Hinduism worships Narayana in the stone, the tree, the animal, the human being.  That which the intellectual and spiritual pride or severity of other religions scorns, it makes its pride and turns into its own form of logical severity.  Stocks and stones, the quadruped and the human being, all these are equals in God, our brothers in the Divine, forms that the Omnipresent has not disdained to assume.  But beyond the material forms there are others that are ideal and symbolic, but not less, if anything more real, more full of divine power than any actual physical manifestation.  These are the mental images in which we worship God.  The Hindu believes that to whatever form he brings his devotion, the love of God is bound to assume and vivify it, and we cannot say that the belief is irrational.  For if there is a Consciousness in the universe and transcending it which answers to the yearning of all these creatures and perhaps itself yearns towards them with the love of the Father, the Mother, the Friend, the Lover, and a love surpassing all these, then it is idle to suppose that It would assume or create for its own pleasure and glory the forms of the universe, but would disdain as an offence to Its dignity or purity those which the love of the worshipper offers to It and which after all Itself has formed in his heart or his imagination.  To these mental forms mental worship may be offered, and this is the higher way; or we may give the material foundation, the pratistha, of a statue or pictured image to form a physical nodus for a physical act of worship.

In the formless also we worship God, in His qualities, in His Love, Power, Bliss, Wisdom, in the great cosmic Principles by which He manifests Himself to the eye of knowledge.  We worship Him as the Impersonality manifested in these things or the Personality containing them.  And we rise at the apex of the pinnacle into that which is not only formless, arupa, but nirguna, qualityless, the indefinable, anir-desyam, of the Gita.  In our human ignorance, with our mental passion for degrees and distinctions, for superiorities and exclusions, we thus grade these things and say that this is superior, that is for ignorant and inferior souls.  Do we know?  The Theist looks down with reprobation on the form-adoring man-worshipping idolater and polytheist; the Adwaitin looks down with a calm and tolerant indulgence on the ignorance of the quality adoring personality-bemused Theist.  But it seems to us that God scorns nothing, that the Soul of all things may take as much delight in the prayer of a little child or the offerings of a flower or a leaf before a pictured image as in the philosopher's leap from the summit of thought into the indefinable and unknowable and that he does best who can rise and widen into the shoreless realisation and yet keep the heart of the little child and the capacity of the seer of forms.

At any rate, this is an attitude towards which these Hymns to the Goddess bring us very near.  They are full of the glories of her form, her visible body; full of the thinker's perception of her in all the shapes of the universe; full of the power of her psychological aspects; pervaded too by a sense behind and often expressed of her final unity and transcendence.  Mr. Avalon brings this out with great force and vividness in his Introduction.  But it should be manifest even to a careless reader of the Hymns.  Take the following passage: -

Reverence to her who is eternal, Raudra,

To Gauri and Dhatri, reverence and again reverence,

To Her who is moonlight and in the form of the moon,

To Her who is supreme bliss, reverence for ever.

This is from the famous hymn in the Chandi-Mahatmya, deservedly one of the best known in sacred literature; but everywhere we find the same crowding of different aspects.  In a hymn of which the eleventh verse is a sensuous description of the physical goddess, -

O Gauri! with all my heart

I contemplate Thy form,

Beauteous of face,

With its weight of hanging hair,

With full breasts and rounded slender waist,

Holding in three hands a rosary, a pitcher and book

And with thy fourth hand making the Jnana-mudra, -

 (mark how the close passes naturally into the psychological symbolism of the form), the ninth is a remarkable piece of Yogic imagery, -

O Mother! like the sleeping King of serpents

Residing in the centre of the first lotus,

Thou didst create the universe.

Thou dost ascend like a streak of lightning, And attainest the ethereal region; -

and the opening is the highest philosophy expressed with great poetic force and interspersed with passages of the richest poetical colour, -

The cause and thinker of the World,

She whose form is that of the Shabdabrahman, And whose substance is bliss.

Thou art the primordial One,

Mother of countless creatures,

Creatrix of the bodies of the Lotus-born, Vishnu and Shiva,

Who creates, preserves and destroys the worlds....

Although thou art the primordial cause of the world,

Yet art thou ever youthful.

Although thou art the Daughter of the Mountain-King, Yet art thou full of tenderness.

Although thou art the Mother of the Vedas, Yet they cannot describe Thee.

Although men must meditate upon Thee, Yet cannot their mind comprehend Thee.

This hymn is quoted as culled from a Tantric compilation, the Tantrasara.  Its opening is full of the supreme meaning of the great Devi symbol, its close is an entire self-abandonment to the adoration of the body of the Mother.  This catholicity is typical of the whole Tantric system, which is in its aspiration one of the greatest attempts yet made to embrace the whole of God manifested and unmanifested in the adoration, self-discipline and knowledge of a single human soul.

