On the ‘Queering’ of Ganesha

Posted by Phil Hine in Gender, History, Pagan, Queer, tantra  |  July 15th 2022  |  About poster:

You create this world. You maintain this world. All this world is seen in you. You are Earth, water, Fire, Air, Aethyr. You are beyond the four measures of speech. You are beyond the Three Gunas. You are beyond the three bodies. You are beyond the three times. You are always situated in the Muladhara. You are the being of the three Shaktis. You are always meditated upon by Yogins. You are Brahma, you are Vishnu, you are Rudra, You are Agni, You are Vayu, You are the Moon, You are the Sun, You are Brahma, Bhur-Bhuvah-Svar.

Ganesa Upanisad

What makes a god ‘queer’? How – and perhaps more importantly – who makes that identification, and when does it become canonical?

I was reading Storm Faerywolf’s recent book, The Satyr’s Kiss: Queer Men, Sex Magic & Modern Witchcraft the other day, and came to the point in the book where Storm begins to discuss various deities who are, in various ways, ‘queer’. I was surprised (although perhaps I shouldn’t have been) to see Ganesha listed as a ‘queer’ deity. What points to Ganesha’s inherent queerness, according to Storm are the following key points:

Ganesha is androgynous. He has a ‘male’ body, but his plumpness, his ‘breasts’, and his movements all signify a female register.
He is associated with ‘oral’ and ‘anal’ eroticism. The former, due to his love of sweets, and the latter because he is situated in the Muladhara – the gateway to the anus – and “it has been suggested that that anal intercourse may have been part of rites aimed at awakening this primal-spiritual power.”

All this sounded very familiar, so I checked some other books.

Thomas Prower, in his 2018 book Queer Magic says much the same, noting that Ganesha has “man boobs”, that his trunk – a phallic symbol – is always flaccid and never erect; and that he resides in the root chakra – again “he is said to preside over ritualistic anal sex among certain cults in an effort to release Kundalini energy.” Plus he is associated with eunuchs.

There is a very similar description of Ganesha in Christopher Penczak’s Gay Witchcraft (2003) – again stressing Ganesha’s androgyny, his “flaccid trunk”, and his location in the root chakra, and the arousal of kundalini through “homoerotic forms of worship involving anal sex.”

Where is all this coming from? And is there anything to it?

There is a much longer description of Ganesha in Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol and Spirit: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Lore (1997). Once again, the entry stresses Ganesha’s androgyny – he has the torso of a male and the head of a female elephant. His trunk and his tusks are “phallic” and from his temples “like a woman’s breasts” oozes a “desirable fluid”. Ganesha’s trunk, although it is a masculine symbol, is “flaccid and soft” – which indicates (apparently) an association with “eunuchs”. Ganesha is “unmarried and incapable of reproducing by ordinary means.” Ganesha’s love of sweets “evokes associations of oral eroticism”.

All these quotes – and more besides in the Cassell’s entry – are citations from Paul B. Courtright’s book, Ganesa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings, which attempted, in part, to ‘read’ Ganesa through the lens of Freudian Psychoanalysis. When Courtright’s book was first published in 1985 by Oxford University Press, it drew little public attention, but its republication in 2001 by Motilal Banarsidass saw a large outcry from Hindus worldwide. The book was widely declared to be offensive to Hinduism, and Motilal, bowing to public pressure, announced that Lord of Obstacles was to be withdrawn from circulation. Academic colleagues of Courtright defended themselves and it was claimed that those objecting to his book were right-wing fanatics. Hindu critics pointed to errors in translation, misinterpretations, and the limitations of psychoanalytic interpretations. Other advocates of the psychoanalytic approach were similarly attacked – notably Jeffrey Kripal (for his book Kali’s Child), Wendy Doniger, and Sarah Caldwell. Threats of death and physical violence were made against these scholars, and the so-called “mythology wars” prompted a good deal of academic brow-beating as authors tried to defend their views, argue for ‘scholarly freedom’ etc.

