The Black Venus, Kali

Calcutta, the capital of India, in Sanskrit is Kalikata, "The abode of Kali."

Kali is one of the forms under which the wife of the god Siva is worshipped. Siva, the third person in the Hindu Trinity, is worshipped under the twofold aspect of "destroyer and preserver." The Aryan mind grasped the fact from nature that the death of the plant only matured the seed which reproduced life. Siva, to the Hindu mind, symbolized death as merely a change of life. But to the Non-Aryans, Siva was the great destroyer, the smiter, the breeder of pestilence. Thus Siva is both Preserver and Destroyer in India.

He is Maha-deva (Maha-deo) the Great God of Modern Hinduism. The Brahmans represent him as a fair-skinned man seated in profound thought, with a symbol of the fertilizing Ganges above his head, and a Bull, the emblem of procreation and of Aryan tillage, near at hand. But the Non-Aryans represent Siva with a necklace of skulls, a collar of twining serpents, a tiger skin, and a club with a human skull at the end; or, in other words, only as the great Destroyer.

And Siva's counterpart, his wife or goddess, has come to be worshipped under a twofold aspect. The high caste Hindus hang wreaths of flowers about the altars of Urna, the beneficent goddess; the low castes pour out the lives of goats to propitiate the favor of the dread Kali, the Black Venus, the terrible destroyer.

In times of pestilence and famine the blood of human sacrifice has flowed freely before the altars of Siva and Kali. As late as 1866, in spite of laws to the contrary, a boy and a girl were found dead before the shrine of Kali in Calcutta. This is not a relic of Vedaism, but of the "religion of terror" which prevailed among the aborigines of India, and which still crops out among their numerous descendants.

In Calcutta, "the abode of Kali," in the broad day-light of the nineteenth century, the statue of the black goddess Kali is still carried through the streets on a certain day, her hair dishevelled, reaching to her feet, with a necklace of human skulls, her tongue protruding from her mouth, her girdle stained with blood. This takes place in the capital of British India. But ask any Hindu, who has learned to read and write, if he believes in such a goddess, and he smiles at your credulity.

How long this living death of a national religion will last, no one can tell. But the capital of Queen Victoria's Indian Empire, as its name implies, is still the Abode of Kali, the Black Venus; and the annual feast of the Black Venus of Kali is a great connecting link between India's past and present.