Aum Mahakalyai Namaha!

20

Kaali

Ya Devi sarvabhuteshu, branti rupena samsthita,

Namasthasyai, namasthasyai, namasthasyai namo namaha!

O Goddess who resides in all creatures in the form of confusion,

Hail to thee, hail to thee, all hail to thee!

Kaala is the Sanskrit word for time, and the goddess Kaali is divine consciousness in the form of time—relentless, all-consuming, and indomitable. She is also the beloved of Shiva. Parvati is Shiva’s wife, but Kaali is his soul mate. While Parvati’s role is to subdue and soften Shiva’s violent nature, Kaali’s role is the very reverse. She incites him to wild, dangerous, and destructive behavior that threatens the stability of the universe. She loves carnage, destruction, and violence. Friend of ghouls and ghosts, she performs the same functions as Shiva but in a more violent fashion. Even Shiva cannot tame her spirit. Her wrath is immediate and dire, especially against treachery and falsehood. She is ruthless to the haters of the divine. She cannot bear indifference and negligence in the performance of divine works. Force and strength are her characteristics. Her divinity springs out in the splendor of tempestuous action. There is an overwhelming intensity in Kaali, a divine violence hastening to shatter every limit and obstacle. Her sword is swift and straight.

Kaali imagery can be bizarre. She is portrayed in a number of different fashions, but in all of them her appearance is intimidating and intended to put off all those who are not ready to accept life as it is. She is sometimes known as Bhayankari, or the one who terrifies. Sometimes she is naked and pitch-black in color, with long, disheveled hair that flows like night behind her. She wears a girdle of severed arms and a necklace of freshly cut heads. Her earrings are children’s corpses and snakes are her bracelets. She has a cavernous mouth dripping with blood, a lolling red tongue, and long, sharp fangs. She has clawlike hands with hooked nails. Her favorite haunts are battlefields, where she gets drunk on the hot blood of her victims, and cremation grounds, where she sits on corpses, surrounded by jackals, goblins, and ghosts.

This is the visage Kaali shows to the uninitiated. But this is only one of her facades. Her visible mask is that of nature bringing forth all beings from her womb, feeding them at her breast, then devouring and assimilating them back into herself. This is her public mask as known to science: a material cosmos that seems to be a superficially purposeless chaos of opposing qualities, of creation and destruction, cause and effect, light and darkness, good and evil. Here she appears as a randomly willful despot, elusive and aloof.

But the face she shows to her devotees, who value her for her own sake and not for the evanescent charms of her creation, is altogether different. To those fortunate ones, untamable nature becomes a doting mother whose sole concern is their ultimate well-being. The transformation from one extreme to the other is well brought out by an analogy of the great twentieth-century saint Swami Rama Thirtha: As long as we pursue the things of the world for their own sake, they will remain frustratingly elusive, like a shadow that flits ahead always just out of reach. At this stage the world seems alien and unfriendly. However, the moment we wake up from this elusive creation and turn around to face the creator, the shadow of creation follows dutifully behind us, as the tail of a dog. Nature supports those who sincerely turn toward God.

As the embodiment of universal destruction, Kaali is not an easy goddess to love, but if one loves her without reservation, as a child loves a mother even though she may be ugly, then she will come in any of the forms in which one wants her to come. To a Krishna bhakta she will come as Radha, to a Shiva bhakta she will come as Parvati, and to one who loves her as a child, she will become the Divine Mother, placing the devotee on her lap and teaching him or her everything. Many of the greatest Hindu saints discovered this esoteric secret and were ardent worshippers of Kaali. They realized that the secret of life lay in accepting both sides of the coin of life: the destructive and the constructive. There are two sides to the Divine Mother. One is the feminine side, representing the maternal, life-nourishing, and life-bearing principle. The other is her destructive side, which takes back and swallows the creatures she gives birth to. For Kaali is, as we’ve said, time, the all-producing, all-consuming principle in the flow of which everything that comes into existence has to vanish after the expiry of its brief spell of allotted life.

Adi Shankaracharya, the founder of the Advaita philosophy of nondualism, was an ardent worshipper of the goddess. He says in one of his poems:

Who art thou, O fairest one? Auspicious one!

You whose hands hold both delight and pain?

Both the shade of death and the elixir of immortality,

Are thy grace, O Mother!

