ENGLISH

Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worship in West Bengal

By June McDaniel

Book information

Year
2004
ISBN
9780195167900, 9780195167917, 9781423756590, 0195167902, 0195167910
LCC
BL1225.K33 W36 2004
Open Library ID
OL3674828M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
1 MB (1253006 bytes)
Pages
368\367
Scanned
yes
Time added
2011-06-04 13:46:07

Description

In Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls, June McDaniel provides an exhaustive, accessibly written overview of Bengali goddess worship or Shakti. McDaniel identifies three major forms of goddess worship, and examines each through its myths, folklore, songs, rituals, sacred texts, and practitioners. She traces these strands through Bengali culture and explores how they are interwoven with each other as well as with other forms of Hinduism and other forms of religion. McDaniel also discusses how Shakti practices have been reinterpreted in the West, where goddess worship has gained the values of sexual freedom and psychological healing, but lost its emphases on devotion and asceticism. She takes the reader inside the lives of practicing Shaktas, including religious professionals, hymn singers, philosophers, visionaries, gurus, and even a businessman, and offers vivid descriptions of their rituals, practices, and daily lives. Drawing on years of fieldwork and extensive research, McDaniel paints a rich, expansive portrait of this fascinating religious tradition.

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