Ages – and Ages
How the changing Yuga affects our devotion

The Kali Yuga does not remain constant. There are Ages within Ages. How does this affect the proper Way of Devotion to Our Mother God? A question from Honoured Miss Natasha throws light on this.

My friend has pointed out that in your FAQ on the worship of God as Mother, you say:

while we do look at varying traditions of God as Mother, we attempt to see all this traditional information from an authentically traditional perspective; and perceive, underlying all the representations of God as Mother, a common theme and Unity that is not of this Age, but Eternal.

However, in the page on the use of Living Images you say:

Seizing upon Goddess Images that belong to a different world-Era, or were already largely emptied of spiritual content before they were abandoned, is a highly parlous procedure.

I do not think there is really a contradiction between these two statements, but my friend suggested that there might be. Would you be so very kind as to comment on this?

The worship of Our Mother God goes back long before the current Kali Yuga. In fact it goes back to the very dawn of time.

Now time is not simply a quantitative progression. As manifestation unfolds, different possibilities are opened, while others are closed. World Ages – even within the Yuga – have a very different character and the nature of many things changes as the consolidation of the terrestrial universe and the final phases of the "materialisation" of maidenkind proceed throughout the final Yuga.

Within traditional societies, orthodox adaptations are made, so that the Ancient Tradition may still be followed in a manner possible to each successive Age.

If we look at very early Images with our modern eyes, no such orthodox adaptation will be made and we shall end up with some entirely untraditional notions (perhaps about "nature goddesses" or "sex goddesses" with no possible way of understanding what a very different humanity would have meant by such things – or even if these really were the things they meant).

We believe that Providentially, even in the Kali Yuga, Our Lady has adapted Her Image to our current nature. Thus we are wise to adopt images from living traditions, at least for our primary devotion.

In doing this, we shall be attaching ourselves to what is eternal and not of this Age, in a way that cannot possibly be the case if we look at very ancient images – which were not even intended for our comprehension – with our modern eyes.

In just the same way, we shall have a far better way of understanding an ancient text if it is translated into our language than if we simply gaze at words we do not know and invent our own meanings for them.

By "adaptations for the current age" we mean the adaptations to traditional Imagery that have taken place Providentially under Our Lady's guidance: giving us Images like those of Kuan Yin, Sri Lalita or the Lady Mary, suited to the devotional and soul-needs of the current era (meaning the last thousand years or more).

We do not mean adaptations to the anti-traditional and ultra-individualist ideologies of the last few Western centuries and especially the post-1960s world.

On the contrary, the Providential Images provided by Our dear Mother in the late Kali Yuga are our surest defence against these errors.

See also:

Pagan Goddess worship

Goddess Images: On the use of Sacred Images for devotion

Kali Yuga: The Nature of the Age

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