The world cannot be fragmented into clean and unclean, creative and destructive, male and female, as the human mind attempts to do. The world is a unified totality of the terrible and the sublime, welded together. Through the Kaali imagery we are made to realize that to experience opposites is to be fully human. One is meaningless without the other. Such fearless affirmations from a gruesome divine power like Kaali become a comforting directive. It encourages women, who experience the so-called unclean bodily functions like menstruation and pregnancy, to feel worthy of themselves as females. In fact, the Kaali imagery has the potential to become a symbol of completion and release for all women all over the world.

Most pictorial representations of Kaali show her in the wholly negative aspect. She is often depicted as an emaciated, gruesome hag with bony fingers, protruding teeth, and prominent canines. She has an unquenchable hunger for flesh and blood. She is cold-blooded, self-centered, ungenerous, and selfish. The hunger for life that impels the infant to suck hard at the very lifeblood of its mother through her teats is shown in its most loathsome transformation. The goddess feeds upon the entrails of her victims. Her victims are all those born from her own womb. She haunts the cremation grounds, for she loves to feed on intestines that are still steaming with the last breath of expiring life. Like Nataraja (Shiva as the cosmic dancer), she has a halo of flames. These flames are the tongues of the universal conflagration that reduces everything to ash at the termination of an age or kalpa. But these flames are also to be found all the time; they lick incessantly at the bread of life. Life feeds on death. For every newborn creature that comes into the world, another returns to the earth from which it came. Every time we eat, it is at the cost of the death of something else.

Some Tantric texts describe Kaali as standing on a boat that floats on a sea. The sea is made up of the lifeblood of the children belonging to all species that she brings forth, sustains for a brief period, and then takes back. She stands and quaffs the warm blood from a cranial bowl. Just as her love is unending, her thirst is unquenchable.

When we conceive of totality we should never forget its ambivalent character. Both the creative and the destructive principles are one and the same. Both emanate from the same divine cosmic energy that becomes manifest in the process of the unfolding of the history of the universe. The supreme goddess Maha Devi represents both aspects of life. To accept one and ignore the other is a form of childish indulgence that Hindu philosophy does not cater to. As Tripurasundari, Maha Devi is the embodiment of the feminine principle—the personification of man’s desire. But in order to show her full significance, her other side has to be revealed. She has to be shown as Kaali, old, black, and ugly, the embodiment of man’s disgust, holding the symbols of destruction and death.

The eight gruesome heads strung in a garland around Kaali’s neck represent the eight pashas (ropes of ignorance) or emotions that cloud the mind and incite it to keep performing endless actions that tighten the knots that tie us to the wheel of life and death. These eight pashas are lust, anger, greed, delusion, envy, shame, fear, and disgust. In a state of ignorance we possess many or all of these grinning heads. Kaali chops off these heads one by one to free us from these ropes.

Kaali’s lolling tongue is meant to lick up the hundreds of asuras that multiply in us. These are our desires. The moment one is fulfilled, another hundred appear, like in the story of the asura Raktabija (see chapter 13). As soon as a drop of Raktabija’s blood fell to the ground, it multiplied into many more demons. Similar is the case with our desires. If we allow them to take root, a hundred other desires crop up. We should pray to Kaali to spread her tongue and lick them up before they reach the ground.

Some of Kaali’s pictures show her as having huge breasts. Breasts are the symbol of motherhood and maternal love. The baby sucks from its mother’s breasts all that it needs for life and growth. Kaali also has a huge belly, for she consumes and digests all the beings in the universe. In order to cover her nakedness she wears a skirt of freshly severed human arms, dripping with blood. The Sanskrit word for “arm” is kara, which is closely related to the word karma, which means “action.” So these arms represent the karmas (or actions) of innumerable births. If you look closely you find that both left and right arms are found in Kaali’s skirt, which shows that the karmas include both positive and negative ones. She wears them as a covering for her navel and pubis, for most karmas are performed for the sake of food and sex.

Kaali’s anklets are little cobras. Snakes are a symbol of our ancestors. These snakes remind us to pray for our ancestors, without whom we would never be here.

The goddess also has four hands. One holds the cranial bowl that yields an abundance of food and the other the lotus that is the symbol of eternal life. Sometimes Kaali is seen carrying a noose instead of the lotus. This is meant to convey the message that she will free us from the noose of death and confer immortality. A third hand holds the pair of scissors with which Kaali cuts the knots that bind us to embodied existence. In the fourth hand she carries a sword, which symbolizes physical extinction and spiritual determination. With this sword she cuts through our error and ignorance—the veil of individual consciousness and our doubts, false ideas, and impressions.

