Let us begin with the notion of continuation in the Anthropocene epoch. There are predominantly two vital ways to continue or remain— presence and absence. In presence, the human animals extend their stay on the earth either through posthuman interrelations and assemblages or transhumanist uploading of consciousness into machinic brains. Absence then is linked to total disappearance, extinction, existing as spectral forms, as fossils, and geological impressions. Anthropocene requires recognition of our precarious situation; extinction demands an imagination of self-annihilation, of reading ourselves as a nomadic process in environmental histories. The question that remains is not how to save humans drowning in cognitive capitalism and sixth mass extinction, but rather if it is possible to track and locate interkingdoms so that what emerges is not entirely the Anthropos but an interconnected symbiont. What is simultaneously imperative is to find the ground (geographical, political, and ethnographic) and the local perspective from which one effectuates the crises. It is also equally necessary to explore the surrounding habitat, not just neighbourhood flora and fauna, but the lives of endangered species and the debilitating effects of technological growth. Perhaps, a way out of this imminent ending is to be excavated from mythologies, spiritual dimensions, and speculative fabulations (Haraway). We escape the labyrinth only by perceiving it as a forest and following the animal as our guide. To comprehend the human-toward-death, we must identify them as ash or food for animals, as bones and flesh turning to filth and garbage. Journeying to the beginning also assists in solving the anthropocentric puzzle— humans evolving out of the ancient virosphere and viruses like Cyanobacteria oxygenating the air or genetically modifying placental mothers to give birth.
This article will focus on a kind of realignment of humans, animals, and the environment with the help of Indian mythical and spiritual histories. As my vantage point, I would like to focus on the speculative inventions of human-animal symbionts by Donna Haraway in her phenomenal work on the Chthulucene. Haraway weaves the Camille Stories around the Children of the Compost, a community surviving in a more paralyzingly complex environment by merging with different species and intuiting themselves as “humus, rather than as human or nonhuman” (140). The Camille children as symbiotic beings will be a combination of human and monarch butterfly, and thus, androgynous in appearance, with visible and sensory features of both their parents (Haraway 149). Camille children followed a three parents model, the third being an animal from an endangered species. These stories emerge as a response to the demographic and ecological crises threatening the existence of all lives on this planet. Haraway borrows the Proto-Germanic ‘guman’ which later changes into ‘human’,
…but both come soiled with the earth and its critters, rich in humus, humaine, earthly beings as opposed to the gods. In Hebrew, Adam is from adamah or “ground.” The historical linguistic gender tone of guman, like human and man, is masculine/universal; but in sf worlding adam, guman, adamah become more a microbiome of fermenting critters of many genders and kinds, i.e., companion species, at table together, eating and being eaten, messmates, compost. (Haraway 169-170)
Haraway’s Chthulucene highlights sym-poiesis (making with) instead of autopoiesis or self-making. It is a kind of tentacular becoming in a heterogeneous society that believes in the manifesting forces of Gaia and making kin rather than children. Chthulucene could be broken down into the Greek root ‘khthôn’ (underground, earth and underground) and ‘kainos’, meaning that which is marked by the “temporality of the thick, fibrous, and lumpy “now,” which is ancient and not” (Haraway 206). The tentacles of the chimerical creature Haraway adopts from Pimoa chthulhu spider, the Octopus cyanea, and Medusa’s hair. These conjoinings and holobionts crop up from compost piles. Haraway refers to “symanimagenesis”, in which, as derivative from animism, one establishes connections with ghosts and spirits that reside in material things. Humans, Haraway suggests, must be read as humus (and not posthuman) or organic soil to engender possibilities of a restructuration formed through decomposition of not only the flesh but of anthropocentric ways. Unlike Haraway’s forward march to new compositions of world-making and species-making, I return to the old fables of god-making, human-making and animal-making where everything is subsumed into a cosmic oneness, a horizontal coexistence through exchange and inwardness. The lines that follow take us to a similar kind of world-making, full of multispecies possibilities, unknowing one’s position on earth and reimagining convergence.
