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Subject: Kali in Hollywood's Temple of Misogyny
                                   
                             by Fran Nowve
                                   
                         published in The Beltane Papers Beltane '93
                                                                    
   The return of the Goddess in modern western culture is being
   experienced by different segments of the population on vastly
   different levels. To many people, the Goddess is a pleasant
   alternative to the authoritarian Father God of
   Judeo-Christianity. The Goddess is seen by these people as a
   loving Mother who is unconditionally giving and accepting.
   (Actually, that is a very radical step for our consciousness to
   take. Unconditional love is deeply subversive of the values
   upheld by the Patriarchy.) As powerful as this first step is,
   however, it is but the beginning of an exploration into the
   long-denied heart of the Goddess (and our own suppressed female
   psyches).
   
   Those who have proceeded further along the path of Goddess
   worship speak of the "Dark Mother," who represents aspects of the
   Goddess which are sometimes frightening, painful and confusing.
   The Dark Mother is nothing less than the totality of our long
   denied self. If the Male principle is rational and "moral" and
   orderly and white, the Female principle is irrational,
   immoral/amoral, chaotic, and black. She is our very shadow, the
   much-feared "evil" which we spend enormous amounts of energy
   pretending not to know even exists. Books like Shakti Woman by
   Vickie Noble are now proliferating which deal with the process
   whereby we may come to terms with that long buried reality.
   
   Among the various examples of the Dark Mother, Kali is possibly
   the most misunderstood. Thus, it should not come as a complete
   surprise that even a film-maker like Steven Spielberg, who has
   been in many ways a spokesman for the New Age (e.g. ET), should
   deal with Kali in a highly reactionary manner. In making Indiana
   Jones and the Temple of Doom, Spielberg erected a temple to
   Misogyny. The film presents two images of Woman: Woman as Clown
   and Woman as Demon. The former is exemplified by Willie Scott,
   who is vain, acquisitive, childish, and lets a little boy put her
   in her place ("You call him 'Mr. Jones,' Doll!" says Short Round,
   a little boy who takes his masculinity seriously). Willie's pain
   and terror are not taken seriously by anybody. The viewer is
   encouraged to experience them as "comedy" and the other
   characters either don't notice or treat her cries of distress as
   "noise" (for example, the scene where she tries to mount the
   elephant and winds up facing backwards and the scene where
   unaccustomed to jungle sights and sounds, she panics).
   
   The latter image of Woman is presented by the Goddess, Kali-Ma,
   who is depicted more as demon than as Goddess. Spielberg takes
   some strange liberties with Hindu theology here; he can't or
   won't go beyond Christian polarities. Kali is made into a Hindu
   counterpart to Satan while the God, Shiva, is treated as a
   counterpart to Christ or (the good) God. All the "good"
   characters are on the side of Shiva and Indy even tells one of
   the villains that he will have to answer to Shiva in the next
   life. Kali provides the evil-doers with Satanic power (the dark
   light). They rob poor villagers of a sacred stone, causing
   poverty and desolation to descend upon them while kidnapping
   their children, whom they make into slaves. Such Christianization
   of the Hindu deities is particularly laughable in light of the
   fact that Shiva is Kali's consort. Tradition depicts him lying
   prostrate at Kali's feet, swooning in ecstasy (or dead).
   
   These evil Kali-worshippers are none other than members of the
   notorious "Thuggee" cult. The Thuggee are a real historic
   phenomenon. They were worshippers of Kali who actually practiced
   human sacrifice to the Goddess. As such, they are pointed to as
   examples of everything "evil" about Goddess worship. For example,
   William Schoebelen in "Wicca, Satan's Little White Lie,"1 makes
   much of the Thuggee and even refers to "Indiana Jones." He uses
   the propaganda of that movie as "proof" that Wicca (and all
   Goddess worship) is evil.
   
   As strange as Spielberg's version of Hindu theology is, he takes
   some even stranger liberties with history by locating the Thuggee
   in a palace in Bangkok. The real Thugs were highwaymen, outlaws,
   who depended upon he predominance of food travel for their
   success in finding "victims." The advent of the railways in the
   1800s seriously cramped their style, all but eliminating their
   power. Furthermore their method of execution was strangling, not
   fire in a fancy contraption, as Indiana Jones would have it.2
   
