The Hindus (73 page)

The final Puranic rationalization for the Tantras is that heresies taught to heretics make them so evil that they must reach the furthest point of the cycle and then rebound from the extreme, to become good again, to go back to the head of the queue, to go back to GO, like all the creatures of the Kali Age. Indeed the “orthodox heresies” are also justified by the doctrine of the forbidden acts in the Kali Age (
kali-varjya
): Some things that were forbidden in the past (such as Tantric rituals) are permitted now because we are too corrupt to meet the old standards. This argument was then sometimes inverted to argue that some things that were permitted then (such as female promiscuity, or Draupadi’s polyandry) are forbidden now for the very same reason: because we are corrupt, in this case too corrupt to commit these acts without being totally destroyed by them.

What
are
these terrible, dangerous things that the Tantric texts taught people to do? Central to Tantric ritual is what the Tantras call the Five Ms, or the Five M Words (since all five terms begin with an
m
in Sanskrit), which might be called, in English, the Five F Words:
madya
(fermented grapes, wine),
mamsa
(flesh, meat),
matsya
(fish),
mudra
(farina), and
maithuna
(fornication). Like so much of Tantra, the Five Ms are an inversion, in this case an inversion of other pentads in more conventional forms of Hinduism. Puranic Hindus ingested the “five products of the cow” (
panchagavya
) to purify themselves of pollution: clarified butter, milk, and yogurt, plus bovine urine and feces.
^ic
Tantrism, which accepts this schema, has, in addition, its own version of the five ritual elements, the Five M Words, or, in one variant, the Five Jewels (semen, urine, feces, menstrual blood, and phlegm) or Five Nectars (with marrow in place of phlegm).
⁵³
One Buddhist Tantra further divides flesh (
mamsa
) into Five Meats (beef, dog, elephant, horse, and human flesh), together with Five Ambrosias (semen, urine, feces, blood, and marrow, slightly different from the Five Jewels).
⁵⁴
All these pentads were probably a deliberate antinomian travesty of the “five products of the cow”; one Tantric text substitutes for the bovine urine and feces the blood and flesh of the cow, a bovicide abomination that deliberately subverted orthodox categories of purity,
⁵⁵
forcing participants to look beyond the dualities of purity and impurity and the conventions of food and sex that drive so much of Hinduism.
⁵⁶
One can hardly imagine a more blatant, in-your-face,
maithuna
-you attitude than the one at the heart of this substitution.

The
Mahanirvana Tantra
elaborates upon each of the Five Ms: Wine may be made from sugar (or molasses), rice, honey, or palm tree juice and made by someone of any caste. Meat may be from animals that come from the water, the land, or the sky, and again, it doesn’t matter where it comes from or who kills it; the only stipulation is that the animals be male, not female (as is the case for Vedic sacrifices too). Fish are best without bones, though the ones that have lots of bones may also be offered to the goddess if they are very well roasted or fried. The best farina (
mudra
) is made from rice, barley, or “earth-smoke” wheat, which is especially nice when fried in butter.
⁵⁷
And fornication may involve one’s own wife, another man’s wife, or a woman who belongs to the group in common.

Wine, flesh, and fish were prohibited for high caste Hindus, and there is little debate about the basic lexical connotation or the denotation of these terms,
⁵⁸
though as we will see, there is much debate about whether they are to be taken literally. But the other two Ms,
mudra
and
maithuna
, have proved more problematic even to define in their primary meanings.
Mudra
, here interpreted as a fourth material article, farina, or parched grain (sometimes kidney beans, or “any cereal believed to possess aphrodisiac properties”
⁵⁹
), has a primary lexical meaning of “stamp” or “seal” (as in “seal ring”); it also means “signal” or “hand gesture,” and may indicate, in some texts, not farina but either of two other Fs: finger positions (physical movements of the hands corresponding to imagined acts) or the female sexual organ, which “seals” the male organ in the sexual act.
⁶⁰
The uncertainty of the referents of words used in the Tantras compounds the question of their literal or figurative meaning.

