Kamakhya is the great temple of a strand of Hinduism that the respectable mainstream has often preferred not to look at directly.
No image, a cleft. There is no statue in the inner sanctum. The goddess is present as a natural fissure in the rock, kept perpetually moist by an underground spring, venerated as her yoni, her generative and sexual power. Among the fifty-one Shakti Pithas, the places where parts of the dismembered goddess Sati are said to have fallen, Kamakhya is where her yoni fell, which makes the temple the pre-eminent seat of the goddess as creative force.
Ambubachi. Each June the temple observes the Ambubachi Mela, the festival of the goddess's menstruation. For several days the sanctum is closed while she is held to bleed, the spring is said to run red, and cloth from the shrine is distributed afterwards as a powerful blessing. On reopening, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims come, among them large numbers of Tantric practitioners and ascetics for whom this is one of the central sites of their path.
What it does not apologise for. Kamakhya still practises animal sacrifice openly, where most large temples have quietly dropped it, and its Tantric associations are not hidden. It is a working demonstration that Hinduism contains, and has always contained, a tradition that treats the divine feminine as bodily, sexual and bloody rather than sublimated, and that this tradition has its own great pilgrimage, priests and calendar.