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Is There a Tradition of Rejecting the Goddess?

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Atheism and the Goddess

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Abstract

This chapter deals with the following issue: while there is a tradition of rejecting God that informs the age-old discourses of atheism, it seems that it is difficult to speak of the epistemology and vocabulary of a tradition of rejecting, specifically, the Goddess. Such a reductionist mode of atheism does not find it necessary to separately address the question of the differently gendered figurations of divinity which might involve not just gender shifts but also significant onto-theological shifts related to the issue of the relation between divinity, materiality and metaphysicality. It is in this context that this chapter explores an Indic philosophical discourse, that is, Advaita Vedanta, the monist ontology of which rejects the ultimate reality of God while grappling with the inerasable apparition of the apparently feminine entity, maya, which is equated by Shaktism with the divine feminine. The chapter also explores the role of the Goddess in Advaita Vedanta and in the lives of certain male philosophers of this tradition—which underlines the friction between the philosophical negation of the Goddess and the intuitive understanding of her inerasable presence on the part of the male Advaitins.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, West Bengal, India

    Anway Mukhopadhyay

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Mukhopadhyay, A. (2023). Is There a Tradition of Rejecting the Goddess?. In: Atheism and the Goddess. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27395-7_3

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