The 64 Yogini Temples of India: History, List and Sites

The 64 Yogini temples are circular, open-roofed shrines built in early medieval India for a group of Tantric goddesses called yoginis. Around a dozen sites are known and only a handful survive in good condition — chiefly Hirapur and Ranipur-Jharial in Odisha, and Bheraghat, Mitawali and Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh.

They are unlike almost any other Hindu temple: no towering spire, no enclosed sanctum, no single presiding image — just a ring of niches open to the sky, each once holding a goddess. This guide explains who the yoginis were, why the buildings take this shape, what scholars can and cannot date, and what a visitor finds at each surviving site today. For the wider map of Tantric sites, see our page on Shakti Peethas and sacred geography.

Who Are the Yoginis in Tantric Tradition?

The yoginis (योगिनी) are a class of female divinities central to early Shaiva and Kaula Tantra. Early Tantric texts describe them as fierce, independent and mobile — often winged or flying, sometimes animal-headed, each with her own mount, weapons and mantra. They are not merely attendants of a great goddess; in the texts that matter most to them they are the powers through which the Goddess acts, and through whom a practitioner gains both esoteric knowledge and siddhis.

The number sixty-four is the one that stuck, and it is usually explained as a multiplication of the eight Mother goddesses (Matrikas) by eight. But the tradition is not rigid: surviving lists and temples give forty-two, sixty-four and eighty-one, and the names in one list rarely match another. Sculptural inscriptions at some sites name the yoginis individually, which is how scholars have reconstructed several of these lists.

What Does "Yogini" Mean?

The word is the feminine of yogi, and it carries three overlapping senses in Tantric literature. It means a goddess of the kind described above; it means a human female practitioner of yoga or Tantra; and, in Kaula usage, it means a woman regarded as embodying one of these goddesses within a lineage or kula. Kaula texts speak of teaching transmitted through the "mouth of the yogini" (yoginivaktra), a phrase that captures how much authority this tradition placed in female figures. A parallel class of beings, the dakinis, plays a comparable role in Buddhist Vajrayana.

Why Are Yogini Temples Circular and Open to the Sky?

Almost all known yogini temples share an unusual plan: a circular enclosing wall with niches cut into its inner face, a small shrine or platform at the centre, and no roof. The technical term for a roofless temple is hypaethral. Standing inside one, a visitor is surrounded by goddesses, facing inward, under open sky.

Scholars offer several complementary explanations, and none is certain:

• The rites needed open air. Yogini worship involved offerings, fire and nocturnal practice that suited an unroofed enclosure.
• The yoginis fly. Texts repeatedly describe them arriving through the air, so an open roof has been read as a practical courtesy as much as a symbol.
• The circle is the mandala. The ring of niches reproduces the layout of a yogini chakra or mandala, with the practitioner or the central deity at the hub — the same logic that organises the Sri Yantra.
• Secrecy. These were esoteric, initiatory cults. Most sites stand on hilltops or outside settlements, away from public temple life.

The exception proves the point: the Chausath Yogini temple at Khajuraho is rectangular, built of granite on a raised platform, with rows of small cells around an open quadrangle. It is still roofless and still a ring of cells facing a central court, but the circular plan is absent.

64 Yogini Temple List: The Major Surviving Sites

Vidya Dehejia's survey — still the standard work — catalogues around a dozen yogini temple sites, several of them ruined to their foundations. The five below are the ones worth travelling for. Dates follow the ranges scholars give; where counts are disputed, the table says so.

Other sites — Dudhai and Badoh in the Bundelkhand region, Lokhari and Rikhiyan in Uttar Pradesh, Naresar and Shahdol in Madhya Pradesh — survive only as fragments, scattered images or foundations. The Lokhari yoginis, carved with animal heads, are among the most striking pieces of Indian sculpture; several were stolen from the site in the twentieth century and some have since been repatriated from foreign collections.

