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11. Anandamayi Ma

God Came as a Woman

lisa lassell hallstrom

This essay is published for the first time here.

I begin by posing a provocative question: How would our lives be different if we
had been raised with the conviction, the surety, that God exists as our Divine
Mother, all-loving and all-powerful?
Over the past two decades, this question has been posed by many Western femi-
nist theologians who assume that a move away from patriarchal images of God as
father and king toward powerful yet compassionate female religious images would
empower women and help create a more balanced and humane society. It has pro-
voked a passionate interest in and nostalgia for real and imagined ancient goddess
cultures, such as those proposed to have flourished in the fertile valleys of the Old
Europe of prehistory.
Yet we need not look to the past to stimulate the reimagining of God as Mother
or to examine the impact on women and men of worshipping the Divine Feminine.
India has one of the oldest, continuous traditions of goddess worship in the world,
and even today the Goddess is worshipped by devout Hindus in both her multiplic-
ity and her unity. Although most Hindus devote some part of their devotional life
to the worship of Devi in some form, those who relate to the Absolute primarily as
feminine principle are called Shaktas, or those who are of the shakti, or the dynamic,
creative power of the universe.