From Rumi’s Divan of Shams of Tabriz (translated by James Coleman)

Of late, I have been re-reading some of the writings of Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, the thirteenth century Persian Sufi mystic whose poetry is so beloved in the contemporary West.

Rumi’s insistence on an ecstatic and mystical union with the divine through physical experience that is both ascetic and sensate, such as sacred dancing, resonates (in some senses) with the “divine materialism” of Sri Vidya tantra. (An interesting article on some possible congruencies between Islam and tantra historically can be found here: http://www.adishakti.org/pdf_files/islam_and_tantra_(sites.netscape.net).pdf .

Sufism, commonly known as the “mystical tendency” within Islam, itself has many branches (as tantra does). And like tantra, it emphasizes studying with a teacher or teachers. Rumi’s beloved teacher was Shams of Tabriz.

Rumi was forty and Shams was sixty when they met. Rumi, married with children, was a member of the privileged classes, a renowned scholar, a lawyer and a religious teacher; Shams was a wandering mystic, poor (although not uneducated) footloose and known as “The Bird” because of his inability to remain in one place for long. Between these two men, something ignited. They went into spiritual seclusion together for several months and from that encounter Rumi the ecstatic poet was born.

In this poem (translated by Will Johnson) Rumi speaks of Shams as his spiritual dancing partner:

⊃

Bats in the night sky
Love dancing with darkness

Birds that love the sun
Dance from dawn to dusk

A fast-blowing morning breeze
Go and tell Shams of Tebriz:
Tell me who you are
And come dance with me

⊃

Whilst, in this poem, (also translated by Will Johnson) Rumi speaks of Shams as his ecstatic mentor:

⊃

There’s not a lover in this world
Who could look at your face
For even one moment
And not be completely melted down

Shams of Tebriz
You’re the fountain of life

That water can only be found
In your entrancing eyes

⊃

Rumi’s language in relation to Shams is intense and passionate. They knew one another for just four years. Then, one evening whilst they were talking together at Rumi’s house, so the story goes, Shams was called by a voice at the door, he went out, and was never seen again; it is said he may have been murdered by Rumi’s family.

Some moderns have been drawn to the possibility that Rumi and Shams were in a homosexual relationship. Andrew Harvey (co-editor of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying) is an openly gay spiritual teacher and author based in the US, who has written The Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi (1994). He is also the author of an audio book called Gay Mysticism (2000) that locates Rumi, alongside Plato and Walt Whitman, as a “gay mystic”.

On the other hand, the Mevlevi order, founded by Rumi and today a traditional Sufi order based in Turkey, regards itself as the true heir to Rumi’s teachings. An article on their website, by Ibrahim Garnard, “A Reply to Misunderstandings about Rumi and Shams”, takes Westerners like Harvey to task for speculating that Rumi and Shams were involved in a sexual relationship (see http://www.dar-al-masnavi.org/rumi-shams.html ). Garnard argues that the language of love in Persian Sufi poetry refers to “lovers of Allah” and in that sense Rumi and Shams were spiritual lovers, united by their joint experience of the divine. He expostulates that sodomy was, and is, a sin in Islam and that, as devout Muslims, Rumi and Shams themselves condemned it.

Arising between these two perspectives on the relationship between Rumi and Shams, I find many of the contradictions of cultural and historical encounter. The citation of their bond in the service of undoing homophobia is strategically attractive – and oh what sublime love poetry to lay before the feet of gay pride. And yet Garnard is correct that the contemporary West sometimes impoverishes the complexities of close relationships by its tendency to view them only as “made real” through the defining prism of sex acts.

Exactly what kind of love was between Rumi and Shams must remain with them, but the lyrical outpourings it bequeathed to us continue to sing with the cosmos. And in Rumi’s poetic descriptions of ecstatic wholeness, I find strong resonances with the hymns to samadhi found in Hindu traditions, including the tantric.

⊃

When the lover breathes
Flames spread through the universe

A single breath shatters this world of illusion
Into the tiniest particles

The world becomes an ocean
From beginning to end
And then the ocean disappears into rapture

At that moment the sky splits open
An uproar fills the world
And all time, space, and existence disappear

(Rumi, translated by Will Johnson).

