Reflections on Kali Ma

"Mask for Kali" (2014)

I seem to be dreaming masks again these days, and thus, this new Kali mask insisted upon being made.............

Kali Ma is greatly revered by millions of Hindus.  As religious archetype, She can be very hard for Westerners to understand.

Kali is the Dark Goddess, found throughout India, in Tibet manifesting as Black Tara, as far away as Bali manifesting as Rangda.  She is beloved, and She is terrible, a personification of the  transformative powers of the Three-fold Mother Goddess  as destroyer and changer.   The Goddess as three-fold (as Maiden (birth), Mother (sustainer), and Crone (destroyer)) is an ancient symbol of the ever changing processes of life.....the Trinity is probably Indo-European in origin, and is found in the  Hindu Brahma/Vishnu/Shiva trinity, and perhaps in the Father/Son/Holy Ghost Trinity as well.   

Kali's tale begins when the Hindu Gods could not defeat a plague of demons that were destroying the Earth.  They called at last upon Durga, who manifested Kali.  And it was Kali who destroyed the demons - but in her ecstasy, she could not be stopped, and so the Gods called upon her Consort, Shiva, to enter the battlefield to stop her.  He lay down before her,  and when she stepped upon his body, Kali at last stopped and ceased her blood lust.


Kālī  means "black, dark coloured", and is also drawn from the Sanskrit word for time.  Kāla primarily means "time" but also means "black" in honor of being the first creation before light - the "black matter/Mater" from which all is born. 

Severed heads adorn Her necklace, Her skin is black as night, and Her tongue protrudes from Her  face with the lust of battle, as well as the immense laughter of Kali, destroyer of illusion, who sees beyond all appearances. Kali's dance is the destruction that must occur for each new beginning, the ending cycle that begins a new cycle as well. Kali's love is tough love; yet the dancing feet and the flaming sword of Kali are among the most powerful expressions of Divine Love.

Here is the destruction of that which has become corrupt, rotten, but interestingly, within this imagery there is also often a Tantric meaning,  the arising of the power of Kundalini, symbolized by the erect penis of Shiva, the Eros that is the vitality of creation, the new seed.

"Kālī means "the black one" and refers to her being the entity of "time" or "beyond time." Kāli is strongly associated with Shiva, and Shaivas derive the masculine Kāla (an epithet of Shiva) to come from her feminine name. A nineteenth-century Sanskrit dictionary, the Shabdakalpadrum, states: कालः शिवः । तस्य पत्नीति - काली । kālaḥ śivaḥ । tasya patnīti kālī - "Shiva is Kāla, thus, his consort is Kāli" referring to Devi Parvathi being a manifestation of Devi MahaKali.  Other names include Kālarātri ("black night"), as described above, and Kālikā ("relating to time"). Kāli's association with darkness stands in contrast to her consort, Shiva, who manifested after her in creation, and who symbolises the rest of creation after Time is created. "

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kali

KALI
by Lauren Raine

Once upon a time,

The world became overpopulated by demons

They filled the world with their insatiable greed

and reproduced themselves endlessly

They ate the light of day,
They soiled the air

They consumed the trees, 
They swallowed the waters

They devoured the lands with insatiable greed.

Eating, eating eating!  Fill me!

Until there were no more things of beauty made

or new dreams dreamed
or children born.

The Gods called to Me,
The unborn ones called to Me.

The time had come 
to say Enough.  And.....NO MORE!

I am the Goddess of  No More!

I, I am the one who devours....fool!
I, I am the shadow,
the flame,  the dancing feet
of all those whose lives are wasted
by the demons of greed and arrogance

I....I  am the Mother
of those who are yet to come!

Jai Ma, Kali Ma! 

Kali Yantra

KALI
by Drissana Devananda

I wanted to create a performance for Kali. As I drove to the event, I brought a costume, and a live snake with me, thinking the snake represented the serpentine energy of the kundalini. I had a sense of what to do, but I didn't have a script, a plan. 

When I went on stage, and I took a newspaper, and acted as if I was reading a paper.   I just let the mundane despair come out. "I can't stand it!" I said, and then I turned my back to the audience, just breathing, and whispered, "When I meditate, sometimes I become a Goddess......." 

Then I put on the mask. And a hot, hot energy seemed to rip through me. I turned around, faced the audience, and words just fell out of my mouth.

