Mother Goddess worship is very popular in South India especially in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. In Bengal also Mother Goddess worship is predominant with similarities in practices of the South. Tantric cult which is deep-rooted in Goddess worship of Bengal has its echo in Kerala and Tamil Nadu also. Similarities in Sakteya mode of worship are also seen among Bengal and Kerala. The priestly duties in the Sakteya temples in Bengal were done by non-Brahmins as was in Kerala. In Kerala Pidars, a sub-class of Brahmins are the chief priests in temples like Kodungalur kavu and Madayikkavu. Pidars category is believed to have been brought from Bengal where Sakta mode of worship is popular. Thus there exist so many similarities in rituals, day-to-day temple activities, festival ceremonies, forms of worship and legends related to Mother Goddess worship in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Bengal.
By utilising a generous grant from the Government of West Bengal, the Council of Direction of International School of Dravidian Linguistics entrusted T. Madhava Menon IAS to write a book on The Mother Goddess in Bengal and in Kerala. Within the stipulated time he finished the work and submitted the report. It is published here with slight modifications regarding diacritic marks noted by Dr. Ravi Sankar S. Nair.
This work is an in-depth examination of the forms, rituals, local cultures and anthropological aspects of Mother Goddess worship in Bengal and in Kerala. This book also contains details of major places of worship and also ethnographic aspects of this culture. The Mother Goddess in Bengal and in Kerala authored by T. Madhava Menon is an important addition to the field of religious studies as well as cultural studies.
The famous archaeologist Gimbutas, Marija, remarked:
"My archaeological research does not confirm the hypothetical existence of the primordial parents and their division into the Great Father and Great Mother figures or the further division of the Great Mother figure into a Good and a Terrible Mother. The life-creating power seems to have been of the Great Mother alone. A complete division into a "good" and a "terrible" Mother never occurred; the Life-Giver and the Death Wielder are one deity. Her manifestations are manifold; she may be anthropomorphic or zoomorphic; she may appear in a triple aspect; she may be a waterfowl or a bird of prey, a harmless or a poisonous snake; but ultimately, she is one indivisible Goddess. If "good" is life, birth, health, and increase of wealth, she can be called the good Fate. The term "Terrible Mother" needs explanation. The "vulture" or killer aspect of the Goddess is frightening indeed, but if we look at the symbols associated with the aspect of death, it becomes clear that these symbols don't exist alone; they are interwoven with those promoting regeneration.... In her death aspect she is the same Fate who gives life, determines its length and then takes it away when the time comes. .... The regeneration starts at the moment of death. It begins within the body of the Goddess, in her moist uterus which is expressed in an animal form as a fish, frog, turtle, hedgehog, hare, or the head of the bull". (Gimbutas 1989:316-317)
The belief in one or more Supreme Beings who are present not only in the complex of experiences cognizable to an individual during his life time but also beyond that both in time and space, has been found in some form or other in practically every human community (Brown, D:1991). They are generally believed to be more "powerful" than the humans and, under certain conditions, capable of harming or helping the humans. It is possible to speculate that the humans observed the periodicity of persistence of phenomena which they could not find reasonable explanations for;
e.g., the rising and the setting and the rising again of the sun, the phases of the moon, and so on, leading to the speculation that dissolution might not be permanent, but only a prelude to a regeneration. Among humans themselves, they observed an analogue of this cycle of dissolution and regeneration in the menstrual cycles of the female. (Cf., Durkheim E: 1915). Such a system of beliefs associated with practices that become rituals over time, with or without specialized experts to discharge at least part of some aspects of such practices, has been called "Religion", though much controversy still persists about the precise definitions of this term. There are some authors, e.g., Debuisson, D: 2003; Fiel, Ernst: 2000, etc., who feel that it may be futile to seek a globally applicable meaning to the term.
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