Merchant of Venice_e-version

BHOLANATH BHATTACHARYA
Esoteric Cults of Consort Worship in Bengal

From the very days of inception woman breeds a sense of fear as well as devotion in the minds of man due to her mysterious relation with the process of creation. Worshiping woman as a symbol of power of creation and fertility also started from then. At the preliminary stage woman was worshiped as mother. Later, as man also found himself as a contributor in this process of creation, woman was worshiped as companion. The author gives a description of these confined cults which are practiced in different parts of Bengal in India for a long time. Before thirty five years this paper drew the attention of Mircea Eliade, Dineshchandra Sarkar, Atul Sur, Mazharul Islam and Mikhail Nalizevski when it was published for the first time in the ‘Folklore’ journal.