Chapter 91. Shiva, Vishnu and the Goddess: Sectarian Hinduism and the Tantric Current

What outsiders call “Hinduism” is, in the words of Michael Baltutis’s primer, “a family of myriad faiths with four primary denominations: Saivism, Vaishnavism, Shaktism and Smartism” [Baltutis, What Is Hinduism?, #54289, “Chapter 2: Hinduism’s Four Denominations”]. Running through all four, and through Buddhism as well, is the Tantric current: ritual and yogic systems that use the body, sound, sexuality and the feminine power (shakti) as means of liberation. This chapter covers the sectarian map, Kashmir Shaivism, the goddess cults, the Tantric texts and their “left-hand” rites, and the Western readers who reshaped Tantra.

The four denominations and Daniélou’s “primordial” Shaivism

Baltutis defines each denomination by its personal deity. For Saivites, “Personal God and temple Deity is Siva, neither male nor female,” with Ganesha and Karttikeya also worshipped. For Shaktas the deity is “Shri Devi or Shakti, female, worshiped as Rajarajeshvari, Parvati, Lakshmi, Sarasvati, Kali, Amman, etc. — the Divine Mother.” Vaishnavas worship Vishnu and his incarnations, and Smartas choose among several deities within one non-dual framework. Baltutis describes the Saivite path as four stages, charya, kriya, yoga and jnana: the soul moves from virtuous living through temple worship and internal yoga to “union with God Siva” [Baltutis, What Is Hinduism?, #54289, “Chapter 2”].The Kularnava Tantra lists five Tantric “branches” (Vaishnavas, Saivas, Saktas, Sauras and Ganapatyas) and complains that “the wrangling among the members sometimes creates problems, while they forget that Tantra is the source of Mantras of each sect” [Kularnava Tantra, #54810, Introduction].

Alain Daniélou offers a far more radical history, and it is contested. In his essays collected as Shiva and the Primordial Tradition he claims that “since prehistoric times, India has known two great religious traditions,” Shaivism, “a nature religion,” and Jainism, “a humanistic religion.” On this account Aryan Vedism only gradually absorbed them, and the result is “what is now known as Hinduism.” He claims that “from Shaivism comes the cosmological research known as Samkhya, as well as Yoga.” He further holds that the Jain doctrine of karma and transmigration “justifies the social hierarchy” and was later “used to justify contempt for the untouchables,” while “Shaivism has never accepted the idea of the inequality of birth” [Daniélou, Shiva and the Primordial Tradition, #67683, “The Shaivite Revival from the Third to the Tenth Centuries C.E.”]. He calls the period from the third to the tenth centuries CE “an extraordinary revival of a very ancient philosophic and religious heritage, coming from the prestigious pre-Aryan civilization.” “Shaivite and Tantric rites, needing no brahmanic priesthood, continued alongside the Vedic rites” [ibid.]. He also argues that the textual record has been misjudged: “the Tamil versions of some texts are more ancient than the Sanskrit versions,” and the roots of the Agamas, Tantras and Puranas go much deeper than their written dates suggest [ibid.]. His editor Jean-Louis Gabin adds that Sumerian parallels “confirmed” the authenticity of the Samkhya texts [Gabin, “Editor’s Preface,” in #67683]. These are the claims of Daniélou and his editor and are reported here as such.

Daniélou’s theology is openly polemical. Monotheism, he writes, is “a metaphysical error” and “merely a political fiction,” and monotheistic religions “have served as an excuse for persecutions, massacres, and genocides” [Daniélou, #67683, “Shaivite Cosmology and Polytheism”].

The linga and the Shiva–Shakti polarity

Daniélou reads the linga as cosmology, in three parts. The square base, hidden in the pedestal, “represents Brahma… the power of gravitation”. The octagonal middle is “Vishnu, the centripetal force of concentration”. The cylindrical top is “Shiva, the centrifugal force of expansion, the bursting forth of form and matter.” The yoni is “Energy, which is the substance of the world” [Daniélou, #67683, “The Symbolism of the Linga”]. Devdutt Pattanaik, writing for a popular Indian audience, sees both sides as misreading the symbol: “Western scholars have been spellbound by the sexual form but pay scant regard to the metaphysical thought… Hindu devotees, in contrast, are so focused on the metaphysical thought that they ignore, or simply deny, the sexual form” [Pattanaik, 7 Secrets of Shiva, #47449, “Author’s Note”].

