We now have to look at some of the detail of what is proposed in the
'secret' ceremonies of traditional Tantra and compare and contrast with
what is possible or desirable today. The first and most culturally
challenging aspect is the sharp difference in roles betwen the duti who
performs the secret ritual and the wife of the brahman who takes part
in mainstream Vedic ritual. This is the dualism that should perhaps
cause pause for thought far more than the male/female dualism that so
many LGBT neo-tantrists want to wish away in their more recent
appropriation. This separation appears to be at the heart of a more
general essentialist separation of women from women, crudely put in the
Western tradition as the 'whore/madonna' model of what it is to be a
woman. Often presented as a product of 'patriarchy', this almost
certainly misrepresents what is going on. We have not only males coping
with the female when female power is essentialised into separate spheres
of duty and pleasure (and then, in Tantra, the latter is given its
religious or spiritual form as means and justification) but an attempt
to institutionalise these into different forms of essentialist female
self-imagery in pre-modern and even modern culture.
Even
today, we see this same bifurcation made by women (not men), under
apparent conditions of freedom, into the 'good' feminist and the slut
or, in reverse, the sex-positive feminist and the oppressive radical
feminist. What is going on here? Merely the overlay of in-born or
culturally developed authoritarian or socially conservative attitudes on
the one hand and libertarian and socially expansive modes over and
against gender difference. What was imposed in traditional society from
above, creating the unhappiness of free spirits stuck in formal
household ritual and those yearning for stability but stuck in the
lifestyle of the outsider, is now a matter of personal choice (if you
can escape the impositions of those immediately around you), yet the
inherent personality differences remain because they are locked into our
genetic variation. Instead of a sphere for the household and social
conformity and a sphere for difference and autonomy, the post-modern
world has opened up a brutal struggle in which authoritarians now strive
to impose their vision on all regardless - this is the world of
fascists, Islamists, radical feminists, late Marxists and 'Mumsies'.
Tantric
traditionalism resolves this issue without any necessary equity and
without real care for individual choice by accepting an open world of
duty and authority and creating a secret world of self-discovery and
exploration. This is where a modern reversal into that world as it
actually existed is neither likely to be successful nor desirable. The
modern world has created the totalitarian mode of thinking (where the
traditionalist world permitted private life) and the impulse of the
post-modern authoritarian is not towards traditionalism but towards
totalitarianism. This challenge is a challenge to Tantric revivalism
which absolutely depends if it is to be even remotely authentic not on
itself being defined by external 'correct behaviour' (which is where
neo-tantra often heads as it accommodates contemporary liberal mores)
but by the existence of a private life 'that does not frighten the
horses'.
We find a situation where (insofar as
authority does not interfere unless certain boundaries are crossed) the
existence of a strict rules-based society (which we do not have) almost
demands a secret but not subversive alternative culture. This can exist
today but not be truly subversive any more. Yet it can no longer exist
safely in the long run because there is no defining authority which
cannot be owned by either the authoritarians or libertarians against the
other (because of the arrival of democracy) and where social rules are
inchoate and 'up for grabs'. No alternative subversive culture can exist
now without being in some sort of permanent dialectic with the constant
rules-based assault on its margins. Subversive cultures are always
trying to find their function on shifting sands. The Vedic housewife and
the duti cannot live in harmony and balance today because they
can evade each other and nor should they since there should be no reason
why 'housewives' cannot participate in sexual exploration if they so
will it or the modern duti not decide to find a partner and raise
a family. This state of cultural flux is millions of cultural miles
from the cultural stability and fixed personal statuses of traditional
Tantra. The only way of reproducing the original situation is to create a
cult and such a cult, precisely because it is not embedded in the
greater society, is by definition not mimicing Tantra's essential
quality at all - its logic as part of a total cultural system. The point
is that Tantra was 'secret' but not outside the culture. Anything
secret today is simply criminal or playing an unnecessary game.
We
have not discussed the male part in all this since it is merely the
mirror image of the female - that is, engaged in functionally
essentialist roles where the Tantra only exists to allow the person to
break free in order to develop their own selves in relation to the
universe but where the method involves a re-essentialising of not only
the practitioner but his (or theoretically her) partner. There are
equivalent essentialist roles in our society but these are more likely
to be embedded in the mind and only sustained rather than commanded by
society. An unhappy LGBT person has a solution in that they can go to a
big city and join an open and lively LGBT community (at least in the
West if not in Russia or other socially less developed cultures) but an
Indian Tantric who engages in 'secret ceremonies' (basically sexual) has
still to go underground precisely and paradoxically because they were
part of a total pre-modern culture - the clue is in the word 'secret'.
Yes, modern swingers hide their identity for social reasons and many gay
people never get around to telling their parents but it is possible not
to hide and possible to tell for all except paedophiles and
practitioners of bestiality. It is just a matter of wilful courage and
not a war against the rest of humanity. The equivalent liberatory
function to Tantra required today is not the sexual act itself but a
psychological one of liberation from the dead weight of personal pasts
on the one hand and from ideological theories based on faith or
exploitation on the other. The first expresses itself in the
psychotherapeutic movement and the second in exhausting political
struggle between bands of activists working on a populist democracy with
weak and malleable politicians. Neither situation existed in medieval
India.