The famous Kaali statue at the temple of Dakshineswara that the great saint Sri Ramakrishna worshipped shows a slight variation on Kaali’s four hands. Her upper left hand holds a sword. On the esoteric level this sword stands for the destructive principle of the world process. For one who sees no deeper than this, the weapon is naturally frightening. The worldly man senses, quite rightly, that the sword is directed at him; in fact it is hanging over his head. He knows not when it might fall. His spiritual evolution is still in the primitive stage, and he tries desperately to appease Kaali’s wrath by offering live animals and money. He does not realize that her sword is directed at decapitating his animal instincts. In fact, this is the esoteric truth behind all animal sacrifice: we are supposed to sacrifice our animal instincts at her feet and not goats and buffaloes. The devotee, on the other hand, does not fear the sword for he knows that it is poised to sever the deadly enemies of spirituality—lust, greed, pride, and the rest of the demonic brood. Indeed, the severed head that Kaali holds in her lower left hand is a token of her inevitable success in defeating these demons that are products of our ego.

If her left arms show negative aspects, Kaali’s right arms portray positive ones. Her upper right hand is raised hand, with the palm facing upward, to show the abhaya mudra, signifying that divine protection will be given to all sincere aspirants on the path of spirituality. The lower right hand, with the palm turned downward, offers boons and assures the devotee that whatever he lacks for spiritual evolution will be granted unasked, a gift of grace.

In the Mahanirvana Tantra, Kaali is the most common epithet used for the primordial Shakti. In this scripture Shiva, who is known as Mahakaala or the lord of time, praises Kaali thus:

At the dissolution of things, it is Kaala (Time) who will devour all, and by reason of this I am called Mahakaala. Since you are the one who eats Mahakaala himself, you are known as the supreme, primordial Maha Kaali or destroyer.

Since you are the devourer of Kaala, you are Kaali, the original form of all things, and therefore you are known as Adya (the primordial goddess). After dissolving all things, you remain alone, formless, ineffable, and inconceivable.

Kaali is destruction incarnate, the destruction that is brought about by constant generation and life-bearing. She also destroys the veil that Maha Maya has enshrouded us in. She comes like the black night that brings in its wake the dawn. Without her there would be no death and therefore no life. Terrible is the face she shows to the haters of the divine and ruthless is her mood toward them. Intolerant of hypocrisy, she deals roughly with all those who are false, treacherous, indifferent, and negligent. Her hands are outstretched both to strike and to succor, for she is the eternal mother. Her love is as intense as her wrath and her compassion as deep. Only the great, the strong, and the noble worship her. They accept her blows and know that she will melt whatever is negative in their natures and mold it into strength and perfection. She can achieve for us in one day what might take years for us to achieve by ordinary means. Nothing can satisfy her short of the supreme, the highest heights and the noblest aims.

One of Kaali’s great devotees, Ram Prasad, wrote this about her:

O Mother Kaali, you dwell in cremation grounds,

So I have made my heart a burning pit where you can dance.

One desire burns in the conflagration of my life,

To watch your blazing dance!

Lord Shiva lies beneath your feet

Gaping up at your dance,

While I sit waiting on my funeral pyre,

Looking for you with closed eyes!

The well-known pictorial representation of Kaali dancing on the prone and corpselike figure of Shiva has a deep, esoteric meaning: that that Shiva without Shakti is nothing but shava. The supreme by itself is inert or zero. It is Shakti that pulsates with life. She is the infinity of forms. It is only at her touch that Shiva can come alive and become the enjoyer of all forms. The master of time (Mahakaala) becomes time itself at the touch of Maha Maya, but until then he might as well be considered a corpse. This is what Parvati told Shiva when he refused to look at her; she claimed that without her, who was his Prakriti, he, Purusha, would be unable to move! So also the human body becomes a corpse when Shakti or the power of Prakriti leaves it at the time of death.

The mythological story behind this pictorial representation is quite interesting. It is said that at one time Kaali began to dance on a battlefield and eventually lost all control, since she had become drunk on the blood of her victims. Nobody could manage her or put a stop to her mad rampage. At last, to bring her to her senses, Shiva lay down on the battlefield, emulating a corpse. When she started to dance on her beloved husband she came to her senses and stopped the bloody carnage.

