MA(CROCOSM)

I’m tickled pink to see so many of you reading my Kali Ma entry. (2,009 views to date!) As promised I’ve been working on a second installment and if you’re reading this, then I’ve finally finished it and posted it for your pleasure.

Previously, I identified Kali – Ma with the starving monster near the Heart of our local galaxy. Our very own local Super massive Black Hole. Her precise location in time and space is in Sagittarius A* and occupies 3.6 million times more mass than Sol, our local Sun.

Desire- by Nina Paley America’s Best loved Unknown Cartoonist and creator of Sita sings the Blues.

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Super Massive Black Hole- wikipedia

Today I’m going to demonstrate the Micro-cosmic nature of Kali.

In the past I’ve discussed the Micro Macro concepts in this blog. You can browse here if you wish.

The Micro And The Macro

The study of iconography – pictures being worth 1,000 words and all that is an excellent primer for demonstrating larger concepts (Macro) through smaller images steeped in tradition. Each image contains the entirety of the larger concepts, in miniature. Hence Micro/Macro.

The depiction of Desire by Ms. Paley is cartoonish but true to the ancient depictions of the Dark Goddess Kali which as I’ll demonstrate incorporates the Microcosmic view of the universe.

In fact Ms. Paley contacted me (I know, how exciting!) to let me know that this image is not Kali per se, but her own Id, who just happens to look like Kali’s twin sister.

A little further down in this essay I briefly touch on the ego and the subconscious as being microcosmic emanations of larger cosmic forces, (sun and moon). The Id, according to Freud is the part of the personality that exists at birth, prior to the development of Ego. It is primarily concerned with the fulfillment of desire, you know I’m hungry, tired, wet – fix it! Kind of thing. Without it, without desire – there would be no living.

The concept of the Micro-Macro was devised by ancient thinkers who identified two worlds; that of the Micro (little) or human world, and that of the Macro (large) cosmic world. Concepts that were developed by mathematician Pythagoras, philosophers Plato, Philo and of course the Alchemists .

The philosophy states everything in the little world of man is a reflection of the larger world of the cosmos, identified as the Adam Kadmon aka the Primordial or Universal (Hu)Man aka Anthropos.

Simply put, it means that the human form evolved to encompass all the cosmic forces of the universe that houses us, including desire. A Mystic take can conclude that god can be found through intensive navel gazing.

Kali An Iconic Goddess:

The dark goddess is blue black, like the ocean. She’s naked, clad only in space. She’s full breasted as the nourisher of all life.

Her white tusks and red tongue show her devouring aspect: as the cosmic destroyer.

Kali’s upper and lower right hands offer blessings and grants fearlessness. Her Upper left hand holds a curved blade dripping with the blood of someones freshly severed head – which the goddess holds in her lower left hand. According to tradition, this severed head represents ego liberation.

Signaling Kali as the Mater Logos (originator of sound) her skull necklace represents the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet. Just as a mother might keep her children’s baby teeth, or locks from their first hair cut, these skulls may also represent the accumulated wisdom of the devotees Kali has freed from the constructs of ego.

If the head is used in Kali’s iconography to represent the ego, it’s the underlying skull that represents wisdom. The violent act of severing the head from the body mirrors the painful act of ending ones ego centric view of the world.

The flaying of a skull, exposes the wisdom in the bone.

For bone wisdom, life in death – crone archetypes that mirror Kali you can read up on La Loba, “The old woman who lives in a hidden place that everyone knows but few have ever seen.”

Also if you’re into mythology and the feminine psyche and haven’t yet heard of Women who run with wolves, do yourself a favor and google Clarissa Pinkola Estés, you’ll be happy you did!

La Loba, is clearly harnessing the power of Logos to revive the dead. Or rather to rescue the essence trapped within the dead – soul in the form of a laughing woman. This resembles Kali’s role as liberator and as mater logos.

Circular Logic

Artists, Mystics and mathematicians agree; the source of creation is represented as a dot, or a circle. see bindi, daath.

The simple, repetitive geometric form of the Kali composition is the circle:

• Kali’s penetrating eye’s
• the spherical head she holds
• the string of skulls on her necklace
• the Yoni Eye below her belt.

All these items reflect the properties of Life, Death and Rebirth inherent in the form of a circle.

As I mentioned a bit earlier everything about the human form corresponds with some aspect of the larger cosmos. For example the ego has long been associated with the sun. And the subconscious, feeling part of us with the moon.

In terms of psychology, we tend to identify with the ego. We often think it is a person’s ego that drives them to do this or that. Closer to the truth, it is something called the shadow that calls the shots. The devil made me do it moments, are the acts of the shadow. The shadow is made up of all the parts of a person the ego deems undesirable.

As intimated earlier, the curved sword Kali wields against the necks of her devotees represents her power to cut the binds of illusion cast by the ego. She cuts through those illusive binds releasing the shadow’s of the psyche or the ‘demonic’ forces described by the Vedics. Kali assists her children to see past the constructs of ego, an act that releases the negativity. which Kali is said to lap up with her long tongue for annihilation within her black maw.

