How to Identify a Fraudulent Tantrik Practitioner?

Indian tantrik ritual amulets and totkas used in spiritual healing practices

The Hidden Rules of India's Tantriks: Vows, Nailed Feet, and Bodies That Aren't Your Own Anymore

You've probably seen a poster somewhere promising to fix your life in two hours. Maybe you've heard a story about a relative who spent seven years and a small fortune on yagyas that never quite worked. Or maybe you just grew up hearing the word "tantrik" tossed around like it explains everything and nothing at the same time. Here's the thing — there's a whole hidden economy behind that word, with its own rules, its own frauds, and a few stories so specific and so strange that they're hard to write off as pure superstition. Let's get into it.

Tantrik, Aghori, Naga Sadhu — They're Not the Same Thing

People use these words like they're interchangeable, but they're supposedly different stages entirely. Tantrik, aghori, naga sadhu, baba, avadhoot — tradition holds these are separate phases of practice, each with its own path and its own rules. And honestly, the line between them is genuinely hard to draw. Even people close to this world admit that explaining the exact difference between each stage would take a whole conversation of its own.

Take Tarananth Tantrik, a famous name out of Kolkata, said to be one of the most accomplished siddha tantriks of his time. There's a Hoichoi show built around his life that walks through the stages believed to turn an ordinary practitioner into a full-blown aghori. And here's a detail worth sitting with: a lot of people just called him "tantrik," when according to the tradition he came from, he was technically still an aghori-in-training — someone still in the learning stage. A tantrik, in this framework, is simply someone who's mastered "tantra."

So what is tantra, exactly? That's supposedly a massive subject on its own — big enough that even people who practice it say it deserves its own dedicated conversation with a real specialist down the line. But stripped down to a basic explanation, the claim goes something like this: whoever masters some kind of mechanism — some system of energies — and bends it to work according to their will, is called a tantrik. Which, stripped of the mysticism, sounds a lot like an engineer's job description. And that's basically the point being made to skeptics: everything here supposedly comes down to energy. Whether it's flowing, or whether it's blocked. Make of that what you will.

Can a Tantrik Actually Control a Spirit?

This is the claim that gets repeated constantly, and it's worth unpacking instead of just accepting or dismissing outright.

The belief isn't that a tantrik dominates a spirit outright. It's more like a negotiation. The practitioner performs a ritual — worship, specific mantras, whatever their guru passed down — and when the spirit or deity is said to appear, the tantrik doesn't command it so much as extract a promise from it. A vow. "I've done this practice for you, now I need this from you" — that's roughly the shape of it. So it's less mind control and more spiritual contract law, if that makes sense.

And naturally, tantriks are said to split into good and bad, same as any profession with real power attached to it.

The Fake Ones: Amulets, Rudraksha, and the "Two-Hour Fix"

This is where things get uglier, and honestly, more predictable.

There's a whole subclass of self-styled tantriks who reportedly do nothing but perform. Amulets stacked up their arms, ash rubbed across their forehead, rudraksha malas handed out like business cards with claims of massive protective or even digestive powers attached — that one alone probably deserves its own separate explanation someday. It's theater, dressed up as spiritual authority.

Some of what's known about how these frauds actually operate reportedly came from someone's own teacher — someone they'd rather not name, but deeply respect — who laid out exactly how a bad tantrik strings a client along over time.

The scam pattern people describe going through usually looks something like this:

Someone sees a poster promising a fix in two hours
They call, and are told a "samagri" (ritual materials) fee is needed — no charge for the actual work, just the materials
They send money, often a few thousand rupees
Nothing changes
When they push back, they're told they must have done something wrong, and to try again

It's a loop, and it apparently works on almost everyone at some point because desperation doesn't leave much room for skepticism. If you're stuck, unsure what's true, you start calling every baba whose poster you've seen — and the conversation always ends up circling back to money.

There's a personal version of this too, worth mentioning. Anyone who's gone through a phase of genuine confusion — not knowing what's real, what's a lie, what's actually happening to them — knows how this plays out. You reach out to every option that looks credible, asking each one why this is happening to you. And no matter how different they seem going in, the conversation eventually lands in the same place: payment. That pattern alone is telling. It's spread widely enough in the market today that almost everyone's brushed up against some version of it, which is exactly why staying aware of it matters.

