“Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorializations measured with the craft of a surveyor.”
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“The Supreme Lord fashions the body and the senses, corresponding (to the sphere of) duality by the power of Maya, while through His power of knowledge He generates Mantras. Their body is the self-awareness which is the expanse (akasa) (of consciousness), and they denote the wonderful diversity of things.”
Ksemaraja, commentary on the Spandakarika (Dyczkowski, 1992)

For the final part of this extended essay I will focus on Sitala and her relationship with disease and possession. Here, a “grotesque” element (from an outsider’s perspective) might well be the idea that Sitala – rather than conforming to the tendency to dichotomise deities as either helpful or harmful – is considered to be the agency which bestows and removes disease. Moreover, Sitala’s bestowal of diseases is often considered to be a “blessing” or sign of Sitala’s grace – with the person experiencing “the kiss of the goddess” and thought to be in a state of intensified “closeness” to Sitala – making the disease a form of possession and sometimes, granting the person a reciprocal power in the realm of disease-management, and as an oracular medium of the goddess.

India has had a long-established culture of possession for over three thousand years, with textual references found in the Rg Veda and the Atharvaveda with numerous schemas (and multitudinous taxonomies of spirits) emerging and cross-pollinating each other through the dharmasastras, tantric schools and ayurvedic practices, as well as yoga and devotional approaches (see Smith, 2006, for a full account) and remains popular today as a contemporary practice, and several scholars have studied contemporary possession practices, particularly in relation to the non-sanskritised village or local goddesses (for example, Foulston, 1999, McDaniel, 2004).

Possession and disease: Sitala and smallpox
Smallpox seems to have become widely prevalent in India from around the 7th century A.D., and gradually ceased to be rare and exceptional. By the mid-19th century for example, 4 million deaths were attributed to smallpox between 1865 and 1899. Smallpox was generally considered to be inevitable and inescapable. It is within this context of the inevitability of smallpox infection that much of the early anthropological and medically-oriented accounts of Sitala are situated. Prior to the introduction of vaccination by the British, the dominant approach to coping with smallpox in India was variolation – using a small portion of infected matter (such as pus) to give a person an attenuated case of smallpox (giving immunity from further infection, although 2-3% of those variolated died). Practices of variolation was described in British accounts of smallpox outbreaks in the late eighteenth century in India, and according to Frédérique Marglin (1987) was accompanied by the worship of Sitala. Nicholas (2003) cites eighteenth & nineteenth-century British accounts of inoculation which suggest that variolation was carried out by itinerant specialists, sometimes known as tikadars – “mark-makers”, who had long-term relationships with client villages.

According to Marglin, smallpox was homologised with Sitala and the sufferer spoken to and of, as though he or she were the goddess; offered cooling drinks (such as asses milk) or food and leaves of the neem tree (which have antiseptic properties) – the same substances that would be offered to the goddess in formal puja. Fabrizio Ferrari (2007, p86) states that:

“Informants all agree in saying that cold waters and cooling edibles are offered to Sitala, not to the ill person. This is because the diseased person is Sitala, quite literally.”

When Sitala is angered, she becomes heated – and the diseases she controls overheat those she possesses, so that measles sufferers are thought to have the goddess’ heat within them. Marglin argues that Sitala, angry and heated, is the diseased person, and when pacified and cool, she is the “cured” patient. In treating the disease sufferer as Sitala, gentleness is emphasised and extremes such as confrontation and aggressiveness are to be avoided, lest the goddess be angered and the disease intensified. This understanding of disease, she argues, does not view disease as an “enemy to be eradicated”. Marglin draws on Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic (1975) in arguing that just as in the prison, the enemies of society are placed in a condition of surveillance, so too the hospital or clinic, places the enemy of health – the diseased person – under surveillance, subject to disciplinary control. This, Marglin says, is the consequence of a dichotomous disease model which constructs disease as “an enemy to be destroyed” and death as a negative failure.

British colonial administrators tended to characterise the entirety of Indian medicine, religion and popular belief as superstitious and irrational. Variolation was banned by the colonial government in 1865 and replaced with vaccination, which met considerable resistance as it was conceived of as offensively polluting and another instance of coercion by the authorities – and vaccination was not immediately effective. Colonial administrators tended to interpret resistance as superstitious ignorance and further proof of the “backwardness” of Indian religions – particularly the worship of Sitala – in resisting change and improvements.

Following independence, the Indian government continued to press for eradication of smallpox through vaccination (see Marglin for discussion of “forced vaccinations”). In the early 1970s, a new approach to vaccination was embarked on by the Indian government in collaboration with the World Health Organisation, which stressed sensitivity to local practices and public co-operation, rather than top-down enforcement, and India was declared free of smallpox in 1980.

Sitala and AIDS
India is estimated to have 2.47million people living with HIV (aidsdatahub.org India country review accessed 1 July 2011). A 2006 study found that 25% of People Living with AIDS/HIV (PLWAH) had been refused medical treatment on the basis of their HIV-positive status. A joint report issued in 2010 by WHO, UNAIDS and UNICEF estimated that over 1 million PLWAH in India are without access to anti-retroviral (ARV) treatments. India’s health minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad, has been roundly criticised for the remarks he made at recent HIV/AIDS conference in New Delhi. Speaking about men who have sex with men (MSM), Azad said “This kind of act is unnatural and it should not be indulged in.”