As I picked up the snake, I remember saying, "This is the Kundalini, this is the serpent." I spoke about how we channel that enormous energy into sexuality, but we don't understand that it can rise further into our hearts, our vision centers, infusing our entire being. All of this was spontaneous! I genuinely can't say it was I, Drissana, who did it. When I went into the dressing room later, I was shaking. It was as if Kali had left, and I was just this small, exhausted person, who for a moment had been inhabited by that ferocious intelligence.

Kali is the surgeon. She cuts away what has to go. I ask for that quality when I have to cut something out of my life; an addiction, or a relationship that no longer is about growth. And I ask it be done precisely, this cutting away of dis-ease, malignancy, the aspects that no longer serve. Kali was the last resort savior. When the Gods couldn't kill the demonic forces that ravaged the Earth, they called on a woman's wrath.

We all have the ability to call the Goddesses into ourselves. I can do this in my dance, but in everyday life it's more difficult. That's why I thrive on performance, because I can freely let those forces work through me. What I forget is that we can call on them at other times. We've forgotten that the Goddess dwells within us, all the time, and not just when we wear a mask, or are in workshop, or a ritual. We are, in Tantric terms, extensions or emanations of the Gods and Goddesses - we are their material aspects. We're not bodies that are seeking the spirit, we're spirits that are seeking bodily experiences.

Remembering is a devotional practice. In the Hindu tradition, everyone has a deity they focus on as their personal deity. In the West, as we begin to reclaim the Goddess for spiritual practice, we each need to create a relationship with the Goddess form we have chosen, in order to manifest what we need for spiritual and emotional growth, to invoke the help we need. That practice is not just cerebral. We function out of our whole self, our bodies and spirits. The body-mind. That is where we re-member, we communicate with the Goddess within ourselves.

Performance 2000, Photo courtesy Tom Lux

Women need to become angry. Now. About the women of Afghanistan, the meaningless wars, the destruction of our environment. The demons of insatiable lust are devouring our planet. Those souls who await the future are being denied their birthright. Kali is the catalyst for saying "No more". She's the voice of women whose voices aren't being heard, women who need to open their mouths and speak for the first time. 

It's time to embrace the sword of Kali and start cutting away the delusions that are destroying our world. This is the ferocious mother who says "get away from my children, or I'll kill you."

Mothers today aren't saying that. They're giving their children away. Giving them away to war, giving them away by allowing our environment to be depleted, giving permission to the powers that be to destroy their future. 

This is the dance of Kali.

**These are two of  the "spirit photos" from a 2004 ritual theatre performance called "Restoring the Balance". I always felt very blessed, or affirmed, in these surprising photos, which I shared with the cast, although not with others after a while, realizing that many people did not believe they were "real".   Quynn Elizabeth, a Shamanic practitioner in Tucson, invoked and performed with the Kali mask - and amazingly, these goat-like images appearing three of the photographs from that segment of the event.  Later we learned that in India goats have been sacrificed to Kali - something we did not know. Below is seen the back of Quynn's head, and appearing behind her is a kind of figure eight or infinity symbol, and the "goat".   Perhaps, the meaning of this phenomenon, is that Spirit was providing a symbolic "sacrifice" for our dance........ 

From "Restoring the Balance" (2004).  Photo courtesy Ann Beam.

Syncronicities and Kali

I've been having a cluster of synchronicities of late, so much so that I have to laugh, and I try to figure out the "meaning" of it all, although I think interpreting synchronicities, like interpreting dreams, is not a one, or even two, or even three dimensional matter.  Also,  interpreting a synchronicity, like interpreting a dream, is archetypal and collective, but it is also "site specific" and very personal.

I've been negotiating for years about a collection of masks for someone.  I admire her work and dedication  very much, but I have found her very difficult to work for.  Well, impossible, for me at least.  She cannot make the collection she wants in leather, and so, in the course of this project,  I've made 5 sample masks, drawings designed to be especially carved by Balinese artists in wood, created a blog for her, researched and archived the unique symbology of her project, even made an elaborate latex mask to see if that worked.  Many hours of speculative work, completely unpaid.  Nothing seemed to please her, and nothing ever seemed clear to me.  The  only mask she seemed to like is one I made 4 years ago, a "Black Tara" mask, and although she had previously rejected it and asked for  masks that were very specific in their traditional symbology, suddenly she sent me pictures of this mask (which I had sold to a collector)  and said she wanted it. 


The Tibetan Black Tara is very much related, in meaning, cross-cultural origins,  and in appearance, to the Hindu Kali. 

