Kali

The Devi Mahatmya tells of her birth in the seventh of its thirteen chapters, and it is worth reading closely because it is usually told wrong. The Goddess, called there Ambika or Durga, faces the generals Chanda and Munda; her face blackens with rage and from her brow steps Kali, dark-skinned, hollow-eyed, tongue out, wearing a garland of heads. She kills the two generals and brings their heads to the Goddess, who for that gives her the name Chamunda.

The Raktabija episode comes afterwards, in the eighth chapter, and is a different one. That demon multiplied every time a drop of his blood touched the ground, so that wounding him was manufacturing him an army; Kali solves it by drinking the blood in the air, before it falls, and devouring what had already sprung up. Merging the two episodes into one and having her born of Parvati during the fight against Raktabija is the most repeated error about her: she is born of the Goddess in the earlier battle, and against different enemies.

She is shown with very dark, almost black skin, which in the Tantric reading indicates what has neither form nor limit. She goes naked or in a skirt made of severed arms, and wears two distinct garlands: one of freshly cut heads and a necklace of fifty skulls, read as the fifty letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, that is, the whole of language. In her commonest form she has four arms: two hold the khadga sword and a severed head, and the other two make the boon-granting gesture and the abhaya mudra, the one that removes fear. That the hand which reassures and the hand which holds the head belong to the same figure is the core of her iconography, not a decorative contrast.

The protruding tongue is her most recognisable feature, and the traditional explanation is not the one usually given. It does not express thirst for blood: it is the gesture of biting one's tongue on realising that she has set her foot on Shiva, stretched out beneath her. He lies motionless because he stands for consciousness without energy, which without shakti cannot so much as stir; hence the pair is drawn this way and not the other. Reading the scene as a reversal of male and female roles is a modern interpretation, legitimate as a reading, but it is not what the text says.

The worship of Kali flourishes in Bengal and Assam, with the Kalighat temple in Calcutta as epicenter, where goat and buffalo sacrifices honor her bloodthirsty appetite during festivals like Kali Puja, coinciding with Diwali. Tantrikas venerate her at dawn in cremation grounds, reciting mantras to transcend dualities and attain siddhis, seeing her as Dakshina Kalika, granter of mukti. For Shakta devotees, Kali dissolves the ego and illusory world (maya), guiding to liberation (moksha) through intense bhakti. Her tantric iconography, with Shiva submissive under her feet, inverts patriarchal roles, affirming divine feminine primacy over masculine passivity.