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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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