The Shatkarma: The Six Acts of Tantric Magic

A flyer in a newspaper, or a website that finds you at three in the morning, makes a promise. Get your ex back. Control anyone you desire. Remove the black magic your enemy has placed on you. Guaranteed results. And printed among the guarantees are two of the oldest words in the tantric vocabulary: vashikaran, and shatkarma.

The person who answers that advertisement is usually in pain. They have lost a love, or a child will not come, or the money has run out, or someone they trust has turned cold, and they are frightened enough to try anything. What they will mostly find is a man who takes their money in installments and then stops answering the phone.

The words on the flyer, though, are not invented. They point at something real and old, a genuine stratum of the tantric ritual world called the six acts. But almost nothing about how those words are used today is honest, and the sharpest judge of the fraud turns out to be the tradition itself, which took the dark side of its own magic far more seriously, and far more warily, than any advertisement ever will. This is the story of what the six acts actually are, where they came from, and why the tradition ringfenced them long before any rationalist thought to.

Two things called shatkarma

First, a knot to untie, because the word itself is a trap.

Shatkarma means simply “the six acts,” and the tradition uses it for two completely different sets of six. One is entirely benign and has nothing to do with magic: in hatha yoga, the shatkarma are the six purifications of the body, the cleansings with names like neti and dhauti and nauli, techniques for scouring the nasal passages and the gut and the abdominal muscles before deeper practice. A person searching for “shatkarma” in the hope of a morning cleansing routine and a person searching for it in the hope of a curse are chasing the same word to opposite ends of the tradition.

This article is about the other six. In the literature of tantric ritual, the shatkarma, sometimes the shatkarmani, are the six operations of what can only be called magic, the deliberate use of mantra and rite to produce an effect in the world. And unlike the yoga purifications, most of them are not gentle at all.

The six acts

The six, as the manuals list them, run from the harmless to the terrible, and the tradition is clear-eyed about the difference.

The first is shanti, or shantikarana, pacification. It is the one unambiguously good act: the quieting of illness, the averting of calamity, the calming of a malefic influence. To this the longer lists often add pushti, the increase of health and prosperity. These are the white acts, the ones a healer or a priest performs without shame, close kin to ordinary worship.

The other five bend darker. Vashya, or vashikaran, is subjugation: bringing a person under one’s control, bending their will to one’s own. Stambhana is immobilization, the arresting or paralysing of an enemy, a faculty, a process, holding something fast so that it cannot move or act. Vidveshana is the sowing of enmity, setting friends or allies against one another. Uchchatana is eradication, the uprooting and driving away of a person from their place, unsettling them until they flee. And the last is marana, killing, the rite of destruction aimed at a life.

The tradition arranges these along a moral gradient it makes no attempt to hide. Shanti and pushti are the white acts. The lower four, stambhana, vidveshana, uchchatana, and marana, are the black ones, the destructive register the texts themselves flag as dangerous and hedge with warnings. It is worth saying plainly that this account describes these as categories of intention and nothing more. It gives no procedure, no mantra, no method for any of them, and it will not, because the point here is understanding, not instruction.

Even the count of six is looser than it looks, and honesty requires the footnote. The number six is fixed and rhetorical, but the membership drifts between texts. Some lists drop vidveshana and put in akarshana, attraction, the summoning of a person or a power toward oneself. Others name mohana, deluding, or kshobha, agitation. A few run to seven. The “six acts” is a firm frame around a slightly fluid set, and the manuals genuinely disagree.

What the manuals agree on more closely is a system of correspondences. Each act has a colour, and a form of the deity visualized in that colour, and a direction and a season to match. The pacifying rites are white. Subjugation is red. Immobilization is yellow. The driving-away is smoky grey. And the killing rite is black. Texts such as the old Uddishatantra preserve verses laying out this palette, and the scholar Teun Goudriaan, whose study Maya Divine and Human remains the standard work on the six acts, traced how the whole scheme hangs together as a ritual grammar of colour and intention.

The colours reach up into the pantheon of the Goddess. Among the ten Mahavidyas, the ten great forms of the Devi, the fierce ones carry the destructive acts. Bagalamukhi, the yellow goddess who seizes the tongue and stills it, is the deity of stambhana above all others; the scholar David Kinsley notes that of all the Mahavidyas she is the one most bound up with magical power, the power to transfix and paralyse. Dhumavati, the smoke-coloured widow, presides over the smoky register of driving-away and destruction. Kali and Chinnamasta and Bhairavi hold the black tier of death and dissolution. The gentler poles of attraction and beauty belong to a goddess like Tripura Sundari, though she is above all a deity of liberation and should never be reduced to a love-charm. The map is firm at its anchors and looser at its edges, and the texts offer more than one version of it.

