The Goddess as supreme (Shakti)

Shaktas affirm the Goddess (Devi, Shakti, in forms such as Durga, Kali, and Parvati), as the supreme reality: not the consort of a male god but the ultimate power (shakti) from which all, including the gods, arises. On this view the divine feminine is the active, creative energy of the cosmos and its very ground, at once fierce and maternal, destroyer of demons and giver of liberation. Worship centres on the Goddess in her many aspects and, in its Tantric forms, on the awakening of her power within the practitioner. The foundational Shakta text is the Devi Mahatmya (also called Durga Saptashati), part of the Markandeya Purana and generally dated to around the fifth or sixth century CE, which narrates the Goddess's defeat of the buffalo-demon Mahishasura and proclaims her the source of all divine power.

Later Tantric elaboration systematised her forms into the Ten Mahavidyas (wisdom goddesses), including Kali, Tara, and Chinnamasta. The Kamakhya temple in Assam, one of Shaktism's most important pilgrimage sites, venerates the Goddess in aniconic form as a cleft rock associated with the yoni and observes an annual festival, Ambubachi, marking her yearly menstruation, a ritual calendar without real parallel in Vaishnava or Shaiva practice.

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.