Hirapur and Ranipur-Jharial: The Odisha Temples

Hirapur, a short drive from Bhubaneswar, is the one most visitors see. It is small — the circular wall encloses a courtyard a visitor can cross in a few paces — and it is intact enough that the original experience survives: a ring of black chlorite yoginis, each standing on her own mount, facing a central pillared shrine. It is also a living temple, with daily worship, which sets it apart from the ruined sites.

Ranipur-Jharial, in Balangir district, sits on a broad sheet of rock among other temple remains. Its circular yogini shrine is larger and plainer, and its central pavilion holds a striking three-faced Shiva shown dancing. The site is remote; the nearest large town is Titlagarh, and most visitors arrive by road from Balangir or Bhubaneswar.

Bheraghat, Mitawali and Khajuraho: The Madhya Pradesh Temples

Bheraghat (Bhedaghat), on the cliffs above the Narmada near Jabalpur, is the grandest of the group. Its ring is wide enough to feel like a courtyard, and the surviving images — many labelled with the yoginis' names — make it the single most important source for reconstructing who these goddesses were. The Gauri-Shankara temple planted in the middle is a later Kalachuri-period addition and changes the character of the site, turning a yogini circle into the courtyard of a Shiva temple.

Mitawali, in Morena district, stands on a flat-topped hill reached by a long stair. Its sixty-four cells and central Shiva shrine are unusually well preserved, though the yogini images have gone; the temple is often visited together with the nearby Padavali and Bateshwar groups. A popular claim that it inspired the design of India's circular Parliament building is repeated locally and in the press but has no documentary support.

Khajuraho's Chausath Yogini temple lies apart from the famous carved temples, on rising ground at the western edge of the site. Built of coarse granite rather than the sandstone used later, it is generally taken as the earliest surviving structure at Khajuraho and a reminder that the place began as a Tantric centre. Devangana Desai's study of Khajuraho's religious imagery discusses its place there.

The Kaula and Yogini Cults Behind the Temples

These monuments belong to a specific religious moment. Between roughly the 8th and 12th centuries, Kaula and allied Tantric traditions moved from cremation-ground asceticism toward organised, and often royally funded, worship. Yogini worship was attractive to rulers: the goddesses were credited with protective and martial power, and initiation into their circle carried political prestige as much as spiritual standing. That combination explains why temples of an esoteric cult were built in stone at all.

Ritually, a yogini temple was a place of chakra puja — worship of the full circle of goddesses, performed by initiates rather than by the general public. Practices ranged from straightforward offerings to the transgressive rites associated with the left-hand path, and the literature is frank that access depended on initiation. Our pages on the three traditions of Tantra and on Tantric sadhana set out that framework; the closest living parallel to a yogini circle is the Mahavidya group described on our Dasha Mahavidya page, and the great yoni shrine at Kamakhya, where a whole hill functions as a circuit of goddesses.

Why Did the Yogini Cult Decline?

No single cause explains the disappearance. Historians point to the collapse of the dynasties that paid for these temples, the political upheavals of the 12th to 14th centuries in northern and central India, and the gradual absorption of yogini worship into broader Shakta and Durga traditions that had wider public appeal. Because the cult was initiatory, it was unusually vulnerable: once the lineages thinned, there was no congregation to keep the buildings in use. Images were carried off, reused in later shrines, or left in the open. What remained was a handful of rings of stone, some of which were not properly documented until the twentieth century.

What Visitors See Today

Most of these temples are protected monuments under the Archaeological Survey of India, and they are quiet places — none draws the crowds of a major pilgrimage site. Hirapur is the exception in that it remains an active shrine with daily worship, so ordinary temple etiquette applies there: remove footwear, dress modestly, and ask before photographing rituals or worshippers. At the other sites the main constraints are practical ones, listed below.

Opening hours, entry arrangements and the condition of access paths change, so check current information locally before setting out. Odisha and Madhya Pradesh both have hot summers; the cooler months are generally more comfortable for sites that involve a climb.