   But more needs to be said about this strange phenomenon. India is
   a predominantly Hindu nation. The Hinduism of today has a long
   and colorful history. For one thing, it is really the result of
   combining various other religious traditions and paths. Just as
   the England of today is the result of the intermingling of two
   peoples, the Norman aristocrats and the Celtic peasants, modern
   India is the result of two different populations coming together,
   the Aryans and the Dravidians. The Dravidians were the Goddess
   worshippers. The indigenous population, they were darker and
   shorter than the fair skinned Aryans who invaded. The Aryans
   brought with them their patriarchal culture, and imposed the
   caste system and their sense of racial superiority on the
   Dravidians. Dravidians had a religious history going back many
   centuries. Jainism, Buddhism, and Yoga are some major traditions
   practiced by Dravidians. Both Buddhism and Hinduism are the sort
   of religions which have the capacity to absorb other traditions.
   Tantrism, which is usually regarded as part of Hinduism, is
   really a separate religion, according to Isaac Bonewits.
   "Tantrism survived (in India) by masquerading as a sect of
   Hinduism."3 It is "the system of yoni-worship, or female-centered
   sex worship, allegedly founded thousands of years ago in India by
   women of a secret sect called Vratyas. The primary object of its
   adoration was the lingam-yoni-Shiva and the Goddess Kali."4 "It's
   entirely possible that in this reinstatement of the Goddess, both
   in the popular cults and in the deep philosophy of the Tantra, we
   have another sign of the resurgence of the religiosity of the
   non-Aryan matriarchal tradition of Dravidian times."5
   
   A Triple Godhead was set up as a counterpart to the triple
   goddess: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Of these three, Shiva, who is
   credited with the invention of Yoga, had originally been part of
   the Dravidian religion. There was a feeling on the part of those
   loyal to the "old religion" which worshipped Kali and Shiva that
   Brahma and Vishnu were "punks," not worthy to be put on a par
   with Shiva. The present pantheon of Hinduism was clearly a
   compromise, somewhat of a patching together of diverse
   theologies.
   
   "Tantric yogis insisted that their supreme Shiva was the only
   god, and all the other gods were only inferior imitations of him.
   He was certainly older than the vedic heaven-gods... Shiva's
   worshippers may have been literally correct in viewing other gods
   as recent upstarts. Some of the scriptures claimed that Brahma
   and Vishnu were so puny that they couldn't even realize the
   limits of Shiva's cosmic lingam."6
   
   The Thuggee considered Brahams, the top caste, to be enemies of
   Kali. Sacrifices were taken exclusively from this group. Women
   were never sacrificed. Clearly, there is more to this "human
   sacrifice" business than actually meets the eye. It would seem
   that the Thuggee were actually engaged in a class war- or even an
   anti-imperialist war on class and national enemies. The Brahams
   represented the Aryans who invaded and imposed their religion on
   the Dravidians. The Dravidians were the underdogs. Their side of
   the fighting took the form of guerrilla warfare, highwaymen
   waiting to take the enemy by surprise. It is amazing that this
   political aspect to the subject of Kali worship and the Thuggee
   cult hasn't been more widely discussed and documented.
   
   But who is this Goddess who could inspire such dreadful acts
   (even if they were done to fight imperialism)? As stated above,
   she is a Dark Goddess. The name, Kali, is th Hindu word for
   Black. She is usually depicted dancing on top of the lifeless
   form of Shiva. There's no getting away from it: Kali is not
   "nice." As ex-Wiccan Christian fundamentalist William Schnoebelen
   put it, she is "not the sort of girl you'd wish to bring home to
   mother."7 (Incredible that even an ex-Wiccan Goddess worshipper
   would think of the Goddess in such terms, isn't it?) No, Kali
   isn't a "girl" at all. Although she is a triple Goddess, she is
   far too powerful to imagine as anything less than a full-blooded
   woman embodying danger and mystery.
   
   Myth has it that Kali sprang from the brown of the Goddess Durga
   in the middle of a full-scale battle wherein Durga was fighting
   the demons, Mahisasura, Sumbha and Nishumba at the behest of the
   gods who had begged her to save them. Kali appeared black, naked
   (or draped in tiger skin), and "emaciated, wide-mouthed,
   lolling-tongued, with deep sunken red eyes."8 She severed the
   heads of Canda and Munda, servants of the demons. Then she took
   on the demon, Raktabija:
   
     From the blood shed from his wounds sprang thousands of fresh
     combatants, representing the destructive masculine principle.
     To annihilate this archtypical power, Kali again and again
     drank the rakta-bija (the seed blood). This symbolic devouring
     represents the "taking possession of" or rendering harmless of
     an overpowering destructive element, a phallic power.9
     
   From the stories can be seen the basically beneficent nature of
   Kali (and Durga) despite her terrifying image and her actual role
   as "destroyer." Not being dualistic, Wiccan and Paganism accept
   destruction as a natural and beneficial part of the whole.
   
   Kali is nothing less than a long denied, long forgotten aspect of
   our female self- our power to be "ugly;" to impose limitations
   just as Nature imposes mortality on everything which has a
   temporal existence on earth.
   
   We are no longer accustomed to associating the feminine with that
   kind of power. The Goddess has returned with a message of
   feminine power and Kali is the greatest expression of it. As
   such, we can expect her to continue to draw flack from the
   Spielbergs and the Schnoebelens. And we can consider it a tribute
   to the depth and breadth of her and our power.
   
EOF