Free Shakti: The Feminine Divine by Anuja Chandramouli

cowardly terror.
    When his fear reached its zenith, he finally found his courage. The blindness that had beset him for so long was lifted and his innate clarity of thought was restored. He remembered Shakti, even as white-hot anguish seared his insides, turning them pulpy with pure terror, but this time he did not flinch. Rather, he welcomed the hurt, knowing that it would help him see better. She was the Goddess he had loved so much and who had broken his heart by rejecting him. The pain ofheartache had driven him to despair and, with moronic obduracy, he had wanted to wound her and make her hurt the way he was hurting. Vishnu had been right; it was not love that drove him towards such a calamitous path, but hubris at its most unadulterated. In that respect, he was worthier of the attentions of Madhu and Kaitabha rather than the affections of the Divine Mother.
    Shame coursed through him as he recoiled from the naked truth he was finally ready to confront—Usas had been the victim of his lust-fuelled lunacy, and even if the approaching monsters chewed up his heart, it would be a kindness he did not deserve. Brahma forced himself to acknowledge that his vicious crime justified whatever pain Madhu and Kaitabha meted out to him a hundredfold, if not more. For the first time, he was almost convinced that forfeiting his life to these creatures would be a good thing.
    He wished to do only one thing before willingly giving himself over to death. He wanted to do something, anything, to convey to the Goddess the full extent of his regret and remorse. The magnitude of his crime filled him with such profound shame that he longed for the pain his aggressors were about to inflict on him, just to drown it out.
    Before he went off-kilter again, Brahma steeled himself. His last moments should not be spent futilely in flagellating himself, even if he deserved it. Instead, he would use his gift with words to extol Shakti’s magnificence, her generous spirit which saw her mother the great multitudes of men and gods, birds and beasts alike and, above all, her supremacy over all else. Those who came after him would never forget the words he would utter on that day.

Durga’s Power Play
    B RAHMA SHUT HIS eyes, marvelling at his new-found sense of peace. The terrible guilt and endless fear, which had left him a wretched wreck, was finally drained, and he could not have asked for more. Focusing his entire being on Shakti, he addressed her directly, palms joined together in prayer, ‘Incomparable Devi, creator, protector and dissolver of the universe, I bow before thee! You are Vac, the goddess of speech embodied in Om, which encompasses the beginning, middle and end of all in creation; the supreme consciousness, the pure source from which all emerge, through whose bounty all receive nourishment, and to whom all must eventually return.
    ‘It is the precious knowledge you bestow that cuts through illusory falsehoods masquerading as the truth and liberates one from the bondage of deception and attachment. You are Mahamaya, the enchantress who shrouds the truth in layers of illusion, and you are Mahamoha, toying with us and deluding us into mistaking the unreal for the real. Truth and falsehood,virtue and vice, good and evil exist only relative to each other and all are variables under the control of the Great Goddess and Demoness, indistinguishable from each other in that they all originate from you. Thus you use the power of maya to ensure that the bitter and better are imbibed in balanced doses, so that one never overpowers the other and neither detracts from the unchanging neutrality that is their true state of being.
    ‘You are Prakriti, Mother Nature, the sacred vessel that holds the three gunas, whose essence constitutes the composition of all in existence. It is through your grace that they are activated and bring all else into being. As the Goddess Ratri, you watch over us all when I rest my eyes at the end of a day, while the great flood