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The Shadow of the Dalai Lama – Part I – 5. Pure Shaktism, tantric
feminism, and alchemy
© Victor & Victoria
Trimondi
5. PURE SHAKTISM, TANTRIC
FEMINISM,
AND ALCHEMY
In order to understand the “theological”
intentions of Vajrayana and its iconography
and psychology, it is of great value to draw a
comparision to the matriarchal and gynocentric
goddess cults of India. The high tensions and
explosive forces in the sexual magic scenarios
of the tantras can only be explained in the light
of the conflicting manner in which the two cultural
currents treat the dynamic between the sexes.
To our knowledge there is no culture where the
sexes have as theocratic systems given rise to
such sophisticated and complex power struggles
as in Indian — up to and including the present
day.
Heinrich von Glasenapp calls pure Shaktism the contrary
counter-force to androcentric Buddhism: “pure,
hundred-percent Shaktism is the teaching of all
those sects which regard Durga or one of her forms
as the mistress of the world” (von Glasenapp,
1940, p. 123). Durga, that is just another
name for the goddess Kali. She is worshipped by
her followers as the highest universal deity.
All other gods, whether masculine or feminine,
emerge from her. She has both pleasant and horrific
characteristics, but the dark and cruel traits
predominate. She is traditionally linked to a
destructive, man-destroying sexuality. She epitomizes
forbidden sex, destructive rage, and death. Terror
and madness count among her characteristics and
it is believed her out and out destructiveness
will one day reduce the world to rubble. Our era,
which Hindus and Buddhists equally consider to
be the “dark” one, and which is rushing headlong
and inevitably towards its downfall, bears the
name of this fearsome goddess — Kali
yuga.
Kali appears to her believers as Shakti, that is as feminine
energy in the form of a universal female divinity.
In her omnipotence “she includes both the spiritual
and the material principles and can therefore
be understood to contain both the soul and nature
... The feminine principle creates the cosmos
in combination with the masculine principle– though
the masculine is always of secondary importance
and subordinate to the feminine principle...”
— reports the tantra researcher Agehananda Bharati
(Bharati, 1977, p. 174).
Here the androcentric Wheel of
Time has been rotated 180 degrees and Tantrism’s
patriarchal pattern of dominance has been reinterpreted
matriarchally. Instead of shaven-headed monks
or long-haired Maha Siddhas, women now celebrate
as “priestesses and female shamans”. The omnipotent
divinity now reveals itself to be a woman. “Thus
the followers of the Shakti school justify their
appellation by the belief that god is a woman
and it ought to be the aim of all to become a
woman” (Bhattacharyya, 1982, p. 109) — writes
Bhattacharyya in his history of the tantric currents.
The gynocentric male sacrifice
According to one widely distributed
view, the matriarchal element and goddess cult
are believed to have been predominant for centuries
in Indian society and can still now be discovered
in folk culture (Bhattacharya, 1982, p. 116, note
41; Tiwari 1985). The native inhabitants of the
first pre-Aryan agricultural societies were followers
of the “great goddess”. Ritual objects from excavations
of the ancient towns of Mohenjodaro and Harappa
(c. 2500 B.C.E.) indicate that matriarchal cults
were practiced there. Astounding parallels to
the Babylonian goddesses of the Fertile Crescent
have been drawn.
Only following the violent intrusion
of patriarchal pastoral peoples from the north
(around 1500 B.C.E.) was the native religion of
India systematically displaced. From now on the
Aryan caste system with its sacrificial priests
(Brahmans) and warriors (Kshatriyas) at its peak
determined social religious politics. Nor did
the first phase of Buddhism show any essential
change in the androcentric pattern. At the time
of the Maurya and Gupta periods (around 300 C.E.)
this experienced a decisive transformation. The
ascetic doctrine of early Buddhism (Hinayana) gave way to the
ideal of the compassionate Bodhisattva (Mahayana). Hinduism’s colorful
lineage of gods developed — often represented
as great mythical couples. But the archeologists
have also excavated numerous clay figures from
this epoch, which depict the Great Mother deity.
Her figure even appears on coins. The submerged
“feminine principle” of the earliest times thus
reappeared between the third and seventh centuries
C.E. in India.
Starting among the rural population
it gained access to even the highest strata. “
The mass strength behind it,” Bhattacharyya informs
us, “placed goddesses by the side of gods of all
religions, but even by doing so the entire emotion
centering round the Female Principle could not
be channelised. So the need was felt for a new
religion, entirely female dominated, a religion
in which even the great gods like Visnu or Shiva
would remain subordinated to the goddess. This
new religion came to be known as Shaktism” (Bhattacharyya,
1982, p. 207).
The Buddhists were also not in
a position to remain completely untouched by this
renaissance of ancient female cults. This can
be detected, for example, in the famous collection
of poems, Therigatha, where Buddhist
nuns sing of their liberation from the slavery
of everyday family life. But there was never a
real emancipation movement of female Buddhists.
In contrast the followers of the Buddha Shakyamuni
were successful in their epochal attempt to gain
control of the “new women”, through integration
and manipulation, without needing to combat or
suppress the emergent “woman power” directly:
the monks discovered Vajrayana.
