The Sophia Secrets

By Savitri L. Bess

The Sophia Secrets
A magical realism novel

Writer Anne Demaree escapes an unhappy life in New Mexico when she moves to a bungalow by the sea in Southwest Harbor, Maine. With a sense of urgency, she escalates her elder years quest, a final search for meaning.
Before she settles down in Maine, she and a friend take off on a two-week trip to a Kali Temple in India. Shaken to the core by her experience, Anne is determined to dig into the essence of this controversial Hindu deity. She must align with somebody or something as least as powerful as her uncontrollable anger, so she can heal.

Anne neglects to take into account that you do not ask for Kalis help without accepting the consequences. Kali is, after all, the goddess of transformation. One stormy morning on a trail by the sea, Anne stumbles upon a mysterious old woman who tells Anne she must follow her, because Anne is running out of time.

Is the old woman real? Anne asks around, but no one has heard of her. Nevertheless, the old woman keeps showing up in the most unusual places and times, telling poignant stories, delivering exotic experiences, and sometimes with accompanying visions of goddesses.

Meanwhile, Anne has found a tender love interest in Adam Waterfield, a retired philosophy professor and Cranberry Island native. A crisis with Adams drug-troubled grandson soon finds Anne at dead center of the turmoil.

Falling in love and helping a teen boy were not part of Annes plan. Will these two throw her completely off track or be somehow vital to her elder journey?

I didnt want it to end.
Rosalie Kell, Graphic Artist

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Sep 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9781452556826

Savitri L. Bess

Savitri L. Bess, with masters’ degrees in counseling psychology and fiber arts, is the author of The Path of the Mother (Ballantine), about God as Mother. Recipient of National Endowment for the Arts and Fulbright Grants, Savitri has spent much of her adult life in Hindu Ashrams in USA and India. An active counselor, astrologer, and tapestry weaver, she now lives in Southwest Harbor, Maine.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

India

WHY DON’T YOU GO TO India before you move to Maine? There are quite a few black Goddesses there.

Do you want to go, too? I said. I’m not due in Maine until late September. Come on, let’s both go! And on a whim my friend Lori Silverbush and I bought tickets to India, on Singapore Airlines.

I’d called Lori after I’d awakened from a recurring dream about a dark woman in a vast emptiness. I’d sat up on my futon bed, wrapping my arms around myself, shivering from the cool of August’s monsoon season in the high desert in Taos, New Mexico. The glow from the full moon had cast diffuse shadows on the walls, on the sheen of the white adobe. While waiting for the conch shell to sound to wake everyone in our community for meditation, I’d gone over my dream: She has long black hair and almond-shaped red eyes. Terrifying. This time she invites me to pass through my fear. I tunnel through a watery turbulence and into a swirling mass of starlight where there is silence and a steady drone-like hum, like the sound of a conch from a far distance.

I was pretty sure the dark woman was the Hindu Goddess Kali that I’d been reading about over the last year. Kali had attracted me initially because I knew I needed to align with somebody, or something, that equaled the intensity of my uncontrollable anger. I also knew I needed to live alone, to get away from the tangles of community living. I’d hit the jackpot when my cousin Dorothy offered to take me on as property manager for her summer home in Southwest Harbor, Maine, in exchange for free rent in the guest bungalow. It felt like the parting of the Red Sea, supporting my move to leave Taos.

My desire to write and the impossibility of doing so because of so many interruptions from community residents had begun to get to me after a while. The incessant knocks on my door—do you know where the hose sprinkler is, I need to talk to you about something that happened to me today, can you help me plant the flowers in the courtyard, I need a check for the new soup pot we decided to buy. Never-ending. I didn’t know how to say no. For over a year now I’d been feeling edgy and prone to anger outbursts and even rage. Not entirely new emotional states for me, but at age sixty-three I was not getting any younger and really wanted to stop, or at least understand these personality pendulum swings, from warm and grandmotherly to crusty crone.

