The Goddess Who Stepped Beyond Anger: The Emergence of Kali

Kali (Kālī) is one of the most striking figures in Hindu tradition: a dark, fierce goddess with a lolling red tongue and a garland of severed heads. This article tells the story of how she first appears in the Devi Mahatmya — leaping out of the forehead of the great goddess in the middle of a battle — and then follows the later, much-loved story of Kali stepping on Shiva. Along the way it explains her names, her appearance, and how the tradition understands a goddess who looks so terrifying yet is worshipped as a mother.

The setting: a war for the three worlds

The Devi Mahatmya (Devī Māhātmya, “The Greatness of the Goddess”) is a Sanskrit text of thirteen chapters, preserved within the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa and recited widely as the Durgā Saptaśatī or Caṇḍī. It tells three battles in which the Goddess saves the world. Kali appears in the third.

In that episode two asura (demon) brothers, Shumbha and Nishumbha, have seized the three worlds — heaven, earth and the underworld — and driven out the gods. The gods pray to the Goddess, and she appears as a radiant, beautiful figure called Ambika or Chandika (Caṇḍikā, “the fierce one”). Many readers simply call her Durga — the great goddess who, in the earlier episode of the text, was formed from the concentrated power of every deity in the cosmos. (A telling of that earlier episode is on AdiVeda as The Goddess Born from Every God’s Power.)

Shumbha hears of her beauty and sends a proposal of marriage. She replies that she has vowed to marry only someone who defeats her in battle. Insulted, the demon kings send force instead. Their general Dhumralochana goes first and is destroyed. Then Shumbha and Nishumbha send two more commanders, Chanda and Munda, with vast armies, terrible weapons and the confidence of beings who had never been defeated, to drag her back by force.

Why her fury took a separate form

When Chanda and Munda advanced on the goddess, seated on her lion on a golden peak of the Himalaya, her anger rose. The Devi Mahatmya says that her face grew dark with wrath — “black as ink” in many translations — and from her furrowed brow sprang Kali.

It is as if the fury was so total that it exceeded what her current form could contain, and had to step out as a being of its own. Kali leaped from Durga’s forehead.

The text describes her vividly:

• her skin dark, and her body gaunt and emaciated;
• a gaping, fearsome mouth and a lolling red tongue;
• deep-sunk, reddened eyes;
• a sword and a noose in her hands, and a staff topped with a skull (khaṭvāṅga);
• a garland of human heads and a tiger skin for clothing.

She filled the directions with a terrible roar. Later paintings and temple images build on this description, often giving her four arms, wild, loose hair and a skirt of severed arms.

What she did to the army

She fell on the demon army. She ate them — this is the verb the text uses. She seized elephants with their riders and bells and flung them into her mouth, crushed chariots and horses, caught weapons in her teeth. Her hunger was not ordinary appetite but purpose: the total elimination of what needed to be eliminated.

Chanda and Munda themselves she slew. She seized Chanda by the hair and cut off his head, and Munda fell the same way. Then she brought their heads to the goddess as an offering, laughing. Chandika gave her a new name in return: Chāmuṇḍā, from Chanda and Munda — the one who destroyed them. The chapter is read as the Chaṇḍa-Muṇḍa Vadha, the seventh chapter of the Durga Saptashati.

Kali’s part in the war is not over. In the next chapter she is called upon again against Raktabija, a demon from each drop of whose spilled blood a new demon springs. Kali spreads her mouth across the battlefield and drinks the blood before it can touch the ground. That story is told in Raktabija and Kali.

Shiva beneath her foot: the later story

The Devi Mahatmya ends Kali’s role with the defeat of the demons. But the image most people know — Kali standing on Shiva, tongue out — comes from a story that is not in the Devi Mahatmya. It grew up in later tradition and is especially beloved in Bengal and eastern India. It is usually attached to the aftermath of the war, often to the killing of Raktabija. Versions differ, but the outline runs like this.

Kali, having been born from fury, had difficulty stopping. Intoxicated by battle, she moved across the field in a wild dance, consuming everything in her path — demon armies first, but her energy did not distinguish carefully when it was in full expression. The three worlds trembled. Even the gods who had called forth the goddess were alarmed at where this was going.

