CHAPTER 15

SECTS AND SEX IN THE TANTRIC PURANAS AND THE TANTRAS
600 to 900 CE

CHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES ARE CE)

550-575 Kalachuris create the cave of Shiva at Elephanta

606-647 Harsha reigns at Kanauj

630-644 Xuan Zang (Hsuan Tsang) visits India

650-800 Early Tantras are composed

765-773 Raja Krishna I creates the Kailasa temple to Shiva at Ellora

900 and 1150 The Chandellas build the temples at Khajuraho

1238-1258 Narasimhadeva I builds the temple of Konarak

WHAT USE ARE IMAGINED IMAGES?

If the shapes that men imagine in their minds could achieve Release
for them, then surely men could become kings by means of the
kingdom that they get in their dreams. Those who believe that the
Lord lives in images made of clay, stone, metal, wood, or so forth and
wear themselves out with asceticism without true knowledge—they
never find Release. Whether they waste themselves away by fasting,
or get potbellies by eating whatever they like, unless they have the
knowledge of the ultimate reality—how could they be cured? If
people could get Release by performing vows to eat nothing but air,
leaves, crumbs, or water, then the serpents and cattle and birds and
fish would be Released.

Mahanirvana Tantra^hs1

The texts called the Tantras mock physical icons and dream images, as part of their general challenge to most aspects of conventional Hinduism (including fasting and asceticism), but they go on to replace these physical processes and mental images with ones of their own, produced in Tantric rituals, claiming that they have the power to transform the worshipers into deities. Tantra is one of the many actual peripheries that survive against an imagined non-Tantric center, an all-encompassing religious movement that rivaled Hinduism as a whole and indeed explicitly turned upside down some of the most cherished assumptions of the Brahmin imaginary.

How you define Hindu Tantra is largely predetermined by what you want to say about it; some scholars define it in terms of its theology (connected with goddesses and usually with Shiva, though this is not unique to Tantrism), some its social attitudes (which are generally antinomian, also not unique to Tantrism), and some its rituals (often involving the ingesting of bodily fluids, particularly sexual fluids, which is indeed a Tantric specialty^ht). Like Hinduism in general, Tantra is best defined through a Zen diagram combining all these aspects.

INDIA IN THE TIME OF HARSHA

After the Gupta Empire fragmented, in the seventh and eighth centuries CE, once again we enter a period when there is no single political power, which seems to be the default position for most of ancient Indian history; empires are the exception. Again it is a fruitful period of change and creativity, when new castes, sects, and states emerged, and new regional kingdoms.² One of these was the kingdom of Harsha, who reigned from 606 to 647. We have far more information about him—more available light—than we have about most kings of this period, largely because of three witnesses. His court poet, Bana, wrote a prose poem about him, the Harshacharita, which offers, hidden between the layers of fulsome praise and literary ostentation, quite a lot of information about life as it was lived at Harsha’s court. And the Chinese Buddhist traveler Xuan Zang (also spelled Hsuan Tsang, Hiuen Tsiang, Hsuien-tsang, Yuan Chwang), a monk and scholar, inspired by Faxian, who had visited the Guptas two hundred years earlier, visited India between 630 and 644, returning to China with twenty horses loaded with Buddhist relics and texts. He wrote a long account of India, including a detailed eyewitness description of Harsha’s administration. ³ Since both Bana and Xuan Zang were under Harsha’s patronage, we must take their testimonies with a grain of salt, but much of what each says is confirmed by the other, as well as by the third, even more biased witness, Harsha himself, who wrote three Sanskrit plays, two of which describe life at court.

Harsha came of a powerful family and ruled over the fertile land between the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, an area that he extended until he ruled the whole of the Ganges basin (including Nepal and Assam), from the Himalayas to the Narmada River, besides Gujarat and Saurashtra (the modern Kathiawar). He shifted the center of power from Ujjain and Pataliputra to Kanauj (near modern Kanpur). After Harsha’s initial conquests, there was peace in his empire. He died without leaving an heir; on his death one of his ministers usurped the throne. His empire did not survive him.

Harsha was descended from the Guptas through his grandmother, and his sister, Rajya Sri, was married to the Maukhari king at Kanauj. According to Bana, after her husband was killed in battle, Rajya Sri was taken hostage. She escaped and fled to the Vindhyas, where she was about to commit suttee, but Harsha snatched her from the pyre. She then hoped to become a Buddhist nun, but Harsha dissuaded her, because through her he could control the Maukhari kingdom.⁴ That Bana regarded the practice of suttee as a serious problem is apparent from a passage worth quoting at some length:

Life is relinquished quite readily by those overcome by sorrow; but only with great effort is it maintained when subjected to extreme distress. What is called “following in death” [anumarana] is pointless. It is a path proper to the illiterate. It is a pastime of the infatuated. It is a road for the ignorant. It is an act for the rash. It is taking a narrow view of things. It is very careless. All in all, it is a foolish blunder to abandon your own life because a father, brother, friend, or husband is dead. If life does not leave on its own, it should not be forsaken. If you think about it, you will see that giving up your own life is only an act of self-interest, for it serves to assuage the unbearable agonies of sorrow that you suffer. It brings no good whatsoever to the one who is already dead. In the first place, it is not a way to bring that one back to life. Nor is it a way to add to hisaccumulations of merit. Nor is it a remedy for his possible fall into hell. Nor is it a way to see him. Nor is it a cause of mutual union. The one who is dead is helpless and is carried off to a different place that is proper for the ripening of the fruit of his actions. As for the person who abandons life—that person simply commits the sin of suicide, and nothing is achieved for either of them. But, living, he can do much for the dead one and for himself by the offering of water, the folding of hands, the giving of gifts, and so forth.⁵

This remarkable statement combines, with no contradiction whatsoever, the religious assumptions of a pious Hindu and a sensible, compassionate, and highly rational argument against the ritual suicide of a widow. This is a valuable piece of evidence of resistance to such ritual immolations during Harsha’s reign.^hu

Harsha was a most cosmopolitan king, known as a patron of the arts and of all religions. Besides the poet Bana and another famous poet, Mayura, he also kept at his court a man named Matanga Divakara, a critic and dramatist who is said either to have come from one of the Pariah castes (a Chandala) or to have been a Jaina.⁶ Harsha does not mention temple worship in his plays; he writes, instead, of a spring festival that the whole city participates in, dancing in the streets and sprinkling one another with red dye (as people do during the Holi festival even today), and of an individual puja to the god Kama that the queen carries out at a small outdoor shrine.⁷ Harsha was a religious eclectic; two of his three plays (the ones about court intrigue) are dedicated to Shiva, while the third,Nagananda, invokes the Buddha. But the plot of Nagananda is as Hindu as it is Buddhist: A prince gives up his own body to stop a sacrifice of serpents to the mythical Garuda bird, a myth that clearly owes much to the snake sacrifice in the Mahabharata as well as to the story of King Shibi (in both Buddhist and Hindu traditions). Xuan Zang noted a movement of nonviolence toward animals during Harsha’s reign: Indians are “forbidden to eat the flesh of the ox [or cow],^hv the ass, the elephant, the horse, the pig, the dog, the fox, the wolf, the lion, the monkey, and all the hairy kind. Those who eat them are despised and scorned.”⁸

Harsha may have became a convert to Buddhism in his later life; we know that he sent a Buddhist mission to China and held assemblies at the holy Hindu site of Prayaga, where donations were made to followers of all sects.⁹ During this period Buddhism still thrived in large monasteries in Bihar and Bengal, though it had begun to vanish from South India and was fading in the rest of North India. Xuan Zang says that the king of Sindh was a Shudra, but a good man who revered Buddhism.¹⁰

TANTRIC PURANAS

PROTO-TANTRIC SHAIVA SECTS

Scholars have scrambled to find the sources of Tantra, the ur-Tantras, during this period, but those sources are numerous, hard to date, and widely dispersed. A number of sects with some Tantric features, though not yet full-blown Tantra, arose in the early centuries of the first millennium CE and later came to be regarded as Tantric—through our bête noire, hindsight. And a number of Shaiva Puranas describe sects that share some, but not all, of the characteristics of Shakta Tantras (that is, Tantras dedicated to the goddess Shakti). Tantric ideas doubtless developed in sources long lost to us, but they appear textually first in the Puranas and after that in the Tantras. We must therefore look to the mythology of Puranas composed during this general period (600 to 900 CE) for the mythological underpinnings of Tantric rituals.

Besides the Puranas, there is scattered textual and epigraphical evidence of movements that may be considered proto-Tantric. In the first century CE, a sage named Lakulisha (“Lord of the Club”) founded a sect of Pashupatas, worshipers of Shiva as Lord of Beasts (Pashupati),¹¹ and in the next centuries more and more people identified themselves as Pashupatas.¹² A Pashupata inscription of 381 CE counts back eleven generations of teachers to Lakulisha.¹³ The Mahabharata refers to them, but examples of their own texts begin much later.¹⁴ The Kurma Purana condemns them, and the Linga Purana reflects some of their doctrines.¹⁵ They lived in cremation grounds (hence they were Pariahs, polluted by contact with corpses), and their rituals consisted of offerings of blood, meat, alcohol, and sexual fluids “from ritual intercourse unconstrained by caste restrictions.”¹⁶ The imagery of the cremation ground comes from older stories about renouncers and finds its way later into the mythology of Shiva and then into Tantric rituals.

The Pashupatas give a new meaning to passive aggressive; they went out of their way to scandalize respectable folks. The Pashupata Sutra, which may be the work of Lakulisha himself, instructs the novice Pashupata to seek the slander of others by going about like a Pariah (preta), snoring, trembling, acting lecherous, speaking improperly, so that people will ill-treat him, and thus he will give them his bad karma and take their good karma from them,¹⁷ a highly original, active spin on the usual concept of the intentional transfer of good karma or the inadvertent accumulation of bad karma. Now we have the intentional transfer of bad karma. For in fact these Pashupatas were perfectly sober and chaste, merely miming drunkenness and lechery (two of the four addictive vices of lust). The onlookers were therefore unjustly injuring the Pashupatas, and through this act their good karma was transferred to the Pashupatas, and the Pashupatas’ bad karma to them.¹⁸ (No one seems to comment on the fact that through their deception, the Pashupatas were harming the onlookers and hence would presumably lose some of their own good karma through this malevolence.)

