ordered">Few words on Hinduism

Often Hinduism is described as a polytheistic religion - with the existence of numerous gods and goddesses. However the majority of the forms of Hinduism is monotheistic - recognizing only one deity and showing other gods and goddesses as manifestations or aspects of the same god – a supreme god.

What is original in Hinduism is that this supreme being can also have a feminine aspect.

This feminine aspect of the god is called by the proper noun Shakti (but the common noun shakti means power). Likewise, a goddess is called devi, spelt without capital, while Devi – with capital – refers to the supreme Goddess.

The devi herself covers several forms: either the sweet and loving mother Parvati, or the faithful wife Lakshmi, or the mighty Durga, or the ferocious Kāli. Here, devi\goddess – without capital – refers to the limited forms of the goddess.

According to my subject, I will focus my interest in the limitless idea of Devi/Goddess (with capital).

In the Hindu tradition, the concept of the female deity – Devi - is derived from the supreme cosmic power of Shakti, the source and the sustenance of all creation.

In the pre-Vedic tradition (1200 bc), India was a female-dominated culture. People had only feminine goddesses, from the nature : earth, rivers, mountains, and even caves were goddesses.

In such a female-dominated culture as the Indian one, women could choose their lovers and husbands and the male could not refuse the woman or he was killed.

After this period, India lived many invasions, notably the Aryans, coming from the North. They invaded northern India and arrived with their own culture and beliefs. The Aryans were of warrior peoples. They venerated a whole pantheon of male gods. With fire (Agni) as their medium, they invoke masculine warrior gods like Indra, the god of gods, then the god of war and the one of toner, and many other male gods who reside in the sky.

The people of India were a very open people. So they accepted these new beliefs. However, it was still difficult to integrate male gods with a purely feminine pantheon.

Thus, the only way for these gods to survive or to get a own life was to become the consort of a goddess.

On the same time, this warrior people brought with them a real social transformation. Women are turned into a symbol of masculine honour. This transformation from prizes possession to venerted object marks the triumph of patriarchy in India.

An excessive urbanisation also resulted in disgust for the things of material. But meaning was sought beyond the city walls : in the wild earth below and the open sky above.

Those who were looking at the earth below saw it as the Goddess, embodying the paradoxes of the world (Ishtar, the fertile, Gauri, the domestic and Kāli the wild). Here, the world were seen in feminine terms.

But gradually, the gaze turned upwards toward the sky. The earth became a trap and women a bondage.

Since two thousands years, the Puranic Hinduism gods could not be explained without the Goddess. She was not a supplement, she was a complement of the god.

Three sects emerged in later Puranic Hinduism: two masuline, focused on Shiva and Vishnu, and one feminine focused on Devi.

It was in epics times (100-600 BC) that the Goddesses became the wives of the gods of the Hindu Trinity.

Brahma is the god who wanted to control Devi. Shiva is the ascetic who attacks Bhrama for that. He renounces social life until Devi transformed into Gauri (Parvati) made him householder and father.

Vishnu is the householder who looks upons Devi as Lakshmi, goddess of auspiciousness and abundance.

Devi is seen here as the Shakti who gives the energy of life to the god. It is said that a god without his Shakti has no existence, he has no life.

The iconography represents sometimes the god and his Shakti in a one and same body. It is then called Adharnarishvara, showing thus that a god and his Devi have an identical importance.

- She is on the same time his mother, his daughter and his wife.

- She gives them the illusion that they can dominate her but never let them master her.

- She gives the opportunity to overcome the fear that creates patriarchy and on the same time she provides the tools to overcome the fears that arise from patriarchy.

Kāli in Hindu texts

The worship of a mother goddess as the source of life and fertility has prehistoric roots. In fact, it exists from the earlier Vedic period, probably long before 1200 bc.

There are many indications of the importance of fertility and the importance of worshiping feminine power in the remains of the Indus Valley Civilization. Female figurines were found depicting the female figure (Coburn 15).

