Author:
Publisher: Nicolas-Hays, Inc.
ISBN: 0892546166
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 407
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Book Description
About 16 centuries ago, an unknown Indian author or authors gathered together the diverse threads of already ancient traditions and wove them into a verbal tapestry that today is still the central text for worshippers of the Hindu Devi, the Divine Mother. This spiritual classic, the Devimahatmya, addresses the perennial questions of the nature of the universe, humankind, and divinity. How are they related, how do we live in a world torn between good and evil, and how do we find lasting satisfaction and inner peace? These questions and their answers form the substance of the Devimahatmya. Its narrative of a dispossessed king, a merchant betrayed by the family he loves, and a seer whose teaching leads beyond existential suffering sets the stage for a trilogy of myths concerning the all-powerful Divine Mother, Durga, and the fierce battles she wages against throngs of demonic foes. In these allegories, her adversaries represent our all-too-human impulses toward power, possessions, and pleasure. The battlefields symbolize the field of human consciousness on which our lives' dramas play out in joy and sorrow, in wisdom and folly. The Devimahatmya speaks to us across the ages of the experiences and beliefs of our ancient ancestors. We sense their enchantment at nature's bounty and their terror before its destructive fury, their recognition of the good and evil in the human heart, and their understanding that everything in our experience is the expression of a greater reality, personified as the Divine Mother.
Author: Judith Illsley Gleason
Publisher: Harper San Francisco
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
A celebration in folklore, mythology, music, and art of the African goddess Oya. This expanded edition of an underground classic (Shambhala, 1987) features new artwork, new chapter introductions, and songs with musical scores. The author of six books, Judith Gleason has traveled extensively to Africa and the Caribbean to research the ancient and contemporary Yoruba and Santeria traditions.
Author: Aditi Devi
Publisher: SCB Distributors
ISBN: 1935387812
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 188
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Book Description
In Praise of Adya Kali details the goddess Kali, and her culture of devotion in West Bengal and South Asia. Different from most contemporary books about this Dark Goddess, this book offers a liturgy of worship—a spiritual practice, the Song of the Hundred Names of Adya Kali, that readers can use to cultivate a direct devotional relationship to Kali. In Praise of Adya Kali is also a context-setting guide, establishing this practice as a general orientation to life. Most compelling, the text of this liturgy and Commentaries contain an intimate revelation of how the goddess establishes herself in her devotees’ bodies and thus intervenes, by unconditional love and acceptance, in their lives. A lengthy Introduction, both scholarly and personal, describes the goddess and the possibilities that these prayers will offer. Aditi Devi guides us in how to build a shrine to Kali, various types of offerings to make to her, and suggests a schedule for how to use this liturgy with a long-term commitment over the course of 108 nights. “This Song of the Hundred Names is a powerful teaching that all forms are her forms,” the author notes. Male, female, or other gendered, readers are presented with the possibility to experience the depths of their own internal feminine energies, and thereby come into greater healing and wholeness, more readily able to express this often neglected part of ourselves.
Author: Devadatta Kālī
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788120829312
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 404
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Book Description
This translation combines Western scholarship with an insider's perspective, based on the author's 37 years of spiritual practice in the Hindu tradition.
Author: Thomas B. Coburn
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791404454
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Coburn provides a fresh and careful translation from the Sanskrit of this fifteen-hundred-year-old text. Drawing on field work and literary evidence, he illuminates the process by which the Devī-Māhātmya has attracted a vast number of commentaries and has become the best known Goddess-text in modern India, deeply embedded in the ritual of Goddess worship (especially in Tantra). Coburn answers the following questions among others: Is this document "scripture?" How is it that this text mediates the presence of the Goddess? What can we make of contemporary emphasis on oral recitation of the text rather than study of its written form? One comes away from Coburn's work with a sense of the historical integrity or wholeness of an extremely important religious development centered on a "text." The interaction between the text and later philosophical and religious developments such as those found in Advaita Vedanta and Tantra is quite illuminating. Relevant here are the issues of the writtenness and orality/aurality of 'scripture,' and the various ways by which a deposit of holy words such as the Devī-Māhātmya becomes effective, powerful, and inspirational in the lives of those who hold it sacred.
Author: Devdutt Pattanaik
Publisher: Vakils, Feffer & Simons Pvt Ltd
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 148
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Book Description
Takes readers through Shakta imagery, philosophy, beliefs, customs, history, folklore and myth. This book includes tales of Adi-Maya-Shakti, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Parvati, Kali, Durga as well as several village-goddesses such as Kanyakumari, Vaishnav-devi, Bahucharmata and heroines such as Anasuya, Arundhati and Savitri.
Author: P. C. Cast
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440643652
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 434
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Book Description
Ancient gods Artemis and Apollo get caught up in a game of love with a mortal woman in this Goddess Summoning novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author P. C. Cast... Tired of dating egomaniacs, interior designer Pamela Gray has nearly given up. She wants to be treated like a goddess—preferably by a god. As she whispers her wish, she unwittingly invokes the goddess Artemis, who has some tricks up her celestial sleeve… Twins Artemis and Apollo have been sent to the kingdom of Las Vegas to test their mettle. Their first assignment: make Pamela’s wish come true. So Artemis volunteers her golden brother. After all, who better than the handsome God of Light to bring love to this lonely woman? It might be a first, but here in Sin City, where life is a gamble, both god and mortal are about to bet on a high-stakes game of love...
Author: Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190844558
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
Reciting the Goddess presents the first critical study of the Svasthanivratakatha (SVK), a sixteenth-century Hindu narrative textual tradition. The extensive SVK manuscript tradition offers a rare opportunity to observe the making of a specific, distinct Hindu religious tradition. Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz argues that the SVK serves as a lens through which we can observe the creation of modern 'Hinduism' in the Himalayas, as the text both mirrored and informed key moments in the self-conscious creation of Nepal as the 'world's only Hindu kingdom' in the late medieval and early modern period. Birkenholtz mines the literary historiography that is contained within the SVK text itself, chronicling the text's literary and narrative development as well as the development of the Svasthani goddess tradition. She outlines the process whereby the SVK gradually transformed into a Purana text, and became a critical source for Nepali Hindu belief and identity. She also examines the elusive character of the goddess Svasthani whose identity is tied to the pan-Hindu goddess tradition, and the representation of women in the SVK and the ways in which the text influenced local and regional debates on the ideal of Hindu womanhood. Reciting the Goddess presents Nepal's celebrated SVK as a micro-level illustration of the powerful ways in which people, place, and literature intersect to produce new ideas and concepts of identity and place, even in a historically non-literate culture.
Author: Suresh Narain Mathur
Publisher: Diamond Pocket Books (P) Ltd.
ISBN: 9788128808029
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 94
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Book Description
From more than 33 million gods & goddesses in Hindu mythology. This book has story for only more popular ones.
Author: David Kinsley
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publ.
ISBN: 9788120803947
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
Hindu Goddesses is a valuable sourcebook and reference work for students and scholars of Hindu goddesses and of Hinduism in general. Each goddess is dealt with as an independent deity with a coherent mythology, theology and, in some cases, cult of her own. Within the complex, diverse, and rich goddess traditions of Hinduism, one can find suggestions of nearly every important theme in the Hindu religion. In many ways, this book is as much a study of the Hindu tradition itself as it is a study of one aspect of that tradition. No other living religious tradition has displayed such an ancient, continuous, and diverse history of goddess worship.