That afternoon after my phone call with Lori, I pulled my suitcases down and began packing. At the window I noticed a small spider sliding down its silk thread and then crawling across the sill. I pushed open the window to let it out, giving it a little shove. While I packed I thought of Dan, my first husband. Marrying him had softened my temper. But there had been a prickliness rising between us during the year before he’d left for Egypt. He and I had been teaching at a college in Colorado, he math and I creative writing. He was an Egyptologist by hobby. During a sabbatical leave to teach math in Egypt, he’d signed on with an archeological dig there and never returned. He’d written a short note to finalize all business between us, giving me the house. I suspected he’d fallen in love with an exotic Egyptian woman or joined an Egyptian mystery cult. I’d wondered if I was getting too old for Dan, though he had said I was still an attractive woman even at fifty-one, tall, slender, athletic, long auburn hair turning silver at the temples. He used to tell me during candle light dinners that I was seducing him with my jade green eyes. Only a man in love with his wife would pay such compliments. I couldn’t fathom why he’d left. I tumbled into a deep depression, making it difficult for me to pull myself into the classroom to teach. Then one day I saw an advertisement for a self-inquiry and meditation workshop. I signed up. For the first time in a long time, maybe even long before Dan left, a light had emerged out of a dark fog. After quite a few years, and another brief marriage disaster, I’d joined this Taos spiritual community that I was now leaving behind after five years of living here.

Two weeks later I shipped my belongings to Maine, and Lori and I flew to India for our two-week journey. Her husband hadn’t seemed to mind that we were leaving him behind. She’d confided in me many times about their relationship difficulties after he’d broken his fingers and could no longer play his guitar. Music had been his life. She was relieved to be away from him for a while. Lori, a couple of decades younger than I and independently wealthy, could afford to take off for India. I had to be careful, but had some savings from my college teaching days and from the sale of my Colorado home. I loved the feeling of acting a bit recklessly right now.

Our first stop was Calcutta. In spite of my last-minute brush-up study about Kali, I never suspected what was in store for us in India. After a jet-lagged sleep in a modest hotel, Lori and I took our first auto-rickshaw ride, a hair-raising adventure, weaving in and out of traffic, dodging bullock carts and bicycles and trucks, amidst incessant beeping of horns. Our three-wheel motor scooter rickshaw came to a sputtering halt outside the massive Dakshineswar Temple compound on the sacred Ganges River. After the driver argued that we hadn’t given him enough money, we gave in, adding more rupees to his open hand. Apparently satisfied the rickshaw driver, squeezing his hee-haw horn, sped off in a cloud a black smoke. Lori and I stood looking at one another, eyes fogged over in a daze, not exactly sure which way to go, disoriented even though the hotel manager had given us instructions. We brushed the dust off our new kurta pajama outfits, knee-length Indian blouse and pants. Crowds of people milled around. Crows dove and cawed, looking for morsels. Hibiscus bushes with their incandescent red flowers with the light shining through them, lined the way. We stared in awe at the Ganges, struck by how wide it was, and the people bathing there; and the elegant Kali temple with its pagoda rising high, set between two flat-roofed temples with their many arched portals.

At one of the make-shift wooden stands, we purchased our little baskets filled with offerings for Kali—sweet meats, incense sticks, red powder, a hibiscus garland, and a few mysterious items we couldn’t identify. Next to us a child wept, pulling on her mother’s sari. We followed the crowd through the entrance and into the cement courtyard arena with its complex of temples and other buildings. We wandered, bewildered, over to what we supposed was the end of the line of Kali devotees, a line that snaked through the courtyard. Our hotel manager had explained that men and women entered in separate lines to see Kali, that it would be a long wait, perhaps hours. It was one of the most auspicious days of the week to visit Kali, and we had indeed found ourselves in a great throng of people. The Kali shrine itself, we had read in our little booklet, was small, set inside the monumental temple. Our place in line was just above the banks of the Ganges, in front of a row of twelve identical little Shiva temples, with brick red pagodas, standing sentinel in front of the Kali Temple. Some devotees were carrying cups with water from the river to offer to the Shiva images, the lingams.

