The sacred female energy of Shakti

Last week was Shivaratri, and this week it is International Women’s Day on 8 March. What better way to marry the two than to investigate Shakti, the feminine creative aspect of the universe. 

Shiva’s consort has many names: Parvati, Shakti, Durga, Uma, Gauri. She is the embodiment of motherhood, love and fertility, and she balances Shiva’s destructive attributes with creation. 

Alongside the triumvirate of Brahma the creator and Vishnu the preserver, is Shiva the destroyer-creator. He is the Lord of making things end so that the new can take their place. 

Hinduism may be perceived and practised as a multitheistic religion, but in its tenets, all is one, the gods and their many avatar are but different names given to the one truth of existence and reality. And in this, Shiva can be referred to as the Supreme Being.

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Shiva is considered masculine, and conceptualised as pure consciousness -- call it soul, transcendent spirit, whatever that exists beyond the material. Shakti is feminine energy and is a dynamic reality. The union of Shiva-Shakti symbolises creation and the coming together of male and female energy. 

One of the most sacred texts in Hinduism is the Shiva Purana, and it describes Shakti as having a ‘parturient’ trait. Parturient is used to describe a woman in labour, so Shakti is thought of as fertile, and always on the verge of creation if the pure consciousness of Shiva wills something.

This may seem to suggest that the feminine aspect is submissive and waiting for the masculine form to act and uphold the need for creation. But we have to see this as a human conceptualisation to make sense of our own existence and the need to explain reality. 

Another way to interpret the gendering could be that the masculine is not of much use if the feminine does not exist. In other words, what good would it be if there was nothing to be conscious of, and there was only a destroyer. It is the feminine form that holds the power of creation. 

Parvati may have been regarded as feminine because she creates, gives birth. And consciousness as masculine because of its association with Shiva, the yogi-ascetic. 

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The Shiva Purana perspective is that both are balanced and the same, and neither can exist without the other. 

‘Just as Shiva, so also the goddess. Just as the goddess so also Shiva. No difference shall be thought of between the two as between the moon and the moonlight’, says the text, which is part of the Shaivite literature corpus.

In fact, the composite deity of  ‘Ardhanarishvara’ expresses precisely this union and can be translated as ‘the Lord who is half woman’. Ardhanarishvara is a depiction of a being that is split straight down the middle: the right half is traditionally Shiva with his masculine features and Nandi the bull consort, and the left side is Parvati or Durga with feminine traits and a tiger consort. 

“The paintings and statues of Ardhanarishvara show that Shiva and Shakti are both inseparable and the same,” explains historian and author Govinda Tandon. 

“This is all the Hindu concept of ekam sat vipra bahudha vadanti, that truth is one, but called by many names,” Tandon adds, pointing out that the the bull and tiger consorts co-exist in the divine pair, although they would be prey and predator, further reinforcing the concept that opposing characteristics can prevail in the same being. 

Read also: Giving faces to a deity, Shaguni Singh Sakya

The Shiva-Shakti postulation of the coexistence of opposites exists in other faiths as darkness giving way to light. It is an attempt to understand the universal truth that what appears to be antithetical are essential to reality, and meaningless without the opposite aspect. 

Other philosophies also share this understanding of dual oneness. Ancient Chinese belief systems came up with Yin-Yang, where Yin is receptive and dark, and Yang is active and bright, each containing a seed of the other. 

The message is not to rank one better than the other, but that maintaining a balance between the two is key to living in Tao, or the natural path of the universe. 

Western thinkers have also described the two as Chaos and Order, or Nature and Culture. Too much chaos, and nothing sustains itself (think Nepal’s politics). Too much order, and everything stagnates, like in a dictatorship where anything that deviates from the strict command is punished, and nothing truly new and revolutionary is allowed to foster.

All of these ways to see the duality somewhat echo each other, although they may not be exactly the same. But what is common to all these ideas of Shiva-Shakti, Creation-Destruction, Ying-Yang, Light-Darkness, is the same overarching message: that both forces are inseparable and must exist in a cosmic dance for it to be optimal. 

Nataraja is another manifestation of Shiva, where he dances with wild abandon (Tandava), symbolising the creation and destruction of the universe. In Tantricism, creation follows destruction as Shiva and Shakti join in this union. 

This notion also aligns with the latest discoveries in astrophysics of matter and antimatter, and the singularity in a black hole where time and space merge.

The Shiva-Shakti duality can also be regarded as a singularity. A photon, for example, is a quantum of light and can be both a particle and a wave. In the ‘wave-particle’ duality, light can behave as a particle when hitting something, but act as a wave when travelling through space. 

Or, take the Observer Effect in quantum physics. Electrons fired at a card with two slits will behave like waves, creating ripple patterns beyond the slits. But introduce a detector, and the electron behaves like a particle, the ripples disappear. 

Shiva is tangible reality, Shakti is pure energy. Some physicists who study sub-atomic particles say that the deeper they investigate, the more they begin to see the hand of a Supreme Being. 

The scriptures and their depictions of the divine transcend and exist in the everyday world around us. Evolution, for example, is possible because of natural selection through the act of reproduction, the fusion of gametes from two parents that creates the genetic variation so they can ‘be fruitful and multiply’. 

Govinda Tandon used to be the chair of the Pashupati Area Development Trust committed  to managing and conserving the temple dedicated to the benign manifestation of Shiva, one of the holiest Hindu shrines in the world. 

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The temple itself is regarded as the site where Shiva and Parvati once took the form of antelopes on the forested banks of the Bagmati.

For Tandon, there is a strong message from the divine union of Shiva-Shakti, Uma-Maheswar, Gauri-Shankar, Shiva-Parvati: “The masculine and feminine principles existing in the same form as equals should inspire us. Societies, families work best when men and women respect each other as equals. One complements the other.”