The relationship between AIDS awareness and local religions in India has attracted some interest, particularly following the “birth” (or “creation”) of a new goddess – AIDS-amma. AIDS-amma was “created” by Mr H.H Girish, a science teacher in the village of Menasikyathana Halli, in Karnataka, as part of an AIDS awareness campaign. Mr Girish built a shrine and installed the goddess on World AIDS day 1997. Girish found out about a local couple who had died of starvation, having been ostracised from their community when it was discovered they had AIDS. Girish calls the shrine a “Temple of Science” and gives lectures, urging the villagers to seek information rather than protection from the goddess. AIDS-amma is represented by a whitewashed stone on which are solid black silhouettes of a woman and a man’s torso, standing back to back. In the middle of the figure’s merging heads is a large red circle, upon which are written AIDS and HIV in English, along with informative messages in the local language, Kannada.

link to photos of Girish and the AIDS-amma shrine

Anna Portnoy, a Harvard undergraduate who visited the shrine in 1999, says that Girish intended the figures of the man and woman to represent religion, and the red circle to represent the HIV virus, or more generally, science. He gave weekly lectures at the shrine about AIDS, and entreats villages to ask the goddess for knowledge – “Please AIDS-amma, bless me with information” – rather than seeking protection or a cure. Portnoy also interviewed villagers about their relationship to AIDS-amma:

On Friday, three or four women did straggle over from the larger Pataladamma temple, which was set back another twenty meters from the AIDS-amma shrine. With the sound of Pataladamma’s priest chanting in the distance, one of the women, a young mother, lit a stick of incense for AIDS-amma, while the others pressed their folded hands to their chests. The women were reluctant to discuss the temple or its subject. “We don’t know anything about AIDS-amma,” one said. “We don’t know anything except that there is a disease called AIDS.” I asked if there were a connection between the disease and the goddess and she told me that that is what educated people had told her.

The men in the village were more forthcoming about their knowledge of AIDS-amma. Most claimed to go to the temple every day and to pray for a “clean” or “clear” mind. They perceived the man and woman painted on the “idol” to be having sexual intercourse–a pictorial lesson in how the disease is transmitted. One man said, “The idol is quite fearsome. It’s a woman and man because [AIDS] travels from woman to man.”

Portnoy reports that in April 1999 someone – reportedly from a neighbouring village, slashed the AIDS-amma stone in two and poured red paint over it. She was later informed that people did not object to a new temple as such, but felt that the way Girish had connected sex and religion was morally wrong. Some newspapers had reported that Girish had considered placing a box of contraceptives at the shrine as an offering, but Girish told Portnoy that such an open display would incur open religious opposition. Portnoy reports that the vandalism caused villagers in Menasikyathana Halli to rally round in support of the shrine, rebuilding it and forming a union to protect and develop it. There is now a yearly jatra (“fair”) in which AIDS-amma is carried in procession around the village, accompanied by street plays, free medical checkups and blood donations (AIDS-amma Jatra).

Opinions in India about the long-term effectiveness of AIDS-amma are divided. Some critics maintain that the creation of AIDS-amma will encourage villagers to seek protection or cure from her, whilst other commentators believe that AIDS-amma will become a rallying point for raising awareness and countering the negative public perceptions of AIDS.

Although Sitala is frequently referred to as “the smallpox goddess” it would be more accurate to say that she has at her call a wide range of fevers and diseases. Although she is worshipped in order to keep these diseases at bay, there is also the homology of disease-as-possession to consider. Several scholars, notably June McDaniel (2004) and Lynn Foulston (2009) have observed that despite the eradication of smallpox, Sitala has to some extent retained her popularity in relation to diseases such as measles, syphilis, TB and malaria, but more recently, she is also worshipped as an AIDS-goddess.

Ferrari describes the situation thusly:

“According to my fieldwork in rural West Bengal, AIDS tends to be seen as the result of erratic social and ritual behaviour. Especially among less educated people, AIDS is a punishment for not regularly worshipping the goddess and the acceptance of a modern/Western lifestyle, especially concerning intergender relations. The awareness that AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease is not sufficiently rooted, especially among women. … In rural communities diseases are invariably related to the action of deities and spirits. Further, the existence of sexual taboos makes it difficult to understand that a disease – considered a state of possession – can be caused by sexual activity. Śītalā is believed to visit her sons and daughters through AIDS as she used to do with smallpox. The persistence of this pattern has led Śītalā’s devotees to believe in the possibility of recovery from HIV positiveness through worship (pūjā) and sacrificial offering (balidān). Contagion is not always seen as a life-threat. In fact, it can be a privileged condition.”

Ferrari says that devotees of Sitala view contagion as a desirable form of possession and – just as smallpox victims were identified with Sitala, so too PLWAH are experiencing “the kiss of the goddess” (a euphemism previously associated with smallpox) – “an extreme form of love which can eventually devour them.” Ferrari describes specialists known variously as Khalsis, ojhas or rojas who communicate with the goddess as trance oracles, and who suffer, or have suffered from, diseases which they claim to be able to cure, and give advice to clients on healing methods, preventative measures, and offerings to be presented to the goddess. He says that in some case, PLWAH in Bengal are identified as healers in this way and play a similar role in relation to HIV/AIDS. According to Ferrari, some of his informants not only expressed a belief in the possibility of recovery, but also expressed “happiness with their condition, as it gives them social recognition.”

