Kali Maa: The Great Dark Mother of Enchantment

Out of all the Divine Feminine personifications, the Hindu goddess Kali has had the most profound effect on my life. I got to know her, in the strange and spiraling ways of the Divine Feminine, through the Black Madonnas of France and Italy.

Before I established my own relationship with Kali, I had known two main Western versions of her.

One was the Christian version, which basically presented goddess Kali as a blood-thirsty demon that uncivilized people had the misfortune of worshipping. The other version, the New Age Kali, wasn’t much different.

From New Age Kali to the Black Madonna

The New Age Kali was someone you could turn to, or “embody,” in order to channel anger. In this version, Kali is angry and destroys everything in her way. Consequently, you can use her when you feel disempowered and need to get your anger out. Some spiritual teachers suggested Kali for protection against scheming neighbors or abusive boyfriends, making her comically similar to a Catholic saint (albeit a destructive one).

Problem is, it’s quite difficult to establish a relationship with a caricature. I didn’t know Kali.

It was my meeting the Black Madonnas of Moiano and Montevergine in Southern Italy that introduced me to the Dark Feminine. To the Queen of the Underworld who is also the Queen of Heaven. That lady will not put up with nonsense.

I believe our archetypes of Divine Mother, and of the Divine Feminine in general, are quite distorted. This distortion is, incidentally, the reason why many women struggle with power and abundance. We have either Virgin Mary to look up to, pure and chaste and never touched by a man, or Lilith, the queen of the demons of hell. We can never be both, we can never be real.

Remember all those fairy tales with an evil stepmother? The good mother is always dead or away, and the evil stepmother is trying to destroy a beautiful young girl. But it is the “evil” stepmother who initiates the girl into adulthood.

What if the stepmother is just another face of the mother? What if Lillith and Eve both live within you? Surely you know how to both create and destroy — our wombs do that every month! We know how to bless and to curse with the same breath, we have been prostitutes and nuns and everything in between in our journey.

Kali, the Mother

When mother Teresa came to Kalighat to establish her temple for the dying, the local devotees came to believe that she was an incarnation of Kali. Yes, Kali herself.

Kali as Divine Mother is the Queen of the dead and the dying, she is the gateway into the underworld and a portal into another life. She is also a healer and a comforter. She is a destroyer and a birther of worlds in one.

This Kali is not the Mother in an echo chamber of comfortable positivity and spiritual bypassing, where all is “love and light”. Kali is dark and fertile, like volcanic earth, where the magma that once destroyed everything in its path has become the source of new life.

Kali as Divine Mother is real. Kali Maa is dark as the earth itself. Like a poppy seed that falls and dies, and then is born again to new life. To bloom into a poppy plant, a delicate flower that has comforted the suffering of millions upon millions and destroyed lives and dreams of thousands.

Kali is an initiatrix. She knows grief and pain, just as much as she knows the ecstasy of sensual pleasure and the abandon of love. Love, too, is death. Love, too, is life. Kali is love.

In the poetry of Ramprasad, Kali comes through as the Lover and the Beloved, the Creatrix that is beyond good and evil, and as close to the Unmanifest in her pregnant nothingness as we allow her to be:

Enchantress of hearts
Fresh as a lotus
Her movements are those of a swan…
At once form and formless, 
Kali is the letter K, 
Foundation of all that is. 
She is pleasure and liberation, 
Supreme abode and the one and only Name, 
Beyond that what else is there? 
In the heart where Kali watches 
Run the waters of the Ganges
And when the hour comes 
That heart which has become Eternal 
Laughs at death!