Open any podcast today and you will hear about the 64 Yoginis. Their circular temples, their midnight rites, their fierce beauty. We are glad they are being spoken of again. But we must say something plainly, as people who have sat with the Gurus of this tradition: talking about the Yoginis is not knowing the Yoginis.
At Satyamshakti Astro and More, we are trying to bring back the long-lost knowledge of these goddesses with the help of our scriptures and esteemed Gurus, and with the blessings of Dakshinamurthy and Dattatreya. This blog is about what the Yoginis actually are, the practical tantra almost nobody discusses, the Nitya Devis and Anga Devatas who attend the great goddesses, and what was truly lost.
Who Are the Sixty-Four Yoginis?
The Yoginis are the great expansion of the Saptamatrikas. Where the Seven Mothers are the shaktis of the gods, the sixty-four are the shaktis of everything: of the directions, the arts, the senses, the letters, the winds of the body. One traditional teaching derives them simply: eight mother-powers, each unfolding into eight forms. Eight times eight is sixty-four, the number of completeness.
They are not “good” or “evil” in any simple sense. In the old texts the Yoginis are beautiful and terrifying in the same breath. They grant siddhis, supernatural capacities, to the sincere sadhaka, and they devour the arrogant. They fly by night, gather in cremation grounds and circles, drink, dance, and laugh. They are the wild, untamed aspect of the Goddess herself, the part of Shakti that refuses to sit still on a throne.
This is the first thing the podcasts miss. The Yoginis are not a mythology to be admired. They are a practice to be entered.
The Temples: Circles Open to the Sky
Between the 9th and 12th centuries, extraordinary temples were raised to the Yoginis across Central India and Odisha. They are unlike any other Hindu temples: circular, roofless, open to the sky, ringed with sixty-four niches, each holding a Yogini.
Hirapur, Odisha (9th century): the smallest and most perfect, a stone circle barely twenty-five feet across, with a dancing Bhairava at its center.
Bhedaghat, near Jabalpur (10th century): the largest, set on a hill above the Narmada, its Yoginis carved in poses of astonishing vitality.
Ranod, Madhya Pradesh: a quieter shrine, half-forgotten, holding some of the finest Yogini sculpture ever made.
Khajuraho: the oldest, built of granite, and unusually rectangular, proof that the tradition had many local forms.
Lokhari, Uttar Pradesh, and others scattered and mostly ruined.
Why circular? Because the temple is a chakra, a mandala, a yantra you can walk into. Why roofless? Because the Yoginis are powers of the open sky and the night; no roof can contain them, and the sadhaka who worships here worships under the stars, in the dark, where these goddesses actually move.
Stand in the Hirapur circle at midnight and you understand in one breath what a hundred podcasts cannot convey: you are standing inside the Goddess’s own body.
The Practical Tantra Nobody Discusses
Here is what very few people know practically, and it is the living core of the tradition.
The Yoginis live in your chakras. Every serious student of kundalini knows their names, though few realize they are Yoginis: Dakini presides over Muladhara, Rakini over Svadhisthana, Lakini over Manipura, Kakini over Anahata, Sakini over Vishuddha, and Hakini over Ajna. When the texts speak of awakening the chakras, they are speaking of approaching these fierce mothers within your own spine. This is not symbolism. In the Kaula practice, you meet them.
The sadhaka becomes Bhairava. The secret at the heart of Yogini tantra is identification, not supplication. In the chakra-puja, the practitioner does not beg the sixty-four for favors. He or she takes the seat at the center of the circle, as Bhairava among the Yoginis, and the powers that seemed external are recognized as one’s own energies. This is why the tradition was always initiatory. It is not information. It is transformation, and it requires a Guru who has walked the circle before you.
The sixty-four are a complete science. Sixty-four Yoginis, sixty-four arts, sixty-four tantras: the number marks a total system of embodied knowledge. To “know” the Yoginis meant to master the powers of body, breath, speech, and mind in an integrated discipline, not to collect sixty-four names.
The Nitya Devis: The Eternal Goddesses
Very few people know the Nitya Devis, and this is among the most beautiful of the lost teachings.
