Kali: Cutting Away
The following three-part series was created as a result of a class I took in Spring 2010 at CIIS called Queering the Sacred, which was taught by Dr. Randy Conner.
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Introduction
The Great Mother Kali is a manifestation of Shakti[1], who queers the boundaries of gender, sexuality, and spirituality. She obliterates traditional gender roles, demands a radical sacrifice of the status quo, and destroys all that stands in the way of illumination. I had no choice in my introduction to Kali. She was literally forced upon me in my adolescence through the conceited actions of heteronormative, Christocentric chaperones charged with my care during a summer mission trip to Kolkata, India. For many years my conception of Kali was through a lens of fear and dread. She radically shook my worldview through blood sacrifice of which I had no context, let alone forewarning, through which to understand her power and purpose.
Twenty-two years after my first encounter with Kali, I was finally able to contextualize her fierceness, while finding her absolute relevance within my own life. This paper will consider the various ways in which I have known and am learning to understand the Dark Goddess Kali. I will explore the ways in which she has enacted sacred destruction in my life in order to help me discover freedom from illusion. I will examine the ways in which her acts of destruction have manifested radical transformation and regeneration in my life. I will discuss how Kali queers the sacred by fiercely living on the edge of that which is conventional and socially acceptable. And finally, I will talk about how her queering of gender through the manifestation and joining of Shiva and Shakti speaks to me personally.
The Blood of a Goat
From the ages of eight to eighteen, I was a devoted Christian and attended Calvary Temple—an Assemblies of God church. During the summer of 1989 I participated in a mission trip with my church youth group. This was a three-week trip to Israel, Egypt, and, our main destination, to work with the Assemblies of God missionary of Kolkata (formally Calcutta), India started by the late Mark Buntain and his wife Huldah.
At the time of the mission trip I was just sixteen years old. I was a shy, awkward, follower who was painfully self-conscious, and had no self-esteem to speak of. Our church youth pastor, Pastor Steve, enjoyed the use of shock value as a method through which to deliver his message of salvation. This mission trip proved to be his most radical and influential. On one of our days in Kolkata, Pastor Steve and one of the missionaries decided to take our group to one of the smaller temples honoring the goddess Kali. Neither Pastor Steve, nor our missionary guide forewarned us about where we were going or that we were here for a Puja[2] nor what we were about to experience. The missionary paraded our group around the exterior of the Kali temple. I was alarmed by the sewer system, which consisted of deep grooves in the street through which streams of blood and urine flowed by. As we walked past an open doorway on the first side of the temple, the missionary told us that people have been known to go into the temple and never be seen again. He further explained that found upon the altar were human skulls, many of which were those of children. As we completed our parade around the exterior of the temple, we were stopped in front of a guillotine of which I found myself foremost in front of. As if it were choreographed to our arrival, deep base drums began to play at a frenetic pace. I noticed two men walked towards the guillotine with a goat. I tried to ask Pastor Steve or any of the other chaperones what was going on, but no one would answer me. Before I had the chance to say another word the two men wrangled the goat into the guillotine and chopped off its head. Worshippers rushed forward to dip their hands in the blood. They in turn ran it through their hair and put a Bindi or a Tilak[3] on their foreheads. The two men then picked up the body of the goat—still kicking and convulsing—and brought it over to a small, covered stand. One of the men then proceeded to reach directly down the neck of the goat and pull out its innards, which several of the worshippers ate. I was in complete horror and shock. At that moment, I happened to glance down at my shoes and realized they were spattered with blood.
The missionary finally decided to usher our group out of the area and back towards our bus. I could not handle to pleas of the seemingly countless children begging our entirely Caucasian group for money. I shook of their touch as they reached out, pleading for anything we could spare. My trust and innocence had been ripped from me and in that moment, everyone and everything felt of absolute evil. As we were piled into the bus, Pastor Steve asked the group if we wanted to go to one of the mass crematoria. He explained to us that, in Kolkata, crematoria were essentially dumps for dead bodies in which they would open-air cremate large piles of the deceased. I could not fathom his desire to take us there, but for the first time in my life I found my own voice and spoke out. Perhaps it was in that moment, that I unknowingly first embraced the radical cutting away power of Kali as I made my emphatic declaration that I would not be going.
It was just two years later that I left the church that had been my primary community throughout adolescence. Shortly after that time, I walked away from Christianity all together. I would, however, hold this distorted view of Kali for many years to come.
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[1] A Hindu conceptualization of cosmic power or energy.
[2] A Hindu act of worship.
[3] Bindi or KumKum for women and Tilak for men. Milan Sandhu, “Bindi!” Highlights for Children, June 2005, 8.