There is much to be said for the
suggestion the tantric practices, or at least
similar rites, were originally part of the cult
of worship of the great goddess, which in contrast
to early Buddhism had a completely free and open
attitude towards sexuality. This is also admitted
implicitly by the Buddhist yogis when they project
all the forces of the universes into a female
archetype. Since they were convinced they possessed
a technique (upaya)
which in the final instance placed absolute power
over the goddess in their hands, the could maintain
this apparent omnipotence of the feminine without
risk. One almost has the impression that they
deliberately adopted the omnipotent matriarchal
image.
Yet as soon as women actually grasped
for power, this was seen by all the androcentric
cults of India as a great disaster and much feared.
The woman then appears as a bestial horror god
or a bloodthirsty tigress who kills her lover,
performs bizarre dances upon his corpse or places
the still-aroused penis of the dead in her vulva.
She is depicted as a being with a gaping maw and
bloody canines. Numerous variants of such macabre
portraits are known. In the light of such images
of horror the fears of the men were thoroughly
justified and man-destroying cult sacrifices were
then no rarity in the vicinity of the black Kali.
The religious studies scholar Doniger
O’Flaherty traces them all back to the archetypal
ritual of an insect, which bears the name of “preying
mantis”. This large locust bites off the head
of the smaller male during copulation and then
consumes it with relish (O’Flaherty, 1982, p.
81). Although the tales do not say that the goddess
rips off the head of her lover with her teeth,
she does decapitate him with a saber.
Such female cults are supposed
to imitate vegetative events in nature. Just as
the plants germinate, sprout, blossom, bear fruit
and then die back to arise anew from seed, so
death appeared to them to be a necessary aspect
of life and the precondition for a rebirth. When
the ancient cosmocentric mother goddess donates
fertility, she demands in return bloody sacrifices.
It was mostly animals and humans of male gender
who had to surrender their lives to preserve and
propagate the plant, animal and human kingdoms
(Herrmann-Pfand, 1992, p. 102; Neumann, 1949,
p. 55). It is not said, however, whether this
vegetative orientation to the cult was the sole
motive or whether there was not also a bloody
demonstration of power within a religiously motivated
struggle between the sexes involved.
The cruel rites of Kali in no way belong to the
past. As the Indian press currently reports, in
recent times more and more incidents of human
sacrifice to the goddess have accumulated, in
which it is primarily children who are offered
up. The ancient and universal myth of the Earth
Mother, who consumes her own progeny and fattens
herself with their corpses, who greedily laps
up the blood-seed of humans and animals, who lures
life into her abyss and dark hole in order to
destroy it, is actually celebrating a renaissance
in contemporary India (Neumann, 1989, pp. 148–149).
The vajra and the double-headed
ax
Initially, men may have reacted
with fear and then with protestation to such bloody
matriarchal rites, as we can conclude from many
patriarchal founding myths. Perhaps some kind
of masculine anxiety neurosis, derived from long
forgotten and suppressed struggles with matriarchy,
lies hidden behind the seemingly pathological
overemphasis accorded to the vajra and thus the “phallus”
in Tantric Buddhism?
In a cultural history of the “diamond
scepter” (vajra), the Tibetologist Siegbert
Hummel mentions that the vajra was worshipped both
in Vedic India and among the Greeks as a lightning
symbol. The symbol entered Buddhism via the Hellenistic
influence on the art of Gandhara. The current
form only evolved over the course of centuries.
Formerly, the vajra more resembled a “double-headed
ax with lightning-like radiance” (Hummel, 1954,
pp. 123ff.).
Hummel, who has also examined matriarchal
influences on Tibetan culture in other works,
surmises that the symbol had a Cretan gynocentric
origin. But let us quote him directly: “Vajra”
and “double-headed ax” presuppose “images of the
Cretan mother deity, who carries a double-headed
ax, as not just a sign but also an embodiment
of her sovereignty and power as well as a magical
instrument, a privilege, incidentally, which male
deities significantly did not receive” (Hummel,
1954, p. 123). The Minoan cult object is said
to have been used as a weapon with which the sacred
bull was slaughtered.
This bovine blood ritual, which
according to reports and myths of antiquity was
widely distributed among the matriarchal cults
of the Near East, brings the ancient male sacrifice
into the discussion once more. Then the bull is
considered a historically more recent substitute
for the husband of the tribal queen, who herself
was supposed to be the incarnation of a goddess.
Following the expiry of his period in office,
the priestesses sacrificed him and soaked the
soil with his royal blood in order to generate
fertility.
Aside from this, it is highly likely
that ancient castration were linked with the double-headed
ax (Hummel, 1954, pp. 123ff.). At any rate, the
almighty Cybele bore this sharp implement
as her emblem of power. Classical authors report
with horror how the fanatical priests of this
Phrygian mother-goddess let themselves be ritually
emasculated or performed the mutilation themselves.
“Cybelis” is said to be a translation of “double-headed
ax” (Alexiou, n.d., p. 92).
If we accept Hummel’s account of
the origin of the vajra
as the man-destroying scepter of the great goddess,
then the excessive reverence with which the Tantric
Buddhists treat the “thunderbolt” becomes more
comprehensible: The ax, which once felled or mutilated
man has now become his most-feared magical weapon,
with which he graphically demonstrates his victory
over the great goddess.
