|
Kali's paramount place of worship
is in the cremation ground, preferably at the dead of night,
on a suitable day of the waning Moon. Here, her nature becomes
clear and apparent. For an adept in the worship, the whole world
is a cremation ground, and She, the true form of time, who by
herself creates and destroys all, is personified as the pyre.
There, after life, all mortals and their wishes, dreams and reflections
come to their fruition, a pile of worthless ashes.
Kali's dwelling place, the cremation ground
denotes a place where the pancha mahabhuta (five elements) are
dissolved. Kali dwells where this dissolution takes place. In
terms of devotion and worship, this denotes the dissolving of
attachments, anger, lust and other binding emotions, feelings
and ideas. The heart of devotee is where this burning takes place,
and it is in the heart that Kali dwells. The devotee makes her
image in his heart and under her influence burns away all limitations
and ignorance in the cremation fires. This inner cremation fire
in the heart is the gyanagni (fire of knowledge), which kali
bestows.
Kali is the universal mother. It is believed
that she goes into the darkness with us, and for us, to swallow
our sins, worries and concerns. She can show us how to radically
transform our lives by embracing our own darkness, rather than
fearing and fleeing from that which haunts us. She can spiritually
hack away at the handcuffs that keep us shackled to the hungry
ghosts of the past. There comes a point in the process when you
must surrender fully to her healing powers, and let her bring
you back cleansed, transformed, whole.
Kali is the powerful Hindu Goddess who is
in charge of darkness, death and regeneration. Many people fear
her because she is so awesome looking, but Hindus love and adore
her as their great goddess and they see her as a manifestation
of power that is fierce and potent. She is shakti (female energy)
incarnate and the manifestation of primordial power. While she
is the consort of the great Lord Shiva, she is also seen dancing
wildly, with his form beneath her feet. They are partners in
darkness, and in dancing the dance of death and regeneration.
She brings life and death. She is regeneration and rebirth. In
many ways she is the consummate representation of the classic
power of the Divine Female - the power to give birth, to bring
death to the old and to regenerate. Her haunts are the cremation
grounds, where she takes life, and then recycles it into new
life. Her symbol for cutting away at evil and darkness is to
behead humans, but what that image really represents is the cutting
away of the human ego and all the problems it causes. She eats
pain, and swallows despair, and the secret shadows of our lives.
Kali is a goddess who acts in violent, gruesome,
fearsome ways, killing as her main function, yet she is not evil.
She is a representation of negative forces in the universe. Yet
even then, she is a manifest form of godhead, a part of the divine
whole. Kali in one aspect is still the mother of all. According
to devotional literature she is revered as a terrible fearsome
goddess, but also as one who must be accepted and loved. Kali
represents in a way the kinks in the Hindu system of dharma.
A system that is based upon structure and purity, that ritualizes
and prepares for the occurrences of death and other disorder.
Yet there are things that are unexpected, impure and chaotic.
Kali is the representation of what is outside the order.
The Hindu goddess Kali deals with the horrible
aspects of life that most people will not think about. Embodying
horror, rage, unkempt fury and chaos, Kali is worshiped as a
goddess and not mistaken for a demon. Chaos must exist in compliment
to order in the creation and maintenance of balance in the universe.
The dark side of the divine exists in contrast to the bright
and the beautiful. In Hinduism, the polarity of good and evil
are blurred. The demons may perform austerities to be granted
boons, just as the gods may go awry and threaten the stability
of the cosmos. No female deity embodies the duality of light
and dark in a complimentary existence as well as Kali.
Kali is the full picture of the Universal
Power. She is Mother, the Benign; and Mother, the Terrible. She
creates and nourishes and she skills and destroys. By Her magic
we see good and bad, but in reality there is neither. The whole
world and all we see is the play of Maya, the veiling power of
the Divine Mother. God is neither good nor bad, nor both. God
is beyond the pair of opposites that constitute this relative
existence.
The Tantras mention over thirty forms of Kali.
Sri Ramakrishna often spoke about the different forms of Kali.
The Divine Mother is known as Kali-Ma, Maha Kali, Nitya Kali,
Shamshana Kali, Raksha Kali, Shyama Kali, Kalikamata, and Kalaratri.
Among the Tamils she is known as Kottavei. Maha Kali and Nitya
Kali are mentioned in the Tantra Philosophy.
