"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). [powerful image of this in BW's tarot deck]

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 of the Feminine but particularly of the Maternal. For in a profound way life and birth are always bound up with death and destruction.

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 acnowlegment 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-morten judgment.

Tantric worshippers of Kali thought it essential to face her Curse, the terror of death, as willingly as they accepted 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 exist 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 images of Kali the Destroyer. The London Museum displayed such an image with the label saying only, "Kali -- Destroying Demon." The Encyclopedia Britannica devoted five columns to Christian interpretations of the Logos without ever mentioning its origin 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." [a very important concept in the time of AIDS, I'm thinking]

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:

Thou art the Original of all the 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 who art the Supreme Primordial Kalika Resuming after dissolution Thine own form, dark and formless, Thou alone remainest as One ineffable and inconceivable though Thy self without beginning, multiform by the power of Maya, Thou art the Beginning of all, Creatrix, Protectress, and Destructress."

Walker devotes six pages of her epic work to Kali-Ma, and it is as diverse and complex as the Shadow side we all carry and must explore in order to integrate it into our lives so that it we become one with it, that it not rule us unknowingly.

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