My tree was rooted on the edge of the old bowling green, which had, since I first met her, fallen into disuse and uneven scrub. Her girth was such that I could clasp my arms around her in a full hug, but she was an armful, not spindly, a mature tree with beautiful skin, smooth in places and furrowed in others. I came to her in all seasons. I came to lie beneath her in the sun, and feel my outspread feet mirroring her roots below whilst my starfish arms filled with petals. I came later, to watch her new copper-green leaves turn to the full green of Summer. I returned when she was shedding, and again when she was bare. Her blossom under the stars made me breathless. At sunsets, we sat hushed together.

Sometimes I brought offerings; milk poured at her roots, a sliver and blue ribbon tied to a fine branch… I brought friends too. Once in Spring snow, we laughed; all cold white flakes and pink confetti. Other times, we feasted her. I came when I was sorrowing too, and the pulse of life in her held me, and spoke to me.

I did not name her. She was herself, a lively, steady presence. I would think of her when I was home on the sofa by lamplight and she was tossing in the wind, feeling the blue night with her many eager fingers…

No doubt a lot of people have relationships with trees. Maybe a majestic beech on the dog-walking route, or a ripe town rowan near the flats… The pull, for me, was first instinctual. Her spot was removed from the tumble of folk by low railings, but on a grassy slope with a view. Later, I cultivated our bond as an act of magic, something into which I fell far deeper (as with magic I often do) than I had planned or prepared for. But it was a good deep, a vital deep…

When I was a child, if a doll of mine became maimed or broken I could never bear to look at it, or to touch it. I would lock it away, out of sight, and try to pretend nothing had happened. I couldn’t seem to move on from the horror, take the glue and try to mend it. So when I noticed, last Spring, that the tree had flowered only with a great struggle, and partially; and when the malaise continued, and her pink froth was not replaced by its customary canopy, I felt paralysed.

I thought about leaving, pretending the relationship was nothing to me now, a whim, a fancy. But I knew it wasn’t going to be that way. A magical connection cannot be sundered when times get tough, or at least only with great violence. So I visited often and anxiously, hoping against hope.

All Summer she was bare, all Summer naked. And when I hugged her, I felt the life in her retreating inwards, moving further from the surface. I knew she was dying. I had no choice but to live with it. I raged against it, I made my peace with it. I understood it was a gift.

The shape of my tree-shadow (that second shadow you carry when you are wedded to a tree) changed from the fine pink locks of a girl to the loneliness of a blasted charcoal silhouette. I felt exposed when someone’s inner eye, catching the scent of decay, would look at me twice. Guiltily, I wanted it to be over. And I never wanted to let go.

Wending my way at dusk to her spot, just after the year had turned, a voice inside my head said, before ever I reached the bend in the path – what will you do if she isn’t there? And she wasn’t, only her low cut stump, about half an inch from the ground. I planted my feet there in shock. Sap rushed to my head, stars rushed overhead. I was spun on the axis of the world, elated and grief-stricken. Her severed roots bled underfoot.

After that evening I avoided the park. I was a tree widow. I sat with life after death, mine after hers, as one does; bereft, moody and off-balance. I was sombre, quieter. I thought about meeting a new tree. I knew I couldn’t. I wondered if I ever could.

By Beltane I had girded my loins and I was ready for her wake. I dressed in black, threaded with silver, and an over-tunic of sewn pearly pink flowers. I painted her likeness in green glitter and dotted blossom on my cheek. I took my staff of cherry wood in my hand and made a flower crown of white and pink. Pulling on my black saddle boots, I was a Blodeuwedd of the void. What a May Day of festivities, of men bedecked in green and pheasant feathers, of friends and dancing, ale and horns. All day I carried her with me, our lady of fondant flowers.

A part of me will always be cherry tree now.

Regrettably Pat Robertson is in some company. When New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Austrian Catholic bishop Gerhard Wagner said it was God’s punishment for homosexuality in the city. Fred Phelps, founder of the Westboro Baptist Church agreed, referring to “fag-semen-rancid waters”. Perhaps not coincidentally, New Orleans is also a major locale for the practice of Voudou, which was brought to Louisiana by the slave trade when that state, like Haiti, was a French colony. Voudou is regarded askance by some varieties of Christian precisely because of the “dark” image it was imbued with by colonialism, a result of its link to insurrectionary politics.

