Subversive Myth

"Back at the dawn of time, the Great Goddess, who creates the world and then lives as the world, is asked to incarnate as Sati (She-Who-Is) in order to make the sacred marriage with her eternal consort, Shiva. Without her presence, Shiva cannot act in the world. He sits on a mountain, lost in meditation, disdaining to perform his cosmic function. This creates havoc in the cosmos. So, the great deities Brahma the Creator and Vishnu the Sustainer approach the Goddess on their knees. They beg her, for the sake of the world, to take the form of a woman and lure Shiva out of his yogic trance. Daksha, a mind-born son of Brahma, will be her father. The Goddess agrees, but only on one condition. She has seen that men and gods have begun to treat women as property, lesser creatures in the cosmic hierarchy.

“If I agree to become your daughter,”she tells Daksha, “you must promise to honor me as the Great Goddess. If you do not, I shall instantly leave my body, for I will know that the time is not yet right for me to act fully in the world.”Daksha humbly agrees, and Sati is born in his household. At the age of sixteen, she marries Shiva, drawing him out of meditation through the allure of her irresistible beauty and her power of creating bliss. Shiva is the primal outsider of the Hindu pantheon, the lord of thieves as well as yogis. The original shaman as well as the primal yogi, he resides in the deep forests and mountains, attended by ghosts and goblins. He refuses to change his homeless lifestyle just because he has a wife.

So for eons, Shiva and Sati make passionate erotic love under trees and beside streams, in subtle realms beyond the clouds, and in secret mountain caves. They adore each other with cosmic passion. Then the trouble starts. A few thousand millennia have passed. Daksha has worked his way into a position of power as the leading deity of religious orthodoxy. In the process, he has forgotten his promise to the Goddess—and forgotten his daughter’s real nature. He disapproves of Shiva’s rebel status and feels personally threatened by Shiva’s obvious disdain for convention. Daksha plans a huge cosmic fire ritual, which will establish for all time the religious structures of the universe. He invites every god, titan, celestial musician, snake deity, and nymph in the universe. But in a fit of celestial malice, Daksha deliberately sends no invitation to his daughter and her consort.

Sati hears the news on the day of the sacrifice. She is stunned beyond measure. Daksha has done the unthinkable. Not only has he grievously insulted her beloved, he has dishonored the World-Mother, the power of life itself, without whom religion is meaningless. Sati knows she cannot remain in a world that does not recognize her. She sits in meditation, summons her inner yogic fire, and sends her life-force into the ether, leaving her body behind. Shiva goes mad when he finds her. He takes himself to the ritual ground and destroys the sacrifice. He then takes Sati’s body in his arms and begins to careen through the worlds. Wherever he carries her body, earthquakes and volcanoes, tidal waves and forest fires erupt. At last, the gods do the only thing they can do to save the universe. They send the great wanderer, Saturn, to cut Sati’s body into pieces. As the parts of her body fall to Earth, they become physical pockets of sacred ecstasy, earth shrines. For eons, in hidden caves and beside trees, near bodies of water and at the heart of villages, people will find the goddess enshrined in the soil and rock itself. Her body is the sacrifice that infuses the divine feminine into the earth...

There is a form of myth that is subversive. This version of the Sati story speaks for a hidden voice within its traditional culture: the voice of primal feminine dignity. Such a powerful myth interacts with the psyche and connects us to the deep structures of the universe. Sati’s gesture, her willingness to immolate herself to call attention to injustice, called out an answering recognition in me. It had something to do with romance, with the power of doomed love, with Shiva’s grief, but it was more a recognition of the deep feminine capacity for passion, for feeling itself, for the kind of love that cares nothing for safety or conventional wisdom. That kind of love, I saw, is a quality of the universe itself, which is willing to destroy its own life-forms when the conditions of life become untenable. The divine feminine knows that a birth sometimes demands a death, and that the personal self sometimes has to die if the world is to be made sacred. It wasn’t only the content of the story that moved me. It was the energy itself, the pulsing, love-saturated, subtly sensual energy that rose in the atmosphere that night in India as we invoked the Goddess. That energy seemed to be telling me that there are secrets, ways of being in the universe such that only the divine feminine can reveal...

After that night, I began to “see”her everywhere, almost as if she were pursuing me. I went about my normal existence, which was highly scheduled and mostly work centered. But every now and then, “she”would show up. Once as a palpable presence who seemed to hover in the air next to me emanating soft waves of, yes, maternal tenderness. More often, I would sense her as a subtle sensation of luminosity that would infuse the air, or as an inner feeling of joy, or a sensation of being surrounded by a soft, embracing awareness."

-- Sally Kempton, Awakening to Kali The Goddess of Radical Transformation

~ "Ardhanarishwara (Sanskrit: अर्धनारीश्वर, Ardhanārīśwara) is a composite androgynous form of the Hindu God Shiva and his consort Parvati (also known as Devi, Shakti and Uma in this icon). Ardhanarishvara is depicted as half male and half female, split down the middle. The right half is usually the male Shiva, illustrating his traditional attributes. Ardhanarishvara is considered "half man half women" this is not supposed to be literal, this is more of a symbolic meaning. The meaning is that the ultimate being should have a good balance between masculine and feminine (symbolized as sun/moon) energies this is not referring to gender; this can be comparable to yin and yang in Confucianism (light/dark).

The earliest Ardhanarishvara images are dated to the Kushan period, starting from the first century CE. Its iconography evolved and was perfected in the Gupta era. The Puranas and various iconographic treatises write about the mythology and iconography of Ardhanarishvara. While Ardhanarishvara remains a popular iconographic form found in most Shiva temples throughout India, very few temples are dedicated to this deity.

Ardhanarishvara represents the synthesis of masculine and feminine energies of the universe (Purusha and Prakriti) and illustrates how Shakti, the female principle of God, is inseparable from (or the same as, according to some interpretations) Shiva, the male principle of God. The union of these principles is exalted as the root and womb of all creation. Another view is that Ardhanarishvara is a symbol of Shiva's all-pervasive nature." ~ Wikipedia