Sources
David Arnold Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (University of California Press, 1993)
Suparna Bhaskaran Made in India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/national Projects (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1987)
Mark SG Dyczowski, The Stanzas on Vibration: The SpandaKarika with Four Commentaries (SUNY, 1992)
F Ferrari, Love Me Two Times.’ From Smallpox to AIDS: Contagion and Possession in the Cult of Śītalā (Religions of South Asia, North America, 1, jun. 2007. Available at: http://www.equinoxjournals.com/ROSA/article/view/3517/2210 [Purchase/Login required] Date accessed: 28 Jun. 2011.)
June McDaniel Offering Flowers, Feeding Skulls: Popular Goddess Worship in West Bengal (Oxford University Press, 2004)
FA Marglin, Smallpox in Two Systems of Knowledge (UNU/WIDER working paper, 1987)
Ralph W Nicholas, Fruits of worship: practical religion in Bengal (Orient Black Swan, 2003)
Laurie L. Patton Jewels of Authority: Women and Textual Tradition in Hindu India (Oxford University Press, 2002)
Frederick M. Smith The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilisation (Columbia University Press, 2006)
Susan Wadley, Sitala: The Cool One (Asian Folklore Studies 39. (1980): 33-62)

web sources
Stigma and discrimination in India http://www.aidsonline.org/ accessed 28 June, 2011)
Undergraduate Witnesses Birth of a Goddess the Harvard University Gazette Archives (http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/02.24/AIDS.html) accessed 28 June, 2011)
Anna Portnoy A Goddess in the Making (Whole Earth Magazine, Fall 2000, online article accessed 27 June, 2011)

It seems likely, for example, that advanced practitioners of yoga and other psychophysical practices would develop rather distinctive image schemata appropriate to their experiences and sadhana, transmitted by specific gurus and teaching lineages.
Quoted from Glen A. Hayes in Whicher, Carpenter, p164 (2003)

For this post I’m going to focus on the work of tantric scholar Glen A. Hayes, who has produced a number of fascinating essays on aspects of the Vaisnava tradition. I’ve been interested in the Vaisnava forms of tantra for some years now, ever since I read Edward Dimock’s classic The Place of the Hidden Moon. Generally, when attempting to get to grips with forms of tantra, I’ve found it very useful not only to look at what I think of as primary traditions (those that form the major inspiration for practice) – which for me, is (more-or-less) Srividya and the Kaula streams, but also to examine other forms of tantra and related traditions (see For the Love of God: Variations of the Vaisnava School of Krishna Devotion which I wrote back in 2003, as an early attempt to find queer themes in Vaisnava tantra). Hayes’ translation of the practice of Bhuta Suddhi from The Necklace of Immortality for example, helped me get to grips with this particular practice enormously.

As this series progresses, I will at some point get around to exploring some of the key themes which have emerged out of Lakoff & Johnson’s work on metaphor. However, for now, I think it would be more useful to examine how some aspects of those theories are being applied to tantric studies.

Over the last few years, there has been a move in scholarly research away from treating tantra as a singular, pan-Indian tradition, and an increased focus towards regional tantric vernacular traditions – for example, both Hugh Urban and Loriliai Biernacki have focused on tantra in Assam (and Hugh Urban’s The Economics of Ectasy examines the Bengali Kartabhaja movement with its mingling of tantric, Christian and mercantile imagery). Hayes’ work in the essays I’m examining here focuses on localised forms of Bengali Vaisnava Sahajiya. As Hayes remarks (2006, p45): “One way to “liberate” local tantras from the constraints of the dominant Sanskrit-based model of “tantra” is to explore the vernacular language itself, to coax out the often-profound metaphors and entailments that “live” in the texts.” For Hayes, examining vernacular traditions is important not only because they developed in particular cultural and historical contexts, but also in that they use distinctive metaphors “in their attempt to construe and express sacred realities and beings”.

Hayes draws on the work of Lakoff & Johnson and Gary Palmer (Towards a Theory of Cultural Linguistics) – in particular, Palmer’s argument for “folk cognitive models”. He suggests that in vernacular tantric traditions, practitioners are not just using different language to express a global tantric world-view – but that they are “expressing distinct cognitive and cosmological models.” He gives as an example the Sahajiya “cosmophysiology” of ponds and rivers which is so different from the familiar Saivite schema of cakras and nadis. It’s this aspect of Sahajiya practice that initially caught my attention, as it struck me as a much more naturalistic (and poetic) schema for homologising various layers of experience than the rather static presentation of chakras, nadis etc., that has become dominant in western occult representations of the “internal body”.

Hayes points out that, in the case of Vaisnava Sahajiyas bodily experiences, image schematas and metaphorical projections would have been influenced not only by tradition-specific understandings of the relationship between body, senses, imagination and reality, but also the wider Bengali culture and language, other religious forms, and geography – and that in order to understand the “metaphoric worlds” of the Vaisnava Sahajiyas, one should always be attentive to the surrounding context. This in itself is an important point, as outside of contemporary scholarly work, tantric practices are all too often represented as being a ‘break’ with the wider South Asian cultural and religious traditions – as though tantra is wholly radically different to “mainstream” culture.

Hayes goes on to examine some Vaisnava Sahajiyas metaphorical projections which express the relationship between embodiment and the process of liberation. For example, in The Necklace of Immortality there is the stanza;

This path of sadhana is difficult to traverse, it is near-yet-far; from a distance it seems close, from close up it seems distant.

This expresses the familiar tantric/yogic metaphor of sadhana as a journey, but adds a paradoxical twist – “near-yet-far” which, Hayes says, is an image often used by Vaisnava Sahajiyas. He also shows how Vaisnava Sahajiya image schemata relates to geography by discussing the system of the winding, crooked river and the four enchanted lotus ponds which Vaisnava Sahajiya teachings replace the schemata of cakras familiar to Saiva/Sakta systems.