Frankly, as a devotee of Ganesa (albeit a ‘Western’ one) for nearly 40 years, I have some sympathy with Hindu critics of such psychoanalytic interpretations. All too often, they tend towards a kind of reductionism and a universalist assumption that ‘western’ notions of mind, psyche, etc. can be applied equally to South Asian cases, or anywhere else for that matter. Such easy assumptions also occur in a great deal of contemporary queer writing, especially when the author ventures beyond the global north.

Arvind Sharman, in his foreword to Invading the Sacred, makes the salient point that during the colonial period, “knowledge” about India was produced – and dominated – by outsiders (Westerners, Colonial authorities, Orientalists) but that the debate over scholarly texts about India showed that the dominance was now being vigorously contested. Sharma urges dialogue between American scholars and their Indian critics.

But I’m not done yet with the Cassell’s “queering” of Ganesha. After liberally quoting from Courtright’s Freudian interpretations of Ganesha, the entry moves on to assert that Ganesha’s link to homoeroticism is “by his association with the first chakra, the body’s sacred power center located in the region of the anus” and proceeds to quote from Alain Daniélou’s 1984 book Shiva and Dionysus: The Religion of Nature and Eros:

“Ganesha is the guardian of the gate which leads to coiled-snaked goddess [Kundalini] … In the human body, the strait gate leading to the earth-center, or snake-goddess, is the anus. It is here that the centre of Ganesha is found, the guardian of gates and mysteries, and servant of the Goddess.” The entry goes on to say that “Daniélou indicates that cultic homoeroticism may have taken the form of anal intercourse” and further quotes Daniélou stating that “The male organ, in directly penetrating the area of coiled up energy (Kundalini), may help its brutal awakening and thus provoke a state of enlightenment and sudden perception of realities of a transcendental order.”

Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol and Spirit: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Lore, p154.

Shiva and Dionysus was republished by Inner Traditions under the title Gods of Love and Ecstasy (1992). In chapter six, during a long discussion about labyrinths, Daniélou writes:

“It is interesting to note that Freud, by a different route, also arrived at the intuition of this aspect of the subtle structure of the human being. “The story of the labyrinth reveals a representation of anal birth: the winding paths are the intestines, Ariadne’s thread, and the umbilical cord (S. Freud, New Introductory Lectures.) There is a whole ritual connected with anal penetration through the narrow gate opening on the labyrinth (in man, the intestine). In Tantric Yoga, the centre of Ganesha – the guardian of the gates – is found in the region of the rectum. The male organ, indirectly penetrating the area of coiled-up energy (Kundalini), may help its brutal awakening and thus provoke a state of enlightenment and sudden perception of realities of a transcendental order. Hence this act may play an important part in initiation. “This probably explains one male initiation ritual, widespread among primitive people but rarely recorded frankly by Western Observers …, during which adult male initiates have anal intercourse with novices … Such a custom may well lie behind the homosexual eroticism actively encouraged among the Classical Greeks.” (P. Rawson, Primitive Erotic Art, p48.)”

Gods of Love and Ecstasy, p123

And again, a little later:

“In a special rite, prostatic orgasm linked with anal penetration plays an important role. This is connected with the cult of Ganesha, the son of the goddess and guardian of gates, whose Centre – according to Yoga – is in the prostatic plexus. “A relationship seems to have been established between the Kundalini and the sexual organ … The secret sexual practices probably involve a momentary awakening of this power. … It can be said that … Tantric symbolism representing the Shakti in man at the level of ‘earth’ in the Muladhara, in the form of a snake coiled around the phallus of Shiva and closing the orifice, has a deep significance.” (J. Evola, Le Yoga Tantrique, p.222).”

Gods of Love and Ecstasy, p160

I should admit here, just for the record, that when I first read Gods of Love and Ecstasy in the late 1980s, I was highly intrigued by this apparent correlation between anal intercourse and the Muladhara chakra, and made passing mention of it in my 1995 essay ‘Sodomy as Spiritual Fulfilment’ (reproduced in my recent book, Hine’s Varieties).