- The Hour of the God Vol 17

But certain races have the function more evolved or more ready for evolution than the generality of mankind, and it is these that will lead in the future evolution.  In addition, the race has a mighty will-power which comes from the long worship of Shakti and practice of the Tantra that has been a part of our culture for many centuries.  No other people could have revolutionised its whole national character in a few years as Bengal has done.  The Bengali has always worshipped the Divine Energy in her most terrible as well as in her most beautiful aspects; whether as the Beautiful or the Terrible Mother he has never shrunk from her whether in fear or in awe.  When the divine force flowed into him he has never feared to yield himself up to it and follow the infinite prompting, careless whither it led.  As a reward he has become the most perfect adhara of Shakti, the most capable and swiftly sensitive and responsive receptacle of the Infinite Will and Energy the world now holds.  Recently that Will and Energy has rushed into him and has been lifting him to the level of  his future mission and destiny.  He has now to learn the secret of drawing the Mother of Strength into himself and holding her there in a secure possession.  That is why we have pointed to a religious and a spiritual awakening as the next necessity and the next inevitable development.

- The Harmony of Virtue Vol 3

The idea of a spiritual motherhood... is an eternal truth which has been recognised for ages past both in Europe and in Asia.  The distinction I have drawn between the physical relation and the psychic and spiritual relation, is also not a new invention; it is an idea known and understood everywhere and found to be perfectly plain and simple by all.

-On Himself Vol 26

The Divine Mother is the Consciousness and Force of the Divine - which is the Mother of all things.

-The Mother Vol 25

The Gita does not speak expressly of the Divine Mother; it speaks always of surrender to the Purushottama - it mentions her only as the Para Prakriti who becomes the Jiva, that is, who manifests the Divine in the multiplicity and through whom all these worlds are created by the Supreme and he himself descends as the Avatar.  The Gita follows the Vedantic tradition which leans entirely on the Ishwara aspect of the Divine and speaks little of the Divine Mother because its object is to draw back from world-nature and arrive at the supreme realisation beyond it; the Tantric tradition leans on the Shakti or Ishwari aspect and makes all depend on the Divine Mother because its object is to possess and dominate the world-nature and arrive at the supreme realisation through it. This Yoga insists on both the aspects; the surrender to the Divine Mother is essential for without it there is no fulfilment of the object of the Yoga.

In regard to the Purushottama the Divine Mother is the supreme divine Consciousness and Power and above the worlds, Adya Shakti; she carries the Supreme in herself and manifests the Divine in the worlds through the Akshara and Kshara.  In regard to the Akshara she is the same Para Shakti holding the Purusha immobile in herself and also herself immobile in him at the back of all creation.  In regard to the Khsara she is the mobile cosmic Energy manifesting all beings and forces.

-The Mother Vol 25

In all that is done in the universe, the Divine through his Shakti is behind all action but he is veiled by his Yoga Maya and works through the ego of the Jiva in the lower nature.

In Yoga also it is the Divine who is the Sadhaka and the Sadhana; it is his Shakti with her light, power, knowledge, consciousness, Ananda, acting upon the Adhara and, when it is opened to her, pouring into it with these divine forces that makes the Sadhana possible.  But so long as the lower nature is active the personal effort of the Sadhaka remains necessary.

-The Mother Vol 25

.......the Mother is one but she comes before us with differing aspects; many are her powers and personalities, many her emanations and Vibhutis that do her work in the universe.  The One whom we adore as the Mother is the divine Conscious Force that dominates all existence, one and yet so many-sided that to follow her movement is impossible even for the quickest mind and for the freest and most vast intelligence.  The Mother is the consciousness and force of the Supreme and far above all she creates.  But something of her ways can be seen and felt through her emobodiments and the more seizable because more defined and limited temperament and action of the goddess forms in whom she consents to be manifest to her creatures.

There are three ways of being of the Mother of which you can become aware when you enter into touch of oneness with the Conscious Force that upholds us and the universe.  Transcendent, the original supreme Shakti, she stands above the worlds and links the creation to the ever unmanifest mystery of the Supreme.  Universal, the cosmic Mahashakti, she creates all these beings and contains and enters, supports and conducts all these million processes and forces.  Individual, she embodies the power of these two vaster ways of her existence, makes them living and near to us and mediates between the human personality and the divine Nature.

