ABSTRACT
THE mystery of woman, never greater than it is in the case of the Indian woman, finds some solution if she be regarded as a manifestation of creative śakti. At various stages in her life she is regarded as almost divine, as the repository of abnormal śakti; as a maiden attaining puberty and as a suvāsinī with children she fulfils the law and manifests power. As a woman without issue she is credited with baneful power, and though the position of the widow in India permits of no simple explanation, into the treatment of the widow there enters something of the same idea as underlies the treatment of the childless woman; neither the widow nor the woman without issue is complete, and where there is something missing there must be loss of śakti.