In Timaeus, Plato described the parallel nature of the human being and the universe. Convinced of the concept of a world soul, Plato surmised there must be such a thing as the human soul. Plato elucidates his belief by saying,

“Just as the body of the universe is spherical, and its soul is composed of orbits along which the planets wander, so too the soul of the human being is composed of orbits along which its emotions rove, and it inhabits the head, which is spherical.”

He ends this treatise with a striking statement.

The rest of the human body exists merely to serve the head.

-Microcosm and Macrocosm – Plato

Just supposing Plato was onto something, if the body exists to serve the head, and the head exists as a repository of the entire existence of said body, whatever it is the head represents – logos, wisdom, ego, soul essence, whatever – has to be something pretty special to invest several millenia in the evolution of the craniums we have today.

The spherical nature of the head, has been correlated to the shape of the soul. Plato imagined the soul as a circle and mirroring the La Loba story, he concieved of the soul also as female.

Seed of Life

On a hunt for more Plato info I came across this image at Springhill Studios, of artist Rebecca Moran.

I was pretty much blown away with the image bombs the artist lobbed my way.

The first thing I saw was a gold fish.
It was my second glance that showed me the Yoni.
I also recognized the artistry of Venus at work, a precise image of the merging of the Micro and the Macro. Finally, I imagined I saw a bindi point in the intersecting lines.

My next thought was, “Does that say vessel (of the) fish?”

I looked it up, and vesica means ‘fish bladder’, and piscis means well, ‘fish’. So yeah it pretty much looks and sounds exactly like what it is.

Of course a bladder is a small triangular organ located in the pelvis that stores and excretes urine, but according to WORDNET it is also a distensible membranous sac (usually containing liquid or gas).

A visit to Halexandria.org yielded this:

The Vesica Pisces motif (and its derivatives, the Flower of Life, Tree of Life, and fundamentals of geometry) has a history of thousands of years and easily predates virtually all major religions of the current era.

A short but fascinating list of what the Vesica Pisces represents from Halexandria.org :

1) The joining of God and Goddess to create an offspring,

2) A symbol for Jesus Christ,

3) In art a pointed oval used as an aureole in medieval sculpture and painting,

4) The vagina of the female goddess,

5) The basic motif in the Flower of Life,

6) An overlay of the Tree of Life,

7) The formative power of polygons,

A geometrical description of square roots and harmonic proportions.

A quick visit to Wikipedia for bladder instruments revealed a lovely late medieval image of the Dance Macabre showing skeletal Death playing the bladder pipe.

It’s a medieval allegory on the universality of death: rich or poor, the dance of death unites all.

Medieval European artists depict the blowing through a vesica as a death knell and Death itself as a dancing corpse or skeleton.

In certain ways this image closes the chapter that started with Kali as the Mater Logos. Kali, the originator of sound is also the mother of all living. She is also death. Artistically, the motif of skulls and sound permeate both the Kali images and these Dance Macabre images indicating that death and life have the same origin.

Mater LOGOS

Aum (OM) is the sound of the infinite. By sound and form, AUM symbolizes the infinite Brahman (ultimate reality) and the entire universe.

AUM is a word, a mantra and the first letter of the Sanskrit language. Tradition tells us, it is the sound a baby’s first breath makes and is the note of creation and preservation of the world.

Composed of three syllables it symbolizes (in triplicate) the microcosm within the macrocosm: the three states of the nature of man, the three divisions of the universe, and the three god pairs: Brahma and Saraswati (the goddess of Speech) Vishnou and Lakshmi, and Shiva and Kali who all represent the coupled emanations of the supreme being.

Glyphicly speaking, what better way to represent a point of origin than a simple dot? The semi circle indicates an opening, and the squiggly line represents a wave. Or at least I think it does. And here’s why. The glyph for water in Egyptian and Meso-American hieroglyphs is the same symbol extended into a wave line by repetition, forming an image of a river, or a rolling wave. The glyph emanating from the dot of AUM, gives me the definite feeling it represents one wave, by its very singularity.

A wave that is not water, a wave that emanates from a ‘hidden’ (semi circle) point of origin. A wave that separates into the triple form revealed in the trident of Shiva and Poseidon, or the nymph/mother/hag triple goddess, or the Roman Catholic’s Holy Trinity.

The ancient Vedics who first devised the word AUM demonstrated an intimate knowledge of the cosmos. They understood quantum (ie micro) principles being rediscovered by science today. They knew that light and energy and matter were made of teeny tiny particles arranged in wave patterns. And they maintained as many esoteric traditions around the globe have, that all there is, came into being through the agency of sound, or Logos aka the Word.

I came across this very concise page listing several religious traditions that associate sound with creation.

While looking for correspondences between Kali, Logos, sound and the black hole I came across a world of celestial sound. Once and for all confirming my dreams of space as being full of sound, not a silent vacuum (which is what I had been taught).

The Black Hole or Sag A* (Sag A Star) as its affectionately known, emits a clear tone in in B Flat.

Which brings me to the Aleph Bet and Kali’s creative power.

Updated: Two new installments have been posted.

Brooding Kali

Mother’s Multiplicity