Tara means “star” in Sanskrit, and some scholars trace the origins of her cult to the Mesopotamian goddesses of the stars, Ishtar and Astarte: indeed the modern English word “star” and “Tara” are almost certainly linked through a common Indo-European root, via the Persian Sitara, the Greek Aster and the Latin Stella, all of which have the same meaning. It is even possible that the modern Catholic cult of Our Lady Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, may be part of the same tradition. Moving eastwards in the early centuries AD, the cult of Tara quickly became central to Mahayana Buddhist cosmology, where the great goddess was worshipped as the consort of the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara and came to represent primordial female energy. As such, it was believed that she enabled her devotees to surmount all forms of peril and danger.
In her Hindu form, which re-entered Bengal from the Himalayas via Buddhist Tibet, and hence is sometimes known as “Chini Tara”—Chinese Tara—the goddess has always been perceived as a more volatile figure than her Buddhist devotees understood her to be. According to the Mantra Mahodadhi of Mahidhara, the great medieval Sanskrit work on Tantra, Tara can be found “sitting on a white lotus situated at the centre of the water enveloping the entire universe.
With her left hand she holds a knife and a skull and, in her right hands, a sword and a blue lotus. Her complexion is blue, and she is bedecked with ornaments … She is decorated with three beautiful serpents and has three eyes. Her tongue is always moving, and her teeth and mouth appear terrible. She is wearing a tiger skin around her waist, and her forehead is decorated with ornaments of white bone. She is seated on the heart of a corpse and her breasts are hard … [She is] the mistress of all three worlds.
In this frightening aspect, she is not alone, but instead part of a sisterhood who encompass a range of visions of the divine feminine at its most terrible: a brood of dark-skinned and untameable Tantric divinities who are worshipped in Bengal, and who here take precedence in popular piety over the more familiar male gods: Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. These goddesses, known as the Ten Mahavidyas, are attended by jackals, furies and ghosts. They cut off their own heads, and are offered blood sacrifices by their devotees. In the miniatures which illustrate the Tantric texts, they prefer to have sex with corpses than living men or gods, straddling them on a burning cremation pyre and bringing the dead to life through the power of their shakti. These goddesses, embodying all that would normally be considered outrageous or even repulsive, lie at the shifting threshold between the divine and demonic, violating approved social values and customs—“going up the down-current,” as a Bengali Tantric once put it to me.
All this is a survival of some of the oldest forms of Tantric rites which date back to the early medieval period, when they were once widespread around India. The word “Tantra” is a reference to ancient texts that deal with yogic practices, magical rites, metaphysics and philosophy, and which straddle the world of Hindu Vaishnavites and Shavites, and cross over into not only Jainism and Mahayana Buddhism, but even Chinese Daoism and some forms of Sufi Islam.
Though Tantrism became well defined only at the end of the first millennium AD, some of its constituent elements, such as its goddess cults, shamanism and sexual yoga, may date back to pre-Aryan and pre-Vedic religious currents, and in many ways are fundamentally opposed to the ideas and structures of the Vedas, which emphasise the social and religious hierarchies. Tantrics, in contrast, oppose society’s conventions and encourage the individual of whatever background to develop a mystical relationship with the deity within, placing kama, desire in every sense of the word, in the service of liberation. While Tantric texts can represent an elevated philosophical tradition, popular Tantric practice is often oral and spontaneous. It aims at ritually gaining access to the energy of the godhead that created and controls the universe, then concentrating and internalising that power in the body of the devotee. This turns the world and the body into channels of salvation, and a means of merging with the Absolute, but also grants tangible magical powers to the devotee, in this life, in the present.
Shaivite Tantrics regard the universe as the product of the divine play of Shakti and Shiva, which are ultimately identical, separate aspects of the same unity, like fire and heat. To access this energy, early Hindu Tantric rituals seem to have encouraged blood sacrifice in cremation grounds as a means of feeding and winning over a series of terrifying and blood-thirsty Tantric deities. By the tenth century there was a change of emphasis towards a type of erotico-mystical practice involving congress with the Yoginis, powerful and predatory female Shakti divinities who demanded that they be worshipped and fed with offerings of sexual emissions, as well as with human and animal sacrifice.