He quotes (2006, p43-44) from the Amrtaratnavali of Mukunda:

Through the ninth door is the Pond of Lust (kāma-sarovara).
Thus has been proclaimed the story which all the sastras discuss.
There are the Pond of Lust (kama-sarovara) [and] the Pond of Self-
Consciousness (mana-sarovara);
The Pond of Divine Love (prema-sarovara) [and] the Pond of Indestructibility
(aksaya-sarovara).
The four ponds lie within the heart.
If you have a body (deha), you can reach the other shore.

In his contribution to Tantra in practice Hayes notes that the four lotus ponds (sarovaras “clearly reflects the watery deltaic geography and topography of Bengal, and it also expresses the Sahajiya emphasis on physicality, substances, and fluids.” (p313).

In the wider Vaisnava tradition, rivers and ponds are frequently mentioned as sites particuarly associated with Krishna and Radha – and as sites of transformation. The Narada Purana for example, contains the story of how the sage Narada is transformed into a gopi after bathing in a pond called “Kusum Sarovar” on the instructions of the goddess Vrinda – after which Narada was able to participate in the secret love play of Krishna. The transformative power of Krishna’s sacred ponds is also attested to by Vaisnava sadhus:

“A bath in the Radharani pond [kunda] will give you the body of a gopi so you can love Krishna like Radha. Even Lord Shiva came here so he could take part in rasa-lila [Krishna’s circle dance with the gopis.”
Charles R. Brooks, in Lynch (1990)

The Yamuna river is said by some devotees to have been formed from the drops of persipration that fell from Krishna’s body as he made love (large sections of the Yamuna are now heavily polluted). For further discussion of the role of ponds in Krishna devotional practice, see Haberman, 1994. Of course in India, water and bathing have complex associations between life, washing away sin, and the threshold between earth and heaven. The foursquare stepped ponds built adjacent to temples are considered to be tirthas (“ford, crossing”).

So the Sahajiya schema of Lotus ponds homologises body/sadhana with local geography, social & cultural forms and the rich mythopoesis of Krishna. Both Mark Dyczkowski (A Journey in the World of the Tantras) and David Gordon White (Kiss of the Yogini have argued that the various “internal geographies” (i.e. body-mappings, of which cakra schemas are but one example) of tantric traditions relate to sacred geographies of place and their interiorisation – and entextualisation.

Sources
Loriliai Biernacki, Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex, and Speech in Tantra Oxford University Press, 2007
Charles R. Brooks, Hare Krishna, Radhe Shyam: The Cross-Cultural Dynamics of Mystical Emotions in Brindaban in Divine passions: the social construction of emotion in India Owen M Lynch (ed), Univ. California Press, 1990
Gavin Flood, The Tantric Body IB Tauris, 2006
David L Haberman, Journey through the Twelve Forests: An Encounter with Krishna Oxford University Press, 1994
Glen A. Hayes Metaphoric Worlds and Yoga in the Vaisnava Sahajiya Tantric Traditions of Medieval Bengal in Yoga: The Indian Tradition, Ian Whicher, David Carpenter (eds) RoutledgeCurzon, 2003
Glen A. Hayes, The Guru’s Tongue: Metaphor, Imagery, and Vernacular Language in Vaisnava Sahajiya Traditions in Pacific World Journal Third Series, No.8, Fall 2006
Glen A. Hayes, The Necklace of Immortality: A Seventeenth-Century Vaisnava Sahajiya Text in Tantra in practice David Gordon White (ed), Motilal Banarsidass, 2001
Hugh B. Urban, The Power of Tantra: Religion, Sexuality and the Politics of South Asian Studies IB Tauris, 2010

“metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

In a post last year I made a brief mention of Lakoff & Johnson’s groundbreaking work on embodiment & metaphors in relation to understanding tantric terms. This is a theme I want to expand on in 2011, so for the first post in this series, I’m going to discuss some thoughts I had after reading A.K Ramanujan’s famous essay “Is there an Indian way of thinking”.

Until recently, scholars have tended to think of metaphors in terms of literary and poetic devices, and western philosophy has, for the most part (with a few notable exceptions, such as Nietzsche) been dismissive of metaphors. A popular understanding of metaphors (often found in occult texts) is that they can only ever partial attempts to depict a basically ineffable reality – or that they are at best misleading, and at worst, lies. However, this view of metaphors is changing, largely thanks to the emergence of Cognitive Linguistics, whose exponents emphasise how both metaphor and metonymy are not merely ornamental figures of speech and writing but play a crucial role in our ability to conceptualise. Both metaphor and metonymy have been shown to be rooted in both human bodily experience and how we interact with our environments. Hence Mark Johnson’s explanation of metaphor is that it is:

“… a pervasive mode of understanding by which we project patterns from one domain of experience in order to structure another domain of a different kind. So conceived, metaphor is not merely a linguistic mode of expression; rather, it is one of the chief cognitive structures by which we are able to have coherent, ordered experiences that we can reason about and make sense of. Through metaphor, we make use of patterns that obtain in our physical experience to organize our more abstract understanding.”

