A naked, midnight-dark figure wearing a skirt of severed arms and a necklace of decapitated heads, tongue dripping red as she stands on a man’s chest. To outsiders it looks like pure terror, yet to millions of devotees this is the ultimate loving mother. This deep dive traces the biography of the Hindu goddess Kali, from her birth in the sixth-century Devi Mahatmya as the physical manifestation of Durga’s rage to her role as a symbol of spiritual liberation and modern empowerment.

Along the way we unpack the battle with the self-replicating demon Raktabija, the moment Shiva stops her world-shaking dance by lying down among the corpses, and why every piece of her terrifying iconography is actually a philosophical map. We also follow her into the cremation grounds of tantric practice, the intimate poetry of Ramprasad Sen, parallel goddesses like Anat and Sekhmet, and the 1970s feminist movement and rock-and-roll logos that carried her into Western pop culture.

• Why the protruding tongue is a gesture of modesty and embarrassment in Bengal, not aggression
• How the garland of 51 or 108 heads represents the Sanskrit alphabet and the building blocks of reality
• The tantric meaning of Kali standing on Shiva: dynamic energy animating static consciousness
• Why devotees deliberately seek a mother who destroys worldly comfort rather than granting it
• Her appearance on the first cover of Ms. Magazine and her influence on the Rolling Stones logo