An Indian woman thin as a rail, dressed in a tattered faded red sari appeared, her eyes luminous, her smile infectious. She took us each by the hand. Come, she said. Farther up the line at the bottom of the stairs to the Kali Temple, she chattered in Bengali to some Indian women, made a space for us, and then shoved us gently into the line. Lori and I nodded to her, with palms together thanking her, and then she disappeared into the crowd. The woman in front of us held a baby in her arms; her little boy clutched tightly to her sari with one hand, and with the other clasped tightly around their basket. Behind us an older woman smiled at us and wobbled her head side to side, Indian fashion, as if to indicate she was fine with us cutting in front of her. Pressed between bodies, we were carried along inch by inch, up the stairs, amidst unfamiliar smells, spices and body heat. Though it was relatively early in the morning, the sun was already hot. I was wet with perspiration. Not used to coming into full body contact with strangers I was in line with—not for the movies, not for the county fair, not even with a friend—I felt irritated and wanted to yell at them to back off and stop pushing. After a while I relaxed into the joining of bodies, falling into a sense of moving along as one being, progressing slowly forward, with only one common purpose in mind—a vision of Kali inside the temple.

The emotional fervor intensified as we reached the entry to the sanctuary, bodies pushing urgently into one another, no longer a tame single line, but a mass of humanity pressing forward. I lost track of Lori. I was a lone pilgrim. We were inside now. The coolness felt refreshing. Incense smoke wafted all around, carrying the scent of sandalwood. Some devotees pulled on a rope hanging from above and tied to the clapper of a bell, like a ship’s bell. I was shoved along amidst the cries of many calling out: Kali Ma! Jai Kali! Bodies moving forward, our vision of Kali near. Some women knelt at the waist-high gate in front of Kali’s shrine, reaching through the bars to touch the floor. Some stretched across the gate holding out their small baskets of offerings. The priest taking these baskets, slinging the hibiscus garlands onto Kali’s feet, offering the baskets to the Goddess, picking out some sweets to leave with Kali Ma and returning the baskets, mostly full, back to the devotees. Prasad. Food offered to the God or Goddess, sacred food, to be eaten.

Now I was at the gate in front of the shrine. Nothing between Kali and me. Barely aware, I felt the priest take my basket. An electrifying energy enveloped me. I entered eternity. Time stood still. I looked at her blackness, her large eyes, red tongue, her feet standing on Shiva, her husband, lying on a silver lotus. She is black. He is white. She is animated. He is still. Tears filled my eyes, streaming down, and then I felt the basket against my hands, someone pressing my fingers around the basket, someone tugging on my arm, pulling me away from the gate.

I stood to the side, stunned, compelled by her, drawn to the wild look in her eyes, to her garland of skulls, to her sense of unguarded abandon. Painted black and red, ornately adorned with gold, crowned, and garlanded with flowers, shimmering in the play of light, bearing a curved lopping sword, the head of a demon in her hand. Intellectually, I knew she is the Goddess of transformation and regeneration, the destroyer of negativity, the great protector, primordial. But emotionally I was unhinged.

I felt Lori at my side. We walked out, threading our way through all the people, towards the Ganges. I feel like I just completed a rite of passage, I said.

It was.

We sat on the banks of the quietly flowing river, watching the occasional boat pass by and men bathing in their dhotis in the sacred river’s bathing ghats, dunking themselves over and over again in a ritual observance, chanting. A deep peace surrounded me. Did you know it would be like this? I asked Lori. Lori and I had often discussed our readings about Eastern philosophies and religions, and had seen several documentaries about religious life in India and in Japan. She often came to the meditations at our Taos center.

