174. gurus
Shaktism, then, is the worship of the primordial power underlying the universe
personified as a female deity who is considered to be the Supreme Being. Although
worship of the Goddess has its roots in India in pre-Vedic times, the Shakta path de-
veloped as a formal sectarian option between the sixth and the tenth centuries and
was legitimated by two Sanskrit texts, the Devi Mahatmya and the Devi Bhagavata.
While the Devi Mahatmya emphasized the dreadful aspect of the Goddess; the Devi
Bhagavata, written in the eleventh or twelfth century, emphasized her supremely
compassionate side.
The Devi Bhagavata, mimicking one of the most beloved Hindu devotional texts,
the Bhagavad Gita, articulates four important principles of the Shakta path: the
heart of the path is devotion to Devi, the Great Mother, for its own sake; the Great
Mother possesses both an individual, divine form and exists eternally as formless
consciousness or Brahman; the divine as Devi exists in the world of form, animat-
ing and pervading all that we see and do; and finally, the Goddess, Devi, can mani-
fest herself in various incarnations, in the same way as the god Vishnu took form as
Lord Krishna and Lord Ram, for the sake of her devotees.
It is this last doctrine that brings us to a second and even more provocative ques-
tion: How would our lives be different is we had actually spent our lives, from child-
hood through adulthood, with a person whom we believed was that all-loving and
all-powerful God the Mother?
The doctrine ofavatara, or divine incarnation, was formally introduced around
the turn of the Common Era in the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, but was developed
more fully in the Bhagavad Gita. According to the Hindu tradition, there are two
progressions along the continuum between human and divine. The first is the as-
cending progression from human being to perfected being (for example, a siddha or
sadguru) in which matter is considered to have been spiritualized by the will and
spiritual practices of a human being. The second is a descending progression from
God into perfect being, or avatara, in which spirit is considered to have become ma-
terial by the will of God. An avatara is described in the following way, referring usu-
ally to Lord Krishna or Lord Ram: he is born free, without karma, completely lib-
erated from the bonds of the ego; he takes human form in response to his own will
in order to be accessible to those who long to seek refuge in him; he has full recall
of his former births and is aware from birth of his divine origin; and, finally, his
devotees need only recognize his divine nature to be saved.^1
In the past several hundred years, the doctrine ofavatara began to be reinter-
preted and applied to many male historical figures. Perhaps the first was Krishna
Chaitanya, a sixteenth-century ecstatic worshipper of Lord Krishna, who was pro-