An early text describes the Pashupatas as wandering, carrying a skull-topped staff and a begging bowl made of a skull, wearing a garland of human bone, covered in ashes (the ashes of corpses), with matted hair or shaved head, and acting in imitation of Rudra (the Vedic antecedent of Shiva).¹⁹This behavior closely resembles the vow that Manu prescribes for someone who has killed a Brahmin: “A Brahmin killer should build a hut in the forest and live there for twelve years to purify himself, eating food that he has begged for and using the skull of a corpse as his flag (11.73).” Why was this said to be in imitation of Rudra/Shiva? Because Shiva was the paradigmatic Brahmin killer, indeed, the Brahma killer.

SHIVA, THE SKULL BEARER

The Pashupatas were eventually transformed into a sect called the Skull Bearers (Kapalikas), who no longer followed the philosophy or stigmatizing behavior of the Pashupatas except for the skull begging bowl and who developed their own texts. Several Puranas tell the myth of the origin of the Skull Bearers; one version runs like this:

SHIVA BEHEADS BRAHMA

Brahma desired Sarasvati and asked her to stay with him. She said that he would always speak coarsely. One day when Brahma met Shiva, his fifth head made an evil sound, and Shiva cut it off. The skull remained stuck fast to his hand, and though Shiva was capable of burning it up, he wandered the earth with it for the sake of all people, until he came to Varanasi.²⁰

This story may be traced back to the Vedic myth in which Rudra beheads Prajapati to punish him for committing incest with his daughter, Dawn,²¹ and to the myth of Indra’s pursuit by the female incarnation of Brahminicide, who sticks to him like glue.²² Already many things have been cleaned up, at least a bit, to the credit of the gods: Brahma now assaults not his own daughter but Sarasvati, who is to become his wife, and who, being the goddess of speech, upbraids him for talking obscenely. Brahma, who often has four heads but is sometimes called Five-Headed (Panchamukha), in this myth is imagined to go from five to four. And now Shiva is not, as in earlier versions, forced helplessly to endure the relentlessly adhesive skull²³ but is entirely in control and submits to the curse “for the sake of all people.” This retroactive justification of the god as the power of his sect increases (a transformation that Rama too went through) is an essential move in the theology of the Tantras, as we will see.

Other texts went even further to absolve Shiva of any implication that he might have been punished against his will, by simply removing him from the scene of the crime altogether. One version begins with the familiar tale of Brahma, Vishnu, and the flame linga but then moves on in new directions:

BHAIRAVA BEHEADS BRAHMA

Once when Brahma and Vishnu were arguing about which of them was supreme, a flame linga appeared between them, and from it there emerged a three-eyed man adorned with snakes. Brahma’s fifth head called the man his son; thereupon the man, who was Rudra, became angry. He created Bhairava [“The Terrifying One”] and commanded him to punish Brahma. Bhairava beheaded Brahma, for whatever limb offends must be punished. Then Shiva told Bhairava to carry Brahma’s skull, and he created a maiden named Brahminicide [Brahma-hatya] and said to her, “Follow Bhairava as he wanders about, begging for alms with this skull and teaching the world the vow that removes the sin of Brahminicide. But when he arrives at the holy city of Varanasi, you must leave him, for you cannot enter Varanasi.” And she said, “By serving him constantly under this pretext [of haunting him in punishment], I will purify myself so that I will not be reborn.” Then Bhairava entered Varanasi with her still at his left side, and she cried out and went to hell, and the skull of Brahma fell from Bhairava’s hand and became the shrine of the Release of the Skull [Kapala-Mochana].²⁴

Bhairava first appears as a replacement for Shiva in the Daksha myth, where several texts state that Shiva created him and sent him to do the dirty work of creating mayhem in Daksha’s sacrifice.²⁵ Here he frees Shiva both from the stigma of having committed the original crime of Brahminicide and from submitting to any punishment at all; Shiva creates the avenger himself and even arranges for the punishment incarnate to serve her own vow of penance and find Release. The Release of the Skull thus has a triple meaning; it is the place where Bhairava was released from the skull but also where the skull itself—indeed the very crime of Brahminicide incarnate—was released from its own pollution and became a shrine.^hw And it is the place of Release (mochana is closely related tomoksha) for those human worshipers who know the myth and/or make a pilgrimage to the shrine. Brahma is saved from the embarrassment of a sexual crime (however bowdlerized) by the substitution of another familiar myth, the myth of the argument between Brahma and Vishnu that we have encountered before. Most important, the myth accounts for the creation of what remains one of the great Shaiva shrines, the Release of the Skull in Varanasi.

The reverse savior myth of Indra’s Brahminicide is here reversed back in the other direction so that it becomes a savior myth after all, reformulating the Vedic faith in divine intervention, the worshiper asking the god for help: The god Shiva, or his creature, commits a sin expressly in order to establish a cure for other people who will commit that sin, or other, lesser sins, in the future. According to many versions of the story, Shiva could have rid himself of the skull if he wanted to, but he kept it on his hand until he reached Varanasi, delaying his own salvation, in order to pave the way for humans in need of salvation; his role as savior may have taken on some new qualities at this time as a result of contact with the Mahayana Buddhist ideal of the bodhisattva (potential Buddha) who willingly postpones his own final Release in order to help others to find theirs. Shiva also acts as a savior in the many bhakti myths in which he brings salvation to sinners and in the Mahabharata myth of the churning of the ocean: When a fiery poison comes out of the ocean and threatens to burn the universe to ashes (yet another form of the submarine mare fire), Shiva swallows it and holds it forever after in his throat (1.15-17). Shiva’s bhakti toward his worshipers also explains why he marries despite his vow to remain a chaste yogi forever²⁶ and, on the other hand, why he persists in generating ascetic heat even when he has decided to marry; in both cases, he does it to keep the universe alive or for the sake of his devotees.²⁷ The Skull Bearer may also represent a Shaiva response to the avatars of Vishnu. The transition from the pattern of the Indra myth to that of the Shiva myth is made possible by the shift from the second alliance, in which Indra fears or even hates humankind, to the third alliance, the bhakti alliance, in which Shiva loves humankind.

The logic of the myth of a god who commits a sin in order to establish a cure for other people who will commit that sin in the future is made more circular in yet another variant of the story:

THE SKULL BEARER BEHEADS BRAHMA

Once Brahma’s fifth head said to Shiva, “Be a Skull Bearer” [Kapalika or Kapalin], addressing Shiva by his future name. Shiva became angry at the word “skull” and cut off the head, which stuck to his hand.²⁸

The myth seems aware of the confusion of time cycles, for it notes the incongruity of Brahma’s use of Shiva’s “future name.” Shiva becomes a Skull Bearer because he is a Skull Bearer, apparently deciding to have the game as well as the name. Since the name isthe person, the word the thing, in the Hindu conception of speech acts such as curses, by naming Shiva, Brahma makes him what he calls him, a Skull Bearer, just as Daksha cursed Shiva to be a heretic because he was one. Shiva, who committed the prototypical Brahminicide—beheading not just any old Brahmin but Brahma himself—also invented the vow to expiate Brahminicide.

Daksha often accuses Shiva and his followers of being, or curses them to be, “Skull Bearers” and “Death Heads” (Kalamukhas).²⁹ The myth of Daksha sometimes involves the mutual exchange of curses, as the result of which two groups of sages are cursed to become followers of reviled religious sects or false doctrines.³⁰ Daksha curses all of Shiva’s servants to be heretics, Pariahs, beyond the Vedas, and Shiva’s servant Nandi (the bull in anthropomorphic form) or Dadhicha curses Daksha and his allies to be hypocrites, false Brahmins,³¹ or to be reborn in the Kali Age as Shudras and to go to hell, their minds struck down by evil.³² Once again the apparent results of the curses are actually their causes: Because Shiva was already a Pariah, denied a share in the sacrifice, Daksha curses him and his followers to be such, and because Daksha heretically denies the true god, Shiva’s servant curses him to be a religious hypocrite.

SATI, SECOND TAKE: SHAKTA SHRINES

The story of Sati and Daksha from the early Puranas was now retold, combining that story with the myth in which Shiva wanders with Brahma’s head. The result was a myth in which Shiva beheads Daksha and wanders with the corpse of Sati:

SATI’S CORPSE IS DISMEMBERED

Daksha conceived a hatred for Shiva and also for his own daughter Sati, who had married Shiva. Because of her father’s offense against her husband, Sati burned her body in the fire of her yoga, to demonstrate Sati-dharma. Then the fire of Shiva’s anger burned the triple world, and Shiva beheaded Daksha; eventually, Shiva gave Daksha the head of a goat and revived him. But when Shiva saw Sati being burned in the fire, he placed her on his shoulder and cried out over and over again, “Alas, Sati!” Then he wandered about in confusion, worrying the gods, and Vishnu quickly took up his bow and arrow^hx and cut away the limbs of Sati, which fell in various places. In each place, Shiva took a different form, and he said to the gods, “Whoever worships the Great Mother with devotion in these places will find nothing unattainable, for she is present in her own limbs. And they will have their prayers answered.” And Shiva remained in those places forever, meditating and praying, tortured by separation.³³

Again, “Sati-dharma” means both what Sati did and what any Good Woman should do. Daksha is beheaded in place of the goat that is the usual sacrificial animal, and when he is revived, he is given the goat’s head, for his own is lost. The idea that the sacrifice itself was in essence already a substitute,³⁴ the victim in the sacrifice substituting for the sacrificer, eventually developed into this myth in which the sacrificer, Daksha, was himself substituted for the goat who was to be the substitute for him, another myth about a sacrifice gone disastrously wrong by being literalized.^hy

