The principal seat of Sakta worship is the north-eastern part of India--Bengal, Assam and Behar. The great majority of its adherents profess to follow the right-hand practice; and apart from the implied purport and the emblems of the cult, their mode of adoration does not seem to offer any very objectionable features. And even amongst the adherents of the left-hand mode of worship, many of these are said to follow it as a matter of family tradition rather than of religious conviction, and to practise it in a sober and temperate manner; whilst only an extreme section--the so-called _Kaulas_ or _Kulinas_, who appeal to a spurious Upanishad, the Kaulopanishad, as the divine authority of their tenets--persist in carrying on the mystic and licentious rites taught in many of the Tantras. But strict secrecy being enjoined in the performance of these rites, it is not easy to check any statements made on this point. The Sakta cult is, however, known to be especially prevalent--though apparently not in a very extreme form--amongst members of the very respectable Kayastha or writer caste of Bengal, and as these are largely employed as clerks and accountants in Upper India, there is reason to fear that their vicious practices are gradually being disseminated through them. The divine object of the adoration of the Saktas, then, is Siva's wife--the _Devi_ (goddess), _Mahadevi_ (great goddess), or _Jagan-mata_ (mother of the world)--in one or other of her numerous forms, benign or terrible. The forms in which she is worshipped in Bengal are of the latter category, viz. _Durga_, "the unapproachable," and _Kali_, "the black one," or, as some take it, the wife of _Kala_, "time," or death the great dissolver, viz. Siva. In honour of the former, the _Durga-puja_ is celebrated during ten days at the time of the autumnal equinox, in commemoration of her victory over the buffalo-headed demon Mahishasura; when the image of the ten-armed goddess, holding a weapon in each hand, is worshipped for nine days, and cast into the water on the tenth day, called the Dasahara, whence the festival itself is commonly called Dasara in western India. _Kali_, on the other hand, the most terrible of the goddess's forms, has a special service performed to her, at the _Kali-puja_, during the darkest night of the succeeding month; when she is represented as a naked black woman, four-armed, wearing a garland of heads of giants slain by her, and a string of skulls round her neck, dancing on the breast of her husband (Mahakala), with gaping mouth and protruding tongue; and when she has to be propitiated by the slaughter of goats, sheep and buffaloes. On other occasions also Vamacharis commonly offer animal sacrifices, usually one or more kids; the head of the victim, which has to be severed by a single stroke, being always placed in front of the image of the goddess as a blood-offering (_bali_), with an earthen lamp fed with ghee burning