A Set That Opens With Kali and Closes With Wealth

The order of the ten Mahavidyas is doing something, and the position of Kamala at the end is where it is easiest to see. The list begins with Kali in the cremation ground, naked, garlanded with heads and standing on a corpse, and it ends with a golden goddess on a lotus being bathed by elephants while devotees ask her for money. Between the two stand a goddess who has decapitated herself, a starving widow, and a goddess of the outcaste.

The tradition does not present this as a range of unrelated deities filed together for convenience. It presents them as one Goddess at her furthest reaches, and the pairing of the first and the last is the clearest statement of that claim: the power that ends things and the power that provides are not opposites needing reconciliation but the same power seen from two positions. Several texts make the point explicitly by having the Mahavidyas emerge together from a single goddess in a single episode.

Kamala is also the point of entry. Almost every Hindu household worships Lakshmi and almost none would describe itself as tantric, so the last item on an esoteric list is the one item on it that is universally familiar. A framework that would otherwise have remained the property of initiates has one member standing in every shop and kitchen in the country, and that is a large part of how the list stayed in circulation at all.