By the Gods!

Kali

Kali Ma, called the “Dark Mother,” is the Hindu goddess of creation, preservation, and destruction. She is especially known in her Destroyer aspect, squatting over her dead consort, Shiva, devouring his entrails while her yoni sexually devours his lingam, penis. Kali, in this aspect is said to be “The hungry earth, which devours its own children and fattens on their corpses…” In India the experience of the Terrible Mother has been given its most grandiose form of Kali, which just is not simple imagery; it is the image of the Feminine, particularly the Maternal, for in a profound way life and birth are integrally connected to death and destruction.

In Hinduism Kali’s three functions are assigned to the gods: Brahma, the creator; Vishnu, the preserver; and Shiva, the destroyer. It is noted that Vishnu, who is thought to have brought the world out of the primal abyss, wrote the following about Kali: “Maternal cause of all change, manifestation, and destruction…the whole Universe rests upon Her, rises out of Her and melts into Her. From Her crystallized the original elements and qualities which construct the apparent world. She is both mother and grave… The gods themselves are merely constructs out of Her maternal substance, which is both consciousness and potential joy.”

Blood sacrifice was important in the worship of Kali. Kali was the Ocean of Blood at the beginning of the world; she might be said to be the primordial mass from which all life arose; her ultimate destruction of the universe is prefigured by the destruction of each individual, though her karmic wheel always brought reincarnation. After death came nothing-at-all, which Tantric sages called the third of three states of being; to experience it was like the experience of Dreamless Sleep. This state was also called “the Generative Womb of All, the Beginning and End of Beings.” Kali devoured Time, she resumed her “dark formlessness,” which appeared in all myths of before-creation and after-doomsday as elemental Chaos.

- http://www.themystica.com/