Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Interlude XLVI. Foucault - part 24
From "Blood and Death Out of Place":
Reflections on the Goddess Kali - David R. Kinsley
(in The Divine Consort: Radha and the Goddesses of India edited by Hawley and Wulff, (Beacon Press)
Before we begin, I want to remind you of something I wrote much earlier in a different context. I interpret Hindu goddesses as aspects of the feminine, not as South Asian versions of Greek goddesses -- that you might imagine hanging about Mt Olympus (or maybe Annapurna) causing trouble. This approach, as you will see, works perfectly with Kali.
And a word on accents: As you may have noticed, I use proper European accents on occasion but mostly not. I do not deny the value of accents as a guide to pronunciation, but (rationalization follows) they have no value in reducing linguistic entropy, so I’m not killing myself to always employ them. All this gets much much worse with the languages of the sub-continent, and I’m following the same (easier for me) path of ignoring the multitude of accents that should buzz about many of these words like mouches above merde. Plus, I have no chance of pronouncing these words correctly with or without the accents. Long Live English!
p144
... Though most popular today in Bengal, she [Kali] has been known in Hindu religious texts for more than 1,500 years and has been worshiped at one time or another throughout the Indian subcontinent...
...Hindu texts referring to the goddess are nearly unanimous in describing her as terrible in appearance and as offensive and destructive in her habits. Her hair is disheveled, her eyes red and fierce, she has fangs and a long lolling tongue, her lips are often smeared with blood, her breasts are long and pendulous, her stomach is sunken, and her figure is generally gaunt. She is naked but for several characteristic ornaments: a necklace of skulls or freshly cut heads, a girdle of severed arms, and infant corpses as earrings. She is usually said to have four arms. The upper left hand holds a bloodied cleaver, the lower left hand, a freshly cut human head; the upper right hand makes the sign “fear not,” and the lower right hand, the sign of conferring boons.
p145
Her habits and associations reinforce her awful appearance. Her two favorite dwelling places are battlefields and cremation grounds. On the battlefield she is usually said to carry a skull-topped staff, to howl ferociously, and to consume her enemies by eating their flesh and drinking their blood. In the cremation ground she is described as being surrounded by snakes, jackals, and ghosts and is often described as sitting on a corpse... although Kali’s temples today may be found in the midst of cities and towns, her temples in earlier literature are described as being located on the fringes of civilization, in the woods or near cremation grounds. Kali also has a long history of association with criminals and is notorious for having been the patron goddess of the murdurous (sic) Thugs...
...In these myths Kali seems to be Durga’s [another Hindu goddess] embodied fury, appearing when Durga loses control or is confronted with a formidable task.
p146
[In a different myth] ...In general, Parvati is a benign goddess, but from time to time she manifests destructive aspects. When she does, Kali is often brought into being... It would seem that in the process of Parvati’s gearing up for war, Kali has appeared as Parvati’s wrath personified, her alter-ego as it were...
In her association with the god Siva [Shiva], Kali’s tendency to wildness and disorder, although sometimes tamed or softened by him, persists, and at times she incites Siva himself to dangerous, destructive behavior...
p147
...we find references or images that show Siva and Kali in situations where either or both behave in disruptive ways, inciting each other, or in which Kali in her wild activity dominates an inactive, sometimes dead Siva.
The former type of relationship is seen when the two are described as dancing together in such a way that they threaten cosmic order. In Bhavabhuti’s Malatimadhava the divine pair are said to dance wildly near the goddess’s temple, which is located near a cremation ground. Their dance is so chaotic that it threatens to destroy the world. Parvati is described as standing nearby, frightened. Here the scenario is not that of a dance contest but one of a mutually destructive dance in which the two deities incite each other...
In iconographic representations of Kali and Siva, Kali nearly always dominates the pair. She is usually shown standing or dancing on Siva’s prone body... and when they are depicted in sexual intercourse, she is shown above him...
