, which devours, chews up and smacks everything that has welled up out of its own womb in the shape of life, and for which the murder of its creatures is a task as indifferently inert as it is intoxicating: the life process of the world's body.
The decline to the maternal, the return home from the adventures of the masculine, whose great models have been cleared away and broken, remains of solemn dubiousness.
The melancholy songs of the 18th century mystics of Bengal, Ramprasads and other chanting yogin revolve in ascetic devotion around the consolation and desolation of this devout filiality. The mother is as pitiless as she is merciful, since she is life itself, and life remains as it is, whether one calls it tenderly "Mother" in a cry for help, or tightens oneself to withstand its Medusa-like countenance. She lets herself be called "Mother" and this sound can for a moment release the heart from the boundless fear of the silent horror of life, which ceaselessly grinds its blossom with its jaws, but this cry does not transform the mother, she remains the dark figure, crowned with the severed hands and heads of countless victims, dripping with her blood, the blood-filled bowl raised to her lip, in order to slurp the steaming juice of life tiger-like from it with a broad tongue.
In all the imploring devotion to her maternal embrace, the melancholy realisation forces itself forward that she remains what she is: the all-encompassing whole that keeps its balance out of opposites, sheltering mother's womb, silently nourishing, giving breast and hand, and gulping death's throat, chewing up everything.
To lie down to rest on the thorny bed of this bitter light-dark insight is the final wisdom of Ramprasad in his Songs to Mother:
"Mother, how many times will you drive me around the wheel of becoming, like a blindfolded ox turning the oil mill?
You tie me to the drawbar of the world and drive me around without end. What have I done that thou hast subjected me to the six mill-hands, to the passions? Eighty times a hundred thousand births have I wandered through, and the gate of the womb is not yet closed to me, painfully wounded I come again.
When a child cries and speaks the dear word mother, the mother takes it on her lap, so, I see, it happens in the whole world, I alone am excluded.
Calling upon Durga, many sinners have obtained forgiveness; take the bandage from my eyes, that I may see the feet that banish all fear!
Numberless are the wicked children, but who ever heard of a wicked mother?
Mother, this is the hope of Ramprasad: that he may find rest at thy feet."
The return to the childlike relationship with the mother necessarily contains an ironic element: that the ever-birthing world mother should be good for lifting her child out of the timeless cycle of birth and death, which is nothing other than the play of her motherhood. But with whom else but with the Goddess, who is formed of all worlds and beings, should the cry of her child find fulfilment?
The motherly world-power can only ever want to work the incessant rebirth of all creatures, silently, without asking; the monotony of life, which circles unepically-cyclically in the recurrence of the same, in the round dance of seasons, ages, generations, is already the meaning of the whole in its circling course, nothing uniquely masculine is given beyond that, breaking in historically, setting epochs, parting times in the vegetative circling as the course of the hero or the descent of a saviour.
Out of the monotony of this murmuring stream of life flows the ancient melancholy of the people in the maternal cultural sphere, which, with the fading of male gods and role models of Aryan-Brahman character in the last world age of Hinduism, overwhelmingly captivates the Indian atmosphere, flows basically what from the West has been called the Indian pessimism of life.
Again and again this stupid spring, again and again this deadly seriousness towards the divine stupor full of personal agitations and crises: that the hens and greens find each other and the necessary, miraculous happens, the silent rite that rejoices the world mother; again and again struggles and convulsions, that empires burst and borders tremble, thrones rise and fall, that the inevitable happens: Biography and world history continue. And always it was like never before: Tedeum, peace bells from all towers, flags of victory over city and country; always magically outrageous as in Tristan and Isolde, never before have two loved each other as we do with sweeps across the Milky Way and back into childbirth, for that is what the good world mother, the old bawd of the cosmos, the Great Maya, was involuntarily once again bent on.
