As Bengal tells it
Bengali Shakta tradition · 2 min read
The demon Raktabija could not be killed, because every drop of his blood that touched the ground stood up as another Raktabija. The more the goddess wounded him, the more of him there were, until the whole battlefield was full of him.
So she sent out Kali from her own forehead, black as a night with no moon, with a garland of heads and a skirt of cut-off arms, and Kali opened her mouth wide and caught every drop of his blood before it could fall, and drank it, and ate the demons as they were born, until there was only one Raktabija left, and no blood in him, and he fell.
Then Kali began to dance.
She had drunk too much blood. She danced on the field among the dead, and the earth shook under her feet, and the mountains cracked, and the sea came up over the land. She did not stop when the demons were gone. She did not seem to know they were gone.
The gods came running to Shiva.
"She will break the world," they said. "Nobody can go near her. Stop her."
"Nobody can stop her," said Shiva. "But she may stop herself."
He went down to the battlefield and lay down on the ground among the dead bodies, on his back, with his eyes shut, in the path of her dance.
Kali came dancing across the field, and her foot came down on his chest.
She looked down. She saw who it was under her foot: her own husband, lying there like a corpse. The dance stopped. Her tongue came out between her teeth, the way a Bengali woman bites her tongue when she has done something she should not.
Shiva opened his eyes and looked up at her.
"Are you finished?" he said.
She stood there with her foot on him and her tongue between her teeth and her sword still in her hand, and the blood went out of her eyes, and she was herself again.
That is how she is shown in a thousand Bengali shrines: black, four-armed, a sword and a cut head in her left hands, her right hands raised to bless and to say do not be afraid, her hair loose, her tongue out, and one foot on Shiva's chest, who lies under her pale as ash.
Bengal reads the picture another way too. In Bengali, Shiva without the little vowel that is his Shakti becomes shava, a dead body. The god without the goddess has no life of his own. She is not standing on her husband; she is standing on what he would be without her. In that reading the tongue is not shame at all, and the picture is not of a wife who forgot herself but of the power that wakes the god.