Terra-cotta statues were found in former farming societies valued at 2000 BC. One of these statues strongly look like Kāli. Notably by her dance on man’s body, but also the collar of human skulls that she carries around the neck. So, a cult to a similar goddess already existed.

However, we know that in India, the first sources of a religious knowledge come only from the oral tradition.

The scripture of the first Vedas (sacred texts) is said to have been done in around 1500–1000 BCE (controversed datation).

(It is said that the Vedas were compiled around the time of Krishna (c. 3500 B.C.), and even at that time they were hardly understood. But even the historians give different view to the subject. They said that Vedas are a compilation of poetry and texts of various rishis (sages).)

The transformation of the female deity into a Great goddess of cosmic powers was achieved with the composition of the Devi Mahatmya (Glory of the goddess), a text of the 5th to 6th century, when worship of the female principle took on dramatic new dimensions.

There, the goddess is not only the mysterious source of life, she is the very soil, all-creating and all consuming.

She can get numerous shapes – This is due in part to the richness of the meanings and symbols associated with the Devi.

She is perceived as the divine Mother - creator of the universe.

She also appears as the female counterpart of the male gods.

And more recently, Bharat Mata appears, she is Mother India, the personification of India itself.

Many historians believe that the origin of the goddess Kāli is in the great Sanskrit tradition - including the oldest texts of Hinduism - considered to have been revealed by the gods and written by the sages.

The name Kāli is found in the Mundaka Upanishad, one of the main Upanishads or Vedic commentaries, where Kāli is the name of one of the seven languages of the sacrificial fire or yajna. Her first mention as a divinity is found in the Kathaka Grihya Sutra, another Vedic commentary.

An important source for the myths and stories of Kāli is the set of sacred Hindu texts known as Puranas. Again, their date is the subject of scholarly debate, but most researchers estimate their writing somewhere between 400 and 1400 CE. In the Agni and Garuda Puranas, Kāli is described as giving success in war and allowing the conquest of enemies.

Kāli is described for the first time as a frightening goddess, in one of the Epics : the Mahabharata.

The story says that she is seen by Asvatthama when he enters at night in the camp of Pandavas to kill all the soldiers. She has blood-stained eyes, four arms, wears red garlands, and is of a terrifying appearance.

But Kāli makes her 'official' debut in the Devi-Mahatmya[1], where she is said to have emanated from the brow of Goddess Durga (slayer of demons) during one of the battles between the divine and anti-divine forces. Etymologically Durga's name means "Beyond Reach". She is thus an echo of the woman warrior's fierce virginal autonomy. In this context Kāli is considered the 'forceful' form of the great goddess Durga.

Violent forms have become important in the traditions of Kāli, and the goddess in her ferocious form can be found in medieval texts such as Devi, Garuda, and Shiva Purana.

By that time, Kāli is identify to the primal form of nature, « before culture and outside culture ». Human society is created within her ; she ultimately consumes human society.

Around 500CE, Tantik litterature began to be composed. Here, we find Kāli and Kāli-like goddesses (as Tara, Sundari, Tripira, Bhairavi + various forms of Kāli).

Theses goddesses are associated with wild and domestic spaces. The devi here wants gods pay attention to her for the benefit of humanity.

Open to multiple interpretations, the myth of Kāli can be understood and interpreted in various ways.

The symbolics of Kāli

Kāli is perhaps the most dramatic form of Devi in Hindu mythology.

Kāli is represented as a Black woman with four arms; in one hand she has a sword, in another the head of the demon she has slain, with the other two she is encouraging her worshippers. For earrings she has two dead bodies and wears a necklace of skulls ; her only clothing is a girdle made of dead men's hands, and her tongue protrudes from her mouth. Her eyes are red, and her face and breasts are besmeared with blood. She stands with one foot on the thigh, and another on the breast of her male cunterpart, Shiva. Some scholars say that it is her husband.