“Nitya” means eternal, and also daily. The Nityas are the goddess’s eternal companions, and each one is worshipped on her own lunar day. In the Sri Vidya tradition, sixteen Nityas attend Lalita Tripurasundari, and each presides over one tithi of the lunar fortnight:
Kameshwari, Bhagamalini, Nityaklinna, Bherunda, Vahnivasini, Mahavajreshwari, Shivaduti, Tvarita, Kulasundari, Nitya, Nilapataka, Vijaya, Sarvamangala, Jvalamalini, Chitra, and Lalita herself as the sixteenth, the Maha-Nitya in whom all the others dissolve.
This gives the sadhaka a daily calendar of the Goddess: every single day of the month belongs to one of her eternal forms. The worship is nitya, daily, because the Goddesses are nitya, eternal. They do not visit on festivals. They are the structure of time itself.
In the Kali kula too, Ma Kali is never alone. She stands at the center of her own circle of eternal attendants, her Yoginis and Nityas, her powers arranged around her like stars around the night sky. To worship Kali truly is to worship her whole mandala.
The Anga Devatas: The Limbs of the Goddess
And almost no one speaks of the Anga Devatas, though they are the key to understanding every yantra.
Just as your body has limbs, every great deity’s mandala has anga-devatas, limb-deities. The sixteen Nityas are Lalita’s limbs. The sixty-four Yoginis are Kali’s limbs. The directional guardians, the weapons of the goddess personified, the Gurus of the lineage seated in the yantra’s outer rings: all are angas, upa-angas, and pratyangas, the limbs, sub-limbs, and joints of one divine body.
This is why a yantra is not a diagram. It is a body, and worship is not decoration but anatomy: you honor each limb so that the whole Goddess stands complete before you. The popular worship that honors only the central deity and ignores her attendants is like greeting a person’s face while ignoring their hands. The old tantrics would have called it incomplete, and they would have been right.
What Was Lost
The Yogini temples were abandoned centuries ago. The Kaula lineages that kept the midnight practices went underground or died with their last Gurus. The manuscripts, in Sharada, Grantha, and Newari scripts, sit untranslated in libraries and private collections. The British archaeologists who “discovered” the temples carried the sculptures to museums and wrote papers, but a paper is not a practice.
What was lost was not information. It was the living chain: the Guru who could look at a disciple and say, “You are ready for Dakini now.” The circle that met on the dark nights. The calendar of Nityas kept day by day, month by month, for a lifetime. Information survives in books. Practice survives only in people.
The Podcast Problem
We do not mock the podcasts. Every revival begins with curiosity. But we must be honest: you cannot learn Yogini sadhana from audio. The tradition is practical in the most literal sense. It lives in the body (nyasa, chakra, breath), in the Guru’s mouth (mantra is given, not taken), and in the circle (the temple, the cremation ground, the midnight hour). A description of fire never warmed anyone.
This is why we say: be grateful for the curiosity, but do not mistake it for the thing itself.
Walking the Circle Today
What can a sincere seeker do now?
Visit the temples. Go to Hirapur, to Bhedaghat. Walk the circle. The stones still hold the charge; the Yoginis have not left, only the crowds have.
Learn the inner Yoginis. Begin with the six chakra Yoginis, Dakini to Hakini, within a legitimate kundalini or Sri Vidya discipline. This is the practical door that stands open.
Keep the Nitya calendar. Even simple daily remembrance of the presiding Nitya of the tithi reconnects you to the eternal rhythm the old tantrics lived by.
Find a Guru for the depths. The midnight sadhanas, the chakra-pujas, the fierce forms: these belong to initiation. This is not elitism. It is the same reason fire is kept from children.
Why We Are Doing This
The Yoginis were never defeated by argument. They were defeated by forgetting. And forgetting can be undone.
With the blessings of Dakshinamurthy, the silent teacher in whose stillness all mantras are born, and Dattatreya, the adi-guru who carries every lineage within himself, we at Satyamshakti Astro and More are working to rebuild the living chain: text by text, practice by practice, Guru willing, student by student.
The sixty-four are still dancing in their circles, under the open sky, waiting for the sadhakas to return.
The circle is unbroken. It was only unwatched. Come, and watch with us.