In Sum
The presence of Tantrism as a legitimate, socially integrated component of Bhaktapur's marked symbolic life, like the legitimate and integrated presence of the dangerous deities, has transformed both Tantrism and Bhaktapur. Esoteric Tantrism and the exoteric religion of the dangerous deities allow for the representation of emotions and ideas that are not represented in—and are often in opposition to—the ordinary moral order of the city. Because of this legitimate and central representation, the ideas and emotions are not totally relegated to such peripheral forms as ghost beliefs, witches and shamans, or to the "imaginary" world of fairy tales and wonder stories, or to private fantasy. All these modes exist in Bhaktapur, although some of them seemed played down in comparison with some other Nepalese groups. (Bhaktapur, for example, uses mostly hill tribe shamans for spirit healers; it treats sadhu renouncers as a "non-Newar" tradition.) The dominant alternative supernatural mode is not only legitimate but also, in some contexts, at the apex of the social system.
Tantrism is intimately connected with the meanings of the dangerous deities who are the objects of its worship, and it shares their implications and uses. Those implications are apparently contradictory to ordinary social order, but they are related to that order in an elaborate, mysterious higher unification. Tantrism and the dangerous deities represent amoral forces and the force that controls such forces, and thus the possibility of using this force to protect the moral system itself; they represent the possibility of escape from the civic system in both its dangers and its attractions and yet, at the same time, a tool for binding the members of a corporate group to the group under the shared protection
and threat of a dangerous deity; they represent danger and chaos, but also fertility and creativity, a realm that can destroy but that is necessary to the life of a community.
Tantric practice and the exoteric worship of the dangerous deities—although some of their symbolic forms may become routine and probably mostly empty of meaning for some or many of its practitioners—are nevertheless able to bring many of these meanings to repeated life, in ways that we have tried to suggest. Tantric practices, albeit somewhat timidly, violate some of the moral laws that are central markers of reputation and status in the public society. Blood sacrifice (less timidly) does this not only in Tantrism but also in the worship of the dangerous deities throughout the city.
Blood sacrifice and Tantrism's other antinomial moves have, among other meanings, a potential epistemological implication for people in Bhaktapur. The violations of the ordinary dharma which must necessarily be done in the worship of the dangerous deities are at the same time violations and not violations. They are "not violations" because they are done in the special transcendent contexts of Tantrism and sacrifice. The city's moral laws are thus valid only in a certain context. This is an important addition to Bhaktapur's large assortment of socially defined paradox-generating contexts, and of different kinds of realities which individuals experience. Tantra, however, in its doctrinal alliance with mysticism, carries the implications of shifting rules and definitions toward the implication that all contexts may be arbitrary and illusory. This is another way—alongside the direct category dissolving possibilities of the experience of meditation—that may lead to a sense of things in which an enlightened or "liberated" individual may come to see through (or, at any rate, peek through) the veil of illusion, maya , in which the moral world and ordinary logic exist.[50] That is, the results of experience will support philosophical doctrine. The purposes of Tantric puja are conceived as either powerful action for the sake of the corporate group involved, which may in some cases be the whole city or, alternatively, personal "escape" as a transcendence of samsara[*] , the ordinary moral world. Power and escape may look to an outsider as different matters, but in the context of Bhaktapur (and Hinduism) they are strongly unified, for they both represent an escape from and a transcendence of the ordinary moral system, the network of pressures, limitations, and relations of ordinary life.
It is this transcendence of the ordinary moral and social world that makes Tantrism significant both for the renouncer (the sadhu or yogi )
and the upper nonpriestly strata[51] (the Ksatriya[*] kings, court officials, and warriors). For this latter group, their power consists, or consisted, precisely in that they have, on proper occasions, to rise above and violate the ordinary dharma in the performance of their necessary protective functions (chap. 10). The alliance of aristocracy, royalty, power, mystic renunciation, and the social legitimacy of Tantrism and the dangerous deities is characteristic of Bhaktapur.