What is Shaktism?

Sometime around the fifth or sixth century of the common era, somewhere in the Sanskrit-writing world, a person we cannot name sat down and wrote a sentence that the tradition had almost never written before. The sentence says that the ultimate reality, the ground of everything, the power behind every god in the sky, is a woman.

We do not know who wrote it. The text is anonymous. It was folded into a larger work, the Markandeya Purana, as its chapters 81 to 93, and it took on a life of its own. Hindus call it the Devi Mahatmya, the Glory of the Goddess. Bengalis call it the Chandi. It is chanted, even now, in the small hours before a temple opens.

The scholar Thomas Coburn, who spent a career on this one text, put the puzzle plainly. When the Devi Mahatmya declares the feminine to be the Absolute, it is doing something for which there is almost no Sanskrit precedent. The Goddess had been present in the tradition for a very long time. She had never, in a surviving Sanskrit text, been named as the reality behind Brahman itself. This article is about that sentence, and the long approach to it, and the vast tradition that flows out from it.

The stream and the word

Hinduism is often mapped as four great streams, distinguished by which face of the one reality a community holds supreme. Vaishnavas centre Vishnu. Shaivas centre Shiva. Smartas hold five deities as equal. And Shaktas centre the Goddess. This is the stream called Shaktism, and its followers are the Shaktas. The single most important map of the tradition’s inner diversity is the map of these streams of Hinduism, and Shaktism is one of the four rivers on it.

The word comes from shakti, meaning power, capacity, the energy by which anything is done. In the Shakta understanding of Shakti, this power is not a thing the divine possesses. It is the divine, in her active form, and she is a she. A Shakta is one who holds that this power is supreme.

Here is the claim in its hard form, and it is worth stating without cushioning. In Shaktism the Goddess is not a consort. She is not the wife who stands a step behind the god. She is Brahman, the ground of being, and the male gods act only by the power she lends them. Where other streams give her a place beside a male supreme, Shaktism gives the place to her. Soften that and you have described a different religion.

A whisper in the oldest book

The approach to this claim is very long, and it begins as a whisper. In the Rigveda, the oldest layer of the tradition, there is a hymn spoken in the first person by a goddess. She is Vak, the personified power of speech, and in the Devi Sukta (Rigveda 10.125) she says that she moves with the gods, that she upholds them, that she is the queen who gathers up treasures. The exact Vedic wording is difficult to render with confidence, and careful readers paraphrase it rather than pin it to a single English line. What matters is the shape of the claim. A feminine voice, in the oldest book, saying that the whole order of things runs through her.

Near it sits a quieter hymn, the Ratri Sukta (Rigveda 10.127), addressed to Ratri, the Night, herself a goddess. Griffith’s public-domain rendering of 1896 opens:

With all her eyes the Goddess Night looks forth approaching many a spot: she hath put all her glories on. Immortal, she hath filled the waste, the Goddess hath filled height and depth: she conquers darkness with her light.

Read it and you can hear the feminine divine as the Veda knew it. It is real. It is scattered. It is a voice here and a night there, luminous and unsystematic. It is not yet a theology. No one in the Rigveda says the Goddess is Brahman.

One temptation is worth heading off at once, because it is everywhere. The cities of the Indus Valley, flourishing in the third millennium before the common era, left terracotta female figures that some have read as a “mother goddess” cult, and it is tempting to draw a straight line from those figurines to Durga. What we can say is that goddess imagery in the subcontinent is very old and that female figurines are abundant. What we cannot say is what those people believed, because the Indus script has never been deciphered. Calling the figurines a mother-goddess religion is an interpretation, and a contested one. It is not a documented fact, and honest work keeps the two apart.

The hint on the mountain

The whisper becomes a hint in the Upanishads, the texts that ask what lies behind the gods. In the Kena Upanishad there is a small, strange scene, and a goddess walks straight into the centre of the tradition’s deepest question.

The gods have won a victory and grown proud, certain the triumph was their own. A mysterious spirit, a yaksha, appears. Agni, god of fire, cannot burn a blade of grass it sets down. Vayu, the wind, cannot move it. The gods are baffled. Then, in the third and fourth sections, a radiant woman appears, Uma Haimavati, Uma the daughter of the mountain, and she alone knows what the spirit was. Müller’s public-domain translation of 1879 gives her answer:

It is Brahman. It is through the victory of Brahman that you have thus become great.

Slow down over who is speaking. The figure who knows Brahman, who reveals it to the king of the gods himself, is a goddess. The caution belongs here too. The text does not make Uma the supreme reality, and it does not tie her to Shiva. She is the one who reveals the Absolute, not yet the Absolute revealed. But the tradition has now placed the knowledge of the highest truth in a goddess’s mouth. The next step is to place the truth itself there.

The declaration

That step is the Devi Mahatmya, and it is the hinge of the whole tradition.

The frame is a war story. The gods, driven from heaven by demons, pour their concentrated energies together, and from that combined fire the Goddess takes form and goes to battle. She kills the buffalo demon Mahishasura. She meets the demon brothers Shumbha and Nishumbha. And at the climax of that second war comes the moment where the myth turns into a metaphysics.

Shumbha taunts her for fighting with the help of other goddesses, the Matrikas, the mothers who had streamed out of the great gods to join the battle. Her reply is the sentence the tradition never forgot. In Pargiter’s public-domain translation of 1904 it reads:

Alone verily am I in the world here; what other goddess is there besides me? See, vile one! that these goddesses, who have their divine power from me, are entering into me indeed.

