In another story, Kali is summoned by a group of criminals who decide to sacrifice a human to her image in order to gain her favour. They unwisely choose a young Brahmin monk of upstanding character, however his saintliness shines so brightly that her statue is scorched in his presence. She manifests but proceeds to horribly kill her erstwhile worshipers by decapitating them and drinking their blood. Here, Kali demonstrates her refusal to be controlled by those who think they understand her and her triumph over the attributes of ignorance and evil, as well as the absolute impartiality of her nature.
While Kali was well integrated into the Vedic, or orthodox, Hindu tradition from the first, she also developed a parallel relationship with Tantra. Tantric teachings are a collection of ancient magical stories and folk practices that exist alongside the Vedic tradition, and could be considered to hold to the wild tribal origins of Kali more faithfully than the Vedic. In this aspect she is considered to stand outside of the constraints of space-time and have no permanent qualities; she existed before the universe was created and will continue to exist after the universe ends.
Limitations of the physical world such as colour, light, good and bad do not apply to Kali. She is a symbol of Mother Nature herself — primordial, creative, nurturing and devouring in turn, but ultimately loving and benevolent. In this aspect of goodness she is referred to as Kali Ma, Mother Kali, or Divine Mother, and many millions of Hindus revere and worship her in this form. It is worth noting that Shiva, in his role of destroyer of worlds, also stands outside the boundaries of the physical universe and is well complimented by his association with Kali.
From the 14 th century to the 19 th century, a cult group called the Thuggee from the Hindu word to deceive was operating at will in India. A hereditary sect, Thuggee membership was passed from father to son, although outsiders, particularly criminals, could be recruited if found worthy — or might end up as victim if not.
During its peak, the group is believed to have had thousands of followers and during the years of its operation its members are estimated to have killed anywhere between , and 2 million people. Thuggees proudly traced their origin to the battle of Kali against Raktabija, and considered themselves her children, created from her sweat. The British finally wiped out the Thuggees in the mid 19 th century, and the cult of religious stranglers ceased to exist except in myth and folklore.
A groups of Thuggees strangling a traveller on a highway in India in the early 19th century. One member of the group is gripping the traveller's feet, another his hands, while a third member is tightening the ligature around his neck. Anonymous Indian artist. Made for Capt. Picture credit: Frances Pritchett's web site, Columbia University. It is difficult to discover any concrete information about this group of women — their name, the extent to which they practiced in India, whether they were associated with the Thuggee cult, and whether they died out or continue to exist within the many Tantric sects extant today.
Here Kali is shown in her post 17th century, rehabilitated form: beautiful of face and body, blue skinned rather than black, her right foot forward to indicate the correct spiritual path, with her right hands displaying the gestures of fearlessness and blessing and her left holding the sword and severed head.
Author Surendra Nath Khar. In part because of her dread characteristics and habit of acting unpredictably, at least to those who tried to control her, devotion came late in the game to Kali — even devout Hindus were wary of her wrath. However in the seventeenth century Kali received a makeover from the Tantric Bengali poets in northwest India. No longer a terrifying red-eyed crone, she began to be depicted as voluptuous, motherly, young and beautiful, with a gentle smile, attractive ornaments and pleasing blue complexion.
While she continued to brandish weaponry and severed heads, two of her right hands now made soothing gestures - the mudras of fearlessness and blessing. Today, her image reflects her duality. Kali is depicted in the act of killing but smiles engagingly. Her protruding red tongue signals both modesty a Bengali tradition and her thirst for blood. Her dishevelled hair hints at unrestrained blood lust and alternatively the metaphysical mystery of death that encircles life.
Her three eyes represent omniscience, her voluptuous breasts both sexual lust and nurturance. Her nakedness simultaneously represents carnality and purity. Her necklace of severed heads and girdle of severed arms signifies her killing rage but are also tantric metaphors for creative power and severance from the bonds of karma and accumulated deeds.
Even her stance is imbued with dual meaning. While her right hands are generally associated with positive gestures, her left hands hold weaponry — depending on the number of arms she is portrayed as having, a bloodied sword or trident, a freshly severed head and a skull cup to catch the blood.
However, even these are symbols of greater purpose. The sword symbolises higher knowledge, the head the human ego that must be severed in order to exit from the cycle of life and rebirth. In the 20 th and 21 st centuries, many western feminist scholars have adopted Kali as a mascot of female empowerment, or have politicised her as a symbol of the supposed former matriarchal golden age that came before our present state of patriarchal control and decline.
