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Something was clearly wrong with the woman.

As I walked pass, she jumped up, rocked unsteadily one way and the other, then lunged towards my face with her long, dirt-stained fingernails. I side-stepped, and she lurched after me, one foot dragging slightly behind the other. Then, as abruptly as she got up, she sat down again on the floor, and curled herself up into a little ball. Nearby, three other women rolled around beside her, cackling to themselves in deep, broken voices.

Mr. Venugopal put a calming hand on my shoulder: "You must not worry about these ladies," he said, smiling at my alarm. "Each of them has a devil in her. But soon all these evil spirits will be exorcised."

He patted me reassuring on the back: "By tonight our Goddess- Parashakti- will have all these devils tamed. By eleven o'clock I promise you sir, all these ladies will be ripe as rain."

Mr. Venugopal was a kind and devout old man. We had met a little earlier that morning in a roadside tea stall; as we shook hands, Mr. Venugopal had handed me his card. It read:

Venugopal - Chief Engineer to All-Kerala Electricity Board (Retired)

Mr. Venugopal, it was true, looked a slightly unlikely Chief Engineer. As he sat at his breakfast, gobbling down great plates of idli sambha, he was naked but for a thin white cotton loincloth. Over the top of this loincloth spilled his sizeable paunch. He wore heavy black glasses and his forehead was marked by a prominent sandalwood tilak mark. Over his chest, attached to a thin black thread, hung a Hindu charm:

"I am a retired person interested in Spiritual affairs only," he explained. "Now my career is over I visit temples and pray to God. But of all the temples I have visited, the Goddess of this place is by far the most powerful. I tell you: if you surrender to her you will get total peace of mind."

Perhaps I had looked a little sceptical, for Mr. Venugopal had immediately offered to take me around the great temple of Chottanikkara himself. Although all the major temples in Kerala are officially closed to non-Hindus, Mr. Venugopal insisted that he was a personal friend of one of the temple officials and that his friend would be happy, as he put it, "to expedite everything". Sure enough twenty minutes later, I was through the great wooden gatehouse with its upturned flying eves, past the burly temple guards, and inside the temple's first compound.

"Listen," said Mr. Venugopal "Before I take you into the presence of the Goddess, let us sit down in the shade and take our rest. Then I can tell you about the Mother."

We found a stone wall-bench under an arcade of the cloister garth. There Mr. Venugopal started to explain:

"We Hindus believe that some of the symptoms of epilepsy - delirious convulsions and mad utterances - are due to the effect of yakshis or evil spirits. These spirits have astral bodies only, and are invisible. Their identity can only be guessed at by the symptoms of the possessed person, and also by the astrological calculations of our Brahmins.

"Our feeling is that every evil spirit would like to unite with the Almighty. But thanks to his bad deeds he cannot. For this reason there are too many evil spirits roaming around in the atmosphere.

"Now the aim of these yakshis is to get inside the bodies of weak-minded peoples. Then they think they will be brought to a temple where some compensatory puja [prayers] will be done for them, and in this way they will get salvation. Oh yes, sir. That is their aim. Come."

We walked past the first shrine and through a courtyard lined with a succession of small cells, each covered by a simple wooden door. Walking in the same direction as ourselves there flowed a continuous stream of pilgrims. Many were plump Brahmins over whose oiled and glistening torsos hung thin sacred threads. I remarked on the number of visitors to Mr. Venugopal.

"Each year this shrine is more and more popular," he replied. "Twenty years ago peoples did not have belief. They were materialistic and said that all temples were just humbug and nonsense. Now many have learned the error of their ways. They think materialistic things are not everything. They realise you cannot get peace of mind even with all the material benefits in the world. So, like all people who are in trouble, they call for their Mother and she is answering them."

We had arrived at the bottom of a great stairway. Here a second gatehouse led past a tank into a second compound.

"Mr. William. At this stage you must please take off your shirt. If you wish to go into the inner temple, you must be wearing only a pant or a lungi [a loin-wrap]. This is our custom."

"Why here?" I asked. "Why not at the entrance?"

