It just about floored me when I
read Jeffrey Kripal’s account in his book Kali's Child of the “divinization” of Sharada Devi: Perfecting
the Mother’s Silence. Kripal’s
well-analyzed exposition of the constructing of a holy person might have saved
me from learning those lessons the hard way in relation to guru-bhakti cults.[1]
Reading about Sharada, it was impossible not to think
of the Peter Sellers film, Being There, in which his character, Chance,
a moronic gardener addicted to watching television, is envisioned as a virtual
saint by his sophisticated acquaintances. Just as with Sharada, the richly
fertile space of Chance’s silence was easily filled up with the projected
ideals of others. All that either of them had to do was to “be there.” The
needs of their devotees supplied them with divinity. As Kripal puts it,
“Sharada’s silence is filled in, seen, interpreted, acted out, worshiped,
created in speech and social etiquette, treasured, even photographed, until it
is given a voice that can speak to the anxious conditions of British Bengal.”
Additionally, in Sharada’s case, monks were
busy practicing spiritual spin control in order to create a figure that could
serve the needs of the new religious movement. To be fair, Kripal points out
that Sharada was a genuinely patient and compassionate woman, but it is
doubtful she was the incarnate Goddess of the Universe others made her out to
be.
It surprised me to learn of the mental
illness in the Ramakrishna family line. I knew Ramakrishna himself was, shall
we say, “eccentric,” but if I interpret the text correctly, his sister was
psychotic, and her daughter Radha (Sharada’s adopted niece), was
mentally/developmentally retarded.
I also had not realized what drudgery
Sharada’s life was while her husband was alive. I had thought that she had been
venerated as the Holy Mother her whole time at Dakshineswar, but apparently,
for years she was a virtual prisoner who spent her days “in a tiny octagonal
cubicle in the temple music tower, sleeping, praying, and, most of all, cooking
for her famous husband and his numerous male guests.” While Ramakrishna swooned
in samadhi, his poor wife was swooning with constipation and exhaustion. If the
goddess really is a feminist, that would have been an appropriate time to kick
brahmin butt.
In Ruth Erndl’s essay, I found intriguing
Stanley Kurtz’s idea that the Hindu tendency to meld all goddesses can be
traced to the presence of many mother figures in every household, “who in the
Hindu (male) psyche become one great Mother.” I ponder how this principle would
operate in parts of Nepal, where because of the lack of marriageable women,
polyandry is practiced and a woman typically marries a group of several brothers.
Would this contribute to a One-God-in-Many-Forms theology?
Sree Padma’s essay, From Village to
City: Transforming Goddesses in Urban Andhra Pradesh, shows how village
goddess-worship traditions have adapted to the deluge of changes brought about
by rapid urbanization. However, she points out that with seventy percent of
India still rural, village goddess worship dominates religious life. “It is
without question the most widespread form of religiosity expressed in the Hindu
tradition.” Then she explains a process called “Sanskritization,” by which
local goddesses have been absorbed into the Brahmanic tradition. She believes
that Sanskritization of local goddess cults should not be seen as something
grafted onto the Hindu tradition, “but as a process by which an ancient,
predominant form of religious practice comes to be incorporated into textual
traditions.” She takes this thesis further:
…Sanskritization
in the goddess cults I examine functions primarily as ritual and metaphysical
‘window dressings,’ that do not alter the fundamental ethos of goddess
veneration. While some scholars interpret the Sanskritization of local
goddesses as reflecting the absorbent nature of the ‘great tradition’ of
Brahmanic Hinduism, I would argue that veneration of local goddesses is
actually the ‘great tradition’ in question (italics mine), given its
historical longevity, geographical ubiquity, and cultic predominance.
She later mentions the process of
“de-Sanskritization,” in which a Brahmanical goddess, Durga, is turned into a
local deity, Kanakamma, who is then “re-Sanskritized” by sacred texts and
rituals.
I found interesting the tale of Erukamma’ a
goddess who was once responsible for smallpox and other “hot season” diseases.
Although she devoured children through disease, her protective powers could be
invoked through ritual devotion and offerings of cooling prasad: water, fruits
and yogurt, etc.
Elaine Craddock’s essay, Reconstructing
the Split Goddess as Sakti in a Tamil Village, goes into more depth about
Mariyamman, another smallpox goddess (a.k.a. Bavaniyamman). Mariyamman has the
power to kill with smallpox, but also the power to heal the disease. Like Kali,
“she is not just a fearful deity, but the object of intense love.” Strangely,
smallpox is seen as “a sign of the goddess’s favor, a manifestation of her
dwelling in the body of the devotee.” It is also a whip to snap her devotee’s
attention back to constant worship of her. “She is often pictured as a fierce,
angry goddess with a voracious appetite for blood sacrifice and a capricious
character, a vivid manifestation of ambivalent power.”
The archetype of blood sacrifice,
associated not only with this goddess, but also with many ancient cultures,
including, of course, the Hebrews and Christians, seems to me to be based upon
a conception of and reaction to the sheer fact of death. Since every born
creature is vulnerable to injury, sickness, old age and suffering; and because
each birth leads to death, the primitive sense that all life is blood sacrifice
to the Creator of Life is easy to conceive. This must have been especially true
in pre-scientific cultures that lacked both an understanding of disease
processes and the means to treat and cure them, and in which every person had
seen death up close—not hidden away in hospitals. The Vedas talk about the
multitude of forms as a kind of food. The endless interchange of energy and
transformation of forms is seen as a universal feast—everything and everyone is
both a consumer of food and food for another.
It is psychologically interesting that
suffering in violent ways should turn an innocent victim into a deity. It
happened not only in the case of Renuka, who becomes a goddess, but also
“people who lived or were known in the village and died violently may be
worshiped as part of the most localized realm of the divine hierarchy.”
[1] The fact is, I have seen
firsthand every one of the same ploys and sillinesses enacted innocently or
intentionally in the company of “holy persons.” (For example, physical
illnesses are equated with “taking on the karma of devotees.” Alcoholism,
manic-depression and sexual and emotional abuse are all interpreted as the
“crazy wisdom” of one who is beyond conventional morality.) In my early
twenties and thirties, I spent several years in the communities of Maharaji (a
teen-aged guru from India
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