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Kali/Art of Tantra: Graveyard Practices

To: tyagi 
From: 
Subject: Kali/Art of Tantra: Graveyard Practices (9407.kalittr.pr)
Date: 49940724
Quoting: _The Art of Tantra_, by Philip Rawson:

	Contact with the dead, from the point of view of caste,
	is deeply defiling, especially if the dead are themselves
	of lower castes.  To handle corpses is the task of the
	lowest members in the whole caste hierarchy. . . .

	. . .

	  [The sadhaka] must confront and assimilate, in its most
	concrete form, the meaning of death together with the
	absolute social defilement it entails.  His Goddess, his
	loving Mother in time, who gives him birth and loves
	him in the flesh, also destroyus him in the flesh.  His image
	of Her is incomplete if he does not know Her as his tearer and
	devourer. . . . It is the hideous form which She assumes when
	the sadhaka recognizes that to him as an individual She is the
	girl with the axe or sword, the smallpox, cholera and
	famine-lady who grins as She drains his blood and cracks his
	spine. . . . He may call her, among other names, Durga (hard to
	approach) or Kali (the power of time) . . .
			(pp. 112-13)


...Rawson confirms ...the etymology of "Kali." [as 'black']  
Don't know how big a Sanskrit expert he is, but he is/was Keeper of 
the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art, University of Durham, and was 
the keeper of the Eastern Art Department at the Ashmolean Museum, at 
Oxford.

...he's also got books on *Tao* (1973), *Tantra* (1973), and *Erotic 
Art of India* (1977).

_Art of Tantra_ has tons of great color pictures of Kali, including
some amazing folk art.  There's a modern icon from Bihar that has
multiple faces all over the place, and is just awesome (though in B & W!!!!)
Some unnerving (literally) stuff from the Punjab, 1800-1820, of Kali on
the battlefield.

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