Shaktism is the third of the great theistic streams of Hinduism, drawing on ancient goddess veneration and elaborated in the Tantras and in texts such as the Devi Mahatmya that proclaim the Goddess supreme. Its affirmation places the feminine principle where Vaishnavism places Vishnu and Shaivism places Shiva. Shakta thought often integrates the god and goddess as inseparable, consciousness and its power, while insisting that the power, the Goddess, is the accessible face of the absolute and the source of both bondage and release.
Shakta Tantra has long been divided between Dakshinachara ("right-hand path"), which worships the Goddess through conventional, purity-observant ritual, and Vamachara ("left-hand path"), associated with the panchamakara or five Ms, wine, meat, fish, parched grain, and sexual union, elements ordinarily forbidden to the orthodox that Vamachara practitioners use ritually to transcend the very distinction between pure and impure. Practitioners and lineages disagree sharply over whether these elements are to be taken literally, under strict initiatory supervision, or purely symbolically, a division that mirrors the literal-versus-symbolic debate found in Vajrayana Buddhist tantra and that has made Vamachara practice controversial even within the wider Shakta and Hindu Tantric world.