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For this occasional series, I’m going to provide some short notes on various tantric ritual procedures. Tantric rituals tend to follow a fixed sequence of actions (pūjā-vidhi) as set forth in the ritual manuals (paddhati) – often distillations of much longer tantric scriptures, giving step-by-step guides for practitioners.
Continue reading »As a follow-up to the series of essays on Theosophy and Race, and the Red Flags posts, I will now turn to a more complex and contentious subject, generally known as the ‘Aryan Invasion Theory’ (AIT). How does this relate to the tantras? The origins of the tantras, according to some authors, can be traced to an ancient people, peaceful, agrarian, and goddess-worshipping, who were invaded and suppressed by patriarchal, warlike Aryans. Their cities were destroyed, and their tantric practices were driven underground or preserved, in secret by occult adepts. This narrative draws on the Aryan Invasion Theory.
Continue reading »During a recent interview in which I spoke briefly about my tantra practice, I was asked to give an example of a simple exercise. Here it is.
Continue reading »Thus far in this series, I have been examining early Indian textual sources for glimpses of how persons of non-normative sexualities or gender presentations were represented. For this post – as I promised at the end of the previous installment – dealing with ‘changes of sex’ – I will examine a text from a much later period, a 16th-century Tamil version of the Brahmottara-Khaṇḍa, featuring the famous Queen Sīmantinī. The Brahmottara-Khaṇḍa is a section of the Skanda Purāṇa, that has been dated to between 700 -1150 C.E.
Continue reading »In the previous post in this series, I outlined the representation of kleśās within the Pātañjalayogaśāstra – a.k.a the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali (YS). For this post I want to discuss a more complex issue – are kleśās “tantric”? This is something I have pondered, on and off, for some years. As I explained in the first post, I was introduced to kleśā practice through initiation into AMOOKOS, and the kleśās were presented to me by my mentor – with the support of the AMOOKOS grade papers (published, in part, in the book Tantra Magick) – as a core component of daily practice. As I said, I spent a decade or so using the kleśā schema as a means of self-observation and analysis. This was very fruitful. Perhaps it should have been enough. Gradually though, it began to dawn on me that the perspective underlying the kleśā practice was very different from that of the tantras.
Continue reading »In the first post in this very occasional series, I discussed the assertion, often found in many popular books on tantra, that it is “many thousands of years old” and linked it to the notion of the authentic archaic. More recently, I have examined the Pasupati Seal, which is often drawn upon to support these assertions. For this post, I’m going examine another “Red Flag” – the widely-held view that tantra is not religious in character. I first addressed this contentious issue back in 2010 (see this post) but I want to return to it and say more about how this assertion is constructed and reinforced.
Continue reading »In the previous post in this series, I outlined how I began my practice with the five kleśas as presented in the AMOOKOS practice manual, Tantra Magick. Now I want to turn to an examination of how the kleśas are dealt with in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras (YS). Before doing so, however, I want to give a brief introduction to the philosophy that underpins the Yoga Sūtras.
Continue reading »Continue reading »“The five kleshas must not be regarded as petty foibles, weaknesses or minor failings or amusing defects which can be considered for a short moment and then dismissed and forgotten. They form the foundational obstruction in Twilight Yoga as in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.”
Dadaji The Exegetikos
“In the subjugation, bewitching, and agitation (kṣobha) rites [the deity] should be visualized as red-colored. In rites of subjugation (nirviṣīkaraṇa), pacification, and prosperity increasing rites [the deity] is white. (1.33)
For the immobilization the deity is yellow, in eradication smoky-colored, in bewildering rites color of a cochineal insect [i.e. red like a ladybug], but in the killing rites the deity is black.” (1.34)
Uḍḍiśatantra
I recently listened to Amy Hale give a wonderful lecture on how theories of colour developed in Western Esotericism, I thought it was high time that I had a stab at some notes on the use of colour within the tantric traditions. This is a vast subject, and I’m going to take it slowly.
Continue reading »Back in 2020, I briefly discussed the notion sometimes encountered that Tantra is thousands of years old – that it predates the Vedas, Buddhism, and Jainism. To illustrate the post, I used an image of the infamous Pasupati Seal that is often pointed to as evidence of Tantra’s antediluvian origins. So for this post, I’m going to take a closer look at the Seal and its tangle of interpretations.
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