"As a final test, the living goddess must spend a night alone in a room among the heads of ritually slaughtered goats and buffaloes without showing fear."
this ritual comes from a people who used to engage in Sati, the belief that a woman should burn herself alive on her husband's funeral pyre upon his death. That ritual is now dead in Hindu society, but I feel that the more prosperous India becomes the more of their older less humane rituals will eventually leave their religion.