Is there an Indian way of thinking?
In posing this question, Ramanujan demonstrates how the meaning of the question changes depending on which word (is, there, an, Indian, way of thinking) is stressed. He goes on to discuss various ways that Indian thinking has been characterised – in terms of hypocrisy, inconsistency, an “inability to distinguish between self and not-self, no clear notion of universality,

“I think cultures (may be said to) have overall tendencies (for whatever complex reasons) – tendencies to idealise, and think in terms of, either the context-free or the context-sensitive kind of rules. Actual behaviour may be more complex, though the rules they think with are a crucial factor in guiding the behaviour. In cultures like India’s, the context-sensitive kind of rule is the preferred formulation. Manu … explicitly says: ‘[A king] who knows the sacred law, must imagine into the laws of caste (jati), of districts, of guilds, and of families, and [thus] settle the law of each’ (Manu 7.41).”

Ramanujan goes on to discuss how texts may appear (particularly to non-Indians) to be historically anonymous, but that their contexts, uses etc., are explicit – that stories are “encased in a metastory” – that within a text, one story provides the context for another within it: “not only does the outer frame-story motivate the inner sub-story; the inner story illuminates the outer as well.” Ramanujan highlights the point that Indian poems can be understood as ecosystems in which the human agent’s activities and feelings are a part – that “to describe the exterior landscape is also to inscribe the interior landscape … Scene and Agent are one; they are metonyms for one another.”

For India, Ramanujan proposes, the western universals – such as the opposition between Nature and Culture, space & time – are not neutral, but have properties depending on context – that there is a constant flow of substance – from context to object, from non-self to self, through all types of activities (from breathing to art). He argues that this emphasis on context is related to the Indian concern with jati “the logic of classes, of genera and species.”

By way of contrast, Ramanujan points out that although all societies have context-sensitive behaviour/rules – but that the “dominant” ideal – as in western culture – may be the “context-free”. He cites the ideals of egalitarian democracy and Protestant Christianity as emphasising both the universal and the unique – where every person is both equal and like any other – whatever the context of their circumstances. Both technology (interchangeable parts) and post-Renaissance Science (universal laws and facts) intensify the bias towards the context-free. He says that in context-free societies the counter-movements tend to lean towards the context-sensitive (holistic medicine for example) whereas in context-sensitive-dominant cultures (such as India) “the dream is to be free of context” (hence mokasa – release, for example).

In closing his essay, Ramanujan notes that “modernisation” in India can be seen as a move (at least in principle) towards the context-free, and points out that cross-cultural borrowings accomodate towards the prevailing tendency. Two examples of this process which spring to mind are the way that highly context-dependent Hindu “systems” become “generalised” for the benefit of both Western and modern Indian readers, and the process by which meditation has become detached from its original esoteric contexts and turned into a universal (and thereby accessible) technique.

One reason that Ramanujan’s essay interests me is that his description of a western tendency towards an (apparently) context-free, universalised knowledge which is divorced from “culture” is a theme I have been exploring in the ordering-machine series. It strikes me that a common problem for occultists approaching tantra is the tendency to approach it in terms of the familiar western approach to knowledge, i.e. to fit it into a familiar schema, rather than exploring its differences from western occultism. The “total knowledge system” which I quoted Regardie describing in the last Ordering-Machine post tends to subordinate local concepts into its own universal schema – a process which is inherently reductionist and orientalist (in the sense that it assumes that the western occult understanding of a concept is superior to the subaltern perspective of the originating context).

Two common issues which arise in relation to the interpretation of tantric imagery are the tendency to take metaphors literally, and the tendency to conflate themes and terminologies from different religious cultural contexts in the reification of a homogenous explanation – a strategy which Olav Hammer (2004) terms Synonymization.

One of the best-known examples of taking a tantric metaphor literally is the statement Charles Leadbeater makes in his book The Chakras. When writing of the Sahasrara or “Crown” chakra, he says:

“It is described in Indian books as thousand-petalled, and really this is not very far from the truth, the number of the radiations of its primary force in the outer circle being nine hundred and sixty.”

To which Sir John Woodroffe (aka “Arthur Avalon”) made a rejoinder in a later edition of The Serpent Power:

“…both the “Lotuses” described in the Hindu books and the number of their petals is accounted for by the author, who substitutes for the Svadhisthana centre a six-petalled lotus at the spleen, and corrects the number of petals of the lotus in the head, which he says is not a thousand, as the books of this Yoga say, “but exactly 960″.”
The Serpent Power, p7, 1919

Woodroffe goes on to say, in a footnote, that “Thousand” is here, only symbolic of magnitude. i.e. not literally, a thousand.

Not only is Leadbeater taking a metaphorical statement (“thousand-petalled” lotus) as a literal description of reality, he is also playing the all-too familiar game of occult oneupmanship by positioning himself as a more authoritive source than the “Hindu books” because, after all, he has psychically seen the Crown Chakra and counted its petals.

Synonymization, according to Hammer, is related to the process of pattern-making. Whereas the latter, for Hammer, involves a reduction of differences between say, myth A in one culture, and Myth B in another, or ritual A in one tradition and ritual B in another tradition, synonimization erases difference between different religious terminologies – for example, an author might assert that the Hindu concept of prana is fundamentally the same as the Chinese Ch’i or Reich’s “Orgone Energy”, as Mesmer’s “Magnetism” and so on. This kind of conflation obviously draws on the popularity of perennialism – the idea that all religions are saying the same thing, aimed at the same goal, or ultimately derive from the same source, and often, according to Hammer, takes the form of “foreign” terms interspersed into an English text (usually without qualification).

In the next post in this series, I’ll take a look at some recent scholarship which investigates the relationship between context and metaphor in understanding particular forms of tantric praxis.