Sati is dismembered, as the Primeval Man was in the Vedas. And just as the place where the skull of Brahma (the antecedent of Daksha³⁵) falls becomes the great shrine of the Release of the Skull in Varanasi, so Sati’s limbs, as they fall, become the plinths (pithas) of pilgrimage shrines,³⁶ with both Shiva and Sati eternally present to answer prayers. Other texts say that Shiva took the form of a linga in each pitha, and the place where her yoni is said to have fallen became the central Tantric shrine in Assam (Kama-rupa).³⁷

PROTO-TANTRIC GODDESSES

CHANDIKA /DURGA, SECOND TAKE: SHAKTI BHAKTI

In “Glorification of the Goddess,” Chandika was said to have been created from the gods’ energies (tejas), though she quickly assumed command. Now she is created from her own power, and she is eroticized. Indeed, this process began indirectly even in “Glorification of the Goddess,” when, after killing the buffalo, Chandika seduced and killed another antigod:

CHANDIKA SEDUCES AND KILLS SHUMBHA

Shumbha fell madly in love with Chandika and proposed marriage. She replied that she would only marry someone who vanquished her in battle. There was a battle, in which the shaktis came out of the gods Brahma, Shiva, Skanda, Vishnu, and Indra to aid her: whatever form, and ornaments, and weapons, and animal vehicles each god had, his shakti took that very form. Even Chandika emitted her own shakti, howling like a hundred jackals. And after she had absorbed all the gods’ shaktis, she killed Shumbha.³⁸

Shumbha has an ally, Nishumbha, whom Chandika kills too; the names suggest that this myth is modeled on the earlier story of the seduction of the antigods Sunda and Upasunda by the nymph Tilottama, who leaves their killing to the gods. This myth is then a combination of the older theme of “dangerous upstart seduced by nymph” with the new theme of “d.u. killed by goddess.” Chandika gives Shumbha death in lieu of sex; he dies in the battle that she demands as a prelude to marriage, a marriage that never happens, and goes straight to heaven, since his love-war relationship with the goddess is regarded as a form of dvesha-bhakti , devotion through hatred (as well as love). Though dozens and dozens of antigods who lack Shumbha’s passion are vanquished by the gods on every page without seeing the light, his passion makes his death in combat a form of enlightenment, a popular Hindu theme that is foreshadowed by the heaven-guaranteeing heroic battle deaths in the Mahabharata.

THE SEDUCTION AND KILLING OF MAHISHA

Most Sanskrit texts play down the erotic relationship between the goddess and the buffalo, and some (beginning with “Glorification of the Goddess”) omit it altogether. But other texts revel in it, and it bursts out again and again in the art-historical traditions, in both paintings and sculptures, which emphasize, as do the texts, the extraordinary beauty of Chandika or, rather, of Durga, as she is now usually called. Even “Glorification of the Goddess” tells us that the gods give her some rather good jewelry and specifies that of all the parts of her body made from parts of the gods, her genitals were made of energy itself.³⁹ But a later Sanskrit text, the Skanda Purana, states that Durga was already a powerful goddess when Mahisha defeated the gods and that the gods went to her to beg her for help in dispatching him.⁴⁰ Another text from roughly the same period brings out the erotic element more vividly:

CHANDIKA SEDUCES AND KILLS MAHISHA

Mahisha had forced Brahma to promise that if he had to die, it would be at the hands of a woman; he asked this in order to ensure that he would not die, since he regarded it as unthinkable that a mere woman, beneath contempt, should overpower him. The gods created Durga. She enticed Mahisha, who proposed marriage. But she replied that she wanted to kill him, not to sleep with him, that she had become a woman in the first place only in order to kill him; that although she did not appear to be a man, she had a man’s nature and was merely assuming a woman’s form because he had asked to be killed by a woman. Moreover, she said to Mahisha’s messenger, “Your master is a great fool, and certainly no hero, to want to be killed by a woman. For to be killed by one’s mistress gives sexual pleasure to a pansy (kliba) but misery to a hero.” The besotted Mahisha, however, was persuaded by a counselor who suggested that this clearly antierotic speech was the amorous love talk of a passionate woman: “She wishes to bring you into her power by frightening you. This is the sort of indirect speech that enamored women use toward the man they love.” Mahisha then dressed up in his best suit and boasted to Durga that he was a man who could make a woman very happy. She laughed and killed him by beheading him.⁴¹

Mahisha’s boon is a variant of Ravana’s, narrowing the field of his killer to someone regarded as impossible, a mere woman. And so once again the gods had to create someone to kill the upstart without violating the fine print of the demonic contract. Though Durga here is so beautiful that she inspires the antigod with a destructive erotic passion, she herself is so devoid of erotic feelings that she insists not only that she is a man rather than a woman but that her would-be consort is not a man, but a mere pansy. To clinch this argument, she insists that only a pansy would wish to experience a Liebestod with a woman. The aggressive woman rides astride the buffalo, and her sexual supremacy is expressed through a martial image: She holds an erect phallic sword in paintings and sculptures depicting the slaying of Mahisha.

The explicit meaning of this image is that the proposed battle is, by implication, a sexual union. But the image also plays upon the notion (which it self-consciously inverts) that every actual sexual act is, by implication, a fatal battle, a notion basic to Indian thinking about the dangers of eroticism and the need for the control, even the renunciation, of sensuality. In a more positive vein, the fact that Mahisha desires to marry and/or battle Durga, despite her clearly antierotic warning, implies that either marriage or battle may be a way of achieving unity; that either may serve as an initiatory death leading to a desired transformation; that strong emotion, be it lust or hatred, seeks a conflict that leads ultimately to the resolution of all conflict in death. It is this deep intertwining of sex and violence that seems to underlie Durga’s extraordinary appeal, for she is one of the most popular Hindu deities, worshiped by both men and women.

The image of Durga on top of the helpless Mahisha, placing her feet on shoulders and head as she beheads him or on the back of the cowering buffalo, an image much reproduced in both sculpture and painting, seems to me to be mirrored in the well-known Tantric image of the goddess Kali dancing on the (ithyphallic) corpse of Shiva, with her sword in her hand, often holding in another hand a severed head, an inversion of the myth in which Shiva dances all around India carrying the corpse of Sati. Often the goddess Kali stretches out her tongue to drink the streams of blood spurting from the severed heads or necks; in this she is the descendant of the female antigod Long Tongue in the Brahmanas. Some contemporary Hindu glosses of this icon (particularly in Bengal) attempt to minimize the violence inherent in it; they say, “She sticks out her tongue in shock when she realizes that she is trampling on her own husband,” and they say that the severed head represents the severing of the ego, interpretations that reduce the dominating demonic goddess Kali to the properly submissive wife Parvati. But others say that she is the letter i that turns the corpse (shava in Sanskrit) into Shiva; she brings him to life. Indeed sometimes the Goddess holds the severed head while she straddles a copulating couple.

Whose is the severed head that the goddess holds in many of these icons? Sometimes she herself is headless, Chinnamastaka (“The Severed Head”), and we might think that the head she holds is her own, for it matches her headless body in color and other qualities. One strange variant of the Mahisha myth, which appears in texts in both Sanskrit and Tamil, suggests that the head might be Shiva’s. In this myth, after the goddess has killed Mahisha, his head sticks to her hand just as Brahma’s head sticks to Shiva’s after Shiva beheads Brahma. After bathing in a river shrine (tirtha), the goddess discovers that there is a Shiva linga on Mahisha’s headless torso—that is, in the place where his head was.⁴² In the context of this particular story, the main function of the epiphany is to identify Mahisha as a devotee of Shiva and hence to plunge the goddess into an agony of guilt, necessitating a complex expiation. But in the context of the patterning of the myth as a whole, this linga functions to demonstrate the fusion of Mahisha and Shiva and, moreover, of Mahisha’s head and Shiva’s phallus.^hz

Yet another possible victim as donor of the severed head may be the devotee of the goddess. Puranic and Tantric mythology, as well as contemporary local mythology and early Tamil literature, abound in tales of male devotees who cut off their own heads in an act of devotion to Durga, and Mahisha himself is such a devotee.

TANTRICS

With this mythological corpus as a prelude, let us now consider Tantra itself.

The Zen diagram of Tantra (that is, a cluster of qualities, not all of which need be present in any particular text or ritual) includes the worship of the goddess, initiation, group worship, secrecy, and antinomian behavior, particularly sexual rituals and the ingesting of bodily fluids. There are Tantric texts, Tantric rituals, Tantric myths, Tantric art forms, and, above all, Tantric worshipers. There are Tantric mantras (repeated formulas), Tantric yantras (mystical designs), and Tantras (esoteric texts), as well as Tantric gods and their consorts. Within Hinduism, there are Shaiva, Vaishnava, and Shakta Tantras, as well as Tantras devoted to other gods, and there are, in addition, Buddhist Tantras and some Jaina Tantras; Buddhism and Hinduism once again, as in the Upanishadic period, share a number of features, in this case certain rituals and images.^ia

Tantra originated, both in Buddhism and in Hinduism, sometime between the sixth and eighth centuries of the Common Era,⁴³ but it truly hit its stride in the tenth century, having changed significantly in the course of those centuries. ⁴⁴ In particular, from the tenth century the Tantras were infused with the spirit of bhakti. Tantra probably began in the northern fringes of India, Kashmir, Nepal, Bengal, and Assam—places where Buddhism too flourished—but it soon took hold in central and South India. Something in the social conditions of the time inspired the Tantric innovations, a combination of the growing anti-Brahmin sentiment of some bhakti sects and the impulse, always present from the days of the breakaway Vratya ascetics of the Veda and the extreme renunciants of the later Upanishadic period, to find new religious ways to alter consciousness. In both yoga and Tantra the transformation was controlled by meditation. Similarly, the flying, drug-drinking, long-haired sage of the Veda reappears in the flying, fluid-drinking Tantric.

