Kali, Chaos Magic and the KLF: On Black holes and the Rites of Mumufication

This is based on a talk I gave for the Living Well Dying Well Foundation on the rite of MuMufication, the building of the People’s Pyramid, and the background to it all in Chaos Magic and Discordianism. But first I note the special relevance of the countercultural Hindu goddess, Kali, and her significance as a trickster avatar of death.

She is the womb that births all, and the tomb that swallows all.
Aditi Devi^¹

… the fate of massive stars is to collapse behind an event horizon, to form a ‘black hole’ which will contain a singularity; and… there is a singularity in our past which constitutes… a beginning to the universe.
Stephen Hawking²

As part of a course I am taking, possibly toward becoming a death doula, I have to present an account of the death rites of a particular religion or culture. I first opted to talk about Shaktism, and about Kali in particular, as she is a goddess of death, worshipped especially in Assam, Kerala, Kashmir and Bengal,³ and I have become obsessed with her since realising how perfectly she expresses the totality of death while wielding primordial power. But then I realised I should be telling people instead about The People’s Pyramid, and its associated memorial rites for the MuMufied, as I’d joined the commemorations at the Toxteth Day of the Dead only last November, and have been thinking about them ever since. So I’m preparing my presentation on the KLF. But the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that aspects of Kali’s worship are relevant to the spirit of the KLF and JAMMs, so here are some notes on each.

Kali worship is an ancient component of Indian culture. Specifically, it is part of the strand of Skaktism, which worships the mother goddess, Maha Devi, though it appears in other contexts too. The other major strands of Hinduism focus mainly on Shiva or Vishnu. Many believe Shaktism to be derived from an independent, aboriginal mother-worshipping Indian religion, probably centred in the central regions of the subcontinent, dating back to the Harappan culture and beyond. This religion may have later been absorbed into the male-dominated culture of the people who either invaded or spread their control over the country from the North-West in 1800-1500 BCE (the ‘Arya’). Many of the Vedas tell stories of competition between male and female deities which may be relics of the cultural conflict between patriarcal and matriarchal cultures as they clashed.

In the male-dominated traditions of Shaivism and Vaishnavism, the man represents spiritual energy, while the female is associated with the inferior world of matter (much as in the Christian West and beyond). The patriarchal tradiitons claim that nature exists only so as to allow the expression of spirit, and thus nature is secondary, and subservient to spirit. Goddess-worshipping Shaktism shares this account of the distinction between male spiritual power and female natural power, but insists that female is nevertheless primary. The devotees of Kali say that the male gods create merely abstract spiritual potentials, while Kali’s devouring of time – constantly eating the present and casting it into the past, while allowing the future to break in and replace it – embodies the great churning of the world around the axis of the present moment, which brings everything into existence then destroys it in an eternal cycle – as the present moment becomes the past and the future emerges in its place – so the female is decidedly the greater power, the engine of the real. That is only to speak of the manifested Kali in this world, in which past, present and future are distinct. In the archetypal real world of the holographic celestial horizon,⁴ past, present and future are combined as one, and Kali’s three eyes are one. Kali is in some ways the Shakti equivalent of Shiva. Both are destructive, and both, crucially, are said to devour time.

In thinking of Kali recently it struck me how much she resembles the black hole of modern physics. To see why, we have to understand her key features. Her most distinctive characteristics are that she is black or midnight blue; she is generally depicted as unsightly and naked, with dishevelled hair and a lolling tongue; she has several arms, carrying weapons, or with her hands in specific mudra poses of benediction; she carries a decapitated head in one hand, with a necklace of skulls around her shoulders, and she wears a girdle of severed limbs about her waist; she is depicted dancing, or trampling on her consort, Shiva. Her lolling tongue is perhaps related to the flaming tongue of Agni, the Vedic god of fire, which was said to consume the sacrificial offerings of the faithful.

In the early hymn to the mother goddess, the Devi Mahatmya,⁵ Kali is said to have been born as an aspect of the goddess Durga, when she was battling the demon Raktabija. The monster proved impossible to defeat, as each time a drop of his blood hit the ground, a new demon sprang up to support him in battle. So Durga became (or created) Kali (‘she who is dark’ / ‘she who is death’), whose brutal destruction swept through the demons, killing the lot. But Kali’s rage did not end there. Unable to constrain herself, she carried on killing everything in her path, threatening eventually to destroy the entire universe. She was only stopped when Shiva lay on his back on the battlefield, exposing his erect penis. This immediately caught Kali’s eye, and she stopped the slaughter in order to sit down on Shiva, thus ending her killing spree – though this story of the taming of Kali may be merely a later Brahminical embellishment aimed at demonstrating the superiority of the patriarchal gods, demonstrated by their ability to subdue the female (with a penis!). In any case, in original depictions of Kali she may not have been dancing on Shiva so much as dancing with him, so to say.