In the vajra, the “diamond scepter”,
“thunderbolt” or “phallus”, the androcentric control
of the world is symbolized. It represents the
superiority of the masculine spirit over the feminine
nature. “The vajra”, Lama Govinda writes,
“became ... the quintessence of supreme spiritual,
a power which nothing can withstand and which
is itself unassailable and invincible: just as
a diamond, the hardest of all substances, can
cut to pieces all other substances without itself
being cut by anything else” (Govinda, 1991, p.
65). In order to demonstrate this omnipotence
of absolute masculinity, there arose within “Vajrayana” the linguistic
obsession which links all the events and protagonists
of the tantric rituals to the word vajra.
It is not just the objects which
are ceremonially sacrificed, like vajra-incense, vajra-shells, vajra-lamps, vajra-perfumes, vajra-flowers, vajra-flags, vajra-dresses and so forth
which bear the Sanskrit name of the “diamond scepter”,
but also all the ritual activities such as vajra-music, vajra-dance, vajra-motion, vajra-gestures. “The whole
of this system pivots upon the idea of the vajra, which is the supreme
ideal, but at the same time environs the initiate
from his first steps. Everything which concerns
the mystique training bears this name. The water
of the preliminary purification, the pot that
contains it, the sacred formula to repeat over
it ... all is vajra” (Carelli, 1941, p.
6).
Even the symbol of supreme femininity,
the “emptiness” (shunyata), is not spared its
application. “The vajra
represents the active principle,” writes Snellgrove,
“the means towards enlightenment and the means
of conversion, while the bell represents Perfection
of Wisdom, known as the Void (sunyata). In the state of
union, however, the vajra
comprehends both these coefficients of enlightenment,
the means and the wisdom” (Snellgrove, 1987, vol.
1, p. 131). “Shunyata”, we can read in
Dasgupta,
“which is firm, substantial, indivisible and
impenetrable, incapable of being burnt and imperishable,
is called Vajra... Vajra ... is the void and
in Vajrayana
everything is Vajra”
(Dasgupta, 1974, pp. 77, 72).
Vajra and the “bell” (gantha) count as the two most
important ritual objects in Tantrism. But here
too the masculine “thunderbolt” has achieved supremacy.
This is most graphically expressed in the symbolic
construction of the feminine “bell”. In order
to display its subordinacy to the masculine principle,
it always possesses a handle in the form of a
half vajra. One will also not find
a gantha,
which does not have numerous tiny “diamond scepters”,
i.e., “phalluses”, engraved on its outer edge.
The bell, visible and much-praised symbol of the
feminine, is thus also under the hegemony of the
“thunderbolt”.
The gesture of dominance with which
the tantric master seals his consort during the
sexual act is called the Vajrahumkara
mudra: he crosses both hands behind the back
of his partner, with the vajra
held in his right hand, and the gantha in the left. The symbolic
content of this gesture can only be the following:
the yogi as androgyne is lord over both sexual
energies, the masculine (symbolized by the vajra)
and the feminine (symbolized by the gantha). In encircling ("sealing”)
his wisdom consort with the androgyne gesture,
he wishes to express that she is a part of his
self, or rather, that he has absorbed her as his
maha mudra
("inner woman”).
The dakini
Among the noisy retinue of Kali can, in Hindu accounts,
be found a cluster of lesser female demons known
as dakinis. A s we have already
seen, these also play an indispensable role in
the salvational practices of Buddhist Tantrism.
The “sky walkers”- as their name can be translated
— are less a female species of angel; rather,
they are primarily a subordinate class of female
devils. Since they originally belonged to the
Kali milieu, their historically
more recent transformation into a Buddhist support
unit must surely provide some interesting insights
into the early history of Tantrism and its relation
to the gynocentric cults.
The dakinis have a preference for
hanging around crematoria. Their favorite fare
is human flesh, which they use for magical purposes
in their rituals. They visit sickness upon women,
men, and children, especially fever, obsessions,
consumption, and sterility. Like the European
witches they fly through the air and assume the
most varied animal forms. They thus torment those
around them as cats, poisonous snakes, lionesses
and bitches. They are reviled as “noise-makers,
women who take away, hissers, and flesh-eaters”.
As vampires, they suck up fresh blood and ritually
consume menstrual discharge — their own or that
of others. Like the Greek harpies, with whom they have
much else in common, they devour afterbirth and
feed themselves from corpses. They have a great
predilection and craving for the male seed. These
horror-women can even consume the breath of a
living person (O’Flaherty, 1982, p. 237).
Their terrible appearance is described
in a biography of the great Tibetan deliverer
of salvation, Padmasambhava: some ride upon lions
with their hair let out and carry skulls in their
hands as signs of victory; others perch upon the
backs of birds and let out shrill shrieks; the
bodies of yet others are topped by ten faces and
ten mouths with which they devour human hearts;
a further group vomit up dogs and wolves; They
generate lightning, and descend upon their victims
with a thunderclap. “The trace of a
third eye upon her forehead [can be found], they
have long clawlike finger-nails, and a black heart
in her vagina” (Stevens, 1990, p. 73). Ritual
curved knives, with which they dismember corpses;
a skull bowl out of which they slurp all sorts
of blood; a small two-ended drum prepared from
the brain-pans of two children, with which she
summons her companions and a scepter, upon which
three skulls are skewered, — are all considered
part of a dakini’s standard equipment.