Sources
Jan Fries, Kali Kaula: A Manual of Tantric Magick (Avalonia, 2010)
Denise Green, Metonymy in contemporary art: a new paradigm (Univ. Minnesota Press, 2005)
Olav Hammer, Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Brill, 2004)
Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason (Univ. Chicago Press, 1987)
McKim Marriott (ed) India through Hindu Categories (Sage Publications, 1990)
Gary Palmer, Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics (Univ. Texas Press, 1996)

“I praise the circle of deities innate within the body, an elevated assembly continually present, the end of everything, vibrant and the essence of experience.”dehasthadevatacakrastotra

For this post, I want to discuss some “Tantric” themes which relate to embodiment – in particular, whilst stressing that Tantra constitutes an embodied practice, I also want to point towards a key difference between South Asian and “western” esoteric epistemologies – that underwriting Tantra’s embodied practice is what might be called an embodied theology.

Embodiment and “bodies” have been increasingly the subject of scholarly focus from the 1970s onwards. In contrast to the majoritarian “natural” body – typically assumed to be a fixed material entity, subject to empirical science and existing apart from culture, the body has been historicised, and analysed as as much a cultural phenomenon as a biological entity – and the very boundaries of corporeality have also been brought into question. For a useful overview, see Csordas, 1994; also Adrian Harris’ Embodiment Resources

Perspectives on Embodiment are shaping the way that scholars are approaching Tantric Bodies – in terms of understanding how traditions & practices produce Tantric Bodies. A number of scholars have drawn on Foucault’s studies of “technologies of the self” in order to interpret how disciplinary practices produce bodies in accordance with ideal subjectivities and symbolic representations.

The familiar dualism of mind v. body, or body v. soul, with the attendant antagonism towards the body (“The body is tomb”, says Plato, in his Gorgias) is (more or less) completely absent in South Asian theologies. As Herbert Guenther points out: “…the body is not something that man has, but man is his body.” (Guenther, 1972, p9) Furthermore, as Ian Whicher has argued, systems such as classical Samkhya and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras – which have tended to be interpreted as “dualistic” (and thereby associated with a world-denying “spiritual liberation”) can be approached in different ways (See for example, Whicher, 2003).

“The human body, which is a consequence of the contraction of consciousness, is thought to contain the higher universe beyond it and also the absolute consciousness of Siva which which it is ultimately identical and of which it is a projected form. The human body is, therefore, homologous with the cosmical hierarchy, which we might call the ‘manifest cosmic body,’ and contains within its transcendent source, what we might call the ‘essential cosmic body.’” Gavin Flood, Body and Cosmology in Kashmir Shaivism (Mellen Research University Press, 1993)

The Tantric Body, as Flood points out (2006) is actively constructed through practice and the forms of tradition – the body is shaped/experienced according to the root metaphors of tradition & culture. Lakoff & Johnson’s (1999) presentation of the embodied basis of metaphorical thinking is a useful starting point, although they overlook the historical and cultural specificity of metaphors – that is, the way that metaphorical concepts are shaped, constrained (and contested) within the surrounding social, cultural, historical & geopolitical contexts. It’s easy, for example, to fall into the trap of assuming that when tantric texts “talk” about bodies – that the idea of body corresponds to how the body is conceptualised in contemporary western thought. It’s usually the case that Sanskrit terms often interpreted as “body” have a much broader semantic range. The term atmabhava for example, which occurs in Buddhist texts, can be understood not only in terms of the corporeal/material body, but also the entire person – including feelings, thoughts, sense-perceptions and moral qualities. Similarly, the term hridya – often translated as “heart” refers not merely to the anatomical organ, but in a much broader sense, to the ‘core’ of one’s being which is simultaneously the whole of reality. In the nondual Trika the Heart embodies the paradoxical nature of Siva – both transcendent and immanent; simultaneously still and vibrating (see Muller-Ortega, 1989 for an examination of the Heart in nondual Kashmir Shaivism).

How then, to think of Tantric bodies? The Tantric body is all – it is the lived cosmos. Bodies are in constant flux; expanding – contracting; folding-unfolding; enmeshed in complex webs of relationality – mandala bodies; yantra bodies – relating/merging with other beings, both bodied and unbodied. Tantra bodies are multiplicities, open systems in continual process. The Tantric Body is both the site for, and the means of transformation – an expansion of awareness that the lived cosmos and transcendent source are identical to the body.

In the Trika tradition, visualisation -combined with other practices such as mantra, nyasa, etc., is said to draw the deities near to the practitioner by coalescing their shape or form out of consciousness, whereupon they come to reside in the ritually-prepared body – particularly in the heart. Aspects of tantra practice are often denoted as being either Internally (antaryaga) or externally (bahiryaga) directed. Internal worship might involve for example, visualising one’s chosen deity taking up residence in one’s body. External worship might involve worshipping a deity as present within an image. However, these should not be read as opposed practices, but as practices which synergistically support each other – internal practice (what might be construed as “meditation” in the West) supports and enhances external practice (ritual).

Susan Greenwood, in her recent work on magical consciousness (see review) has proposed that analogical thinking is core feature of magical consciousness. For nondual tantra as the entirety of the lived cosmos unfolds from a single point (see my notes on tattvas for some related discussion), I’d argue that Tantra is oriented towards homological thinking (iI’ll come back to this another time). Tantric texts abound with highly complex, rhizomatic homologies – and these homologies are not merely textual/abstract – but extend into social and material culture – to geographical locations, architectural elements, buildings, etc. Similarity between elements is never absolute, nor does it reduce differences – what we find instead is homologies between multiplicities. The Sankrit kula for example, can refer an (extended) family grouping – and by extension, what which is obtained from a family (in the sense of lineage); it can refer to a group of deities; to the embodied cosmos in the widest sense – and the process of that emergence (Sakti). Muller-Ortega points out that:

“In the inconceivable enormity of Siva’s game, any self-contained unit – for example, our universe – may be termed a kula. The unit is self-sufficient precisely because it is a part that is structured out of wholeness. Since the kula’s essential reality is finally that wholeness which it has bodied forth, every unit or kula, resonates in identity with every other structure, composed of that wholeness. It is in this way that the human body, as a kula, resonates in identity with the entire universe.

