 |
version seven. http://demongin.org |
Kali Iconographies
A quick report on my recent time under the needle; a summary of last week's attempt at incorporating Hindu philosophy into my life (and epidermis).
Monday, 2009-01-12 | Under the Needle
| G8 Summit riots, ethnic violence, police sirens... |
While about.com makes wikipedia.org look positively canonical by contrast, there are, occasionally, good, Cliff's Notes style summaries of complicated cultural phenomena:
Kali is represented with perhaps the fiercest features amongst all the world's deities. She has four arms, with a sword in one hand and the head of a demon in another. The other two hands bless her worshipers, and say, "fear not"! She has two dead heads for her earrings, a string of skulls as necklace, and a girdle made of human hands as her clothing. Her tongue protrudes from her mouth, her eyes are red, and her face and breasts are sullied with blood. She stands with one foot on the thigh, and another on the chest of her husband, Shiva.source
Unfortunately, however, that summary mashes up two distinct iconographies.
The reference to the protruding tongue, the torso drenched in blood and the foot on the chest of her consort, Shiva, refer to a primordial battle in the vedas wherein Kali, one of the Dasavatara (i.e. ten principle avatars) of Vishnu, appears in non-avatar form to battle the demon Raktabija. This demon, not unlike the hydra, is a self-replicator: each time his blood touches the ground, a copy is produced. This makes him nearly invulnerable. When Kali is summoned forth from Vishnu, she sucks the blood from the original, careful not to spill any, slays it and then swallows each of the duplicates.
Hence images of Kali in which she appears with either a bowl of blood, holding a demon's head (i.e. not a man's head) or bathed in blood with a Predator-like, impossibly large Baraka-mouth, refer to that battle and are of that particular iconography. It is worth repeating that these representations of Kali are not representations of Kali as an avatar of Vishnu.
It is in another, different, iconography, that Kali in her capacity as an avatar of Vishnu is represented. When you see Kali with the sword, the severed head of a man and with one foot on upon her thigh and another foot upon the chest of the dead Shiva, that's when you're dealing with the iconography of Kali-as-avatar.
Without dwelling too long on the avatars of Vishnu or how they correspond to the ages or epochs of life on this Earth (which you can easily wiki) suffice it to summarize that Shiva is the avatar of Vishnu that represents creation and maintenance of order. During the age of Shiva, the age that directly precedes the age of Kali, Shiva sets about the difficult task of creating and maintaining order in the world.
One day, however, the aspect of Vishnu summarized by Kali arrives. Kali, whose sword represents divine wisdom, i.e. wisdom that forces the student to come to terms with the bitter fact of the sheer inconsequentiality and futility of things, makes her home in places of vice: thieves' dens, houses of ill-repute, prisons, etc. When the age of Kali, Kali Yuga or the age of vice, begins, Kali emerges from these places and sweeps across the globe, sewing destruction and death in her path. Hence the severed head, the garland of skulls and the girdle of human arms that characterize the iconography that portrays Kali-as-avatar: the head, the skulls and the arms represent human will, the human body and human works (respectively).
That she holds the severed head opposite her sword hand and wears the skulls and arms as clothing represent the fact that during Kali Yuga, the age of Kali, all the thing-iness and carnality of human development that were so painstakingly and laboriously achieved and realized during the age of Shiva are undone by divine wisdom and become little more than trinkets and trophies the the whirlwind goddess of death and undoing.
And hence, in this iconography, she stands with one foot on her thigh and the other foot on the chest of Shiva, her consort: one foot is on her thigh to indicate that the destruction she sews is part of a dance--a predictable pattern--and the other foot rests upon the chest of her fallen mate to indicate that it is she who claims the final "victory" in what looks, to us, like a conflict. The same thesis-antithesis relationship that is summarized in the relationship of Shiva and Kali as mates is summarized in the feet of Kali: one foot describes the outcome of a conflict, the other foot argues that the conflict was never a conflict at all, rather that it was simply a matter of procedure or process.
In a single phrase, then, this iconography of Kali describes the inevitability of ruin.