And here's a claim that's a lot bigger than it sounds, and worth sitting with before dismissing: the position isn't that all of this is fake. It's that these things do work — at least according to the people who practice them seriously. That's a heavy statement to make, and it deserves the same scrutiny as everything else here, not blind acceptance.

The One Rule That Separates Real Healers From Frauds

Here's a distinction worth remembering: genuine spiritual teachers, in this tradition, are said to never take a single rupee. Not for the ritual, not for the materials, nothing. The belief is that the real giver in any healing is a higher power — Shiva, specifically, in this framing — and the practitioner is just a conduit. Take payment, and you've broken that.

That's supposedly the line. Not whether someone wears the right clothes or knows the right words, but whether money changes hands at all. And this, apparently, is what separates the people genuinely trying to fix someone's problem from the pretenders doing something strange with the same tools.

There's also a distinction some practitioners draw for themselves. Not every tantrik wants money — some genuinely don't. But there's also a step below "tantrik" that some people prefer to claim instead: healer. Someone with a small amount of blessing or ability, not someone who's undergone the formal training or rituals that make a tantrik a tantrik — and, in some cases, someone who has no interest in ever becoming one.

When Bad Tantra Makes Things Worse, Not Better

Sometimes calling in a poorly trained tantrik doesn't fix a household problem — it deepens it. That's the claim, anyway, and it lines up with a scene from the Turkish horror film Dabbe, which — and this sounds made up until you actually look into Turkish folk horror — draws heavily on real regional superstition. In the film, a family cursed by someone's tantra-like ritual has a corner of their house dug up to reveal a stash of buried items, including a cow's head and a pile of totem-like objects.

The idea underneath all of it: rituals are basically techniques, and techniques are neutral. Learn the alphabet, and you can write anything — a prayer or a threat. If the person learning has a destructive mindset, the same basic method (animal sacrifice, buried totems, whatever) gets bent toward something harmful, because the energy's been "molded" that way from the start. Dabbe also shows families preserving a baby's umbilical cord in a box for use in rituals later — treated as extremely dark material in the film, and shown quite brutally on screen. And the point being made is that India has equivalents. Just less visible ones. Less cinematic, maybe, but not necessarily less brutal.

The Village Near Sitapur That Still Nails Down Its Dead

This one's short, but it's stuck with me.

There's a village a little past Sitapur where, according to local memory, accidents and misfortune used to happen constantly. Generations ago, a tantrik passed through and gave the village an answer: when someone dies, take the largest iron nail you can find, and drive it into the corpse's feet before cremation. The reasoning was that it would stop the spirit from walking back afterward.

Apparently, some in that village still do this today. Whether it works is obviously not something anyone can verify — and honestly, it reads like exactly the kind of local rule that outlives the logic behind it. It doesn't hold up to much scrutiny — it doesn't really make sense that a nail in someone's foot would stop them from returning as a spirit — but that hasn't stopped the practice from continuing.

The Boat on the Ganga and a Body That Wasn't His Anymore

This one's a Banaras story, and it's one of the stranger claims out there.

A married couple went for a boat ride along the ghats. Another passenger on the boat — a tantrik — asked them for some money. The husband handed it over without much thought, maybe ten rupees. That's when the tantrik reportedly told him something like: you're leaving your body here, you're not going anywhere.

The man tried to jump off the boat. He couldn't. They were in the middle of the Ganga by then, nowhere to go, and the claim is that the tantrik had made a "sankalp" — a binding vow — over the man's body for the price of ten rupees. Meaning, from that point on, the body was said to belong to the tantrik. The idea is that some bad tantriks do this specifically: they claim a body through this kind of vow and use it to fuel their own sadhanas, drawing on it to increase their power. It's described as "neech kul ka tantra" — a low, base form of tantra practice that's looked down on even within the tradition.

Bollywood Already Told This Story

If any of this sounds like a movie plot, that's because it basically was one. The old Akshay Kumar and Preity Zinta film Sangharsh features Ashutosh Rana playing a Kali-worshipping tantrik who kidnaps children, driven by the belief that sacrificing ten or eleven of them would make him immortal. Child sacrifice for immortality is obviously an extreme claim, and one that isn't endorsed even within the tradition being described here — it's held up as an example of how far some people are willing to push the practice past any reasonable line.

