Tryambakeshvar, and Paithan. See
also ghat.
Goddess
India is home to a host of different god-
desses. Although goddesses differ greatly
in demeanor and character, they are all
generally seen as expressions of a single
underlying female deity. This vision of
the goddess coincides with the charac-
teristic Hindu practice that allows for
multiple manifestations of a divinity,
while at the same time asserting his or
her underlying reality as a single entity.
Many of India’s goddesses are the deities
of a specific site, who might be wor-
shiped only in that specific place. Yet as
these local goddesses are all mythically
linked as differing forms of a single great
Goddess, the sacred sites (tirthas) are
also connected with this great Goddess.
The sites, called pithas or “benches,”
form a sacred network stretching
throughout the entire subcontinent.
The origins of the goddess cult
in India are uncertain. Excavations of
cities of the Indus Valley civilization
have unearthed female figures with
enormous breasts, hips, and buttocks.
These figures resemble the Venus of
Willendorf found in Bronze Age Europe
and suggest that there was some kind of
cult associated with women’sfertility.
Some interpreters have seen the Indus
Valley figures as proof that the cult of the
Mother Goddess originated in the Indus
Valley civilization, but hard evidence
supporting this claim is slim. Another
reason some interpreters believe that
goddess worshipmust have come from
the indigenous Indian culture is that the
deities mentioned in the Vedas, the old-
est Hindu religious texts, are almost
exclusively male. The female goddesses
in the Vedic hymns are infrequent and
unimportant—Ushas (the dawn),
Prthivi(the earth), and Nirriti(death
and destruction). But somehow female
divinities were elevated from virtual
obscurity and became conceived as the
reigning power in the universe.
The cult of the great Goddess
appears fully formed, seemingly out of
nowhere, in about the fifth century. She
first appears in the text known as the
Devimahatmya (“greatness of the
Goddess”), which is itself a section of theGoddessA shrine in the Godavari River near the riverbank of Nasik.