Death in ancient societies was not subsumed into linear time but broadened as part of cyclical/seasonal time. Life, both in its cellular form and living matter/flesh, perpetual undergoes death and decay. While cells wither and regenerate inside, bodies post-death transform into post-human compost. My paper attempts to locate the essence of the non-dual posthumous/posthumus through Kali’s post-human reduction of humans into dirt and cinders. Kali’s evolution in Tantric philosophy works in tandem with post-dualistic post-humanism that erases the rigid symbolic distinctions between life and death. Kali, as black night, death, all-destroying time, dissolves all forms into the depthless void. As darkness herself, Kali unifies duality, disintegrates colours, and haunts funeral grounds. The form of Kali as Chinnamasta (one with the severed head) balanced over the copulating Rati and Kama and feeding her blood to her companions Dakini and Varnini, is the figure of self-sacrifice, of destruction, detachment and subsuming, and the necessary corollary to the process of creation. Smashana Kali (the dweller of cremation grounds) represents the death of ego, the burning and returning of all that is human to ashes, sky, earth, and space (where the human breaks down into humus/compost).
Goddess Kali is a part of the Ten Mahavidyas where she is represented as black with feral expressions, her upper left hand holding a bloodied cleaver, the lower left clutching a severed head, her right upper is raised in ‘abhayamudra’ (fear not), and the fourth soothes with blessings (Kinsley 8). Naked with unkempt hair, garlanded with human heads, and encircled with hacked arms around the lower abdomen, she stands over a supine Shiva in a crematorium. David Kinsley writes that “her body gleams with blood….Her ear ornaments are the corpses of children. Her fangs are dreadful….Her breasts are large and round….She makes a terrible sound and lives in the cremation ground, where she is surrounded by howling jackals….She is eager to have sexual intercourse in reverse fashion with Mahakala” (67). Her lolling tongue desires to taste debris and trash, all that is forbidden by society, polluted, littered. Kali derives her forms through ‘dhyanmantras’ (meditational realizations) which are intrinsic visualization of people undergoing Yogic discipline or a continuous harnessing of their nervous system. It is interesting to note that the source of the one hundred and eight names of Kali is Indian sculpture where the ideal measure of a figure is called ‘navatala sharira’ (‘tala’=palm) which believes in the theory that the total length of our palm is the length of our face, and thereon the entire body is measured by placing nine ‘talas’ horizontally and twelve ‘angulas’ (nine multiplied by twelve is hundred and eight). Moreover, they refer to the Yogic experience of synchronized Bija Matric (monosyllabic mantras) vibrations manifesting through hundred and eight parts of the body.
Kali’s name signifies a movement from the circumference to the centre. Brahma is the expansion from the centre where everything is unmanifest into a continuous circle (the entire world is Brahman, emerging from Brahma, who is both immanent and transcendent). Parallelly, when the world begins contracting/disappearing level by level and merges with the centre, which is also a withdrawal of senses where the world ceases to exist, and you are with the ‘onlyness’ of your self, that experience in meditation is ‘Kaivalya’ (solitude through detachment). Kali is that definite centre where one’s whole world has shrunk into the centre. This is one of the reasons behind equating Kali and Krishna whose etymological root is the Sanskrit ‘dhatu’ ‘Krish’ (which means to pull inwards). ‘Krim’ (electrical energy and fire beckoning Kali, the goddess of time and transformation) and ‘Klim’ (reproductive, water promoting, magnetic mantra of Krishna, the god of devotion and beauty) are often used interchangeably in Sanskrit. Kali is both death as folding up of the world and also the devourer of death/time— at the end of the contraction, time dissolves. With her gaping mouth, she swallows both ‘Kala’ (time) and ‘Mahakala’ (time before time has split up into the three dimensions), which transforms her into an absolutely ‘swatantra’ (independent) entity with a black body and disheveled hair. And her tongue symbolizes the ‘anuchhistho’, that word which has not been corrupted by the tongue, the word that emerges from one’s experience of Kali. Even Chamunda, the primitive form of the medieval Kali defeats the self-duplicating demon Raktabīja by drinking all his blood and killing him by assimilating. Therefore, when Krishnananda Agamavagisha of Nabadwip finally crystallized the modern iconography of Kali, we receive an evolution from the haggard Chamunda form that is only hunger to the all-ingesting Kali who is non-dual and self-eating (I devour myself). The ‘chandrakala’ (moon beam) on her head is the last fourteenth digit of the moon (symbolizing the mind) just before vanishing into ‘amavasya’ (total darkness), which is only when the goddess is worshipped. Kali, then, becomes the unifying principle under which all other aspects or avatars unfurl, the saṃhāra or taking back into and obliteration of the world.