Why Some Mantras Are Deliberately Incomplete

Here's a detail that explains a lot of the danger people talk about. Texts like the Atharvaveda or the Ravana Samhita are said to contain methods Shiva reportedly taught Ravana — full instructions on what a ritual does and how it's performed. But published versions, like those from Chaukhamba or Gita Press Gorakhpur, are said to leave the actual mantra incomplete. Deliberately.

So what happens is self-taught practitioners — people without a guru, working straight from the text — read these instructions, assume they've got the whole thing, and try repeating it anyway. It doesn't work, but that doesn't stop them from trying. It's worth being clear here: this isn't a knock on tantriks who've been properly initiated by a guru. It's specifically the self-made ones, working off half a text, that this concern is about.

A Family Still Paying After Seven Years

Sometimes the harm isn't dramatic — it's just slow and expensive. A relative's son developed what the family describes as a supernatural, paranormal problem — this is an old story by now. They brought in a tantrik. That was roughly six or seven years ago. Since then, they've paid for yagya after yagya, ritual after ritual, more times than anyone can count. And by most accounts, nothing has meaningfully changed for the son — even though the tantrik keeps insisting there's been progress.

It's not a dramatic story. That's kind of the point. This is what most of these cases actually look like: not a boat on the Ganga, just a slow financial drain with no clear result. And that's exactly the kind of doubt this whole world tends to leave you with.

How the "Return Customer" Scam Actually Works

Strip away the spiritual language, and the fraud version of this business runs like a subscription model. There are said to be tantriks who genuinely know deep mantra-vidhan, real knowledge — but even they, in the beginning, tend to lean on a trick: they read your situation and drop a few accurate-sounding details about your past to get you to trust them fast. From there, the pattern for the knowledge-light frauds looks something like this:

The tantrik first figures out the person's actual situation — reads the pulse of the room, essentially
They recommend a yagya or havan, usually costing 10,000–15,000 rupees
Families who can afford it pay up; sometimes poorer, more vulnerable people get targeted too
Things seem to improve for a short while
The same problem returns
The client comes back, and pays again

The theory behind why it "works" temporarily is unsettling: the claim is that some of these tantriks are controlling a minor spirit the whole time, binding it with the same kind of vow described earlier, and after the money's collected, they send it right back to the same household to cause trouble again. It's a business, and apparently a well-understood one on their end. Captive customer, recurring revenue, all dressed up as spiritual crisis.

The Woman Who Spoke in Four Different Voices

This is the case that probably sticks with people the longest.

A woman — a friend's aunt — reportedly switched between three or four distinct voices, and the family believed her deceased sister, who'd died years earlier, was entering her body and speaking through her. They took it seriously enough to look into it properly.

What turned up was this: she'd been under the care of the same tantrik for ten straight years. A visit to her home revealed somewhere around 50 to 60 different taweez (amulets) scattered across the property, placed there over a decade. And the explanation offered for why this made things worse, not better, comes down to energy: even amulets carrying mantras or prayers, when there are too many of them concentrated in one place, are said to clash against each other — and that clash apparently made her condition deteriorate rather than settle. Meanwhile, the tantrik had reportedly been charging her somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 rupees a week — for ten years straight. Do that math for a second. That's not a healing practice. That's a subscription with a body attached to it. When she was finally told none of this was supernatural — that it was just a bad spirit someone had placed on her — she confirmed it: exactly ten years earlier was when she'd first gone to that same tantrik.

So — Genuine Practice, or Just a Very Old Business Model?

That's really the question this whole world keeps circling back to. Some of what's described here — the vow-taking, the incomplete scriptures, the idea that intention shapes how a ritual turns out — has an internal logic that's hard to dismiss outright, even if you can't verify any of it. And some of it — the ten-year amulet subscription, the "your fault, try again" scam script — is just fraud wearing spiritual clothing.

What do you think — is there something real underneath all these traditions, or is it mostly people exploiting the same fear and desperation, generation after generation?