Beauty + Terror
I was born in India, where I spent the first ten years of my life, before my family and I immigrated to the UK. One of my favorite things about India was my maternal grandmother, my Didu, who was the love of my early life. My younger sister and I would relish the time we’d spend with her, in her big house in Calcutta, with her fierce German Shepherd, Devil. He was completely devoted to my Didu, her most loyal companion - a guard dog in the truest sense, not tolerating any belligerence leveled in her direction, and also as gentle as a teddy bear to my sister and I.
Ferocious and loving equal measure- just like my formidable and magically efficacious grandmother.
Every morning, we would wake up excitedly to tea being brought to us, served from one of Didu’s beautiful collection of old bone-china teapots and teacups. We’d greedily dunk our Marie biscuits into the tea and feast on whatever fruit was in season- I remember sweet and juicy lychees and mangoes were firm favorites.
After bathing, my grandmother would meditate for an hour in her puja room. Gentle plumes of sandalwood incense filled the air as we sat quietly behind her. Her altar displayed, among other sacred objects and images, two black and white photos of the Indian mystic, Ramakrishna and his beloved Sarada Devi - both of whom Didu was a follower of.
I’ve been thinking a lot about these early vignettes recently as a particular story about the Goddess Kali has been insistently swimming around in my mind.
Ramakrishna, a powerful mystic, was a lifelong devotee of Kali. One of his best known visions of Her tells of him sitting on the banks of the Ganges, in deep meditation. He sees a beautiful young woman gracefully emerge from the water, revealing her swollen belly, late in pregnancy. She emerges onto dry land, and gives birth to her baby, whom she then lovingly, tenderly lifts to her breast to nurse.
Entranced by this idyllic and deeply beautiful scene, Ramakrishna continues to observe as the woman transforms into a fierce and terrifying apparition - the Kali we are more familiar with. This ferocious emanation of the Mother then lifts the baby up to her bloody red mouth, crushes the bones between her sharp teeth and swallows the infant in one ghastly gulp.
Far from sending Ramakrishna running for the hills, this revelation of the fullness of the Mother as both beneficent Creator and fearful Destroyer simultaneously, only served to deepen his unconditional devotion and love for Her.
For the most part, the mainstream western mindset finds this rendering of the primordial feminine principle to be deeply distasteful. Yet, this both/and aspect of Her was also present in the pre-Christian traditions that are indigenous to the west. Before the misogyny of demystified patriarchal Christianity made the aspirational apex of the non-dual feminine into a lopsided hobble of “goodness” and virginal “purity”, the pre-Christian goddesses were archetypes of the wholeness of both Beauty and Terror.
In ancient Sumeria - which predated the Egyptians - there was Inanna, Goddess of Love and Beauty, Sex and War. Inanna is intimately connected to the Egyptian Isis and All that She is. Isis in turn deeply influenced the ancient Greeks and the Eleusinian Mysteries; and also later, before the deadeningly reductive literalism by the Church fathers, the alchemical allegory of Mary’s Immaculate Conception which symbolizes a unification of the opposites - dark + light, feminine + masculine - giving birth to Christ consciousness, the Son of God(dess) who like the sun, dies every night and is reborn every morning.
I’ll save Eve and Lilith for another occasion.
The colonization - not only by the Church fathers but by the majority of post-antiquity patriarchal cultures across the world - of the Beauty and Terror that is indigenous to the primordial - and temporal - feminine principle has been reduced to a one-dimensional experience.
It is from the blackness of the void - the Dark Goddess - that all life, all light emerges and eventually returns to. True Beauty cannot exist without Terror: Aphrodite, Goddess of Love + Beauty and her lifelong consort Aries, God of War. To grasp after one while rejecting the other is the childish game of the colonized mind.