What’s common to both Daniélou and those who have reproduced his ideas, I notice, is that all this talk of ‘rites’ and ‘cults’ is at best speculative. Yet because the author has made these connections, they become evidence of the existence of a cult, a secret society, a secret practice. No actual evidence is presented. Yet the salient points here are:

• Ganesha is the deity associated with the Muladhara chakra.
• That chakra is at the base of the spine. It’s connected to the anus and is the seat of Kundalini.
• Anal penetration can stimulate the chakra and lead to a kundalini awakening.

Is there any substance to this?

Yes, according to some chakra schemas, Ganesha is the presiding devata of the Muladhara chakra. But, as is now well known, there are many such schemas, differing in number of chakras (and other figurations) and their locations, and the range of deities to be installed in them differs according to particular traditions, texts, and practices. In fact, the Muladhara chakra, in some schemas, is located in the navel.
So why should Ganesha be installed in the Muladhara? The explanation that was given to me by one of my teachers, I am afraid, is not very exciting. It is considered good practice to invoke Ganesha to ‘remove’ any obstacles to the practice one is about to perform. It is that simple.

Now to the physical correlation between parts of the body and the chakras. This is more complicated. The medicalization of chakra locations with nerve plexuses and endocrine organs is a late nineteenth-century innovation. Chakras, at least within the classical tantric traditions (roughly between 6th-12th century CE) were tools for ritual practice; they are visualized as part of a range of practices such as worship of deities (often groups of deities) along the body’s axis. Broadly speaking, they have no independent existence beyond their visualization in a particular practice. But over time, this changed. The hathayoga corpus of texts, which date from around the 11th century, places more emphasis on physical practices that affect the chakras directly. But these texts display a very different perspective to the body and its capacities than the tantric traditions. The injunction not to ejaculate – to retain semen within the body is often a central concern of hathayoga texts, but certainly not the case in the earlier tantric traditions.

Now for a closer look at Alain Daniélou.

Alain Daniélou (1907-1994) is remembered today as a French intellectual, Indologist, and musicologist. The author of over 20 books, he received many awards for his contribution to the study and promotion of Indian music. He spent nearly 30 years in India and was at various times a director of the Adyar Theosophical Library and a director of the College of Indian Music in Varanasi. He is reputed to have been initiated into Saivism by Swami Karpatri, a highly-respected Sannyasi, and later claimed that many of his ideas were influenced by the Swami’s teachings, as well as traditional Hinduism.

How reliable is Daniélou as a source of knowledge about India, and in particular, the special tantric rites of “anal penetration” he alludes to so tantalizingly? Again, there is no simple answer. Daniélou was openly homosexual and his autobiography The Way to the Labyrinth shows that he counted amongst his friends and acquaintances some of the most famous intellectuals and artists of the twentieth century, including Jean Cocteau, Rabindranath Tagore, Jean Renoir, Charles Laughton, Charlie Chaplin, Andre Gide, and Benjamin Britten. In 1931, he met Raymond Burnier, a handsome, blonde Swiss, and they remained together – although their relationship was far from monogamous – until Bernier’s death in the late 1960s. Together, they traveled the world, visiting Afghanistan, Japan (where he visited a ‘boy brothel’) and China, mentioning in passing the ‘first-rate cherubs’ of the bordellos of Peking. Curiously, he has little to say about any sexual encounters in India, but avers that:

“In traditional India, a six-year-old schoolboy has already studied texts of the Kama-sutra which explain all the secrets of loveplay and its variations. These diversions are very important, for they possess a mystical value linked to practices of tantric yoga, which forbid relations with the wife except in preliminary exercises. The aggressive puritanism of contemporary Indians is a result of the British influence.”

Jean Louis Gabin, in his introduction to The Linga and the Great Goddess comments extensively on Daniélou’s translations of Swami Karpatri’s writings. Gabin was both a friend and editor of Daniélou’s books. His first point is that Daniélou wrote that Swami Karpatri founded the Jana Sangh – a political movement that, in actuality, Karpatri was deeply opposed to. Secondly, and more germane to this discussion, he shows how, in his later published works, Daniélou consistently replaces the Sanskrit linga with ‘phallus’ or ‘sexual organ’ – a point which Karpatri definitely does not agree with.