Much of Tantric ritual took place during secret initiations in relatively remote areas, but these rites were not a particularly well-guarded secret. The secret was that there was no secret.^ib Tantra and Tantric practices were well publicized, esoteric but not necessarily marginal or even subversive; much of it was public, even royal.⁴⁵ Like the sages of the Upanishads, as well as the bhakti movements, Tantrics maintained a close association with kings,^‡ who made good use of the Tantras themselves⁴⁶ as well as lending to the Tantras the symbolism of kingship. Kings had participated in sexual rituals for many centuries (recall the horse sacrifice), and every king was wedded to at least one goddess, Shri (Good Fortune) or Lakshmi (Good Luck) or Earth itself (Bhu-devi). Moreover, if you transform your body so that you become a god, as Tantrics claimed to do, you are also becoming a king. And Tantra is all about power, and power is catnip for kings.

Using the MO that had served it well for many centuries, the Brahmin imaginary absorbed many of the new sects,⁴⁷ but this time it met its match in Tantra.

There are several different sorts of Tantrics. Within the wider landscape of the two paths that had forked apart at the time of the Upanishads, Tantra effected a new resolution. Outside Tantra, Hindu renouncers on the path of Release still hoped for moksha at death, by which they meant casting off all constraints of form and individuality to be absorbed in brahman. But Hindu householders on the path of rebirth, whose texts were now the Puranas, expected, at death, to be reborn either on earth or—the new option—in the heaven of Shiva or Vishnu or the goddess, from which they would not be reborn again and might even achieve Release; indeed, some Hindus referred to rebirth in such a heaven as a kind of Release. Both groups therefore acknowledged Release as an ultimate goal, but understood it in distinctive ways. Entering this scene, the Tantric “path of mantras,” open to both ascetics and householders, promised to grant not only Release (which the Tantras often call nirvana) from the world of transmigration but magical powers (siddhis) and pleasures (bhogas) on the way to Release, ⁴⁸ thus combining the rewards of the paths of rebirth and Release. The third path, the horrible dead-end reincarnation, mired in the worlds of corals and insects, still threatens the person who neither sacrifices nor meditates, but the Tantric path guarantees to protect the worshiper from that dreadful default. Tantra thus offered the best of both worlds, or, as the Tantric mantra has it, bhukti-mukti, bhoksha-moksha, or bhoga-yoga, “enjoyment-Release,” which has been nicely translated as the biunity of “sensual delight and spiritual flight.”⁴⁹

Another useful way to view the place of Tantra within the Hinduism of this period would be to divide the options slightly differently, into a devotional world of bhakti (guru/god/goddess) and a philosophical world further divided into Vedanta (meditation) and Tantra (ritual), a triad that comes out of the Gita synthesis of devotion, knowledge, and action. This formulation also divides Tantra into its “left-hand” or transgressive traditions (those that violated caste laws of purity—trafficking in blood, death, skulls, sex, all impure) and its “right-hand” or conservative traditions. Most non-Tantric Hindus regard all Tantrics as following a left-hand path (vama), while the right-hand Tantrics look askance at the Tantrics whom they regarded as left-hand, themselves being more right-hand than thou.

TANTRA AS SALVATION IN THE KALI AGE

Shiva’s role as a savior is not limited to establishing the sect of the Skull Bearer or the shrine in Varanasi that will save future sinners. In the Shaiva Tantric tradition, Shiva does more; he actively seeks out sinners and instructs them, by teaching them the very doctrines that, in the eyes of someone like Daksha, mark them as Pariahs.

Several Shaiva Puranas disapprove of the Tantras and stand behind “the Vedas,” which probably means not actual Vedic sacrifice but “Vedic religion” in the sense of Puranic religion, in this case the worship of Shiva. These Puranas nevertheless assert that Shiva is the author of the Tantras and that the Tantras serve a useful purpose—for some people, but not for them. They narrate the tale of a group of sages, cursed to be barred from the use of the Vedas, who were saved by Shiva. How they are cursed takes many forms; sometimes they are the sages who stand with Daksha against Shiva and are cursed in punishment for that. This is one version:

SHIVA TEACHES TANTRIC TEXTS

When Vishnu learned that the sages had been cursed to be outside the pale of the Vedas, he went to Shiva and said, “There is not even a drop of merit in people who are beyond the Vedas. But nevertheless, because of our devotion [bhakti] to them, we must protect them even though they will go to hell. Let us make texts of delusion to protect and delude these evil people.” Shiva agreed, and they made the Kapala, Pashupata, Vama [“Left-hand,” i.e., Tantric], and other texts. For the sake of the sages, Shiva descended to earth when the force of the curse had come to an end, and he begged alms from those who were outcast, deluding them as he came there adorned with skulls, ashes, and matted hair, saying, “You will go to hell, but then you will be reborn and gradually work your way to the place of merit.”⁵⁰

The ambivalent moral status of the sages in this version of the myth is evident from Vishnu’s statement: The sages are evil and doomed to hell, but the gods must protect and delude them (an interesting combination) so that they will ultimately find merit. Moreover, even though the doctrines that Shiva teaches them are mediating ones—below the Vedas but above damnation—he cannot teach those doctrines while the sages are still cursed to be heretics (which is what being debarred from the Vedas amounts to in these stories); he must come to them “when the force of the curse had come to an end” to teach them new false texts. That is, they need to have worked off the curse, to have started on the path upward, before he can give them the Tantras.

How can Shiva “protect” the sages by teaching them a new heresy? The “left-hand” doctrines help them by giving them some religion, albeit a heresy, since they are denied the Vedas; the heresy serves as a staircase between non-Vedic and Vedic religion,⁵¹bridging the gap between complete darkness and true religion, purifying them enough so that they can enter the waters of purification. They need an orthodox heresy (an oxymoron, but it fits the situation) to break the ritual chain of impurity. This concept of weaning is expounded by apologists for the Tantras, who argue that Shiva knew that the animal leanings of certain people made them need meat and wine and therefore invented Tantric rites in order gradually to wean them from this pleasure “in associating it with religion,” the idea being that it is better to bow to Shiva with your sandals on than never to bow at all.⁵² Shudras and the victims of curses are forbidden to study the Vedas; some other people are simply incapable. Out of pity for all of them, Shiva teaches heresy, raising them up “step by step,” a doctrine that may have been influenced by the Buddhist idea of skill in means, suiting the teaching to the level of the person to be enlightened. The assumption (often stated explicitly) is that he gives them a religion that is “natural” to them (sahaja, “born with” them), that makes use of the things that everyone naturally enjoys—sex, wine, meat. Tantra in this view is Hinduism with training wheels. Thus Shiva makes some people heretics in the first place so that he can ultimately enlighten them. This enlightenment at first appears as a heresy, which they reject, and indeed it is a heresy, in comparison with the ideal, Vedic or Puranic worship. But for some, this heresy is their only salvation, and their own god has created it for a good reason.

The final Puranic rationalization for the Tantras is that heresies taught to heretics make them so evil that they must reach the furthest point of the cycle and then rebound from the extreme, to become good again, to go back to the head of the queue, to go back to GO, like all the creatures of the Kali Age. Indeed the “orthodox heresies” are also justified by the doctrine of the forbidden acts in the Kali Age (kali-varjya): Some things that were forbidden in the past (such as Tantric rituals) are permitted now because we are too corrupt to meet the old standards. This argument was then sometimes inverted to argue that some things that were permitted then (such as female promiscuity, or Draupadi’s polyandry) are forbidden now for the very same reason: because we are corrupt, in this case too corrupt to commit these acts without being totally destroyed by them.

TANTRIC RITUAL: FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE THE FIVE MS

What are these terrible, dangerous things that the Tantric texts taught people to do? Central to Tantric ritual is what the Tantras call the Five Ms, or the Five M Words (since all five terms begin with an m in Sanskrit), which might be called, in English, the Five F Words: madya (fermented grapes, wine), mamsa (flesh, meat), matsya (fish), mudra (farina), and maithuna (fornication). Like so much of Tantra, the Five Ms are an inversion, in this case an inversion of other pentads in more conventional forms of Hinduism. Puranic Hindus ingested the “five products of the cow” (panchagavya) to purify themselves of pollution: clarified butter, milk, and yogurt, plus bovine urine and feces.^ic Tantrism, which accepts this schema, has, in addition, its own version of the five ritual elements, the Five M Words, or, in one variant, the Five Jewels (semen, urine, feces, menstrual blood, and phlegm) or Five Nectars (with marrow in place of phlegm).⁵³ One Buddhist Tantra further divides flesh (mamsa) into Five Meats (beef, dog, elephant, horse, and human flesh), together with Five Ambrosias (semen, urine, feces, blood, and marrow, slightly different from the Five Jewels). ⁵⁴ All these pentads were probably a deliberate antinomian travesty of the “five products of the cow”; one Tantric text substitutes for the bovine urine and feces the blood and flesh of the cow, a bovicide abomination that deliberately subverted orthodox categories of purity,⁵⁵forcing participants to look beyond the dualities of purity and impurity and the conventions of food and sex that drive so much of Hinduism.⁵⁶ One can hardly imagine a more blatant, in-your-face, maithuna-you attitude than the one at the heart of this substitution.

The Mahanirvana Tantra elaborates upon each of the Five Ms: Wine may be made from sugar (or molasses), rice, honey, or palm tree juice and made by someone of any caste. Meat may be from animals that come from the water, the land, or the sky, and again, it doesn’t matter where it comes from or who kills it; the only stipulation is that the animals be male, not female (as is the case for Vedic sacrifices too). Fish are best without bones, though the ones that have lots of bones may also be offered to the goddess if they are very well roasted or fried. The best farina (mudra) is made from rice, barley, or “earth-smoke” wheat, which is especially nice when fried in butter.⁵⁷ And fornication may involve one’s own wife, another man’s wife, or a woman who belongs to the group in common.