This resonance might be explained as a kind of parallelism between a microcosm, the body, and a macrocosm, the universe itself. The notion of kula, however, tends to collapse the micro/macrocosm distinction. In a final sense, due to the indivisible nature of Siva, microcosm and macrocosm are simply indistinguishable. Wherever Siva is present, the whole is present. If the body is a structure composed essentially of Siva, then all that is manifested from Siva, including the entire array of universes, may be found present in the body. Their presence in the body is not, it must be emphasised, as a microcosmic replica. The infinite reality out of which the array of universes are structured is present in the body, and thus they too are present in the body.” (Muller-Ortega, 1989, p101-102).

That seems like a good note to end (for now).

Further Reading
Thomas Csordas Embodiment and experience: the existential ground of culture and self (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Gavin Flood, Body and Cosmology in Kashmir Shaivism Mellen Research University Press, 1993
Gavin Flood, The Tantric Body: The secret tradition of Hindu religion I.B. Tauris, 2006
Herbert Guenther The Tantric view of Life Shamballa Publications, 1972,
Geroge Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (Basic Books, 1999)
David Peter Lawrence, The Teachings of the Odd-Eyed One: A study and translation of the Virupaksapancasika with the Commentary of Vidycakrvartin SUNY, 2008
Paul Muller-Ortega, The Triadic Heart of Siva: Kaula Tantricism of Abhinavagupta in the Non-Dual Shaivism of Kashmir SUNY, 1989
Anne Weinstone, Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism University of Minnesota Press, 2004
Ian Whicher, David Carpenter (eds) Yoga: the Indian Tradition RoutledgeCurzon, 2003
David Gordon White, Sinister Yogis University of Chicago Press, 2009

In reflecting on the primacy of practice as bodied experience I want to highlight one of the “thinking tools” of Pierre Bourdieu – Habitus and the related idea of Hexis.

Bourdieu’s approach to practice (see Outline of a Theory of Practice) is that not all learning is explicit and gained through discourse, but is often tacit and embodied. He also stresses that actions are often “unconscious” improvisations (“jamming”) and not merely related to consciously following rules. Further, such improvisations take place during activities without being “thought-through”. This capacity to improvise is the product of the social learning process in which the “game rules” of society are internalised and practiced (through activities and active self-making). According to Bourdieu. although learning takes place via the home and in school, it is the habituation – the repeated and affirmed performance of particular repertoires (including cognitive, affective and bodily) that form the unconscious dispositions of habitus. Socially competent performances thus become a matter of routine – we can act without being able to explain exactly what we are doing.

Habitus for Bourdieu, is a set of dispositions which incline agents to act in certain ways. Dispositions generate practices, perceptions and attitudes which are ‘regular’ without being consciously coordinated or governed by any conscious “rule”. Habitus predisposes members of a society to interact in ways consistent with the social norms of their group. It is the social, cultural and physical environment that we, as social beings inhabit, through which we know ourselves and through which others identify us. These dispositions include postures, speech styles, ways of eating, moving, conceptions of private space, predispositions towards particular ways of thinking and feeling – they are habits of orienting one’s physical & psychological selfhood to the world. Bourdieu holds that these dispositions are preconscious and so not readily amenable to conscious reflection and modification – we perform them without conscious reflection because they are “obvious” and commonsensical, and as it were, we have ‘forgotten’ that we have learned them. For Bourdieu, the body itself is the “site of incorporated history”.

“Bodily hexis is political mythology realised, embodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable manner of standing, speaking and thereby of feeling and thinking.” Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice

Bodily hexis is the expression of all the factors which make up one’s habitus – embodied in our physical being. It is in bodily hexis that the personal combines with the social.The body is a mnemonic device upon which and in, the very basics of culture are imprinted and enacted. For Bourdieu, the way that we relate to our bodies reveals the “deepest dispositions of the habitus”. One of Bourdieu’s examples of hexis is how the politics of gender are revealed through ways of walking, sitting or even standing still:

If all societies … set such store on the seemingly most insignificant details of dress, bearing, physical and verbal manners, the reason is that, treating the body as a memory, they entrust to it in abbreviated and practical, i.e. mnemonic, form the fundamental principles of the arbitary content of culture. The principles embodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit; nothing seems more ineffable, more incommunicable, more intimable,. and therefore more precious, than the values given body, made body by the transsubstantiation achieved by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy, capable of instilling a whole cosmology, an ethic, a metaphysic, a political philosophy, through injunctions as insignificant as ‘stand up straight’ or ‘don’t hold your knife in your left hand’. Bourdieu, 1977

Bourdieu was attempting to produce a way of looking at action that overcame the ‘gap’ between individual agency and social structures. There are problems with his theories (which I won’t go into here) but what interests me at the moment is this emphasis on the body as that which acted upon (and used to act with) and as a repository of cultural and symbolic value. The body, for Bourdieu, is a public object (in addition to being experienced privately), formed and known through social practices and discourses.

