Dhumavati is the strongest single piece of evidence that the Mahavidyas were assembled deliberately rather than collected by accident. A list of the great forms of the supreme Goddess that took in prosperity, learning, beauty and terrifying power might reasonably be expected to stop there. This one takes in the state that every auspicious rite is designed to keep out of the house, and gives it the same standing as the rest.
She is worshipped accordingly. She is generally not approached by married couples for the usual goods, and the tradition warns that her presence brings what she is, so that a woman whose husband is living has reason not to take up her worship. Her devotees are ascetics, renouncers and those seeking the removal of misfortune, and the logic is straightforward: the goddess who is loss is the one to address about loss. She has an active temple in Varanasi, where offerings unlike those of ordinary temple practice are made to her.
The theological point is stated plainly in the texts that praise her. If the Goddess is everything, then she is also what nobody wants, and a devotion that offers her only the acceptable half has not understood the claim it is making. Kinsley reads her as the Goddess at her most uncompromising: not a benign figure with a dark aspect, but the disagreeable itself, given a name, a chariot and a share of worship.