O ṃ ! O glorious Goddess of the Wet Cloth ( ā rdrapa ṭ e ś var ī ), O She Who is Garbed in Green and Blue, O Dark One, O Salivator, O Fie...
Oṃ! O glorious Goddess of the Wet Cloth (ārdrapaṭeśvarī), O She Who is Garbed in Green and Blue, O Dark One, O Salivator, O Fierce One, Howler, Skull-Bearer, Flaming Mouth, Seven Tongues of Flame, the Thousand-eyed One, approach! Approach so-and-so! I offer you an animal! Cut off the life of so-and-so! Approach! Approach! You Who Steal Away Lives! Huṃ phaṭ bhur bhuvaḥ svaḥ phaṭ! You that devours cloth soaked in blood, cleave my enemies! Cleave! Drink the blood! Drink! huṃ phaṭ svāhā.
The heterodox nature of Hinduism has fascinated me for years. The shadow aspects of the religion that most urban Indians dismiss as mumbo jumbo, I find intriguing. Recently a friend who is familiar with my interests sent me a corpus of obscure texts dealing with magic rituals, including the Uḍḍīśatantra, Uḍḍāmeśvaratantra and Uḍḍāmaratantra.
Uḍḍ-corpus texts are framed as a dialogue between Śiva and Rāvaṇa, the demonic ruler of Lanka who abducted Rama’s wife Sita and spirited her away to his palace. Rāvaṇa’s primacy is what distinguishes Udd-corpus from more conventional Tantras in which Siva and his consort Sakti or Parvati are interlocutors. In fact, the Uḍḍīśatantra is an important text in contemporary Sri Lanka, though its contents are not known to many.
Dr Aaron Michael Ullrey, an expert in magic rituals in Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, wrote...