Wine, flesh, and fish were prohibited for high caste Hindus, and there is little debate about the basic lexical connotation or the denotation of these terms,⁵⁸ though as we will see, there is much debate about whether they are to be taken literally. But the other two Ms, mudra and maithuna, have proved more problematic even to define in their primary meanings. Mudra, here interpreted as a fourth material article, farina, or parched grain (sometimes kidney beans, or “any cereal believed to possess aphrodisiac properties”⁵⁹), has a primary lexical meaning of “stamp” or “seal” (as in “seal ring”); it also means “signal” or “hand gesture,” and may indicate, in some texts, not farina but either of two other Fs: finger positions (physical movements of the hands corresponding to imagined acts) or the female sexual organ, which “seals” the male organ in the sexual act.⁶⁰ The uncertainty of the referents of words used in the Tantras compounds the question of their literal or figurative meaning.

As for the last element, maithuna is usually translated as sexual intercourse, more literally “pairing,” but since all the other terms seem to be material substances, it may mean more precisely “what is derived from sexual intercourse”—that is, the fluids produced in sexual intercourse. This gloss is a bit of a stretch, but it is lexically correct, does assimilate maithuna to the other substances consumed as food at the forbidden feast, and has the added virtue of linking the Five Ms with another widely attested characteristic of South Asian Tantra in its earliest documented stage, a ritual in which what Sterling Hayden in Doctor Strangelove called “precious bodily fluids” (in this case sexual or menstrual discharge) were swallowed as transformative “power substances.”⁶¹

For the Tantras do say things like “The body of every living creature is made of semen and blood. The [deities] who are fond of sexual pleasure drink semen and blood.”⁶² Drinking blood and seed together is a very Tantric thing to do. In one of the Puranic antecedents of the Tantras, “Glorification of the Goddess,” the goddess Chandika came up against an antigod that was actually named Blood Seed (Raktabija), from every drop of whose blood (or, if you prefer, semen) a new antigod appeared. To conquer him, Chandika created the goddess Kali and instructed her to open wide her mouth and drink the blood as well as the constantly appearing progeny of Blood Seed; then Chandika killed him.⁶³ The goddess Kali effectively aborts the birth of offspring of Blood Seed by prophylactically swallowing his seed, the drops of his blood.⁶⁴ In other Puranas, the goddess emits multiforms of herself who extend their tongues to lick up each drop of the semen-blood before it can fall to the ground.⁶⁵ The long tongue of the goddess Kali, like that of the female antigod Long Tongue, the bitch that licks up the oblations, is the upward displacement of her excessive vaginas, a grotesque nightmare image of the devouring sexual woman, her mouth a second sexual organ.

But it is not semen-blood but female blood (together with male semen rather than male blood) that plays the central role in the Tantras. The menstrual blood of the female participant is connected to the polluting but life-giving blood of the menstruating goddess, which flows to the earth each year,⁶⁶ and the blood of her animal victims, decapitated and offered in sacrifice. Not just the goddess, but the Yoginis, a horde of ravishingly beautiful, terrifying, and powerful female deities, participated in the drinking of the sexual fluids. These Yoginis were often placated with blood offerings and animal sacrifices but also propitiated by exchanging sexual fluids with the male practitioners and by consuming those fluids (as well as other prohibited foods). In return the Yoginis granted the practitioners, at the very least, “a powerful expansion of . . . the limited consciousness of the conformist Brahmin practitioner” and, at most, supernatural powers, including the power of flight.⁶⁷

SANITIZING THE SYMBOLISM OF TANTRIC RITUAL

In protest against these transgressive forms of Tantra, many texts insisted that the ritual instructions were never intended to be followed literally but were purely symbolic. The sanitized interpretation of the Five Ms, for instance, introduced new ritual substitutes, glossing madya (wine) as a meditational nectar, mamsa (flesh) as the tongue of the practitioner, matsya (fish) as his breaths, mudra as inner knowledge, and maithuna as “supreme essence.”⁶⁸ We can view the symbolic as a historical development from the actual (as may have been the case with references to human sacrifice at a much earlier period), or we can assume that the ritual was always purely symbolic, never real (like the ogres in the Ramayana), or that both were always already present from the start (like the linga that is and is not the phallus of Shiva). We might summarize the question, Did the Tantrics actually have Tantric sex? and respond with three guesses:

FIRST GUESS: They Did.

Variant 1: Once They Did It; Now They Talk About It.
Variant 2: First They Talked About It, and Then They Did It.
SECOND GUESS: It was Always All in Their Heads.
THIRD GUESS: They Always Did It and Imagined It at the Same Time.

Let us consider them one by one.

The historical argument implies that the Hindus themselves bowdlerized their own tradition: “No one is swallowing anything; we’re all just meditating.” The argument for historical development begins by asserting that Tantra began as a non-Brahmin (sometimes even anti-Brahmin), antihouseholder movement and then was taken up by Brahmins and householders. Since we don’t have access to the earliest layers of Tantra, before the extant texts, we can’t know who the original worshipers were or what they did then; perhaps they did drink blood at first and then stopped, perhaps not. But we do have Tantric texts that seem to indicate that their authors drank blood and performed the sexual ritual. One can argue that Tantric ritual texts tell us precisely what the practitioners did, and that they mean what they say.⁶⁹

Later, the historical argument continues, many Hindus merely imagined that part of the ritual and/or declared that it never had taken place at all,⁷⁰ while Hindus who continued to perform the rituals described them in a code that made it appear that they were merely performing them symbolically. Certain elite Brahmin Tantric practitioners, led by the great systematic and scholastic theologian Abhinavagupta in Kashmir (975-1025 CE), sublimated the ritual into a body of ritual and meditative techniques “that did not threaten the purity regulations required for high-caste social constructions of the self.” The Tantra of the cremation ground was cleaned up and housebroken so that it could cross Brahmin thresholds. The theoreticians eliminated the major goal of the unsanitized Tantrics, the consumption of the substances, and kept only the minor goal, the expansion of consciousness, now viewed as the cultivation of a divine state of mind homologous to (rather than actually produced by) the bliss experienced in sexual orgasm. This sanitized High Hindu Tantra was a revisionist transformation “from a kind of doing to a kind of knowing,” abstracted into a program of meditation mantras. ⁷¹ It led to a split into householder sects, which worshiped Shiva but regarded the ritual texts as merely symbolic meditations, not as prescriptions for action, and more extreme cults, which continued to worship goddesses through rituals involving blood, wine, and erotic fluids, rituals that were entirely real.⁷²

The relatively straightforward historical thesis is complicated, or nuanced, by several factors. Even after the period of transition there was still a place in the secret initiations for the consumption of prohibited foods and sexual fluids; the earlier, unreconstructed form of Tantra may also have persisted as a kind of underground river, flowing beneath the new, bowdlerized, dominant form of Tantra. Another sort of compromise consisted in sexual rituals performed only within the confines of coitus reservatus, eliminating the release of the fluids. But where some texts speak of meditation instead of maithuna, and others talk of coitus reservatus, yet others continue to talk about drinking fluids.

A third compromise consisted in performing the original rituals but shifting the goal from the development of magical powers or the transformation of the worshiper to “the transformative psychological effect of overcoming conventional notions of propriety through the consumption of polluting substances.”⁷³ Finally, a system of overcoding may have permitted some high-caste, conformist householder practitioners to have it both ways, to lead a double life by living conventionally while experimenting in secret with Tantric identities; thus they might put on a public face to claim (to eighteenth-century missionaries, for instance) that they were “shocked” (like Claude Rains in Casablanca) by Tantric practices, in which they themselves covertly participated.⁷⁴

The bowdlerizing effect may also have been a result of the Tantrics’ concern to make crystal clear the line between the use of antinomian elements in the ritual and any sort of casual orgiasticism. That is to say, “Kids, Don’t Try This at Home.” The original Tantric sources on sexualized ritual seldom mention pleasure, let alone ecstasy, though the later texts do speak of ananda (bliss).⁷⁵ Indeed the Tantras seem sometimes to lean over backward to be plus royaliste que le roi in hedging their sexual ceremonies with secrecy, euphemism, and warnings of danger, realizing that in harnessing sex for their rituals, they are playing with fire. In this, the Tantras share in the more general Hindu cultural awareness of the dangers of sex, which even the Kama-sutra emphasizes.

This is a strong argument for the original physical reality of the Tantric substances; why warn people to be careful about them if they don’t exist? Wine, for instance, is, like sex, dangerous. The passage in the Mahanirvana Tantra glossing the Five Ms includes this caveat: “Meat, fish, parched grain, fruits and roots offered to the divinity when wine is offered are known as the purification [shuddhi] of the wine. Drinking wine without this purification, by itself, is like swallowing poison; the person who uses such a mantra becomes chronically ill and soon dies, after living only a short life span.”⁷⁶ The text, well aware of the fact that intoxicating liquors are one of the addictive vices, returns to this issue later on, taking pains to distinguish the ritual use of wine (which is regarded as a goddess) from casual drinking, which it abhors:

Mortals who drink wine with the proper rituals and with a well-controlled mind are virtually immortals on earth. But if this Goddess wine is drunk without the proper rituals, she destroys a man’s entire intellect, life span, reputation, and wealth. People whose minds are intoxicated from drinking too much wine lose their intelligence, which is the means by which they achieve the four goals of life, and such a man does not know what to do or what not to do; every step he takes results in something that he does not want and that other people do not want. Therefore, the king or the leader of the Tantric group should torture and confiscate the property of a man whom drink has made grotesque, with unsteady speech, feet, or hands, wandering in his wits and out of his mind; and he should heavily fine a man whom drink has made foul-mouthed, crazy, or devoid of shame or fear. ⁷⁷

Even wine that has been purified by the ritual is a danger if taken in excess. The social symptoms of alcoholism (“every step he takes results in something that he does not want and that other people do not want”) are as closely observed as those in the equally perceptive description of the compulsive gambler in the Rig Veda.

