Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Hinduism - Ritual & Practices

During the goddess Gangamma's festival in the town of Tirupati, lower-caste men take guises of the goddess, and the streets are filled with men wearing saris, braids, and female jewelry. By contrast, women participate by intensifying the rituals they perform for Gangamma throughout the year, such as cooking and offering food. Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger argues that within the festival ultimate reality is imagined as female and women identify with the goddess, whose power they share. Vivid accounts by male and female participants offer new insights into Gangamma's traditions and the nature...

This book, Kashmir Shaivism: the Secret Supreme, by the twentieth century's great philosopher saint Swami Lakshmanjoo, presents a systematic unfolding of the Tantric teachings of the ancient tradition of Kashmir Shaivism. This profound tradition, long enshrouded in secrecy, is so rich and detailed in its descriptions of what it reveals as the ascent of individual consciousness to universal God Consciousness that it has been characterized as 'a mystical geography of awareness'. Within the pages of this book is found the key of the oral tradition which unlocks its secrets and provides the...

This book shows how the performance of rituals influences the understanding that Hindu women form of their own selves, their sense of femininity, identity as well as their role and position in the lived-in world, and vice versa. Drawn from an intensive ethnographic fieldwork in southern Orissa, each section of the book takes a close look at a specific ritual practice, in exploring concepts such as purity/pollution, religious observances (such as fasting), deity possession, associated beliefs and attitudes, as also celebrated traditions such as Th kur n Y tr, local processions, and the role...

- Reveals the practices of Vamachara, known as the Left-hand Path but more accurately translated as the Path of Shakti

- Includes a Kali ritual from the Nirrutara Tantra, translated here for the first time

- Presents devotional chants, meditations, and mudras specific to Tantric worship of Kali

According to traditions going back to pre-Vedic times, Kali sprang from the third eye of the Goddess Durga as a destructive and terrifying...

The Kanwar is India's largest annual religious pilgrimage. Millions of participants gather sacred water from the Ganga and carry it across hundreds of miles to dispense as offerings in Śiva shrines. These devotees--called bhola, gullible or fools, and seen as miscreants by many Indians--are mostly young, destitute men, who have been left behind in the globalizing economy. But for these young men, the ordeal of the pilgrimage is no foolish pursuit, but a means to master their anxieties and attest their good faith in unfavorable social conditions.

Vikash Singh walked with...