Kali

The name Kali appears early, but not as a goddess. The Mundaka Upanishad names Kali and Karali, the black one and the terrible one, among the seven flickering tongues of the sacrificial fire. The Vedic hymn to Ratri, the night, already pictures a dark goddess, but a gentle one.

In the Mahabharata a black, grinning goddess called Kalaratri, the night of time, appears to the soldiers in the Sauptika Parva on the night Ashvatthama slaughters the sleeping camp, leading them away with a noose. She is the shape of death coming.

The Kali of the stories is born in the Devi Mahatmya, around the sixth century, in its seventh chapter, from the brow of the angry goddess. The later Puranas, the Linga, the Kalika and the Devi Bhagavata, gave her her own myths, and the Tantric traditions made her the highest of the ten great wisdom goddesses, the Mahavidyas, with her worship in the burning ground. In the Tamil country she met an older goddess of war and the wilderness, Korravai of the Sangam poems, and the two became hard to tell apart; Kali shrines still stand at the edges of southern villages, facing outwards.

Her gentle form, the one Bengal loves, is later. Bengal's own tradition credits the sixteenth century Tantric scholar Krishnananda Agamavagisha with the image of Dakshina Kali most shrines now use. In the eighteenth century the poet Ramprasad Sen sang songs to her as Ma that Bengal still sings, and in the nineteenth Ramakrishna served her at Dakshineswar and spoke of her as the Mother of the universe. Through his followers, and Swami Vivekananda, that Kali became known across the world.