(Of course, the conflation of the linga with the phallus is a standard trope of orientalist works from the colonial period – see my posts tagged phallicism for related discussion.)

Here’s just one example of Daniélou’s translations from Swami Karpatri and how they changed over time. ¹

The difference between the two translations is quite distinct. Worshipping the Sivalinga does not automatically imply ‘sex-ritual’ yet in the later translation, Daniélou equates the linga directly with the phallus and that its worship is sexual. He then attributes the quote directly to Swami Karpatri – making it seem as though this is the Swami’s view.

Throughout The Linga and the Great Goddess, Gabin carefully documents the differences between Karpatri’s writings and Daniélou’s interpolations of them – in terms of both his additions and his frequent omissions. This is not the only example of Daniélou’s creative interpolations. Daniélou also produced a ‘queer’ version of Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra, published in English as The Complete Kama Sutra: The First Unabridged Modern Translation of the Classical Indian Text.

Again, as with his autobiography, Daniélou avers in his introduction, that the Kamasutra “forms part of the traditional teaching to be studied by children and adolescents.” He goes on to declare that contemporary Indian “puritanism” is entirely the fault of Islam and the Anglo-Saxons (i.e. the British) and that the crackdown on “sexuality and all its variants” is entirely due to the application of Section 377 by the socialist government of Nehru. ²

Daniélou’s translation of the Kamasutra includes some novel innovations. The Kamasutra does indeed contain descriptions of same-sex activity, both between men, those of the so-called “third nature” and women, but some of Daniélou’s translations go beyond the meaning of the text considerably. He translates svairini, for example – a term which has a wide range of meanings, such as a woman who is willful, independent, and sometimes, an adulteress as ‘Lesbian’ or ‘Homophile’. Another term, vita, widely used in Sanskrit drama to indicate a libertine, or a companion to a prince, becomes “gigolo”. In the section entitled ‘Superior Coition or Fellation’ he renders a passage to state that: “There are also citizens, sometimes greatly attached to each other and with complete faith in one another who get married [parigraha] together.” ³ Parigraha can be translated as marriage, but Ruth Vanita points out that even within the Kamasutra itself, there are four different usages of the word. ⁴

Perhaps the most ingenious interpolation is Daniélou’s “Virile Behaviour in Women [Purushayita]” which he informs the reader, includes “the sodomization of boys [purushopasripta]” by women – and later in the chapter, an act two women perform with each other. Pegging, in other words. In order to discover this truth, Daniélou renders Vatsyayana’s phrase yukta-yantra (“when the instrument has been attached”) to mean that one partner has penetrated the other with a dildo, presumably because yantra is usually translated as ‘instrument’. But Vatsyayana uses the term apadravya when he writes about ‘sex toys’ and it does not specifically refer to dildos. Yukta-yantra’ is rather, a phrase that Vatsyayana uses to indicate (heterosexual) sexual intercourse. One should also note that Daniélou has translated purusa – ‘man’ as ‘boy’. Given that Kamasutra addresses the nagarika – the urbane, sophisticated metropolitan male (or his female equivalent – see this post), if a male is being pegged in this section, it is an adult, rather than an adolescent.

Daniélou, a Traditionalist ⁵ took what might be generously described as a loosely comparative approach to Indian religions. He believed that fundamentally, the worship of Siva and Dionysus were one and the same, emerging out of a timeless primordial tradition. The recovery and revitalization of this tradition, in his view, would serve to regenerate the West. I am not going to attempt an in-depth examination of Daniélou’s alternative history of Siva as presented in Gods of Love and Ecstasy for the present. Suffice to say, it is through this close relationship between Ancient India and Greece that Daniélou can reinforce his statements about Ganesa and anal penetration by alluding to both “primitive initiation rites” and the homosexuality of the Classical Greeks, and by his appeal to the authority of Freud’s notion of the labyrinth as “anal birth”.

