Kali

(“black”) Incomprehensibly fierce and
powerful divine form of the Mother
Goddess. Kali is the awful, uncontrolled power of the divine in its most
terrifying aspects. She is consistently
associated with images of blood, death,
and destruction; her dwelling place is
the cremation ground. Her iconography portrays her as clothed with severed heads and limbs, and her form is
lean, gaunt, and haggard, with lolling
tongue and lips smeared with blood.
Paradoxically, millions of Kali’s devotees
(bhakta) refer to her as “mother.”
Kali’s roots are uncertain, but she is
generally assumed to be an autochthonous (“of the land”) deity. Her dark
color—associated with low social status, her preference for dwelling in
inaccessible places, and her worship
by Indian aboriginal tribes and people
at the margins of society, all seem to
point to origins as a local goddess, perhaps of tribal people. Some early
Sanskrit dramas, such as the poet
Bhavabhuti’s Malatimadhava, mention fierce goddesses who received
offerings of blood from their devotees.
This same motif was a central element
in the stories about the Thugs in the
nineteenth century.
One of Kali’s earliest descriptions
comes in the Devimahatmya, the earliest
known source for the notion that God is
feminine. One of the Devimahatmya’s
episodes describes the birth of Kali (in
her form as Mahakali) as the anger of
the Goddess incarnate. In the story, Kali
first destroys the demon armies by stuffing them into her mouth and eating
them whole, symbolizing her all-consuming power to destroy. Her other feat
in this text is the destruction of
Raktabija, a demon who receives the
boon that any drop of his blood that falls
to the earth will instantly turn into a
clone of him—a boon that renders him
practically unconquerable. Kali defeats
him by drinking his blood as it is shed
until it is completely gone. Both of these
episodes reinforce her image as a terrifying and powerful goddess, her destructive capacity, and her associations with
substances and practices normally
considered to be defiling. As Kinsley
notes, Kali can also be seen as a symbolic statement that human life is
uncertain and that tragedy and misfortune can occur without warning, despite
the best-laid plans.
Worship of Kali has followed two
paths, one in agreement with these horrific images and one in contradiction to
them. On one hand, Kali has been an
important deity for practitioners of the
secret, ritually-based religious practice
known as tantra. The tantras describe
reality as resulting from the interaction
between polar opposites, symbolized in
the deities of Shiva (consciousness) and
Shakti (“power”). Shiva provides the
ordering principle and is the Ultimate
Reality, but Shakti provides the energy
and dynamism that actually makes
things happen. Consequently, goddesses
take on an important role in tantric
practice. Among these goddesses Kali
stands preeminent, perhaps because
she is the most radical articulation of
feminine power and can thus be seen as
bringing the greatest power to bear on
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Kali
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Kali
Image of the goddess Kali. Her fierce power is represented by the symbols of death and destruction
that surround her: skulls, fire, her blood-smeared tongue, and severed heads and limbs.
behalf of her devotees. Her power over
all things and Shiva’s helplessness without this power is symbolized by the
images of Kali standing over the prostrate Shiva, clearly in a dominant position. In this tradition, the tantric expert
is seen as a heroic figure who gains
power from the goddess.
The tantras also stress the reconciliation of opposites as a way to destroy all
conceptual dualism and affirm the ultimate unity of the entire universe. To
carry this out, tantric rituals may
include practices involving substances
normally forbidden, such as the socalled Panchamakara, or “Five
Forbidden Things,” as a way to affirm
the provisional nature of all judgments
of purity and impurity (ashaucha).
Again, Kali is the quintessential tantric
deity, since her iconography and
mythology involve things normally considered impure: drinking blood and
receiving animal sacrifices, living in the
cremation ground, and clothing herself
with severed limbs.
The other dominant image for the
worship of Kali is as a mother. This
image is preeminent in the Bengal
region, and has become widely established there during the past few hundred years. This image of Kali is rooted
in Indian images of motherhood, which
are greatly idealized in terms of a mother’s devotion to her children. The central
belief is that if a devotee approaches Kali
as a submissive child, ready to take
whatever blows she gives, she will ultimately turn her awesome forces toward
protecting her devotee. Kali’s most
famous devotees are the nineteenthcentury Bengali figures Ramprasad and
Ramakrishna; the former is famous for
a poem in which he states that there are
bad children but never a bad mother.
Religious adepts such as Ramprasad
and Ramakrishna have been able to
maintain this tension between Kali’s
horrific persona and her image as a
mother, but in popular devotion this
tension has been largely lost. Modern
images of Kali tend to sweeten or ignore
her horrific aspects, often portraying her
as young, beautiful, and almost benevolent. For more information on Kali, see
David R. Kinsley, The Sword and the
Flute, 1975; and Hindu Goddesses, 1986.