3.  Some early scholars

In his famous tome, The Great Mother:  An Analysis of the Archetype, Erich Neumann includes this diagram, in which he puts the Judeo-Christian/Greco-Roman mother/virgin goddesses (Mary, Demeter, Sophia) at the top of his circle, with the attributes “Good Mother, Virgin, Positive Transformative Character, Inspiration.”  At the bottom, shaded, portion of the circle, Neumann includes the African and Eastern goddesses if Astarte and Kali, with the descriptions of “Terrible Mother, Witch, dismemberment, death, sickness, madness, and devouring.”

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He goes on to describe a Kali ritual and her image:

“Today the temple of Kali at the Kalighat in Calcutta is famous for its daily blood sacrifices; it is no doubt the bloodiest temple on earth…. The temple serves simply as a slaughterhouse… This rite is performed amid gruesome filth… The Goddess desires only the blood of the offerings… In her “hideous aspect” the Goddess, as Kali, the “dark one” raises the skull full of seething blood to her lips… The most terrible of the three images of Kali is not the one with the inhuman many arms, hideously squatting amid a halo of flames, devouring the tentrails that form a deathly umbilical cord between the corpse’s open belly and her own gullet.  Nor is it the one that, clad in the nocturnal black of the earth goddesses and adorned with the hacked-off hands and heads of her victims, stands on the corpse of Shiva—a barbaric specter whose exaggeration of horror makes her almost unreal.  . These figures are gruesomely alike.  Their sheer frightfulness makes us hesitate…” (Neumann 152-153).