The unfortunate native Taino (Arawak Indians) of the “Island of Mountains” were invaded by Columbus in 1492, and Haiti was a Spanish colony before it was a French one. Slaves from Africa were imported in large numbers to turn the country into a coffee and sugar-producing gold mine for its European owners. Life on the plantations was so brutal that the average number of years a slave survived after their transportation was ten, and because the death rate exceeded the birth rate the importation of slaves continued. Voudou arose in the melting pot of different African nations and their religious beliefs created by that trade, together with the slaves’ encounters both with the Taino and with the Roman Catholicism of their masters. The beliefs of the Fon of Dahomey (now Benin and Togo) and the Yoruba of what is now Nigeria were particularly prominent.

The best book on Haitian Vodou probably remains Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen (1953). Vodou is a fascinating syncretic religion. Its spirit intercessors, the Lwa, communicate by possessing their believers, and they are involved, passionate, proud and funny, imbued with distinctive personalities, likes and dislikes. The Ghede, whom it now seems sadly apposite to mention, are spirits of the ancestral dead. They are ruled by the Lwa Baron, (one of whose forms is Baron Samedi), together with Maman Brigitte, (a diasporic form of the Catholic Saint Brigid). The Ghede love black and purple and, as spirits both of death and fertility, they also enjoy lewd joking and dancing.

Haiti is the only nation in the world whose independence from colonial rule was gained as part of a successful slave rebellion. And it is for its defiant insurrection, in which Voudou played a unifying part, that it has been punished since. Not by God, but by vengeful capitalists. The slave revolution, which took place between 1791 and 1803, was apocryphally initiated by a Vodou Hougan (priest) known as Dutty Boukman in a night ceremony at a place called Bois Caiman in the northern mountains of the island (this is the origin of Pat Robertson’s “devil pact” story). In the early 1800s the United States, still a slave owning nation itself at that point, imposed a trade embargo on Haiti, in concert with France and Spain, fearful that Haiti’s revolution might inspire other enslaved Africans. Haiti won its freedom, but in order to receive official recognition (and much needed bank loans) from its erstwhile colonist, it was forced to pay reparations to France for its “loss of property”. It took over one hundred years, from 1825 to 1947, to clear this “debt”, which someone has calculated amounted to 21 billion dollars in today’s money. Haiti has been hobbled by poverty, violence and corruption ever since.

The post-colonial poverty of Haiti has led to a dreadful deforestation of the country (from 60% forest coverage in the 1920s to less than 2% coverage today) as people have cleared the land for cooking firewood. And that deforestation makes the severe weather events to which the country is increasingly prone (Haiti suffered four hurricanes in 2008) much worse, because there are no longer tree roots to stop the top-soil from being washed away. Land suitable for cultivation is diminished and Haiti imports 40% of its food, with many of its people, even before Tuesday’s earthquake, dependent on food aid.

Haitian Voudou is a resilient faith. It was born in times of great endurance. Indeed, when the Lwa Erzulie Dantor rides a human “horse” in possession, she makes only sounds. There are no words, it is said, because her tongue was cut out during the slave rebellion. Dantor is a fierce protectress, particularly of women who have suffered domestic or sexual violence. Lesbians are also particularly associated with her (as gay men are with her sister, the perfumed Erzulie Freda). Vodou possession is also rather gender interesting, as female Lwa happily possess men as well as women and vice versa.

Vodou is also, in its roots, a voyaging faith, and in a new wave of syncretism (approved of by some “orthodox” practitioners and disdained by others) it has become popular amongst a variety of Western pagans; undoubtedly initially because of its “dark” reputation, propagated by Hollywood movies such as White Zombie (1932) with Bella Lugosi and Roger Moore’s Live and Let Die (1973) then, of course, by its later re-working in Grant Morrison’s celebrated graphic novel series The Invisibles.

To give thanks for the personal delight I have had in encountering the Lwa, I will be listening to Wyclef Jean’s wonderful album Welcome to Haiti, Creole 101 tonight, lighting a candle for the people of Haiti, and donating to the present relief effort on www.dec.org.uk. Hopefully many other UK pagans will be joining me.

