A Wider World

The Sacred Beyond

Kali is all raging black arms and lolling red tongue. She is hungry. Kali wants sacrifice, and here at the Dakshin Kali Temple in a misty gorge just outside Nepal’s Kathmandu Valley, hundreds of pilgrims await on a Saturday at dawn to give their Hindu warrior goddess what she craves.

They bring her cows, goats, and chickens. Blood mingling with the smell of incense renders the air thick and ancient, with a weight of sickly sweetness. My stomach churns, and I know it is not the curry this time. On my shoes, I do not know which red splotches are from powders for the blazing tikkas that dot foreheads around me and which from the last throes of slaughtered calves.

Still, my eyes remain open. I resolve to watch everything, as if by looking closely, I could see the sacred beyond the gore.

A man in head-to-toe white is next in line to enter the main square of the temple, where a statue of Kali watches from on high. On a rope, he tows a goat black as night. He can pay for a boy to kill for him, but he takes out his own curved knife, and with a sawing swiftness, goat body and head lie separate, each oozing blood in the marbled gutters at the feet of Kali.

The man smears himself with the blood—forehead, neck, white garb—and walks away in bare, bloody feet. He drags the beheaded goat behind him. Animals killed today in honor of Kali are boiled in vats on temple premises; worshippers eat the sacrificial meat. The killings are only symbolic.

Next to me, a burgeoning Hindu from Colorado tells me maybe the portrayals of Kali as bloodthirsty are symbolic, too. Kali asks us only to sacrifice our egos, he says. In Hindu texts, Kali collects the blood of demons, not innocents. Locals too are questioning the ancient rite: in Kali temples today, sometimes pumpkins are sacrificed instead. What is sacrifice, this man says, but intention?

I realize then I had also sacrificed something that day: my comfort. I wonder how many goats that equates to for Kali.