circle of their original worshippers. In other words, the conception of a single great goddess,—Devī, Durgā, Kālī,—is later in order of time than the local cult out of which it originated.
The facts already stated lead to the inevitable conclusion that many of the Mother goddesses have been developed from the Grāmadevatā, or village goddesses, many of whom owe their origin to the cult of Mother Earth. The benignant and chthonic, or malignant, manifestations of this Earth goddess account for the two distinct types which we find among the Mothers as a class. The localisation of function in the case of the village goddesses opens the way for the specialisation of the Mothers, many of whom ultimately come to be regarded as responsible for distinct spheres of activity ; various classes of disease, for instance, being made over to distinct deities. But this is a later development, the Mothers, as well as the other deities of Hinduism, being in their most primitive types deities “of all work.” This does not affect the theological so much as the practical aspect—the cultus. “The really important question,” as Robertson Smith puts it, “is not what a god has power to do, but whether I can get him to do it for me, and this depends upon the relation in which he stands to me.”[1]
At the same time, in dealing with a complex polytheism like that of Hinduism, it is rash to assume a single origin for a group of deities, with infinitely varied legends of origin and cult ritual. And there are types which cannot readily be derived from the Earth Mother.
In the first place, we have the group of the Forest Mothers. While the village Mothers, as representing the agricultural stage, may be propitiated with animal sacrifice, there is no evidence that the dweller in the jungle offers the produce of the chase, a boar or a stag, to his Mother goddess. The common method of propitiating them is for each passer-by
- ↑ The Religion of the Semites, 2nd ed. 83.
