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5. Religion for the Age of Darkness: Tantra and the History of Religions in the Twentieth Century
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chapter 5 Religion for the Age of Darkness Tantra and the History of Religions in the Twentieth Century The Tantra may be regarded as the religious experience most appropriate to the present condition of man—to life in the kali yuga, the age of darkness. . . . Humanity is fallen: it is now a case of swimming against the stream. . . . The tàntrika does not renounce the world; he tries to overcome it while enjoying perfect freedom. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries (1960) Following in the wake of John Woodroffe’s heroic defense of Tantra, a new wave of scholars began to take an active interest in, and often a strange preoccupation with, the teachings of the Tantras. Many of the greatest European Indologists and scholars of comparative religion, such as Mircea Eliade, Agehananda Bharati, and even C. G. Jung, were extremely interested in Tantra and in some cases saw it as the very essence of Eastern spirituality.1 At the same time, a new generation of Indian scholars also began to take an interest in Tantra, which they saw as one of the most primordial forms of Indian religions. Thus D. N. Bose and Hiralal Haldar praise Tantra as a tradition deeply rooted in the Vedas and as the “standard bearer of Aryan culture.”2 Thus, whereas some authors have lamented the neglect of Tantra in modern discourse, I would argue, on the contrary, that we might even speak of a “Tantrocentrism” at the heart of the history of religions. This is a trend that runs parallel to what Steven Wasserstrom calls the “esocentrism” of the modern study of religion, or the preoccupation with the mystical, interior side of reli165 gion, to the neglect of its more mundane, practical, and social dimensions . Similarly, the modern study of Eastern religions has often been characterized by a central preoccupation with Tantra, as the most erotic and alluring aspect of the exotic Orient itself.3 For both Indian and European authors, moreover, the scholarly imagining of Tantra has had profound political implications, tied to the cultural , economic, and nationalist interests of those who studied it. Indeed, the history of scholarship on Tantra is in many ways a political history of the history of religions as an academic discipline; for it has been tied from its inception to larger questions, not just of colonialism and nationalism , but also to the re-formation of political identities in the aftermath of imperialism and in the decades of the Cold War.4 In what follows, I will examine five exemplary figures, three Europeans and two Indians. On the European side, surely among the three most in- fluential modern scholars of religion were also among the most widely read authors on the subject of Tantra: Heinrich Zimmer, Julius Evola, and Mircea Eliade. These three have had a formative impact on the fields of Indology (in the case of Zimmer), esotericism and right-wing politics (Evola), and comparative religions (Eliade). And all three felt a strong attraction to Tantra, a tradition that they defined as the culmination of all Indian thought: the most radical form of spirituality and the archaic heart of aboriginal India. There are, of course, other important scholars who could be mentioned here, such as the Italian Buddhologist Giuseppe Tucci and theAustrian convert to HinduismAgehananda Bharati, both of whom played important roles in the study of Tantra. However, because these two have been discussed by others (most notably by Gustavo Benevides and Jeffrey Kripal), I only mention them in passing in this chapter.5 But why this special preoccupation with the sexy, steamy world of Tantra among the most influential modern scholars of religions? As I will argue, each of these three regardedTantra as the ideal religion for the modern era. In what they described as this modern “age of darkness,” they felt an intense sense of dislocation and a longing for an idyllic traditional past. As Benevides has argued in his study of Giuseppe Tucci, this feeling of loss and nostalgia was true of many European intellectuals in the early decades of this century, who shared a profound disillusionment with the rapid changes of modernity and the “dislocations that took place in Europe as a result of industrialization and urbanization.” As Europe shifted from a stable, traditional agrarian world to the changing, uprooted world of the modern city, many felt a longing for “a world not touched by the icy winds of modernity.”6 Some would try to return to a more tra166...