Mahadevi
महादेवी mahādevīThe great Goddess: the one supreme feminine reality of whom Durga, Kali, Lakshmi, Saraswati and the local goddesses are read as forms.
Where this term appears
- Who is Durga? Deities
This is the central conviction of Shaktism: that the ultimate is the Goddess, the Mahadevi or Adi Parashakti , and that what other traditions call Brahman is, for the Shakta, the Mother.
- Who is Parvati? Deities
Shakta theology says all goddesses are faces of the one Mahadevi.
- Who is the Goddess? Deities
In its Vedic setting this is Vak, speech as creative power, not yet the Mahadevi of later myth.
- The Bhakti Movement History
Basava, a statesman and reformer, and the fearless woman-saint Akka Mahadevi, who walked away from a king and, by some accounts, from her clothes, to belong wholly to Shiva, composed short, sharp free-verse say…
- The Chola Age and the Temple as Institution History
Sembiyan Mahadevi , a Chola queen who lived into great old age across the second half of the tenth century, devoted some sixty years to religious patronage on a scale that shaped the whole tradition.
- What is Shaktism? Lineages
Shaktism is the major stream of Hinduism whose followers, called Shaktas, hold that ultimate reality is feminine: the Goddess, Devi or Shakti, is not a consort of a…
- Kamala: The Lotus at the End of the Garland Treatise
She is fortune as the Goddess's own sovereign nature, grace that is hers to give because she is the supreme reality, the same Mahadevi who was Kali and Chhinnamasta, now showing her face of fullness.
- Ten Faces of the One Treatise
The Goddess of the wider Shakta tradition, the Mahadevi , the one supreme Power, is here refracted into ten, the way a single light is refracted into colours by a prism.