Kali Ma and the Dark Goddess

"Mask for Kali" (2014)

Here is the Kali mask currently in my show at Arise Gallery in San Francisco...... the mask was also used at the Parliament of World Religions in 2015 by Macha NightMare and colleagues.  I think often of Kali, of being in the time of "Kali Yuga", according to the Hindu great calendar.   Kali Ma is greatly revered by millions of Hindus, but as a religious figure she is very hard for westerners, with our dualistic religious systems, to understand.  So I thought I'd share this article, along with an interview I did with Drissana Devananda, a friend in the Bay Area who has danced with the Kali mask, and with fire.  I find her wise words always important.

Kali is the Dark Goddess of  India, in Tibet manifesting as Black Tara, as far away as Bali manifesting as Rangda.  She may also be related through the migrations of the Indo-Europeans to the Caillech of Scotland.  Her origins are ancient indeed, going far back into pre-history. 

She is beloved Mother, the last resort Savior, and She is also  terrifying,  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 I believe was also co-opted in early Christianity as the Father/Son/Holy Ghost Trinity as well, as this "power of Three" would have been very prevalent in pagan Europe.   

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 the fierce Kali.  It was Kali who destroyed the demons - but in her ecstasy, she could not be stopped, and so the Gods were forced to call upon her Consort, Lord 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, in the dance of Kali, is found the necessary destruction of that which has become corrupt, rotten, that whose time has come to end, just as the forest must burn for the new trees to arise.  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.

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. (2001)

Below 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 appeared in three  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.

Closing Exhibit of Masks of the Goddess, and New Revised "Masks of the Goddess" Book

In May I will be concluding the 20 year MASKS OF THE GODDESS PROJECT, which began as an Invocation to the Goddess at Reclaiming's 20th Annual Spiral Dance in San Francisco in 1999.  I have been so privileged to collaborate with Priestesses, Playwrights, Dancers, Ritualists, Community Organizers, Photographers, Artists, Photographers, Choreographers, Writers, Singers, and Psychologists in sharing the stories and  "Faces of the Goddess".  So many from around the country participated in the Project - please know that your spirit and contribution will be there, in every mask and photograph.   

The Opening will be May 5th, and I'll give a small slide presentation, and afterwards I'm delighted that there will several performances, including Evelie Delfino Sales Posch to sing her beautiful songs, and mask wearers Drissana and Vibra to invoke the Goddesses.  Perhaps we'll see you there!

I have also just revised and added a great deal of new material to my book 
"The Masks of the Goddess", which is available at  Blurb.com.
 You can turn pages in a "Preview" at this link:
 http://www.blurb.com/b/9380795-the-masks-of-the-goddess

Thank you once again for sharing your creativity and love of the Goddess with so many, and especially, with me.  May the Masks  continue their work. 

Lauren 
www.masksofthegoddess.com
www.laurenraine.com

New Mask for Exhibit: "Ereshkigal"

  "To light a candle is to cast a shadow."

Ursula K. Leguin

"Everything is Alive"........

I  woke up recently with the phrase "everything is alive" in my mind.  To muse on that "threshold voice", I wanted to explore what "everything is alive" might mean, and this story from Alice Walker came to mind.  

Catherine Keeler  asked "How would we live if we saw the world with a 'webbed vision', meaning how would we live if we saw ourselves within a community, visible and invisible, of relationships with all kinds of living, responsive beings, including the food we eat, perhaps even the things we use and take for granted.  As if it was all a kind of "great conversation", and creating "good relationship" was a primary concern.   We would live so very differently...........


When did the world cease to be alive, and become a "thing"?  When did plants, animals, and people become "things" or "resources" or "commodities" ?   And how much of the conversation goes on without us realizing it, in spite of our objectification and de-humanization,  all the time anyway?

I reflect on a little story of my own.  At Christmas time a few years ago, because they were on sale, I bought a turkey and baked it. I felt rather silly, as I had no one to share this dinner with, being alone that Christmas day.   I remember feeling rather sad about being alone, on Christmas day,  with a baked turkey.   I realized I had cranberry sauce, but no gravy, and so I decided to try to find some at the local Walgreens,  the only place I knew would be open.  As I went into the store, sitting on the sidewalk was a young man with a bottle of  Windex offering to clean my windshield for some change.

