The Rise of the Goddess in the Hindu Tradition.

• Author: White, David Gordon

Over the past twenty years, books on the Hindu Goddess have become something of a cottage industry in the West. Ranging from detailed anthropological treatments of regional traditions, to critical translations of fundamental sources on the Goddess, to text-based overviews of the history of Goddess cults, these studies have done much to compensate for a prior penury of scholarship concerning the distaff side of the Hindu pantheon. Tracy Pintchman has written a well-argued and original book that fills a long-standing gap in Western writing and research on the Goddess, to wit, the emergence of the Goddess as a distinct, self-sufficient deity, in philosophical and mythological sources, and in special relation to the three cosmic principles of prakrti, maya, and sakti. This work will no doubt become the reference work on the subject, as well as a useful tool for teaching on undergraduate and graduate levels.

The heart of this book is its second and third chapters, devoted to the feminine principle in philosophical discourse and in puranic cosmogony and cosmology, respectively. It is in these chapters that Professor Pintchman truly shines as a scholar, carefully leading the reader through the evolution and elaboration of the abstract concepts of prakrti, maya, and sakti, from their relatively simple and tentative Vedic antecedents to the highly sophisticated synthesis that one finds in the Sakta Devibhagavata Purana. The changes in the meaning of these terms are subtle, and Pintchman is at her best as she skillfully compares and contrasts the uses of these terms as they occur across some fifteen hundred years of Sanskrit textual tradition. Her translations of passages from the Samkhyan and puranic sources are clear and accurate.

The task Pintchman has set for herself in this book is an ambitious one, for which a historical overview of the evolution of these three concepts proves, on at least one count, to be insufficient. This is the issue of the ambiguous nature of the Great Goddess who is, by turns, beneficent and terrible, nurturing and devouring. This insufficiency is especially apparent in Pintchman's final chapter in which she proposes to present her conclusions on a contextual, thematic, historical, and interpretive basis, and to tackle the issue of "the ambiguous Goddess." Unfortunately, she instead does little more than to present a summary of rather dated anthropological and sociological theory on the role of goddesses and women in...