As for the last element,
maithuna
is usually translated as sexual intercourse, more literally “pairing,” but since all the other terms seem to be material substances, it may mean more precisely “what is derived from sexual intercourse”—that is, the fluids produced in sexual intercourse. This gloss is a bit of a stretch, but it is lexically correct, does assimilate
maithuna
to the other substances consumed as food at the forbidden feast, and has the added virtue of linking the Five Ms with another widely attested characteristic of South Asian Tantra in its earliest documented stage, a ritual in which what Sterling Hayden in
Doctor Strangelove
called “precious bodily fluids” (in this case sexual or menstrual discharge) were swallowed as transformative “power substances.”
⁶¹

For the Tantras do say things like “The body of every living creature is made of semen and blood. The [deities] who are fond of sexual pleasure drink semen and blood.”
⁶²
Drinking blood and seed together is a very Tantric thing to do. In one of the Puranic antecedents of the Tantras, “Glorification of the Goddess,” the goddess Chandika came up against an antigod that was actually named Blood Seed (Raktabija), from every drop of whose blood (or, if you prefer, semen) a new antigod appeared. To conquer him, Chandika created the goddess Kali and instructed her to open wide her mouth and drink the blood as well as the constantly appearing progeny of Blood Seed; then Chandika killed him.
⁶³
The goddess Kali effectively aborts the birth of offspring of Blood Seed by prophylactically swallowing his seed, the drops of his blood.
⁶⁴
In other Puranas, the goddess emits multiforms of herself who extend their tongues to lick up each drop of the semen-blood before it can fall to the ground.
⁶⁵
The long tongue of the goddess Kali, like that of the female antigod Long Tongue, the bitch that licks up the oblations, is the upward displacement of her excessive vaginas, a grotesque nightmare image of the devouring sexual woman, her mouth a second sexual organ.

But it is not semen-blood but female blood (together with male semen rather than male blood) that plays the central role in the Tantras. The menstrual blood of the female participant is connected to the polluting but life-giving blood of the menstruating goddess, which flows to the earth each year,
⁶⁶
and the blood of her animal victims, decapitated and offered in sacrifice. Not just the goddess, but the Yoginis, a horde of ravishingly beautiful, terrifying, and powerful female deities, participated in the drinking of the sexual fluids. These Yoginis were often placated with blood offerings and animal sacrifices but also propitiated by exchanging sexual fluids with the male practitioners and by consuming those fluids (as well as other prohibited foods). In return the Yoginis granted the practitioners, at the very least, “a powerful expansion of . . . the limited consciousness of the conformist Brahmin practitioner” and, at most, supernatural powers, including the power of flight.
⁶⁷

In protest against these transgressive forms of Tantra, many texts insisted that the ritual instructions were never intended to be followed literally but were purely symbolic. The sanitized interpretation of the Five Ms, for instance, introduced new ritual substitutes, glossing
madya
(wine) as a meditational nectar,
mamsa
(flesh) as the tongue of the practitioner,
matsya
(fish) as his breaths,
mudra
as inner knowledge, and
maithuna
as “supreme essence.”
⁶⁸
We can view the symbolic as a historical development from the actual (as may have been the case with references to human sacrifice at a much earlier period), or we can assume that the ritual was always purely symbolic, never real (like the ogres in the
Ramayana
), or that both were always already present from the start (like the linga that is and is not the phallus of Shiva). We might summarize the question, Did the Tantrics actually have Tantric sex? and respond with three guesses:

Let us consider them one by one.

