Shakta: The Goddess
The Goddess in her many forms: Devi as supreme reality, Durga and Kali, the Mahavidyas, and the Shakta traditions that worship the divine as feminine power.
The Shakta stream holds that the ultimate reality is female. Not a consort, not a counterpart, but the ground itself, and the male deities dependent on her for the capacity to act at all. The Devi Mahatmya, composed by roughly the sixth century, is the text that states it outright.
She is met in many forms and the tradition insists they are one. Durga riding into battle against a demon the gods could not defeat. Kali, black, garlanded with heads, standing on Shiva. Lakshmi, Saraswati, and the river goddesses whose worship predates any of the texts.
These pages take the fierce forms as seriously as the gentle ones, which is harder than it sounds and is where most popular accounts flinch. The classical sources are kept apart from the modern sensational gloss throughout.