The rural people believe that Shakti is the protector of the village, the punisher of evil people, the curer of diseases, and the one who gives welfare to the village. There are many temples devoted to various incarnations of the Shakti goddess in most of the villages in South India. The Shakti goddess is also known as Amma (meaning 'mother') in south India, especially in the states of Karnataka,Tamil Nadu,Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. Indrani is part of a group of seven or eight mother goddesses called the Matrikas (Brahmani, Vaishnavi, Maheshvari, Indrani, Kumari, Varahi and Chamunda and/or Narasimhi), who are considered shaktis of major Hindu gods (Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Indra, Skanda, Varaha/Yama and Devi and Narasimha respectively).Ī goddess statue at the Jain temple of Sravanbelagola, India ĭavid Kinsley believes that the concept of "Shakti" may be derived from Lord Indra's consort Sachi (Indrani), meaning power. According to the Vedas (as written or sung by the rishika), a woman's femininity cannot exist apart from her Shakti, and Shakti is a metaphor for womanhood. She bestowed her healing spirit into the womb and regenerative energy of every female of every species of the earth. The Kundalini-shakti from the Yoga tradition: life force/sexual energy that can be awakened for conscious creativity.įemale teacher Swami Mayatitananda notes that at the beginning of Creation, as it is written in the Shakta Advaita, the Divine Mother took form and set in motion the wheel of manifestation. Vishnu's female counterpart is called Lakshmi, with Parvati being the female half of Shiva. However, in other Hindu traditions of Shaivism and Vaishnavism, Shakti embodies the active feminine energy Prakriti of Purusha, who is Vishnu in Vaishnavism or Shiva in Shaivism. In Shaktism, Shakti is worshipped as the Supreme Being. Shakti exists in a state of svātantrya, dependence on no-one, being interdependent with the entire universe. Shakti is cosmic existence as well as liberation, its most significant form being the Kundalini Shakti, a mysterious psychospiritual force. Not only is the Shakti responsible for creation, it is also the agent of all change. On the earthly plane, Shakti most actively manifests through female embodiment and creativity/fertility, though it is also present in males in its potential, unmanifest form. Shakti is the concept, or personification, of divine feminine creative power, sometimes referred to as 'The Great Divine Mother' in Hinduism.
Shakti ( Devanagari: शक्ति from Sanskrit shak, "to be able"), meaning sacred force or empowerment, is the primordial cosmic energy and represents the dynamic forces that are thought to move through the entire universe in Hinduism.