Spiritual Power and Political Power Through the Centuries
“For at least the last thousand years, perhaps longer, the concept of power in its political and social application has been intimately connected with Tantric theology – so intimately, one might suggest, that the one cannot be adequately understood apart from the other.” (Gupta and Gombrich 1986: 123)
Tantra, as understood popularly in the west, is broadly apolitical; it is held to be a deeply private practice, with private results experienced only by the tantric practitioner themselves.
In its Southeast Asian context, however, it was historically riven by dialectical tensions: On the one hand, drawing its spiritual efficacy from its transgressive and taboo practices; on the other, accommodating itself to local power structures by promising warlords access to magical powers gained thereby.
In this brief essay we will sketch two lines of inquiry. First we will examine the tensions in historical tantra, or, more properly, Śākta-Śaivism, and its relationships with structures of political power. We then will then take a stab at understanding the extremely divergent political understandings of “tantra” in the culture of the colonial world. For as it turns out, the political valence of the tantric tradition is remarkably variable. From origins in the political dropout culture of pre-medieval India, to mercenary black magic available for sale or rent to local strongmen, to a profound and esoteric theory and praxis available only to the educated class; then from a discovery by (and simultaneous invention of) scandalized Anglican colonial researchers, to appropriation by, in turn, American feminist rebels, Italian Fascist occultists, and English satanic jingoists, to eventual incorporation into the broadly “apolitical” new age spirituality movement which in fact inherits politics from all these.
In traveling this crooked path down the centuries, we will find further evidence that, as in the second- wave feminist slogan puts it, “the personal is political.” Different constructions of the body politic, different notions of the spiritual implications of what is done in the bedroom, both inform and are informed by political power structures and movements. Thus the political ramifications of spiritual practice and philosophy are not implicit; they are in flux, open to interpretation, require struggle.
1. Medieval India
First, some notes about the Indian historical context. Practices recognizable as “tantric” developed in the subcontinent during the relative stability of the Gupta and Vākāṭaka dynasties. Mass migrations, perhaps ultimately resulting from the construction of the Great Wall of China, brought an end to both these dynasties (as well as the western Roman empire) by the early sixth century CE. Thus ended the “Pax Gupta” and what is considered classical Indian civilization; there followed an extremely complex and unsettled period of political tumult in central and northern India, marked by warlordism, strife, and frequently changing allegiances. These years — stretching from the seventh to the eleventh century, when Ghaznavid invasions precipitated further change — also mark the flowering of the tantric tradition.
The politics of these centuries can be considered feudal: regional lords, in Sanskrit sāmanta (सामन्त), extracted tribute and provided defense to local strongmen, who in turn extracted from and provided to villagers under their power. This hierarchical dominance structure came to be called a circle of influence or maṇḍala (मञ्डल), which, strikingly, was a political term before it became a religious or artistic one; the beautiful depictions of subdeities encircling a larger central deity, thought by Carl Jung to symbolize and catalyze harmony of mind, represent, in fact, an idealized model of feudal exploitation.
Also notable in the seventh and eighth centuries CE were increased depictions of fierce goddesses at local and regional palaces and courts, most especially Durgā (दुर्गा). Over these centuries, Durgā and her variants displace the Vedic deities formerly found in regal architecture. As her depictions become more common, her iconography changes, and she is increasingly shown with the insignia of royalty — the scepter, the crown, the royal battle-drum. Indeed, Gupta and Gombrich report that kinglets in this period were symbolically married to Durgā upon ascending the simḥāsana (सिम्हासन), the “lion throne” — Dūrga, also, is normally depicted astride a lion.
It appears that over these years of interregnum, Brahmanic ritual specialists, long close to state power, after many centuries of maintaining a relative sinecure, began to encounter competition from a newer breed of Śaivite ritualist, who laid claim to heterodox but effective methods of advancing their patrons in this changed and highly competitive landscape. Foremost among these was the ability to propitiate and command fierce deities; goddesses of disease and catastrophe such as Durgā, Kālī (काली), and the “Seven Mothers” or Saptamātṛkā (सप्तमातृका), all of whom are unknown before the late Gupta period and rise meteorically to prominence thereafter. The Seven Mothers in particular originate as demonesses responsible for illness and death of children, who undergo a transformation, not uncommon in folk religion, from fearful spirits to goddesses worthy of worship.
The mechanism of this transformation in medieval India is the tantric adept, who begins as an ascetic dropout signaling his devotion to the spiritual path by performing transgressive acts guaranteed to render him ritually impure and unpalatable to mainstream society. The sine qua non of this, in full-blown kaula ritual, is the consumption of the sexual fluids of the guru and consort; but there are many ways of dirtying oneself. To be impure, to haunt the cremation ground, also put these ascetics at risk of both psychic and physical disease, and thus brought them into proximity with its various demons. Their familiarity with, and sangfroid around, disease, disaster, and death, at some point pivoted from social liability to marketable job skill, as warlords wished not only to protect themselves and their families from such deities, but more importantly to direct them against their many enemies.
