Verse 20

¹⁷So it stood with those low-born men, whose nature was passion and darkness, whose minds were swollen with the dust of pride in wealth, who had made light of a company of heroes who are portions of the Bhagavan, and roamed off the road as they pleased, taking their pleasure in cruelty. What they were doing was too harsh: the killing of one who had become Brahman, the son of a seer of Brahman himself, who had no enemy and was a friend to every living thing, a thing not allowed even at the slaughtering block. And when she saw it, that same goddess Bhadra Kali burst out of the stone at once, her body burning with the light of Brahman, which is more than any can bear.

¹⁸Her face was terrible, the brows bent crooked and quick in a rush of rage, the tusks and the red eyes swelling, as though she meant to destroy the world; and in her fury she let out a great roar of laughter. Leaping down, she cut the heads off those wicked men with that same sword, and with her company drank the hot liquor of blood running from their throats; and reeling drunk with drinking too much of it, she sang aloud with her attendants and danced, and played with the heads as with balls. ¹⁹Just so does a black rite against the great, an overstepping of them, bear its whole fruit upon the one who does it. ²⁰Visnudatta, there is nothing very wonderful in this, that he was not shaken even when the cutting off of his own head came upon him. For those highest swans who are the Lord's own have the knot of the heart untied that ties them to the body and the rest as a self; they are friends at heart to all that lives and have no enemy; and the Bhagavan himself, who does not blink and whose weapon is the finest of discs, guards them by one means and another, and never carelessly, once they have come to the ground of his feet where no fear can reach them from anywhere.