Kali Ma

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It's very hard for Westerners to grasp Kali's nature. Among other things, Her name is used to refer to spacetime, the basic fabric of physical reality; Her intensely black skin signifies outer space, and Her nature as the great Mother Goddess signifies the way in which everything in our universe, ourselves included, is wrapped in and an integral part of spacetime. Intensely destructive when battling the enemies of life, the demons and evil spirits that menace everything alive, She is also the ultimate loving mother. She and Her consort, Shiva, are often pictured with Kali having just cut off Her consort's head; but notice that in those representations Shiva is smiling, and that what His decapitation represents is the cutting off of the conscious, rational mind, allowing the instinctive nature to achieve dominance -- as in the sex act, when a man can be rendered half-unconscious by a powerful orgasm brought about by a skilled sexual partner. In Their sexual congress, Kali and Shiva represent eclipses of the Sun and Moon; Kali's dominance represents a total eclipse of the Sun, while Shiva's dominance represents a total eclipse of the Moon. The light of the Sun represents daylight, rational consciousness, while that of the Moon represents the instinctive mind, which comes to prominence among the shadows of the period between sunset and dawn. Kali Ma, the Great Mother, represents the primordial, those parts of ourselves and our universe that came into existence before all else, and provide the matrix in which all things take place. Her many arms and legs in relatively modern representations of Her may have originated as a style meant to show motion in a static, two-dimensional medium; in Her divine dance and in battle, She moves so quickly, and has such great mastery of countless different weapons and combat techniques and dance techniques that She seems to be moving infinitely quickly, so that we see Her simultaneously in numerous poses. While Her skin is said to be jet-black, She is represented in paintings and sculpture with sky-blue skin; that color is also that of the Japanese concept of Void, the endless, open sky out of which all things come, and so it also represents spacetime. She is our defender and protector, the loving Great Mother who nurtures and cherishes all life, including humanity as well as any other life-form, and while Her warlike aspect terrifies us, Her love enwraps the whole living world in Her mantle of nuturance and protectiveness.