“_Sakti_” worship has also attained great influence and extensive predominance in many parts of India. This is the worship of the _Sakti_ or the female half of the great deities of the land. The _Saktar_ preëminently worship _Kali_, the goddess of blood, and the other consorts of Siva. It is a worship of power (“_Sakti_” means energy or power), and usually power of the maleficent type. It is perhaps the lowest form of Hinduism and easily lends itself to a gratification of the lowest passions of men. This _tantric_ cult (the _tantras_ are the sacred books of the Saktar) is the only one in modern Hinduism which indulges in bloody sacrifices—_Kali_ and her sisters being satisfied by blood as by nothing else. This attests the non-Aryan origin and character of this worship, inasmuch as Brahmanism, since the days of Buddha, abjures all bloody sacrifice.
Let it not be supposed, however, from the above remarks, about the multiform and self-contradictory character of the amorphous thing called Hinduism, that it is therefore impossible for us to understand and measure its nature and power. For Brahmanism, through all ages, has not been without a definite tendency, an underlying philosophy and pervasive fundamental beliefs. It is indeed more a congeries of faiths than a simple religion, like Christianity. And yet, amid all its hosts of contradictions and ways of salvation and sects and cults there have sounded, as a diapason through all the centuries, the fundamental teachings of Vedantism. A few doctrines such as pantheism, transmigration, “karma,” “bhakti” and final absorption into the Supreme Soul are all but universally held by the people of all sects and divisions, however much at variance with these their peculiar beliefs may seem to be.
The prominent staple of Hindu religious thinking in all ages has doubtless been Vedantism—that subtle form of pantheism which has charmed and bewildered not a few of the great minds of the Occident also. The paramount influence of this philosophy upon all religious thought and life in India is unmistakable today, as it has been through the centuries. Of this Max Müller says,—“If the people of India can be said to have now any system of religion at all ... it is to be found in the Vedanta philosophy, the leading tenets of which are known to some extent in every village.... Nothing will extinguish that ancient spirit of Vedantism which is breathed by every Hindu from his earliest youth, and pervades, in various forms, even the prayers of the idolater, the speculations of the philosopher, and the proverbs of the beggar.”