Thus life begets itself in lust and exterminates itself in victories, intoxicates itself every time with the magic of its unleashed demons, that is the drunkenly self-exhilarated dance of the Goddess World with dissolved hair, the girlish seductress in the full gleam of her slender charms, that is the scourge stroke that whips the life team forward through the night of the universe.
Childhood to the World Mother is abandonment and lamentation. Ramprasad sings:
"Is motherhood a mere word on your lips? Giving birth does not make one a mother if she does not understand the grief of her child.
For ten moons and ten days a mother endures hardship, but now, though I hunger, my mother does not ask where her child is.
Parents of men rebuke their sons when they have offended them. Though you see death, the terrible devourer approaching to kill me, but that does not bother you.
Ramprasad speaks: Where did you learn this behaviour. If you are like your father, the Himalaya: of stone, then do not arrogate to yourself the name of world mother."
The passionate urge towards the mother may call up everything childlike in the devotee of the Kali and bring it to formative dominion in him, perhaps he finds in this decline to the mother-child relationship or in the persistence in it the sheltering form of life, like a believer bound with us in the bosom of the Mother Church, and the sight of her tearing horror, which balances her all-nourishing motherliness, can involuntarily serve as a model for the unpurified demoniac of his nature, that he lives childlike innocently, unconsciously at home in the diversity of the Goddess, mutely at home in her uncanny model, like the fish in the water.
But the true adept of the Mother Goddess, less naïve, as he struggles with all his might consciously for her mystery, can only, renouncing every gesture of maternal love and care on the part of the Mother to whose worship he has consecrated his life, find the dark balance of renunciation and longing in the melancholy realisation for whose inexorability he feels ripe in view of his dying hour. Thus Maharaja Ramkrishna of Nator, a contemporary of Ramprasad, sings of his last hour to Kali and Shiva:
"When my mind fades,
whisper Kali's name in my ear.
This body is not mine,
Passions wash it away.
O forgetful one -
give me my rosary,
When I swim dead in the Ganga.“
Ramkrishna speaks fearfully to the Great Forgetter:
„You do not care for my welfare,
Do not care for my fate."
Shiva, the "Gracious One", is the "Great Forgetter" who does not remember his pious one in life and death, this is the truth that imbues the believer and comforts him by virtue of its bitterness. Thus Shiva is the true consort of the Kali: she too is the "Forgetter", drunk with herself as the Great Maya of endless play; eternal procreation she ceaselessly devours her children, in bringing forth and loving nourishment she is indifference and forgetting, since one is like the other to her.
The Godhead is the great forgetting. To keep everything, even to write it down: "liber scriptus proferetur, in quo cunctum continetur" is completely foreign to the divine. In masculine ages and cultures, the phantasmagoria of the epic and the dramatic emerges as the highest interpretation of existence: the hypothesis of life and the illusion of the unique in heroic life and tragedy on the basis of the ever new breakthrough of extraordinary figures: gifted heroes, descended gods. But the maternal consciousness of India remembers them all as the return of the eternal same: in the eon-wide blurring monotonous series of the Buddhas and in the circling cycle of the Avataras.
Each heroic boy whom the mother gives birth to experiences and conquers the world anew as a single one, but the mother calmly watches his old games, games of many sons of yore whom she forgot, an ever fresh, ever same stock of the cyclically grinding uneventfulness of the stream of life.
The transfigured image of this oppressive idyll of the mother's world is Nirvana: in it, the silent urge of life has purified itself from the oppression of its rage to crystal silence; here, the game of the mother's world, that nothing happens in all the circling and crying, has transfigured itself and rests on itself.
But whoever remains enchanted by its circles can, in the sustained contemplation of the irreconcilable opposites of motherly love and mercilessness as the unity of life and death, penetrate himself with the essential secret of the Great Maya and in this be liberated from the love and fear of his own transience. In the unity of the moment and timelessness, he experiences the flickering standstill of the whirring wheel in which he swings.