"Feeding the Enemy to the Goddess: War Magic in Shaiva Tantric Texts" by Olga Serbaeva is an article originally published in the journal "Religions". It´s rather "in-house" and deals with some medieval Tantric texts on war magic. We are very far removed from the amorous pastimes of Krishna and Radha, or the dharmic law-and-order of Vishnu. This is a world of human sacrifice and black magic. The deity worshipped is often Kali, sometimes Kubjika or "Mahalakshmi" (really Durga), or the terrible Matrikas (Mothers) as a collective.
Even apart from the human sacrifice, the rituals are clearly transgressive in nature. They involve offerings of the magician´s own blood, alcohol or unspecified "juices", which are perhaps sexual substances. The Goddess should be visualized as "howling like a jackal", the jackal being associated with the charnel ground. Human "omentum" (fat?) should also be offered. How has it been obtained? One particularly complex ritual feature an entire mandala made of corpses. If these rituals are conducted *before* the war, where do the human remains come from? In other cases, the enemy army is the sacrifice. There is also a ritual conducted in the middle of a battle field, after the battle is over.
The Tantric texts promise various supernatural results from the hideous rituals which will benefit the kings fighting the war. The power of illusion is central: the magician can conjur imaginary armies to scare the enemy, or take the form of the terrible god Bhairava. The author suspects, however, that the *real* purpose of this war magic wasn´t to aid the kings (that was more of an side effect used to "sell" the rituals to powerful patrons), but to make it possible for the Tantrika to obtain human body parts in a "legal" way. Thus, the rituals serve the religious or spiritual purpose of bringing the practitioner closer to the Goddess...
I´m not sure if that´s very reassuring, though.
