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¿Quien es Kali?

En occidente la diosa de la religion induhista, Kali o mejor dicho Kali-ma no tiene muy buena imagen, en parte por la historia de la secta de los extranguladores, pero en mayor parte por la imagen de Kali que se ha manejado en el cine de Hollywood.

Cierto que tambien la representacion de Kali es responsable, pues para los ojos de un occidental parece terrible y siniestra. Se le representa con 4 brazos, una espada ensangrentada y sosteniendo una cabeza cercenada, y con el pie en el pecho de su esposo, el dios Shiva (El dios de la destrucción). En cierta forma nos recuerda a loas dioses nahuas, como la diosa madre Coatlicue con su falda de craneos.

Los 4 brazos de Kali, representan el circulo completo de creación y destrucción, el cual esta contenido dentro de ella. Ella representa los ritmos de creación y destrucción inherentes en el cosmos.

Sus manos derechas, hacen los mudras de "no temas" y confieren votos, representando el aspecto creativo de Kali, en tanto que sus manos izquerdas, sostienen una espada ensangrentada y una cabeza cercenada. Estos representan la destrucción de la ignorancia y la llegada del conocimiento. La espada es la espada del conocimiento, que corta los nudos de la ignorancia y destruye la falsa conciencia (la cabeza cercenada).

Kali abre las puertas de la libertad con su espada, habiendo cortado los 8 lazos que retienen a los seres humanos. Finalmente sus tres ojos representan el sol, la luna y el fuego, con el cual ella es capaz de observar los tres modos del tiempo: pasado presente y futuro. Este atributo es el origen lde nombre de Kali, que es la forma femenina de "kala", que en sanscrito significa "el tiempo".

Shiva a sus pies, representa el pontencial pasivo de la creación. Asi Kali es su Shakti, o el principio femenino universal y la fuerza energizante de todas las divinidades masculinas, incluyendo a Shiva.

Asi, Kali es Kali ma, la madre Kali, la madre tiempo, la diosa obscura, el principio y fin de todo.

Como comentario de interes, abajo inlcuyo un fragmento de un articulo donde se critica la version de Spielberg en la pelicula Indiana Jones y el templo de la perdición. .

Me parecio importante , asi que en cuanto tenga tiempo libre proporcionare una traducción al español.

 

  The return of the Goddess in modern western culture is being experienced by different segments of the population on vastly different levels. To many people, the Goddess is a pleasant alternative to the authoritarian Father God of Judeo-Christianity. The Goddess is seen by these people as a loving Mother who is unconditionally giving and accepting. (Actually, that is a very radical step for our consciousness to take. Unconditional love is deeply subversive of the values upheld by the Patriarchy.) As powerful as this first step is, however, it is but the beginning of an exploration into the long-denied heart of the Goddess (and our own suppressed female psyches).

Those who have proceeded further along the path of Goddess worship speak of the "Dark Mother," who represents aspects of the Goddess which are sometimes frightening, painful and confusing. The Dark Mother is nothing less than the totality of our long denied self. If the Male principle is rational and "moral" and orderly and white, the Female principle is irrational, immoral/amoral, chaotic, and black. She is our very shadow, the much-feared "evil" which we spend enormous amounts of energy pretending not to know even exists. Books like Shakti Woman by Vickie Noble are now proliferating which deal with the process whereby we may come to terms with that long buried reality.

Among the various examples of the Dark Mother, Kali is possibly the most misunderstood. Thus, it should not come as a complete surprise that even a film-maker like Steven Spielberg, who has been in many ways a spokesman for the New Age (e.g. ET), should deal with Kali in a highly reactionary manner. In making Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Spielberg erected a temple to Misogyny. The film presents two images of Woman: Woman as Clown and Woman as Demon. The former is exemplified by Willie Scott, who is vain, acquisitive, childish, and lets a little boy put her in her place ("You call him 'Mr. Jones,' Doll!" says Short Round, a little boy who takes his masculinity seriously). Willie's pain and terror are not taken seriously by anybody. The viewer is encouraged to experience them as "comedy" and the other characters either don't notice or treat her cries of distress as "noise" (for example, the scene where she tries to mount the elephant and winds up facing backwards and the scene where unaccustomed to jungle sights and sounds, she panics). The latter image of Woman is presented by the Goddess, Kali-Ma, who is depicted more as demon than as Goddess. Spielberg takes some strange liberties with Hindu theology here; he can't or won't go beyond Christian polarities. Kali is made into a Hindu counterpart to Satan while the God, Shiva, is treated as a counterpart to Christ or (the good) God. All the "good" characters are on the side of Shiva and Indy even tells one of the villains that he will have to answer to Shiva in the next life. Kali provides the evil-doers with Satanic power (the dark light). They rob poor villagers of a sacred stone, causing poverty and desolation to descend upon them while kidnapping their children, whom they make into slaves. Such Christianization of the Hindu deities is particularly laughable in light of the fact that Shiva is Kali's consort. Tradition depicts him lying prostrate at Kali's feet, swooning in ecstasy (or dead). These evil Kali-worshippers are none other than members of the notorious "Thuggee" cult. The Thuggee are a real historic phenomenon. They were worshippers of Kali who actually practiced human sacrifice to the Goddess. As such, they are pointed to as examples of everything "evil" about Goddess worship. For example, William Schoebelen in "Wicca, Satan's Little White Lie,"1 makes much of the Thuggee and even refers to "Indiana Jones." He uses the propaganda of that movie as "proof" that Wicca (and all Goddess worship) is evil.

