Lakshmi

10/06/16 • 47 min

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the origins of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, and of the traditions that have built around her for over 3,000 years. According to the creation story of the Puranas, she came to existence in the churning of the ocean of milk. Her prominent status grew alongside other goddesses in the mainly male world of the Vedas, as female deities came to be seen as the Shakti, the energy of the gods, without which they would be powerless. Lakshmi came to represent the qualities of blessing, prosperity, fertility, beauty and good fortune and, more recently, political order, and she has a significant role in Diwali, one of the most important of the Hindu festivals. With Jessica Frazier Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Kent Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies at the University of Oxford Jacqueline Suthren-Hirst Senior Lecturer in South Asian Studies at the University of Manchester and Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster University Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Previous Episode

Margery Kempe and English Mysticism

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the English mystic Margery Kempe (1373-1438) whose extraordinary life is recorded in a book she dictated, The Book of Margery Kempe. She went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to Rome and Santiago de Compostela, purchasing indulgences on her way, met with the anchoress Julian of Norwich and is honoured by the Church of England each 9th November. She sometimes doubted the authenticity of her mystical conversations with God, as did the authorities who saw her devotional sobbing, wailing and convulsions as a sign of insanity and dissoluteness. Her Book was lost for centuries, before emerging in a private library in 1934.

The image (above), of an unknown woman, comes from a pew at Margery Kempe's parish church, St Margaret's, Kings Lynn and dates from c1375.

With

Miri Rubin Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London

Katherine Lewis Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Huddersfield

And

Anthony Bale Professor of Medieval Studies at Birkbeck University of London

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Next Episode

Baltic Crusades

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Baltic Crusades, the name given to a series of overlapping attempts to convert the pagans of North East Europe to Christianity at the point of the sword. From the 12th Century, Papal Bulls endorsed those who fought on the side of the Church, the best known now being the Teutonic Order which, thwarted in Jerusalem, founded a state on the edge of the Baltic, in Prussia. Some of the peoples in the region disappeared, either killed or assimilated, and the consequences for European history were profound.

With

Aleks Pluskowski Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading

Nora Berend Fellow of St Catharine's College and Reader in European History at the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge

and

Martin Palmer Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education, and Culture

Producer: Simon Tillotson.