ORIENTAL SERIES.

KALIKA KALIKA-PURANA. 143
mastery with which he wields the language,
and on account of
the consummate tact with which he imparts to it a more simple
or more artificial form, according to the requirements of the
suhjects treated by him, without falling
into the artificial dic-
tion of later poets or over-stepping the limits of good taste ;
on account of the variety of his creations, his ingenious conceptions,
and his happy choice of suhjects; and not less on
account of the complete manner in which he attains his poetical
ends, the beauty of his narrative, the delicacy of his sentiment,
and the fertility of his imagination." Many of his works have
been translated, and there
by
is a French translation of the whole
Fauche.
KALIKA. The goddess Kali.
KALIKA PUKAJVA. One of the eighteen Upa Purawas.
"It contains about 9000 stanzas in 98 chapters, and is the
only work of the series dedicated to recommend the worship of
the bride of Siva, in one or other of her manifold forms as
Giri-ja, Devi, Bhadra-kali, Kali, Maha-maya. It belongs, there-
fore, to the Sakta modification of Hindu belief, or the worship
of the female powers of the deities. The influence of this
worship shows itself in the very first pages of the work, which
relate the incestuous passion of Brahma for his daughter, San-
dhya, in a strain that has nothing analogous to it in the Yayu,
Linga, or Siva Purawas. The marriage of $iva and Parvati is a
subject early described, with the sacrifice of Daksha and the
death of SatL And this work is authority for /Siva's carrying
the dead body about the world, and the origin of the Pi&a-
sthanas, or places where the different members of it were scat-
tered, and where Lingas were consequently erected. A legend
follows of the births of Bhairava and Yetala, whose devotion to
the different forms of Devi furnishes occasion to describe, in
great detail, the rites and formulae of which her worship consists,
including the chapters on sanguinary sacrifices translated in the
Asiatic Researches (vol. v. ), Another peculiarity in this work is
afforded by very prolix descriptions
of a number of rivers and
mountains at Kamarupa Tirtlia, in Assam, and rendered holy
ground by the celebrated temple of Durga in that country, as
Kamakshl or Kamakshya. It is a singular and yet uninvesti-
gated circumstance, that Assam, or at least the north-east of
Bengal, seems to have been, in a great degree, the source from