Miscellaneous Myths: Kali Tries To Kill Everything

Wow, who'd have ever guessed that this wasn't a fully accurate portrayal of Hindu worship? So Hinduism is often called the oldest religion on earth, a description that actually seems to be true. And because of its antiquity and the fact that it's a synthesis of a large number of disparate traditions and practices from all over the Indian subcontinent, summarizing it concisely in the space of an entertaining intro paragraph is... difficult, to say the least. In the broadest, most insultingly simplified terms, Hinduism focuses on how best to live one's life while simultaneously finding a way to escape samsara, the cycle of reincarnation. There's also the concept of maya, illusion, as a source of distraction from one's proper understanding of their place in the universe. And there's also Brahman, which is this sort of ultimate universal principle thing, which is really hard to concisely define without sounding like a hippie or a cult leader, but it's kind of the unifying principle energy... thing of the universe. There's also Shakti, which is a specifically feminine primordial cosmic energy thing that seems to play the same role as Brahman does in the versions that use it. Now when it comes to the gods specifically, Hinduism has a system that sounds more complicated than it is. Basically, every god is an aspect of that primordial energy universe stuff, and most gods will be specific aspects of other bigger gods. For example, Parvati is the gentle, nurturing, motherly aspect of cosmic universe goddess Shakti, Durga is the warrior aspect of Parvati, and Kali is the pissed off warrior aspect of Durga. They're all usually treated as distinct goddesses, but at the same time they're also all the same entity, taking increasingly specific forms. One other confusing element to all this is that, because the Hindu gods are kind of fluid and mostly symbolic, their relationships with one another can also be pretty flexible from myth to myth. For example, the general rule is that mother goddess Parvati is the wife of Shiva, the destructive aspect of the Trimurti whose job it is to end the universe. But Kali, whenever she's around, is also characterized as Shiva's wife without this conflicting with Parvati's thing. So now that we've sort of barely not really contextualized this, today let's talk a little bit about Kali and how she nearly danced the universe to death. Word of warning, there's about a half million variants on this story, with this being only one of them. Mythology is fun like that. Please be nice to my comment section. So our story begins with Durga and the Matrikas, a good name for a band, fighting these dudes Chanda, Munda, and Raktabija along with their obligatory army of faceless minions. Now these guys are Ashuras, who are bad guy deities that make a habit of battling the Devas, who are the good guy deities. Raktabija specifically has a particularly annoying power that makes him significantly harder to manage than the others. Whenever a drop of his blood touches the earth, it pops out a duplicate of him. This makes fighting him extremely frustrating due to his continuously replenishing supply of bad guys. In fact, it's so frustrating that the sheer force of Durga's pissed-off facial expression causes Kali to spontaneously manifest out of her forehead creases and start kicking ass. Now Kali is a lot of things, but terrifying sums her up pretty well. As a physical embodiment of Durga's wrath, she's unsurprisingly lacking in chill, and after immediately murdering Chanda and Munda with minimal difficulty, she starts up on taking down Raktabija, first by eating all of his clones and most of the rest of his army, and then by juicing him like an orange. This unsurprisingly kills him pretty thoroughly, and with Kali drinking all his blood before it can reach the ground, he's left tragically cloneless and is therefore dead for real. So with that, the battle's over and the Devas have won, but unfortunately, Kali, as a manifestation of Durga's unstoppable rage, doesn't exactly chill out just because the battle's done. Instead, she starts wreaking widespread havoc, murdering basically everything she comes across and dancing on the bodies of the dead. Her victory dance slash murder party gets so intense that it starts threatening the universe itself, at which point the rest of the Devas decide it's time to call in Shiva to sort this all out. So Shiva surveys the situation and decides that the only way to get through to his scary wife is through a dramatic heroic sacrifice, so he dives under her foot mid-stomp to heroically shield the ground from her onslaught. When Kali realizes she just boogied all over her husband, she bleps in surprise and immediately calms down and stops destroying the universe. Which is good, because as established, that's Shiva's job. Anybody could be that guy. Night is young and the music's high. With a bit of rock music, everything is fine. You're in the mood for a dance. And when you get the chance, you are the dancing queen. Young and sweet, only 17. Dancing queen, feel the beat from the tambourine. Yeah, I know this is all wildly inaccurate and culturally insensitive and stuff, but the biggest problem is, why isn't Indy freaking out about the snakes?