p148
In general, then, we may say that Kali is a goddess who threatens stability and order... more often than not she becomes so frenzied on the battlefield, usually becoming drunk on the blood of her victims, that she herself begins to destroy the world that she is supposed to protect. Even in the service of gods, that is, she is ultimately dangerous and tends to get out of control. In her association with other goddesses she appears to represent their embodied wrath and fury, a frightening, dangerous dimension of the divine feminine that is released when these goddesses become enraged or are called upon to take part in war and killing. In her relationship to Siva she appears to play the opposite role from that of Parvati. Parvati calms Siva, counterbalancing his antisocial and destructive tendencies. It is she who brings Siva within the sphere of domesticity and who, with her soft glances, urges him to soften the destructive aspects of his tandava dance. Kali is Siva’s “other” wife, as it were, provoking him and encouraging him to his mad, antisocial, often disruptive habits. It is never Kali who tames Siva but Siva who must becalm Kali. Her association with criminals reinforces her dangerous role vis-a-vis society. She is at home outside the moral order and seems to be unbound by that order.
p150
... She is almost always associated with blood and death, and it is difficult to imagine two more polluting realities in the context of the purity-minded culture of Hinduism. As such, Kali is a very dangerous being. She vividly and dramatically thrust upon the observer things that he or she would rather not think about. Within the civilized order of Hinduism, the order of dharma, of course, blood and death are acknowledged. It is impossible not to acknowledge their existence in human life. They are acknowledge, however, within the context of a highly ritualized, patterned, and complex social structure that takes great pains to handle them in “safe” ways, usually through rituals of purification...
p152
Kali puts the order of dharma in perspective, perhaps puts it in its place, by reminding the Hindu that certain aspects of reality are untameable, unpurifiable, unpredictable, and always threatening to society’s feeble attempts to order what is essentially disorderly: life itself.
To her devotees Kali is known as the divine mother. In the light of what I have said, I would suggest that she is mother to her devotees because she gives birth to a wider vision of reality than the one embodied in the order of dharma. The dharmic order is insufficient and restrictive without a context, without a frame, as it were. Kali frames that order of dharma, as maya, prakrti, and sakti out of control, as death and blood out of place, Kali makes that order attractive indeed.
Yet the wider vision that she presents may be understood in a more positive way as well. The Hindu religious tradition consistently affirms a reality that transcends the social order. From the perspective of moksa, final release from the endless round of births and deaths, the order of dharma is seen as a contingent good, a realm that must finally be left behind in the quest for ultimate good. Standing outside the dharmic order, indeed threatening it, Kali may be understood in a positive way as she who beckons humans to seek a wider, more redemptive vision of their destiny.
Depending upon where one is in one’s spiritual pilgrimage, then, Kali has the power either to send one scuttling back to the womb of dharma or to provoke one over the threshold to moksa. In either role she might be understood as the mother who gives her children shelter.
Wow! I can’t believe how apropos this turned out to be.
From Philosophies of India by Heinrich Zimmer
(Princeton University Press)
Who Seeks Nirvana?
p560
...in Hinayana [Buddhist] usage the term bodhisattva denoted a great being on the point of becoming a Buddha and so passing from time to nirvana, an archetype of the Buddhist lay-initiate escaping from the world, whereas in the Mahayana [also Buddhist] the concept was translated into a time-reaffirming symbol of universal saviorship. Through renouncing Buddhahood the Bodhisattva made it clear that the task of moksa, “release, liberation, redemption from the vicissitudes of time,” was not the highest good; in fact, that moksa is finally meaningless, samsara and nirvana being equally of the nature of sunyata, “emptiness, the void.” In the same spirit the Hindu Tantric initiate exclaims: “Who seeks nirvana? “What is gained by moksa?” “Water mingles with water.”
p561
... And with respect to the ideal of becoming annihilate in Brahman, he [Sri Ramakrishna] would sometimes say, quoting the poet Ramprasad, “I love to eat sugar, I do not want to become sugar.”
The Mahayana Bodhisattva tastes unending saviorship by devoting himself with absolute selflessness to his teaching task in the vortex of the world; in the same spirit, the Hindu Tantric initiate, by persevering in the dualistic attitude of devotion (bhakti), enjoys without cease the beatitude of the knowledge of the omnipotence of the Goddess.
Note that this book addresses just the Kali-centric version of Hindu Tantra practiced in West Bengal. The link above covers other forms of Tantra and this link covers even more.
“The Divine Mother revealed to me in the Kali temple that it was She who had become everything,” Sri Ramakrishna told his friends. “She showed me that everything was full of Consciousness. The Image was Consciousness, the altar was Consciousness, the water-vessels were Consciousness, the door-sill was Consciousness, the marble floor was Consciousness -- all was Consciousness... I saw a wicked man in front of the Kali temple; but in him also I saw the Power of the Divine Mother vibrating. That was why I fed a cat with the food that was to be offered to the Divine Mother.”