But Pandora is a utopia, and utopias are fascinating because of what they have to say about the parent cultures that imagined them. In this utopia, lithe blue Na’vi men and women appear to enjoy equal status and respect, at least in the sphere of hunter-warriors occupied by Neytiri, the woman (not yet with children) at the centre of the story. And the Na’vi live in harmony with nature. Indeed, Nature is their religion. The Omatikaya (Blue Flute Clan) whom Cameron introduces us to, are Gaia-ist immanent pantheists. Eywa is their deity and she, the “All Mother”, is the planet Pandora itself, in particular the electrical bio-connectivity which is shared between all its creatures. She speaks to the Na’vi in signs, by means of the floating seeds of sacred trees (Neytiri calls them “very pure spirits”) and in the bond they are able to form with plants and animals by a joining of tendrils at the end of their hair plaits. The voices of Na’vi ancestors can also be accessed, by linking tendrils with violet bioluminescent “trees of souls”. The Omatikaya have a clan mother and a clan father. But it is the clan mother who is their spiritual leader or shaman; she who “interprets the will of Eywa”.

You begin to see a very modern paganism. The lithe and high-kicking screen feminism of the last couple of decades (think Cameron’s own Dark Angel for example) where violence is ever-present and wielded with aplomb by hot girl-women is combined with a Goddess-as-Gaia spirituality. Meanwhile ex US military, working for a greedy nature-destroying corporation, are the enemy. Avatar is clearly the product of a culture which contracts military duties to private companies like the infamous Blackwater and also permits women to serve in many military roles as well as recognising an ever increasing number of pagan faiths in the services; Pagan, Wiccan, Druidic, Shamanic, Dianic Wicca, Gardenarian Wicca and Seax Wicca.

The film raises some interesting questions about violence and paganism. The People, as the Omaticaya call themselves, live in an absolutely jaw-droppingly beautiful forest (it is worth seeing the film several times just to be there), but, that forest is populated by some extremely fierce clawed beasties and it is as hunter-warriors that the Na’vi are initiated into adulthood. The human visitor they relate to the most is, like them, someone of sinew and muscle who delights in physical challenge. Jake Sully, the hero, is a marine. Do the Na’avi practice war themselves, or are their warriors simply defenders of the clan from marauding predators? We see a gathering of the clans to fight the common human enemy, carrying weapons aplenty, bows and arrows and lances, but the film glosses over whether they have ever used them on each other. Martin Prechtel, someone who spent time with Tzutujil Mayan people in Guatemala and talks about that traditional culture with a refreshing lack of sentimentality, recently told a story (at a talk of his I was at) about how “there had never not been war” amongst the different Mayan groupings, until the great and terrible earthquake of 1976 when it seemed the world was ending. Pretchtel also spoke about the tradition of cultural exogamy, of marrying only women from out-groups, and how, in some Native American cultures, secret prayers would be said to make the warriors of their enemies strong so that the daughters of their enemies would also be strong. War has probably been part of sexual selection amongst human beings in many settings.

Pandora is a world ruled by a fierce natural selection, one that appears to keep the Na’avi population at levels that do not upset the balance of its ecosystems. Critics have unkindly pointed out the similarities to Dances with Wolves, Disney’s Pocahonatas and FernGully. But Avatar is Paradise Lost. It is the longing for an earth before the discovery of agriculture some ten thousand years ago, the inexorable rise to seven billion people and the brink of environmental apocalypse. Of course Cameron’s pagan utopia is not without violence. How could it be when the spectacle of violence is the ker-ching in the Hollywood blockbuster? It is a utopia where there is room for violence. Neytiri, in a move clearly echoing some Native American traditions, teaches Jake that when an animal is killed for food its spirit must be thanked. Pandora is a utopia where violence is legitimately spiritual.

Critical reactions have been mixed, and are quite entertaining in themselves. US right wing bloggers have called the film a smorgasbord of tree hugging treachery. Guardian readers have be-moaned recycled plots. One website (I am still fence-sitting about whether it’s a spoof or not) titled “Stop Avatar, the Future is Transgender Not Straight” calls for protests because there are no LGBT characters in the film. Much entertaining back-talk follows. But, is it really stupid to wonder what it would be like to be gay in Na’vi society? One of the film’s conundrums is also one of the conundrums of recontructionist paganisms and the modern world that increasingly embraces them. Do we really want to live “way back when”, without painkillers and sofas? The answer, provided rather resoundingly by Cameron at the box office, is yes we very much do. In our imaginations…

I was standing in water the other day and the angle of it created a stream broken into drops, cascading from the end of my chin. Each drop chased the preceding one and, looking down at them, I was hit by amazement. Their light-catching, simple procession immersed me in immediate wonderment. But I was not bathing in a dramatic waterfall, merely showering on ordinary morning. Tantrism is a philosophy of the cultivation of everyday ecstasy. 

