Kali the Mother

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Here is an extract from Sister Nivedita's Kali the Mother. Hope you like it:

 

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In the West, art and poetry have exhausted to associate all that is

tender and precious with this thought of woman-worship. The mother

plays with the little One, or caresses or nurses Him. Sometimes she

even makes her arm a throne, whereon He sits to bless the world.

In the East, the accepted symbol is of a woman nude, with flowing.

hair, so dark a blue that she seems in colour to be black,

four-handed-two hands in the act of blessing, and two holding a knife

and bleeding head respectively, garlanded with skulls, and dancing,

with protruding tongue, on the prostrate figure of a man all white

with ashes.

A terrible, an extraordinary figure! Those who call it horrible may

well be forgiven. They pass only through the outer court of the

temple. They are not arrived where the Mother's voice can reach them.

This, in its own way, is well.

Yet, this image, so fearful to the Western mind, is perhaps dearer

than any other to the heart of India. It is not, indeed, the only

form in which the Divine Energy presents Herself to Her worshippers.

To the Sikh, She is absorbed, embodied in his sword; all women,

especially as children, are Her incarnations; glorious Sita carries

the great reality to many.

But Kali comes closer to us than these. Others we admire; others we

love; to Her we belong. Whether we know it or not, we are Her

children, playing round Her knees. Life is but a game of

hide-and-seek with Her" and if, in its course, we chance to touch Her

feet, who can measure the shock of the divine energy that enters into

us? Who can utter the rapture of our cry of "Mother?

 

Victory to Mother.

 

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