Bhairavi is the feminine of Bhairava, the terrifying form of Shiva, and her iconography combines what is usually kept apart. She is red, or the colour of a thousand rising suns, seated on a lotus or a corpse, garlanded with severed heads and smeared with blood; and in the same figure she holds a rosary and a book while making the gestures of granting boons and of dispelling fear. A cremation ground and a scholar's library are given to one goddess without apology.
She is most often invoked as Tripura Bhairavi, and unlike Kali or Chhinnamasta she carries no single arresting narrative. What the tantras give instead is a proliferation of qualified forms, Sampatprada, Kaulesha, Siddha, Bhayavidhvamsini and others, each with its own mantra and its own result, so that Bhairavi functions as a class of practice at least as much as a person.
The associations that recur are time and heat. She is linked with pralaya, the dissolution at the end of a cycle, and with kala, time as the agent that consumes what it produced; and she is linked with tapas, the heat a practitioner generates through austerity, which burns away whatever it is applied to. Those are the same operation seen from outside and from inside, destruction as a cosmic process and destruction as an ascetic method, and a number of accounts treat her less as a distinct personality than as that operation given a face.