Sculpture of a Dakini
The dakinis normally only reveal
themselves to the Tantric — either as human women
in flesh and blood or as dream figures, or as
ghosts. In the bardo state, the time between
death and rebirth, however, they encounter everyone
who has died in order to carry out their horrific
sacrifices. The Tibetan Book of the Dead also
calls them gauris
and many individuals among them are named: Ghasmari, Candali, Nari, Pukkasi
and so forth. They ride upon buffaloes, wolves,
jackals and lions; wear the most varied human
bones as jewelry; clasp banners of children’s
skin in their hands; their baldachins are made
of human skin; they play their horrible melodies
upon the hip bones of a Brahman girl from which
they have fashioned flutes; as scepter one grasps
the corpse of an infant, another rips the head
of a man off and consumes it. With this dreadful
display the “sky walkers” want to induce the spirit
of the dead person to seek out in fear the protective
womb of a human woman so as to be reborn. But
should he courageously resist the frightful images,
then he becomes freed from the “Wheel of Life”
and is permitted to enter nirvana.
Consequently, the tantras urge
that every adept procure for himself the arts
and cunning of Cakrasamvara, the first Buddhist
dakini subduer, in order to conquer and bind these
female fiends, as he can only experience enlightenment
by subjugating the demonesses. He then becomes
lord over the feminine in general, precisely because
this opposed him in its most terrible form as
a death-goddess and he did not yield to it.
But the process has more than just
a psychological dimension. Since the dakinis come
from the army of the black Kali,
for patriarchal Tantrism her subjugation is also
a “theocratic” act. With every victory over a
“sky walker” the gynocentric cult of the great
black goddess is symbolically overpowered by the
androcentric power of the Buddha.
The methods employed in this act
of conquest are often brutal. When the Maha Siddha Tilopa met the
queen of the dakinis in her palace in the form
of an attractive and graceful girl (a witch’s
illusion), he did not let the demoness pull the
wool over his eyes. He tore the clothes from her
body and raped her (Sierksma, 1966, p. 112). In
the Guhyasamaja Tantra the masculine
Hauptgottheit draws the dakinis to him with skewers
and diamond hooks which “shine like scorching
flames”. We have already mentioned Albert Grünwedel’s
surmise above, that the “sky walkers” were originally
real women who were transformed into pliant spiritual
beings via a “tantric fire sacrifice”. The possibility
cannot be excluded that the reason they suffered
their fiery “witches’ fate” was that before their
“Buddhization” they offered their services to
the terrible Kali as priestesses.
Whilst it is true, as the Tibetan
historian Buston tells us, that the demonesses
were subjugated by the tantric divinity Cakrasamvara and converted
to Buddhism, their cruelty was only partially
overcome by the conversion. Actually, from this
point on, there are two types of dakini and it
is not uncommon that the two represent contrary
aspects of a single “sky walker”. The dark, repulsive
form is joined by a figure of light, an ethereal
dancing fairy, a smiling virgin. This goodly part
took over the role of the inana mudra for the yogi,
the amiable spiritual woman and transcendent bearer
of knowledge. I the next chapter we discuss in
more detail how such a division of dakinis into
evil witches and good fairies represents a primary
event in tantric (and alchemic) control techniques.
Thus the evil party among the dakinis
did not need to surrender their pre-Buddhist terrors,
and unlike the bloody Erinyes
from the Greek sagas, did not transform themselves
into peace-loving pillars of the state like the
Eumenides. Rather, the horror
dakinis offered their destructive arts in the
service of the new Buddhist doctrine. They continued
to play a role as forms in which the death-mother
and her former mistress, Kali, whom an adept needed
to subdue, could appear. Their terrible emergence
has become a downright essential, albeit mortally
dangerous, stretch to be traversed upon the path
of tantric enlightenment. Only at the end of a
successful initiation do the “demonesses” appear
in the form of “female angels”.
For Lama Govinda, however, who
constantly attempts to exorcise all “witches’
dances” out of Tibetan Buddhism, their light form
is the only truth: for him, the dakini represents that element
of the “ethereal realm” which we are unable to
perceive with our senses, since the Tibetan name
for the sky walker, Khadoma, is said to have this
meaning (Govinda, 1984, p. 228). The European
lama explains the Khadomas
to be “meditative geniuses”, “impulses of inspiration,
which transform natural force into creative genius”
(Govinda, 1984, p. 228) — in brief, they operate
as the muses of the yogis. Govinda’s view is not
all that incorrect, but he describes only the
result of a many –layered and very complicated
process, in which the demonic dakini is transformed
via the “tantric female sacrifice” described above
into a soft and ethereal “sky walker”.
