Because Shakti as raw cosmic power has no single fixed body, her worship is carried instead by the specific goddesses said to embody her, and by places and seasons rather than a uniform icon. The Shakti Peethas, a network of shrines scattered across South Asia and traditionally numbered at fifty one, are each held to mark a spot where a part of the dismembered goddess Sati fell to earth, and together they map a devotional geography of the divine feminine that pilgrims still visit.
The autumn festival of Navaratri, nine nights given over to the Goddess in her successive forms, is the widest shared expression of Shakti worship, observed with different regional emphases from Bengal's Durga Puja to Gujarat's garba dance to South India's golu doll displays, evidence that a single theological principle generates strikingly different popular practice.
Formal Shakta theology and its ritual technologies, developed at length within the tantric traditions, are treated by practitioners as advanced and, in places, initiatory material rather than public teaching, and this atlas describes that fact rather than the content of any closed rite. In sculpture and painting the principle is rendered through her named forms, Durga with her many weapons, Kali dark and unbound, Lakshmi seated on the lotus, so that Shakti herself remains formally without a single icon even as her forms fill temples across the subcontinent and beyond it.