Another argument for the historical reality of the left-hand Tantric rituals is the fact that such rituals apparently continue to this day, particularly among the Bauls of Bengal and the Nizarpanths (“Hinduized” Ismai’ilis of western India). An unbroken line of teachers and disciples culminates in present-day living Yoginis, who endure for the most part in the greatly reduced form of aged, poor, widowed, and socially marginalized women, who are sexuality exploited, often accused of practicing witchcraft when an untimely death or some other calamity befalls a village, and still occasionally put to death.⁷⁸ At the same time, the bowdlerizing continues too; in modern Kolkata, priests at the Kalighat temple sometimes “Vaishnavize” the goddess Kali by removing reminders of her Tantric background.⁷⁹

In passing, we might consider the variant of the first argument that, in Tantric fashion, reverses it, turning history on its head and arguing that left-hand Tantra was at first just a mental exercise, and then someone took it literally. (First They Talked About It, and Then They Did It.) This too would account for the two levels of Tantra, and it is logically possible, but there is little historical support for it.

So much for the historical argument that Tantra was a ritual that became, for the dominant culture, a kind of myth (or a myth that became a ritual).

The second argument—that the left-hand Tantric ritual was always just a myth (or It was Always All in Their Heads)—is precisely the viewpoint of the people that those who hold with the historical hypothesis regard as the bowdlerizers, the people who insist that Tantra was never real, that the left-hand Tantric rituals were never actually performed and were only symbolic from the very start. These are probably the majority of educated Hindus today. In keeping with the doctrines of illusion (which were, like Tantra, being developed in eleventh-century Kashmir), this philosophical approach argues that all the Tantric rituals were illusory mental images of rituals that were never real, that Tantric sex was never a ritual but only a myth, as cannibalism has sometimes been thought to be, something that some people thought other people were doing, when in fact no one was doing anything of the sort. This would mean that even the people who wrote the early Tantric texts merely imagined that they were doing what they said they were doing. After all, people have imagined that they have flown to heaven and walked among the gods, so why not imagine that you’re drinking your sister’s menstrual blood?

But it is also possible that there were two levels of myth and ritual from the start, as there were in the early Upanishads, and this is the third argument: Some people would meditate on the sacrifice and perform the sacrifice (or They Always Did It and Imagined It at the Same Time), which also allows for the possibility that others would merely meditate, and still others would merely perform the ritual without meditating. In this view, the two paths of Tantra, meditation and action, jnana and karma, lived side by side, like the two paths in the Upanishads, and sometimes even coexisted in a single worshiper. I have argued that stories about Pariahs, goddesses, and antigods may simultaneously reflect actual attitudes to real Pariahs, women, and tribal people and symbolic attitudes to imaginary goddesses, antigods, and, indeed, Pariahs. So too Tantric rituals could be simultaneously real and symbolic. Few would deny that the dominant trend in Tantric interpretation has long been, and remains, metaphorical or metaphysical. But how do we know that the unsanitized school did not interpret their texts, too, metaphorically?

The Mahanirvana Tantra recognizes three grades of humans: men who are like beasts, capable only of conventional worship, such as image worship (corresponding perhaps to the third group in the Upanishads, below the main two paths); heroic men, who practice Tantric rituals (the path of rebirth); and godlike men, who practice Tantric meditation, having transcended and internalized Tantric ritual (the path of Release).⁸⁰ Yet as we saw in the passage “What Use Are Imagined Images?” this text also seems to mock people who are satisfied with mere mental images of rituals without performing them, to argue that it is better to meditate upon the ritual than to perform the ritual, but only if the worshiper has reached a high level of understanding through internalizing the ritual—that is, by performing it many times.

An even closer parallel might be seen in the Upanishadic passage (BU 6.4) in which the worshiper in a sexual embrace with his wife imagines each part of the act as a part of the Vedic offering into the fire, while presumably anyone making the offering into the fire could also imagine each action as its sexual parallel.^id Tantra collapses the metaphor and says that the act of intercourse with the ritual female partner is itself a ritual, like making an offering into the fire. Thus the Tantras fold back into the path of Release the Upanishadic sensuality that the Brahmins had filtered out. The mudras, the gestures, may form a mediating bridge between the act actually performed and the mere imagination of the act; they gesture toward the act. This understanding of the multiple layers of ritual symbolism supplements rather than replaces the chronological hypothesis, for if, as appears most likely, both levels were present from the start, historical factors over the centuries may have caused one level, the purely symbolic and mythical, to rise in importance as the other, the unsanitized ritual, lost power and status.

Given the attention that Indian literary and erotic theory pays to double meanings, to the linguistic “embrace” that simultaneously means two different things, it seems wise to assume that the Tantrics too engaged in split-level symbolism. The substances would be both/and as well as neither/nor: both literal and metaphoric, but also neither of these, being signs pointing to a set of meanings—the irrelevance of pollution or the relevance of nonduality—for which the signifiers (in this case, the Five Ms) are arbitrary. What is significant is not whether these antinomian acts were imagined or performed, but that the higher-order discourse in which the debate about them took place was of central concern not only to the Tantrics but to mainstream Indian religion.⁸¹

In part because some people argue that the early Tantrics never actually did any of the transgressive things they said they did (the second argument), one might be tempted to insist that they always did (the first argument). But the texts, like many, if not most, religious texts, are ambiguous; you can read them to say that they did or that they did not. Thus Tantra was for some people a ritual and for others merely a myth, or for some people a sexual ritual and for others a meditational ritual. And for some, both. Not only does imagination not preclude doing, but doing does not preclude imagination; they can be simultaneous. Tantrics were certainly capable of walking and chewing imaginary gum at the same time.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR THE WOMEN?⁸²

Since sex is both dangerous and central to Tantrism (vama means both “left-hand” and “a woman,” and so to call Tantra the Vama path, as was often done, was to feminize as well as stigmatize it), Tantric sexual rituals, and Tantric women, are very carefully controlled. Many Tantric rituals involve women both as sexual partners and as channelers of the goddess, therefore objects of ritual worship.⁸³ The centrality of women to Tantric ritual may have had a positive influence on more general attitudes to women during this period, such as Bana’s enlightened attitude to the ritual immolation of widows. There is also much talk of shakti and goddesses. Where the Mahabharata and Ramayana and the early Puranas are framed as conversations between two men, one of them a professional narrator (Charioteer), most Shaiva Tantras (and even some of the Vaishnava ones) are framed as dialogues between Shiva and Parvati. But it is by no means clear that Tantra benefited rather than exploited the women involved.

In the central Tantric ceremony, the male Tantric invokes Shiva, who enters him, while his female partner invokes Shiva’s shakti, the goddess, who enters her. The body of the Tantric thus becomes the icon (murti) of the god, and when he unites with his partner, the power of the goddess in her (or in her sexual fluids) unites with his semen and travels up his spine through a series of wheels of power (chakras), or stations of the spine, until they reach the top of his head and produce what is variously described as bliss, complete enlightenment, or Release. The particular power involved in this ritual, called the Kundalini (“the Coiled One”), takes the form of two channels of bodily fluids imagined in the shape of two serpents, male and female, intertwined around the spine (like the medical caduceus, symbolizing the human body in perfect health). Yoga had already established ways of raising the Kundalini to maintain health and, sometimes, to attain immortality; Tantra added the idea of stirring it up with ritual sex. In Nath versions of Kundalini yoga, the submarine mare is said to be a fire at the base of the spine, homologized with the Kundalini serpent (for horses are often connected with snakes in India). The centrality of semen in this ritual suggests that it was designed for men, though some Indian texts (including medical texts) do assume that women, like men, have semen and can draw it up through the spine to the brain. Some texts go so far as to assume that the male Tantric is able to draw the female’s fluid back into his own sexual organ and up his spine, the so-called fountain pen technique.⁸⁴

There is a lot of Tantric talk about how wonderful women are: “Women are gods, women are life, women, indeed, are jewels. One should always associate with women, whether one’s own wife or another’s. What I have told you is the secret of all the Tantras.”⁸⁵Yet there is no evidence that actual Tantric women were equal partners in any sense of the word; to the question What’s in it for the women? (once called “the most embarrassing question you can ask any Tantric”⁸⁶), it would appear that the answer is: Not much.⁸⁷Yet though Tantric ritual performance may construct rigid gender roles, it also allows possibilities for the subversions of those roles.⁸⁸ Some women found a kind of autonomy, freedom from their families, in the Tantric community, but for the most part the rituals were designed to benefit people who had lingas, not yonis.

Though many Tantrics probably had no concern whatsoever for the way they appeared to others,⁸⁹ and most of them were “less concerned with shocking the conventional sensibilities of the wider South Asian society than they were with the transformative effects,”⁹⁰ some did seem to thumb their noses at the bourgeois who condemned them. We can see this attitude in the passage with which this chapter began, “What Use Are Imagined Images?” which mocks conventional religion—fasting and the worship of icons. (The extremists among this sort of Tantric were the Aghoris, “to whom nothing is horrible,” who would do, or eat, anything at all to cultivate and then to demonstrate their indifference to conventional ideas of pleasure and pain.) Since, as we have seen, texts like theKama-sutra assume that sex and carnivorousness are perfectly normal, you have to go out of your way to make them godlike; hence, for some Tantrics, the ritual involved sex not just with your wife but with your sister and/or a low-caste woman.

The Mahanirvana Tantra distinguishes between one’s own wife (svakiya), who is permitted as a partner for the sexual ritual, and two forbidden women, another man’s wife and a woman used in common by the entire group (sadharana).^ie Other Tantric texts from which the author of theMahanirvana Tantra takes pains to distinguish himself permit both one’s own wife and another man’s wife as partners. (His distaste for these texts is an instance of the sanitizing effect.) The ritual contact with one’s own wife involves the use of her “flower,” a common euphemism for menstrual blood. The other women present in the ritual are referred to as shaktis, a term that may designate the women who are the partners of the other men participating in the ritual.

CASTE INVERSIONS

Tantra combines with the indifference to caste characteristic of many renunciant movements the antipathy to caste characteristic of many bhakti movements.

