Kali is intense power personified. Exhibiting uncontrollable, destructive rage she staunchly protects against dangers and successfully frees her devotees from ego.

Understanding the Kali symbols
Learn about the meaning behind the symbols

Outsiders may regard Kali’s skeletal body with pendulous breasts, her lolling tongue, her fierce weapons, her garland of decapitated heads, and her girdle of severed arms as hideous and fearsome. But for her devotees, who realise that Kali’s raging ferocity targets only negativity, she is considered protective and nurturing. In India, it is common for parents to bring their tiny new-borns to Kali temples and place the infants before images of the fierce goddess in the belief that she will protect the child for life and instil him or her with infinite power.   

Kali is beseeched by her devotees to help them overcome fears, particularly that of death — humanity’s greatest dread. As such, she is regarded the grand destroyer of time, the passage of which ultimately leads to death.  Kali helps us see that death is not to be feared, for the end brings with it the possibility of fresh beginnings and lives anew.   

Above: Dakshina Kali India, Punjab Hills, Kangra, 1800–25. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland. Gift of John and Berthe Ford.