The original potentialities return to the self at this stage of experience through the destruction of all other phenomenal forms. However, the sexual energy of the full-bodied, naked goddess is not linked to reproductive tools and transcends reproduction. If ‘srishti’ (creation) is pouring out of the generative liquid, then in Kali the river flows upwards within herself; she is eroticism without the need to reproduce. Whatever has been poured out into the world is absorbed back to the self. Thus, she is found in the crematorium grounds and on the funeral pyre where the total Saṃsāra (world) burns and vanishes. The funeral fire connotes the extinguishing of ignorance and inhibitions, of karma and attachments, and the rising of the blazing of the inner fires of knowledge that is Kali herself as a cataclysmic and transformative force. Crematoriums and corpses suggest an awareness of the temporality and nothingness of human desires and thus, serve as the appropriate ground for the spiritual quest of the sādhaka. Kinsley reads the cremation ground as the “terminal” where these “transitions routinely take place…it represents a more-or-less-permanent “opening” to the spirit world and the beings that inhabit it. It is a place of spirit traffic, of coming and going from one world to another. It is a liminal place, betwixt and between worlds, where…contact between worlds is relatively common” (237). In S’avasana (the sadhana or worship of the corpse), the sādhaka sits astride a dead body and the “Devata materializes by means of the corpse. There is possession of it (Āveśa)—that is, entry of the Devata into the dead body. At the conclusion of a successful rite, it is said, that the head of the corpse turns round, and, facing the Sādhaka, speaks, bidding him name his boon, which may be spiritual or worldly advancement as he wishes” (McDaniel 128). Kali of the burial grounds (Smashan Kali) alludes to an ever-presence of death, burning of ego, and turning into ashes. Here, ashes do not denote the categorical death of everything, but rather that which remains and is indestructible— what remains of the body are the ashes. Kali as ashes is that adamantine centre that shall not perish further and the centre from which the world shall materialize again. Destruction and reconstruction unfold in a concurrent, circular mode. For Kali, the objective is not directed at reproduction but unification; in that sense, she is ‘kaivalyadayini’ (the giver of unity and detachment). An illuminating example of composting and regenerating is elaborated by Daniel Odier. Kali of the crematorium is the deep tranquillity of the corpse where,
You are being reconnected to nature. Become one with everything…your body decomposes. Pieces of flesh, muscles, organs separate from the bone and fall to the ground, which welcomes them. In this return to the elements there is a veritable voluptuousness that needs to be savored, because the very idea of death terrifies us, whereas the experience can be felt as a grand return to nature. The earth absorbs the pieces of flesh. The bones appear as a beautiful whiteness. And from the effects of wind, sun, and weather, the pieces break apart and are ground into a powder that mixes with the earth until you have completely disappeared into the voluptuousness of a return to unity…imagine that all the cells of the flesh come back together, vivified by the earth; they re-form muscles and organs, which reattach themselves to the skeleton, which also is reassembled…in this return…an organic pleasure that has been washed free of its memories, a new freshness, a harmonious and delicious functioning…It is as if there is no longer any difference between your body and the environment. You are one with everything. (35)
On the other hand, even in the thoroughly anthropological, ‘sadhana’-centric designing of the gods and goddesses, the animals take us back to the village experience where all these origin stories first surfaced. As cosmic mother, in Chudamani Tantra, Kali proclaims herself as “Great Nature, consciousness, happiness, the quintessential” (Odier 10). Kali’s ‘vahana’ (deity’s mount) jackal is considered Kali herself. The unpredictability of the hunting jackal in the blanket of the night, along with its other association like nocturnal behaviour, massive adaptability, and symbolic death, links it to the blackness of Kali. Incidentally, prior to the main offering of the ‘bhog’ (divine food), balls of rice must be placed in the filed for the jackal to consume. The eating by the jackal is symbolic of Kali herself accepting the prasad. To this extent, all these various experiences inside the body and the phenomenal experiences outside are mapped onto the bodies of the animals. Even the rise of kundalini in our body is depicted by the movement of animals (either jumping and rising like a monkey or shooting straight up like a snake). In this mythological narrative, there is perpetually a privileging of the animals primarily because they appeared out of tribal forests and waters. Gods and animals are sensed in unison. On the grounds of transmigration, a lot of sādhakas believe many of the animals to be in a particular stage of evolution waiting to be born as human beings or fallen yogis who made mistakes and were born as animals. Even in Tantric traditions, ‘pashu’ or animal is a classified state of the human who performs their Vedic/Vaishnava/Shaivaite rituals or referred to a disciple of a guru who has just started his journey. Seema Mohanty, in her Book of Kali explicates that
