JEF PIERCE
University of Pennsylvania jfpierce@upenn.edu
WILDERNESS AS CHORA: THE LIBERATING ENVIRONMENTAL ETHOS OF THE DEVĪPURĀṆA In its reappraisal of dualistic ontologies, the Devīpurāṇa reframes materiality not as an impediment to spiritual advancement but as its very condition of possibility. Drawing on a nascent tantric religious economy, the text establishes the wilderness as both an extension of the feminine divine body and as the impetus for dissolving subject-object divisions. The natural world—envisioned as the womb of the Goddess as Mother—becomes a space in which the religious practitioner may transcend the boundaries imposed by culturally constructed dichotomies, particularly those structured through language. This dynamic may be illuminated through the Kristevan notion of the chora, a pre-symbolic psychic space in which a newborn’s experience is mediated by the maternal body prior to the formation of discrete identity. In this undifferentiated state before the imposition of signifying language, the subject encounters a unified field of material existence, unmarked by distinctions between self and other. The Devīpurāṇa similarly gestures toward overcoming the thetic break, inviting a return to a choric mode of being through a refusal of rigid semiotic structures and a corresponding immersion in the natural world. Within this evolving Śākta idiom, nondualistic participation in the material realm becomes a means of attaining fundamental knowledge and engaging the divine. The Devīpurāṇa advances this position through several interrelated strategies: by asserting the identity of the Goddess as the elements of the natural world; by deploying richly experiential poetic tropes to describe wild landscapes; and by valorizing tantric practices that transgress socially imposed boundaries. Immanent in mountains, rivers, flora, fauna, and the peoples who inhabit these liminal spaces, the Goddess surrounds and pervades. Though mediated through textual language, the practitioner is ultimately encouraged to move beyond the constraints of linguistic parameters and to reenter a choric space in which the boundaries of selfhood dissolve and the totality of the divine may be apprehended.