"Our Goddess Parashakti reveals herself in different forms in different parts of the temple," explained Mr. Venugopal. "At the top she is in her most gentle and wise and motherly form: there she shows herself as the Goddess Saraswati and the Goddess Lakshmi. But here in this lower compound she appears is her most terrible form. Here she is Kali. We must be most respectful. To anger her..."

He broke off and ran his fingers melodramatically across his throat:

"Finish," he said, arching his eyebrows for emphasis.

The inner compound was much smaller than those we had already passed. A wall pressed in around the small dark shrine where the believers were bowing in front of the idol. To one side stood a tree. Its trunk was punctured by hundreds of long steel nails.

"This is the Devil's Tree," said Venugopal. "By hammering nails into the bark with the heads of the patients we clamp the spirits to the Goddess Kali so they will not disturb any other person."

"Did you say with their heads?"

"Oh yes. But first the possessed person must be in a state of trance. She must be seized by the Goddess, then she will feel nothing."

"And how do you persuade Kali to seize the person?" I asked.

"Oh that is easy matter," said Mr. Venugopal. "We feed her twelve basins full of blood."

Who is Parashakti?

Her names are as many as her devotees, though often she is called simply Mahadevi - 'The Great Goddess,' for the world was created when she opened her eyes, and it is destroyed whenever she blinks.

Some call her Jagatikanda, the Root of the World. Others know her as Supreme Ruler, She Who Supports the Galaxy, She Who Is Ruler Of All The Worlds, Mother of All. Her most sacred title is the Root Of The Tree of the Universe.

Yet if Parashakti is Life itself, she is also Death. She destroys all she creates and for this reason many of her devotees choose to worship her as Pancapretasanasina, She Who Is Seated On a Throne Of Five Corpses. She is also known by the following names: She Who is Wrathful, She Who Has Flaming Tusks, She who Causes Madness, She Whose Eyes Roll About From Drinking Wine, the Terrible One, Night of Death.

To call her, the Brahmins chant a Sanskrit invocation. It goes something like this:

Come, come in haste, O Goddess, with thy locks bedraggled, thou who hast three eyes, whose skin is dark, whose clothes are stained with blood, who has rings in thy ears, who hast a thousand hands, and ridest upon a monster and wieldest in thy hands tridents, clubs, lances and shields.

Though she is fierce, terrifying and destructive, the Goddess is said to be quick to come to the aid of her devotees. In times of drought she appears in a form having many eyes. When she sees the condition of her creatures she begins to weep and her woe has the force of a hundred monsoons. Soon the rivers begin to flow, the ponds and the lakes fill to overflowing, and verdure covers the earth. In Parashakti lies the rebirth of the world.

At no place on this earth is the Great Goddess so accessible as in her principal shrine of Chottanikkara. For there - so it is said - her idol sometimes comes to life and in physical form takes action to protect her devotees against devils and demons.

Once, the Brahmins here told me, a demonic yakshi desired a handsome young Brahmin. The Brahmin was crossing the jungle in order to perform a puja at the temple at Chottanikkara when the yakshi first saw him. She joined him on his journey and began to talk sweetly to him. It was late in the evening and the yakshi's outer form was that of a tall and lovely Tamil girl; she knew that if she were able to persuade the Brahmin to spend the night with her then she would be able to devour him alive.

But on his way through the forest the Brahmin happened to stop at the hut of a holy man. He invited his beautiful companion to come inside and take some refreshment, but she refused and hovered among the trees outside. The holy man, through his spiritual powers, realised then the true nature of the yakshi. He gave the Brahmin a red cloth and told him to leave the woman and to go on as fast as he could to the shrine of Parashakti. When he got there he should throw the cloth over the idol; only then would he be saved.

The Brahmin ran from the Holy Man's hut and the yakshi, realising that she had been discovered, abandoned her disguise and changed into her real form. She became as tall as a mountain with a mouth like a cave, and her hair was a mass of hissing cobras. The yakshi chased after the boy and by the time he had neared the temple gatehouse, the yakshi was virtually upon him. She grabbed at his leg and he just managed to throw the red cloth over the idol before the yakshi pulled him from the temple gateway.

