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  • Kiss of the Yogini: “Tantric Sex” in Its South Asian Context
  • Glen Alexander Hayes
Kiss of the Yogini: “Tantric Sex” in Its South Asian Context. By David Gordon White. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. 372. $48.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper).

Kiss of the Yogini is a remarkable and truly impressive feat of scholarship. The author, David Gordon White, is one of the world’s leading South Asianists and an historian of religions at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This work is of major relevance to any cross-cultural understanding of the roles of sexuality in religion, culture, and history. It both offers a historical critique of many modern, especially “New Age” interpretations of the ancient Asian traditions of “Tantra,” and challenges older Western scholarship on the topic. Since “tantric sex” has become a ubiquitous and clichéd trope in the area of sexuality studies, White’s volume offers a novel and paradigm-shifting reappraisal about its origins and history. Kiss of the Yogini is a rich and complex effort, as White calls upon not only numerous Sanskrit texts (which he translates himself) but also a wide range of ethnographic, artistic, architectural, and sociological materials. He does this in a witty and engaging style, which only enhances his scholarship.

White begins by arguing that what is today typically regarded as “tantric sex” (that is, extended sessions of blissful coitus) is not what the earliest (sixth to eighth century CE) Tantric texts entailed. Rather, he convincingly shows, these earliest Kaula (clan-based) Tantrics were more concerned with the propitiation of terrifying and powerful female deities known as Yoginis by the ritual exchange and consumption of sexual fluids. Further complications resulted from the later reinterpretations of these earlier Kaula Tantric practices, especially by the great Kashmiri Hindu theologian Abhinavagupta in the eleventh century CE. In brief, this later movement created what White terms a “soft core” version of the fluid exchanges, interpreting it metaphorically and philosophically, transforming it from a very physical form of “doing” into a type of abstract, mystical kind of “knowing.”

This is a very complicated volume, and many of the extended analyses and textual explorations are really intended for South Asianists, historians of religions, and scholars of Tantric studies. Still, anyone who is interested in a sophisticated modern understanding of the myriad and often transgressive uses of human sexuality throughout history should read it. It is well worth the effort. White provides wonderful translations of previously unstudied Sanskrit texts, many of which contain graphic passages concerning the ritual uses of sexual fluids in the propitiation of the goddesses and Yoginis. One vivid if complex passage from a late Kaula composition states: “The Goddess is fond of the vulva and penis, fond of the nectar of vulva and penis. Therefore, one should fully worship the Goddess with the nectar of vulva and penis. A man—who worships the Goddess by the drinking of the virile fluid and by taking pleasure in the wife of another man, as well as with the nectar of the vulva and penis—knows no sorrow and becomes possessed of [End Page 190] perfect mantras. But he who worships Candika without the clan-generated fluids (kuladbhavairdravyair vina) [will see] the good deeds of thousands of lifetimes destroyed” (74).

As White’s meticulously detailed treatment shows, the goals of the earliest Tantrics were not the sexual bliss and expanded consciousness (ananda) of much later interpretations of Tantra but rather the acquisition of mystical powers (siddhi) by the male practitioner, whom Kaula texts called a “Hero” (vira), and the pleasing of the female deities, who might even reward the Hero with the ability to fly. In fact, White documents the distinctive medieval Yogini temples, which are hypaethral in structure—open to the sky and containing up to sixty-four powerful sculptures of these beautiful and terrifying goddesses. It was in these open-air temples where the male and female Tantrics engaged in the ritual collection of the sexual fluids and where the fluids would be “offered” to the goddesses in lieu of the offering of one’s own flesh (although some early texts do indeed mention this offering as well). The Yoginis...

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