Maya

As the virgin mother of Buddha, Maya embarrassed ascetic Buddhists and was soon written out of the script. Like ascetic Christians speaking of Christ's birth, some Buddhists claimed the Enlightened One could not touch his mother's "parts of shame" and so was born through an opening in her side. This mythic Caesarian section seems to have been bungled, for a few days later Maya died -- "of joy," as Buddhist scriptures rather fatuously put it.

Nevertheless, Maya remained very much alive as one of Kali's most revered manifestations, because the very fact of "Existence"-- the material cosmos-demanded her presence. As Zimmer analyzed her:

Maya-Shakti is personified as the world-protecting, feminine, maternal side of Ultimate Being, and as such, stands for spontaneous, loving acceptance of life's tangible reality...[S]he affirms, she is, she represents and enjoys, the delirium of the manifested forms.... Maya-Shakti is Eve, "the Eternal Feminine," das Ewig-Weibliche: she who ate, she and tempted her consort to eat, and was herself the apple. From the point of view of the masculine principle of the Spirit (which is in quest of the enduring, eternally valid, and absolutely divine) she is the pre-eminent enigma.

In herself Maya embodied all three aspects of the maternal trinity. Her colors were white, red, and black, the colors of the Gunas, or the Virgin-Mother-Crone. Like every other form of Kali, she was Creator, Preserver, Destroyer. She was also a spirit dwelling perpetually in women, A Mahayana text says, "Of all the forms of Maya, woman is the most important."

Maya's son Buddha was surrounded by her symbols. He entered his trance of meditation under her sacred fig tree, which protected him from the weather. On his return from the soul-journey, his first symbolic act was to accept a dish of curds from a maiden on Full Moon Day in the month of May, the greatest of Buddhist festivals.

Not only the month but many other traditions attest to the great age and wide distribution of the Goddess Maya. She was more than the Maia who mothered Hermes; she was also Maga the Grandmother-goddess who bore Cu Chulainn's mother; and the Mandaean Christian's Almaya, called "Eternity," or "the World," or "Beings"; and Maga or Maj the May-maiden in Scandinavia. Like the Hindu Maya who brought forth earthly appearances at creation, the Scandinavian one personified the pregnant womb of chaos before the beginning: Ginnungagap. In this the World-virgin was associated with the idea of magical illusion, creating "appearances" like her Hindu counterpart.

This universal Creatress-name may have reached the western hemisphere also. The Maya people of Yucatan offered sacrifices in the same way as in northern India, at the same seasons, determined by the same stars. Mayan "scorpion stars" were the same as the constellation Scorpio on Hindu and Greek charts. As in India, Mayan divine images were painted blue and Mayan women pierced the left nostril for insertion of a jewel. Another version of the Creatress seems to have been the Mother Goddess Mayauel of the Mexican Agave, called "Woman with Four Hundred Breasts," with a strong resemblance to the world-nurturing Many-Breasted Artemis and other eastern forms of the deity who mothered all the world's creatures.

http://www.menlo.com/folks/davis/Maya_Web/Maya_Name.html 

Kalis, has an etymological, connection, to; 'Krater'.[the cup]







 http://www.constellationsofwords.com/Constellations/Crater.html 

'Ride the Snake?', I think not!