Jottings: Some “Red Flags” in the representation of Tantra – I

Posted by Phil Hine in History, tantra  |  April 26th 2020  |  About poster:

Something I find fascinating – and at times infuriating – is how a great many people claiming to be advocates, teachers, or representatives of “authentic” Tantric lineages or practices continually recirculate tropes that effectively erase any recognition that Tantra has any historical or cultural specificity.

One of the commonest tactics is to stake the claim that Tantra is “thousands of years old” – anything from 3,000 to 30,000 years. Like the Monolith in 2001, it was there at the “beginning” and Tantra existed well before the rise of the Vedas, Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism. In fact, it’s often asserted, Tantra has “no beginning” because no one can say exactly how it got started. Yet curiously, it’s also asserted that Tantra has no – or at least very little – written history. I came across that latter assertion most recently in an anthology of Queer Magical essays. My jaw dropped. I imagined for a moment, the translations of tantric texts on my bookshelves suddenly popping out of existence, the scholarly accounts of the history of the Tantric traditions disappearing into the void, the keepers of the thousands of digitized online manuscripts suddenly finding their servers empty.

Something that goes hand in hand with this disavowal of any kind of written history is that Tantra is “experiential” – you can only really understand it by experiencing it – which is apparently unique. A related claim is that Tantra should not be considered a “religion” but rather, is a set of “techniques” which can be repurposed towards whatever aim an exponent wants to endorse.

Another standard move is that, whilst admitting that Tantra, originally, may not have been all about sacred sex, there’s usually not much discussion of what that non-sexual teaching may have been about, as it is “sacred sex” that the writers want to talk about. Moreover, because we can look around the world and see other traditions which look a bit like Tantra, particularly if they are deemed to be sex-positive, then Tantra isn’t really that unique, is it? Furthermore, because there are so many varieties of Tantra – and because of its global spread, and a multitude of opinions, styles, approaches, and brands, if anyone does try and make unequivocal statements about any aspect of Tantra then they can be safely dismissed as arrivistes or parvenus. Because no one “really” knows and no one can say for sure where it all comes from. Well okay, it comes from India, but it’s not only Indian. It sort of comes from everywhere – and simultaneously, nowhere.

I sometimes feel that that there’s a kind of rhetorical version of the Roman principle of res nullius going on here – the legal principle that things deemed to be without an owner (wild animals, lost slaves and abandoned buildings) could be seized by anyone and taken as property. I’ve nothing against people producing their own practice modalities – after all, I’ve spent many years hyribidizing, for example, western ceremonial magic with dramatherapy. My own tantra practice is hybridized. What I do find difficult to understand is why, in staking out a claim to be taken as an authority; to represent Tantra to others, it is necessary to erase its history.

Someone asked me recently if I thought this was just down to ignorance or lack of awareness – that people simply aren’t aware of Tantra’s history or literature, or think it is just too complicated to get into. I don’t know, is the short answer, but I don’t believe it’s just a matter of education and access to resources, if only because the kind of rhetorical processes that I’m describing here, are not new.

There’s a very similar pattern discernable in the reception of ideas about the Chakras in nineteenth-century Theosophy. It begins in the middle of the nineteenth century with European Theosophists encountering early descriptions of concepts such as the chakras and kundalini – and they are really excited by this, and ask their “Indian brethren” for more information. But very quickly, they come up with their own views on chakras, and as their views on the chakras are coming out of a kind of liminal esoteric wisdom space which is privileged over any kind of mere exoteric historical record, they become ‘superior’ to the Indian perspectives, and thus commentators start pointing out that Indian textual sources themselves are not consistent on the subject and in any case Indians have lost contact with the “real” esoteric tradition. And it is a short step from there to looking around the world and finding other analogous schemas which became evidence that the Indian system of Chakras was just one of many, and anything that disagreed with the Theosophical ‘esoteric’ view could be dismissed, discounted, or re-explained. By the early twentieth century, Theosophist Charles Webster Leadbeater is presenting himself as an authority on the chakras because he had seen them – which I read as an early analog of the “experiental” claim which surpasses merely reading about something in a book.

It would be easy to dismiss these representations of tantra as egregious errors or to dismiss the entire conundrum as a contest of truth-making claims between, say, those who take a scholarly or historically-based approach to the subject and those who are suspicious of academia. I think a more fruitful approach would be to examine these representations within their wider cultural context – to try and think through them and ask what they are actually doing – by what logic they operate. My contention, which I will try and expand on in a future post, is that despite sharing the term “Tantra” and to an extent, an overlapping field of discourse, the exponents of Tantra as “sacred sexuality” and practitioners of the historically-grounded traditions such as “classical Tantra” are coming from entirely different perspectives.

The archaic authentic
For the remainder of this post I want to call attention to the importance of authenticity in these representations. That this is of importance is highlighted by the trademarking of the term “Authentic” Tantra or of websites such as true tantra. I don’t know of any contemporary tantric teacher who is distinguishing themselves from their competitors by saying that they are deliberately making stuff up.

Authenticity is highly valued in contemporary culture. It’s associated with notions of the real, of the natural, the essential, the proper, the expression of the ‘real’ self in contrast to cultural conditioning, or parental upbringing. To be recognized as an authority within a field of relations, in order to acquire social and cultural capital, an individual needs to be recognized and accepted as “authentic”. The identification of forms of exotic religious practices with a purely individual experience is itself a common and normative rhetorical strategy.

Tantra no matter how it is presented is authentic because it is held to be “archaic” – even if that archaic quality is only vaguely nodded at, as within these discourses, the notion of the archaic has a much wider valence – bound up with notions of the primitive, the universal, and the individual, and at the same time, a kind of experience which surpasses or transcends external sources of authority, such as religions:

Above all, tantra does not prescribe answers: unlike a religion, it does not tell you what to think and believe. It gives you structures to explore these themes experientially and personally, and then to come to your own conclusions based on these experiences. The only authority in tantra is your own heart, your own sense of what is true for you and what your spirit needs to follow.

John Hawken ¹

Contrast this with a “definition” of Tantra from tenth-century Saiva, Rāmakaṇṭha:

“A tantra is a body of teachings, constituting the revealed command of the Lord, which establishes the obligatory injunctions and prohibitions for His worship, preceded by the exposition of the special consecrations of those eligible for the higher and lower aims of human existence.” ²

Sources
Véronique Altglas From Yoga to Kabbalah: Religious Exoticism and the Logics of Bricolage. (Oxford University Press. 2014.)
Charles Lindholm Culture and Authenticity. (Blackwell Publishing. 2008.)
Hugh Urban Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics and Power in the Study of Religion. (University of California Press. 2003.)
Christopher Wallis Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a Timeless Tradition (Mattamayūra Press. 2013.)

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