(Re)Mystifying the Devi Mahatmyam

This collection challenges normative, fixed, and universal interpretations of the Devi Mahatmyam , a central Hindu mythical-text for goddess worship. Authors in this anthology animate, resituate, and resignify this mythical-text across social worlds. The text is viewed as a living “mnemotext,” where myth functions as memory and method, enabling creative rearticulations and reclamations in areas of leadership, war, peace, diplomacy, reproductive justice, gender equality, grief, psychological resilience, and spiritual empowerment. Through decolonial, social justice, feminist, ecowomanist, psychological, thealogical, philosophical, poetic, memoir, creative fiction, auto-ethnographic, and interdisciplinary approaches, contributors seek not merely to demystify but to remystify the mythical-text for our times. In doing so, they demonstrate the complex entangled interrelationship between myth, subjectivity, women and society, gender, race, species, and the Earth, and how this ancient wisdom of the feminine principle might help us address the ethical and planetary challenges we face today.