Normally I'd provide some coins and move on, but the sight of this homeless young man, sitting there in the cold on Christmas Day, was just too much.  I got to talking with him, and finding him intelligent, I asked him if he'd like some turkey, and we ended up sitting on the porch eating that turkey dinner together.  I later paid him to do some odd jobs for me before he disappeared from that area, and I hope he found his way off the streets.   Apparently, I didn't buy that turkey just for myself, although I thought I did.  The universe responds.


The Universe Responds

by Alice Walker

A few years ago I wrote an essay called "Everything is a Human Being", which explores to some extent the Native American view that all of creation is of one substance and therefore deserving of the same respect. In it I described the death of a snake that I caused, and wrote of my remorse.

That summer "my " land in the country crawled with snakes. There was always the large resident snake, whom my mother named "Susie", crawling about in the area that marks the entrance to my studio. But there were also lots of others wherever we looked. A black-and-white king snake appeared underneath the shower stall in the garden. A striped red-and-black one, very pretty, appeared near the pond. It now revealed the little hole in the ground in which it lived by lying half in and half out of it as it basked in the sun. Garden snakes crawled up and down the roads and paths. One day leaving my house with a box of books in his arms, my companion literally tripped over one of these.

We spoke to all of these snakes in friendly voices. They went their way, we went ours. After about a two week bloom of snakes, we seemed to have our usual number: just Susie and a couple of her children.

A few years later, I wrote an essay about a horse called Blue. It was about how humans treat horses and other animals; how hard it is for us to see them as the suffering, fully conscious, enslaved beings they are. After reading this essay in public only once, this is what happened. A white horse came and settled herself on the land. (Her owner, a neighbor, soon came to move her.) The two horses on the ranch across the road began to run up to their fence whenever I passed, leaning over it and making what sounded like joyful noises. They had never done this before (I checked with the human beings I lived with to be sure of this), and after a few more times of greeting me as if I'd done something especially nice for them, they stopped. Now, when I pass they look at me with the same reserve they did before. But there is still a spark of recognition.

What to make of this? 

But what I'm also sharing with you is this thought: The Universe responds. What you ask of it, it gives.............I remember when I used to dismiss the bumper sticker "Pray for Peace". I realize now that I did not understand it, since I also did not understand prayer; which I know now to be the active affirmation in the physical world of our inseparableness from the divine; and everything, especially the physical world, is divine."**

** (From: "The Universe Responds: Or, How I learned We Can Have Peace on Earth", 
Living by the Word, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, N.Y., N.Y., 1988.)

ANGELS IN NEBRASKA

In an article from his webzine "Warrior of the Light", Paolo Coelho wrote:

"I let my life be guided by a strange language that I call “signs”. I know that the world is talking to me, I need to listen to it, and if I do so I shall always be guided towards what is most intense, passionate and beautiful. Of course, it is not always easy."

I have also often  found myself engaged in a "Great Conversation" that seems to be going on all around me, and occasionally I’m stunned to realize I wasn’t listening.  Lately, grounded with so many duties and laundry lists, I feel like a virtual deaf mute.  

The conversation seems to become most lively when I'm in movement. Between destinations lies a mythic land of flight and migration, a free range  in the "Bardo" of transit, where I occasionally meet Angels of the Flux pointing the way.  I'm getting ready to hit the road to go to California briefly, and already feel the longing to just be in motion........ and perhaps, those Angels, will speak to me again. 

JOURNAL ENTRY, September 3, 2005.

Stopped in Cozad, Nebraska, home of the Robert Henri Museum.

When I was getting my MFA, I had to study, among others, the work of Robert Henri and the "Ash Can School" of painting, which he founded.  It was called the "Ash Can School" because Henri and collegues were tired of the romanticized,  dreamy landscapes  of their time, and instead took to painting realistic scenes of urban life in New York and elsewhere, which was a great innovation. 