There is a story telling that the male heads around Kāli’s neck are the heads of men who were killed after they made love or just wanted to make love with women without their consent.

Kāli's fierce appearances have been the subject of extensive descriptions in several earlier and modern works. Though her fierce form is filled with awe-inspiring symbols, their real meaning is not what it first appears- they have equivocal significance:

- Kali's blackness symbolizes her all-embracing, comprehensive nature, because black is the color in which all other colors merge; black absorbs and dissolves them.

- There is one mantra in Hinduism telling : 'Just as all colors disappear in black, so all names and forms disappear in her (in Kāli) ' (Mahanirvana Tantra).

- Black is said to represent the total absence of color, again signifying the nature of Kāli as the ultimate reality.

This is named in Sanskrit nirguna (beyond all quality and form). Either way, Kāli's black color symbolizes her transcendence of all forms.

A devotee poet says:

"Is Kāli, my Divine Mother, of a black complexion? She appears black because She is viewed from a distance; but when intimately known She is no longer so. 

The sky appears blue at a distance, but when you are close by, you will find that it has no colour.

The water of the ocean looks blue at a distance, but when you go near and take it in your hand, you find that it is colourless."

... Ramakrishna Paramhansa (1836-86)

Kāli's nudity has a similar meaning.

In her absolute, primordial nakedness she is free from all covering of illusion. She is Nature (Prakriti in Sanskrit), stripped of 'clothes'. Her nudity symbolizes that she is completely beyond name and form, completely beyond the illusory effects of maya (illusion or false conciousness). Her nudity is said to represent totally illumined consciousness, unaffected by maya.

Kāli is the bright fire of truth, which cannot be hidden by the clothes of ignorance. Such truth simply burns them away.

She is full-breasted; her motherhood is a ceaseless creation.

Her disheveled hair forms a curtain of illusion, the fabric of space – the time that organizes matter.

Her garland of fifty human heads, each representing one of the fifty letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, symbolizes the repository of knowledge and wisdom.

She wears a girdle of severed human hands - Hands that are the principal instruments of work and so signify « the action » or karma. Thus the binding effects of this karma have been overcome, by devotion to Kāli. She has blessed the devotee by cutting him free from the cycle of karma.

Her white teeth are symbolic of purity (Sanskrit : Sattva).

Her tongue drawn which is red, dramatically depicts the fact that she consumes all things and denotes the act of tasting or enjoying what society regards as forbidden, i.e. her indiscriminate enjoyment of all the world's "flavors".

Kāli's four arms represent the complete circle of creation and destruction, which is contained within her. She represents the inherent creative and destructive rhythms of the cosmos.

Her right hands, making the mudras of "don’t fear", represent the creative aspect of Kāli, while the left hands, holding a bloodied sword and a severed head represent her destructive aspect. The bloodied sword and severed head symbolize the destruction of ignorance and the dawning of knowledge. The sword is the sword of knowledge, that cuts the knots of ignorance and destroys false consciousness (the severed head that contain only false knowledge). Kāli opens the gates of freedom with this sword.

Finally her three eyes represent the sun, the moon, and the fire, with which she is able to observe the three modes of time: past, present and future. This attribute is also the origin of the name Kāli, which is the feminine form of 'Kala', the Sanskrit term for Time.

Another symbolic but controversial aspect of Kāli is her proximity to the cremation ground. It is said that she lives in a cremation ground.

O Kāli, Thou art fond of cremation grounds; so I have turned my heart into one 

That thou, a resident of cremation grounds, may dance there unceasingly. 

O Mother! I have no other fond desire in my heart;

fire of a funeral pyre is burning there;

O Mother! I have preserved the ashes of dead bodies all around that Thou may come.

