In order to maintain social order, we very quickly learn to repress or sublimate any desire that may arise in our minds to kill other living beings – a primitive desire to destroy all others but ourselves; the forbidden pleasure that we feel when hurting another — something we as civilized people don’t like to admit to.
This potential or subtle desire to kill or to hurt others, is present to some degree in the psyche of everyone. This repressed destructive desire, unconsciously motivates many of our actions in day to day life.
In the iconography of Tantra this aspect of our sub-conscious minds is personified and represented as a woman with the head of a crane (baka), the placid, graceful crane being considered the most deceitful of all creatures – it stands on one leg in the river, perfectly still like a yogi — but it waits for an unsuspecting fish to glide by.
Bagalā-mukhī is also known as Pītāmbāra-devī (The goddess garbed in yellow). She presides over all the gross and subtle forms of killing. She is more than any of the other Mahā-vidyās the presiding goddess of the supernormal yogic powers known as “siddhīs” which can either be used for universal good (“white-magic”) or subjective self-agrandisement (“black-magic”). She is the cosmic force which incites men to kill and to torture one another.
Bagala-mukhi is also strongly associated with sexual desire and pleasure — particularly that of the sado-masochistic type. Several of her epithets in her thousand-name hymn (sahsranāma-stotram) associate her directly with kāma, “sexual desire,” or the god of sexual desire, Kāma-deva.
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