Modern Tantra, tantra
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Aspects of Tantra
Five essays exploring modern Tantra
Phil Hine
A Coecton of Sacred Magck | The Esoterc Lbrary | www.sacred-magck.com
for Vishvanath
Contents
One: Setting the scene....................................................................3
Two: Devotions & demonesses........................................................7
Three: The science of extremes......................................................12
Four: The guru: fakir or faker?......................................................17
Five: The joy of sects....................................................................23
Sources/Links...............................................................................29
Aspects of Tantra
3
Only the other day I was chatting over the phone to a friend in America,
and happened to mention that I was currently involved with a Tantric magic
study group. My friend became very animated, and in tones of some envy said that
he’d always wanted to ind a group where people were willing to do Tantric magic
with each other. It was at this point that an alarm bell began to ring in my head.
“Look,” I said, “I mean Tantric magic, not group sex.” “Oh,” my friend replied, “I
wasn’t aware that there was anything more to Tantra than group sex.” Now this kind
of reaction isn’t untypical, even among otherwise experienced occultists. Over the
last few years, whenever I’ve mentioned my interest in Tantra, I’ve often watched
people’s mental gears grinding away as they visualise contorted sexual postures and
perhaps, unusual combinations. To think of Tantra only in terms of sexual rites is
a gross oversimpliication. In fact, Tantrism is a complete magical system in itself,
incorporating a wide variety of magical methods and metaphysics.
Many elements of Tantric magic have become absorbed into the general magical lore
of the West. Such elements include concepts such as Kundalini, the Chakras, Karma,
Yoga, etc. Concepts such as the Chakras have been widely taken up by new agers and
spiritualists, many of whom would be horriied if told of the roots of these concepts
in tantrism.
So why does Tantra have such a ‘dodgy’ reputation? In part, this is due to the
efforts of the European chroniclers of Indian religious life. The Abbé Dubois for
example, author of the seminal work on Hindu life, “Hindu Manners, Customs and
Ceremonies” (1807), wrote in much detail of the “abominable debaucheries” of ‘sakti
worship’. The Abbé’s work contained the irst detailed account of the orgiastic ritual
that came to be known as ‘cakrapuja’ (circle-worship), and his book did much to ix
the European notion that Hindus were depraved. The Abbé’s descriptions of sakti
worship was passed down from author to author, and still colours some modern
notions of Tantra. Similarly, the Rev. William Ward, writing of famous tantric texts
such as the Yoni Tantra, reverted to asterisks occasionally whilst describing
“...things
too abominable to enter the ears of man, and impossible to be revealed to a Christian
public...”
By the mid-Nineteenth Century, Tantra has acquired the glamour which
surrounds it even today - of ‘forbidden rites’, ‘orgiastic ceremonies’, ‘ritual murder’
and ‘oriental mysteries’.
Of particular relevance to occultists is the inluence of organisations such as the
Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The former,
in particular, were instrumental in importing many Indian esoteric concepts into
Western occultism, although these concepts were invariably mutilated in the process.
A good example of this ‘twisting’ of ideas, (which began with the Theosophists and
A Coecton of Sacred Magck | The Esoterc Lbrary | www.sacred-magck.com
One: Setting the scene
M
ention Tantra to most people, and they will invariably think of sex-magic.
Aspects of Tantra
4
continues even now) is that of the Chakras. Now most people who have done some
reading of magical texts will have come across the Chakras, as they have become a
fairly basic element of what is known as the Western Esoteric Tradition. So much so
in fact, that it is more or less taken for granted that the Chakras have some factual
basis for existence. The original tantric texts which describe the varying systems of
Chakras (some describe six, others, seven, nine, or even eleven) use a great deal of
symbolic language and metaphor, much of which western authors have mistakenly
taken literally. Sir John Woodroffe, in his book The Serpent Power, gives an exam-
ple of this when he presents a critique of C.W Leadbeater’s book The Inner Life.
Leadbeater claims to have counted the number of petals of the Sahasrara Chakra and
says that the number is not 1,000, as is often given in tantric texts, but exactly 960.
Woodroffe points out that the Indian use of “thousand” is a metaphor for a great
magnitude, and not a literal count. Leadbeater has mistaken a metaphorical state-
ment for a literal one, which makes nonsense of his assertion. Unfortunately, many
Theosophical notions such as this are passed from book to book, without, as Pete
Carroll once quipped “any intervening thought.”
It was largely the Theosophical Society who spread the notion that the so-called
‘Left-Hand Path’ of Tantrism was tantamount to ‘Black Magic’, due to the prevalence
of sexual gnosis. For Theosophists, as much as their Christian brethren, there was no
way that sensual enjoyment could be seen as ‘spiritual’ in any sense.
