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To: tyagiFrom: 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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