The image of Chhinnamasta is fixed in every detail and every detail is doing work. She stands, usually naked and garlanded with skulls, holding her own severed head in her left hand and the blade that removed it in her right. From the neck rise three jets of blood. Two arc outward to her attendants Dakini and Varnini, one dark and one fair, who drink; the third falls into the mouth of the head she is carrying. Beneath her feet lies a copulating couple, most often identified as Kama and Rati, desire and pleasure, on whom she stands, in many versions with the woman above.
The composition is a closed circuit. She sustains her companions and herself out of her own body, so that the consumed, the offering and the consumer are one figure, and the sexual couple that would ordinarily be the source of generation is the platform rather than the origin. Commentators read the image as the identity of giving and taking life, as the moment at which desire is not indulged but turned back and drawn upward, and as self-offering that feeds others.
The reading is not settled and does not need to be. Unlike most Hindu iconography this image was plainly designed to be interpreted rather than merely recognised, and the tradition supplies several interpretations side by side without choosing. What is agreed is that it is a meditation object before it is anything else.