And then the text does something no summary can improve on. The Matrikas are absorbed back into her body, one by one, until she stands on the field alone. This is Devi Mahatmya 10.5, and it is the moment the Goddess stops being one power among many and becomes the one power of which all the others were only expressions. Coburn’s word for what the Devi Mahatmya achieves is crystallization. Goddess worship had existed for centuries, diffuse and local. This text gathers it into a single theology and says, in effect, that every goddess is her, and she is the reality behind the gods.

A stone in Rajasthan confirms how fast this took hold. The Dadhimati Mata inscription, dated to 608 of the common era, quotes the Devi Mahatmya directly. Within a lifetime or two of its composition, the text was already scripture carved in rock.

The architecture

A declaration needs an architecture to live in, and Shaktism built one of the most elaborate in all of Hinduism. Much of it is Tantric. Most of the surviving Tantras are Goddess-centred, and to understand the machinery it helps to know what Tantra actually is before meeting its Shakta forms.

Practitioners themselves often draw a simple map of two families. One is the Srikula, the family of Sri, gentle and regal, centred on the beautiful goddess Lalita Tripurasundari, worshipped through her diagram the Sri Chakra and the mantra-system called Sri Vidya. Its great commentator is Bhaskararaya of the eighteenth century, whose Sanskrit learning gave the tradition an intellectual spine that still holds. The other is the Kalikula, the family of Kali, fierce and cremation-scented, centred on the dark goddesses of time and dissolution. This Srikula and Kalikula division is a serviceable map, and it is worth saying where it comes from. It traces to practitioner usage rather than to a single academic authority, and the finer scholarship draws the lines differently. Alexis Sanderson, working from the manuscripts, distinguishes several distinct Shakta Tantric systems, among them the Trika, the Kalikula-Krama, the cult of Kubjika, and the Traipura-Srividya. The two-family map is the door. Sanderson’s taxonomy is the house behind it.

There is a live scholarly argument here, and Shaktism is not complete without it. Sanderson holds that the Shakta Tantric traditions largely arose within Shaiva Tantra, as its Goddess-facing wing, so that the historical Goddess of the Tantras is in large part a development inside a Shiva-centred world. Narendra Nath Bhattacharyya, in his History of the Sakta Religion, argues the other way, for a Shaktism with its own deep and partly independent roots reaching back into indigenous and pre-Aryan goddess worship. The texts can be read toward either conclusion. We can say that the surviving Shakta Tantras are entangled with the Shaiva ones. We cannot say, from the record alone, that the Goddess was only ever a branch of Shiva’s tree.

The left-hand path

Some Shakta lineages practise transgression, and this is the part that draws the tourists and the sensational headlines, so it needs the plainest possible handling. In the path called vamachara, the left-hand practice, the qualified initiate ritually uses five substances that ordinary religion forbids: the panchamakara, the five Ms, being wine, meat, fish, parched grain and sexual union. That is the loss, and it should be led with, not buried. A tradition that reaches its highest reality can also handle poison in its ritual.

The gate is the whole point. These rites are hedged with initiation and restraint at every turn. They belong to the qualified practitioner, the vira or hero, and are expressly closed to the ordinary bound person who might seek them as a thrill. And the tradition polices its own abuse in language sharper than any outside critic. The Kularnava Tantra, the most quoted Kaula manual, says it flatly in its second ullasa, its second chapter. In the sense preserved in Arthur Avalon’s public-domain edition of 1917:

If liberation could be won merely by drinking wine, then all who drink would attain perfection.

If meat-eating brought merit, the text goes on, every carnivore would be meritorious; if coupling freed the soul, every creature would already be free. The fault, it says, lies not in the path but in those who abuse it. Whether the five Ms are meant literally, as controlled ritual, or symbolically, as an inner alchemy in which the true “wine” is the nectar of union, is a question the tradition itself holds open, and this article will not close it. Both readings are old, and both are attested.

What can be corrected is the picture inherited from the colonial encounter. The Baptist missionary William Ward, writing in the early nineteenth century, described Tantra as organized depravity, and that framing hardened into the popular idea of Tantra as a cult of sex and blood. The scholar Hugh Urban has traced in detail how that image was constructed, as much by outsiders needing a scandal as by anything in the texts. The counter is simple and documentary. The transgressive practices are attested in Sanskrit sources long before any European set foot with a notebook. They were not invented to shock the missionaries. They were misread by them.

One further practice belongs to Shaktism’s fierce face and must be handled carefully: the blood offering, bali, the animal sacrifice still made at some Goddess temples. Its legal status varies by place and has been contested and curtailed in modern times, and the honest thing is to speak of it in general and declining terms rather than to state any current rule from memory. What can be said is that offering blood to the Goddess is an old strand of the tradition, uneven across regions, and increasingly restricted.

The street

For all its metaphysics, Shaktism lives most of its life on the ground, and any account that stops at the manuscripts has missed most of the religion.

It lives in the poems of Ramprasad Sen, the eighteenth-century Bengali who sang to Kali as a child sings to a difficult mother, scolding her, pleading with her, loving her without dignity. It lives in the yogini temples of medieval India, roofless circles of stone open to the sky, where sixty-four goddesses once stood ranged around the edge. It lives in the great autumn festival when the image of Durga is built up over weeks in bamboo and clay, worshipped for a few days as the Goddess herself, and then carried to the river and let go. And it lives, most quietly of all, in the uncarved stone under a tree at the edge of a village, smeared with vermilion, that some woman has tended every morning for longer than anyone remembers, and whose name may be in no book at all.

That stone and Bhaskararaya’s Sanskrit are the same tradition. The scholar with his Sri Chakra and the woman with her vermilion are both saying the thing the anonymous author wrote down all those centuries ago. The power that holds the world is a mother, and she is the reality behind every god there is.

The tradition did not need the sentence to be true. It wrote it down anyway.

She was already there.