Zeynep Oral's Books:

Devi:

Finally a woman, a goddess. Devi is the Mother Goddess… from the same lineage as Kubaba and Kybele in Anatolia, Aditi in India.

She created all the gods. She is the mother of the universe. She is the mother of rivers, mountains, fire, water and air. She exists to discard all the pains, poverty and unhappiness from the world.

She was born several hundred times, each time she had a different name, and with the different names her functions and characteristics changed.

When she takes the name Laksmi, she is the wife of Vishnu and Goddess of Fortune. When her name changes to Uma, she takes on female energy and becomes the other half of Vishnu. If her name is Parvati, she is the wife of Shiva and the Goddess of Kindness, Beauty and Abundance.

The above are the best states of the Mother Goddess. She is slim waisted, wide hipped, large breasted, full lipped and mostly irresistibly pretty. Especially when she has the name Uma, she turns to a luminous beauty goddess from whom you cannot take your glance.

But this goddess has also ugly, terrifying, and scary states. Durga, for example, has ten arms and wanders around on a tiger. Her body is still beautiful but her face is terrifying because Durga has come to the world to kill. In their wars with evil kings, and demons, and when they are about to be defeated, gods call on her for help. And Durga comes and kills all the bad ones.
However, there is a state of this goddess much more terrifying than Durga. Her name is Kali. Kali is the Black Mother Goddess. She is intimate with demons. Her naked body is "decorated" with sculls, cut-off children's heads and her face is bloody. Some of her statues depict a long tongue that reaches all the way down to her breasts. Kali is the destroying feature of Shiva.

Okay, all the killing is of the bad and evil ones, but "evil" according to whom and what? Kali, how could there be "evil" children?

Oh Mother Goddess! You, who are a woman too: you are intelligence, sensitivity, passion, love; you are brave, trustworthy, a peacemaker, courageous, tenderhearted, a mother, fertile, productive, hardworking, self-sacrificing, truthful, how can you accept such evil roles?

Not that I do not know of women who are liars, thieves, furious with passion, who would put people in danger for their personal interests, who would overlook children being tortured, deliriously passionate for money, property, power, who would incite violence…But you are the Mother God! At the very least don't be a bad example!

Gods, Goddesses… They won't finish by counting, run out by seeing, reading, learning…The parade of gods, goddesses, half gods accompanying them, and the people blessing them turn out to be a festival that forces imagination in this labyrinth of thousands of years. When the half sacred animals on which they have ridden over the mountains, passed over the rivers, slit the air, and the symbols they always had with them, and the millions of details of these symbols become a united whole, this forms the concept we call "mosaic time".

From Burma to Cambodia, Vietnam to Laos, Brobudur to Angkor, going from temples, to statues, reliefs, pictures, stories, dances, and music, I could touch some parts of this mosaic. I touched, however, the tiniest part of this huge marble fragment that embraces human life and the world for most of the people of Far Asia.

Wherever I went in that part of the world, they existed first. They existed in the most passionate loves and dreadful hates, in boundless freedom and helpless captivity, in shining bravery and miserable cowardice, in hope and helplessness, in acceptance of fate and challenge of fate, in wisdom and innocence, in intellect and emotions, in kindness and wickedness; they always existed. They existed in life and death.

They were the Gods.