Characteristics Of Shaktism

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Shaktism
Shaktism is the denomination of Hinduism that has the most followers. The original pre-Aryan worship of the goddess of fertility contains many traits that can later be recognized in Hinduism and particularly in the denomination Shaktism. Shaktism, is undoubtedly the one of the three directions that has the bloodiest cult. We know from a Chinese pilgrim who visited India in year 629 and 645 that humans were sacrificed to Durga, and that pilgrim itself was almost sacrificed as a part of the ritual.
All the way up to the 20th century the sacrifice of widows was still a ritual that could be found within the religion. This is believed to be the relics of the past sacrifice cult in which members of the lower castes passed through India and murdered to satisfy the bloodthirsty Kali. While being a cruel deity, the Shakti is also the “creator and life-giving divine mother”
In the Skanda Purana, the largest Mahapurana, a genre of eighteen Hindu religious texts, the female deity, Shakti, is portrayed as the mightiest of the deities, The Great Divine Mother, due to the fact that the other gods worship her. Characteristic for the three main denominations of Hinduism is that exactly their God is the most prominent. In the Skanda Purana, the female deity conquers a demon after drinking the finest wine available, made from the blood of the animals sacrificed to her. In this way she is being linked to one of the symbols of fertility, namely wine; which in turn becomes a justification of the bloody sacrifices. In addition to representing the fertility cult, in the form of a sacrificial cult and in one of the side branches also in the form of desire, especially to the sexual (The Chakrapuja Ritual), is the mother deity also affected b...

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...are described as human ideals or forbidden desires.
Then it would be possible with Xenophanes, Karl Marx, and the majority of the other modern critics of religion to reach the conclusion that there is no god. But even though it could be possible to reach that conclusion, it wouldn’t change the fact that the conception of god is still worshiped around the world.
The Hindu conception of god can also be characterized based on its pronounced tolerance to other gods and the conclusion would be that the core of the religion is that the individual is seeking a personal experience with God and the different gods, “like various rivers originate from various mountains and run in different directions, east, west, north and south, and yet eventually come back and mix their water with the cast sea, thus leading all the different religions to you, God” (Radhakrishnan 1834-1886)

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