Serene Zloof performing Kali

Photo courtesy Lena Grace

Interestingly, a mutual acquaintance of ours is a woman who bought a number of the original "Masks of the Goddess" collection 6 years ago, and I'm pleased to say has been using them  in her own work with the Goddess and her community. One of the masks that she owns is the mask of Kali, a mask I made in 1998 using my own face as the base.  That's a potent mask, and has been used in some significant performances.*  I myself have danced with fire in it, invoking Kali with dance and spoken word.

Anyway, this commission wasn't going to work.  I found myself walking around the house muttering to myself "The heck with this, she can drive someone else nuts!"  Maybe she feels that way about me too.   I decided to withdraw from the project. 

Within a day of making this decision, but before sending an email that released the project, I received a strange email from a woman who wrote that Lena (the woman who owns the Kali mask) had lent her the Kali mask, and she was making a musical about the Goddess.  She further went on to give a link to a mask maker ("with integrity" she said) who she was using for her musical, a woman who makes her masks out of latex and not leather.  I didn't much like the "with integrity" comment, wondering if that meant I somehow lacked it, and I also did not bother to inform her that the Kali mask is made of leather...........no matter.  What is significant in this is that within a day of my deciding to not pursue the project any further, I get an email from someone who, not knowing about the situation, gives me a link to another mask artist, one who does not use leather, which I immediately passed on appropriately, and hopefully all are now happy and this artist will pick up where I left off.

Later that day I was driving to do some errands, and I noticed I had been humming a song.  It was Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker"!

Personally, this synchronicity has a lot of, well, internal significance.  Making masks is what I do, my mastery gained with experience, training, endless repetition, study, and always the help of the spirits.   The process is always infused  with synchronicity and the collective mind.  Magic, in other words.  I realize that what I was doing was compromising in too  many ways, and I had  lost my desire to do the project.    A worthy project, but not for me to do.


So, Kali stepped in! 

Within a day of all this, by the way, still pondering what the meaning of this was for me, I received this from a group email:

So...........in my experience, or interpretation, of working with both Synchronicities and with The Goddesses, there is personal work, transformation, that they offer, and they are also often reflections of a greater, integral reality.  Kali, Black Tara, is, for me, about releasing what has to go, has to be cut away with Kali's sword, in the world, or perhaps, in more simple ways, within our lives.  I do not blame anyone in this, rather, the piece of this that is for me has to do with the ways that I do not respect, or trust,  my own knowledge, experience, and gift.

But when we work with Kali, when we work with the Goddess, we work with a great power rising in the world, the Dark Goddess striving to transform and heal.  And She works with us, whether we realize it or not.  I think, as I work now on a new Kali mask, that greater meaning is what I'm going to meditate upon...........

Performance 2000, Photo courtesy Tom Lux

 

The Summer Solstice - Joy to All

Someone was the Sun
calling from across
the little island fields

we turned and took the last
glimpse of the closing lid

"Let's go, shall we?"

I could not answer
but only followed after

just someone's glance
along the rock path.




.......Felicia Miller

 

"Now I Become Myself"

 There is a joy I find,  as I prepare to turn 65, a joy I find in the "coming into Myself" that age brings, at last, at last knowing who you are, the masks peeled away.  And the joy of knowing yourself in that beautiful field of Unknowing as well, the field of evergreen becoming.  Thanks to May Sarton for this poem.......

Now I Become Myself

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
‘Hurry, you will be dead before-’

(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)

Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.

All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.

Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

May Sarton

Amaterasu Omikami and the Sun

Hail and Awake!
Children of the blue, brown and green Earth
I have come from my shining abode in Heaven
I am Amaterasu Omikami  - Great Woman Who Possesses Noon

Here is a gift for you:
A mirror, to draw you from your cave of sleeping
To see yourself in all your wonder
Allow me to introduce you  to yourself!

Mary Kay Landon

Painting by Aya Kato,

As we approach the Summer Solstice, I think of course of the Green Man, and the many solar dieties associated with the Sun.  But there is also the wonderful story from Japan, the  tale of Amaterasu,  Goddess of  the Sun. 

Angered by her vulgar, violent brother Susanowa,  god of storms,  Amaterasu Omikami fell into despair about the ugliness and the ignorance of the world. And so, deprived of the warmth and light of the Sun, the world began to die. She retreated to a cave, and refused to  come out.   

