Male Immortality Female Mortality The "Seed Man" and the Patrilineage The King and the Genealogies The Male Self The Dangerous Gift The Lineage Goddess   A play on words metaphorically links the genealogy--pronounced bans--and bamboo, pronounced baans. This is how women artists portray bans.             shakti - is a multivocalic term meaning: energy, power, especially the transforming power of human reproductivity; and the power of feminine deities. Shakti is often the term used to refer to the Goddess in her Formless form, the transcendant Goddess, Devi.

The Male Self In explaining how the genealogist reckons who a man is, a genealogist drew this diagram: The loop at the bottom left represents the groom, and all the other loops are his ancestors, at least those relevant to determining a proper marriage partner. At first I did not know what to make of the single loops that represented the "ancestors." These were "the fathers in all the lines," he said. But where were the mothers? The sixteen lines on the right half of the diagram represent his mother’s ancestors, but his own mother is not shown. The mothers were not there, but the mothers’ fathers were. The diagram showed all the fathers in both mothers’ and fathers’ lines. Women were simply not represented. Nor were their names recorded in the genealogies; all women were referred to simply as kanya (virgin daughter) of such-and-such a man who WAS named. The groom contains the blood of all these male ancestors. The girl he marries must not have any of the same ancestors or the marriage would be incestuous.It is the genealogist's responsibility to insure no such incestuous marriages occur to stain the families or the community. It has happened occasionally in the past; such cases are written in the Curse Panji.  The Dangerous Gift Marcel Mauss wrote: "To give something is to give a part of yourself." This worries Brahmans, making them extremely cautious about their marriage arrangements. Kanyadan quite literally takes part of the girl's father with it---in the form of her father's blood which will mix with the groom's in the body of the bride. On the other hand, the gift of a girl in marriage, kanyadan, is likened to a gift to a god. "My daughter’s husband is Vishnu to me," said one Srotriya. A daughter is the finest gift a man has to give. Though he loves his daughter, he cannot keep her. To keep her past puberty was considered a great sin for a father in former times, which was why daughters were married at a very early age, often as young as five or six. Still, accepting the daughter involves the receiving family in risk. Conveniently overlooking the absolute dependence of the lineage on her reproductive powers, the ideology of marriage focuses on the dangerous substances the bride brings to mix with the husband’s patrilineage. As the genealogist puts it: "The boy will enter the householder stage and he is taking the girl to enter; hence it depends on the girl. If she isn’t of good blood line, his whole grhastyam is spoiled. So purity of blood is essential." The mixing that takes place also alters the status of the future lineage by a partial mongrelization of it in the womb. The mixing disturbs the ideal perfection of the self-contained patriline. The Lineage Goddess How are the essential--but structurally invisible--wives and mothers of all those generations represented? Perhaps it is not so easy to mystify a world of pure fathers and sons after all. They cannot reproduce themselves. Many a genealogy in the books ends with the dreaded term: navald. No offspring. Line ended. It is wives who bring life to the lineage. Female reproductivity is its cross-generational life force. But this power, being an eternal property of the lineage, transcends single females. This is the power of shakti, the power of the goddess. structural invisibility - note how, from this discussion, women who are perfectly visible in the everyday life of society can be structurally invisible: they don’t appear in the genealogies and have no name besides kanya. Every Maithil Brahman lineage has its lineage goddess, called kul devi. Kul Devi is worshipped by all--and only--the sons and wives of the lineage. Daughters may not participate in her worship. At the very founding of each lineage in a village, the founder made a home for Kul Devi by undertaking an arduous journey to seven sites distributed across the length and breadth of India, sites particularly associated with the powers of the Goddess, to collect enough soil to mix together and fill a round earthen pot. This pot becomes the place where the goddess is rooted as the Kul Devi of the lineage. It becomes, in the obvious metaphor of the pot, the true, timeless, and immortal womb of the lineage. Each actual woman who marries into the lineage is an incarnation of this immortal feminine protector and mother of the lineage. kul means the smallest unit of the patrilineage; kul devi thus means "lineage goddess."The symbolism of the pot, and its association with feminine deities in India, has long been noted by scholars. It figures in Jungian psychology as an archetypal symbol of the human psyche. Whether or not Jung was right about the existence of unconscious pan-human symbols, the pot’s significance in Mithila is unquestionable and not in the least unconscious. Her temple is the Kul Devi shrine of each family compound. The pot of soil is never visible in the Kul Devi shrine; it lies buried beneath a low platform of two levels, where at the central spot an empty plate and various other symbols are the only actual visible signs of Kul Devi.