sense of “she who is the ruler of time” it derives
from kala (time, spelled slightly differently in
SANSKRIT letters).
Kali is the most frightening of the goddesses
and the most misunderstood by non-Hindus.
Mythologically, she originates in the fury of the
goddess DURGA and emerges physically from that
goddess’s forehead. She has a terrible, frightening
appearance. She is originally very black (though
in modern depictions she is often lighter), usually
naked, emaciated, with long disheveled hair. She
wears a skirt of severed arms, earrings made of
the corpses of children, and a necklace of human
skulls. In one hand she holds a cutting instru-
ment, in another the severed head of a man. She
has long sharp fangs, bloody lips, and a bloody
lolling tongue.
In iconography Kali is often depicted as stand-
ing upon the chest of the supine corpse of SHIVA,
her nominal husband. She is known to frequent
the burning grounds where burned and unburned
corpses abound, where she is always accompanied
by female jackals. She, as does DURGA, likes liquor,
meat, and blood.
There is little doubt that Kali is a fierce
autochthonous non-Aryan goddess who has been
absorbed into the larger Brahminized pantheon of
Hinduism. Kali first appears in developed liter-
ary form in the Devibhagavatam of the 11th to
12th centuries, where she is seen to be PARVATI,
wife of Shiva, who becomes completely black out
of fury when battling the demons Shumbha and
Nishumbha. She also appears in the 16th-century
Devimahatmya, part of the Markandeya Purana;
this is the source of the story that Kali emerged
from the enraged Durga.
Kali is most associated with eastern India,
particularly Bengal. Her devotional literature
and cultic followings began to proliferate as
early as the 13th and 14th centuries. Bengal is
the only state to worship Kali during the all-
India festival of DIVALI. The medieval Bengali
poet Ram Prasad is best known for his Bengali
hymns in devotion to “Mother Kali,” and the
modern Bengali Saint RAMAKRISHNA, who had
perhaps the greatest influence in the West of any
Indian spiritual figure, was known as a devotee
of Kali alone.
Devotion to Kali requires the utmost surrender
and the ability to see that her chaotic and fearsome
visage is only a barrier placed before the devotee,
who must have the courage to seek the inner
depths of her compassion and the SHAKTI or uni-
versal power she represents. When one has accom-
plished this step, one can learn to become Kali, as
Sri Ramakrishna so clearly demonstrates. When
one has learned to be her truth, then one’s con-
sciousness and being are completely transformedThe temple to the goddess Kali, in Dakshineshwar,
Bengal, where Sri Ramakrishna served as a priest
(Constance A. Jones)Kali 221 J