Kaali’s most famous appearance is to be found in the Devi Mahatmyam, in which she is the personification of Durga’s wrath (see chapter 13). When the demons Chanda and Munda tried to catch hold of Durga, the goddess turned black with rage and out of her furrowed brows came the hideous figure of Kaali. The Devi Mahatmyam describes her thus:

Carrying a many-colored staff, topped with a skull, wearing a garland of human skulls;

With a garment of tiger skin, exceedingly frightening with her dried-out skin,

With widely gaping mouth, terrifying with her lolling tongue;

With sunken, reddened eyes and a mouth that filled the directions with roars!

In another episode Kaali is the personification of Parvati’s wrath. When the gods asked Parvati to destroy the two demons Shumbha and Nishumbha, Kaali came out of Parvati’s body and went to the Vindhya mountains, where she defeated the asuras and remained there as the goddess of the mountain (see chapter 18). The temple of Vindhya Vaasini at Vindhyachala is dedicated to her.

Whenever Shiva went out to destroy demons, Kaali would accompany him. She was adorned with skulls and her eyes were closed with the intoxication of drinking blood. Shiva praised her as being the daughter of the Himalayas, which shows her identification with Parvati. When Shiva sent Virabhadra to destroy Daksha’s hall of sacrifice (see chapter 15), Kaali was part of his terrifying entourage.

In the Mahabharata, Kaali is mentioned in the context of the killing of the Pandava children by Ashwatthama. The latter was a devotee of Shiva and had invoked him. Shiva sent Kaali to help him. The Mahabharata gives a vivid description of her:

Kaali of bloody mouth and eyes, smeared with blood and garlands,

With reddened garments, alone, crested noose in hand,

The night of death (Kalaratri) laughing derisively and standing firm did the Pandavas see.

Binding men, horses, and elephants with terrible snares did she sally forth,

Carrying various spirits who were bound with snares, their hair disheveled.

She appears again in the wonderful work Kumarasambhava, by the great poet Kalidasa, who describes himself as the slave of Kaali. He writes that he had been ignorant until he started to worship the goddess, who rescued him and made him the greatest poet of the land.

To be a devotee of Kaali is not an easy affair. She makes us suffer and disappoints us in terms of worldly desires and pleasures. She gives her devotee a vision of himself that is not confined to the normal physical and material limitations. As one of her devotees said, “One who loves Kaali can easily forget worldly pleasures.” Nothing can satisfy her except the noblest aims. Therefore the victorious force of the divine is always with her, and it is only by her grace that great achievements can be accomplished here and now.

Kaali’s devotee need not bother to ask for worldly joys because she will not give it. It is because of this that Kaali’s devotees can find a reality that goes beyond worldly comfort and security. Her figure is one that is capable of destroying the comforting, mythical assumptions that one has of the world. One who thinks of the universe as an orderly, beautiful whole in which God as the protecting father sits in his heaven and tenderly looks after the needs of his children will never be able to understand the significance of Kaali.

It is only in this century that the scientists have discovered that their notion of the universe as an orderly whole, in which atoms and molecules behave in a set and understandable pattern, is a myth of their own wishful thinking. The energy field from which the whole universe rises is far from being orderly. It is a seething mass of turbulent forces made up of energy particles that seem to have no observable method of behavior. Though to the scientistific mind this may have been a shocking revelation, the Indian mind had realized it long ago. The figure of Kaali forces us to step out of the everyday world of logic into a world of unpredictability, dramatic reversals, opposites, and contrasts.

Ram Prasad writes about her:

You shine in deepest darkness, O Mother!

So yogis worship you in dark caves.

They find in your unlimited darkness,

Unlimited peace,

Who are you, Mother,

Clothed in nothingness,

Glowing in the deepest recesses of my mind?

Your frenzied laughter terrifies,

While your love like lightning from a black cloud,

Shocks the worlds with light.

Kaali is India’s gift to the world: the eternal, horrifyingly beautiful, caressing, and murdering symbol of the totality of the world-creating and world-destroying process.

The gods who watch the earth with sleepless eyes,

Have given to man the burden of his mind.

They gave him hungers, which no food can fill

His body the tether with which he’s tied.

They cast for fodder, grief, hope and joy,

His pasture ground they fenced with ignorance.

Into his fragile, undefended breast,

They breathed a courage that is met by death,

They have traced a journey that foresees no goal.

Aimless man toils in an uncertain world,

Lulled by constant pauses of his pain

Death prowls, baying through the woods of life.

—SAVITRI BY SRI AUROBINDO

Thus ends the twentieth chapter of Shakti, known as “Kaali,” which describes Maha Devi in her form as Kaali.

Aum Aim Hreem Kleem