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Deity

Shakti

SHAHK-tee
Also Known As Mahadevi The Great Goddess, the supreme form in Shakta theology. · Devi The Goddess, without qualification. · The Divine Mother · Adi Parashakti The primordial supreme power. · The Great Goddess · Divine Mother
Hindu Deities

As the face of Chiron, the wounded healer, Shakti embodies the vital energy that heals and transforms. Shakti is the primordial cosmic energy of Hinduism, the dynamic divine feminine, the active power that moves through and animates the whole universe. She is personified as the Great Goddess, Devi, and as the empowering energy and consort of each of the gods, taking form as Parvati, Durga, and Kali; without her the gods themselves are inert. In the tantric traditions she is the Kundalini, the serpent power coiled at the base of the spine that rises to bring awakening. As creation, preservation, and destruction in living motion, and as the transformative force within, she embodies the healing, quickening power of the divine.

Facts
Attributions
Mythic Association
In Shakta theology Shakti is regarded as the active power of an otherwise inactive Shiva, personified as his consort and understood as the dynamic force underlying the entire cosmos. 2
Cult
Attributes and Iconography
Because Shakti is understood as the single power behind every goddess, her iconography shifts with the form she is said to be taking: as Durga she rides a lion bearing weapons in many arms, as Kali she stands dark skinned and garlanded with skulls, and as Lakshmi she sits serene on a lotus, each image read as one face of the same underlying divine energy. 2
Worship and Practice
Shakti is honored across much of India during Navaratri, nine nights in which devotees worship a sequence of goddess forms understood as expressions of her single underlying divine energy, a festival David R. Kinsley identifies as one of the clearest popular expressions of Shakta theology in practice today. 2
Identity
Gender
Female 1
Belief
Theology
Monistic: one ultimate reality behind all appearance 2
History
Historical Note
Shakta theology, the branch of Hinduism centred on Shakti as supreme reality, holds that the god Shiva is inert and without power except as animated by Shakti, reversing the more common Shaiva framing in which the goddess is Shiva's consort or energy, a doctrinal distinction scholars treat as central to how Shakta communities understand the relationship between the divine masculine and feminine. 1
Origins
Origin of the Name
Shakti derives from the Sanskrit root shak, to be able, so the word itself denotes power or capacity before it denotes a goddess, and Hindu philosophical texts use the same word for the active, creative energy understood to animate the entire cosmos. 1
Function
Domain / Function
Creation and cosmogony 1
Domain / Function
Cosmic order and truth 1
Attestation
Era of Attestation
from 400 BCE 1
Veneration Today
Actively venerated in a living tradition 1
Historicity
Not a historical person: a divine or other-than-human being 2
Position Profile
Key Text
Shakta theology holds that Shakti is not merely Shiva's consort but the active, dynamic power without which the god remains inert, a relationship the tradition often illustrates through the image of Shiva as a corpse, shava, animated only by the presence of the goddess upon or beside him. 2
Learn More
The Power That Moves the World

Shakti is the primordial cosmic energy of Hinduism, the dynamic divine feminine, the active power that moves through and animates the whole universe. The Sanskrit word means simply power or ability, and as a theological principle it names the force by which anything acts, exists or changes: without shakti, being is inert. In the philosophy of the goddess-centred traditions (Shaktism), this power is understood as feminine and as ultimate, and it is inseparable from the consciousness it activates.

A famous saying captures the relationship: Shiva without Shakti is shava, a corpse, that is, pure consciousness without its energy is motionless and lifeless; it is Shakti that gives it the capacity to create, sustain and dissolve. Every god has his shakti, personified as his consort, and the many goddesses of Hinduism, Parvati, Lakshmi, Saraswati, Durga, Kali, are understood in this framework as forms of the one Shakti, the Mahadevi or Great Goddess.

In the Shakta traditions this feminine power is not subordinate to a male god but is herself the supreme reality, worshipped as the mother of the universe. Shakti is also a term of yogic practice, where it names the coiled energy (kundalini) latent within the body, to be awakened and raised. At its widest, Shakti is the Hindu name for the truth that reality is not static but a living, moving power, and that this power is to be revered as the Goddess.

Where the Goddess Is Kept: Shrines, Seasons, and Schools

Because Shakti as raw cosmic power has no single fixed body, her worship is carried instead by the specific goddesses said to embody her, and by places and seasons rather than a uniform icon. The Shakti Peethas, a network of shrines scattered across South Asia and traditionally numbered at fifty one, are each held to mark a spot where a part of the dismembered goddess Sati fell to earth, and together they map a devotional geography of the divine feminine that pilgrims still visit.

The autumn festival of Navaratri, nine nights given over to the Goddess in her successive forms, is the widest shared expression of Shakti worship, observed with different regional emphases from Bengal's Durga Puja to Gujarat's garba dance to South India's golu doll displays, evidence that a single theological principle generates strikingly different popular practice.

Formal Shakta theology and its ritual technologies, developed at length within the tantric traditions, are treated by practitioners as advanced and, in places, initiatory material rather than public teaching, and this atlas describes that fact rather than the content of any closed rite. In sculpture and painting the principle is rendered through her named forms, Durga with her many weapons, Kali dark and unbound, Lakshmi seated on the lotus, so that Shakti herself remains formally without a single icon even as her forms fill temples across the subcontinent and beyond it.