One could argue that it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Daniélou’s suggestions of ‘rituals’ reflect a practice he either participated in or witnessed whilst he was in India, but it is quite a stretch to jump from there to talk of “cults” or even to suggest that this was a ‘traditional’ practice in India, Tantric or otherwise. Daniélou saw India as an enlightened civilization (in opposition to the West, and in particular, Christianity) when it came to matters of sexuality – an all-too-familiar example of romantic orientalism. As Robert Aldritch comments: “Daniélou lauded the traditional and abhorred the modern, bemoaning the Westernisation of ‘his’ natives and posing as the real, if self-appointed, last guardian of values being undermined by political and cultural change.” ⁶ In order to support his beliefs, Daniélou was prepared to adopt the authority of Indian textual sources and to attribute his views to revered figures such as Swami Karpatri to reinforce them, even if that required creative interpretations, omissions, and rewriting passages to fit his ideas.

Some Closing Thoughts
Over the past decade or so I have become increasingly wary of the tendency to uncritically look for evidence of ‘queerness’ across cultural and historical divides, without regard for difference or specificity. To do so, I would argue, is to repeat the errors of the orientalists; to adopt, even unconsciously, an interpretive position of privilege to reveal ‘truths’ that may not, when we look closer, be actually present – or perhaps not in the way that we would like them to. To unreflexively jam indigenous concepts into familiar categories. It may be comforting, it may give us a romantic sense of global kinship, yet at the same time, it is a form of epistemic violence.

During the centuries of the great expansion of Europe across the world, indigenous sexualities and gender formations were routinely pathologized, violently repressed, erased, and categorized. The seemingly stable and opposed categories of the homosexual and the heterosexual emerge directly from colonial epistemology. The pathologization and regulation of indigenous sexualities was a tool of Empire. This, if nothing else, requires those of us who have an interest and investment in queer modes of magic, to tread carefully. Not to take statements and narratives at face value; to be curious and questioning; to be sensitive to interpretations and the wider discourse in which they appear. As much as it is tempting to find evidence for queerness in other cultures and histories, I believe we should be attentive to challenging queerness when it has been conjured into existence from speculative sources.

It is perhaps ironic that, as a devotee of Ganesha, his trunk does not ‘symbolise’ for me anything to do with phalluses, flaccid or otherwise, but discrimination, strength, and sensitivity.

Sources
Robert Aldritch. 2003. Colonialism and Homosexuality. Routledge.
Rudi C. Bleys. 1996. The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-male Sexual Behaviour outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination 1750-1918. Cassell.
Randy P. Connor, David Sparks, Mariya Sparks. 1997. Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol and Spirit: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Lore. Continuum International Publishing.
Caroline Cottet and Manuela Lavinas Picq (eds). 2019. Sexuality and Translation in World Politics. E-International Relations Publishing.
Alain Daniélou. 1987. The Way to the Labyrinth: Memories of East and West. transl. Marie-Claire Cournand. New Directions. [available to borrow on archive.org]
Alain Daniélou. 1992. Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus. Inner Traditions.
Alain Daniélou. 1994. The Complete Kama Sutra: The First Unabridged Modern Translation of the Classical Indian Text. Park Street Press.
Storm Faerywolf. 2022. The Satyr’s Kiss: Queer Men, Sex Magic & Modern Witchcraft. Llewellyn Publications.
Swami Karpatri. 2009. The Linga and the Great Goddess. Indica Books.
Christopher Penczak. 2003. Gay Witchcraft: Empowering the Tribe. Red Wheel/Weiser.
Thomas Prower. 2018. Queer Magic: LGBT+ Spirituality and Culture from Around The World. Llewellyn Publications.
Krishnan Ramaswamy, Antonio de Nicolas, Aditi Banerjee (eds). 2007. Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America. Rupa & Co.
Michael J Sweet. 2001. ‘Eunuchs, Lesbians, and Other Mythical Beasts: Queering and Dequeering the Kama Sutra’ in Ruth Vanita, (ed) Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society. Routledge.
Ruth Vanita. 2005. Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West. Palgrave Macmillan.

Online
Purusha-Rupini: Blowjobs and Gender in the Kamasutra

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