All the Gods and Goddesses  came to the mouth of her cave, and begged Amaterasu to come out. But Amaterasu Omikami, withdrawn into her dark musings, her depression and introversion, would not, and all the pleas of those gathered could not persuade her to return to the world. 

At last, the Gods placed a  mirror at the entrance to the cave.  Then the little Goddess Uzume, known for her high humor, began to dance. Her dance was so bawdy, so absurd.......that everyone gathered had to laugh, in spite of the dire circumstances. They laughed and laughed and laughed!

With so much raucous laughter, even Amaterasu's dark thoughts were interrupted, and from  sheer curiosity she paused to wonder what was going on.  She opened the cave door just a crack, and peeked out.  And at that moment, her radiant,  shining face was reflected in the mirror. At that very moment, she saw how beautiful she was - and remembered how much joy and laughter there still was in the world, emanating from her, emanating from everyone.  And that is how Amaterasu left her cave of dark despair, forgot about her anger and disillusionment, and joined the dance of life again in all of her glory.  

There are caves of darkness into which we all retreat. For a day, a month, too many years, perhaps a lifetime. Sometimes, we have to be tricked away from abysses of the heart in order to see how beautiful, how valuable, how important the light in each of us really is, how we can ignite other lives by shining from within our own lives.   From that mirror, one can find again the desire to rejoin the hilarious, heartbreaking dance of life, and become the Sun.

Mana Youngbear  

 

Laura Janesdaughter (1999) 

Friday the 13th and the Full Honey Moon

Full Honey Moon: Friday the 13th Brings Rare Celestial Event

Published: Jun 12, 2014, 4:03 PM EDT weather.com

See video:   http://www.weather.com/news/science/space/friday-13th-june-2014-full-moon-honey-moon-20140611?cm_ven=FB_JB_61204_5

 Calling all Pagans (and pagan hearted sympathizers), tomorrow there will be an Auspicious Event in the skies, a beautiful "Honey Moon", so called for it's amber color.  For some of us, Friday the 13th is not a bad luck day at all, in fact, it's auspicious for the Goddess, and highly misunderstood.  And as for honey moons, that also is something with  a bit of little known history.

For one thing, "Friday" originally was dedicated to the Nordic Goddess Freya, otherwise known as "Freya's Day".  Freya was one of the oldest of the Nordic Gods, one of the Vanir** known for her beauty, her compassion (amber is still called "Freya's tears" ), and  importantly, she was the Goddess of love, sensuality, and, along with Odin, also associated with Seiðr,  sorcery, which may very well pertain to pre-Christian shamanic practices and beliefs.  

There are further connections between "Friday the 13" and the Goddess, the most notable being that the number 13 represents the number of lunations in a year, and in many traditions is sacred to the Goddess or the feminine aspect of deity, because there are thus 13 menstrual cycles in the year.  In many early cultures the year was determined by the number 13, the number of moons.  And last, of course, the Moon is very often associated with the Goddesses, including Selene, Isis, Artemis, and so on...............a lot of "feminine" energy, imagery, his-story, and symbology going on here, and depending on your theological point of view, either very superstitious, or very fortunate!

Last, many people may not realize that in medieval Northern Europe it was often the custom to give a newly married couple a months supply of honey mead, which was considered a very special, rare, and rather magical brew, in the hopes that it might help to bring about fertility and love.  Hence, the "Honeymoon".

John Bauer "Freya"

**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanir

In Norse mythology, the Vanir (singular Vanr) are a group of gods associated with fertility, wisdom and the ability to see the future. The Vanir are one of two groups of gods (the other being the Æsir) and are the namesake of the location Vanaheimr (Old Norse "Home of the Vanir"). After the Æsir–Vanir War, the Vanir became a subgroup of the Æsir. Subsequently, members of the Vanir are sometimes also referred to as members of the Æsir. 

Boxless Mind..........

Ever had one of those days that you're sure must have some symbolic meaning, but you can't quite figure out what, exactly, that might be?  No angels or wizened sages are turning up to enlighten you, so you'll just have to grumble your way through it.  About a month ago I indulged in an online rant that made me feel better, having been frustrated by several sources, but then I took it down as inappropriate, which was appropriate.  But I still like some of the images I found to go along with my being such a kermudgeon sometimes. 

The point of my rant was "thinking outside the box"...............glad I'm not ranting anymore, but hopefully, doing some "thinking outside the box", or at least, looking up occasionally...........