Shakti
Filter Results1 entry

Kalighat Kali Temple

Shakti
Correspondences & Relations

Archetypes

The Caregiver, Archetypes

Pantheons

Hindu, Pantheons

Planetary Faces

Chiron, Planets

Chiron was discovered in 1977 and has no place among the nine grahas of classical Indian astrology. Assigning Shakti, the general term for divine feminine power, to it is a modern comparative gesture rather than a jyotisha teaching.

Connections

Associated With

Brahmani, Deities

This source names Shakti directly: "of Hindu tradition, embodying the shakti or divine power of the creator god Brahma."

Source Matrikas (Wikipedia)
Chaitra Parva, Holidays & Festivals

This source names Shakti directly: "of Shiva roused from yogic sleep by Shakti, who then dances the universe and time into being, with performances read as tracing the soul's passage through the cosmic ages that follow."

Source Chaitra Parva and Seraikela Chhau (Sahapedia)Sahapedia
Chaitra Parva and Seraikela Chhau (Sahapedia), Sources

This source names Shakti directly: "Shaiva mythology, Shiva roused by Shakti and the four cosmic ages, its solar calendar spring timing, and its bond with Seraikela Chhau."

Source Chaitra Parva and Seraikela Chhau (Sahapedia)Sahapedia
Chamunda (Wikipedia), Sources

This source names Shakti directly: "seven Matrikas, the only one who is a Shakti of the great Goddess rather than of a male deity."

Source Chamunda (Wikipedia)
Durga, Deities

Durga is understood in Shaktism as the supreme being, one of the named forms in which the one Shakti is worshipped, alongside Parvati, Lakshmi, Saraswati and Kali.

Source Encyclopedia of HinduismDenise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.)
Indrani, Deities

This source names Shakti directly: "of Hindu tradition, embodying the shakti or divine power of Indra, king of the gods and lord of storms."

Source Matrikas (Wikipedia)
Kali, Deities

Kali is understood in Shaktism as the Goddess as time and death, one of the named forms in which the one Shakti is worshipped, alongside Parvati, Lakshmi, Saraswati and Durga.

Source Encyclopedia of HinduismDenise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.)
Kalighat Kali Temple, Sacred Sites

This source names Shakti directly: "is counted among the fifty-one Shakti Pithas, the sites where a part of the goddess Sati's body is held to have fallen as her grieving husband carried it across the land; the portion assigned to..."

Source The Sakta PithasD. C. Sircar
Kaumari, Deities

This source names Shakti directly: "of Hindu tradition, embodying the shakti or divine power of Kartikeya, the god of war and son of Shiva."

Source Matrikas (Wikipedia)
Maheswari, Deities

This source names Shakti directly: "of Hindu tradition, embodying the shakti or divine power of Shiva."

Source Matrikas (Wikipedia)
Matrikas (Wikipedia), Sources

This source names Shakti directly: "or with Narasimhi an eighth, as the shakti or embodied power of a corresponding male deity: Brahmani of Brahma, Vaishnavi of Vishnu, Maheshvari of Shiva, Kaumari of Kartikeya, Varahi of Varaha..."

Source Matrikas (Wikipedia)
Parvati, Deities

Why this is disputed. Parvati is understood in Shakta theology as a benign form of the one Goddess, of whom Durga and Kali are the fierce forms; whether these are aspects of Shakti or distinct goddesses is answered differently by different schools.

Source Encyclopedia of HinduismDenise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.)
Sati, Deities

The Shakti Peethas, a network of shrines mapping the divine feminine across South Asia, mark the places where a part of the dismembered goddess Sati fell to earth.

Source Encyclopedia of HinduismDenise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.)
Shiva, Deities

A saying captures the relationship: Shiva without Shakti is shava, a corpse, since pure consciousness without its energy is motionless; Shakti gives Shiva the capacity to create, sustain and dissolve.

Source Encyclopedia of HinduismDenise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.)
The Sapta Matrikas, Deities

This source names Shakti directly: "in Hindu tradition, each one the shakti or embodied power of a male god: Brahmani of Brahma, Vaishnavi of Vishnu, Maheswari of Shiva, Kaumari of Kartikeya, Indrani of Indra, Varahi of Varaha and..."

Source Matrikas (Wikipedia)
The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, Literary Works

This source names The Great Goddess directly: "A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess is Starhawk's 1979 book, published by Harper and Row, and is the founding published statement of the Reclaiming tradition of Witchcraft she..."

Source The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great GoddessStarhawk
Vaishnavi, Deities

This source names Shakti directly: "of Hindu tradition, embodying the shakti or divine power of Vishnu."

Source Matrikas (Wikipedia)
Varahi, Deities

This source names Shakti directly: "of Hindu tradition, embodying the shakti or divine power of Vishnu's boar incarnation, Varaha."

Source Varahi (Wikipedia)

Related To

The Mother Goddess, Doctrines

Shakti as the Great Goddess is one of the figures the category is built from.

Worshipped In

Hinduism, Religions
Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Sources
1. Encyclopedia of Hinduism
Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.), Routledge, 2008
  • Shakti, Devi Mahatmya-era Tantric concept
  • s.v. Shakti
View the Source
2. Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition
David R. Kinsley, University of California Press, 1988View the Source
Wikidata: Shakti
Wikidata Q382973, class allow-list match (w-wdresolver-0926)View the Source
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005
  • s.v. Shakti; the divine feminine power and Shaktism
  • s.v. Shakti
View the Source

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