Kali - E L Hunter

Most of us meet Kali as a goddess of rage and destruction, black-skinned and gaunt, with her tongue out and a garland of severed heads. That version is real, but it is only the surface. The people who have worshipped her for centuries do not see a goddess of death. They see a mother whose love is fiercer than the gentle kind, and far harder to survive.

To her devotees the skulls and the blood are not horror. A mother who truly protects her child has to be willing to do violence to whatever threatens it, and Kali holds nothing back. The severed heads she wears are the attachments she has cut away from her children. She does not steer them around what they fear. She takes them into it, dancing in the cremation ground among the corpses and the ash, because that is where they have to go and she will not let them go alone. The poet Ramprasad Sen could rage at her and still call her Ma.

This is the Kali her tradition actually built, across two thousand years and the oldest texts in India, not the softened figure the modern world made of her.