The word “vibrating” here works so well with the String theory concept of Cosmic music that I can hardly stand it. Ignoring that random bit about the cat (could it have been Schroedinger’s cat?) Ramakrishna, as I recall from first reading this decades ago, is very interesting but he also stands in the position of Parvati with respect to Kali and the Tantric philosophy he is supposed to be espousing: he tries to tone it down and make it safer and more palatable to (patriarchal) social standards. If he were a disciple of Bataille and Foucault he would be busy formulating a PG rated version of the transgressive -- appropriate for the whole family.
...”But the bhaktas [unlike the followers of Vedanta philosophy] accept all the states of consciousness. They take the waking state to be real also. They don’t think the world to be illusory, like a dream. They say that the universe is a manifestation of God’s power and glory...
p564
“The Primordial Power is ever at play. She is creating, preserving, and destroying in play, as it were. This Power is called Kali. Kali is verily Brahman, and Brahman is verily Kali. It is one and the same Reality. When we think of It as inactive, that is to say, not engaged in the acts of creation, preservation, and destruction, then we call It Brahman. But when It engages in these activities, then we call it Kali or Sakti. The Reality is one and the same; the difference is in name and form.”
This introductory exposition of the Tantric point of view was given on the deck of a little excursion-steamer, sailing up and down the Ganges, one beautiful autumn afternoon in 1882... Keshab Chandra Sen (1838-84) [the person Ramakrishna was speaking to]... was a modern, occidentalized Hindu gentleman, with a cosmopolitan outlook, and a sattvic, humanistic, progressive religious philosophy -- not unlike that of his New England contemporary, the Transcendentalist (and student of the Bhagavad Gita), Ralph Waldo Emerson...
I have to say something somewhere here about how Kali, in Tantra, has been blown-up so far out of her traditional role as the manifestation of goddesses in a crazy mood. Viewing goddesses as the shakti (vital energy) of a god/goddess pair (often actually a god paired with three goddesses... no wonder they go all Kali on Shiva) is pretty standard (this is a bit like the Western bromide that “behind every great man there are three great women.” It’s also a cunning way to marry goddess and god dominated cults so that the adherents of each cult see the relative status of the genders in the way that suites them), but Tantra seems, from my limited knowledge of the subject, to take a concept expressed in a single passage of the Bhagavad Gita -- where Krishna sets prince Arjuna straight about there being no real distinction between Vishnu and Shiva (and so presumably Brahma as well)...
Here is a better statement of this idea:
Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, the triple gods of Hinduism, are different in a limited sense only. They are considered manifestations of the same Supreme Isvara, who is also known as the Saguna Brahman or the awakened or dynamic Brahman...
...and then Tantra not only rolls the Big Three Hindu gods into just Shiva but also has Kali stand for the entire army of Hindu goddesses. Why Kali? I imagine because no one in their right mind is going to mess with her. But -- and it really has been decades since i read this -- I expect to find here that “Kali” will have been expanded to incorporate aspects of some of her sister goddesses. Frankly, I don’t see the point to this monotheistic-ation of the goddesses.
p566
...”After the creation the Primal Power [Kali, the Divine Mother, the Embodiment of Brahman] dwells in the universe itself. She brings forth this phenomenal world and then pervades it, In the Vedas creation is likened to the spider and its web. The spider brings the web out of itself and then remains in it. God is the container of the universe and also what is contained in it.”
I’m just including that as an excellent statement of the monistic/pantheistic Hindu conception of reality. I prefer the Devi dreaming expression of the same idea.
p568
...The Tantric development supported the return to power in popular Hinduism of the figure of the Mother Goddess of the innumerable names -- Devi, Durga, Kali, Parvati, Uma, Sti, Padma, Candi... whose cult, rooted in the Neolithic past, had been overshadowed for a period of about a thousand years by the male divinities of the patriarchal Aryan pantheon... “God Himself,” states Ramakrishna, “is Mahamaya ["the name of the ultimate Shapeless form of the Divine supreme mother Goddess Adi Parashakti Durga and Mahakali." -Wiki], who deludes the world with Her illusion and conjures up the magic of creation, preservation, and destruction. She has spread this veil of ignorance before our eyes. We can go into the inner chamber only when She lets us pass through the door.” It is 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, pre-Aryan, matriarchal tradition of Dravidian times...