As strange as Spielberg's version of Hindu theology is, he takes some even stranger liberties with history by locating the Thuggee in a palace in Bangkok. The real Thugs were highwaymen, outlaws, who depended upon he predominance of food travel for their success in finding "victims." The advent of the railways in the 1800s seriously cramped their style, all but eliminating their power. Furthermore their method of execution was strangling, not fire in a fancy contraption, as Indiana Jones would have it. But more needs to be said about this strange phenomenon.

India is a predominantly Hindu nation. The Hinduism of today has a long and colorful history. For one thing, it is really the result of combining various other religious traditions and paths. Just as the England of today is the result of the intermingling of two peoples, the Norman aristocrats and the Celtic peasants, modern India is the result of two different populations coming together, the Aryans and the Dravidians. The Dravidians were the Goddess worshippers. The indigenous population, they were darker and shorter than the fair skinned Aryans who invaded. The Aryans brought with them their patriarchal culture, and imposed the caste system and their sense of racial superiority on the Dravidians.

Dravidians had a religious history going back many centuries. Jainism, Buddhism, and Yoga are some major traditions practiced by Dravidians. Both Buddhism and Hinduism are the sort of religions which have the capacity to absorb other traditions. Tantrism, which is usually regarded as part of Hinduism, is really a separate religion, according to Isaac Bonewits. "Tantrism survived (in India) by masquerading as a sect of Hinduism." It is "the system of yoni-worship, or female-centered sex worship, allegedly founded thousands of years ago in India by women of a secret sect called Vratyas. The primary object of its adoration was the lingam-yoni-Shiva and the Goddess Kali.

"It's entirely possible that in this reinstatement of the Goddess, both in the popular cults and in the deep philosophy of the Tantra, we have another sign of the resurgence of the religiosity of the non-Aryan matriarchal tradition of Dravidian times."

A Triple Godhead was set up as a counterpart to the triple goddess: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Of these three, Shiva, who is credited with the invention of Yoga, had originally been part of the Dravidian religion. There was a feeling on the part of those loyal to the "old religion" which worshipped Kali and Shiva that Brahma and Vishnu were "punks," not worthy to be put on a par with Shiva. The present pantheon of Hinduism was clearly a compromise, somewhat of a patching together of diverse theologies.

"Tantric yogis insisted that their supreme Shiva was the only god, and all the other gods were only inferior imitations of him. He was certainly older than the vedic heaven-gods... Shiva's worshippers may have been literally correct in viewing other gods as recent upstarts. Some of the scriptures claimed that Brahma and Vishnu were so puny that they couldn't even realize the limits of Shiva's cosmic lingam."

The Thuggee considered Brahams, the top caste, to be enemies of Kali. Sacrifices were taken exclusively from this group. Women were never sacrificed. Clearly, there is more to this "human sacrifice" business than actually meets the eye. It would seem that the Thuggee were actually engaged in a class war- or even an anti-imperialist war on class and national enemies. The Brahams represented the Aryans who invaded and imposed their religion on the Dravidians. The Dravidians were the underdogs. Their side of the fighting took the form of guerrilla warfare, highwaymen waiting to take the enemy by surprise. It is amazing that this political aspect to the subject of Kali worship and the Thuggee cult hasn't been more widely discussed and documented. But who is this Goddess who could inspire such dreadful acts (even if they were done to fight imperialism)?

As stated above, she is a Dark Goddess. The name, Kali, is th Hindu word for Black. She is usually depicted dancing on top of the lifeless form of Shiva. There's no getting away from it: Kali is not "nice." As ex-Wiccan Christian fundamentalist William Schnoebelen put it, she is "not the sort of girl you'd wish to bring home to mother."7 (Incredible that even an ex-Wiccan Goddess worshipper would think of the Goddess in such terms, isn't it?) No, Kali isn't a "girl" at all. Although she is a triple Goddess, she is far too powerful to imagine as anything less than a full-blooded woman embodying danger and mystery. Myth has it that Kali sprang from the brown of the Goddess Durga in the middle of a full-scale battle wherein Durga was fighting the demons, Mahisasura, Sumbha and Nishumba at the behest of the gods who had begged her to save them. Kali appeared black, naked (or draped in tiger skin), and "emaciated, wide-mouthed, lolling-tongued, with deep sunken red eyes."8 She severed the heads of Canda and Munda, servants of the demons. Then she took on the demon, Raktabija:

From the blood shed from his wounds sprang thousands of fresh combatants, representing the destructive masculine principle. To annihilate this archtypical power, Kali again and again drank the rakta-bija (the seed blood). This symbolic devouring represents the "taking possession of" or rendering harmless of an overpowering destructive element, a phallic power.9 From the stories can be seen the basically beneficent nature of Kali (and Durga) despite her terrifying image and her actual role as "destroyer." Not being dualistic, Wiccan and Paganism accept destruction as a natural and beneficial part of the whole. Kali is nothing less than a long denied, long forgotten aspect of our female self- our power to be "ugly;" to impose limitations just as Nature imposes mortality on everything which has a temporal existence on earth. We are no longer accustomed to associating the feminine with that kind of power. The Goddess has returned with a message of feminine power and Kali is the greatest expression of it. As such, we can expect her to continue to draw flack from the Spielbergs and the Schnoebelens. And we can consider it a tribute to the depth and breadth of her and our power.