New Age Tantric practitioners adapt her obvious sexual manifestations as a therapeutic tool, while Hollywood employs her as a convenient symbol of malevolence. But Kali, the true Kali, will continue to defy all attempts to tame and domesticate her, as she has since the beginning of time. Would the real Kali please stand up. Kali can be depicted in various aspects, both as a terrible force for violence and retribution, and as a loving protective chaste figure.
Photo credit: Kashgar. Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained, Secret Societies: the Thuggee. It symbolizes that she is completely beyond name and form, completely beyond the effects of maya illusion. Her nudity is said to represent totally illumined consciousness, unaffected by maya.
Kali is the bright fire of truth, which cannot be hidden by the clothes of ignorance. Such truth simply burns them away. Despite Kali's origins in battle, she evolved to a full-fledged symbol of Mother Nature in her creative, nurturing and devouring aspects. Some groups of people, unfamiliar with the precepts of Hinduism, see Kali as a satanic demon probably because of tales of her being worshipped by dacoits and other such people indulging evil acts.
The Goddess Kali is represented as black in color. Black in the ancient Hindu language of Sanskrit is kaala. The feminine form is kali. So she is Kali, the black one.
Black is a symbol of The Infinite and the seed stage of all colors. The Goddess Kali remains in a state of inconceivable darkness that transcends words and mind. Within her blackness is the dazzling brilliance of illumination.
Kali's blackness symbolizes her all-embracing, comprehensive nature, because black is the color in which all the colors merge; black absorbs and dissolves them. On the other hand, black is said to represent the total absence of color, again signifying the nature of Kali as ultimate reality.
This in Sanskrit, the color black is named as nirguna beyond all quality and form. Either way, kali's black colour symbolizes her transcendence of all form. She appears black because She is viewed from a distance But when intimately known She is no longer so The sky appears blue at a distance, but look at it close by And you will find that it has no colour The water of the ocean looks blue at a distance But when you go near and take it on your hand, you find that it is colourless".
Kali is a great and powerful black earth Mother Goddess capable of terrible destruction and represents the most powerful form of the female forces in the Universe. Worship of the Goddess Kali is largely an attempt to appease her and avert her wrath. The Goddess Kali constantly drinks blood.
She has an insatiable thirst for blood. As mistress of blood, she presides over the mysteries of both life and death. Kali intends her bloody deeds for the protection of the good. She may get carried away by her gruesome acts but she is not evil. Kali's destructive energies on the highest level are seen as a vehicle of salvation and ultimate transformation. Kali is the central deity of Time.
She created the world and destroys it. She is beyond time and space. After the destruction of the Universe, at the end of the great cycle, she collects the seeds of the next creation. She destroys the finite to reveal the Infinite. This Black Goddess is death, but to the wise she is also the death of death. This can only be revealed through the worship of Kali, and meditation on her mysteries. To her worshippers in both Hinduism and Tantra she represents a multi-faceted Great Goddess responsible for all of life from conception to death.
Her worship, therefore, consists of fertility festivals as well as sacrifices animal and human ; and her initiations expand one's consciousness by many means, including fear, ritual sexuality and intoxication with a variety of drugs. Her three forms are manifested in many ways: in the three divisions of the year, the three phases of the moon, the three sections of the cosmos heaven, earth, and the underworld , the three stages of life, the three trimesters of pregnancy, and so on.
Women represent her spirit in mortal flesh. These priestesses attend the dying, govern funerary rites and act as angels of death. All have their counterparts in the spirit world. To this day, Tantric Buddhism relates the three mortal forms of woman to the divine female trinity called Three Most Precious Ones. Kali's three forms appear in the sacred colors known as "Gunas": white for the Virgin, red for the Mother, black for the Crone, the three together symbolizing birth, life, death.
Black is Kali's fundamental color as the Destroyer, for it means the formless condition she assumes between creations, when all the elements are dissolved in her primordial substance. As Kundalini the Female Serpent, she resembles the archaic Egyptian serpent-mother said to have created the world. It was said of Kundalini that at the beginning of the universe, she starts to uncoil in "a spiral line movement, which is the movement of creation. Spirals therefore appeared on tombs, as one of the world's first mystical symbols.
Kali is considered to be the most fully realized of all the Dark Goddesses, but even though Kali was originally worshipped as a warrior goddess, and her followers gave her offerings of blood and flesh, her followers still found her greatest strength to be that of a protector. Kali is not always thought of as a Dark Goddess; rather, she is also referred to as a great and loving primordial Mother Goddess in the Hindu tantric tradition.