Kali as conquered time goddess
Now is it just the wild former
retinue of Kali
which is subdued in Buddhist Tantrism, or is the
dark goddess herself conquered? The Tibet researcher,
Austine Waddell, has concluded on the basis of
an illustration of the time god, Kalachakra, and his consort,
Vishvamata,
that we are dealing here with a representation
of the Highest Buddha in union with the Hindu
horror goddess Kali, who together do the
devil’s work (Waddell, 1934, p. 131). These days,
his interpretation is considered amusing, and
is often cited as a warning example of Western
ignorance and arrogance. But in our view Waddell
is absolutely correct, and he is able to help
us understand the mystery hidden at the heart
of the Kalachakra Tantra.
For the entire post-Vedic Indian
culture (i.e., for both Hinduism and Buddhism),
the goddess Kali represents the horror
mother of our decadent last days, which bear her
name as the Kali yuga. Therefore, she
is the “mistress of history”. More comprehensively
— she is considered to be the
personification of manifest time (kala) itself. In translation, the
word kali
means both the feminine form of ‘time’ and also
the color ‘black’. As such, for Hinduism the goddess
symbolized the apocalyptic “black hole” into which
the entire material universe vanishes at the end
of time. The closer we draw to the end of a cosmic
cycle, the thicker the “darkness” becomes.
Her male counterpole and Buddhist
challenger, Kalachakra,
attempts — one could conclude from Waddell’s
interpretation — to wrench the “Wheel of Time”
from her, in order to himself become “Lord of
History” and establish a worldwide androcentric
Buddhocracy. In the current and the coming eon
he wants that he and he alone has control over
time. It is thus a matter of which of the two
sexes controls the evolution of the complete polar
universe — she as goddess or he as god? When the
tantric master as the representative of the time
god on earth succeeds in conquering the goddess
Kali,
then he has — according to tantric logic — cleared
the way on his path to exclusive patriarchal world
domination.
Aggression toward one another is
thus the basis of the relation between the two
gender-pretenders to the “time throne”. But the
Buddhist Kalachakra god appears to
proceed more cleverly than his Hindu opponent,
Kali Vishvamata. Using magic
techniques he understands how to goad the aggressive
sexuality of the goddess and nonetheless bring
it under his control.
We shall later see that it is also
his intention to destroy the existing universe,
which bears the name Kali
yuga. For this reason he is extremely interested
in the destructive aspects of time (kali)
or, respectively, in the destructive power of
the goddess, who can crush all forms of existence
beneath her. “What is Kalachakrayana?”, a contemporary
tantra commentator asks, and answers revealingly,
“The word kala
means time, death and destruction. Kalachakra is the wheel of
destruction” (Dasgupta, 1974, p. 65).
The “alchemic female sacrifice”
"The Kalachakra Tantra”, writes
the American David Gordon White in his comprehensive
history of Indian alchemy,”.... offers us the
most penetrating view we have of any specifically
Buddhist alchemical system” (White, 1996, p. 71).
In the fifth chapter of the Time Tantra, the “great
art” is treated as a separate discipline (Carelli,
1941, p. 21). In his commentary on the Kalachakra
text, Pundarika compares the whole sexual magic
procedure in this tantra with an alchemical work.
In India, alchemy was and still
is a widely spread esoteric body of knowledge,
and has been since the fourth century C.E. It
is taught and employed as a holistic healing art,
especially in Ayurveda. Alongside its medical
uses, it was considered (as in China and the West)
as the art of extracting gold (and thus wealth
and power) from base substances. But over and
above this, it was always regarded as an extremely
effective means of attaining enlightenment. Indian
yogis, especially the so-called Nath
Siddhas, who had chosen the “great art” as
their sacred technique, experienced their alchemic
attempts not as “scientific” experimentation with
chemical substances, but rather as a mystical
exercise. They described themselves as followers
of Rasayana and with the use
of this term indicated that had chosen a special
initiatory path, the “Path of Alchemy”. In their
occult praxis they combined chemical experiments
with exercises from Hatha Yoga and tantric sexual
rites.
Arabic influences upon Indian alchemy
are presumed, but the latter certainly predates
these. Even older are the sophisticated alchemic–sexual
magic experiments of the Taoists. For this reason,
some important Western scholars of Asia, for example,
David Gordon White, Agehananda Bharati, and Joseph
Needham, are of the opinion that China could be
considered a possible origin for both the “high
art” and Indian Tantrism. On the other hand, European
alchemy of early modern times (16th
to 18th century) has so many similarities
to the symbolic world of tantric-alchemic India,
that — since a direct influence is difficult to
imagine — one must either posit a common historical,
most probably Egyptian, origin, or must assume
that both esoteric currents drew upon the same
archetypal reservoir of our collective unconsciousness.
Most probably, both are the case.
In the West, the close relationship
between occidental alchemy and Tantrism has been
thematized by, among others, the religious studies
scholar Mircea Eliade and Carl Gustav Jung, the
depth psychologist. Jung more than once drew attention
to the parallels between the two systems. His
introduction to a quasi-tantric text from China
with the title Das Geheimnis der goldenen Blüte
[‘The Secret of the Golden Flower’] is just
one example from many. Mircea Eliade also saw
“a remarkable correspondence between Tantrism
and the great western mysteriosophical [sic] current
..., in which at the beginning of the Christian
era gnosis, hermetics, Greek/Egyptan alchemy and
the traditions of the mysteries flowed together”
(Eliade, 1985, p. 211). Of the more modern authors,
it is primarily David Gordon White who deserves
mention; he has exhaustively studied the close
link between alchemic ideas and experiments and
the Indian Siddhas (sorcerers) and their
tantric practices. Without doubt, Tantrism and
alchemy, whether of Indian or European provenance,
share many fundamental images with one another.