O Mother! Keeping Shiva, conqueror of Death, under Thy feet,

Come, dancing to the tune of music;

 I wait with my his eyes closed

... Ramprasad (1718-75)

Kāli's dwelling place, the cremation ground, denotes a place where the five elements (Sanskrit: pancha mahabhuta) are dissolved.

Kāli dwells where dissolution takes place. In terms of devotion and worship, this means the dissolution of all attachments, of anger, of lust, and of all other binding emotions, feelings, and ideas.

The heart of the devotee is where this burning takes place, and it is thus in the heart of each devotee that Kāli dwells.

The devotee makes her image in his heart and under her influence burns away all limitations and ignorance. This inner cremation fire in the heart is the fire of knowledge, (Sanskrit: gyanagni), which Kāli bestows.

(Human being are living in a world of illusion – Maya – everything around us is illusion because everything has a end. Kāli is an endless entity. Kāli uses the fire to burn and distroy everything attaches human beings to Maya : all material attachments, feelings, emotions. So she introduces the fire in the heart of devotees – and on the same time she is living in the fire (cremation ground) : so she resides in the heart of devotees)

The generic term Shakti denotes the Universal feminine creative principle and the energizing force behind all male divinity including Shiva. Shakti is known by the general name Devi, from the root 'div', meaning to shine. She is the Shining One, who is given different names in different places and in different appearances, as the symbol of the life-giving powers of the Universe. It is she that powers him. This Shakti is expressed as the i in Shiva's name. Without this i, Shiva becomes Shva, which in Sanskrit means a corpse. Thus suggesting that without his Shakti, Shiva is powerless or inert.

Kāli is a particularly appropriate image for conveying the idea of the world as the playground of the gods. Insofar as Kāli is identified with the phenomenal world, she presents a picture of that world that underlies its ephemeral and unpredictable nature.

In her mad dancing, disheveled hair, there is made present the hint of a world reeling, out of control.

The world is created and destroyed in the wild dance of Kāli, and the truth of redemption lies in the consciousness of man that he is invited to take part in this dance, to enter the frenzied dance of life and death cycles, generated by the Mother.

O Kāli, my Mother full of Bliss!

Enchantress of the almighty Shiva! In Thy delirious joy

Thou dancest, clapping Thy hands together! 

Thou art the Mover of all that move,

and we are but Thy helpless toys

...Ramakrishna Paramhans

The image of a recumbent Shiva lying under the feet of Kali represents Shiva as the passive potential of creation and Kāli as his Shakti.

Kāli, like Shiva, has a third eye, but in all other respects the two are distinguished from one another.

In contrast to Shiva's sweet expression, plump body, and ash white complexion, dark Kāli's emaciated limbs, angular gestures, and fierce grimace convey a wild intensity. Her loose hair, skull garland, and tiger wrap whip around her body as she stomps and claps to the rhythm of the dance.

Many stories describe Kāli's dance with Shiva as one that "threatens to destroy the world" by their savage power.

She continued her ferocious rampage until Shiva manifested himself as an infant and lay crying in the midst of the corpse-strewn field.

Kāli, deceived by Shiva's power of illusion, became calm as she suckled the baby. When evening approached, Shiva performed the dance of creation (tandava) to please the goddess. Delighted with the dance, Kāli and her attendants joined in.

This terrific and poignant imagery starkly reveals the nature of Kāli as the Divine Mother. Ramaprasad expresses his feelings thus:

Behold my Mother playing with Shiva, lost in an ecstasy of joy! 

Drunk with a draught of celestial wine,

She reels, and yet does not fall.

She stands on Shiva's bosom, and the earth

Trembles under Her tread;

She and Her Lord are mad with frenzy, casting

Aside all fear and shame.

... Ramprasad (1718-75)

Kāli in every women

In the canons of Indian thought, each woman reflects in her the feminine form of the divine.

Kāli 's human and maternal qualities continue to define the goddess for most of her devotees to this day. In human relationships, the love between mother and child is usually considered the purest and strongest. In the same way, the love between the Mother Goddess and her human children is considered the closest and tenderest relationship with divinity.