The  Cozad Museum has some beautiful paintings of the tall grass prairies of Nebraska by a local artist, and a few reproductions of Henri's "Ash Can School" paintings. They don't have any of the originals. Henri's father, it seems, actually was the founder of  Cozad, but it appears that he  had to leave rather suddenly with his sons and wife when he "accidentally" shot a man in a heated argument.  He took his family  to New York, changed his name, started the first casino in Atlantic City, and his talented son went on to study art and become famous. The boy never returned to Nebraska, although he did go on to live and work in Ireland, New York, and Paris. Cozad is proud of him anyway.

I continue to fret about my commitment to art. My life seems like a tapestry, on my good days, the threads finally woven with some skill into a colorful tapestry, I see that I have achieved some small bit of mastery. And then there are days when so much precious life seems wasted, lost, too many disappointments and wrong decisions and wrong turns. Those are days that are about emptying out, discovering things that once seemed so opaque are now, well, transparent. Unimportant. What really matters?  What am I supposed to do now?

So here I sit, with a very nice cup of coffee and a sandwich at the Busy Bee Diner, where I have a front row center seat for the First Bank and Trust Company of Cozad.

That got my attention.

TUCSON SCULPTURE FESTIVAL! I'll be there!

I'm looking forward to participating in this fabulous Show in April, and will bring my recent bas relief clay mosaics, "Our Lady of the Shards".  Maybe I'll see you there!

MARK YOUR CALENDARS  FOR THE LARGEST OUTDOOR SCULPTURE SHOW IN ARIZONA!

Featuring over 60 local, regional and national sculptors, the  SculptureTucson Festival Show & Sale is April 5, 6 and 7  at Brandi Fenton Memorial Park in Tucson, AZ In addition to a chance to see and buy art, collectors and the art-loving community will enjoy free artists talks & demonstrations, live dance & musical performances, food trucks and more!

VISIT OUR WEBSITE

The Festival is FREE and OPEN to the PUBLIC: Saturday, April 6th  9:30am to 6pm and  Sunday, April 7th 9:30am to 4:30pm  For more festival info: www.SculptureTucson.org

The opening night reception, PATRON'S EVENT on Friday, April 5th from 5pm to 9pm is a chance to preview and purchase art before the festival opens to the public. Join us for a wonderful evening of sculpture, live music, and gourmet hors-d'oeuvres & cocktails catered by Hacienda del Sol. Tickets to the PATRON'S EVENT are $50. Purchase tickets:  www.SculptureTucson.org https://youtu.be/lbjDTBLnTjY

More New Masks for my Upcoming Show

BRIDGIT

I've been busy indeed getting ready for my show in May, including finally finishing a new version of  my Book about the Masks of the Goddess Project.  

It is fun to have a chance to practice my mastery of my art.........I have not made many masks in the past few years, mostly because since I stopped doing the shows and "being out there" there have been few requests for masks.  But this is what I am good at, and it has been a great privilege for me to make these Goddess masks for others to use.  

I remember when I first started learning about the "Temple Mask" traditions of Bali, and started working with Ida Bagus Anom in Mas, which is near Ubud.  I was so inspired with the idea of sacred masks, masks that were used to "in-voke" the Gods, masks that were the "special masks" that were kept in the Temples, anointed and cleansed with holy water by the Balians, and maintained and created by a class of mask makers............it seemed so familiar to me, that concept.  Perhaps I once lived in a culture like Bali where masks were sacred, in some other lifetime............

 So when I returned to the U.S., the idea of making a collection of "Temple Masks" devoted to the Divine Feminine made sense to me.  And then my opportunity came along with an invitation to create masks for the Invocation of the Goddess at the 20th Annual Spiral Dance in San Francisco.  It seems fitting indeed that the Project should end in San Francisco as well, 20 years later.  And I am ....... happy to realize that the masks did fulfill that dream, and I have this chance to close with honor for the many people I've been privileged to share them with.

INANNA

CERES/DEMETER 

ISIS

HECATE

ERESHKIGAL

BAST