Bhairava

 Excerpt from Alf Hiltebeitel's Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees (link).

Also known as Adalata (Court) Bhairava, the towering black
solitary image of Kala Bhairab before the palace gate at
Hanuman Dhoka was the chief witness before whom
government servants were annually sworn into office, a function
that corresponds perfectly to his now practically defunct role of
policeman-magistrate of Kasi. Litigants and accused criminals also
swore while touching Bhairava's foot, and he who bore false
witness vomited and died on the spot. As late as the nineteenth
century he was the occasional recipient of human sacrifices,
such as (Mitra-) Varuna had earlier demanded in order to
paradoxically maintain the awesome rta hidden firmly within the
heart of the Vedic socio-cosmic order. 138 Although much of
the symbolism surrounding Bhairava is no longer understood
even by his most ardent devotees and the cult itself is being
rapidly effaced, one has only to replace these symbols in their
original context to recognize the transgressive mode of sacrality
that inspires them. And although this symbolic constellation, an
integral part of the galaxy of criminal gods and demon
devotees, is typically and in many of its elements exclusively
Indian, it is the vehicle of a dialectic of transgression that
flourishes under different modalities in archaic and primitive
religions and is not wholly absent in the other world religions.
Increasingly claimed to be both historically and principally the
original sacred, this ideology assumes in India the form of the
terrifying Bhairava to pose awkward questions that we
modernists, as ethical and rational humanists, would have no
doubt preferred to leave unanswered, had not the secular
counter-sciences of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and linguistics
converged in the ever-widening and deepening archaeology of
contemporary scientia to insistently proclaim with Michel
Foucault the inevitable and imminent dissolution of an already
shrunken Man.