Just like their oriental colleagues,
the occidental alchemists expressed themselves
in a twilight language (sandhabhasa). All the words,
signs, and symbols, which were formulated to describe
the experiments in their obscure “laboratories”,
possessed multiple meanings and were only comprehensible
to the “initiated”. Just as in some tantra texts,
“secret” practices were represented by “harmless”
images in the European treatises; this was especially
true of the topic of erotic love and sexuality.
This strong link to the erotic may appear absurd
in the case of chemical experiments, but the alchemic
world view was, just like that of Tantrism, dominated
by the idea that our universe functions as the
creation and interplayof a masculine and a feminine
principle and that all levels of existence are
interpenetrated by the polarity of the sexes.
“Gender is in everything, everything has masculine
and feminine principles, gender reveals itself
on all levels”, we can read in a European treatise
on the “great art” (Gebelein, 1991, p. 44).
This was also true for the sphere
of chemical substances and compounds, the metals
and elements. Both the tantric and the alchemic
writings are therefore maps of the erotic imagination
and anyone
with a little speech psychology can recognize
the pervasive sexual system of reference hidden
in a hermetical text from the 16th
century. At that time people did not have the
slightest qualms about describing chemical processes
as erotic events and erotic scenarios as chemical
fusions. They behaved in exactly the same manner
in the West as in the East.
Let us now examine tantric alchemy
a little more closely. The Tibetan lama, Dragpa
Jetsen, for example, distinguishes three aspects
of the royal art: the “Alchemy of life: he can make
his life last as long as the sun and moon[; the] Alchemy of body: he can make
his body eternally be but sixteen years old[;
and the] Alchemy of enjoyments: he
can turn iron and copper into gold” (quoted by
Beyer, 1978, p. 253). These three experiments,
then, primarily concern two goals: firstly the
attainment of immortality, and secondly the production
of gold, that is, material wealth. Correspondingly,
in a commentary on the Kalachakra Tantra we can read:
“Then comes the practice of alchemy, which in
this case means the production of gold through
the use of the elixirs” (Newman, 1987, p. 120).
But for the “true” adept (whether
Tantric or European alchemist) it was not just
a matter of the actual yellow metal, but also
the so-called “spiritual gold”. In the West this
was understood to mean the “Philosopher’s Stone”
or the “hermetical elixir”, which transformed
the experimenter into a superman. Alchemy and
Tantrism thus have the same spiritual goal. In
order to achieve this, numerous processes of conversion
were needed in the laboratory of the adept, which
did not just take the form of chemical processes,
but which the alchemist also experienced as successive
transmutations of his personality, that is, his
psyche was dissolved and then put together again
a number of times in the course of the experimentation.
Solve et coagula (dissolve
and bind) is for this reason the first and most
well-known maxim of the hermetical art. This principle
too, controls the tantric ritual in numerous variants,
as, say, when the yogi dissolves his human body
in order to reconstruct it as a divine body.
Without going into numerous further
parallels between Tantrism and the “great art”,
we would like to concentrate here upon a primary
event in European alchemy, which we term the “alchemic
female sacrifice” and which plays an equally central
role for the adept of the high art as the “tantric
female sacrifice” does for the Tantric. There
are three stages to be examined in this sacrificial
event:
- The sacrifice of the “dark woman” or the
“black matter” (nigredo)
- The absorption of the “virgin milk” or gynergy (albedo)
- The construction of the cosmic androgyne
(rubedo)
1. The sacrifice of the black
matter (karma
mudra)
The starting point for an alchemical
experiment is in both systems, the European and
the Indian, the realm of coarse matter, the ignoble
or base, so as to then transmute it in accordance
with the “law of inversion” into something beneficent.
This procedure is — as we have shown — completely
tantric. Thus the Buddhist scholar, Aryadeva,
(third century C.E.) can employ the following
comparison: “Just as copper becomes pure gold
when it is spread with a wonder tincture, so too
will the [base] passions of the Knowing become
aids to salvation” (von Glasenapp, 1940, p. 30).
The same tantric view is taken up in
the eighteenth century by the French adept Limojon
de Saint-Didier, when he ascertains in his Triomphe Hermétique that,
“the philosophers [alchemists] say, that one must
seek perfection in imperfect things and that one
finds it there” (Hutin, 1971, p. 25).
In European alchemy the coarse
starting material for the experiments is known
as the prima materia and is of a
fundamentally feminine nature. Likewise, as in
the tantras, base substances such as excrement,
urine, menstrual blood, part of corpses and so
forth are named in the alchemic texts, no matter
which culture they belong to, as the physical
starting materials for the experiments. Symbolically,
the primal material is describe in images such
as “snake, dragon, toad, viper, python”. It is
also represented by every conceivable repulsive
female figure — by witches, mixers of poison,
whores, chthonic goddesses, by the “dragon mother”
so often cited in depth psychology. All these
are metaphors for the demonic nature of the feminine,
as we also know it from as far back as the early
phase of Buddhism. We may recall that Shakyamuni
compared women in general with snakes, sharks
and whores.
