Shiva as Kala

In a comment on Sunday’s post “The hand of Shiva,” I noted that Kala usually refers to Shiva but that the famous line from the Gita is an exception:

Bill’s post discusses the etymology of cool and notes that it is related to the Old Norse kala. In Hinduism, Kala is the personification of time and death and is often considered an avatar of Shiva, though Krishna also becomes Kala in the Gita, in the line famously quoted by Oppenheimer in connection with the atomic bomb.

The next day, Monday, I found this in the weekly meme post at a well-known hate speech site:

I don’t know where this is from, but it looks to be taken from a comic book or something. It’s clearly supposed to be translation of Gita 11:32, the very text I mentioned as not referring to Shiva, but mangled so that it does refer to Shiva. The original says, “Kala [Death or Time] am I, the great destroyer of the worlds,” to which the meme adds the gloss “Shiva, the Destroyer.” In its original context, these are unambiguously the words of Krishna, who is an avatar of Vishnu and is obviously not claiming to be Shiva. I don’t believe any Hindu would ever consider translating Kala as Shiva here. The confusion probably comes from the popular Western understanding of a “Hindu trinity” in which the role of Destroyer belongs exclusively to Shiva. I don’t see any hint of that in the Gita, which views Vishnu/Krishna not as one-third of the Trimurti but as the Supreme Being plain and simple. That’s how I read it, anyway, but my knowledge of the Gita is superficial, and I am open to correction.

Anyway, the point of this post is not to argue about the theology of an alien religion but simply to note the remarkable coincidence of running into that particular (mis)interpretation of that particular verse just a day after  presenting the opposite interpretation myself. Finding it in a collection of right-wing memes was particularly improbable.

Update (December 3): Cleaning out some folders today, I found this meme -- downloaded on September 13, 2024, from the same site as the Shiva meme shown above:

I can't remember why I thought that was worth saving, but note how it ends with the line "I am the Great Destroyer" -- a direct quote from Gita 11:32. My recent posts about Shiva have mentioned him as "the god of cool things" in connection with Bill Wright's recent posts on "cool" themes. Another recent theme of Bill's is the fox. Here, for example, we see a "fox" post sandwiched between two "cool" posts: