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Nine Nights of the Goddess

Author: Caleb Simmons

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2018-08-01

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 143847069X

Explores the contemporary nature and the diverse narratives, rituals, and performances of the Navar?tri festival. Nine Nights of the Goddess explores the festival of Navarātri—alternatively called Navarātra, Mahānavamī, Durgā Pūjā, Dasarā, and/or Dassain—which lasts for nine nights and ends with a celebration called Vijayadaśamī, or "the tenth (day) of victory." Celebrated in both massive public venues and in small, private domestic spaces, Navarātri is one of the most important and ubiquitous festivals in South Asia and wherever South Asians have settled. These festivals share many elements, including the goddess, royal power, the killing of demons, and the worship of young girls and married women, but their interpretation and performance vary widely. This interdisciplinary collection of essays investigates Navarātri in its many manifestations and across historical periods, including celebrations in West Bengal, Odisha, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, and Nepal. Collectively, the essays consider the role of the festival's contextual specificity and continental ubiquity as a central component for understanding South Asian religious life, as well as how it shapes and is shaped by political patronage, economic development, and social status.

Nine Nights of Power

Author: Ute Hüsken

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2021-10-01

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1438484089

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The autumnal Navarātri festival—also called Durgā Pūjā, Dassehra, or Dasain—is the most important Hindu festival in South Asia and wherever Hindus settle. A nine-night-long celebration in honor of the goddess Durgā, it ends on the tenth day with a celebration called "the victorious tenth" (vijayadaśamī). The rituals that take place in domestic, royal, and public spaces are closely connected with one's station in life and dependent on social status, economic class, caste, and gender issues. Exploring different aspects of the festival as celebrated in diverse regions of South Asia and in the South Asian diaspora, this book addresses the following common questions: What does this festival do? What does it achieve, and how? Why and in what way does it sometimes fail? How do mass communication and social media increase participation in and contribute to the changing nature of the festival? The contributors address these questions from multiple perspectives and discuss issues of agency, authority, ritual efficacy, change, appropriation, and adaptation. Because of the festival's reach beyond its diverse celebrations in South Asia, its influence can be seen in the rituals and dances in many parts of Western Europe and North America.

Goddess Durga and Sacred Female Power

Author: Laura Amazzone

Publisher: University Press of America

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0761853138

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"Amazzone's voice is strong and clear. Goddess Durga promises the transformation, empowerment, and dignity that is our birthright."--Marisa Tomei, Academy Award-winning actor.

Nava Durga

Author: Nalini Ramachandran

Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited

Published: 2020-10-19

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 935305981X

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Durga, as this powerful warrior-goddess is known, Has nine special forms-each one unique, not just a clone. Shailaputri, Brahmacharini and Chandraghanta, Kushmanda and Skandamata, Katyayani and Kaalratri, Maha Gauri and Siddhidatri . . . They are the Nava Durga, Worshipped during Navaratri, The festival of nine nights and nine days That's celebrated across India and the world in myriad ways To praise the goddesses and their glory. This is their story!

Journal Daily

Author: Spiritualtee Durga

Publisher:

Published: 2019-08-06

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 9781088621981

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Navaratri is a Hindu festival dedicated to the worship of Goddess Durga. Navratri means 'nine nights' in Sanskrit, where nava means nine and ratri means nights. During these nine nights and ten days, the nine forms of Devi are worshipped. The tenth day is commonly referred to as Dussehra or Vijayadashami.

Revelry, Rivalry, and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal

Author: Rachel Fell McDermott

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 023112919X

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Annually during the months of autumn, Bengal hosts three interlinked festivals to honor its most important goddesses: Durga, Kali, and Jagaddhatri. While each of these deities possesses a distinct iconography, myth, and character, they are all martial. Durga, Kali, and Jagaddhatri often demand blood sacrifice as part of their worship and offer material and spiritual benefits to their votaries. Richly represented in straw, clay, paint, and decoration, they are similarly displayed in elaborately festooned temples, thronged by thousands of admirers. The first book to recount the history of these festivals and their revelry, rivalry, and nostalgic power, this volume marks an unprecedented achievement in the mapping of a major public event. Rachel Fell McDermott describes the festivals' origins and growth under British rule. She identifies their iconographic conventions and carnivalesque qualities and their relationship to the fierce, Tantric sides of ritual practice. McDermott confronts controversies over the tradition of blood sacrifice and the status-seekers who compete for symbolic capital. Expanding her narrative, she takes readers beyond Bengal's borders to trace the transformation of the goddesses and their festivals across the world. McDermott's work underscores the role of holidays in cultural memory, specifically the Bengali evocation of an ideal, culturally rich past. Under the thrall of the goddess, the social, political, economic, and religious identity of Bengalis takes shape.

Guests at God's Wedding

Author: Tracy Pintchman

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2005-08-25

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 9780791465950

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A fascinating look at women’s rituals honoring the god Krishna.

The Goddess

Author: David Leeming

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2016-03-15

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1780235380

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For as long as we have sought god, we have found the goddess. Ruling over the imaginations of humankind’s earliest agricultural civilizations, she played a critical spiritual role as a keeper of nature’s fertile powers and an assurance of the next sustaining harvest. In The Goddess, David Leeming and Christopher Fee take us all the way back into prehistory, tracing the goddess across vast spans of time to tell the epic story of the transformation of belief and what it says about who we are. Leeming and Fee use the goddess to gaze into the lives and souls of the people who worshipped her. They chart the development of traditional Western gender roles through an understanding of the transformation of concepts of the Goddess from her earliest roots in India and Iran to her more familiar faces in Ireland and Iceland. They examine the subordination of the goddess to the god as human civilizations became mobile and began to look upon masculine deities for assurances of survival in movement and battle. And they show how, despite this history, the goddess has remained alive in our spiritual imaginations, in figures such as the Christian Virgin Mother and, in contemporary times, the new-age resurrection of figures such as Gaia. The Goddess explores this central aspect of ancient spiritual thought as a window into human history and the deepest roots of our beliefs.

Spiritual Literacy

Author: Frederic Brussat

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 1998-08-05

Total Pages: 612

ISBN-13: 0684835347

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This collection presents "more than 650 readings about daily life from present-day authors ..."--Inside jacket flap.