Some contributors to enfolding.org study and practise a form of tantrism grounded in Sri Vidya. Sri Vidya tantra focuses on the divine as Sri Lalita Tripura Sundari, which translates as “she the most beautiful goddess of the three worlds”. Lalita, or “she who plays”, may be thought of as a triplicity because it is said that Brahma the creator, Visnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer are her powers.

Sri Vidya is Shaktism, where the divine as feminine is given prominence, whilst other forms of tantrism may emphasise Shiva or Vishnu. It is also a cult of ecstatic experience. Sri Vidya “espouses a kind of ‘divine materialism’ where “matter and spirit are not ultimately distinct but are a continuity subsumed within sakti, the dynamic feminine creative principle” The Hindu World (2004: 143). 

As a philosophy or a theaology (thea = goddess, as opposed to theo = god) Sri Vidya is startlingly different from the historical philosophies and theologies that Westerners are most familiar with. Aristotle, in The Generation of Animals (circa 330 BC), considered that “the female always provides the material, the male that which fashions it… While the body is from the female, it is the soul that is from the male, for the soul is the reality of a particular body”. This active/ passive, mind/ body split, foundation of Western thought, gave to man the mind and to woman the body, elevating the former and debasing the latter. And it was coded into the next two thousand years of Western culture (for an excellent history of that trajectory in medical science see Thomas Lacquer’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, 1992).

Written tantric texts cannot be dated earlier than the 9^th or 10^th centuries AD, but some scholars, for example Thomas McEvilley,  consider, based on an interpretation of archaeological evidence, that the roots of tantra lie in the Indus valley culture some 2800 BC.

In Sri Vidya tantrism there is no mind/ body split nor is there a separation between the human spirit and the divine. This makes it a philosophy of monism, as opposed to dualism. It is a pantheistic (the divine is present in all living things) and also an immanent philosophy (the spirit as material). It differs from the non-dualism of Aidvata Vedanta, a school of philosophy, based in the Vedas, which also believes human spirit and the divine are not separate; because in that philosophy the material world is a reflection or an illusion of the divine, and for the soul to return to consciousness of union with the divine that illusion must be overcome. Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, also conceived of the world as a less perfect reflection of the divine, as the famous “allegory of the cave” in the Republic (circa 400 BC) exposits, and Plato had a profound influence on Christianity with its conceptual split between the divine ideal and the debased material. By contrast, in Sri Vidya the material world simply is divine. Thus, for Sri Vidya tantric practitioners, it is in mindful/ worshipful experiences of and through the body that we may experience spiritual ecstasy, our one-ness with Lalita:

“This whole world is interwoven in Me; It is I that am the Îs’vara that resides in causal bodies; I am the Sutrâtman, Hiranyagarbha that resides in subtle bodies and it is I that am the Virât, residing in the gross bodies. I am Brahmâ, Visnu, and Mahes’vara; I am the Brâhmâ, Vaisnavi and Raudrî S’aktis. I am the Sun, I am the Moon, I am the Stars; I am beast, birds, Chandâlas, and I am the Thief, I am the cruel hunter; I am the virtuous high-souled persons and I am the female, male, and hermaphrodite… There is nothing moving or unmoving, that can exist without Me.”

Devi-Bhagavata Purana (11^th century text: chapter 33).  

And unlike Aristotle, tantrism views the feminine principle Shakti as active and dynamic and the male principle Shiva as passive and quiescent, although in Sri Vidya tantrism both are aspects of Lalita and are thus not in fact separate and distinct.

Contemporary Western paganisms tend not to have tremendously developed theo or thealogies; these religions are after all very young. But, whether elaborately theorised or not, “divine materialism” or the divinity of the body, is a core belief. This means that the celebration the sacred principle of sexuality tends to be key. And additionally, because second wave (1970s) feminism is one of the roots of contemporary Western paganisms, the divine feminine likewise tends to be prominent.

