Compendium · Goddess of Time, Death and Doomsday

Kali

Kali: the Hindu goddess of time, doomsday and death, and the most famous of the goddesses. She bursts from Durga's forehead in the Devi Mahatmya to fight the demon Raktabija, whose every drop of shed blood spawns a duplicate. Kali drinks the blood before it lands. A bestiary entry on her black skin, her garland of skulls, the god she stands on, and the Bengali festival held on the new moon night of Diwali.

Type: Goddess of Time, Death and Doomsday
Origin: Hindu (Shakta and Tantric tradition)
Period: First major textual appearance c. 600 CE (Devi Mahatmya); worshipped to the present

Her tongue is out and dripping blood. Around her neck hangs a garland of severed heads, fifty of them. A skirt of human arms swings from her waist. In one hand she holds a sword, in another a freshly cut head, and beneath her feet lies the body of a god, face up and calm. This is Kali, the most famous of the Hindu goddesses, and every detail of the image is a sentence in a theology that people keep reading wrong.

The Demon Who Multiplied

The story begins with a problem the gods could not solve. The demon Raktabija, whose name means Blood-Seed, could not be killed, because every drop of his blood that touched the ground grew into a new Raktabija. Strike him once and he became ten. The battlefield filled with copies of him, and the goddess Durga, fighting through the horde, grew so enraged that her fury detached from her body and took a shape of its own. Out of her forehead came Kali.

The new goddess went to work. She spread her vast tongue across the battlefield and drank Raktabija’s blood before it could fall, then swallowed the demon and every duplicate whole. The blood never reached the earth, and the demon who multiplied became the demon who was simply gone.

She did not stop. Kali danced on the corpses, wilder with every step, and her violence began to spill past the demons toward the world itself. The gods were helpless. So Shiva, her husband, walked into the middle of the carnage and lay down. Kali stepped on his chest, looked down, and saw who she was standing on. The frenzy broke.

Reading the Image

The scholar Wendy Doniger traces Kali’s ancestry to the dark deities of the oldest Vedic texts, a goddess called Ratri, Night, and another called Nirriti, feared as a destructive force. The name itself is the clue. Kali is the feminine of kala, a Sanskrit word that means time, doomsday, death, and black all at once. She is what time does to everything.

Her portrait is a catalogue of that idea. The black skin is the darkness before creation and after it. The severed heads and arms are her victories over the demons who opposed order. The sword is the cut that ends things, and the severed head she carries is the ego. In the Kalika Purana she is described differently, as perfectly beautiful and soothing dark, a reminder that the same goddess is both the destroyer and the mother.

The Mother of Bengal

Nowhere is the mother stronger than in Bengal, where Kali is Ma Kali, worshipped with a tenderness that surprises people who only know her skulls. Her festival, Kali Puja, falls on the new moon night that coincides with Diwali, and the city of Kolkata takes its name from her temple, the Kalighat, where the black goddess has been served for centuries. Devotion runs deepest in West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, and Jammu and Kashmir.

The first major appearance of Kali as a goddess in Sanskrit literature is the Devi Mahatmya, around 600 CE, the same text that established Durga. The word had appeared earlier, as a tongue of fire in an Upanishad, but the Goddess who stands on a god was born in that sixth century telling.

A Goddess Named for the End

Kali is easy to mistake for a demon, and that mistake is the point of her. She looks like the end of the world, and she is, but she is the end that clears the way for a beginning. The lion-headed Egyptian goddess Sekhmet nearly destroyed humanity and then healed it. Hecate stood at the crossroads and held torches against the dark. Kali drinks the blood so that no more demons are born from it. Each of them is the same figure in a different language: the destructive power that is also the protective one.

Did You Know?

The lolling tongue is not a sign of bloodlust. In the standard reading, Kali sticks her tongue out in surprise and embarrassment when she realises she has stepped on Shiva, her own husband. The fiercest image in the pantheon rests on a moment of shame.

The question Kali leaves open is the oldest one the site asks. Whether she is a goddess or a name for something in the world, the record is the same: a people who looked at time, saw that it devours, and chose to worship it rather than flatter themselves that they could win. She drinks the blood, the duplicates stop, and the world keeps turning. That is the whole of her mercy.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

Devi Mahatmya (Markandeya Purana, c. 6th century CE)
Kalika Purana
Wendy Doniger, ‘Kali’, Encyclopaedia Britannica
Mark Cartwright, ‘Kali’, World History Encyclopedia
Wikipedia, ‘Kali’ (citing David Kinsley)

Primary Sources

Devi Mahatmya (Markandeya Purana, c. 6th century CE)
Kalika Purana
Wendy Doniger, 'Kali', Encyclopaedia Britannica
Mark Cartwright, 'Kali', World History Encyclopedia
Wikipedia, 'Kali' (citing David Kinsley)

Protections

Worship of Kali as the Divine Mother, who protects devotees who approach her as a child
Tantric and Shakta practice, in which Kali is revered as ultimate reality (Brahman)

Related Beings

Demon Slayer

Durga

Earth Mother

Common Questions

Who is Kali in Hinduism?

Kali is the Hindu goddess of time, doomsday and death, and the most famous of the goddesses. She is the first of the ten Mahavidyas, goddesses of liberating knowledge. In the Shakta and Tantric traditions she is revered as the Divine Mother and as ultimate reality itself. Her first major appearance in Sanskrit literature is the Devi Mahatmya, around the sixth century CE.

Why does Kali stand on Shiva?

After she defeated the demon Raktabija, Kali’s fury became so great that she threatened to destroy the world. To stop her, Shiva lay down in her path, and she stepped on him. Her lolling tongue is read as surprise and embarrassment at having trampled her own husband. The image shows the goddess’s power, and the god who calms it.

Why is Kali shown with a garland of skulls and a skirt of arms?

The severed heads and arms are her trophies from the demon armies she destroyed. The garland of heads, often numbered at fifty, and the girdle of severed arms encode her victory over the forces that threaten cosmic order. The iconography, in the words of the scholar David Kinsley, makes Kali Durga’s personified wrath, her embodied fury.

Are Kali and the Kali Yuga the same thing?

No. Kali the goddess is a feminine noun from kala, time or black. The Kali Yuga is a masculine noun, the final dark age of the cosmic cycle, said to have begun with the Mahabharata war and to last 432,000 years. As a masculine noun, kali is also the losing throw in a game of dice. The goddess and the age share a name and a colour, nothing more.

Where is Kali worshipped today?

Throughout India, but devotion is strongest in West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, and Jammu and Kashmir. The Kalighat temple in Kolkata is her most famous shrine. In Bengal she is worshipped as Ma Kali, the Divine Mother, and the festival Kali Puja is held on the new moon night that coincides with Diwali.