Accordingly, Kāli's devotees form a particularly intimate and loving bond with her. But the devotee never forgets Kāli's demonic, frightening aspects. He does not distort Kāli's nature and the truths she reveals; he does not refuse to meditate on her terrifying features. He mentions these repeatedly in his songs but is never put off or repelled by them. Kāli may be frightening, the mad, forgetful mistress of a world spinning out of control, but she is, after all, the Mother of all Hindus. As such, she must be accepted by her children- accepted in wonder and awe, perhaps, but accepted nevertheless.

The poet in an intimate and lighter tone addresses the Mother thus:

Ô Kali! Why dost Thou roam about nude?

Are You not ashamed, Mother! Garb and ornaments Thou hast none;

yet Thou Pridest in being King's daughter.

Ô Mother! Is it a virtue of Thy family that Thou Placest thy feet on Your husband?

Thou are nude; Your husband is nude; you both roam cremation grounds.

Ô Mother! We are all ashamed of you; do put on thy garb.

Thou hast cast away Your necklace of jewels, Mother,

And worn a garland of human heads. 

Mother! Thy fierce beauty has frightened Thy nude consort.

... Ramaprasad

The soul that worships becomes always a little child: the soul that becomes a child finds God oftenest as a mother.

Kāli succeeded in her mission when man confronts or accepts her and the realities she dramatically conveys to him. The image of Kāli, in a variety of ways, teaches man that pain, sorrow, decay, death, and destruction are not to be overcome or conquered by denying them or explaining them away.

For man to realize the fullness of his being, for man to exploit his potential as a human being, he must finally accept this dimension of existence.

Kāli's boon is freedom, the freedom of the child to revel in the moment, and it is won only after confrontation or acceptance of death.

To ignore death, to pretend that one is physically immortal, to pretend that one's ego is the center of things, provokes Kāli 's mocking laughter.

To confront or accept death, on the contrary, is to realize a mode of being that can delight and revel in the play of the gods.

Kāli is a Mother for her devotees not because she protects them from the way things really are but because she reveals to them their mortality and thus releases them to act fully and freely, releases them from the incredible, binding web of "adult" pretense, practicality, and rationality.

Kāli through the psychoanalyic thought

“In India, God can be a woman." (Vans Kennedy 1831)

According to Vans Kennedy this God's embodiment in a woman can even be superior to His male counterpart.

This idea seems to be a malpractice of exploitation of genders in the Indian society and a redistribution of the usual social roles in India.

Here, I raise the question : Can the archetype of the Hindu goddess evoke for the Westerners many works accomplished by scholars, psychoanalysts and sociologists, about the social relations of gender, relations between females and males in the day-to-day life?

Jacques Lacan, French psychiatrist (1901-1981), was one of the most famous psychoanalysts of the 20th century. For him, the human being: the Subject, constitutes himself by reaching the symbolic word.

Without going into details of the Lacanian thought, it seems important to focus on some of its points of view.

Lacan makes the distinction between need, desire and demand.

The need is the inheritance of our animal instinct which has biological obligations

"The desire is the desire of the Other"^[2]. The desire has two essential features: its subtle character which distinguishes it from the need and the feature of vital necessity for the speaking Subject.

The demand lays in what the human being sets up to get his desire satisfied. It is the demand of his recognition by the Other^[3] through the language.

For the Hindu exegesis, the speech is «a vital thread» of the doctrine which results from the action "to sew together" scattered elements in the oral culture. The speech is the progress, the purpose of bodies and faiths^[4].

The speech is symbolized by the goddess Saraswati. She is the vital link between the gods and the human beings, because She gives them the speech and the access to the Divine.

But today we are talking about Kāli, that other goddess who represents the creative power of the universe. Kāli is both source of life and strength of destruction. She represents both, the desire of the Other and the desire of death.