When there were neither the creation, nor
the sun, the moon, the planets, and the earth, when the darkness
was enveloped in darkness, then the Mother, the Formless One,
Maha Kali, the Power, was one with the Maha Kala, the Absolute.
As Mahakali she is the timeless, immortal, formless power indistinguishable
from the transcendent one or Absolute Power.
Shyama Kali has a somewhat tender aspect and
is worshipped in Hindu households. She is the dispenser of boons
and the dispeller of fear. People worship Raksha Kali, the Protectress,
in times of epidemic, famine, earthquake, drought, and flood.
Shamshan Kali is the embodiment of the power of destruction.
She resides in the cremation ground, surrounded by corpses, jackals
and terrible female spirits. From her mouth flows a stream of
blood, from her neck hangs a garland of human heads, and around
her waist is a girdle made of human arms.
Tantrics worship Siddha Kali to attain perfection.
Phalaharini Kali to destroy the results of their actions; Nitya
Kali, the eternal Kali, to take away their disease, grief, and
suffering and to give them perfection and illumination.
Robbers and thieves have their own kali. Not
so many years ago, robbers lived in Indian woods and had the
habit of worshipping Dakait Kali before they want to rob people
on highways and in villages. Some of these old Kali images have
survived time and are still being worshipped, though for reasons
other than originally intended.
In Kolkata she is worshipped as Bhavtarini,
the redeemer of all creation, the most beautiful one. The beauty
of the Dakshineswar Kali Temple in Kolkata is far removed from
the dreary sight of an active cremation ground. And, although
the Goddess in this temple is the same Ma Kali as the feared
one in the cremation ground, she is regarded as benign-a protrectress
rather than a destroyer.
While someone unfamiliar with the Shakti worship
may perceive Kali's images as equally terrible without making
the slightest distinction between them, the Hindu distinguishes
a benign Kali (dakshina) from a fearful Kali (shamshan) by the
position of her feet. If Kali steps out with her right foot and
holds the sword in her left hand, she is a Dakshina Kali. If
she steps out with her left foot and holds the sword in her right
hand, she is the terrible of the Mother, the Shamshan Kali of
the cremation ground.
Of the many other aspects of Kali, the two
best known are Mahakali and Bhairavi.
In the aspect of Bhairavi, Kali is the counterpart
to Shiva, taking pleasure in destruction, and the ultimate dissolution
of the universe.
Kali is also thought to be an aspect of the
Devi or Mahadevi or Mahakali, who was the most powerful and complex
of all the great Goddesses. When She is in the aspect of Mahakali,
Kali uses Her very appearance to terrify the various entities,
demons, and devils who represent the sinister forces.
It is in this aspect, as Mahadevi, that Kali
is depicted with black skin and a hideous tusked face and claws;
Her forehead bearing a third eye like Shiva's. Here, Kali is
shown with four arms, the upper two holding a bloody sword and
severed head, while Her two lower hands are held out in welcome,
as She grants favors to Her devout followers.
Western scholars erroneously viewed the various
manifestations and incarnations of Kali as many different Goddesses,
particularly isolating those primitve mother-goddesses ("matrikadevis")
grouped together as "Dravidian she-ogres." Yet Kali's
worshippers plainly stated that she had hundreds of different
names, but they were all the same Goddess.
Some of Kali's older names found their way
into the Bible. As Tara, the earth, she became Terah, mother
of the Hebrew ancestral spirits called "teraphim".
The same Tara became the Celts' Tara, Gauls' Turan, and the Latin
Terra, meaning "Mother Earth," said to be interchangeable
with Venus.
The name of 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).
Variations of Kali's basic name occurred throughout
the ancient world. The Greeks had a word Kalli, meaning "beautiful," but
applied the name to things that were not particularly beautiful
such as the demonic centaurs called kallikantzari, relatives
of Kali's Asvins. Their city of Kallipolis, the modern-day Gallipoli,
was centered in Amazon country formerly ruled by Artemis Kalliste.
The annual birth festival at Eleusis was Kalligeneia, translateable
as "coming forth from the Beautiful One," or "coming
forth from Kali." The temple of the Great Mother of the
Gods at Pergamum stood on Mount Mamurt-Kaleh, easily transposed
into Mount Mother-Kali.
