Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion

6. The Cult of Ecstasy: Meldings of East and West in a New Age of Tantra

chapter 6 The Cult of Ecstasy Meldings of East and West in a New Age of Tantra What I tell you must be kept with great secrecy. This must not be given to just anyone. It must only be given to a devoted disciple. It will be death to any others. If liberation could be attained simply by having intercourse with a Makti [female partner], then all living beings in the world would be liberated just by having intercourse with women. KulàrJava Tantra (KT 2.4, 2.117) Because the science of Tantra was developed thousands of years ago . . . many of the techniques are not relevant to the needs of the contemporary Western lover. . . . I see no need for repetition of long Sanskrit mantras . . . or the strict ritualization of lovemaking. . . . So while I have retained the Tantric goal of sexual ecstasy, I’ve developed new approaches to make this experience accessible to people today. High Sex weaves together the disciplines of sexology and humanistic psychology to give the Western lover the experience of sexual ecstasy taught by Tantra but using contemporary tools. Margo Anand, The Art of Sexual Ecstasy (1989) Inspired by the new valorizations of Tantra by Eliade, Zimmer, and more popular authors like Joseph Campbell, Tantra began to enter in full force into the Western popular imagination of the twentieth century. Already in the early 1900s we find the foundation of the first “Tantrik Order in America”—an extremely scandalous, controversial affair, much sensationalized by the American media—and by the 1960s and 1970s, Tantra had become a chic fashion for Western pop stars, as Jimi Hendrix began 203 displaying yantras on his guitar and Mick Jagger produced a psychedelic film, Tantra, depicting the five M’s. Taking Eliade’s positive reinterpretation a step further, Tantra is now celebrated as a “cult of ecstasy”: an ideal wedding of sexuality and spirituality that provides a much needed corrective to the prudish, repressive, modern West. In the process, it has also spawned a variety of new spiritual forms, such as American Tantra, neo-Tantra, and even the Church of Tantra (figure 10). At the same time, these transformed versions of Tantra have been reappropriated by Indian authors. In a complex cross-cultural exchange or “curry effect” be204 The Cult of Ecstasy Figure 10. American Tantra, “New Millennium Flag Bearer,” from the Third Millennium Magic web site (http://www .3mmagic.com/at_main.html). Courtesy of Third Millennium Magic, Inc. © www.3mmagic.com 1999. tween India and the West, we not only find neo-Tantric gurus like OshoRajneesh , but even a heavy-metal band in Calcutta called “Tantra.” Amid the ever increasing circulation of material and spiritual capital throughout the global marketplace, it seems that Tantra has been exported to the West, where it has been processed, commodified, and reimported by the East in a new form. An examination of the history of Tantra and its contemporary manifestations shows that it has undergone profound transformations in the course of its long, convoluted “journey to the West” and back. For most contemporary American readers, Tantra is basically “spiritual sex,” the “exotic art of prolonging your passion play” to achieve “nooky nirvana .”1 This would seem to be an image of Tantra that is very different from that in most Indian traditions, where sex often plays a fairly minor , “unsexy” role and there is typically far more emphasis on guarded initiation, esoteric knowledge, and elaborate ritual detail. At present there is a profound shift in the imagining of Tantra—a shift from Tantra conceived as dangerous power and secrecy to Tantra conceived as healthy pleasure and liberated openness. This shift is exemplified by the two epigraphs for this chapter. The first, the quote from the KulàrJava Tantra, warns of the perils of revealing secrets to the uninitiated masses. Kula practice, it is true, involves rites of sexual intercourse and consumption of wine, but these must occur only in strictly guarded esoteric contexts; in the hands of the uninitiated masses, they would lead to moral ruin and depravity. The contemporary neo-tàntrika, however, takes the opposite position. Jettisoning the old ritual trappings as outdated and irrelevant, the neo-tàntrika takes only the most expedient elements of these age-old techniques, mixes them with contemporary self-help advice, and adapts them to a uniquely late-capitalist consumer audience. Since at least the time of Agehananda Bharati, most Western...