p570
...The world is the unending manifestation of the dynamic aspect of the divine, and as such should not be devalued and discarded as suffering and imperfection, but celebrated, penetrated by enlightened insight, and experienced with understanding... The Vedantic yoga never tires of stating that... “isolation-integration,” can be attained only by turning away from the distracting allure of the world and worshiping with single-pointed attention the formless Brahman-Atman; to the Tantric, however -- as to the normal child of the world -- this notion seems pathological, the wrong-headed effect of a certain malady of intellect... Let those who suffer from the toils of samsara seek release: the perfect devotee does not suffer; for he can both visualize and experience life and the universe as the revelation of that Supreme Divine Force (Sakti) with which he is in love, the all-comprehensive Divine Being in its cosmic aspect of playfull, aimless display... which precipitates pain as well as joy, but in its bliss transcends them both...
p571
Artha (prosperity), kama (the fulfillment of sensual desires), dharma (the enactment of the religious and moral rituals of everyday life, with an acceptance of the burden of all the duties), and moksa (release from it all) are one. The polarity of moksa and the trivarga is transcended and dissolved not in introverted realization alone, but in living feeling as well. By virtue of his talent of love for the merciful Goddess, the true devotee discovers that the fourfold fruit of artha, kama, dharma, and moksa falls into the palm of his hand.
p572
“Come, let us go for a walk, O mind, to Kali, the Wish-fulfilling Tree,” wrote Ramprasad; “And there beneath It gather the four fruits of life.” “The mind ever seeks the Dark Beautiful One,” he states again. “Do as you wish. Who wants Nirvana?”
Tantrism, as a matter of course, insists on the holiness and purity of all things; hence the “five forbidden things” (“the five M’s,” as they are called) constitute the substance of the sacramental fare in certain Tantric rites: wine (madya), meat (mamsa), fish (matsya), parched grain (mudra), and sexual intercourse (maithuna)...
p573
...The Tantric ritual of wine, meat, fish, parched grain, and sexual intercourse is accomplished not as a lawbreaking revel [transgressive], but under the cautious supervision of a guru, in a controlled state of “nondualist” (advaitic) realization, and as the culminating festival of a long sequence of spiritual disciplines, through many lives. The spiritual emotion of the adept is prema: ecstatic, egoless, beatific bliss in the realization of transcendent identity.
Sound familiar? The talk about “dualism” here makes me wonder to what extent Foucault (and Miller) are talking about dualism and not individuation when they talk about “separation”? And, while I’m at it, why is this -- derived from, and even salted with, Sanskrit -- so much clearer than the writings (or at least the translations of the writings) of all those twentieth century intellectuals? To the point where even they (as Foucault admitted about Lacan) don’t always know what their fellow elite intellectual is talking about. I may have already pointed out that even Hume is not much better in this respect.
p574
Coming down again from this sublime height of form-annihilating realization to the kingdom of phenomenality, differentiation is seen but there is no estrangement; there is no tendency then to deprecate -- for there is no guilt, there has been no Fall. The world does not require to be reformed; nor are its laws to be disregarded. All of the various planes of manifestation of the absolute can be beheld in a dispassionate spirit... the whole spectacle of the world, without exception, is generated by the dynamism of Maya-Sakti, the power of the cosmic dance (lila) of the dark and terrible, sublime, all-nourishing and -consuming Mother of the World. The beings of the world, and all the ranges of experience, are but waves and strata in a single, ever-flowing, universal stream of life...
Almost every sentence quoted here was highlighted when I first read this decades ago. I mention this because they proved to be the passages that best respond to, or at least interact with, the content of the Foucault book, but also because I had forgotten how much of this I internalized.
Also, I just now noticed where Robert Persig got the title of his book I like so much, and of the titulary female character of that book, Lila, or “the cosmic dance.”
p576
It is an essential principle of the tantric idea that man, in general, must rise through and by means of nature, not by the rejection of nature... The pleasure of love, the pleasure of human feeling, is the bliss of the Goddess in her world-productive dance, the bliss of Siva and his Sakti in their eternal realization of identity; only as known in the inferior mode of ego-consciousness. The creature of passion has only to wash away his sense of ego, and then the same act that formerly was an obstruction becomes the tide that bears him to the realization of the absolute as bliss (ananda). Moreover, this tide of passion itself may become the baptizing water by which the taint of ego-consciousness is washed away. Following the Tantric method, the hero (vira) floats beyond himself on the roused but canalized current. This is what has discredited the method in the eyes of the community. Its heroic acceptance, without quibble, of the full impact and implication of the nondual celebration of the world as Brahman has seemed too bold, and too sensational, to those whose view of saintliness embraces the Lord’s transcendent repose but omits the detail of His mystery play (lila) of continuous creation...