These misogynous terms for the
prima materia are images which
on the one hand seek to describe the untamed,
death-bringing nature; on the other one readily
admit that a secret force capable of producing
everything in the phenomenal world is hidden within
“Mother Nature”. Nature in alchemy has at its
disposal the universal power of birth. It represents
the primordial matrix of the elements, the massa
confusa, the great chaos, from which creation
bursts forth. , On this basis, Titus Burckhardt,
an enthusiastic expert on the great art, brings
the western prima
materia into direct comparison with tantric
Shakti and the black goddess,
Kali:
“On the idea of Shakti
are based all those tantric spiritual methods
which are more closely related to alchemy than
to any other of the spiritual arts. The Hindu,
indeed, regard alchemy itself as a tantric method.
As Kali, the Shakti is on the one hand
the universal mother, who lovingly embraces all
creatures, and on the other hand the tyrannical
power which delivers them over to destruction,
death, time, and space” (Burckhardt, 1986, p.
117). The alchemic first substance (prima materia or massa confusa) cannot be better
personified in Tantrism than by Kali and her former retinue,
the crematoria-haunting, horrifying dakinis
Experimenting around with the primal
material sounds quite harmless to someone who
is not initiated. Yet a symbolic murder is hidden
behind this. The black matter, a symbol of the
fundamental feminine and of powerful nature from
which we all come, is burned or in some cases
vaporized, cut to pieces or dismembered. Thus,
in destroying the prima materia we at the same
time destroy our “mother” or, basically, the “
fundamentally feminine”. The European adept does
not shy away from even the most crass killing
metaphors: “open the lap of your mother”, it says
in a French text from the 18th century,
“with a steel blade, burrow into her entrails
and press forward to her womb, there you will
find our pure substance [the elixir]” (Bachelard,
1990, p. 282). Symbolically, this violent first
act in the alchemic production is located within
a context of sacrifice, death and the color black
and is therefore called nigredo, that is “blackening”.
2. The absorption of the “virgin
milk” or gynergy (inana mudra)
The “pure substance” or the “elixir”,
which according to the quotation above is obtained
from the entrails of Mother Nature, is in alchemy
nothing other than the gynergy
so sought after in Tantrism. Just like the
Tantric, the alchemist thus draws a distinction
between the “coarse” and the “sublime” feminine.
After the destruction of the “dark mother”, the
so-called nigredo, the second phase
follows, which goes by the name of albedo ("whitening”). The
adept understands this to mean the “liberation”
of the subtle feminine ("pure substance”) from
the clutches of the coarse “dragon” (prima
materia). The master has thus transformed
the black matter, which for him symbolizes the
dark mother, following its burning or cutting
up in his laboratory into an ethereal “girl” and
then distilled from this the “pure Sophia”, the
incarnation of wisdom, the “chaste moon goddess”,
the “white queen of heaven”. One text talks “of
the transformation of the Babylonian whore into
a virgin” (Evola, 1993, p. 207).
Now this transmutation is not,
as a contemporary observer would perhaps imagine
the process to be, a purely spiritual/mental procedure.
In the alchemist’s laboratory some form of black
starting substance is in fact burned up, and a
chemical, usually liquid substance really is extracted
from this material, which the adept captures in
a pear-shaped flask at the end of the experiment.
The Indians refer to this liquid as rasa, their European colleagues
as the “elixir”. Hence the name for Indian alchemy
— Rasayana.
Even though all the interpreters
in the discussion of the alchemic “virgin image”
(the subtle feminine) are of the unanimous opinion
that this is a matter of the spiritual and psychological
source of inspiration for the man, this nevertheless
has a physical existence as a magical fluid. The
“white woman”, the “holy Sophia” is both an image
of desire of the masculine psyche and the visible
elixir in a glass. (In connection with the seed
gnosis we shall show that this is also the case
in Tantrism.)
This elixir has many names and
is called among other things “moon dew” or aqua sapientiae (water of
wisdom) or “white virgin milk”. The final (chemical)
extraction of the wonder milk is known as ablactatio (milking). Even
in such a concrete point there are parallels to
Tantrism: In the still to be described “Vase initiation”
of the Kalachakra Tantra, the ritual
vessels which are offered up to the vajra master in sacrifice,
represent the wisdom consorts (mudras). They are called “the
vase that holds the white [the milk]" (Dhargyey,
1985, p. 8). Whatever ingredients this “moon dew”
may consist of, in both cultural circles it is
considered to be the elixir of wisdom (prajna) and a liquid form
of gynergy.
It is as strongly desired by every European adept
as by every Tibetan tantric master.
We can thus state that, in Tantrism,
the relation between the real woman (karma mudra) and the imaginary
spirit woman (inana
mudra) is the same as that between the dark
mother (prima materia) and the “chaste
moon goddess” (the feminine life-elixir or gynergy) in European alchemy.