At that moment the Kali idol came to life. Seeing that her devotee was in trouble, the Goddess brandished her sword and chased the yakshi into the forest. Beside a jungle pond the Goddess caught up with the demon and cut off her head. Then she drank the yakshi's blood. So much gore flowed from the corpse that to this day the pond beneath the temple still has a reddish tinge.

But the drinking of the yakshi's blood also had its effect on the Goddess. As Mr. Venugopal put it when he first told me the story, "finally the drinking of blood became her habit," he said. "Now she cannot live without it. Every day we must feed her twelve basin's full. In return she still rids us of our demons."

In 1830 a Bengali Maharajah slaked the thirst of the Mother Goddess with the blood of no less than twenty-five of his youthful retainers; as recently as 1835 a boy was beheaded every single Friday at the altar of the Kali temple at Calcutta. Many temples in Kerala still quietly sacrifice cocks, goats and sheep to the Goddess, but at Chottanikkara where Parashakti requires her full twelve basins every day, the Goddess has been gradually weaned (or perhaps detoxed) onto a blood-coloured solution of lime-juice and tumeric.

Parashakti is fed her supper at nine o'clock every evening. After she has drunk and had her fill, music is played for her entertainment. It is then, Mr. Venugopal told me, that the Goddess makes the devils dance.

By night the temple precincts were more eerie than by day. The postcard-sellers had gone and the tea shacks were shuttered and closed. In the dark, unseen palm-trees rustled in the wind. A figure stepped out of the shadows:

"Mr. William?"

It was Venugopal. He looked agitated.

"Come quick," he said. "We are late."

Together, Venugopal and I passed through the empty gatehouse. On the far side, lit by flickering reed torches, we were confronted by a large and completely silent crowd. All the pilgrims and devotees were facing the shrine, bowed double before the image of the Goddess. Some of the men had prostrated themselves flat on their faces, arms outstretched towards the Goddess.

Then quite suddenly the silence was broken. One of the priests clashed a pair of brass cymbals; simultaneously four of his colleagues began to blow conch shells and large curved trumpets of a design familiar from Cecil B. de Mille Biblical epics. From around one corner of the shrine another priest appeared sitting astride a huge tusker elephant. The mahout bowed to the Goddess, hands arched in the gesture of namaskar, then began circling the shrine followed by the cymbal-clashers and the trumpet blowers. As the priests circled round and around, the other devotees joined in until the shrine was ringed by a great collar of circumambulating pilgrims.

The elephant was eventually driven away by its priestly mahout. By the light of the full moon, the cymbal clashers led the way down the great flight of steps to the inner enclosure.

The Kali temple was brightly lit by a nimbus of smoky, acrid-smelling torches. As the devotees streamed-in, two half-naked priests lit the last wicks of a great rack of flickering candles in front of the shrine. The priests opened the doors, and the pilgrims bowed down before the many-armed image of Parashakti-Kali.

I drew closer to try and catch a glimpse of the image in the flickering torchlight. The Goddess was shown as a hideous black-faced hag, smeared with blood, with bared teeth and a protruding tongue. She was naked but for a garland of skulls and a girdle of severed heads; a thug's strangling noose dangled from her belt.

Soon more half-naked Brahmins appeared. Their sweat-wet flesh glistened in the light of the lamps; all of them began to intone Sanskrit mantras to the Goddess. As they chanted, the Chief Priest squatted cross-legged on the ground and I noticed for the first time the deep copper basins lying in ranks amid the shadows at the priest's feet.

Then the possessed women were led in: twelve or thirteen young girls, mostly adolescent, and one single boy in his late twenties. They were arranged in an arc around the shrine, and for a few minutes they stood quite still while the Brahmins continued to chant their mantras. Then the chief priest nodded to the cymbal-clashers, and the music began.

At first the cymbals merely kept time with the meter of the mantras, but soon the conch-blowers and trumpeters struck up too, and the band was joined by four priestly drummers each holding a tall wooden tabla. Soon the mantras were completely drowned by the primeval rhythm of the temple musicians.

