When I first lived in India, Kali (Ka-alee) was a rather scary figure in the Hindu pantheon. She used to be the patron saint of ‘thugs’, those assassins in Bengal in the 19th century. She had skulls around her neck and held a head in one of her right hands. She was a destructress. She made me feel uncomfortable.
One holy day, out of curiosity, I accompanied our cook to the Kali temple on the outskirts of Delhi. We had to walk barefoot on a muddy path till we reached the round temple. Flowers and fruit were available to offer the Goddess. As the Kali devotee approached the open doors to the temple, he or she yelled, “Greetings, Goddess Kali. I came to worship you.” A bit like in the movie Agnes Brown, when the friend each morning entered the church and said out loud, “Good morning, God. This is me,” and turning back toward the door left the church without any further ado. I smiled thinking how it would be in a Catholic Church if everyone coming in on Sunday morning exclaimed, “Hi, Jesus. Martha here!Praise to You, Lord!”
On another occasion, during a vacation in Shimla, we heard of an excursion to a temple on a hilltop. My husband, our two young daughters and I decided to go. It was to be a one-hour walk. It turned out to take three times that long.Soon, my husband had a mutiny on his hand. We reached our goal, nevertheless. A slender saddhu was receiving the pilgrims – only today do I realize that this is what we were – with some white Prasad, holy food, and some sweetened water. As we approached the small temple I realized with disbelief that I had walked all this way for Kali…
Over four and a half years in India, however, I grew to ‘understand’ Kali better and quite slowly I started to feel drawn to her – for the very same reason she had frightened me at first – her anger.
I fell for her when I heard the following story —
Once there was so much evil in the world that Durga could not take it any longer: she became very angry and came to earth as Kali. Kali destroyed all the demons and drank their blood for our sake: were it to fall on the ground the demons would multiply. A powerful goddess, her rage caused huge devastations. She was so angry that she was going to cause an earthquake and destroy the world just by stomping her foot on the ground. To stop her, her husband, Lord Shiva, laid down on the ground under her feet. She was going to trample him when she noticed him and stopped. In horror at what she had nearly done, she stuck her tongue out. Aghhhhhh…
Kali became the counterweight to Virgin Mary in my life, and I needed to experience it. It was reassuring, possibly even healing, to encounter great power and strength in a goddess. I had probably difficulty, and might still have, handling my own anger and felt reassured to find it ‘out there’ in a female archetype.
I remember how when my husband traveled a lot for his job, I enjoyed imagining Penelope not as the faithful wife undoing her tapestry at night to keep her suitors away, but violently unraveling her day’s work in anger at being left alone to handle a situation that she did not like and had never wanted. The suitors were peripheral. The tapestry had to do with Penelope’s relationship with Ulysses and her anger towards him.
Similarly, not long ago, I was delighted to discover Max Ernst’s painting of Virgin Mary spanking baby Jesus. It was a relief to see Mary getting angry with her son, however holy and divine He is.
So it is with Kali. She does get mad. When she does, the whole world, humans and gods alike, gets scared and runs for cover. Kali helped me visualize Virgin Mary getting fed up and slamming doors, yelling, “I have had it!” This is unimaginable, of course, in Christianity and in the Roman Catholic Church particularly.
Surprisingly however it is thanks to Kali that I began to relate to Mary. Kali brought Mary down from her pedestal for me. Once Mary left behind her blue dress and white veil up there and dressed in black, the black of widowhood and mourning, I could somehow start ‘trusting’ her – however inadequate this sounds. It may all be very childish and immature. Nevertheless I think I have fought most of my life an archetype of ‘female perfection’ as a sort of psychological straightjacket imposed on me by patriarchy.
There is much more to Kali, of course, than what I saw at first. Kali is Shiva’s Shakti, the God’s female energy. All Hindu Gods are inactive forces, activated by their female energy, their female counterpart. At the time I found this out, it simply enchanted me: I came from a culture where men were seen as active and women as passive.
The active power of goddesses, unfortunately, seems to have little impact on the position of women in Indian society. Once again, men venerate the powerful goddess without making any transfer on to the women around them.
Finally, in recent years, I have discovered Kali as the Mother of the Universe, the kindest and most loving of all Hindu goddesses, a great protectress.
Somewhere somehow once the anger is gone, Kali Maa and Mother Mary meet in friendship. Who’s to know what happens then…
Kali is a Hindu goddess, the shakti of Shiva. She is called by many names, including Sati, Parvati or Durga. From the mystical point of view she represents the supreme realization of truth, the state beyond manifestation. Kali also symbolizes eternal time and hence she both gives life and destroys it. She is usually represented as a hideous four-armed emaciated woman with fang-like teeth, who devours all beings. She is often associated with burial grounds. Her nakedness indicates that she has stripped off all the veils of existence and the illusion arising from them. Her only garment is Space. She is also described as black, the color in which all distinctions are dissolved; or she is the eternal night, in the midst of which she stands upon ‘non-existence’, the static but potentially dynamic state that precedes manifestation.
A Dictionary of Hinduism, Stutley, Margaret & James, Allied Publishes Private Limited. Bombay, 1977.
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