Mata Kali, –  Kalika, – The Great Destroyer,  – Life & Death Mother,  – Mother of language, –  Mother of Time, (& demon slayer extradordinaire…)

 

Original Power-House of the Hindu pantheon – Kali is both  protector of the earth, and the primordial cauldron from which all life and even the very cosmos itself was born.

This is a goddess so deep in her power, so layered in her complexity, that attempting to capture her essence in words feels, for me at least, like trying to catch hold of the darkness beyond the night sky or the rumbling of a great storm beyond the mountains.

She is Shakti – the universal life force that animates the God Shiva, without her he is merely a corpse, – and as such she is the very wheel of creation and destruction.

All things come from her and will return to her. Hers is the eternal cycle of birth & death, growth and decay, the time before time, coming to be and the return to the cradle of the cosmic womb.

Mother –  or ‘Ma‘ Kali as many call her, is no peaceful transcendant Goddess.

Beloved of the Tantric sects she is energy, action, a pulsing presence in the messy and chaotic material world where birth and death are our relentless companions. She is the midwife who slaps our arse and forces us to the urgency of breath, reminding us that from this very first moment of birth, death is already stalking…

With a fierce mother’s love – she shakes us from the dreamlike trance of our unconsciousness.

 

Hindu art depicts her as a terrfiying force of nature.

With black or blue skin, fangs bared, her long red toungue stuck out in a ferocious grimace, staring blood-ringed eyes, and a necklace of decapitated human heads swinging about her neck.

Most often Kali appears with four arms, holding the Trishul (trident) , Sword, a severed head, and a skull-cup or Kapala in which she collects the blood that she drinks.

In earlier times she was worshipped fervently across great swathes of the Indian Subcontinent, the city of Calcutta (originally Kali-Ghat) was named after her and the the Kali cult on which the origin city was built.

Even today, in an India that has seen its female dieties  gradually subdued and domesticated, there is still a crackling energy  around the name of this ferociously powerful Goddess…

In some regions, especially in rural areas where village women lead incredibly tough and difficult lives, Kali veneration has remained as a private, almost underground practice, partly obscured, but central to the spiritual lives of countless women who look to her for a special type of strength. In particular she is called on by women who must fight for their very lives.

Phoolan Devi, the real – life bandit queen of 1980’s India, who became a heroine to many of India’s most oppressed women, is  sometimes  referred to as a little Durga, and in films about her life she is depicted praying to Durga – the lion riding warrior goddess of whom Kali is the most infamous Avatar.

For  many scholars Mata Kali emerged from the earliest Dieties of the tribal and mountain peoples of South Asia – great numbers of which were absorbed into the Hindu Pantheon and ‘civilised’ by later Sanskrit culture. Yet somehow she has maintained her wildness despite centuries of systemic campaigns to tame her. There have even been attempts by some Brahmin sects to have Kali veneration scrubbed from the religious landscape completely, but the dark one is nothing if not tenacious…

There’s something about Ma Kali that connects on a deep level when we find ourselves battling in the trenches of life.

She is lawless and beyond all limits, calling  us to tap into our own un-tameable &  ferocious nature.

As a mother she protects fearlessly yet with deep compassion, as warrior she is a Beserka, an unstoppable force of destruction. She has no equal, she can’t be killed because she is death, she owns time, nothing can defeat her – so it’s hardly surprising she’s been the inspiration and chosen divinity to countless bands of rebels and freedom-fighters.

During the last 200 years of British Colonial rule in south Asia, Tantric sects who openly worshipped Kali became a smouldering hotbed or revolutionary activity to overthrow the empire. Using stories and Images of  Kali to both educate and inspire insurgents to rise up against British oppression, one such  revolutionary movement was born in Bengal. Young Bengali insurgents, both Hindu & Muslim, styling themselves as revolutionary ascetics formed secret sects who would undergo initiation rites at burial and cremation grounds, sworn-in before an image of the dark mother.

With their  homeade explosives and vows of death or freedom, the British were so rattled by these groups that they were eventually  driven to move their capitol to the relative safety of Delhi.

‘Rise up women, ignite your flame… dance your mad, naked dance…. and awaken your power to burn the world’ 

( words from Muslim Socialist activist & poet kazi Nazrul Islam, who called on India’s women to emulate kali and join the fight for freedom from British rule in the early 20th century)

But this wasn’t the first time the British had found themsleves up against the children of Kali.

During the 1830s and 40s a whole raft of colonial laws had been draughted under The Thuggee and Dacoitery Supression Acts – designed to stamp out secret sects that had been in action since the thirteenth century. The word Thug, now common parlance in the english language, comes from the much feared Thuggee gangs of central and northern India. Who in turn were named from Thugna – a Sanskrit verb meaning to conceal. 

The Thug were a  secret network of organized and muderous bandits made up of both Hindus and Muslims, united under their patron diety Kali. The true nature of India’s legendary Thug gangs is much contested,  stories and analysis twist and turn according to who is doing the telling – but their bond with Ma Kali (or Bhavani as one of her warrior avatars is known), bubbles to the surface  over and over again.

It would take a lifetime (or two) of devotion and study to get anywhere close to the essence of this Goddess, and perhaps that’s a part of her deeply magnetic appeal. A cult diety if ever there was one, mother of a thousand secret sects, inspirer of revolutions, – she has shapeshifted her way through the earliest animist tribal communities,  the birth of Hinduism, Buddhism, and the very heart of Tantric practice.

Her story is so old and her worshippers so numerous through the ages that outside of taking up a serious devotional practice its hard to grasp any more than snapshots, tiny moments,  that speak to the way she has molded the life of a continent.

If there’s one Goddess who’s blood has ceaselessly pulsed through the last few thousand years of human consciousness, it is surely Mata Kali.

Kali Tools & Symbols

Most often represented with four arms, but sometimes with ten, she can be found holding the following weapons and ritual tools;

Scimitar

Club

Disc

Lance

Mace

Bow & Arrows

Conch Shell

Skull Cup   (Kapala)

Trident  (Trishul)

Some representations show her wearing a cresent moon, a symbol, that like the trident, she shares with her consort Shiva

Colour  –  Black,

Animals – Lion, and in some regions also Flying Fox, which is a huge fruit eating bat species found across the the Indian subcontinent

Flower – Hibiscus

Although Mata Kali is nolonger reveered as widely as in the past she still inspires legions of the devoted

In the vastness of the Indian subcontinent there remain those who give their whole lives to her veneration and the work of serving her.

As a non Hindu I stake no claims to having the inside rail on this most mesmerizing Goddess, but as a woman, who has travelled numerous journeys through India  over the last 30 years, I’d say that this Goddess has both influenced and inspired me beyond words. Throughout India her presence lingers on, in the abstract desert shrines daubed with crimson paint, in ancient temple carvings, in the amulets worn by tribal women of the North, and in the relenteless heave of birth and death in a nation of over a billion.

There are many Kali mantra’s but the simple  ‘Om Krim Kali’   is said to protect devotees from every type of evil intention or entity, with a most auspicious hour for chanting  Kali Mantras being the dark before sunrise, at 4 – 5 am.