Dhūmāvatī

Sources treating the Mahavidyas place Dhūmāvatī within a group of ten principal manifestations of the Goddess (the Dashamahavidya). Some modern and scholarly summaries cited among the sources note that various traditions describe the Mahavidyas as expansions or manifestations of older goddess figures (for example emanations related to Sati or Shakambhari in differing accounts), and Dhūmāvatī is thereby located as the crone/inauspicious pole of the Goddess in those frameworks (Sources: Wikipedia entry on Dhumavati; two StackExchange discussions summarizing variant origin accounts). The supplied materials do not contain a single canonical birth-myth or scriptural origin for Dhūmāvatī herself; instead she is treated as one of the ten established Mahavidyas within Tantric theology and narrative (Sources: Wikipedia; ResearchUt; Hinduism.StackExchange items).

Dhūmāvatī is commonly depicted as an old woman or crone — described in some sources as the "Widowed Hag" — and iconography places her in liminal mortuary settings. Specific visual markers referenced in the sources include her carrying a winnowing basket, riding a crow or being shown on a horseless chariot, and appearing in a cremation ground (Sources: Wikipedia; OrderWhiteMoon / Dhumavati page; catalog/encyclopedic entries).

Rather than narrating miraculous conquests, the sources emphasize Dhūmāvatī's symbolic, ritual, and theological functions: she personifies inauspiciousness, widowhood, loss, desolation, and the forbidding side of divine power. A catalog entry included in the source set lists her as a "goddess of strife," and an astrological/ritual commentary describes her as attendant to the fierce goddess Bhairavi in some schemata; these descriptions underline her role within networks of Tantric goddess relations and her association with difficult or marginal states rather than a catalogue of supernatural feats (Sources: Wikipedia; catalog entry; metahistory/Bhairavi page).