Who is Kali?

No image in Hinduism frightens the newcomer more, and none is more misunderstood. A naked black goddess, wild-haired, a garland of severed human heads at her throat and a skirt of severed arms at her waist, her tongue thrust out, a bloody sword in one hand and a freshly cut head in another, dancing on the prone white body of her own husband. To an outsider it reads as a nightmare, a goddess of death and horror. To the tradition that loves her, and Bengal loves her with a tenderness it gives no other deity, she is Ma, the Mother, and every terrible thing about her is mercy in disguise.

To understand Kali is to learn to read that image the way her devotees do, because almost everything in it means the opposite of what it first appears to.

The power of time

Begin with the name, because the name holds the key. Kali is the feminine of kala, a word that means both blackness and time. She is Time itself in its feminine power, and time, in this tradition, is the great devourer. Everything that comes into being is eaten by time: every empire, every body, every world, and at the last, death itself. Kali is that all-consuming power personified, the force that swallows everything that has a form, which is why she is shown as black, the colour into which all colours vanish, the formless that is left when every form has been taken back.

This is the first turn the newcomer has to make. Her darkness and her association with death are not ghoulishness. They are a statement that she is the reality underneath the passing show, the one who remains when time has eaten all the rest.

Born from wrath

Kali enters the great scripture of the Goddess, the Devi Mahatmya, as a weapon of the supreme Devi. When the demons Chanda and Munda attack, the Goddess’s face goes black with anger, and out of her brow springs Kali, gaunt and terrible, who scatters their armies and beheads the two demon-generals, earning the name Chamunda. Against the demon Raktabija, from each drop of whose spilled blood a new clone instantly springs, the gods are helpless, until Kali spreads her tongue across the battlefield and drinks his blood before a drop can fall, drying him to nothing. She is born, in other words, to do the work too terrible for anyone else, the absolute destruction of what cannot otherwise be stopped. She is Durga’s own wrath given a separate body, a face of the one Goddess told in the Puranas.

Reading the terror

Every element of her fearsome form is, in the tradition’s reading, a teaching, and laid out plainly the horror becomes something else.

The garland of severed heads, usually counted at fifty or fifty-one, is read as the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, the whole of language and thought, and as the egos she has cut away from her devotees. The skirt of severed arms is the bondage of karma, the actions that bind us, which she severs at the waist. The sword in her hand is the sword of knowledge that cuts through ignorance, and the severed head it has just cut is the ahamkara, the ego, the false sense of being a separate self. And while two of her hands hold these instruments of destruction, her other two are raised in the gestures of abhaya, fear not, and varada, the granting of boons. The terror and the reassurance are shown in the same body, at the same moment, which is the whole point. What she destroys is never the devotee, only the thing in the devotee that keeps him bound.

This is why the tradition insists, against every outside impression, that Kali is not evil and not even, finally, frightening to those who understand her. She is the most direct of the Mother’s forms, the one who cuts the ego off rather than coaxing it loose, and the liberation she offers, moksha, is on the far side of that cut.

The foot on Shiva

The strangest detail, the goddess standing on her own husband’s body, carries two readings that the tradition holds together. The popular story tells that Kali, having won her battle, was so lost in the ecstasy of destruction that she could not stop, and threatened to dance the world to pieces, until Shiva himself lay down in her path. When her foot fell on the body of her lord she came to herself, and her tongue shot out in the universal Indian gesture of shame, and she was stilled. That is the devotional story, and it is tender: even the uncontrollable is brought to rest by love.

Beneath it runs the Tantric reading, which is metaphysical. Shakti, the active power that does and makes and destroys, is Kali; Shiva is the pure, still consciousness that is the unmoving ground of everything. Without her, the tradition says, Shiva is shava, a corpse, pure being with no power to act; without him, she is force with no ground to rest on. The image of the dark dancing Goddess upon the still white god is, in this reading, the whole of reality in one picture: consciousness and its power, the motionless and the moving, neither complete without the other. This is the heart of the Tantric vision of the Goddess.

The first of the great wisdoms

Kali is not a stray terror at the edge of the tradition; she sits at its centre. In the Tantric reckoning of the Dasha Mahavidya, the ten great forms of wisdom of the Goddess, Kali stands first, the foremost of them all, the form from which the others are often said to flow. To the Shakta and the Tantric practitioner she is therefore the most ultimate of the goddesses, not the most marginal, the formless reality met in its most uncompromising shape. Where gentler forms of the Mother let the seeker approach by slow degrees, Kali offers the short, steep path: she takes everything, and gives, in exchange, the freedom that has nothing left to lose.

The mother of Bengal

For all her ferocity, Kali’s deepest home is the intimate devotion of Bengal, where the terrifying battlefield goddess becomes simply Ma, the Mother a child runs to. The poet Ramprasad Sen, in the eighteenth century, sang her in this register, scolding her, pleading with her, loving her as a wayward but adored parent, and his songs to the Dark Mother are still sung. A century later Sri Ramakrishna, at the temple of Dakshineswar, worshipped her with an abandon that made him one of modern India’s great mystics, and through him the fierce Kali became, for many, the very face of the divine Mother. The great shrine of Kalighat in Kolkata is one of her chief seats.

It is in this devotion that the meaning of all the terror finally lands. The mother who will cut away everything false in you, who will not let you keep your comfortable illusions, who loves you enough to destroy the self that stands between you and freedom, is the most ferocious mother imaginable. She is also, her devotees insist, the most merciful.

The image was never a nightmare. It was a mother, holding up a sword, promising to set you free of the one thing you were most afraid to lose.