Inside Dakshinkali Temple

[Content warning: Contains confronting images and/or video footage]

Twice a week the Hindu temple Dakshinkali, located outside of Kathmandu in Nepal, is opened to people wishing to make offerings to the goddess Kali, which often takes the form of animal sacrifice. Animals are butchered on site and families take their meat home to cook and eat.

Around Dakshinkali Temple outside of Kathmandu, hundreds of candles burn and incense smoke billows through the dawn light. It’s 5 a.m. and already, a line of people stretches into the dark.

Their faces are lit into shadowy smiles by the candlelight. It’s cold and it’s early and some of them have travelled for hours, but there’s a feeling of happiness bubbling from the people waiting.
They’re carrying chickens and leading goats – or dragging the ones who won’t walk.

They’re bringing them to be sacrificed.

On the way into the temple, a laneway of stalls sells flower chains, incense, fruit, and toys for the children. It’s stunning and colourful, even in the faded light before sunrise.

The stalls also sell chickens and goats for those families who did not bring their own. The chickens’ feet are tied to the tops of crates with twist ties, the goats tethered to the sides of the stalls.

We walk past families buying animals and going on to wait with them in line – moving slowly closer to the smells of blood and butchering.

Lined up for a hundred metres behind the temple’s entrance, people carry chains of marigolds strung together and boxes of incense. Honestly, the scene is breathtaking, beautiful.

“We have to cut the animals to make our wishes come true,” he says.

“Yes!” He nods emphatically. And then he pauses. “But maybe in the future, it will be nicer and we won’t have to kill the animals.” He tells me that some people bring coconuts to be sacrificed instead. “For if you are vegetarian,” he explains.

At a small hut behind the temple, butchers accept the newly-killed animals’ bodies, eviscerating them and throwing them in huge, scalding bins of water to loosen their fur and feathers.

The smell grows stronger as the sun rises and the day warms. The butchers hand temple-goers back their animals in plastic grocery bags. They’re meat now, cleaned, boiled and chopped.

Men and women wade back out of the crowd at the butcher’s station and grab their tired but excited children by the hand.
It’s time to go home.

The sun is rising behind him and it feels like too obvious an image of beauty and death, mixed together in this beautiful, solemn place where many have celebrated, and many others have died before the day has even begun.