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9.12. Conclusion
In reaching out to these Asian themes and symbols, Koch seems to be concurring with
the assessment of David Tacey in the need to reassert the divine feminine in a world diverted
from its sense of the sacred partly by the predominance of its male orientation. In India, the
Mother Goddess, whose Neolithic origins were overwhelmed for a thousand years by the male
divinities of the Aryan pantheon, has reasserted itself and is the chief divinity today. Going by
many names—Parvati, Durga, Kali, Devi, Sati, Sri, and many more—, she ‘personifies the
World Illusion, within the bounds and thralldom of which exist all forms whatsoever, whether
gross or subtle, earthly or angelic’. She has ‘deluded the world with Her Illusion and conjures
up the magic of creation, preservation, and destruction’, and spread a ‘veil of ignorance before
our eyes’ which only she can decide to remove to let us enter into her ‘inner chamber’
(Zimmer, 1969, 569). The divine feminine is a powerful symbol, whose paradoxical
significance certainly has a new relevance in a Western society itself paradoxically richer and
more powerful than ever and yet bereft of the mythological core which alone can give it
meaning. The Goddess reigned countless time as the powerful metaphor of fertility, of the
ever-renewing cycles of nature, and therefore of the eternal puzzle of birth, life, and death;
Christopher Koch’s Asian novels are a literary equivalent of an invocation to the Universal
Mother, to re-emerge from the shadows, and re-enchant human culture.
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