Nine Lives(86)

Once satisfied, the Yoginis were believed to reveal themselves as ravishing young women by incarnating in female devotees with whom male practitioners sexually interacted. Especially important was the oral ingestion of sexual fluids thought to give the devotee access to the goddess’s supernatural powers. In this way Tantric sex was used to awaken latent energies from the base of the body and bring them to the fore, so using the physical body with its blood and semen, desires and energies, as a way of accessing the spiritual, and the divine. The elaborate scenes of group and oral sex displayed on the walls of the temples at Khajuraho may well illustrate such rites. Yet while Tantra has come in the West to be associated almost exclusively with “Tantric sex,” the Tantric texts which survive from this period were always more concerned with death and transcendence than the sexualisation of ritual, which was only one part of a much larger whole.

Moreover, the sexual aspect of medieval Indian Tantra is quite different both in aim and practice from the “Tantric sex” marketed in illustrated manuals published in the contemporary West. Early Tantric texts make no reference to pleasure, bliss or ecstasy: the sexual intercourse involved in the rites was not an end itself so much as a means of generating the semen whose consumption lay at the heart of these Tantric fertility rituals—a sort of inverted Tantric version of the offerings made in Vedic fire sacrifices. This original Devi-propitiating Tantric sex stands at an unimaginable distance away from the sort of faddish Tantra cults embraced by Western rock stars, with their celebration of aromatherapy and coitus reservatus, a movement well described by the French writer Michel Houllebecq as “a combination of bumping and grinding, fuzzy spirituality and extreme egotism.”

These original esoteric medieval Tantric traditions nearly died out in India, sinking from view around the thirteenth century AD, probably partly as a result of the disruption that followed in the wake of the violence of the Islamic invasions, which broke many of the lines of guru-disciple relationships through which Tantric secrets were passed. Tantrics later became a particular target of European missionaries, who made “the obscene ceremonies of the Hindoos” central to their polemics. The nineteenth-century rise of the Hindu reform movements, many of which emanated from Bengal in reaction to British missionaries, nearly finished this process. For the reform movements championed what some scholars have called the “Rama-fication” of Hindu worship in the Ganges plains: the rise of the Vaishnavite bhakti cults of Lord Krishna and especially Lord Rama, to the extent that they eclipsed many other more traditional and popular forms of local devotion involving Devi cults and blood sacrifices, which were judged primitive, superstitious and anti-modern by the urban and often Western-educated reformers.

All this conspired to make Tantra a marginal phenomenon almost everywhere except in certain areas of Bengal, Kerala and Assam, as well as in Nepal and Bhutan, where Tantra still flourishes as a mainstream form of religion, in the latter case within a Buddhist rather than Hindu context.

At the root of popular modern Tantric practice lies a deeply subversive and heterodox concept: the idea of reaching God through opposing convention, ignoring social mores and breaking taboos. Whereas caste Hindus believe that purity and good living are safeguarded by avoiding meat and alcohol, by keeping away from unclean places like cremation grounds and avoiding polluting substances such as bodily fluids, Tantrics believe that one path to salvation lies in pushing every boundary and inverting these strictures, so turning what is polluting into instruments of power.

Tarapith, in other words, is a place where the ordinary world is comprehensively turned upside down. Today, the rites that take place in the burning ground involve forbidden substances and practices—alcohol, ganja and ritualised sex, sometimes with menstruating women—for Tara’s devotees believe that the goddess transmutes all that is forbidden and taboo, and turns these banned acts and forbidden objects into pathways of power. Onto this base of transgressive sacrality has grown a whole body of esoteric practice involving secret knowledge, rituals, mantras and mandalas.

The dark and wooded cremation ground in Tarapith is the perfect backdrop to these practices and beliefs, and attracts scores of the hardest of hardcore Tantric sadhus—wanderers, sorcerers and skull feeders. Many of these have been partially unhinged by their experiences or extreme acts of asceticism, and are now looked upon as holy madmen, living in a mystical anarchy in a great open-air lunatic asylum for the divinely mad. These red-robed sadhus live here with their skulls and their spells, with the half-burned corpses, and the dogs and the jackals, the vultures and the carrion crows, occasionally throwing bones at passing visitors to warn them off.