By the eleventh century the Tantras had been available in Sanskrit for some centuries, and Tantra had filtered into Brahmin circles,⁹¹ particularly in Kashmir (in part through the writings of Abhinavagupta), and into Kashmiri court circles.⁹² But this did not by any means limit Tantric audiences to Brahmins; group worship in temples made possible the dissemination of Sanskrit texts to Sanskritless people, and the same would have been true of Tantric circles too. In contrast with the equivocal position of women in Tantra, there is massive evidence that even more than the bhakti movements, Tantra from the very start involved low-caste people. The Tantrics co-opted impurity, using human skulls for their begging bowls, eating nonvegetarian food, and drinking alcohol; they included in their ranks cremation ground ascetics, who were certainly not Brahmins, though not all were from the very lowest castes.⁹³ Tantra turns Puranic Hindu forms upside down; many of its rituals and myths invert, literally or symbolically, Brahmin concepts of power and pollution.

Some Tantras argue that there are only two castes, male and female; one Purana of a Tantric hue argues that all creatures in the universe are the natural worshipers of Shiva and Parvati, since all males are marked with the sign of the god Shiva (the linga) and join with females, who have what Shiva’s consort has, a yoni.⁹⁴ In this view, just as our souls (atmans) replicate brahman within us, so our genitals are semiotic images of the divine, images that we all are born with and always carry on us, as others might acquire and carry a cross or a six-pointed star or, closer to the Tantric home, a Shaiva trident.

Some Tantrics refer to their group as one big happy family, a Kula, and the members of their sect as Kaulas.^if The Mahanirvana Tantra uses this terminology as it flaunts its inclusion of Pariahs. As usual, Shiva is talking to Parvati:

THE IRRELEVANCE OF CASTE

As the footprints of all living creatures disappear inside the footprint of an elephant, so, all dharmas merge into the Kula dharma. How full of merit are the Kaulas! They are themselves the very forms of places of pilgrimage, who by their mere contact purify aliens, Pariahs, and the vilest people. As all the waters that flow into the Ganges become the Ganges, even so all who join in the Kula practice become Kaulas. As the water that flows into the sea is no longer separated [from the other waters in the sea], even so the people who plunge into the water of the Kula are no longer separated [from the other people in the Kula]. All the two-footed creatures on the surface of the earth, beginning with Brahmins and ending with Pariahs, all become masters in the Kula practice. . . . Any member of the Kula who will not allow into the Kula a Pariah or a foreigner [Yavana, “a Greek”], thinking him low, or a woman, despising her, he, being truly low, goes to the lowest place.⁹⁵

The text assumes that on the one hand, Pariahs and aliens (mlecchas) are impure, as it boasts that contact with Tantrics will purify them and that most people will not treat them (or women) with respect, but also, on the other hand, that they are not too low to be allowed into the Tantric circle, and if they join the Family, they are to be treated with respect. The primary concern is not to uplift Pariahs but to extol the power of the Tantras: “If they can save Pariahs, imagine what they will do for a Brahmin!” Thus the text offers evidence of people on both sides of the fight for and against caste.

The Tantras, like some of the Puranas, offer several related arguments to justify, on the one hand, the antinomian nature of certain Tantric texts and rituals and, on the other, the inclusion of people that caste Hindus generally exclude—even certain manifestations of the god Shiva himself. Some Puranas say that Shiva himself is a Pariah, lower than a Shudra,⁹⁶ and in vernacular folktales he is often sexually involved with Pariah women.⁹⁷ When Shiva appears as the wandering beggar (Bhikshatana-murti), well known from Chola bronzes and stone carvings in temples, he has a bell tied to his leg; as bells were worn by Pariahs in order to warn the upper castes of their approach, the iconography “emphasizes in a way the belief that the god was outside the pale of orthodox Vedism.”⁹⁸ In this form, as well as in the form of Bhairava, Shiva is often accompanied by a dog, the Pariah of the animal world.

DEAD ANIMALS

The passage with which this chapter begins rejects the “natural” (sahaja) path to Release, denying that “the serpents and cattle and birds and fish” are instinctively pious. Yet animals play an essential part in Tantric ritual; the five substances of the cow are the model inverted by the Five Ms (or Five Fs), two of which are animal substances (fish and flesh). Various animals were to be sacrificed to the goddess, including two of the Vedic pashus (goat and sheep) as well as deer, buffalo, pig, porcupine, hare, lizard, tortoise, and rhinoceros. The animal was to be killed with a sharp blow from a knife; then the officiating priest would place a lamp on the head of the animal and offer the head to the goddess.⁹⁹

Despite the linguistic overlay of the Vedic Gayatri hymn^ig that the priest whispers into the right ear of the animal, the sacrifice is not at all Vedic; it uses non-Vedic as well as Vedic sacrificial animals (omitting cattle and horses but including porcupines), with a non-Vedic laxness (almost any animal will do) and a non-Vedic bluntness (calling a spade a spade when they kill the animal). Moreover, where the Vedic ritual went out of its way to suffocate the animal in order to minimize the spilling of blood, here the blood, so central to Tantra, is the main point of the ritual.

When it comes to vegetarianism, the Tantrics, like other Hindus, compromise: They allow the eating of meat sometimes and with a few restrictions, some of which are the same and some different from those of the Brahmin imaginary:

MEAT NOT TO EAT

Anyone who knowingly eats human flesh or the flesh of a cow will be purified if he fasts for a fortnight; this is the prescribed restoration. A man who has eaten the flesh of an animal that has the form of a man, or the flesh of an animal that eats flesh, may purify himself of this evil by a three-day fast. A man who has eaten food cooked by foreigners, Pariahs, men who are like beasts, or enemies of the Kula—he may become pure by fasting for a fortnight. If he should knowingly eat the leftovers of these people, he should fast for a month; if unknowingly, for a fortnight. If he eats food prepared by lower castes, even once, he should fast for three days to purify himself.

But if food prepared by a man who is like a beast, or by a Pariah or a foreigner, is placed within the Tantric circle or in the hand of a Tantric, one can eat it without incurring any evil. Anyone who eats forbidden food to save his life in time of death or famine, in an emergency, or when it is a matter of life and death does not incur evil. No sins of improper eating count when food is eaten on the back of an elephant, on stones or logs so big that they can only be carried by several men, or where there is no one to notice anything reprehensible. One should not kill animals whose flesh is not to be eaten, or diseased animals, not even for the sake of a divinity; anyone who does this commits an evil act. ¹⁰⁰

This passage has a fairly high-caste orientation. The flesh of cows is as special as that of humans, and the penance for eating either one is the same as the one for eating food prepared by Pariahs, and not nearly as heavy as the penance for eating their leavings. The usual dharma-shastra rules for emergencies (anything goes) are here extended rather whimsically to eating on elephants or on very large stones (why?) and rather cynically to moments when no one is looking. But the escape clause of permission to eat animals for religious reasons is here ruled out of court. Indeed, if the meat has a different effect for someone who knowingly eats it, but not for the animal that knows it is being killed for a sacrifice, the mental state of the sacrificer must matter more than that of the animal; eating meat is therefore no longer a moral or medicinal problem but a psychological problem.

The rules for not killing are not as complex as the rules for not eating:

ANIMALS NOT TO KILL

A man who knowingly kills a cow should fast for a month and then eat nothing but crumbs for a month; then for a third month he should eat only food that he has begged for. At the end of the penance, he should shave his head and feed members of the Kula, and both distant and close relatives. If he does it unknowingly, he should do half the penance, and he should not shave or cut his nails or wash his clothes until he has completed his vow. If a cow is killed as a result of lack of care, a Brahmin is purified by fasting for eight days, a Kshatriya for six days, a Vaishya for four, and a Shudra for two.

If anyone willingly kills an elephant, camel, buffalo, or horse, he should fast for three days and then he is free of evil. If he kills a deer, ram, goat, or cat, he should fast for a day; for a peacock, parrot, or goose, he should fast as long as there is daylight. If he kills any other animals that have bones, he should eat no flesh for one night. If he kills living creatures that have no bones, he is purified merely by feeling sorry. Kings who, when they are hunting, kill beasts, fish, or birds do not commit evil, for this is the eternal dharma of kings. But one should always avoid injuring creatures except for the sake of the gods; a man who injures creatures according to the sacred rules is not smeared by evil.¹⁰¹

Here, in contrast with the previous passage, there is a dispensation for killing for the sake of the gods. And kings are forgiven their hunting, for Tantra is always inclined toward kings. The distinction between knowing and unknowing action, willing and (by implication) unwilling action, is crowned by the unusual acknowledgment of remorse, a factor that is implicit but seldom explicit in earlier texts about vegetarianism; here it is enough merely to be sorry for certain animals that you kill.

SHAIVA TEMPLES, TANTRIC TEMPLES

ELEPHANTA AND ELLORA

Right before, during, and particularly after the reign of Harsha, the great phase of Hindu temple building that has been called the iconic or canonic period began, when structural temples began to supersede excavated ones, and each region developed in a different way.¹⁰² In Maharashtra, the temple to Shiva on the island of Elephanta off the coast of Bombay testifies to the power and prestige of the worship of Shiva at this time and illustrates several of the dominant myths of Shiva, forming a base that the Tantrics often reversed in building their very different rituals and myths. And the Kailasanatha (or Kailasa) temple of Shiva at Ellora demonstrates in stone what Tantra did in ritual: turns conventional Hindu forms on their head.

These two magnificent stone temples capture on the wing the transition between excavated caves and freestanding rock-cut structural temples, for both of them are simultaneously a cave and a temple. Michelangelo once remarked that the form of the figure that he carved out of a stone was already there, hidden within the stone, and all he had to do was to remove those parts of the stone that were not a part of the figure. The same explanation could be made for these extraordinary temples: The artisans simply (!) cut into the rock and removed all the earth and stone that were not a part of a massive Hindu temple. They seem at first glance to be purely natural caves, and the convex carvings within them are like the so-called self-created (svayambhu) lingas formed of natural rock growths (stalagmites and stalactites) or the temples in Orissa that look, from a distance, like gigantic mushrooms growing there. But then the artistry comes into focus.