Interestingly, in iconography over time, an eighth is added to the Seven Mothers, simply to fill out the mandala form; the male deity at the center, alone or with a consort, is analogized with the tantric adept, ruling over goddesses of disease just like a duke over eight earls. To this day in the valley of Kathmandu there are several cities, formerly capitals of small Newar kingdoms, which are each surrounded by eight mātṛkā temples; the entire urban mandala is now known as navadurgā (नवदुरगा), “nine Durgās” (Gutschow 1983).
Further, in feudal India “kingship” was being made over in the image of a heroic male figure whose sexual powers were homologised with his military power and his very ability to fill the royal role. (Samuels 2008) Tantric ritualists, being intimately conversant with both sex and death, were able to help here too; contemporary satires poke fun at royals being duped into all manner of extreme practices by Śaiva ascetics who promise to restore their sexual prowess. Such a court tantrika could also be a freelancer; Sanderson 2004 quotes several examples of tantric ritual specialists hired “by the job” to repel invasions.
Surveying these developments, a picture begins to emerge: Brahmanic religion, with its complex fire sacrifices and well-established caste affiliations, lost its hegemony with the fracturing of the centralized state, producing a power gap into which flowed a formerly outcaste congregation whose outlook and abilities were more in line with the times; extreme circumstances demand extreme measures. As these previously impolite and unfashionable practices became more widely known if not de rigueur, their philosophical implications began to be reimagined by their highly-educated new adherents. Samuels (2008) argues eloquently and convincingly for a trajectory in which kaula ritual remains more or less the same, while the emphasis shifts from semen and its consumption to the moment of orgasm as an opportunity for insight into nonduality; from the objective, we might say, to the subjective.
2. 20th Century Europe
This is all very interesting — but not that hard to follow. In a time of political stability, peace, and prosperity, a group of dropouts, in antinomian fashion, inverted the religious stance of the dominant culture and its emphasis on purity and propounded a spiritual path of maximum impurity. Later, during a time of instability, war and uncertainty, these same outsiders found patronage, perhaps in the interests of survival (it is easier to live on the margins of society in times of surplus). Their patrons, in turn, reimagined their practices, in the process rendering them both more palatable and, through the generative dialectical tension of the whole situation, creating a hybrid of incredible philosophical richness.
Change the context, though, and everything changes.
By the twelfth century CE Persianate Muslim rule in India was more or less total and – perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not – the tantric traditions we have been following began to disappear from view, going underground and being assimilated into the nascent milieu of hatha yoga. Underground it stays, until the arrival of the East India Company and, with English direct rule, a wave of mostly Anglican scholars representing the developing discipline of “comparative religion.” In poring over manuscripts and interviewing local informants, they began turning up seemingly religious texts and practices which, to the Victorian colonizers, seemed highly irreligious if not actually debauched. Many of these were found in texts called tantra, and our scandalized (and understandably fascinated) scholars began using this word as an umbrella term to categorize these appalling chimerae, so religious in form, so blasphemous in content.
Here our story begins to get even weirder, and the characters we encounter become by degrees less savory. Primary among translators of texts we now consider “tantric,” of course, was the enigmatic Sir John Woodroffe, who wrote under the odd pen name Arthur Avalon. Woodroffe, a barrister, became interested in tantra (so the story goes) after undergoing a psychic attack by a tantrika hired by the defense in a court case he was prosecuting – our earlier investigations should help us make sense of this phenomenon of “black magic for hire.” He proceeded to learn Sanskrit, study meditation under a guru from whom he received several initiations, and translate (with the help of a native accomplice) numerous Sanskrit texts which have been incredibly influential on the popular conception of Indian esotericism, likely the source of most popular explications of kundalini (कुनदालिनि) and the cakra-s(चक्र), for instance.
Woodroffe was on intimate terms with the Bengali intelligentsia of his time; he was a perennialist and advocate of Indian self-rule. Beyond that his politics are somewhat murky, as are the reasons for his hyper-English nom-de-plume. For Woodroffe śakti (शक्ति), “power,” which as we have seen was subject to various interpretations in medieval India, was emblematic of Indian cultural identity, which when rediscovered would inevitably result in uprising against the colonial power, and self-determination.
Woodroffe was also, however, buddies with protofascist occultist Julius Evola, and apparently sent him translations of tantric texts in manuscript form. This friendship is somewhat hard to square with what else is known of Woodroffe’s politics.
Evola will perhaps be less familiar to Tarka readers – yet his influence on contemporary popular ideas of tantra looms extremely large. An aristocrat and personal friend of Mussolini, Evola functioned alternately as gadfly and ideologue of the Fascist party – attacking it for being too soft and modern, while attempting, with mixed success, to provide it with intellectual and spiritual justifications.
Evola was also an occultist, member and founder of several secret societies, and student of tantra, about which he wrote several books that are influential to this day.
