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the purposes of metaphor and symbol an entire system based on such dualities, personified by
that figure who endlessly dances’ (Koch, 1987, 12).
By ‘that figure’ Koch is primarily talking about Kali, an aspect of the Hindu divine
feminine, which is the female aspect of the god Shiva, who is ‘the cosmic dancer, the divine
lord of destruction’ and ‘model of ascetic fervor’, the archetype of the ‘frantic lover and
faithful spouse’. Devotion to Shiva is directed to his
dynamism—this torrential cosmic stream of fleeting evolutions, which is
continually producing and wiping out individual existences (this Niagara, of
which we are the drops), as it seethes in a roaring, tremendous foam (Zimmer,
1969, 351).
Kali is Shiva’s ‘eternal female counterpart, his projected energy’, who arouses him ‘from the
timeless contemplation of his own innermost spiritual luminosity’ to act as destroyer and
creator of the universe (Zimmer, 1969, 141).
This turn to Eastern mythical symbols was entirely appropriate for an Australian writer
fascinated with the demise of the British empire and the West’s cultural system. Koch writes
that he regretted the loss of the European divine feminine, but found that she could be more
easily replaced than resuscitated:
Once as omnipresent as Durga, with names just a various and mysterious, the
ancient triple moon goddess of Europe was now a set of figments; she had
been reduced to a collection of artefacts in museums, however eloquently
Robert Graves might plead for her return. But a very different situation existed
in India. There, I found, she was part of a living culture; and discovering her
had the impact of the truly strange, and the force of unconscious recognition.
She was woman as the incarnation of time and flux and destiny: the Indian
counterpart of the White Lady we have banished from our days, but who still
haunts our sleep. She was one of those whom the Australian Aborigines have
so memorably described as the Eternal Ones of the Dream. (Koch, 1987, 9)
Koch has not abandoned the ‘White Lady’ of Western tradition. He makes repeated allusions
to E. M. Forster’s Passage to India, for example, which provides important thematic models to
Koch, being, as Marjorie McCormick notes, ‘much about the cycles of history and the
possibilities of new life’. There are the Marabar caves,
a primeval womb, the reflections of a match light the first conception, birth,
and death: ‘the two flames approach and strive to unite … the radiance
increases, the flames touch one another, kiss, expire’ (PI 125). The eternal
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