There is a moment that comes in times of great upheaval, when wars begin, rights erode, and the news arrives like a fist, when a particular spiritual dread sets in. Underneath the grief and the fear sits something older and quieter: the feeling that the Divine has looked away.
I have not felt this abandonment, likely because of Kali. After over twenty years of worship, I focus every March on deepening that practice: building her altar, returning to her texts, and renewing the vow at the centre of our relationship. To you, I dedicate my name and my fires of creation and destruction. Remove my illusions and burn away my ignorance and limitations. That name is my Craft name, chosen at initiation, inspired by her—the self I became in part because she was present. When you ask Kali to burn away illusions, you do not feel abandoned by the fire. The fire is her answer.
Kali does not live in a safe place, waiting to visit us in crisis. She lives in the cremation ground. She has always lived there. And we have always lived there too.
How we came together
I do not remember when, how, or why Kali first entered my life. It was over twenty years ago. I was a young, eclectic, mostly solitary Wiccan, not yet initiated, devoted mainly to Greek deities. I had returned home after university and was searching for my next something. My career was changing. My parents’ marriage was unstable. The only things that felt grounded were my friendships, and I was about to meet the coven that would eventually initiate me.
Into that upheaval, Kali arrived. She offered me a way to process what I can only describe as a young, feminist fury, and she lapped up the drops of blood to prevent the demons from multiplying. She gave me a sense of stability I was not finding anywhere else. I performed regular poojas for her. She was the first goddess I ever worked with meditatively. When I initiated into Georgian Wicca in 2006, she inspired my Craft name, the very name I now dedicate back to her each March.
Our relationship has changed, as long relationships do. She has been my demon-slayer, gentle mother, and cosmic dancer. She feels further away now than in the early years, but I see this as information rather than loss. She knows what I need has changed, and distance is its own lesson. Yet, when I sit at the altar each March or in dark times, I turn to her. The relationship shifts but remains grounded.
I write about Kali with some hesitation. I am not Hindu and have not studied with a guru. I often wonder what is open and what is not whenever I write about her; that uncertainty is part of why I do not write about Kali as frequently as other goddesses I am devoted to. What steadies me is bhakti practice, the path of loving devotion, which has historically been open to all, regardless of caste, gender, or origin. Its practices—puja, chanting, meditation, direct personal relationship with the deity—are not initiatory or restricted. They belong to the devotee and the goddess. What I offer is two decades of study, offerings, and attentive devotion year after year. If you feel drawn to her, bring that same devotion. If now is not the time to engage with what Kali offers, I do not know when it would be.My frie
The śmaśāna: more than a place of death
In the Hindu and Tantric traditions from which Kali emerges, the śmaśāna, the cremation ground, is her home. But to understand what that means, it helps to understand that it is more than a place where bodies burn.
In tantric thought, the cremation ground is where identity dissolves. The body, once a vessel of name, history, relationships, roles, and certainties, returns to its elements; all that goes with it. When the pyre is cold, what remains is not just ash but the radical truth that nothing permanent ever was. The śmaśāna is where the fiction of a fixed self is fully undone.
The cremation ground holds power in tantric practice because Kali dwells where identity dissolves. She is not the goddess of death as an ending, but of dissolution—where destruction and creation merge, as my vow always reflects: the fires of both are the same.
Even among traditions that honour gods of death and destruction, distance is implicit: the god presides, rules, and visits. Kali does none of these. In iconography, she stands or dances on corpses and ash, garlanded in skulls, tongue red, eyes wild. Her most iconic image shows her atop Shiva’s prone body. She doesn’t just administer the burning place; she lives there. Dissolution is not something she oversees from afar; it is her nature.
What she asks of us
Kali is not interested in our performances of okayness. She is not moved by careful theologies or spiritual accomplishments. What she asks, in my experience, is the willingness to look directly at what is real, without the armour of narrative.
