Beginnings in Tantra
Here’s a short extract from my new book, Hine’s Varieties: Chaos & Beyond which deals with how I became engaged with Tantra as a subject and a means of practice. It’s a section of the introduction to three essays in the book which deal with tantra-related themes. Hine’s Varieties: Chaos & Beyond is available direct from Original Falcon Publications as both print and ebook.
My engagement with Tantra began with a dream—a dream of Kali. In 1982, I was living in rural Lincolnshire, cut off from occult friends and contacts, and decided that this was an ideal opportunity to take a break from magic for a while. Although I thought I was done (for the moment) with magic, it seemed that magic was not done with me. One night I dreamt of meeting the Indian goddess Kali in a cremation ground. It was vivid. I woke with the memory of her eyes burning into me. The following night I had the same dream, and this continued for another three nights. I wouldn’t say that I had never heard of Kali, but at that time I felt no attraction towards anything Indian. Of course, many occult books were peppered with references to mantras, chakras, and various Indian deities, but I certainly did not expect to have such a direct, intense, and recurring dream-encounter. At the same time it felt significant in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
Lacking anyone to talk to, I wrote the dream down, and turned it into a kind of pathworking, which I would run through before going to sleep. Unsurprisingly, the dream came back, and if anything, intensified. It was this recurring dream of Kali that first put the hook in me, but without anyone to talk to about it—to help me make sense of it—I did not focus on it.
A year or so later I moved to Nottingham to train as a psychiatric nurse and became involved with an experimental drama group. During this period, I was able to reconnect with many of my occult friends. Some of my Wiccan friends “explained” my newfound interest in Kali in terms of having had a past life in India, but I was rather skeptical about such assertions. It was around this time that I first started to try to read up on the subject of Tantra. There didn’t seem to be much available. There were some New Age and “Sacred Sex” books, as well as one or two works written by Western Occultists who tended to treat Tantra as a variant of the Qabalah, but nothing which dealt with ritual or how one might begin some kind of practice—which, of course, was what I wanted. I did read some of the writings of Sir John Woodroffe (aka “Arthur Avalon”), but found these largely incomprehensible.
My first big break came when I moved to York, having made the decision to switch from Psychiatric Nursing to Occupational Therapy training. This three-year diploma was, in itself, a major influence on my later approach to magic, as it included intensive training in both group dynamics and drama-therapy, as well as a multi-disciplinary approach to therapeutic techniques which later influenced my take on Chaos Magic. One of the students in my intake was a woman—Raven—who had spent some time in a Siddha Yoga Ashram in India. Raven seemed to me to be very knowledgeable when it came to Tantra and Yoga (she was a qualified Yoga Teacher), and she was also interested in Wicca. We formed a magical partnership, and she attended some meetings of the covens I was then involved with (one in York, and another in Macclesfield). It was an intensive, and rather a stressful relationship because we felt we could not share our mutual occult interests with other friends. It was through Raven’s influence however, that I was able to make sense of my Kundalini experiences in 1984.
Kundalini is a difficult subject to write about at the best of times, as just about every occult author seems to have their own views on the subject and its significance as a magical or spiritual experience. At the Autumn Equinox in 1984 I was given my second degree initiation in Wicca. A few weeks later I began to experience bouts of vertigo, a sense of bodily dislocation, and odd sensations at the base of my spine. On more than one occasion, these feelings became overwhelming to the point where I was almost having a fit of sorts—my teeth chattering, feeling both hot and cold, and experiencing involuntary muscular contractions. I did not know what was happening, but Raven calmed me down and told me that these sensations were related to the awakening of “the fire-snake” Kundalini. These intense experiences seemed to occur with increasing frequency.
“It began as a scream in my head—Kali’s scream, I thought. It echoed on and on until I no longer ‘heard’ it. I felt it like a white light that shot down my spine, coiling around muladhara, which opened with a blaze. A cold fire, like every nerve was alight, spread around my body. I could feel it glowing from my fingertips. I began to tremble and twitch and felt a very jarring disorientation which worsened to a whirling if I closed my eyes. These unpleasant sensations lasted well over an hour and I struggled to remain in control.”
It’s hard to communicate how scary and discomforting these experiences were for me, having very little in the way of a framework with which to make sense of them. I had read some books that dealt with Kundalini and chakras and so forth but had come away with the definite impression that this kind of experience only happened to advanced magicians, and whatever pretensions I had about myself, I did not think of myself as being an advanced practitioner. Raven was the only person that I could really turn to, and her interpretation that this was a ‘kundalini experience’ seemed to me to be appropriate, given what I’d read and my recent initiation. She felt that milestone, together with the intense ritual and personal work I’d been doing, had triggered the rising of the snake.
This led me to rethink my relationship with the authority of occult texts. Up until that point, I had more or less taken what I’d read in occult books at face value and not really questioned them. I’d begun to be skeptical of some people’s pronouncements of occult fact, but I still had a kind of reverence for text, particularly some of the older authors. I began, from this point, to gain a sense of discrimination—and perhaps a healthy skepticism—towards the pronouncements of occult authorities. Rather than just passively absorbing and internalizing what I was reading in occult texts, I started to gain confidence in my own opinions and ideas. As the years have passed, I’ve been more and more inclined to treat these experiences as just something weird that happened to me, which had, at the time, quite a profound effect on me, but no more than that. Were they “authentic” kundalini experiences? In some ways that doesn’t really matter. One can generate a great deal of spiritual social capital in staking the claim to have had a kundalini experience, but this has never really interested me. It seems to me that intense experiences are simply par for the course if one is pursuing an occult trajectory, and it doesn’t do to read too much into them or interpret them as indicating having attained any degree of proficiency.