The current feminist tendency, in India, is to give a contemporary definition and a rediscovery of the Goddess. There are several dimensions to this cultural project with mainly the desire to restore a feminine aspect of the Divine, which can be used as foundation to the empowerment of the women in India. The relation between feminist scholarship and the study of Hindu goddesses stimulates that research and continue to provoke reflections. It also requires contextualization.

In 1980, Wendy Doniger O' Flaherty, an American Indologist, gave the following report:

“a vast field get opened to us when we look for in the psychoanalytical bases of the symbolism of the representations of the goddess and the worship to the goddess. This has to have an underlying signification ". (Doniger O’Flaherty 1980)

We can wonder also about the merits of such an appropriation of the image of Kāli. I think that the answer to this question cannot be unambiguous or definitive and that the appropriation of Kāli by the feminists requires a double interpretation and a more analytical criticism.

The first one is that, in the Hindu religious education, goddesses are traditionally used to serve the interests, calm the anxieties and improve the religious experiences of men.

Here, the anger of Kāli, Her uncontrolled sexuality and Her dominant position are very explicit. They reveal not only an emotional answer to the oppressive social orders against the women, but also the fear that men feel in front of the divine assignments of the women.

Kāli represents on the same time what the oppressed women dream to become and what the men scare about women. The symbolism of Kāli, is not really liberator for women but seems, in fact, a control lever for the social constructions of genders that the feminists want to reach. For the socio-psychoanalyst Sarah Caldwell: “Kāli thus symbolizes more the goddess of the male fear of the castration than the one of the feminine oppression " (Cardwell 1999).

The psychoanalysis can give an interesting glance, by offering a relevant and strong reading of the understanding of the infancy and the origin of the oedipal complex. We can note its insistence on the ambivalent states: emotional / devotional of the child to his mother, its objectives in his fusional and mystic relations to the mother and puzzling complex symbolism of the beheading, the killer mother. We can think about concepts as: love/death; sexuality/violence.

The mother, indeed mediatises the world for the child, in the meaning that she has on him, in first times of his life, a power of life or death (by the care given to him or not, so psychically as physically), and even during the intra uterine period. Furthermore for Jacques Lacan the first experience of enjoyment (listen as the state of the essential well being that the baby lives), it is this state of well-being that lavishes the contact with the breast of the mother, the heat of her body and the caresses with which she surrounds him.

" The circularity of the sacred place has a report of analogy with the one of the breast, if we understand breast in its double meaning, womb and nipple, analogy which the ethnologists specialists of the "primitive" religions identified for a long time with a " symbolism of universal type".

Lacan supposes that the mother is not only the one we worship, but she is also the power, the creative energy. She responds the child’s needs and demands, but she brings him besides a surplus of pleasure. This surplus beyond the necessity is one of the meanings that Lacan gives to the word enjoyment or Phallus (lingam). He indicates the image (the myth) of a completeness the child thinks to have lived and lost. Lacan asserts that the child begins then imagining that he embodies the object of the lack of the mother, that it is the phallus, the faith made possible by the fact that the separation of the body of the mother was not complete. It is important to understand that mother and child are taken in the same phantasm which corresponds to a phantasm of re incorporation.Thus the phallus also represents this initial lack, which never will fill and which makes people “desiring beings” (êtres désirants), thus “alive”. The idea of life is thus, from the first age, in narrow relation with the one of the death. (Lacan 1966)

This bend by the western psychoanalysis is first interesting because it allows a better idea of the position and the role, dominating, even quite powerful, of the mother. This reading is close to the notion of Divine Mother, thus All Powerful Mother, Worshipped Mother. Furthermore, the mother, under the figure of Kāli, kills, in a castrating moose, to allow the devil a rebirth in a human being's life.

We can also admit that Kāli beheading Shiva is a suggestive of actual castration - as thought by Lacan - or metaphorical death of the ego of man. It is the symbol of submission to the feminine.

