Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worship in West Bengal
by: McDaniel, June

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 2004, Hardcover, red cloth stamped in gilt, 356 pages. Lacks dust jacket. Provides an exhaustive, accessibly written overview of Bengali goddess worship or Shakti. McDaniel identifies three major forms of goddess worship, and examines each through its myths, folklore, songs, rituals, sacred texts, and practitioners. She traces these strands through Bengali culture and explores how they are interwoven with each other as well as with other forms of Hinduism and other forms of religion. McDaniel also discusses how Shakti practices have been reinterpreted in the West, where goddess worship has gained the values of sexual freedom and psychological healing, but lost its emphases on devotion and asceticism. Clean, bright copy.