“But let a noise, a scent, once heard or once smelt, be heard or smelt again in the present and at the same time in the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract, and immediately the permanent and habitually concealed essence of things is liberated and our true self which seemed – had perhaps for long years seemed – to be dead but was not altogether dead, is awakened and reanimated as it receives the celestial nourishment that is brought to it. A minute freed from the order of time has re-created in us, to feel it, the man freed from the order of time.”
Marcel Proust, Time Regained

It’s amazing how smell can evoke memory; how it cross-talks/plays with other senses. As I recall the camping breakfast, I remember-feel the squish of mud between my toes as I crawled, muzzy-headed from my tent that morning; the way the morning sunlight glinted on dewdrops, the clatter in the tent across the way. I am suddenly there with a vividness and presence which is both overpowering and transitory, fading as I close the door. But the cluster of thoughts remain focused on smell itself.

Not so long ago, smell was widely considered to be antithetical to civilisation. Kraft-Ebbing duly pronounced an interest in odours (particularly sexual ones) to be the domain of the olfactophiliac, whilst Havelock Ellis declared that olfaction is only important for “inverts” and “primitives”. Good company then. Stigmata clings to bodily odours, particularly those we associate with sex. In premodern Europe, the senses were gendered. Men owned the “rational” senses – sight and hearing; whilst women had the “feminine” senses of touch, taste and smell, related to the corporeal practices of care. At the same time, these feminine senses were markers of a potentially uncontrollable animality, embodied in the figure of the witch, whose senses were used transgressively, for self-gratification, corruption and enticement to sin. Just as woman could bring forth life; so too their bodies could sap the health of a man, bringing death. Witches, for the sixteenth century demonologists, “reeked of corruption”.

Some years ago I had a brief stint of making incense at a local aromatherapy emporium. I’d leave each day, smelling faintly of Storax, Jasmine, Benzoin and Camphor. Often, with other workers, I’d head to a pub, where our presence would draw a number of responses. Had we been taking drugs? Had we just been to church? We would often attract curious glances, and the occasional chat-up. Hands grabbed and sniffed, copal-dusted arms stroked tentatively. Some are clearly confused – men should not smell so sweet, so unlike the pungency of honest sweat. When we said we’d been working, eyebrows would shoot up. The regime of the normal undone by a faint hint of Rose, a lingering trace of Cedar.

What is it to be a scented body? It’s to be present-distant; earthy-sublime; civilised-wild – to be hyphenated; hybrid, it invokes memory in oneself, evokes passions in others; heads turning as presence wafts faintly across a room. Anointing my fingers with Ylang-ylang, I rub them together, the heat stirring the molecules, close my eyes and try and lose myself in the smell of the goddess. Oh, to abandon the visual; to close down the internal flow of words, and delight in the goddess as pure scent, whirling and drifting. Desires distilled and made manifest; nomadic. Scent transports us; discolates us in time; drags us sideways; in anticipation; in delight; in the wisdom of flesh calling to flesh.

“To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses … and what they can teach us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.”
Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

In his opening chapter, Ingold relates how, when he was a child, his father – a botanist – took him for walks in the countryside, pointing out plants and fungi: “His manner of teaching was to show me things, literally to point them out. If I would but notice the things to which he directed my attention, and recognise the sights, smells and tastes that he wanted me to experience because they were so dear to him, then I would discover for myself much of what he already knew.” Ingold points out that years later, as an anthropologist, he found that Aboriginal peoples in Australia pass their knowledge across generations using much the same principle, and cites Mervyn Meggitt’s study of the Walbiri of Central Australia, which describes how a boy being prepared for initiation would be taken on a grand tour lasting several months, during which he would be shown the “flora, fauna and topography” of the country, whilst being told (by an elder) the significance of various localities.

In his ensuing discussion, Ingold makes some rather telling points: “My father’s purpose, of course, was to introduce me to the fungi, not to communicate by way of them, and the same is true of the purpose of Aboriginal elders in introducing novices to significant sites. This is not to deny that information may be communicated, in propositional or semi-propositional form, from generation to generation. But information, in itself, is not knowledge, nor do we become any more knowledgeable through its accumulation. Our knowledgeability consists, rather, in the capacity to situate such information, and understand its meaning, within the context of a direct perceptual engagement with our environment. And we develop this capacity, I contend, by having things shown to us.” (author’s italics)

Ingold is, I think, making a point which could be easily applied to contemporary occult practice – that the accumulation of information is often equated with being knowledgeable, but that this accumulation doesn’t necessarily lead to an individual being able to situate that information in terms of their living environment. Ingold suggests that in order to do this successfully, requires someone else to show us. This relates to something which Suzanne & I were discussing – that we both had our “formative” magical experiences within a social context – a group (or at least with other people), in other words, rather than, as we suspected is more often the case nowadays – by reading books or primarily engaging in online interaction. Not that there’s anything wrong with that in and of itself, but it does seem to me, at times, that there is a widespread attitude that it “should” be possible to learn magic without actually engaging with other people at any point in the proceedings. In some circles, actually admitting that one has, or has had a fruitful relationship with a teacher is identified with either a lack of creative abillity or being subordinated to the teacher’s perspective. For me, I’d say I really didn’t get anywhere “magically” until I met other people I could talk to, hang out with, and learn from. I spent about five years just reading anything I could get my hands on and ended up horribly confused – and probably spent double the amount of time (if not longer) “unlearning” much of the stuff I’d taken on board uncritically. This aspect of magic, remains to an extent hidden.