The Soundarya Lahari, a hymn attributed to Shankara, rests on the same polarity. In the commentary in the library’s edition, Shiva “would not be able to stir even a second without Shakti.” The Kanchi Mahaswami is cited as saying that “Shiva is quiescent and motionless and Shakti… keeps everything pulsating… and is inseparably united” [Adi Shankara, Essence of Soundarya Lahari, #41963]. The commentary places the divine couple “in the kundalini chakras in which Amba resides as tattvas, from manas to prithvi,” with “a different name, function and quality” in each chakra [ibid., commentary]. The Kularnava’s list of goddess names, which includes Chinnamasta, Bagalamukhi, Matangi and Kamalatmika, shows the same Mahavidya pantheon within Kaula worship [Kularnava Tantra, #54810].

Kashmir Shaivism: play, ignorance and the guru

Kashmir’s non-dual Shaivism (Trika, or Pratyabhijna, “recognition”) made this polarity a philosophy. In his oral commentary on Abhinavagupta’s Bodhapanchadashika, Swami Lakshman Joo describes the supreme Shiva “along with this energy of his own nature,” namely svatantrya, absolute freedom. Shiva is “fond of playing and playing” (nityam kridarasotsukah). His act is called “ati durghata karitvam… action which cannot be acted,” the doing of creation and destruction together [Lakshman Joo, Abhinavagupta’s Bodhapanchadashika, #74413, “Lord Siva’s Unrestricted Creation and Destruction”]. “When you come to understand that it is only a trick, it is the play of Lord Siva and nothing else. Nothing has happened, nothing is lost, nothing is gained” [ibid., “The Nature of Ignorance and Illusion”].

The Motilal Banarsidass edition of the Pratyabhijnahrdayam, dedicated to Lakshmana Joo, states the doctrine systematically. Every appearance is an abhasa, a limited manifestation of universal consciousness. As images in a mirror are “non-different from the mirror,” so the world, “though non-different from the purest consciousness of Parama Siva, appears as different”; therefore “this appearance cannot be called false” [Pratyabhijnahrdayam, #47798, Introduction, “Abhasavada”]. Chapter 92 takes up its comparison with Shankara.

Benjamin Luke Williams’s Harvard dissertation sets out the social side of this metaphysics. The scriptures of the Kulamarga, “a complex of traditions that developed out of more esoteric branches of tantric Saivism,” carry a “person-centered style of religious authority” in which gurus are “indispensable to the process of revelation.” He contrasts this “Kaula idiom” with the Mimamsa view of the Veda as “eternal and authorless.” Abhinavagupta’s autobiographical passages present the ideal guru as “a fully-enlightened Kaula master” who is also learned in scholastic debate and Sanskrit poetry: “a cosmopolitan Siddha” [Williams, Abhinavagupta’s Portrait of a Guru, #75643, Abstract].

Goddess traditions

David Kinsley’s Hindu Goddesses traces the divine feminine from Vedic hints to Tantric theology. Kinsley retells the Sati myth: Daksha’s sacrifice, Sati’s suicide, Shiva carrying her corpse about the universe until Vishnu “slices bits and pieces from Sati’s body,” whose fragments become sacred sites [Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses, #66097, Parvati chapter]. He notes that the Lakshmi myths link the goddess with “victorious kings.” When the demon Bali defeats Indra, Lakshmi “is attracted to Bali’s winning ways” [ibid., Sri-Lakshmi chapter]. Royal fortune and divine favour are thus tied together. Kali is “summoned by Durga to help defeat the demon Raktabija” [ibid., Durga and Kali chapters]. A shilpa-shastra prescribes that Kali temples be built “near cremation grounds” [ibid.]. In “left-handed (vamacara) Tantrism,” Kinsley writes, Kali “conveys death, destruction… the forbidden par excellence,” and “during the pancatattva ritual, the sadhaka boldly confronts Kali and thereby assimilates, overcomes, and transforms her” [ibid., Kali chapter].

Tantra texts and the left-hand rite

John Woodroffe (“Arthur Avalon”) was the first major Western advocate of Tantra. His Introduction to Tantra Shastra records that “the Tantra is spoken of as a fifth Veda” and that, according to the Tara-Pradipa, “in the Kali-yuga the Tantrika and not the Vaidika-Dharma is to be followed.” [Woodroffe, Introduction to Tantra Shastra, #86209, “Mount Kailasa,” “The Human Body”].

The library’s Kularnava Tantra is a commented English digest, not Avalon’s Sanskrit edition. It sets out the Kaula ladder of seven paths: Vedic ritual, bhakti, jnana, dakshina, vama, siddhanta and kaula. The first three are “for the Pasus,” the next two “for the Viras,” and the last “for the Divyas.” It ranks the guru above the gods: “between Guru and god, Guru is higher. There is no initiation higher than that of the Sakta.” It lists the five Ms: “Madya, wine; Mamsa, meat; Matsya, fish; Mudra, grain; and Maithuna, sexual union.” These are “performed with one’s own wife. If the sadhaka has no wife or if the wife is incompetent, he can take another woman for rituals” [Kularnava Tantra, #54810, “Panchatattva”]. It also calls sexual bliss “the cheap worldly substitute for transcendental Bliss” [ibid.].