If, for Woodroffe and his circle, śakti was understood as an expression of the autochthonic spirit of India, for Evola it was something altogether else: A “spiritual virility,” possessed by an elite warrior class (Evola, Yoga of Power p.15), a feminine force which can be controlled and dominated by a cold and unyielding adept (Introduction to Magic p. 262).
Readers will observe that neither of these interpretations are totally unhistorical. The context, however, in which they are being deployed is very different. Medieval Indian tantrika-s claimed access to power, which they offered to competing strongmen who were willing to pay. Evola, on the other hand, was hoping to establish a fascist imperium of absolute hierarchy, with spiritual “power” as its internal core; eventually breaking with the Italian fascists, he switched allegiance to the Nazi party in Germany.
You might think that a figure like this would be obscure and forgotten, consigned, with his peers, to the dustbin of history; but you would be wrong. Not only are Evola’s works on politics still quite popular and influential on contemporary far-right movements; his works on magic, alchemy, and especially tantra are still in print and widely available in metaphysical bookstores. It is not at all uncommon to encounter people socially who will, with a knowing glint in their eye, explain (or should I say “mansplain”) tantra to you based on their readings of Evola. These people are usually unaware of his other body of work, and his biography; but his works on tantra are absolutely imbued with his vision of racial purity, sexual dominance and elitist hierarchy.
Besides personal communication from Woodroffe, Evola’s knowledge of tantric praxis came from Polish sex magician Maria Naglowska, who seems to have gotten most of her knowledge from the fascinating American Paschal Beverly Randolph. Where Evola’s works remain in print and continue to exert both political and philosophical influence, Randolph’s books are long out of print and he is mostly forgotten, and it is hard not to see this as the result of their other differences; Randolph, a poor Black American, orphaned at age eight, ran away from his foster home in his teens and traveled the world, practicing mediumship and medicine without a license. He seems to have learned tantric practices from an Ismai’ili sect in Iran, and wrote and taught (for a price) widely on the subject. He was also extremely active in the movement for Black liberation, contributing, with Frederick Douglass, to the founding of the National Equal Rights League; and, in his own teaching, insisted on equality between the sexes, even going so far as to challenge the gender binary, directing his sermons to “men, women, and all the inbetweenities.” A stark contrast indeed with his more well-known grand-student.
Much more could be written about this fascinating and paradoxical figure, and thankfully a few scholars are conducting research on his life at this very moment; I expect more to be published soon.
Randolph’s teachings, by way of Naglowska and a German named Theodore Reuss, were recontextualized and regurgitated by the most famous tantric popularizer of all, Aleister Crowley. About Crowley probably little need be said, except that his understanding of tantric practice, similarly to Randolph, was as a means of gaining individual divine gnosis, with numerous worldly benefits. While his personal politics, for all his bad-boy demeanor, were solidly jingoistic and warlike, in Crowley there is no hint of Evola’s imperialist ambitions for tantric adepthood, and little interest in collectivity of any kind.
Popular presentations of “tantra” in general derive from either Randolph via Crowley, or Woodroffe via Evola, and are shorn of both the politically liberatory impulses of Randolph and Woodroffe, or the hierarchical and imperial fantasies of Evola and Crowley. But, as is oft-remarked, the absence of politics is itself political. For the goal of tantric practice, in its medieval Indian context, was moksha (मोक्क्ष), “liberation.” But this word, and associated terms like mukti (मुक्ति), “liberated being,” have both spiritual and political valence in Sanskrit; mukti is, in fact, the word used in the early 20th century for Indian independence from the English colonial power, as Woodroffe’s Bengali friends would have been well aware.
And what becomes of liberation when it is imagined as singular, personal, unmoored from the collective? When personal “wellness” rather than social “wellness” becomes the goal? As abhorrent as Evola’s imperialism or medieval sāmanta may be to me personally, at least they acknowledge the existence of society – of the spirituality of society and the sociality of spirit – as a locus of both struggle and cooperation.
In the contemporary popular imagination, indeed, tantric practice is between precisely two (usually heterosexual) people. How different from historical kaula, whose very name, referencing the kula (कुल), “family” or “circle,” indicates its fundamentally communal nature. And its goals, too, have shifted yet again; from ritual pollution, to success in war, to liberatory insight, to liberation from or subjection to political oppression; finally, in our time, the goal of tantric practice would appear to be merely the practice itself – all that neo-tantra promises is “good sex,” and that only for the couple involved.
In the final analysis, perhaps contemporary tantra, with its conception of “power” solely of use to an individual adept (or perhaps two) on their journey to personal liberation through sexual satisfaction, is elegantly symptomatic of its society: An atomized society, ruled solely by the law of “rational self-interest.” And it is my hope that, by considering the historical interpenetration of political and spiritual uses of shakti, power, we might also understand our society as a symptom of our practice, and our practice, thus, as a political force in its own right.