To: tyagi
From:
Subject: Kali/Art of Tantra: Graveyard Practices (9407.kalittr.pr)
Date: 49940724
Quoting: _The Art of Tantra_, by Philip Rawson:
Contact with the dead, from the point of view of caste,
is deeply defiling, especially if the dead are themselves
of lower castes. To handle corpses is the task of the
lowest members in the whole caste hierarchy. . . .
. . .
[The sadhaka] must confront and assimilate, in its most
concrete form, the meaning of death together with the
absolute social defilement it entails. His Goddess, his
loving Mother in time, who gives him birth and loves
him in the flesh, also destroyus him in the flesh. His image
of Her is incomplete if he does not know Her as his tearer and
devourer. . . . It is the hideous form which She assumes when
the sadhaka recognizes that to him as an individual She is the
girl with the axe or sword, the smallpox, cholera and
famine-lady who grins as She drains his blood and cracks his
spine. . . . He may call her, among other names, Durga (hard to
approach) or Kali (the power of time) . . .
(pp. 112-13)
...Rawson confirms ...the etymology of "Kali." [as 'black']
Don't know how big a Sanskrit expert he is, but he is/was Keeper of
the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art, University of Durham, and was
the keeper of the Eastern Art Department at the Ashmolean Museum, at
Oxford.
...he's also got books on *Tao* (1973), *Tantra* (1973), and *Erotic
Art of India* (1977).
_Art of Tantra_ has tons of great color pictures of Kali, including
some amazing folk art. There's a modern icon from Bihar that has
multiple faces all over the place, and is just awesome (though in B & W!!!!)
Some unnerving (literally) stuff from the Punjab, 1800-1820, of Kali on
the battlefield.
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