Mircea Eliade’s Romanian essay Introducere în tantrismul secret calls Tantrism “the last creation of India” and “the most grandiose spiritual creation of post-Buddhist India.” He holds that “there is no break from the Upanishads to Tantrism,” and blames nineteenth-century scholars who read its sexual practices “ad literam” as “vulgar orgies.” He presents the gradual awakening of Kundalini, “the most secret and sometimes (especially for the unprepared) the most dangerous practice,” as the union of Shakti and Shiva “inside the human body” [Eliade, Introducere în tantrismul secret, #59256]. Dan Mirahorian’s Romanian Shiva-Samhita manual opens with a warning to the same effect. Those who practised its exercises “without competent supervision… were seriously injured (psychosomatic and affective disorders; most often vascular accidents and sensory disorders) or died.” He adds that electrical appliances in the practice room risk “death by autocombustion” [Mirahorian, Cartea secretelor din Hatha și Tantra Yoga, #361072, “Avertisment”].

Western appropriations: Evola, Crowley and the yoga debate

In The Yoga of Power, Julius Evola makes Tantra a metaphysics of power. Tantric iconography, he writes, shows “Shakti’s dance over Shiva’s outstretched and still body,” whose “immobility represents the immutability of the male principle.” He cites the union “in viparita maithuna, namely, the sexual position in which the male sits still and the woman… undulates her body over him.” He then argues that “Western ‘activistic’ axioms operated an inversion of the traditional idea according to which the true male principle is characterized by ‘being'” [Evola, The Yoga of Power, #65738, “Shakti: The World as Power”]. He traces Shaktism to a pre-Aryan “autochthonous spirituality,” likening Kali and Durga to “Demeter Melaina, Cybele, Diana of Ephesus” [ibid., ch. I]. Wikipedia describes Evola as “an Italian far-right philosopher,” “an ideological mentor of the Italian neo-fascist and militant right,” who advocated the Italian racial laws and “mentioned having worked for the Sicherheitsdienst” [Wikipedia: Julius Evola].

Aleister Crowley’s Eight Lectures on Yoga, published under the name “Mahatma Guru Sri Paramahansa Shivaji,” recast yama and niyama in astrological and “scientific” terms [Crowley, Eight Lectures on Yoga, #54622]. Hugh Urban documents the wider transfer. Theodor Reuss of the O.T.O. “regarded sexual rituals and the cult of the Lingam… as the root of all religion,” and Crowley went further, identifying “sexual magic as the most powerful of all forms of magic.” Crowley even used a “sexo-economic technique of imagining a shower of gold coins” at climax [Urban, The Yoga of Sex, #51741]. Baal Kadmon’s Lakshmi Mantra Magick (2015) shows the commercial form: numbered mantras for “financial wealth,” with “Lakshmi Money Incense” and gold candles [Kadmon, Lakshmi Mantra Magick, #366921]. Andrew Nicholson’s essay “Is Yoga Hindu?” surveys the dispute over ownership. It runs from the Hindu American Foundation’s 2010 “Take Back Yoga” campaign back to Vivekananda, who dismissed Hatha Yoga as “nothing but a kind of gymnastics” [Nicholson, Is Yoga Hindu?, #44108].

Key points

• Baltutis classifies Hinduism into four denominations (Saivism, Shaktism, Vaishnavism, Smartism), each with its own deity and path; the Kularnava names five Tantric “branches.”
• Daniélou’s contested thesis holds that Shaivism is a pre-Aryan “primordial tradition” and the source of Samkhya and Yoga, revived from the 3rd to 10th centuries CE, and that monotheism is “a political fiction.”
• Kashmir Shaivism (Abhinavagupta, Lakshman Joo) treats the world as Shiva’s free play (svatantrya); appearances (abhasa) are real expressions of consciousness, not illusions.
• Williams shows that Kaula Shaivism placed authority in the living, deified guru rather than in an authorless Veda.
• Kinsley’s goddess studies show the political side of the cult (Lakshmi and victorious kings) and the Tantric confrontation with Kali in the pancatattva.
• The Kularnava digest lists the five Ms and ranks the guru above the gods; Eliade and Mirahorian both stress the danger of unguided practice.
• Western readers turned Tantra into Traditionalist metaphysics (Evola, whom Wikipedia describes as a far-right ideologue), sexual magic (Reuss, Crowley) and commercial “mantra magick” (Kadmon).