 “Of all the world’s religions, Hinduism has the most elaborate living goddess traditions… [but]… a necessary correlation between powerful goddesses and empowered women would imply simplistic theories of role models” write Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen Erndl  in Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses (2000: 11 and 17) The complexities of the relationship between the divine feminine and the social position of women was brought home to me very recently. I met a young woman from India on a weekend workshop with Starhawk, who had come, she said, on a “spiritual pilgrimage” to the UK in search of feminist goddess religion. She told me she did not feel comfortable visiting the temples back home because the priests were inclined to sexually molest young women and she said felt stifled by the expectations of her parents’ patriarchal culture. As a Western student of Sri Vidya tantrism, a goddess-centered spiritual practice originating in India, I had to smile at the juxtaposition of our journeys, she to the West and I to the East, crossing continents in search of divinity we could stand tall within. 

Because it blasts Aristotle out of the water, Sri Vidya tantrism feels revolutionary, mind-blowingly radical even, to me. In fact tantrism has both strongly egalitarian and strongly elitist tendencies, of which more in another post… 

On a closing note, I wonder what the difference might be between the “divine materialism” of Sri Vidya, the celebration of the body we find in modern Western paganisms, and contemporary capitalism itself, which has, after all, elevated consumerism to the status of right moral action? More on this next time…

Let’s start with a different question – what does tantra mean in the popular imagination of the contemporary West? Well, of course it means sex, strange and possibly “sacred”, but sex of some kind.

Let’s dig a little deeper. What does tantra mean when we peruse the popular Western “how to” book market on the subject? Sex is very central, generally married to a narrative of goddess worship and self-liberation. As for the type of sex described in such books, it is usually partnered heterosexual sex, where orgasm, often particularly male orgasm, is delayed or abjured in order that both partners may experience a heightened state of bliss.

A Cautionary Note

As you will discover on the Enfolding.org pages, the tendency of many Western re-workings of tantra to reduce it to “sacred sexuality” is rather like a newcomer to planet Earth forming the notion that Christianity is all about prayer. Prayer is certainly an element of many (although not all) forms of Christianity, but our impetuous alien anthropologist would be missing rather a lot of information were they to study Christian prayer and from that extrapolate the Christian religion.

This particular piece does however take Western re-workings of tantra, and the centrality of sex/gender therein, as its springboard.

A number of the thought formations held by popular Western tantra need to be examined critically if we are to imagine a queer Western tantra.

Western Tantric Practice as Inherently Heterosexual?

In The Passionate Buddha (2002: 151), a Western interpretation of Tibetan tantric Buddhism which focuses on sexual relationships, Robert Sachs writes, “According to Buddhist teachings, the polarity of male and female energy is needed to perform dual tantra; the penis and vagina serve as the most important ports of entry and exit. Thus, by definition, homosexual partners cannot perform dual Tantra as such”.

This narrative, which says that real religious “right living”, real love, real magic, real tantra etc. can only take place where a body with a penis and a body with a vagina are involved, is a narrative which can be found across the religious and spiritual spectrum, including in new Western formations such as Neo-Paganism.

Speaking as a queer practitioner of magic I can tell you that this narrative is mistaken. Magic works just fine if you are lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer or inter-sex, and so does the sort of erotic tantric practice Robert Sachs is referring to. Nor is it necessary, if undertaking partnered work in boy-boy or girl-girl pairings, to perform contortions of identification where one of you takes on a “masculine” aspect and one of you takes on a “feminine” aspect as advocated by some forms of Wicca, for example by Bruce K. Wilborn in his (really rather dreadful) The Gay Wicca Book (2002). You might want to of course, and that’s fine. Heterosexual magic is magic, moreover it is true wild and important magic. And polarity working has its place too (although I would not personally want to limit chosen polarities to penis/ vagina, masculine/ feminine or to map one simply onto the other).

But can Western tantra (which some refer to as Neo-Tantra) involving sexual/ spiritual rites, really be practiced without a conceptual heterosexuality? Doesn’t the union of Shiva with Shakti lie at the heart of the tantric universe? Andre Van Lysebeth in Tantra: the Cult of the Feminine (1995) which seeks to introduce Westerners to Hindu (as opposed to Buddhist) forms of tantra, discusses various “reasons” for homosexuality, citing “abandonment by the mother”, “an inadequacy of heterosexual partners”, “a female soul which has chosen the wrong body” (pp151-154), all of which are familiar speculations from the nineteenth and early twentieth century Western imagination. However, Van Lysebeth, unlike Robert Sachs, believes same sex couples can fully practice tantric union because “A male homosexual couple is actually a heterosexual couple although they may not realise it. One penetrates as the other takes the female part”. Again, that might work for you, and if it does, by all means… but, queery-ing Western tantra does not stop there.