So Shiva lay down in her path.

When Kali’s foot came down on Shiva — on her own husband, on the god whose presence is the ground of her power — she stopped. Not because she was overcome by force; in the tradition, nothing in the three worlds can overcome Kali by force. She stopped because recognition broke through her fury. She looked down, saw who she was standing on, and the wildness drained from her. Her tongue came out in the gesture that every devotee knows from the image.

Why the tongue is out

The extended tongue is read in more than one way:

• Embarrassment. In the popular Bengali reading, Kali bites her tongue in shame at having stepped on her husband — an everyday gesture of “oh no, what have I done” in that region. In this reading the tongue means not ferocity but recognition: the moment when the energy that transcends all limits meets the one limit that matters, love.
• Hunger for evil. Following the Devi Mahatmya, the red tongue recalls the goddess who drank Raktabija’s blood and consumed the demon armies.
• Tantric readings. In some Tantric interpretations the pair represents Shakti (dynamic power) standing on Shiva (pure, still consciousness): energy moving over the unmoving ground that makes it possible.

So in the image, the battlefield is still, the war is won, and the goddess who cannot be stopped stands with the still centre of the universe beneath her feet.

What her name means

Kali is not, in the tradition, simply a goddess of destruction. Her name is read two ways, both drawn from the Sanskrit word kāla: “black” and “time”. She is Mahakali, Great Time — the force older than creation that will outlast it, the darkness before the first light and the darkness after the last. Time devours everything, and so does she.

But she is also the mother in her most absolute form — the mother who will destroy anything that threatens her children, and who is brought back by recognising what she loves. In Bengal she is affectionately called simply Ma, “Mother”.

How she is approached

Devotees who approach Kali often describe a relationship unlike the comfortable devotion given to gentler deities. The emphasis is on radical honesty: because she is understood to see through everything, one offers her what is real rather than what is merely pleasing. Her devotional poetry, above all in Bengal, is full of this directness — devotees argue with her, plead with her and call her by intimate names.

In this understanding, she receives the stripped-down truth of a person and destroys what needs to go and preserves what needs to remain. The skulls and severed heads of her iconography are commonly read in this light — as the ego and false identities cut away — though they are also, simply, the demons of the story.

Kali is honoured at great temples such as Kalighat and Dakshineswar in Kolkata, and in eastern India her main festival, Kali Puja, is celebrated on the new-moon night that coincides with Diwali elsewhere.

From an aspect of Durga to the first Mahavidya

One further thing about this moment, since it is the one that matters most for everything Kālī later becomes. In the Devi Mahatmya she is not an independent goddess: she comes out of Chandika’s forehead as an aspect of her, does the work, and is not given a separate cult. The Tantric literature that develops afterwards reverses that entirely and places Kālī first among the ten Mahavidyas — the head of a group in which Durga does not appear at all. The forehead she emerged from is, in the later tradition, no longer where she lives.

The ten Mahavidyas (“great wisdom goddesses”) are a set of ten forms of the Goddess worshipped especially in Tantric traditions, each associated with a different aspect of reality and of spiritual practice. AdiVeda’s overview of the ten Mahavidyas sets out that second tradition and what each of the ten is for.

Where this story comes from

• Devi Mahatmya (Durga Saptashati), chapter 7: Kali’s emergence from the goddess’s brow, the destruction of Chanda and Munda, and the name Chamunda. Chapter 8: the battle with Raktabija.
• Later devotional and Tantric tradition, particularly in Bengal: the story of Kali stepping on Shiva and the reading of her tongue as embarrassment. This episode is not found in the Devi Mahatmya, and its details vary between tellings.
• Tantric literature: Kali as the first of the ten Mahavidyas.

Read on AdiVeda

• Durga Saptashati — Adhyāya 7 (Chanda-Munda Vadha) — the chapter this story comes from.
• The Demon Who Could Not Die: Raktabija and Kali
• The Goddess Born from Every God’s Power
• Kali — hymns, mantras and texts to Kali published on AdiVeda.
• The ten Mahavidyas