The historical argument implies that the Hindus themselves bowdlerized their own tradition: “No one is swallowing anything; we’re all just meditating.” The argument for historical development begins by asserting that Tantra began as a non-Brahmin (sometimes even anti-Brahmin), antihouseholder movement and then was taken up by Brahmins and householders. Since we don’t have access to the earliest layers of Tantra, before the extant texts, we can’t know who the original worshipers were or what they did then; perhaps they did drink blood at first and then stopped, perhaps not. But we do have Tantric texts that seem to indicate that their authors drank blood and performed the sexual ritual. One can argue that Tantric ritual texts tell us precisely what the practitioners did, and that they mean what they say.
⁶⁹

Later, the historical argument continues, many Hindus merely imagined that part of the ritual and/or declared that it never had taken place at all,
⁷⁰
while Hindus who continued to perform the rituals described them in a code that made it appear that they were merely performing them symbolically. Certain elite Brahmin Tantric practitioners, led by the great systematic and scholastic theologian Abhinavagupta in Kashmir (975-1025 CE), sublimated the ritual into a body of ritual and meditative techniques “that did not threaten the purity regulations required for high-caste social constructions of the self.” The Tantra of the cremation ground was cleaned up and housebroken so that it could cross Brahmin thresholds. The theoreticians eliminated the major goal of the unsanitized Tantrics, the consumption of the substances, and kept only the minor goal, the expansion of consciousness, now viewed as the cultivation of a divine state of mind homologous to (rather than actually produced by) the bliss experienced in sexual orgasm. This sanitized High Hindu Tantra was a revisionist transformation “from a kind of doing to a kind of knowing,” abstracted into a program of meditation mantras.
⁷¹
It led to a split into householder sects, which worshiped Shiva but regarded the ritual texts as merely symbolic meditations, not as prescriptions for action, and more extreme cults, which continued to worship goddesses through rituals involving blood, wine, and erotic fluids, rituals that were entirely real.
⁷²

The relatively straightforward historical thesis is complicated, or nuanced, by several factors. Even after the period of transition there was still a place in the secret initiations for the consumption of prohibited foods and sexual fluids; the earlier, unreconstructed form of Tantra may also have persisted as a kind of underground river, flowing beneath the new, bowdlerized, dominant form of Tantra. Another sort of compromise consisted in sexual rituals performed only within the confines of
coitus reservatus
, eliminating the release of the fluids. But where some texts speak of meditation instead of
maithuna
, and others talk of
coitus reservatus
, yet others continue to talk about drinking fluids.

A third compromise consisted in performing the original rituals but shifting the goal from the development of magical powers or the transformation of the worshiper to “the transformative psychological effect of overcoming conventional notions of propriety through the consumption of polluting substances.”
⁷³
Finally, a system of overcoding may have permitted some high-caste, conformist householder practitioners to have it both ways, to lead a double life by living conventionally while experimenting in secret with Tantric identities; thus they might put on a public face to claim (to eighteenth-century missionaries, for instance) that they were “shocked” (like Claude Rains in
Casablanca
) by Tantric practices, in which they themselves covertly participated.
⁷⁴

The bowdlerizing effect may also have been a result of the Tantrics’ concern to make crystal clear the line between the use of antinomian elements in the ritual and any sort of casual orgiasticism. That is to say, “Kids, Don’t Try This at Home.” The original Tantric sources on sexualized ritual seldom mention pleasure, let alone ecstasy, though the later texts do speak of
ananda
(bliss).
⁷⁵
Indeed the Tantras seem sometimes to lean over backward to be
plus royaliste que le roi
in hedging their sexual ceremonies with secrecy, euphemism, and warnings of danger, realizing that in harnessing sex for their rituals, they are playing with fire. In this, the Tantras share in the more general Hindu cultural awareness of the dangers of sex, which even the
Kama-sutra
emphasizes.

This is a strong argument for the original physical reality of the Tantric substances; why warn people to be careful about them if they don’t exist? Wine, for instance, is, like sex, dangerous. The passage in the
Mahanirvana Tantra
glossing the Five Ms includes this caveat: “Meat, fish, parched grain, fruits and roots offered to the divinity when wine is offered are known as the purification [
shuddhi
] of the wine. Drinking wine without this purification, by itself, is like swallowing poison; the person who uses such a mantra becomes chronically ill and soon dies, after living only a short life span.”
⁷⁶
The text, well aware of the fact that intoxicating liquors are one of the addictive vices, returns to this issue later on, taking pains to distinguish the ritual use of wine (which is regarded as a goddess) from casual drinking, which it abhors: