Who is Kali the Goddess?
KALI MA
KILLER HISTORY OF DEATH AND LIFE
Typed
out for Mother God by William Bond
Kali Ma – from the book by Barbara G.
Walker, “The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets”
With Comments by Guru Rasa Von Werder
"Dark Mother," the Hindu Triple Goddess of creation,
preservation, and destruction; now most commonly known in her Destroyer aspect,
squatting over her dead consort Shiva and devouring his entrails, while her
yoni sexually devours his lingam (penis). Kali is "The hungry earth, which
devours its own children and fattens on their corpses…It is in India that the experience of the Terrible Mother has been given
its most grandiose form as Kali. But all this – and it should not be forgotten
– is an image not only of the Feminine but particularly and specifically of the
Maternal. For in a profound way life and birth are always bound up with death
and destruction."
RASA SAYS: PLEASE NOTE THAT KALI IS
KILLING SHIVA – SHIVA THE MALE GOD. TO ME, THIS IS A VIVID AND PRECISE SYMBOL OF MALE EXTINCTION.
Kali was the basic archetypal image of the birth-and-death Mother,
simultaneously womb and tomb, giver of life and devourer of her children: the
same image portrayed in a thousand ancient religions. Even modern psychologists
face this image with uneasy acknowledgement of its power. It seems the image of
the angry, punishing, castrating Father is somehow less threatening than that
of the destructive Mother – perhaps because she symbolized the inexorable
reality of death, whereas he only postulated a problematic post-mortem
judgment.
RASA: PLEASE BEAR IN MIND AS YOU READ ALL THIS, EVERYTHING IS ATTRIBUTED TO KALI. BUT MOTHER GOD HAS A MYRIAD OF FORMS, AND YOU CAN SEE ABOUT THE SAME THING FOR ALL HER FORMS—IT’S ALL HER IN VARIOUS APPEARANCES. BUT AGAIN, WHY IS SHE SO SPECIFIC
IN THIS APPEARANCE? IT IS WITHOUT A DOUBT THE KILLING OF MALE—ALL MEN AS SHE STANDS NOT JUST ON ONE MAN OR ONE DEMON, BUT THE GOD OF ALL MEN, THE MASCULINE GOD SHIVA, NOT GIVING HIM LIFE AS SHAKTI DOES ON TOP OF HIM, BUT GIVING HIM DEATH. TAKE
NOT THAT WHEN MOTHER GOD GIVES LIFE TO SHIVA HE IS ON THE GROUND INERT. SHE GETS ON TOP OF HIM
AND BRINGS HIM LIFE. THIS, AS KALI, IS THE OPPOSITE.
Tantric worshipers of Kali thought it essential to face her Curse, the
terror of death, as willing as they accept Blessings from her beautiful,
nurturing, maternal aspect. For them, wisdom meant learning that no coin has
only one side: as death can't exist without life, so also life can't exit
without death. Kali's sages communed with her in the grisly atmosphere of the
cremation ground, to become familiar with images of death. They said: "His
Goddess, his loving Mother in time, who gives him birth and loves him in the
flesh, also destroys him in the flesh. His image of Her is incomplete if he
does not know Her as his tearer and devourer."
Few western scholars understood the profound philosophy behind the
hideous image of Kali the Destroyer. The London Museum displayed such an image with the label saying only,
"Kali – Destroying Demon." The Encyclopaedia Britannica devoted five
columns to Christian interpretations of the Logos without ever mentioning it
origins in Kali's Om or Creative Word; Kali herself was dismissed in a brief
paragraph as the wife of Shiva and "a goddess of disease."
RASA SAYS: IMBECILIC MALES AND THEIR POLITICIZED ACADEMIA, DISCREDITING ALL FROM MOTHER GOD AND WOMEN. THEY WILL DIE FOR IT.
Certainly, as the Kalika or Crone she
governed every form of death including disease; but she also ruled every form
of life.
Kali stood for Existence, which meant Becoming because all her world
was an eternal living flux from which all things rose and disappeared again, in
endless cycles. The gods, whom she bore and devoured, addressed her thus:
RASA SAYS: NOTICE SHE BORE THE GODS.
MOTHER GOD IS THE SOURCE OF MALE GODS.
Thou art the Original of all manifestations; Thou art the birthplace of
even Us; Thou knowest the whole world, yet none know Thee…Thou art both Subtle
and Gross, Manifested and Veiled, Formless, yet with form. Who can understand
thee?...It is Thou art the Supreme Primordial Kalika…Resuming after dissolution
Thine own from, dark and formless, Thou alone remainest as One ineffable and
inconceivable…though they self without beginning, multiform by the power of
Maya, thou art the Beginning of all, Creatrix, Protectress, and Destructress.
Brahman's assigned Kali's three functions to three male gods, calling
them Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Kali's archaic consort Shiva
the destroyer; but many scriptures opposed this male trinity as offensively
artificial. A prayer in the Tantrasara said: "O Mother! Cause and Mother
of the World! Thou art the One Primordial Being, Mother of innumerable
creatures, Creatrix of the very gods; even of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the
Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer! O Mother, in hymning Thy praise I purify my
speech!" The Nivana Tantra treated the claims of male gods with contempt:
RASA: TREATED MALE GODS WITH CONTEMPT.
INDEED. HER KIDS.
Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesvara [Shiva], and other gods are born of the body
of that beginningless and eternal Kalika, and at the time of dissolution they
again disappear in Her. O Devi, for this reason, so long as the living man does
not know the supreme truth in regard to Her…his desire for liberation can only
give rise to ridicule. From a part only of Kalika, the primordial Shakti,
arises Brahma, from a part of only arises Vishu, and from a part only arises
Shiva. O fair-eyed Devi, just as rivers and lakes are unable to traverse a vast
sea, so Brahma and other gods lose their separate existence on entering the
uncrossable and infinite being of Great Brahma and the other gods is nothing
but such a little water as is for a hollow made by a cow's hoof. Just as it is
impossible for a hollow made by a cow's hoof to form a notion of the
unfathomable depths of a sea, so it is impossible for Braham and other gods to
have a knowledge of the nature of Kali.
RASA: NO GOD STANDS BEFORE MOTHER GOD.
Even the arrogant Vishnu, who claimed to have brought the whole earth
out of the primal abyss, received the grace of enlightenment concerning Kali
and wrote a poem about her: "Material cause of all change, manifestation
and destruction…the whole Universe rests upon Her, rises out of Her and melts
away unto Her. From Her are crystallized the original elements and qualities
which construct the apparent worlds. She is both mother and grave…The gods
themselves are merely constructs out of Her maternal substance, which is both
consciousness and potential joy."
The Yogini Tantra said of Kali, "Whatever power anything
possesses, that is the Goddess." Shakti, "Power," was one of her
important names. Without her, neither man nor god could act at all.
RASA SAYS: AGAIN, LET US REMEMBER, THAT ALL THESE TERMS GO BACK TO “MOTHER GOD” AS WE IN THE WEST
UNDERSTAND IT. MOTHER GOD IS SHAKTI, DURGA, KALI, AND ALL OTHER NAMES, AND ALL THE QUALITIES HEREIN WORSHIPED AND EXPRESSED GO TO “MOTHER GOD.” MOTHER IS CALLED DURGA,
SHAKTI, KALI, ETC.
It is She as Power (Shakti) who takes the active and changeful part in
generation, as also in conceiving, bearing, and giving birth to the
World-Child. All this is the function of the divine, as it is of the human,
mother…It is thus to the Mother that man owes the World of Forms of Universe.
Without Her as material cause, Being cannot display itself. It is but a
corpse…primacy is given to the Mother, and it is said, "What care I for
the Father if I but be on the lap of the Mother?"
A Tantric scholar points out that "the poets have found much more
intimate cries of the heart when they spoke of the Deity as their 'Mother' than
when addressed themselves as God as Father." Kali's poets approached her
through love: "By feeling is She known. How then can lack of feeling find
Her/" In their view, "All is the Mother and She is really herself. 'Sa'ham'
(She I Am) the Sakta says, and all that he senses is She in the form in which
he perceives her. It is She who in, and as, him drinks the consecrated wine,
and She is the wine." She feeds him as a mother feeds her child, and he
becomes immortal: "Deathless are those who have fed at the breast of the
Mother of the Universe." The Yoginihrdaya Tantra says, "Obeisance to
Her who is pure Being-Consciousness-Bliss, as Power, who exists in the form of
Time and Space and all that is therein, and who is the radiant Illuminatrix in
all beings."
As a Mother, Kali was called Treasure-House of Compassion (karuna),
Giver of Life to the world, the Life of all lives. Contrary to the west's idea
of her as a purely destructive Goddess, she was the fount of every kind of
love, which flowed into the world only through her agents on earth, women. Thus
it was said a male worshipper of Kali "bows down at the feet of women,”
regarding them as his rightful teachers.
RASA SAYS: THIS LAST PARAGRAPH IS
EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TO WOMEN FOR THEIR MATRIARCHY AND TO MEN FOR THEIR RESTITUTION THROUGH THE WORSHIP OF MOTHER
GOD AND WOMEN.
The name Eve may have originated with Kali's Ieva or Jiva, the
primordial female principle of manifestation; she gave birth to her "first
manifested form" and called him Idam (Adam). She also bore the same title
given to Eve in the Old Testament: Mother of All Living (Jaganmata).
RASA SAYS: MOTHER GOD, THROUGH FEMALE,
GAVE BIRTH TO THE FIRST MAN THROUGH PARTHENOGENESIS. THE “OUT OF THE RIB OF ADAM” IS A FAIRY TALE OF OLD HUSBANDS AND THEIR WISHFUL THINKING-LIES.
As the primal Deep, or menstrual Ocean of Blood at creation, Kali was
certainly the same as the biblical tehom, Tiamat, or tohu bohu, the
"flux" representing her state of formlessness between manifested
universes. As Mahanila-Sarasvati the great blue River-Goddess, she was probably
the original namesake of the River Nile. As Kundalini the Female Serpent, she resembled the
archaic Egyptian serpent-mother said to have created the world. It was said of
Kundalini that at the beginning of the universe, she starts to uncoil in
"a spiral line movement which is the movement of creation." This
spiral line was vitally important in late Palaeolithic and Neolithic religious
symbolism, representing death and rebirth as movement into the
disappearing-point of formlessness, and out of it again, to a new world of
form. Spirals therefore appeared on tombs, as one of the world's first mystical
symbols.
RASA SAYS: KUNDALINI SHAKTI IS SHAKTI,
ALSO CALLED CHITI-SHAKTI, AND REPRESENTS THE HOLY SPIRIT OF GOD, THE FEMININE DIVINE
SPIRIT.
Luna priests of Sinai, formerly priestesses of the Moon-goddess, called
themselves Kalu. Similar priestesses of prehistoric Ireland were kelles, origin of the name Kelly, which meant hierophantic
clan devoted to "the Goddess Kele" (see Kelle). This was cognate with
the Saxon Kale, or Cale, whose lunar calendar or Kalends included the spring
month of Sproutkale, when Mother Earth (Kale) put forth new shoots. In
antiquity the Phoenicians referred to the strait of Gibraltar as Calpe , because it was considered the passage to the western
paradise of the Mother.
RASA SAYS: AHA, NOW I KNOW WHY ST. PATRICK ALWAYS BLESSES ME ON HIS DAY. I USED THE NAME KELLIE FOR MUCH OF MY LIFE, AS THE DANCER/PREACHER OF MUCH FAME, AND NAMED MY DAUGHTER KELLIE.
Indo-European languages branched from the root of Sanskrit, said to be
Kali's invention. She created the magic letters of the Sanskrit alphabet and
inscribed them on the rosary of skulls around her neck. The letters were magic
because they stood fro primordial creative energy expressed in sound – Kali's
mantras brought into being the very things whose names she spoke for the first
time, in her bold language. In short, Kali's worshippers originated the doctrine
of the logos or creative Word, which Christians later adopted and pretended it
was their own idea,
RASA SAYS: HERE IS THE EXAMPLE OF MALES
STEALING FROM WOMEN, THEN PRETENDING THEY INVENTED IT. ALL MALE RELIGIONS ORIGINATED FROM WOMEN’S TEACHINGS, INCLUDING
THE KORAN.
Kali's letters magically combined the
elements, which were previously separate as fiery-airy (male) or watery-earthy
(female) forces. The former were "cruel"; the latter
"benevolent." This distinction seemed to reflect the Tantric view of
Kali as Lady of Life and her spouse as Lord of Death.
Though called "the One," Kali was always a trinity: the same
Vigin-Mother-Crone triad established perhaps nine or ten millennia ago, giving
the Celts their triple Morrigan; the Greeks their triple Moerae and all the
other manifestations of the Threefold Goddess; the Norsemen their triple Norms;
the Romans their triple Fates and the triadic Uni (Juno); the Egyptians their
triple Mut; the Arabs their triple Moon-goddess – she was the same everywhere.
Even the Christians modeled their threefold God on her archetypal trinity.
Her three forms were manifested in many ways: in the three divisions of
the year, the three phases of the moon, the three sections of the cosmos
(heaven, earth and the underworld), the three stage of life, the three
trimesters of pregnancy, and so on. Women represented her spirit in mortal
flesh. "The Divine Mother first appears in and as Her worshipper's earthly
mother, then as his wife; thirdly as Kalika, She reveals Herself in old age, disease
and death."
Three kinds of priestesses tended her shrines: Yoginis or Shaktis, the
"Maidens"; Matri, the "Mother"; and Dakinis, the
"Skywalkers" who attended the dying, governed funerary rites and
acted as angels of death. All their counterparts in the spirit world. To this
day, Tantric Buddhism relates the three mortal forms of women to the divine
female trinity called Three Most Precious Ones.
Kali's three forms appeared in the sacred colors known as Cunas: white
for the Virgin, red for the Mother, black for the Crone, symbolizing birth,
life, death. Black was Kali's fundamental color as the Destroyer, for it meant
the formless condition she assumed between creations, when all the elements
where dissolved in her primordial substance. "As white, yellow, and other
colors all disappear in black, in the same way…all beings enter Kali."
The Black Goddess was known in Finland as Kalma (Kali Ma), a haunter of tombs and an eater of the
dead. European "witches" worshipped her in the same funereal places, for
the same reasons, that Tantric yogis and dakinis worshipped her in cremation
grounds, as Smashana-Kali, Lady of the Dead. Their ceremonies were held in the
places of ghosts where ordinary folk feared to go. So were ceremonies of
western "witches" – that is, pagans. They adored the Black Mother
Earth in cemeteries, where Roman tombstones invoked her with the phase, Mater
genuit, Mater recipit – the Mother bore me, the Mother took me back.
RASA SAYS: CONTACT WITH SOULS IN
PURGATORY IS AN IMPORTANT FORM OF MINISTRY. I HAD IT FOR 30 YEARS, HELPED THOUSANDS OF
SOULS BY MY PRAYERS AND SUFFERINGS.
Sometimes Kali the Destroyer wore red, suggesting the blood of life
that she gave and took back: "As She devours all existence, as She chews
all things existing with Her fierce teeth, therefore a mass of blood is
imagined to be the apparel of the Queen of the Gods at the final dissolution.
The gypsies, who worshipped Kalika as a disease-causing Goddess they called
"the Aunt," clothed her in red, the proper color for gypsy funerals.
Blood was as much a part of Kali's worship as it was of the worship of
the biblical God who said blood must be poured on his altars to bring remission
of sins (Hebrew 9:22). The difference between the western God's demand for
blood and Kali's was that Jewish priests took away the meat and ate it
themselves (Numbers 18:9), whereas devotees of Kali were permitted to eat their
own offerings, as in Calcutta :
The temple serves simply as a slaughterhouse, for those performing the
sacrifice retain their animals, leaving only the head of the temple as a
symbolic gift, while the blood flows to the Goddess. For to the Goddess is due
the lifeblood of all creatures – since it is she who has bestowed it – and that
is why the beast must be slaughtered in her temple; that is why temple and
slaughterhouse are one.