Therefore, the sacrifice of karma mudra (prima materia), drawn usually
from the lower classes, and her transformation
into a Buddhist “goddess” (inana
mudra) is an alchemic drama. Another variation
upon the identical hermetic play emerges in the
victory of the vajra master over the dark
horror dakini (prima
materia) and her slaughter, after which she
(post mortem) enters the tantric
stage as a gentle, floating figure — as a nectar-giving
“sky walker” ("the chaste moon goddess”). The
witch-like cemetery whore has transformed herself
into a sweet granter of wisdom.
3. The construction of the
cosmic androgyne (maha
mudra)
Following the consumption of the
“virgin milk”, the drawing off of the gynergy, the ethereal feminine
is dissolved in the imagination of the alchemist
and now becomes a part of his masculine-androgyne
being. Thus, the second sacrifice of the woman,
this time as “Sophia” or as an independent “spiritual
being” takes place here, then the goal of the
opus is reached only when the adept, just like
the Tantric, has completely obliterated the autonomy
of the feminine principle and integrated it within
himself. To this end he works on and destroys
the “chaste moon goddess” or the “white woman”
(inana mudra), once more through
the element of fire. The Italian occultist, Julius
Evola, has described this procedure in clear and
unvarnished terms: in this phase “sulfur and fire
become active again, the now living masculine
exerts an influence on the substance, ... gains
the upper hand over the feminine, absorbs it and
transmits its own nature to it” (Evola, 1983,
p. 435). Accordingly, the feminine principle is
completely absorbed by the masculine. Somewhat
more prosaically expressed, this means the alchemist
drinks the “virgin milk” mentioned above from
his flask.
In summary, if we compare this
alchemical process with Tantrism once more, then
we can say that the alchemist sacrifices firstly
the feminine “mother of all” (prima materia), just as the
Tantric sacrifices the real woman, the karma mudra. From the destruction
of the karma
mudra the vajra
master then obtains the “spiritual woman”, the
inana mudra, just as the alchemist
obtains the “Sophia” from the destruction of the
prima materia. Then the Tantric
internalizes the “spiritual woman” as maha mudra ("inner woman”),
just as the adept of alchemy takes in the “white
virgin” in the form of the luck-bringing feminine
“moon dew”.
Once the work is completed, in
both cases the feminine disappears as an external,
independent and polar correspondence to the masculine
and continues to function solely as an inner force
(shakti) of the androgyne tantra
master, or androgyne alchemist respectively. Within
alchemy this internalization of the feminine principle
(i.e., the construction of the maha
mudra in Tantrism) is known by the term rubedo, that is “reddening”.
Since the symbolic sacrifice of
the woman in both cases involves the use of the
element of fire, in alchemy just as in Buddhist
Tantrism we are dealing with an androcentric fire
cult. Within both contexts a bisexual, ego-centered
super being is produced via magic rites — a “spiritual
king”, a “grand sorcerer” (Maha Siddha), a powerful “androgyne”,
the “universal hermaphrodite”. “He is the hermaphrodite
of the initial being,” C. G. Jung writes of the
target figure of the alchemic project, “which
steps apart in the classic brother–sister pair
and unites itself in the ‘conjunctio’” (Jung,
1975, pp. 338, 340). Consequently, the final goal
of every alchemical experiment which goes beyond
simple moneymaking is the union of the sexes within
the person of the adept, in the understanding
that he could then develop unlimited power as
a man–woman. The identical bisexual definition
of the occidental super being is mirrored in the
self-concept of the Tantric, who following his
mystic union (conjunctio) with the feminine
— that is to say, after the absorption of the
gynergy — is reborn as the
“lord of both sexes”.
In the West, as in the East, he
then experiences himself to be the “father and
mother of his self” — as a “child of his self”
(Evola, 1993, p. 48) — “He marries himself, he
impregnates himself”. He becomes “known as the
father and begetter of all, because in him lives
the seed and template of all things” (Evola, 1993,
p. 35) To put it in one sentence — the mystic
king of alchemy is in principle identical with
the tantric Maha Siddha (grand sorcerer).
It would spring the bounds of this
study to examine further patterns which link the
two systems to one another. We shall, however,
return to this where it seems necessary. In our
opinion, all the events of Tantrism
can be rediscovered in one form or another in
the symbolic scenario of alchemy: the eroticization
of the universe, the deadly dangers which are
associated with the unchaining of the feminine
elements, the “law of inversion”, the play upon
fire, the swallowing of the “moon” (of the feminine)
by the “sun” (the masculine), the mystical geography
of the body, the mantras and mandalas, the mysticism
surrounding the planets and stars, the micro-macrocosmic
theory, the dark light and the clear light, the
staged apocalypse, the grasp for power over the
universe, the despotism of the patriarchal hermit,
and so forth. We would like to let the matter
rest with this list and close the chapter with
a succinct statement from Lhundop Sopa, a contemporary
Tibetan specialist on the Kalachakra Tantra: “Thus,
the Kalachakra
path becomes in the end like a kind of alchemy”
(Newman, 1985, p. 150). Both systems are thus
based upon the same original script.
Next Chapter:
6. KALACHAKRA: THE PUBLIC AND THE SECRET INITIATIONS
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