I’m probably reaching here (the Tristero, yet again), but “mystery play” here reminds me of the Dionysian, especially of the role Nietzsche gave it in his conception of Attic tragedy.
The following relates to both Faust and The Magic Mountain, so I have to include it as well.
p578
Sex in Tantrism, has a high symbolic role... [discussion on the limits all societies have put on the “uncontrollable forces in human nature”] In India, in the ancient world, and among most of the peoples known to anthropologists and historians, there has been, however, an institutionalized system of festivals -- festivals of gods and genii of vegetation -- whereby, without danger to the community, the conventional fiction of good and evil could be suspended for a moment and an experience permitted of the mighty titan-powers of the deep. Carnival, [or Fasching also Walpurgis Night] the day of masks, revealing all the odd forms that dwell in the profundities of the soul, spills forth its symbols, and for one dreamlike, nightmarish, sacred day, the ordered, timid consciousness freely revels in a sacramentally canalized [I mistakenly put “carnal-ized” at first] experience of its own destruction.
p579
The masks are dreamlike. Dreamlike also are the carnival events. Indeed, the world of sleep into which we descend every night, when the tensions of consciousness are relaxed, is precisely that from which the demons, elves, divine and devilish figures of the world mythologies have been derived. All the gods dwell within us, willing to support us, and capable of supporting us, but they require the submission of consciousness, and abdication of sovereignty on the part of our conscious wills. In so far, however, as the little ego regards its own plans as the best, it resists rigorously the forces of its divine substratum [the Socratic/Alexandrian...]. The gods thereupon become dangerous for it, and the individual becomes his own hell. The ancient peoples made peace with the excluded forces by holding them in worship and allowing them their daemonic carnival -- even while cultivating, simultaneously, under the forms of sacrifices to the higher gods, a fruitful relationship with the forces implicated in the social system. And by this means won the permission, so to speak, of their own unconscious to continue in the conventional conscious attitude of profitable virtue.
But the Tantric sadhaka is not interested in conventional survival so much as in the fathoming of life and the discovering of its timeless secret. Hence the makeshift of carnival is not enough: for this only supports the general illusion. His goal is to incorporate the excluded forces as well as those accepted generally, and experience by this means the essential nonexistence of the antagonistic polarity -- its vanishing away, its nirvana; i.e. the intrinsic purity and innocence of the seemingly dark and dangerous sphere. In this way he breaks within himself the tension of the “forbidden,” [transgressive, again] and resolves everything in light; recognizing in everything the one Sakti which is the general support of the world, macrocosmic as well as microcosmic, the mother of the gods and elves, the weaver of the moon-dream of history. Therewith comes release from the world-illusion -- release through its full enjoyment or realization...
p598
...Individuals -- mere waves, mere moments in the rapidly flowing, unending torrent of ephemeral forms -- are tangibly present; but their tangibility itself is simply a gesture, an affectionate flash of expression on the otherwise invisible countenance of the Goddess Mother while play (lila) is the universe of her own beauty. In this dionysian vision the individual is at once devalued and rendered divine, majestic with the majesty of Nature herself and mystically sheltered in the very maelstrom of the world.
Such a view, obviously, is not fit for all, It can appeal to only certain types and tastes: the aristocratic, for example, or the artistic, and the ecstatic. An intellectual temperament, though perhaps appreciative of the torrential magnitude of such a vision, will remain, necessarily, somewhat cool, refusing to respond to it with the whole personality...
How perfect was that? Even a mention of "the dionysian." And he certainly nailed me in that last paragraph. While my original intention -- and expectation -- was to refute Foucault, that last paragraph seems to include him with the "ecstatic" and his beloved Antonin Artaud with the "artistic." One has to wonder if Foucault wasn't just struggling with forces his culture failed to give him ways of dealing with, so that he had to make up his own rituals for breaking... "within himself the tension of the 'forbidden,'"
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