Older than tantra

Here is the point that reframes the whole subject, and it is the one the flyer will never tell you. Scholars of tantric ritual, Teun Goudriaan foremost, argue that this kind of magic was no tantric invention at all. Its roots are Vedic, and they reach back far earlier than tantra.

The clearest witness is the Atharvaveda, the fourth of the Vedas, which is openly the veda of magic. A great part of it is bhaishajya, healing: charms against fever and consumption and snakebite and the worms that trouble a child. And running alongside is abhichara, sorcery: spells to harm an enemy, to compel a reluctant lover, to curse a wrongdoer. The great translator Maurice Bloomfield, rendering the Atharvaveda into English more than a century ago, simply sorted the hymns into the cures and the sorceries, because the text itself makes no secret of holding both. The healing hand and the cursing hand are the same hand, and they are as old as the Veda.

The Vedic sacrifice, too, had its weapon. The high ritual tradition preserved the shyena, the “hawk” sacrifice, a rite performed for the express purpose of killing an enemy. And it is around this rite that the tradition staged one of the deepest ethical arguments in all of Indian thought. The scriptural injunction survives in a chilling conditional form: shyenena abhicharan yajeta, “one who desires to harm his enemy should sacrifice with the hawk.” The philosophers of Mimamsa, the school devoted to the meaning of the ritual texts, seized on exactly this. The rite, they conceded, is effective; it is a real means to its terrible end. And yet, they concluded, it must not be done. As the commentators put it, such malevolent sacrifices are never stated as what one should do; they are given only in the conditional, only as what the rite would accomplish if a man were wicked enough to want it. The verdict of the Mimamsa authors, the tradition’s own oldest analysts of duty, was unanimous: the hawk sacrifice, however potent, is forbidden. Effective and impermissible are not the same thing.

That distinction is the moral spine of this entire subject, and the tradition arrived at it thousands of years before the vashikaran industry existed. The dark magic that a modern person imagines as the exotic secret of the tantras was already there in the oldest Veda, and the tradition’s own philosophy had already ruled its deadliest form out of bounds. The ambivalence is not a later apology. It is original.

Nor was this dark knowledge ever the secret property of tantric adepts alone. It sat in the most mainstream science of statecraft. The Arthashastra, the classical manual of kingship attributed to Kautilya, gives its entire final book to aupanishadika, “secret means,” cataloguing rites to blind, sicken, ruin, or destroy an enemy of the state, and, just as carefully, the counter-rites to shield one’s own troops from the same. Abhichara, in other words, was part of the ordinary toolkit of Indian power long before the grimoires collected it. This account names that book only to place the six acts in their real history; like the manuals themselves, it gives none of their methods.

There is a philosophical strangeness at the centre of all this that the tradition itself kept worrying at. How can a mere formula, correctly recited, compel a result? In the devotional world a deity gives freely, out of grace, and a prayer is a petition that may or may not be answered. Abhichara treats the mantra as something else, a lever rather than a plea, a technology that works by its own power whether or not any god wishes it. The Mimamsa philosophers built a whole metaphysics on exactly this point: the Vedic word is authorless and eternal, and the rite produces its fruit through an unseen potency, the apurva, that follows automatically from correct performance, with or without a listening god. The sorcerer inherits that logic and turns it toward harm. The uncomfortable question the tradition never quite closed is whether the sacred word is a prayer or a machine, and modern scholars caution that even to call the magic “coercion” may be to read it through a foreign, Christian lens of prayer against spell.

None of this was India’s alone, nor even Hinduism’s alone. The impulse to reach for a curse is a human universal. The Greeks and Romans scratched their hatreds onto thin sheets of lead, the defixiones, folded and pierced them with a nail, and buried them in graves to bind an enemy in a lawsuit or to compel a reluctant lover, the very purposes the six acts name. Mesopotamia had its Maqlu rites for burning away a witch’s power; Egypt had its execration texts that smashed a named enemy’s image to dust. Closer to home, Buddhist tantra built almost the identical machine. It has four karmas: shanti (pacifying), paushtika (increasing), vashya (magnetizing), and abhichara (the wrathful act of destruction), each performed at a fire-hearth whose colour and shape are keyed to its purpose, white and round to pacify, red and bow-shaped to subjugate, black and triangular to destroy, the very colour-grammar the Shakta manuals use. The two systems grew up side by side in the same monasteries and courts of eastern India, Bengal and Bihar under the Pala kings, and scholars still argue over who borrowed which way. What the Indic tantric world added to the universal wish to harm at a distance was the systematizing: the sixfold or fourfold doctrine with its colours and its deities, and, more unusually, a long argument within the tradition itself about whether the thing was ever allowed.

The guardrails the tradition built

Tantra inherited this magic and systematized it, gathering the scattered rites into the tidy scheme of six. But it inherited the wariness too, and it built its own guardrails, which are worth knowing because they are the tradition’s own verdict on its darkest material. The same manuals that supply the rites are the ones that warn against them; the tradition was never a single voice, but a long quarrel between the impulse to keep the dark power and the impulse to renounce it.

The manuals that catalogue the six acts do not present the destructive four as ordinary tools. They warn against them. Stambhana and vidveshana and uchchatana and marana are for extremity only, the texts say, for self-defence or for a righteous strike against a tyrant or an enemy of dharma, and even then they carry a karmic backlash that must be worked off through prayaschitta, ritual expiation. The magic is understood to stain the one who works it. To reach for the black acts out of jealousy or revenge, the manuals hold, is to damage one’s own spirit first. That plea of righteous necessity is also, it should be said, exactly the loophole the modern practitioner invokes to justify a curse for hire.

Deeper than the warnings lies a judgment about the whole enterprise. The powers that magic chases, the siddhis, are in the tradition’s own soteriology a snare, and never a prize. Patanjali says it flatly in the Yoga Sutras. The magical attainments, he writes, are powers in the outward, worldly state, and obstacles to samadhi, to the gathered stillness that is the actual goal. Te samadhau upasargah. They are impediments. Every power the sorcerer covets is, to the yogin, a fresh rope tying the mind back to the world it was trying to be free of, and a fresh feast for the ego. The tradition that produced the six acts also produced the teaching that wanting them at all is a spiritual mistake.

So the magic sits where the tradition put it: at the margin. In the great tantric digests it is a laukika branch, a worldly and subordinate application, catalogued alongside the real business of the texts, which is liberation, union with the deity, the dissolving of the little self into the vast one. Even the hatha yoga manuals, when they mention the magical six acts at all, subordinate them to the higher yoga whose fruit is peace, and never power. The magic sat at the margin because that is where the texts, for all that they preserved it, chose to keep it.

There is one more move the tradition made with its own dark instruments, and it is the most interesting of all. It turned them inward. Tantra has a deep instinct to read its most transgressive rites as inner events, the way the Kaula texts insist that the forbidden wine of the five sacraments is really the intoxication of the risen Kundalini and not a drink at all, and that a person who takes it as license to get drunk has understood nothing. In the same spirit, teachers have long re-read the six acts as operations to be performed on oneself. The only marana worth the name, on this reading, is the killing of the ego; the true vashikaran is the mastering of one’s own restless senses; stambhana is the stilling of the runaway mind; uchchatana is the uprooting of the buried tendencies that drive a person against their own will. It should be said plainly that this tidy inner allegory, act by act, is more a modern articulation than a doctrine spelled out in the old operational manuals, which fully meant their targets to be other people. But it is continuous with something genuinely ancient in the tradition, the conviction that the only enemy finally worth conquering is the one inside.

The armour

Against all this the tradition set a light, and it is worth knowing, because it is the honest ancestor of the very thing the scam now sells as “black magic removal.” For as long as people feared abhichara, they built defences against it, and those defences are real and old and dignified. There is a whole protective apparatus in the tradition: the kavacha, the “armour” hymns that wrap a person in the names of a god; the protective yantra worn as an amulet; and above all the fierce guardian deities invoked as shields. Pratyangira, the lion-faced goddess, is called upon precisely to turn a curse back upon the one who sent it. Bagalamukhi, the yellow goddess who stills the tongue, is sought to this day by people facing lawsuits and false accusations and powerful enemies, her worshippers holding that she grants victory only to the one who is in the right. And the great Mahamrityunjaya mantra, the verse that asks to be released from untimely death, has always been reached for as a shield against malice and misfortune alike. The modern removal-specialist, who first frightens a person with an imaginary curse and then charges to lift it, is a parody of this: he wears the costume of the protector while running the con.

Vashikaran, and the industry of the desperate

Which brings us back to the flyer.

Of all six acts, it is vashya, subjugation, that the modern world has turned into a business, under its more familiar name, vashikaran. Stripped of the tantric frame and dressed up as romance, it is sold everywhere: get your lover back, make anyone obey you, bind a straying husband, defeat a rival. Alongside it runs the mirror trade of “black magic removal,” which first persuades a frightened person that a curse has been laid on them and then charges to lift it. The whole thing has become, by every serious account, an underground industry of fake websites and borrowed aliases and paid testimonials and disposable phone numbers, and it works by finding people at their most desperate and taking their money. The complaints tell the pattern: sums handed over in installments, sometimes lakhs of rupees, to a “specialist” who then disappears.

