Introduction

In our discussion of Bhaktapur's pantheon we have emphasized the division of the deities most centrally concerned with the organization of the public city into "ordinary" and "dangerous." These two categories of deities are related to two general modes of religious activity in Bhaktapur and in the Hindu tradition. The mode focusing on the ordinary deities takes special definition in Bhaktapur from its contrast with the worship of the dangerous deities. The worship of the dangerous deities has roots in popular and folk tradition in South Asia but has within it a differentiated aspect that has had a literate development of its own in South Asian high culture. This is "Tantrism," which Bhaktapur differentiates in a traditional South Asian distinction from the "Vedic" practices of the ordinary religion.

Esoteric Tantrism must be distinguished in Bhaktapur on the one hand from the worship of the ordinary deities (which has in itself, as we will note, "Tantric" references) and on the other from the exoteric worship of the dangerous deities by noninitiates. It is Tantrism in itself that will be central to our discussion of the worship of those dangerous deities. For Tantrism not only is the developed mode of relation to the city's dangerous deities in the esoteric practices of the upper social levels of the city but also lies behind much of the public urban symbolism and symbolic enactments centering on those deities which are experienced by all of Bhaktapur's citizens. And it is Tantrism that gives Bhaktapur and

the Newars (as it does neighboring Tibet) much of their special qualities in South Asian religious perspective.