Nothing in Nature appears spontaneously. Everything is a transformation of something else. According to Tantra, the essence of mineral is transformed by plants into sap which is then consumed by animals and humans as food. In the body of animals and humans, sap transforms into plasma, flesh, bone, nerves, semen and blood. Thus all things in Nature are different forms of the same essence. (82)
The eccentric and aberrant form of Chhinnamasta’s with her severed head balanced over the mating posture of Kama and Rati is a reminder of the goddesses’ non-duality and the bond between sex/life and death. In a state of sexual arousal where all opposites are reflected on to her body, generating the desire for self-pleasure, Chhinnamasta beheads herself and feeds her blood to her hungry ‘sakhis’ (companions). However, the stream of blood in the middle falls into the mouth of her own severed head. It implies the “primal sacrifice of and renewal of creation. The goddess sacrifices herself, and her blood, drunk by her attendants, renews or resuscitates the universe” (Kinsley 150). In the Buddhist context, the chopped head may represent liberation, a particular state of expanded, awakened consciousness” (Kinsley 154). Standing in the middle between Ida and Pingala she transforms into Sushumna, the centre of the energy channels that connect our chakras inside from the base of the spine to the head. Moreover, sexuality and death are equated in a kind of orgasmic sensation when every pore of the body in the sexual act converts into thousands and millions of Yonis (female sexual organ) (Ramakrishna). In the Divyacharya level of worship, there is no duality; the worshipper must become the god or the goddess and internalize the experience of the godhead. This heightened, oceanic experience is also akin to death, losing the rope with which one is tied to the world. As Vajra Vairochani, Chhinnamasta is the libidinal energy ‘Vajra’ flowing within the spine that governs the sexual apparatus of the body. The goddess Chhinnamunda herself was envisioned in the sadhana done by the two yoginis Mekhala and Kanakhala, who were renowned for severing their heads and offering them to their guru and then dancing on the streets headless. Iconographies are customarily developed from the models of the yogis or the yoginis. And this non-cruel violence is always a mirroring of the violent act of severing one’s ego, a violation upon the self, of something splintering. The weapons in the hands of the gods indicated this feeling of being cut, cleaved, and separated. Birth itself is a post-sexual act of primal violence and separation, and therefore it is possible for sex and death to be merged in the nervous system of human beings. The juxtaposition of sex and death imageries, though shocking to the civilized, sanitized mind, expresses “simultaneous inception-creation and destruction. The waxing and waning of all beings and all things, from individual organisms to the infinite cosmos itself” (Kinsley 245-246). Kali, perhaps, is the only goddess who moves from destruction to conservation. And Kali as Matangini or Ucchishthachandalini (that which is impure, leftover, partially eaten), is the low-caste Chandal who cremates not only the body but one’s sense of identification. One of the ways of involving in the sadhana of Matangini also involves dirt, filth, waste, profanities, and ‘pisacha’ (the dirty ghost who resides in faecal matter, saliva, urine, rubbish).
In Kali, humans can only reach the transcendental by acknowledging and assimilating the animal and whole of the environment within him, by imagining themselves as ashes, as ground, as compost which is the fertile land for the birth of the conjoined one. We move again from the garbage pile and the heap of corpses surrounding Kali to post-humus existence of Haraway. Haraway clarifies that
Critters are at stake in each other in every mixing and turning of the terran compost pile. We are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities. Critters—human and not—become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding. (97)
Like Haraway’s Camille, Kali too is a compostist, a post-humus compost-maker who spawns a post-human interlinked being non-native to her own humanness.