Kali is where a Western reader's instinct to sort deities into good and evil breaks down completely. She is the standard iconography of horror — black, blood-mouthed, garlanded in skulls, dancing on her husband — and in Bengal she is the object of the most tender devotional literature the region produced. Ramprasad Sen's eighteenth-century songs scold her, plead with her, and accuse her of neglect, in the register of a child arguing with a mother. Ramakrishna, the Dakshineswar temple priest whose experiences shaped modern Hinduism through his disciple Vivekananda, treated her as literally present and once described threatening to cut his own throat when she would not appear. She belongs to the Tantric stream, and her worship in Bengal and Assam included animal sacrifice, which continues at Kalighat and at Kamakhya and is contested in Indian courts. Colonial writers used her, and the thugee panic, to characterise Hinduism as bloodthirsty; devotees regard the fear as the point and the sentimentality as the error.