Lori shook her head, her blond curls bouncing, looking at me with her round hazel eyes. Not even in my dreams.

Days later we traveled to South India, to the land of the temples with larger-than-life Goddesses carved in black granite, where Sarada, Parvati, Meenakshi, Lalita, Kanya Kumari, Rajarajeshwari, Kali—all the forms of Devi, the Mother of the Universe—have been worshipped in an unbroken lineage since ancient times, for thousands of years.

One day Lori and I were sitting on the edge of the narrow meandering Tunga River, in the holy village of Sringeri, in the hilly jungle region where wild elephants roam. Jungle birds whistled. Women spread their freshly washed colorful sari’s out to dry on the ground. Behind us stood two of the Goddess temples, the older Sri Vidya temple made of intricately carved stone and the newer Sri Sarada temple whose polished granite facade is supported by majestic pillars. Next to the Sarada Temple a few people were feeding peanuts to the temple elephant and her baby as the mahout stood close by with his goad.

Anne? Lori said tentatively while fiddling with the end of her peach-colored kurta pajama blouse. Why are you running away?

My eyes smarted. Four or five people climbed into the ferry canoe, and then the boatman poled them across the river. I don’t know what else to do, I said.

Well . . . I mean . . . I don’t know how to ask this . . . She ran her fingers through her hair and wiped the perspiration from her forehead. . . . do you have any idea what causes your blow ups?

Oh, God. If I only knew. I brushed away tears, couldn’t answer right away. I’ve tried and tried to trace it back to childhood. Lately I’ve been wondering if at least part of the problem could have started right there in my mother’s womb. They were breaking up when she got pregnant with me. My sister tells me that their nightmarish screaming matches chased my sister onto the roof where she would hide in the gables and hold her hands over her ears. And then I arrived, in the middle of it all. It’s as though I had been gunned down on a battlefield in some previous life and then plopped into another kind of war. Apparently my father used to leave and go to a hotel and my mother would get hysterical, driving all over town looking for him. All the while, through all the turmoil, I was inside of her. I have vivid but spotty memories from my crib upstairs, of the screaming and yelling. I’d hear him banging on his drum set and then my mother raging at him. I was so terrified I couldn’t cry out and instead vomited in my crib—not popular with my mom. I remember him in the mornings retching into the toilet from his alcoholism. I’d feel frightened and sick from the sound of him. As time went by I blanked most of it all out.

Lori listened, nodding her head now and then.

While we talked the temple school boys training to be priests began chanting the Vedas. Their voices echoed from inside the Sarada Temple. We’d seen them, ages eight to sixteen, several times during our visit, wearing their sparkling white dhotis and upper cloths, and with their long, coconut-oiled black hair pulled tightly back.

I think if I could just sit in that temple, listening to that chanting every day I’d get healed eventually, I said. But anyway . . . I’m too restless for that.

We sat quietly for a while. Two women folded their dry saris. At the edge of the river a school of large gray fish were churning the water, begging and then diving for the morsels a group of people fed to them. I continued my story. My dad left when I was three. As a child I’d make up stories and I was always the leader whenever my friends and I played at cowboys and Indians as we roamed the hills above the sea in my home town. Sometimes I played Batman or the Lone Ranger or Robin Hood. Heroes who save others. I was pretty good at archery, had a target in our back yard for practice. As far as I can tell, the fantasy life of childhood satisfied my need to avoid the pain of a broken family. I think as a child I dominated other children as a way to feel some sense of control over my life and to make up for the pain of being abandoned by my father. And then adulthood came along, reality settled in, and here I am in this mess where I deal with control issues and anger outbursts. Somehow just knowing my past doesn’t seem to be enough.

Lori smiled, causing the dimple in her chin to deepen. Her voice climbed to a delightful high-pitched whine. Do you really think Kali will help?

Dear Mother of God, I hope so.

By you this universe is borne, by you this world is created. By you the universe is protected, O, Goddess, and you always consume

it at the end . . . You are the primordial cause of everything.

~ DEVI MAHATMYAM

CHAPTER TWO

Eternal Night

BEFORE LORI AND I WENT to India, I hadn’t known the way people flocked to the temples to bow down to the Goddess in all her different forms. I hadn’t known the music or the dance—the drums, the piercing oboe-like instruments, the cymbals, the chants, the smoke, the sacred fires, the offerings of sweet rice pudding, the red smears on the foreheads. Many of the Hindu Goddesses I saw on our trip to India were aspects of Kali—some beautiful, some ugly, some stately, some young, some musical, some literary, and some just downright strange to my eyes.

Even after arriving in Southwest Harbor, Maine, I continued to feel irresistibly drawn to Kali. I longed to understand her, to bring the eternal mystery of her into what I had supposed would be a rather ordinary life in my new home by the sea. I decided to study her more deeply, to write a book about her and the other Goddesses related to her—ten of them known as the Wisdom Goddesses, Dasa Mahavidyas. Little did I know what was in store for me.

A mist collected on my windshield of my Honda Civic as I drove down route 102A through the land of pointed firs dotted with occasional birches and maples, now aglow with brilliant red and orange and yellow colors of fall. I’d been living in my cousin’s bungalow for two weeks and most days had been sunny and crisp. I’d just made a trip to the local grocery store in the village and was turning onto Periwinkle Lane near Seawall on the Atlantic, a popular place for summer tourists. As I passed by several summer cottages, now empty for winter, I heard the sound of waves rolling the base-ball-size stones in a percussive clatter. Up until today the ocean had been lake-like calm. Two deer were grazing in one of the front yards. Soon I pulled up at my bungalow next to my cousin’s larger house set in a small meadow surrounded by a forest of firs and spruce. Both structures had weathered gray cedar shingles and white window sills. Beyond the rocky slab of the shoreline, the sea was a deep gray, splashed with white caps, and the flat distant islands were growing dim, with dark clouds overhead, in what looked like an on-coming storm. Houses closer to the sea than my cousin’s had been shuttered or nailed with plywood over their ocean-facing windows to shield them from the lashings of storm tides that, in winter, sometimes crashed through unprotected window panes. I parked under a red-leafed maple tree. Seagulls soared and squawked as I lifted my grocery bags out of the car. I felt a chill rising in the air as I headed to the door and then made my way into the small kitchen area with yellow tile counters and an old-fashioned gas stove.

With a fire in the woodstove, my book on Kali, and with pad and pen in hand, I settled down on the beige, lighthouse-print sofa, not my favorite choice for upholstery, but it was comfortable. I loved the wood paneled walls and couldn’t have been happier with the view. The windows looked out onto the Atlantic, with the shoreline fifty yards down a slight incline. One of these days I planned to replace most of the pictures of boats and family photos on the wall with something that would make the place seem more like my own. I stared at the blank page of my notebook, wondering if I would ever grasp the meaning of Kali well enough to write about her. Over the last few days I’d been studying the ancient story in the Devi Mahatmyam—the Glory of the Divine Mother—which includes Kali’s battle against a demon king who represents the forces of ignorance, greed, and power.

All three stories of the Devi Mahatmyam take place at a time when all the world seems lost to various demon kings. In one of the stories, the Gods come before the Goddess in the Himalayas where, cast in her more beautiful and benign form as Devi, she sits on her crystal studded stone throne. There the Gods bow down to her and then ask her to persuade the evil king to stop destroying the planet and all living beings, to bring balance back to the earth, and therefore to the heavens as well. Devi agrees and the Gods then present her with all their weapons—trident, sword, discus, mace. Before she can proceed, however, she lets the Gods know that the demon king must first come to her. He must take the first step.

As the story goes, the demon king learns, by way of his messenger, that the most beautiful woman in the world lives in the Himalayas. Why, asks his messenger, "since you