Red Tara, the Saviouress, is the active compassion of all the Buddha's constantly manifesting in various appearances and temperaments to specifically guide and aid individual beings according to their particular needs and capacities.
She is a Wish-fulfilling Jewel, whose compassion and kindness exists only to help others in distress and fear. She is a manifestation of pure enlightened power, the awesome purity of awakened mind overpowering all negativity.
Just as Tara in her usual green form may be called upon by Buddhists to protect them from various dangers and threats, in particular the eight great terrors and the sixteen fears, so in her red form as Kurukulla, she may be called upon to exercise her powers of enchantment and bewitchment to bring under her power (dbang du bsdud) those evil spirits, demons, and humans who work against the welfare of humanity and its spiritual evolution. However, in terms of practical magic, she can bring under the practitioner’s power a personal enemy, a boss, a politician, a policeman, or a recalcitrant lover, male or female.
In Tibet, Kurukulla was also called upon when commencing the building of a new monastery, when undertaking a new business or enterprise, when going into court in order to win a law case, and other such activities, because she can subdue and subjugate the demonic and the human forces that stand in one’s way. She, together with Manjushri and Sarasvati, might even be called upon when a student faces a difficult examination in school.

According to the texts, Kurukulla is sixteen years old because sixteen is the ideal number that signifies perfection, four times four. Her face is beautiful and her body voluptuous and alluring, as well as being red in color, because of her magical function of enchantment and magnetism. She has a single face because she embodies non-dual wisdom beyond conventional distinctions of good and evil. She is naked because she is unconditioned by discursive thoughts. She has four arms because of the four immeasurable states of mind, namely, love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. She holds the bow and arrow entwined with flowers because she can give rise to thoughts of desire in the minds of others. In her other two hands she holds the hook that attracts and summons them into her presence and the noose by which she binds them to her will. The ornaments of human bone she wears signify the five perfections, whereas she herself embodies the sixth perfection, that of wisdom. She wears a necklace of fifty freshly severed human heads dripping blood because she vanquishes the fifty negative emotions. She is dancing because she is active and energetic, her compassionate activity manifesting in both Samsara and Nirvana. She dances, treading upon a male human corpse because she enchants and subjugates the demon of ego. She stands upon a red sun disc because her nature is hot and enflamed with passion and upon a red lotus blossom because she is a pure vision of enlightened awareness. In the practitioner’s meditation, such is the recollection of the purity (dag dran) of the vision of the goddess.