This casts more light on the antinomian and
dramatic insistence that the secret rites are nothing without alcohol,
meat and sex [the three Ms]. Indeed, at one point in the Tantraloka, we
have the assertion that 'those who perform the sacrifice without the [usually forbidden] three MS, sources of bliss, also go to a dreadful hell' [Ch XXIX 99-100]. But, and this is an important caveat, only the virasadhaka
(our 'heroic being') is in a fit shape to break the rules in order to
by-pass the normal Vedic methods to attaining bliss. Yet we also have
the statement in the Tantraloka just before the last that 'Enslaved beings who are deprived of the three Ms are deprived of bliss altogether'.
This might well imply that even the accepted socially normative rituals
are a waste of space and that only a tiny elite of antinomians can get
to a state of bliss and presumably improve their reincarnation
prospects. So, the lads who get smashed after a steak and chips and get
laid on a Friday night in Cardiff are not going to get reincarnated well
because they are not 'heroic beings' but neither is the bank clerk
devoted to his wife and young family who sticks to the rules and takes
the train home - only a curiously self-regarding elite group of magical
practitioners who get smashed after a steak and chips and then get laid
on a Friday night in self-created cultic circumstances will do so.
Indeed, everyone is going to go to hell except these cultists, it would
seem.
Back to the duti who has another quality that must be remarked upon - her devotion to the interest of the man, to the sadhaka. It is explicitly stated that 'her selection, therefore, should be irrespective of her beauty, caste, etcet.'
[Ch. XXIX 101]. If we move aside this devotional aspect - though this
is expressed in terms of identification with rather than worship per se -
the picture of the duti is not unattractive: her superficial and social aspects are of no consequence but what is important is her vira,
the same bold and 'virile' character of the man, the same lack of doubt
and determination and the same wilfulness towards the end. Now the
picture of the woman changes - she is not an excluded exploited woman
(from the perspective of those commited to social duty) but an
independent woman choosing to engage in sexual ritual. Once inside the
closed secretive ritual circle, we find what we would recognise as
something more modern, although I would prefer to see it as simply
liberatory of the sort of person to be found in all times and in all
societies and which only wealth and progress has enabled to come out
into the open in recent centuries.
This will to be is
the probable secret here and the will to be applies to both partners.
Indeed, there is an argument that it is the male that is still stuck in
the essentialist traditionalism that make him the organising principle
and that it is the woman, equally active within the ceremony, that is
the more liberated within what amounts to a cultically sanctioned safe
haven. It is the male voice in the writing that sounds shrill and
hysterical. The female voice may be silent but appears silent from
strength and inwardness. For all the male chatter, it is she who is the
active principle. Three types of duti are suggested, She who is
divine, infusing the virile (boldness and power) into the male (an
active principle). She who is initiated by a more advanced male into her
own state beyond fear and doubt (a passive but learning version). And
she who is a sahaja (a spiritual sister) where the potencies
between male and female are experienced simultaneously (a principle of
equality). There is nothing inherently exploitative in any of these -
she is in command or she is learning or she is 'enjoying'. She is not a
thing being used - at least in the theory.
The pushing
away of the wife (and the proscriptions against incest and intimate
friends) from this process is equally interesting because there is a
deliberate attempt to distance the sexual ritual from a certain set of
'love' emotions - attachment, friendship, affection, responsibility -
but without negating a consequent unattached rush of different
unattached or even detached 'love-like' emotions from the act itself.
There is a refinement here that is lacking in Western discourse where
love is an either/or in which sexual engagement without the former set
of emotions is almost automatically consigned into the category of
animal rutting. The Tantric model is very different, enabling a wider
palette of emotional (or is it biochemical?) engagement centred on the
aim or intention of the act. Perhaps the second set of emotions are best
described in terms of bliss under conditions of mutual and egalitarian
respect without the necessity of other bonds. The texts go further by
suggesting that the duti is selected precisely because there is
no prior sexual desire involved and this is seen as part of the heroic
act - which, of course, is totally counter-intuitive to all Western ways
of thinking. The whole business is not even supposed to be 'enjoyable'
in a conventional sense (that is as fulfilment of desire), but just a
means, a trigger, to an end, the inwardness of knowing oneself (to put
it into Greek terms) and establishing the degree to which one is focused
on the ultimate end of 'heaven' (to put it into Christian). There is an
energetics here that help define what is supposed to be felt and which
takes us closer to the psycho-technology involved: what happens during
sex in terms of stimulus on the male; the going deep within; the
energetics of climax; the grounding that takes place; the orgasm itself;
and the duti as energetic principle in herself. The sadhaka
becomes drawn into his own internality, a biochemical response
associated with the heart or with the sexual organs. From one of these
perceived centres, the bliss emerges.
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