The one original transcendent Shakti, the Mother stands above all the worlds and bears in her eternal consciousness the Supreme Divine.  Alone, she harbours the absolute Power and the ineffable Presence; containing or calling the Truths that have to be manifested, she brings them down from the Mystery in which they were hidden into the light of her infinite consciousness and gives them a form of force in her omnipotent power and her boundless life and a body in the universe.  The Supreme is manifest in her for ever as the everlasting Sachchidananda, manifested through her in the worlds as the one and dual consciousness of Ishwara-Shakti and the dual principle of Purusha-Prakriti, embodied by her in the Worlds and the Planes and the Gods and their Energies and figured because of her as all that is in the known worlds and in unknown others.  All is her play with the Supreme; all is her manifestation of the mysteries of the Eternal, the miracles of the Infinite.  All is she, for all are parcel and portion of the divine Conscious-Force.  Nothing can be here or elsewhere but what she decides and the Supreme sanctions; nothing can take shape except what she moved by the Supreme perceives and forms after casting it into seed in her creating Ananda.

The Mahashakti, the universal Mother, works out whatever is transmitted by her transcendent consciousness from the Supreme and enters into the worlds that she has made; her presence fills and supports them with the divine spirit and the divine all-sustaining force and delight without which they could not exist.  That which we call Nature or Prakriti is only her most outward executive aspect; she marshals and arranges the harmony of her forces and processes, impels the operations of Nature and moves among them secret or manifest in all that can be seen or experienced or put into motion of life.  Each of the worlds is nothing but one play of the Mahashakti of that system of worlds or universe, who is there as the cosmic Soul and Personality of the transcendent Mother.  Each is something that she has seen in her vision, gathered into her heart of beauty and power and created in her Ananda.

 But there are many planes of her creation, many steps of the Divine Shakti.  At the summit of this manifestation of which we are a part there are worlds of infinite existence, consciousness, force and bliss over which the Mother stands as the unveiled eternal Power.  All beings there live and move in an ineffable completeness and unalterable oneness, because she carries them safe in her arms for ever.  Nearer to us are the worlds of a perfect supramental creation in which the other is the supramental Mahashakti, a Power of divine omniscient Will and omnipotent Knowledge always apparent in its unfailing works and spontaneously perfect in every process.  There all movements are the steps of the Truth; there all beings are souls and powers and bodies of the divine Light; there all experiences are seas and floods and waves of an intense and absolute Ananda.  But here where we dwell are the worlds of the Ignorance, worlds of mind and life and body separated in consciousness from their source, of which this earth is a significant centre and its evolution a crucial process.  This too with all its obscurity and struggle and imperfection is upheld by the Universal Mother; this too is impelled and guided to its secret aim by the Mahashakti.

The Mother as the Mahashakti of this triple world of the Ignorance stands in an intermediate plane between the supramental Light, the Truth life, the Truth creation which has to be brought down here and this mounting and descending hierarchy of planes of consciousness that like a double ladder lapse into the nescience of Matter and climb back again through the flowering of life and soul and mind into the infinity of the Spirit.  Determining all that shall be in this universe and in the terrestrial evolution by what she sees and feels and pours from her, she stands there above the Gods and all her Powers and Personalities are put out in front of her for the action and she sends down emanations of them into these lower worlds to intervene, to govern, to battle and conquer, to lead and turn their cycles, to direct the total and the individual lines of their forces.  These Emanations are the many divine forms and personalities in which men have worshipped her under different names throughout the ages.  But also she prepares and shapes through these Powers and their emanations the minds and bodies of her Vibhutis, even as she prepares and shapes minds and bodies for the Vibhutis of the Ishwara, that she may manifest in the physical world and in the disguise of the human consciousness some ray of her power and quality and presence.  All the scenes of the earthplay have been like a drama arranged and planned and staged by her with the cosmic Gods for her assistants and herself as a veiled actor.

The Mother not only governs all from above but she descends into this lesser triple universe.  Impersonally, all things here, even the movements of the Ignorance, are herself in veiled power and her creations in diminished substance, her Nature-body and Nature-force, and they exist because, moved by the mysterious fiat of the Supreme to work out something that was there in the possibilities of the Infinite, she has consented to the great sacrifice and has put on like a mask the soul and forms of the Ignorance.  But personally too she has stooped to descend here into the Darkness that she may lead it to the Light, into the Falsehood and Error that she may convert it to the Truth, into this Death that she may turn it to godlike Life, into this world-pain and its obstinate sorrow and suffering that she may end it in the transforming ecstasy and of her sublime Ananda.  In her deep and great love for her children she has consented to put on herself the cloak of this obscurity, condescended to bear the attacks and torturing influences of the powers of the Darkness and the Falsehood, born to pass through the portals of the birth that is a death, taken upon herself the pangs and sorrows and sufferings of the creation, since it seemed that thus alone could it be lifted to the Light and Joy and Truth and eternal Life.  This is the great sacrifice called sometimes the sacrifice of the Purusha, but much more deeply the holocaust of Prakriti, the sacrifice of the Divine Mother.