Lunar 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 a hierophantic clan devoted to "the Goddess
Kele". This was cognate with the Saxon Kale, or Gale, 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.
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 the ceremonies of western "witches" -
that is, pagans. They adored the Black Mother Earth in cemeteries,
where Roman tombstones invoked her with the phrase Mater genuit,
Mater recepit - "the Mother bore me, the Mother took
me back". Kurukulla is a fierce Nepalese and
Tibetan goddess much like Kali.
Kali's title Devi (Goddess) was similarly
widespread in Indo-European languages. She was the Latin diva
(Goddess) and Minoan diwi or Diwija, the Goddess associated with
Zeus at Knossos. Dia, Dea, and Diana were alternate forms of
the same title.
Though called "the One," Kali was
always a trinity: the same Virgin-Mother-Crone triad established
perhaps nine or ten millenia ago, giving the Celts their triple
Morrigan; the Greeks their triple Moerae and all other manifestations
of the Threefold Goddess; the Norsemen their triple Norns; the
Romans their triple Fates and triadic Uni (Juno); the Egyptians
their triple Mut; the Arabs their triple Moon-goddess - she was
the same everywhere. Even Christians modeled their threefold
God on her archetypal trinity.
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.
 |
| DEITY
AT KALIGHAT |
Although Kali is worshipped throughout India
and Nepal, and even in Indonesia, she is most popular in the
state West Bengal in India, where one also finds Kalighat, her
most famous temple just outside Kolkata (capital of West Bengal).
Considering that Calcutta is simply an Anglicized form of kaligata,
the city received its very name from the goddess.
Each district, town and village in Bengal
seems to have its very own Kali famous for a particular miracle
or incident. The Hindus of Bengal have always taken a fancy towards
the Goddess Kali and have worshipped her both as a mother and
as a daughter. The concept of Kali as being both mother and daughter
is enhanced by the various hymns composed by the great Begali
devotees, Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa and Ramaprasad.
Kali is "the divine Shakti representing
both the creative and destructive aspects of nature",
and as such she is a goddess who both gives life and brings
death. Clothed only with the veil of space, her blue-black
nakedness symbolizes the eternal night of non-existence, a
night that is free of any illusion and distinction. Kali as
such is pure and primary reality, the enfolded order, formless
void yet full of potential.
Kali represents the entire physical plane.
She is the drama, tragedy, humor, and sorrow of life. She is
the brother, father, sister, mother, lover, and friend. She is
the fiend, monster, beast, and brute. She is the sun and the
ocean. She is the grass and the dew. She is our sense of accomplishment
and our sense of doing worthwhile. Our thrill of discovery is
a pendant on her bracelet. Our gratification is a spot of color
on her cheek. Our sense of importance is the bell on her ankle.
The full and seductive, terrible and wonderful earth mother always
has something to offer.
One shouldn't jump to the conclusion that
Kali represents only the destructive aspect of God's power. What
exists when time is transcended, the eternal night of limitless
peace and joy, is also called Kali (Maharatri). And it is she
who prods Shiva Mahadeva into the next cycle of creation. In
short, she is the power of God in all His aspects. A very apt
and poetic description of the Great Mother Kali has been given
by Pirsig, who wrote, "Kali, the Divine Mother, is the symbol
for the infinite diversity of experience."
Buy
this painting |
A PRAYER
AND ACCOMPANIMENT
TO THE WORSHIP OF
GODDESS KALI
Courtesy Exotic India
|
Knowest not, Mind, to farm? In the untilled
field
Would golden harvest wave, so thou hadst sown.
Make of her name a fence, that so the yield
Be not destroyed. Not Death himself, O Mind,
Dare come nigh Kali of the tresses free.
When forfeiture will come is all unknown -
To-day, or after many a century.
Lo, to thy hand the present time, O Mind
Haste thou, and harvest. What they gave to thee,
The seed thy teachers gave, scatter it now;
With water of love it sprinkle. If alone,
O Mind, thou canst not this accomplish, thou
Alone, take Ramprasad to be with thee.
-- Ramprasad
This article was written by:
Madhuri Guin Our efforts have been directed at making this article informative and refreshing for you. We will truly appreciate all forms of feedback. Please send your feedback to newsletter@dollsofindia.com.
|