This ritual is performed amid gruesome filth; in the mud compounded of
blood and earth, the heads of the animals are heaped up like trophies before
the statue of the Goddess, while those sacrificing return home for a family
banquet of the bodies of their animals. The Goddess desires only the blood of
the offerings, hence beheading is the form of sacrifice, since the blood drains
quickly from the beheaded beasts…the head signifies the whole, the total
sacrifice.
RASA SAYS: THIS HAD TO HAVE BEEN
INTRODUCED BY MEN. MOTHER GOD DOES NOT WANT US TO SACRIFICE LIVING CREATURES,
BUT WANTS US TO SACRIFICE OUR SINS; ADDICTIONS, BAD HABITS, VICES, ATTACHMENTS
TO EARTH THAT KEEP US FROM GOD. IN MATRIARCHY THEY DID NOT SLAUGHTER ANIMALS,
THEY KEPT GOATS AND SHEEP FOR MILK AND WOOL BARBARA WALKER SAYS ELSEWHERE. BUDDHA, A VERY
MATERNAL SPIRITUAL LEADER, SAID NOT TO SACRIFICE ANIMALS. THIS HAD TO BE
INVENTED BY THE MALES.
Beheading or throat-cutting were common methods of sacrificial killing
in the western world too. "Kosher" killing for Yahweh consisted, and
still consists, of draining the animal's blood, because blood was the special
food of deities. Kali demanded sacrifice of male animals only, for they were
expendable – a custom harking back to the primitive belief that males had no
part in the cycles of generation. Shiva himself, as Kali's sacrificial spouse,
commanded that female animals must never be slain at the altar.
Kali was the Ocean of Blood at the beginning and end of the world, and
ultimate destruction of the universe was prefigured by destruction of each
individual, though her karmic wheel always brought reincarnation. After death
came nothing-at-all, which Tantric sages called the third of the three states
of being; to experience it was like the experience of Dreamless Sleep. This
state was also called "the Generative Womb of All, the Beginning and End
of Beings." Kali devoured Time itself. At the end of Time, she resumed her
"dark formlessness," which appeared in all the myths of
before-creation and after-doomsday as elemental Chaos.
The mystical experience of Kali was often described as a preview of
formlessness beyond the veil of death: a psychic return to the womb, to be
united with Kali's oceanic being. Thus Ramakrishna described it:
I was suffering from excruciating pain because I had not been blessed
with a vision of the Mother…I feared that it might not be my lot to realize her
in this life. I could not bear the separation any longer; life did not seem to
be worth living. Then my eyes fell on the sword that was kept in the Mother's
temple. Determined to put an end to my life, I jumped up and seized it, when
suddenly the blessed Mother revealed herself to me…the temple and all vanished,
leaving no trace; instead there was a limitless, infinite, shining ocean of
consciousness or spirit. As far as the eye could see, its billows were rushing
towards me from all sides…to swallow me up. I was panting for breath. I was
caught in the billows and fell down senseless.
RASA SAYS: I ALSO SAW GOD AS THE INFINITE OCEAN OF BLISS, THE HORIZON KEPT OPENING, IT WAS THE GOLD OF LOVE. I WAS GOD, GOD WAS ME. PRIOR TO THIS I HAD HAD
THE EXPERIENCE OF DROWNING IN THE OCEAN OF GRACE WHICH WAS NOT BLISSFUL.
Ramakrishna revitalized the worship of the Mother, as his pupil
Vivekananda said; "It was no new truths that Ramakrishna came to preach,
though his advent brought old truths to light." Vivekananda predicted the
resurgence of the Mother into the consciousness of the world's population,
after patriarchal religions had forced her into concealment in the unconscious.
"One vision I see clear as life before me, that the ancient mother has
awakened once more, sitting on her throne rejuvenated, more glorious than ever.
Proclaim her to all the world with the voice of peace and benediction. Clearly,
this Goddess was much more that the London Museum 's "Destroying Demon."
RASA SAYS: BRAVO TO RAMAKRISHNA AND VIVEKANANDA
5 20 14 by
Barbara G. Walker, comments Rasa Von Werder
Wow, very interesting and fascinating, Rasa! Thank you for sharing this 😃
ReplyDeletethanks - I'm glad I found it way back somewhere in the old files!
ReplyDelete