kali

They show you the images—Kali with her tongue out, garlanded with skulls, standing on Shiva's body, dripping blood, wielding weapons. They call her terrifying, bloodthirsty, destructive. They frame her as the dark mother, the fearsome goddess, the one to approach with caution and propitiation.

What they don't tell you is that Kali is liberation itself.

The story says she emerged from Durga's forehead, born from divine rage to destroy demons that could not be killed by any other means. These demons—Raktabija especially—had the power to regenerate: every drop of blood that fell created a new demon. The gods were losing. The demons were multiplying. And then Kali emerged.

She didn't defeat Raktabija through strategy or negotiation or measured response. She drank his blood. All of it. Before it could touch the ground and spawn new demons, she consumed it. This is the image that horrifies people—Kali drinking blood, her tongue hanging out, wild and unrestrained.

But here's the truth: Sometimes the only way to stop regenerating patterns is to consume them completely. Sometimes destruction is the only path to liberation. Sometimes you cannot negotiate with the demons—you must devour them before they multiply.

Kali represents the fierce mother who loves you enough to destroy what's destroying you—even if that thing is your own ego, your own attachments, your own comfortable illusions. She is not cruel; she is ruthlessly compassionate. She doesn't hate you; she loves you so much she will burn away everything false to reveal what's real.

The skulls around her neck? They represent the death of ego, of false identity, of the letters we use to spell our small selves. She wears them as a garland—not as trophies but as decorations, as if to say: these deaths are ornamental, beautiful, necessary for the real you to emerge.

Her black or dark blue skin? It represents the void, the infinite potential that exists before creation, the dissolution of all forms back into formless truth. She is the womb of creation and the tomb of destruction—and she teaches us these are the same space.

Her wild hair, unbound and flowing? It represents freedom from constraint, from neat categories, from civilized expectations. Kali cannot be tamed, cannot be domesticated, cannot be made comfortable for those who prefer their goddesses gentle and contained.

The image of her standing on Shiva—her consort, the god of consciousness himself—shows us something profound. In one version, she's dancing so wildly in her destroyer ecstasy that the universe begins to shake. Shiva lies down beneath her feet to protect the world from her power. When she realizes she's standing on the divine masculine, she stops, shocked, and her tongue comes out.

But there's another reading: Kali stands on Shiva because feminine power doesn't need masculine permission. She is not subordinate. The dance of destruction is hers alone. Shiva lies beneath not to control her but to surrender to her, to say: consciousness bows before the raw power of transformation, as the divine masculine bows before the divine feminine in reverence of transformative creation itself. It is his embodied love, respectful devotion, and deepest reverence that stops her dance of death. Shiva is not ashamed of Kali, the raging form of his wife—he is in awe of her, and that awe is greater than his fear, greater than his ego.

Her tongue out? It's the sign of Kali's ultimate teaching: she's so busy doing the necessary work of destruction that she has no time for propriety, no energy for looking "appropriate," no concern for how she appears to others. The tongue out is not shame—it's focus, intensity, the physical sign of someone so absorbed in necessary work that polite appearance becomes irrelevant.

Kali destroys time itself—her name means "the black one" or "time"—and she liberates us from the tyranny of linear progression. She shows us that endings are necessary, that death feeds life, that destruction is not the opposite of creation but its prerequisite.

What makes Kali a feminist icon is her absolute refusal to be palatable. She will not be made nice. She will not soften her truth. She will not pretend that transformation is gentle or that liberation comes without cost. She loves fiercely enough to destroy what must be destroyed, even if—especially if—what must be destroyed is your comfortable self-concept.