Kali is also associated with intense sexuality. Myths tell of the Yoni vagina of Kali when she existed as Sati - wife of Lord Shiva falling down to the Earth on the sacred hill near Gauhati in Assam India , the same place where the Temple of Kamakhya is now located.
The temple's outer walls are highly decorated with carvings showing Kali as a Triple Goddess: squatting, and exposing her Yoni vagina ; as a mother suckling Her child; and as a warrior woman drawing back Her bow. While these carvings show Kali as a sexual being, they also show her as a protective and motherly woman, full of compassion. Known as the "Dark Mother," the Hindu Triple Goddess of creation, protection, and destruction, now most commonly known in her Destroyer aspect, is very often depicted as squatting over her dead consort Shiva and devouring his entrails, while her yoni sexually devours his lingam.
Kali is:. It is in India that the experience of the Terrible Mother has been given its most grandiose form as Kali. But all this and it should not be forgotten an image not only of the Feminine but particularly and specifically of the Maternal. For in a profound way life and birth are always bound up with death and destruction. Kali's paramount place of worship is in the cremation ground, preferably at the dead of night, on a suitable day of the waning Moon. Here, her nature becomes clear and apparent.
For an adept in the worship, the whole world is a cremation ground, and She, the true form of time, who by herself creates and destroys all, is personified as the pyre.
There, after life, all mortals and their wishes, dreams and reflections come to their fruition, a pile of worthless ashes. Kali's dwelling place, the cremation ground denotes a place where the pancha mahabhuta five elements are dissolved.
Kali dwells where this dissolution takes place. In terms of devotion and worship, this denotes the dissolving of attachments, anger, lust and other binding emotions, feelings and ideas. The heart of devotee is where this burning takes place, and it is in the heart that Kali dwells. The devotee makes her image in his heart and under her influence burns away all limitations and ignorance in the cremation fires. This inner cremation fire in the heart is the gyanagni fire of knowledge , which kali bestows.
Kali is the universal mother. It is believed that she goes into the darkness with us, and for us, to swallow our sins, worries and concerns. She can show us how to radically transform our lives by embracing our own darkness, rather than fearing and fleeing from that which haunts us. She can spiritually hack away at the handcuffs that keep us shackled to the hungry ghosts of the past.
There comes a point in the process when you must surrender fully to her healing powers, and let her bring you back cleansed, transformed, whole. Kali is the powerful Hindu Goddess who is in charge of darkness, death and regeneration.
The writer is the director of the American Institute of Vedic Studies and the author of more than 30 books on yoga and vedic traditions. X Login. Sign In With Twitter. English Bangla. Why we must worship Goddess Kali As the transforming power of time, she can usher us into a new era of global peace and understanding. David Frawley.
Also read - The dark side of Durga Puja Bengalis don't like to talk about Yet instead of following Ramakrishna's yogic teachings about Kali, most scholars today look at Kali in an alien and diminished light. Nature of Ma Kali Ma Kali is kala shakti or the power of time. Also read - How Siva evolved over the years Kali is not the goddess of death and destruction as some see her but, on the contrary, represents the complete victory of the Divine over all death and destruction.
Ma Kali as the yoga shakti Kali is the inner power of yoga or yoga shakti. Also read - Miracles of yoga that left this heart surgeon stumped Kundalini shakti, the secret yogic power of transformation within us, works through Kali's grace and motivation. Kali reminds one of Tagore's verses "Let me carry death in life that I may know life in death. Those seeking to bring the Divine Light into the world should worship Ma Kali. Think about the clay effigies of Kali being handmade right by Kalighat Temple in Kolkata—some much bigger than a person, others miniatures—tongues out and arms out dancing: Can you picture a fiercer formation?
Kali embodies the boundless and existential freedom to be—without seeking permission. Kali is the quintessential embodiment of shakti , female power. She emerges as an independent goddess around BCE and evolves as a controversial character: she is a scary, bloodthirsty embodiment of destruction , and the ultimate protector against evil. Duplicity and multiplicity was a trait associated with female divinity in antiquity, she explains. Kali and other early female goddesses were the expression of nature.
Like nature, she has a destructive side as much as a benevolent one. As a female, the power of creation rests with her; and as a female, too, so does the sheer force of nature. The myth wants her to be bloodthirsty and uncontrollable, while Shiva, the male god, is wise and in control: But this, Singhal notes, is just the male retelling of the story, shaped by centuries of patriarchal values.
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