Raktabijaरक्तबीज

Raktabija, whose name means blood-seed, is a demon of the Devi Mahatmya distinguished by a single appalling gift: from every drop of his blood that touched the ground, a duplicate of himself sprang up at full strength. Fighting in the armies of the brothers Shumbha and Nishumbha, he turned the battlefield into a factory of himself, for every wound the goddesses dealt him multiplied their enemy.

The story

As the clones thronged the field and the gods despaired, the goddess Chandika commanded Kali, sprung from her own brow, to open wide her mouth. Then, as the Devi struck Raktabija with her weapons, Kali swept the field with her vast tongue, catching each drop of blood before it could reach the earth and devouring the duplicates as they arose. Drained utterly, the demon fell. The episode belongs to the third and longest section of the Devi Mahatmya, and it is the fearsome, blood-drinking Kali of this battle, dark, gaunt and garlanded, who became fixed in the iconographic imagination; her outstretched tongue is often connected with this feat.

Readings

Commentators have long treated Raktabija as an allegory made flesh: the desire or thought that redoubles with every attempt to cut it down, conquerable not by force alone but by consuming it at the source. The myth thus doubles as a statement about the peculiar work only the goddess's most terrible form can do.