There is a reason the removal con has such purchase, and it is not the occult. Fear itself can make a person ill. The physiologist Walter Cannon, writing in 1942 on what he called “voodoo death,” described how the unrelenting terror of a curse one believes in can drive the body’s alarm system so hard and so long that it does real physical harm, a mechanism medicine now files under the nocebo effect, the dark twin of the placebo. The specialist who first convinces a healthy person that an enemy has cursed them has, in that instant, planted something that can genuinely afflict them, and then sells the cure for the wound he opened.

The trade has even given a holy place a lurid second name. Kamakhya, the ancient Shakta temple above the Brahmaputra in Assam, is one of the oldest and most serious centres of the left-hand tantra in India, a seat of genuine and demanding practice. It is now marketed across the internet as a capital of black magic, a reputation pushed hardest, tellingly, by the very vashikaran-for-hire websites that profit from the fear. (The lurid “black magic village” tag properly belongs to nearby Mayong, further up the Brahmaputra, another Assamese site the tourist trade has draped in the same costume.) A real tradition has been rebranded as a horror show by outsiders’ dread and insiders’ advertising at once, which is as neat a picture as one could want of how the real thing and the con have come to share a vocabulary.

There is an ethical rot at the centre of vashikaran that is worth naming directly, quite apart from the fraud. The act, by its own definition, is the overriding of another person’s will. It targets a specific, named human being and sets out to compel their desire or their obedience. Sold as love, it is the precise opposite of love, which cannot be compelled and remains itself only when it is free. Even within the tradition, subjugation was black magic, one of the acts the texts told you to fear. Outside the tradition, on the flyer, it is fraud layered on top of a violation.

India has fought this trade, and the fight has cost lives. The physician and rationalist Narendra Dabholkar spent two decades campaigning against exploitative black magic and superstition, building a movement in Maharashtra and pressing, year after year, for a law against the babas who prey on the vulnerable. In August 2013 he was shot dead on his morning walk in Pune. His murder did what his decades of argument had not quite managed: within days the long-stalled bill was pushed through as an ordinance, and before the year was out Maharashtra had a law criminalizing the exploitative practice of black magic, the selling of magical cures, and human sacrifice, while taking care not to touch ordinary faith and worship. Other states have since passed their own, and Karnataka’s 2017 law goes further than most, naming vashikaran itself, and even the advertising of it, as an offence. A man was killed for insisting that the flyer was a lie, and the state, at last, agreed with him.

The belief that kills

There is a cost to all of this that is not counted in the rupees taken from the heartbroken, and no honest account of black magic in India can leave it out. The belief in sorcery kills real people, and the people it kills are almost never sorcerers.

Across the poorer districts of Jharkhand and Assam and Bihar and Chhattisgarh, a woman can still be named a dayan, a witch, and beaten, stripped, driven from her home, or murdered for it. The pattern is grimly consistent. The accused is usually old, often a widow, usually poor, very often lower-caste or tribal. A child sickens, a cow dies, a crop fails, and where there is little medicine and less schooling the misfortune is read as a curse, and a curse must have a caster. A village magic-man is often paid to name her. Sometimes the motive underneath is barer still: a childless widow with a patch of land that a male relative will inherit the moment she is gone. India’s National Crime Records Bureau logged more than two and a half thousand murders with witchcraft given as the motive between 2000 and 2016, and hundreds more in the years since, and those are only the ones recorded and named as what they were; the great majority go uncounted, and almost no one is convicted.

The country has fought this too, state by state, with laws against witch-branding, Bihar first in 1999, then Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Rajasthan, and Assam, whose 2015 act is among the toughest in the land and was driven through by the activist Birubala Rabha, herself once accused of witchcraft. The killing has grown quieter, but it has not stopped. And it is the truest and darkest thing the words “black magic” name in India. Not a rite in a forbidden book. A frightened village, and a poor woman with no one to stand between her and it.

The shadow and the light

So the six acts are real, and the tradition kept them, and the tradition was afraid of them, and it was right to be. The aggressive magic was Vedic before it was tantric, and the oldest philosophy of the tradition had already ruled its worst rite forbidden. The yoga at the heart of the same tradition taught that the powers were obstacles and the true goal was elsewhere. The magic was always the shadow, subordinate to a light that was about liberation and never about control.

What is sold today under the old names keeps the darkness and throws the wisdom away. It takes the vocabulary of a tradition that spent millennia learning to distrust its own power, and it uses that vocabulary to prey on grief. The tradition’s own verdict on that is not gentle, and it is very old. The powers are a snare. The killing rite must not be done. And the person who reaches for the dark acts, the texts say, harms themselves before they harm anyone else.

The most useful thing a person frightened by a flyer can know is that the tradition it quotes would tell them to put it down.