Alf Hiltebeitel is Professor of Religion at George Washington University. He works mainly on the two Sanskrit epics, the Mah

"This volume, with its companion, will be of high interest to students of religion, psychoanalysis, and psychology, as well as those interested in comparative literature ... Recommended." -- M. Uebel, CHOICE

"Alf Hiltebeitel's scholarship on the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata and its living presence in Tamil-speaking communities in South India has shaped the field of Mahabharata studies for a generation, and his latest offering expands the scope of his oeuvre even further." -- Journal of Religion

"Spectacularly impressive. You can dip into these amazing volumes and find all manner of marvelous things--not only the valuable information about Freud, Bose, goddesses, and the Mahabharata, but Hiltebeitel's highly creative ideas about them."--Wendy Doniger, Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago

"These volumes comprise the magnum opus of a distinguished historian of religions. It lovingly orbits around two cultural oeuvres of roughly the same length: the great Hindu epic of the Mahabharata and the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud. It is as if Hiltebeitel has treated the Mah?bh?rata as one immense psychoanalytic exploration of the maternal polytheisms of Indian Hindu culture and the Collected Works as an unintended but appropriate mythology of Western civilization and its male monotheisms. Behind this astonishing comparison haunts the question: 'Can psychoanalytic methods work in different ontological structures? Can they work here, for example, in the panpsychic nondualism of the Bengali founder of Indian psychoanalysis Girindrasekhar Bose?' The answer appears to be: 'Yes, they can, uncannily so. And the analysis goes both ways.'"--Jeffrey J. Kripal, Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions

"At a time when scholarship in both religion and psychoanalysis seeks to recover a repressed or marginalized anti-colonial past, Hiltebeitel's manuscript offers a wealth of information which scholars of both religion and psychoanalysis will find fascinating and stimulating. This is the kind of research that stimulates more research."--Marshall Alcorn, author of Resistance to Learning