Can the union of Shiva with Shakti itself be “queered”? The sort of Western tantric practices Sachs and Van Lysebeth are delineating (which do have roots in written sanskrit tantric texts) involve playing with or moving at will the electricity of desire that arises in you and/ or between you and another (or others). It does not depend on types of body parts or insertion of body parts. You can do it on your own (as indeed orthodox tantric Buddhism teaches you must do) or you can do it with anyone you choose to move erotic energy with, penis schmenis. But can you do it whilst conceptualising the universe as the union of Shiva with Shiva or Shakti with Shakti? Can you enclothe Shakti in an inter-sex body entwined with Shiva in a butch body in your mind’s eye whilst you, a femme bisexual, are entwined with a fey gay man? It’s heterodoxy. You won’t find such visions in traditional tantric texts or in popular Western texts about tantra. But the answer is yes, if you want to queer Western tantra in this manner you can.

But will it “work”? If it works for you, it will work. Magic, as Lou Hart writes, “is a many gendered thing” .

One writer on practical queer friendly Western (erotic) tantra whom I can recommend is Dossie Easton, who combines bdsm and tantra in her book Radical Ecstasy: SM Journeys to Transcendence (2004).

Towards a Queer Western Tantra

For me, a queer Western tantra might be one involving the possibility of the free play of gender and sexuality and/or (because free play doesn’t work for everyone) involving multiple gendered, sensual and participatory possibilities. For me a queer Western tantra might be one that breaks down the binary of the couple (i.e. is not just about lesbian couples and gay couples “doing tantric sex too”). A queer Western tantra might be one that fractures the link between genitals and ecstatic exchange altogether and one that travels across the human/ non-human binary (why not ecstatically and erotically merge with the bliss-being-beyond-being of a tree?). Just as tantra is in fact so much more than “sacred sex”, so formations of sacred sexuality/ sensuality/ bliss within it can be infinitely more variant than heterosexual karezza and corresponding visualised god forms (which is not to denigrate those forms, for they are beautiful, but rather to dare to diversify them).

Many rivers run into the ocean of ecstasy.

Journey
Zanskar, Ladakh – site of the twelfth Kalachakra initiation given by the fourteenth Dalai Lama.

After six months teaching Tibetan kids in the Kulu valley, the children of those who had come to India as refugees, I travelled north, first into Kashmir and then into Ladakh. We’d heard the Dalai Lama was giving Kalachakra, a public ritual, amongst the people there. It was 1988.

The journey was a wild pilgrimage composed of the kindness of strangers. There were no spaces left on any means of public transport. We spoke to a rickshaw driver in Srinigar, who took us to see his shopkeeper cousin, one Mohammmed Latif, who knew the chief of police. The chief fed us Kashmiri cardamom tea on his extremely floral carpet and arranged for us to travel with a crew of Sikh lorry drivers in their truck. They cooked the spiciest food I have ever eaten and by moonlight played cards, flicked matches, and unwound their turbans and combed out their long black hair. The truck left behind bright green rice paddy fields and the fiercely steaming Indus and arrived at the snow of the Zoji La pass. Ladakh is a moon-scape; all the hills were bare. In Leh we join another truck, full of pilgrims, on the road to Zanskar. The camaraderie of pilgrimage came upon us. People shared watermelon, chapattis and pickle, and orange cream biscuits. The skies were blue and immense and close to the face, we were so high up. The sunsets were purple and orange, the nights crammed with stars. We slept outside and drank hot butter tea. There were soldiers everywhere, in brown and green uniforms and brown and green vehicles.

The place itself was just outside Padum in a whipping dustbowl of lonely white parachute tents with a water standpipe. The flat landscape was covered in small canals, purple flower patches and some thin wheat. The Dalai Lama had brought the rain to this arid region as a blessing people said. An information tent contained officials of the deposed theocrat. Amongst the mud and melee we registered for a sermon on the thirty-seven practices of the sons of Buddha.

