Outcast Goddesses
Photo: Barbie Robinson
In many ancient cultures, there are some Divine manifestations that are explicitly subversive in terms of how we narrate Reality. These deities may be harbingers of disease, decay, death or chaos. Often invoking them is to ward them off, to outcast them from the domains of our “happiness”. They are feared and shunned.
In recent times I have been invoking Dhumavathi with some of the women in my Individual Program. Dhumavathi is the aged Goddess who frowns and wanders like the smoke (Dhuma means smoke) in desolate and fearful places like cremation grounds. Her Rasas (sensation constellations) include Fear and Revulsion—those sensations which we ostracise from our palette of “useful” feelings.
It is no accident that Dhumavathi appears as the archetypal energy of these times. Ostracism has been a strong paradigm in recent times. And fear and revulsion have been powerful sensations dividing us from within and without. Communities in these times are sometimes built on ostracism of “others” based on fear and revulsion.
Ostracised Goddesses possibly take us to the source of spiritual inquiry—our fears. In Rasa practice there is a flow between fear and revulsion. So long as we blockade ourselves in “communities” created from fear, we paralyse the flow that is required for a fullness of spiritual inquiry.
The outcast Goddess lives outside the village in forests (like Matangi) or in places where we fear to go as they remind us of death and decay (like Dhumavathi). They invite us to consider the fullness of Reality’s palette without excluding colours that do not suit our story of “happiness”.
These Goddesses are not simple “opposites” of the more alluring deities. For example, while Dhumavathi is aged, She is fierce. She begs for alms but also bestows blessings. She does not seek to please, and this manifests unconditional freedom for us to experience. She reveals the intelligence of fear, while being liberated from it Herself.
From the beginning of time, the outcast domain is the source of radical insights and shifts. This is more than about rebelling within a culture or society against the prevailing narratives. An outcast proposes a paradigm shift that is intimate and visceral. It has little to do with social and political narratives and everything to do with the intimate structures of our own architecture of perception through which we live and act in the world. Therefore, we narrate them out of our villages, homes and bodies.
Outcast Goddesses are vital to a full embrace of our own nature and, through this, and through this only, an embrace of the full complexity of Reality. It is not about condoning or rejecting anything, but it is about inhabiting the full spectrum of sensation and events which include fear of death and revulsion of decay and disease.
When we encounter Dhumavathi She has a precious gift in Her tattered clothes—a taste (Rasa) of the magnificent fragility of life and the necessity to live intimately, passionately and with the greatest of compassion. It is the fragility of life that removes hubris, division and judgement.
Outcast Goddesses may well hold the wisdom so needed in these times—what we most fear sometimes is the space from which emerges the divine connection for which we yearn.