Suggestive of actual castration or metaphorical death of ego of man. Symbol of submission to the feminine (shiva décapité par Kāli)

How you want me to make difference between Shiva and Shakti,..How can I take out the fragrance from flower, Rays from Sun, heat from the fire...Shiva and shakti are one. Shiva is Soul and Shakti is Mind.

These two authorities, nun and scientist deal both of the registration of the power of life and death which the woman, as. Kāli, kills the man / devil to allow him the access to the human life. The man by his passivity agrees to die. He agrees to die in his enjoyment (of devil) to go into the register of the Human being.

Conclusion

This vision differs from the previous one because it tends to move Kāli of its Indian original context towards western visions to ask the question of the appropriation of the image of Kāli by the western people. If the feminist reading of the goddess was used only for the desire to express and to articulate the feminist intention to demonstrate that the fight for equality of rights is original and in the reality of the Nature, it is maybe because Western and Indian people mix the religious and social positions of the women in a closed relation with the living conditions of the males?

A part of the answer is that males in India and in West are not only depicted as devils. They can be also concerned by the well-being and the happiness of many women throughout their life: mother, wife, sister, friends, and daughter or simply within the framework of relationships of work, neighbourhood. But it seems that the interest for Hindu goddesses and Kāli in particular, is developed around their symbolism. I understand here that the Hindu goddesses generally and the tantric goddesses even more, offer a hope of social policies between the sexes which seems structurally impossible in our monotheist religions where heterosexuality is coded on the male mysticism.

Hindu people needs to integrate and to pass on paradigms and roles of the male as specificities of their caste and the rights of birth coming from their father and in opposition, the roles of the feminine as unwavering and complex schema of daughter, wife, mother.

Nayanika Mookerjee (1999) asserts that the women, sometimes, play a role in the modelling of men. She claims that “the women are partly for the evaluation of the male performances “. It means that, in this context, the mothers are more important than the wives. They draw again, within the kinship a structure and a mode of strictly organized into a hierarchy functioning. For her, the mothers define partially the position and the role of the man.

Sanjay Srivastava (2004) prefers the notions of work and actions on the psychic structures. He tries to explain that the rigidity of these paradigms is not only due to cultural transmissions but is the translation of a fear of the male in front of mysteries and of the power of the feminine which escape them. He advances the hypothesis of a structural dominion compulsory for the women by men because of this supposed power.

For Hindu people, the Goddess was and continues to be considered as existing here to help for reconstruction or to reform the notions of the male ruler in the society and in the Divine

This exegetical exploration wanted to measure the nature of the worship of the Goddess. This worship brought the men to confine women on lower domestic roles (they had for a long time the status of people of low caste (sudra), including brahminian women).

This study tried to investigate the Hindu religious sphere to understand if it existed or if there are spaces through which the women benefit from a position where they are equalitarian towards genders.

[1] The Devi Mahatmya or Devi Mahatmyam (Sanskrit : devīmāhātmyam, देवीमाहात्म्यम्), or "Glory of the Goddess ") is a hindu religious text describing the Goddess as the supreme power and creator of the universe.It is part of the Markandey Purana, and estimated to have been composed in Sanskrit between 400-600 CE

[2] Lacan J; Les Ecrits. Ed Seuil Paris. 1958

[3] Lacan often used an algebraic symbology for his concepts: the big Other is designated A (for French Autre) and the little other is designated a (italicized French autre). He asserts that an awareness of this distinction is fundamental to analytic practice: "the analyst must be imbued with the difference between A and a, so he can situate himself in the place of Other, and not the other."

[4] Gravari-Barbas M. & Guichard-Anguis S. : Regards croisés sur le patrimoine dans le monde à l’aube du XXIème siècle. Presse Université Paris Sorbonne. 2001

Implications and impacts of an Hindu goddess in the social life of women in India today