Four great Aspects of the Mother, four of her leading Powers and Personalities have stood in front in her guidance of this Universe and in her dealings with the terrestrial play.  One is her personality of calm wideness and comprehending wisdom and tranquil benignity and inexhaustible compassion and sovereign and surpassing majesty and all-ruling greatness.  Another embodies her power of splendid strength arid irresistible passion, her warrior mood, her overwhelming will, her impetuous swiftness and world-shaking force.  A third is vivid and sweet and wonderful with her deep secret of beauty and harmony and fine rhythm, her intricate and subtle opulence, her compelling attraction and captivating grace.  The fourth is equipped with her close and profound capacity of intimate knowledge and careful flawless work and quiet and exact perfection in all things.  Wisdom, Strength, Harmony, Perfection are their several attributes and it is these powers that they bring with them into the world, manifest in a human disguise in their Vibhutis and shall found in the divine degree of their ascension in those who can open their earthly nature to the direct and living influence of the Mother.  To the four we give the four great names, Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati.

-The Mother Vol 25

The faith in the divine Shakti must be always at the back of our strength and when she becomes manifest, it must be or grow implicit and complete.  There is nothing that is impossible to her who is the conscious Power and universal Goddess all-creative from eternity and armed with the Spirit's omnipotence.  All knowledge, all strength, all triumph and victory, all skill and works are in her hands and they are full of the treasures of the Spirit and of all perfection and siddhis.  She is Maheshwari, goddess of the supreme knowledge, and brings to us her vision for all kinds and widenesses of truth, her rectitude of the spiritual will, the calm and passion of her supramental largeness, her felicity of illumination; she is Mahakali, goddess of the supreme strength, and with her are all mights and spiritual force and severest austerity of Tapas and swiftness to the battle and the victory and the laughter, the attahasya, that makes light of defeat and death and the powers of the ignorance: she is Mahalakshmi, the goddess of the supreme love and delight, and her gifts are the spirit's grace and the charm and beauty of the Ananda and protection and every divine and human blessing: she is Mahasaraswati, the goddess of divine skill and of the works of the Spirit, and hers is the Yoga that is skill in works, yogah  karmasu kausalam, and the utilities of divine knowledge and the self-application of the spirit to life and the happiness of its harmonies.  And in all her powers and forms she carries with her the supreme sense of the masteries of the eternal Ishwari, a rapid and divine capacity for all kinds of action that may be demanded from the instrument, oneness, a participating sympathy, a free identity, with all energies in all beings and therefore a spontaneous and fruitful harmony with all the divine will in the universe.  The intimate feeling of her presence and her powers and the satisfied assent of all our being to her workings in and around it is the last perfection of faith in the Shakti.

- The Synthesis of Yoga Vol 21

Prayer helps to prepare this relation for us at first on the lower plane even while it is there consistent with much that is mere egoism and self-delusion; but afterwards we can draw towards the spiritual truth which is behind it.  It is not then the giving of the thing asked for that matters, but the relation itself, the contact of man's life with God, the conscious interchange.  In spiritual matters and in the seeking of spiritual gains, this conscious relation is a great power; it is a much greater power than our own entirely self-reliant struggle and effort and it brings a fuller spiritual growth and experience.  Necessarily, in the end prayer either ceases in the greater thing for which it prepared us, - in fact the form we call prayer is not  itself essential so long as the faith, the will, aspiration are there, - or remains only for the joy of the relation.  Also its objects, the artha or interest it seeks to realise, become higher and higher until we reach the highest motiveless devotion, which is that of divine love pure and simple without any other demand or longing.

 The relations which arise out of this attitude towards the Divine, are that of the divine Father and the Mother with the child and that of the divine Friend.  To the Divine as these things the human soul comes for help, for protection, for guidance, for fruition, - or if knowledge be the aim, to the Guide, Teacher, Giver of light, for the Divine is the Sun of knowledge, - or it comes in pain and suffering for relief and solace and deliverance, it may be deliverance either from the suffering itself or from the world-existence which is the habitat of the suffering or from all its inner and real causes.  In these things we find there is a certain gradation.  For the relation of fatherhood is always less close, intense, passionate, intimate, and therefore it is less resorted to in the Yoga which seeks for the closest union.  That of the divine Friend is a thing sweeter and more intimate, admits (if an equality and intimacy even in inequality and the beginning of mutual self-giving; at its closest when all idea of other giving and taking disappears, when this relation becomes motiveless except for the one sole all-sufficing motive of love, it turns into the free and happy relation of the playmate in the Lila of existence.  But closer and more intimate still is the relation of the Mother and the child, and that therefore plays a very large part wherever the religious impulse is most richly fervent and springs most warmly from the heart of man.  The soul goes to the Mother-Soul in all its desires and troubles, and the Divine Mother wishes that it should be so, so that she may pour out her heart of love.  It turns to her too because of the self existent nature of this love and because that points us to the home towards which we turn from our wanderings in the world and to the bosom in which we find our rest.

- The Synthesis of Yoga Vol 21