A single white building with pointed scalloped roofs sat in a flat plain surrounded by mountains. This was the monastery where the Dalai Lama was temporarily encamped. The white walls were hung with pink and yellow banners. A sea of Ladakhi people gathered before it. The women wore heavy turquoise head-dresses and neat traditional dresses. A raised wooden enclosure housed visiting journalists. Unlike the stoic locals they sprouted a sea of umbrellas. A monk in ceremonial red robes and a pointed yellow hat blew a long horn. Other monks gathered on the steps of the white palace. Deep sonorous chanting of mantras began. The Dalai Lama was with them, but he broke off to giggle. The opening address once sent out by loudspeaker and translated for the Westerners enclave, made the whole field laugh too. Some of the people from this valley of Zanskar, marked by pink ribbons, kept their hands together in reverence from the moment the Dalai Lama took the stage to the moment he left.

A letter from Dawa-La, the headmaster of our school, gained us the privilege of a brief and rare private audience with His Holiness. We had made quite an impression at the school, by working hard rather than lunching out classes smoking weed, as had apparently happened with Western visiting teachers in the past. HH the DL was still giggling when we approached. “I am a very frank person, I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “Tashi Delek” I said feebly. I had hurt my thumb misjudging jumping over one of the water channels, and it was bandaged. The Dalai Lama took my hand in his and ran his fingers gently and unceasingly over my injured digit as we spoke. I made him laugh by explaining it was difficult to jump in a traditional Tibetan dress. As soon as he touched me I entered a strange state. I felt “blissed out”, his warm big-souled energy enfolded me like a blanket. I stayed in that state for weeks afterwards. It glowed like pink honey around me and only faded gradually. I had no frame of reference for the experience then, but now I think of it as a very gentle encounter with someone suffused with tantric practice – a tantric empowerment if you will.

We presented white scarves to HH, as was correct custom, and were presented with some in return, then were taken by aides to an ante-chamber for butter tea and farewells. It was 1988 and in that place of the water channels, where the people are Tibetan kith and kin and had travelled by hook or by crook from all over the region, thousands received Kalachakra empowerment.

Theory
772 deities are represented in the Kalachakra mandala, delicately constructed from coloured sand, revealed to participants and then destroyed. The Kalachakra text can be traced to the tenth century. Kalachakra means Time Wheel (Kala – time, Chakra – wheel) in Sanskrit. For the fourteenth Dalai Lama, the goal for the practitioner of Kalachakra at the highest level is a state of unchanging blissful awareness dedicated to the enlightenment of all beings.

Kalachakra is given at the fourteenth Dalai Lama’s ceremonies to thousands of people as an empowerment or blessing. The Kalachakra mandala is dedicated to world peace. However, there are many levels to Kalachakra practice and it involves, according to the current Dalai Lama, celibacy at its most complex level. At the centre of Kalachakra visualisation and the Kalachakra mandala is depicted an image which may appear overtly sexual, that of the couple erotically embracing, of Kalachakra embracing the goddess Vishvamata, surrounded by ten shaktis. The present Dalai Lama has been interviewed about the practice of Kalachakra (www.berzinarchives. com) and the visualisation of this divine coupling. He comments that “some non-Buddist traditions assert that offering a fire puja of semen in the reality source of a woman pleases Shiva and through that one can achieve liberation. But liberation doesn’t happen like that”. In other words in the Tibetan tantric Buddhism practices by HH DL, sexual energy is invoked as part of its more advanced practices, but it is not actualised between people as described in some non-Buddhist (Hindu) tantras.

What does it mean to have a covenant with a tree? Western en-visionings of shamanism very frequently focus on relationships with animal spirits guides. What about relationships with plants?

Inspired by the folk Tantra tree marriages described in June McDaniel’s book Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worship in West Bengal (2004) I fell in love with a tree in 2006 and began visiting her regularly, in all seasons, and taking offerings. Those visits became a relationship, and whenever I visit I hug her, feeling/ imagining a conversational exchange through that touch. Trees are given spiritual significance in many traditions, from Yggdrasil the Norse world tree to the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. I have been visiting the great palm wine tree in the hothouse at Kew gardens since I was seven, watching her watching me growing older, peering down to remember. The more I talk to people about relationships with trees the more I find people have them, not necessarily modern pagans but all kinds of folk, quietly, persistently. But be careful before you sign on the dotted line with a tree. Trees live long; a covenant with a tree is not to be taken lightly.