A third source of obsfucation has been the somewhat biased work of scholars, both
European and Indian. According to some scholars, particularly those inluenced by
orthodox Hindu or Western ideas, Tantra was a degeneration from the rareied atmos-
phere of Yoga, into witchcraft, alchemy, and astrology. This is erroneous. There is an
increasing body of evidence pointing to the emergence of Tantra from the rituals and
concerns of the tribal peoples. A very early Tantric manuscript, the Kubjika Tantra,
written in the sixth century, is concerned with the rituals of potters. From the prehis-
toric period, the pot has been the symbol of the Great Mother goddess. Some scholars
believe that Tantra emerged from the blending of alchemy and agricultural magic.
Finally, the image of Tantrism has been coloured by the antagonism of modern India.
Indian attitudes towards the sensual have shifted considerably, due to the inlu-
ence of irst Islamic, then Anglo-Saxon prejudice. Professor Bharati, in his classic
work The Tantric Tradition, remarks that ‘oficial Indian culture’, as formulated by
Vivekananda, Gandhi and Radakrishnan, very much considered Tantrism to be very
much beyond the pale. Alain Daniélou, in the introduction to his translation of the
Kama Sutra, notes that:
“Mahatma Gandhi, educated in England, sent squads of his disciples to smash the
erotic representations on the temples. ...Pandit Nehru was irritated by my having pho-
tographed and published the photographs of sculptures showing homosexual relations,
dating from the eleventh century, when he claimed that such vices in India were due to
Western inluence.”
The Complete Kama Sutra, p10
Whilst researching for this article, I was lent a book called “Kali’s Child”, by Jeffrey
J. Kripal - a biography of Ramakrishna, the 19
th
century mystic who was a major
inluence in the reformulation of ‘modern Hinduism’. Vivekananda, his most famous
pupil was decidedly anti-tantric, describing it as the “ilthy vamachara that is
Aspects of Tantra
5
destroying this country”. Kripal reveals however, that Ramakrishna himself went
through a period of tantric training, which his followers chose to ignore. Moreover,
according to this author, Ramakrishna’s ecstatic visions and teachings sprung from an
erotic source, which has also been conveniently glossed over:
“Sakti - in her image, gender, music and scriptures - has been made submissive and
obedient. Bengalis are encouraged to be ashamed of her and her Tantras. Sakti is no
longer on top of Siva.”
Kali’s Child, p27
To understand the beginnings of Tantra, it is necessary to understand something
of Indian history. Orthodox Hinduism, the so-called Great or Brahmanic Tradition,
has its roots in the Vedas, which encapsulate the religious ideas of the Aryans, who
invaded India around 1200 BC, subduing the indigenous peoples (the Dravidians)
with their Iron weapons. In the following centuries of pressure, much of that indig-
enous culture retreated - there was a retreat away from the cities and migration routes
into the forests, mountains and villages. The vast hinterlands of India allowed the
survival of isolated centres of cultural life which retained elements of great antiquity.
Gradually, a landscape emerged along the northern river valleys of cities, supported
by a vast countryside divided into isolated village societies. Whilst the orthodox
culture was dominated by the Vedic rituals of the Brahmins, there also existed a
parallel vision, the Vrata tradition, operating through song, dance, art and magical
incantations - a storehouse of both archaic wisdom and contemporary patterns.
Similar migrations occurred in the ninth & tenth centuries, when entire Buddhist
communities took refuge from persecution in the remote countryside, and in the
eleventh to thirteenth centuries, when pressure from the Muslim Invasions forced
vast numbers of scholars into southern India. It is in southern India that surviving
Dravidian languages can be found.
It is widely believed that, although Tantra as we know it is largely a medieval phe-
nomena, that this ‘revival’ is a direct descendent of Palaeolithic Goddess worship,
and that its magical and psycho-sexual practices evolved from a wide variety of cults
and mystery schools. Dr. John Mumford, in “Ecstasy Through Tantra” (1988) goes
so far as to assert that Tantrism was the “religion” of the Dravidians and, whilst this
may be overstating the case somewhat, there are many scholars who look for the roots
of Tantrism within the mists of Dravidian civilisation; it has been estimated that the
cities of Harrapa and Mohenjo-Daro (these are modern names) had existed for at least
a 1000 years before the arrival of the Aryan invaders, and that the aboriginal Indus
Valley civilisation dates back as far as 2500 BC
One of the main problems I feel, that modern Europeans face when encountering
Tantra is our own predisposition for expecting things to be clear-cut and easily
broken down into bite-size pieces. For example, I have recently been doing some
magical work with Siva, and during this, became interested in Siva’s primordial form
Rudra (Howler). I struggled for a while to ind a point where Rudra became Siva, but
it’s almost impossible to draw such a clear distinction between the two. Fortunately,
(at least to my mind), Tantra resists this ‘diluting’ process due to it’s very nature.
Being used to (and often, greatly attracted by) a multiplicity of ‘traditions’ all jostling
for attention, occultists all too often make the mistake of seeing Tantra as a coherent
tradition. It isn’t. What is generally regarded as Tantra is an intricate interweaving
of philosophy, magic, yoga’s, astrology, alchemy, medicine, folklore, etc. Tantric
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