In hard times, I return to acknowledgment over petition. I do not ask her to fix what is broken or shield me from what is coming. I sit with what is true and say, “I see where I am.” And she replies, “I see you here.” That mutual recognition, small and unadorned, has held me through things without clear meaning or visible end.
I think of her sometimes as the calm at the centre of a hurricane. The storm is real and she is not outside it. She is what holds still inside it. When I am in the middle of something I cannot resolve, that quality of hers is what I lean into. She is not going to tell me it will be alright. She is going to be completely present with me in the place where alright is not yet available.
Kali is not only a comfort, but also the goddess who dances on battlefields and drinks the demon Raktabija’s blood to stop its multiplying. In hard times, her presence is more than companionship in darkness. It is a challenge: stay clear-eyed, act from something steadier than panic or despair, and do what can be done rather than collapse into what cannot. The śmaśāna teaches non-attachment, which, in Kali’s terms, is not withdrawal but the ability to act in the world without being consumed by the outcome. She appears in full ferocity so that we might find our own.
We have always lived here
The cremation ground is not a temporary condition; it reveals the impermanence that defines the world we inhabit—consuming, transforming, and returning all to their elements. This is not despair, but recognition of reality: the same truth that the śmaśāna has always embodied.
Grief often assumes that suffering marks a fall from something better. Kali, always present in dissolution, quietly refuses this idea. The world has always burned. The change is only in our awareness and knowing who lives here.
What shifts when I accept this is not that loss hurts less, but I stop wasting energy believing the burning is a mistake. That energy becomes available for the work of the moment, for those beside me, and for whatever can still be made, protected, or loved amid loss.
Acting from the still centre
Exhaustion and grief have their own logic. When the news is relentless, when the losses accumulate, when the burning goes on long enough, a particular spiritual heaviness can set in. It is not a theological doubt exactly, but a sense of going through the motions, a quiet wondering whether any of it means anything in the face of what is happening.
Kali’s true lesson is not about restoring faith that things will work out, but about enabling us to act without that certainty. The calm within chaos is not passive: it is clarity that allows movement.
Raktabija could not be defeated by ordinary means. Every drop of his blood that hit the ground spawned a new demon. The problem was not the fighting. It was that the fighting kept feeding the very thing it was trying to destroy. Kali’s role was to spread herself across the battlefield and drink the blood before it could reach the ground, consuming the source of proliferation rather than battling its endless consequences, so that Raktabija could finally be destroyed. But her fury did not stop with the victory. She danced on, wild and unstoppable, until the gods feared for the world itself. It was only when Shiva lay down in her path, and she stepped on him, suddenly recognising her consort beneath her feet, that she stilled. That image of Kali standing on Shiva is the most iconic of all her forms, and it carries its own teaching: that even the most ferocious energy needs the ground of consciousness beneath it, that power without awareness becomes its own kind of destruction. There is something in the Raktabija story worth sitting with when the news cycle feels exactly like that: the sense that engagement itself is feeding something, that outrage and despair and doomscrolling are producing more of what they are responding to.
What Kali offers is not detachment from the world but a different quality of engagement with it, one that is clear and undistracted by outcome, rooted in the still centre rather than whipped around by the storm’s edge. The work still has to be done. The things worth protecting still have to be protected. But it is possible to do that work from a place that the chaos cannot reach, if you know where that place is and who lives there.
The śmaśāna is not somewhere you go to escape the world. It is somewhere you go to see it without flinching, and to find that you are still standing. That you have always been standing. And that the goddess who has always lived here is standing with you.
Beautiful!!! 🔥 Jai, jai Kali! Jai, jai Ma!
Macha
This resonates on so many levels. The times of instability when these relationships appear in our lives. The idea of crisis, not as loss but, as dissolution. The gift of sitting with our difficult moments rather than asking for a bandaid. And recognizing the quiet center of every hurricane where we find our core. Thank you for verbalizing the ideas I’ve been chewing on for a while now.