Elephanta is almost certainly earlier than Ellora, generally attributed to Krishnaraja I of the Kalachuri dynasty (c. 550-55), who, together with other possible patrons,¹⁰³ was a devout member of the Shaiva Pashupata sect that was becoming prominent in this region at this time.¹⁰⁴ The temples were created by carving out rock in such a way as to leave intact the forms of the rows of columns and crossbeams, the internal spaces and the images. Sculptures depict Shiva and Parvati marrying and, later, playing dice; Shiva bringing the Ganges from heaven to earth by letting it flow through his hair, Shiva dancing, Shiva as the great yogic teacher Lakulisha, Shiva impaling an antigod on his trident, Shiva as the androgyne (Ardhanarishvara); and the linga. One scene represents the myth, told in the Ramayana (7.16) and elsewhere, in which Ravana, objecting to the lovemaking of Shiva and Parvati on Kailasa, lifted up the mountain, whereupon Shiva simply put his foot down hard on the mountain and imprisoned Ravana under it.

As only 150 miles and two hundred years separate the great Shiva temples at Elephanta and Ellora, it is likely that the artisans of Ellora knew about Elephanta; they certainly adopted techniques from Elephanta, such as the use of basalt. More than thirty temples were carved from the hillside at Ellora between the sixth and ninth centuries CE. The Rashtrakutas built the Kailasanatha temple to Shiva in the eighth century CE, taking over a site where there was already a much smaller cave temple. The Kailasa temple took fifteen years to complete. Many of the craftsmen were imported from the kingdoms of the defeated Chalukyas and Pallavas. As a result, the temple tower resembles the “chariots” at Mamallapuram, and the style of the Kailasanatha temple echoes, though on a far grander scale, aspects of the Pallava shore temple at Mamallapuram built during the same period.

The architects of Ellora excavated the great cave right out of the living basalt of the hillside, leaving, on the floor of the courtyard at the base, freestanding, life-size rock-cut elephants and two massive rock-cut columns, as well as the temple itself, whose tower rises to a height of about ninety feet, or, one might say, whose base is cut down to about ninety feet. The result is an inverted or inside-out temple that one has to climb down into in order to enter, a negative temple like a negative number, turning conventional architectural forms upside down. It solves the problem of decorating the outside of a cave. For since worshipers would circumambulate outside the temple (or stupa), people grew to expect temples to have their decorations on the outside. But the early cave temples could be decorated only inside. The solution was to hollow out the hill and then build a temple whose outside was inside the hill. The ornate exterior of the mass isolated by the deep trenches, replete with columns and parapets and moldings, becomes an extended trompe l’oeil, or optical illusion, looking as if it had been built up like other temples. The artisans also hollowed out the inside (leaving the columns to support it), so that one can also wander inside it just like any other temple. But unlike other temples, this one is a combination of a cave and a mountain.

The temple as a whole was conceived as a replica of the Himalayan peak of Mount Kailasa, the home of the god Shiva.¹⁰⁵ Most of the individual scenes and figures, exquisitely carved, depict Shiva and Parvati, but there is also a magnificent image of Durga killing the buffalo. The artists even went so far as to carve, under the temple, at the bottom of the whole colossal edifice, the image of Ravana being trapped by Shiva under Mount Kailasa,¹⁰⁶ a scene also carved at Elephanta. But the Ellora version has a difference, which echoes the bold negative carving of the temple as a whole: The image of Ravana, connected to the mother rock only at his knees and his many arms, is otherwise completely detached from the background and carved in the round.¹⁰⁷ Ravana is thus finally separated from the rest of the monument and left connected to the dark underworld from which the artists had freed the temple, the “mother rock” that gave birth to everything else but held him back. Later Ramayanas, beginning in the Tamil tradition, tell of a shadow Ravana (“Peacock Ravana,” Mayili-Ravana) who lived in a shadow universe under the earth,¹⁰⁸ like this Ravana underground at Ellora. We might also see the Kailasa temple as an image of the upside-down world that Trishanku created.

The Kailasanatha Temple at Ellora.

KHAJURAHO AND KONARAK

Two other great temple complexes deserve our consideration here; though both were built somewhat later than the period covered by this chapter, they are best understood in the context of Tantra. The images in the temples of Khajuraho and Konarak are solid evidence of the wide spread of sectarian worship at this time, and some of the Shaiva sects represented there were Tantric.

Khajuraho, the capital of the small kingdom of Bundelkhand that the Chandellas ruled, was a busy cultural center where poets, grammarians, and playwrights rubbed shoulders with affluent Jaina merchants and court officials. ¹⁰⁹ Monastic Hindu establishments that arose and grew powerful during this period encouraged the kings to build extravagant temples between 900 and 1150 CE.¹¹⁰ The great complex of twenty-five temples at Khajuraho and the smaller, exquisite temple in the shape of the chariot of the sun at Konarak, as well as other temples in Bhubaneshwar in Orissa (and in Assam and Katmandu), are noted for the carvings of couples in erotic embraces—often called maithuna figures—that decorate their outer walls. Some of the couples are quite demure, gently kissing or fondling each other, but others are in full sexual penetration, “making ingenious love,”¹¹¹ some in positions that the Kama-sutra warns can only be mastered with practice.

The Temple of the Sun at Konarak, in Orissa, decorated with such figures, was built by the young Narasimhadeva I (1238-58 CE), allegedly to please his mother (a strangely Oedipal gift). It is entirely in the form of a chariot, and the sun is depicted on it in miniature, with his own charioteer driving his seven horses, another instance of the whole replicated within itself. Enormous, three-dimensional animals—kneeling elephants crushing warriors and warhorses overwhelming demons—flank the chariot that is the temple, and a frieze depicting both wild and tame elephants, as well as amorous couples, encloses the lower wall. “Colossal stone wheels, each intricately carved, were positioned along its flanks and a team of massive draught horses, also stone-cut, reared seawards, apparently scuffing and snorting under the strain.”¹¹² Though images carved on the temple show the Man-Lion (Narasimha, one of the avatars of Vishnu) worshiping images of Durga and Jagannatha (another form of Vishnu), it is dedicated to the worship of the sun (Surya), a Vedic god who still had the power to inspire the ruling family to construct this monument.

Less explicit (i.e., noncopulating) erotic figures are carved on many other Hindu temples throughout India. (Even Buddhist stupas are often graced by the buxom tree spirits called Yakshis or Yakshinis and the gorgeous courtesan nymphs called Apsarases.) These more muted erotic scenes are a part of the attempt to represent the whole of the material world on the outer walls of temples, both to celebrate the beauty of the world and, perhaps, to gather up all the sensual forces there so that the worshipers can leave them behind as they progress deeper toward the still center of the temple. Such images promise the worshiper the blessings of fertility as well as eroticism. Three levels of eroticism are depicted with very different degrees of prominence: The sexy women are the largest images; the amorous couples are not nearly so large; and the scenes of group sex, stylized and geometrically arranged, are smaller still. The few obscene friezes are very small indeed and placed at difficult-to-spot places, perhaps a private joke on the part of the sculptors who carved the temples.

The actual maithuna couples on Khajuraho and Konarak also partake of these general powers of fertility but may be meant to invoke, in addition, the magical efficacy that the sexual act was supposed to have to protect monuments, which may explain why the erotic images are often placed at the ritually vulnerable parts of temples.¹¹³ Alternatively, the images may have been placed at meeting points of buildings so as to play on “a visual pun between juncture and copulation.”¹¹⁴ The erotic couples on these temples are often said to be Tantric; Khajuraho was an important center for various Tantric sects,¹¹⁵ and the Chandellas were probably Tantrics.¹¹⁶ A few friezes at Khajuraho and more in Assam may be specific references to Tantric rituals.¹¹⁷ For on them, the positioning of the couples (and sometimes groups of three or more) agrees with details of some Tantric texts. Some of the gorgeous women seem to be not Yakshis or Apsarases but Tantric Yoginis, more particularly in some temples the sixty-four Yoginis that the Tantras speak of,¹¹⁸ some with animal faces.¹¹⁹ The significant number of Yogini temples constructed between the eighth and twelfth centuries lends weight to the argument that these were the places where Tantric rituals took place.¹²⁰ One art historian has commented on the “curious paradox” that some of the temples at Khajuraho “can only be fully appreciated today by being viewed from the air.”¹²¹ Were they meant to be viewed by flying Yoginis?

The Chandellas built one temple at Khajuraho at the time of Mahmud of Ghazni’s first invasion of India¹²² and the Khandariya Mahadeva temple, the greatest of them all, during the subsequent Ghaznavid invasions, though the invading forces never came near Khajuraho. While temples were not necessarily built in response to these invasions (they are equally, if not more, a response to the erosion of Vedic ritual and the rise of new forms of sectarian worship), the building of temples took on new meaning in the presence of Islamic kingdoms and armies. The temple carvings abound in martial themes—warriors, weaponry, elephants, big horses rearing and leaping.¹²³ To the limited extent that temple building is a political act, these temples eloquently express the Hindu rulers’ defiance of the Muslim invaders.¹²⁴

It is perhaps puzzling that though the erotic images on these temples would have been anathema to pious Muslims, they were never the victims of Muslim iconoclasm. They may have been spared because the Ghaznavids did not get to Khajuraho and the Mughals got there only after the Chandellas had deserted the temples, which had then faded from prominence and weren’t marked on Aurangzeb’s maps.¹²⁵ The Orissan temples, as well as the temple of Jagannatha at Puri (built during Muhammad bin Tughluq’s reign, in the late tenth to late eleventh centuries),¹²⁶ may have escaped because they were too remote to attract Muslim attention. Or could it be that the Muslims, who were, after all, themselves past masters of erotic poetry and painting, cast an appreciative eye upon the carvings and simply rode by?