In the shadows, I could see that the Chief Priest was now splashing the blood-solution around the shrine, literally throwing it out of the basins with cupped hands so that it landed with a splash - splattering red over the other priests - then ran towards a conduit that passed it in turn towards the roots of the Devil's Tree.

The pulse of the drums rose to a new peak, the conch shells blew; then suddenly something very strange happened. One of the possessed girls started to shake as if in the grip of a violent fever. Her eyes were open but she was quaking now with a lost look on her face. Beside her the other girls were beginning to sway as well, and the trance passed from one to the other like a contagion.

"Look!" whispered Mr. Venugopal. "See how powerful our Goddess is! She is making the spirits dance. Soon maybe they will surrender to her."

One girl in a blue sari was now shaking her long mane of hair backwards and forwards as she was seized by a series of impossible convulsions. Behind her, a woman - presumably her mother - was standing nearby trying to make sure her sari did not unwrap itself beyond the limits of Indian modesty. Every so often the girl's hands would fly up in the air, her robes would fall out of place and her mother would rush forward and pull the material back into its proper position.

Three of the other girls were by now writhing on the floor as if in pain; a fourth was turning like a top, screaming and shrieking as she did so. It was an extraordinary sight. I felt as if I had stumbled back several millennia into some distant Druidical ritual. Yet no one except myself seemed in the least bit surprised by the spectacle, and of the several children who were present, a couple looked positively bored. One was playing with two glass marbles, rolling them from hand to hand, completely ignoring the unearthly commotion going on around him.

After about five minutes - though it seemed much longer - the music reached its throbbing climax. In front of the shrine the chief priest tired of ladling out his solution, began simply upending the bowls of blood so that the red liquid began to lap around the prostrate bodies of the women. The drums pulsed faster and faster; the cymbals clashed; more and more of the possessed fell twitching to the floor.

As the last went down a conch blew a deep note and two priests stepped forward and closed the doors of the shrine. The drums stopped dead. It was over.

As the limp, almost lifeless bodies of the possessed were carried away by relays of the younger priests, I asked Mr. Venugopal whether the women were now cured.

"Sometimes they are, sometimes not," replied Venugopal, inclining his head. "For a particularly troublesome devil it may take a month before the demon will surrender."

We wound our way slowly back up the grand staircase.

"Has anyone you know been cured?" I asked him as we neared the top.

"Oh many people," he replied.

"Tell me an instance."

"Well- last month a cousin of mine brought a boy from Bombay. The boy was from a good family but he was deranged in some way: he wouldn't eat, he quarrelled with everyone, and he refused to go out to work. Anyway, the boy was brought here and he stayed inside the temple for five days.

"Every night the Goddess entered him and asked the demon to leave. Then in the morning the priests fed the boy a little ghee that had been kept in the Goddess's shrine overnight. At first he refused more than a drop, but by the third day he was eating again - great plates of rice and vegetables. It was the first time had touched real food for several weeks.

"On the final day the Chief Priest did some special puja, and that night the devil finally left the boy. Now he is quite normal and has resumed work in his father's insurance company as if nothing had ever happened. This I have seen for myself only one month ago."

"It sounds like a classic case of faith healing," I said - then seeing Venugopal's expression immediately wished I hadn't.

The old man shrugged his shoulders: "If after what you have seen this evening you want to call it faith healing, that is your affair only."

He looked upset by my rudeness and I began to struggle to explain myself. But Venugopal held up his hand for me to be silent: "Every day I see people coming and getting relief. For me that is enough."

"You think the Goddess can exorcise any demon?" I asked.

"For me this is the most powerful temple in India," said Venugopal. "There is no doubt about it: this is the most powerful temple for destroying the evils of the world."

We were at the outer gate of the temple now. The old man turned to go back inside. He said: "In India if you wish to get something done it is best to go first to the Prime Minister. So it is with spiritual affairs. Parashakti is the Supreme Goddess. But to see her work...

Here Venugopal turned and smiled at me.

"To see her work maybe you must first be God fearing and God loving," he said. "Only then can you really understand her power..."

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