Can we analize Tantra from a historical perspective and its possible relation with other cults?
According to White in the Kiss of the Yogini and others it seems that what we know today as Tantra came from native pre IE cults around "witches" who did rituals in cemeteries and caves involving the consumption of menstrual blood and semen to get powers and that eventually some hindus and buddhists were admited on them developing latter a "lite" version of Tantra where explicit sexual practices were turned into metaphors and the "magic" as a way to achieve liberation (this not being the original purpose).
The language and practices of Tantras are similar to voodoo and european witchery (the latter also asociated to women, midnight and cemeteries and also persecuted by the church like the yoginis were persecuted by Brahmins). There's even mention that the dakinis/yoginis fly on sticks, which reminds of the medieval witch and the broom (possibly a stick used for sexual stimulation to reach mental states)
Are those similarities proof of a very ancient common cult that was latter replaced in different parts of the world?
Or the similarities are due to the shock factor, used as a means to "hack" the brain and break social restrictions in any case?
>(possibly a stick used for sexual stimulation to reach mental states)
actually, the stick/broom in europe was most likely used to vaginally apply an ointment with psychoactive ingredients. It is absorbed fast and efficient and sends the consumer "go flying"
Wouldn’t surprise me that they were doing something similar in a early tantra cult.
Xavier Watson
That was what I was aiming at, forgot about the psychodelic stuff, makes even more sense.
Some practices by yogis even today use the consumption of cannabis and othet hallucinogenous stuff to reach "deeper states". Probably also to power up the visualizations
Luis Cruz
why is it presumed to be pre-ie? Also, hindu tantr doesn't interpret sexual practices as metaphors, or magic as only a way to liberation
Lincoln Thompson
It does in several schools since Abhinavagupta. Even in some Vajrayana schools the language is viewed as "symbolical". That's one of the main points of the book, that the tantrie language is actually explicit and not esoteric in regards to what the saddhakas do. The author cites several cases where the ingestion of semen and menstruation is changed for red berries and milk or similar stuff as "less disgusting" substitutes.
Other cases are to be found in the Kalachakra tantra or the Chandramaharosana tantra (both buddhist) where things like "touch the lotus with the vajra" is vajra = penis, padma = vagina, etc and the official explanation by some lamas is that it's either metaphorical or to be "visualized".
Dominic Gomez
In regards to the PIE it's mostly because similar rituals aren't common in PIE reconstructed religion (it has a heavy emphasis on war, horses and purism). Vedic religion is IE, while mainstream religiousness remained tantric. Also tantras praise the woman as teacher (and the role of Devi as creator), with a femenine/matriarchal aspect, completely opposed to patriarchal/masculine IE religiousness.
Jackson Jones
>pooniggers doing perverted shit before we civilized them Wow, who would have guessed.
Wyatt James
Bump
Lucas Morales
>touch the lotus with the vajra" is vajra = penis, padma = vagina, etc and the official explanation But they would just call it linga and yoni and there was no taboo against worshipping or portraying the lingam which is literally a penis inside vagina. Knowledge on pre IE Tantra is non-existent so speculation can be disingenious
Blake Torres
Go back to /pol/.
Leo Lewis
Bump
Angel Morris
I really don't know much about this subject but I would like to know more too. Bump.
Austin Martin
Bump
Jason Collins
Bump
Chase Adams
its actually known that tantrikas practiced and still practice sexual rituals. Including pretty much outright orgies. In some tantric literature, sexual imagery and language is symbolic and meant to symbolic, in others its literal and meant to be literal.
Aaron Thompson
>Also tantras praise the woman as teacher (and the role of Devi as creator), with a femenine/matriarchal aspect, completely opposed to patriarchal/masculine IE religiousness.
Thats not true at all of vedic religion and I don't know why this incorrect notion is so common. There are goddesses in vedic religion and they are very important. Aditi for example, supreme goddess of infinite light. Vak, the supreme goddess of cosmic speech/vibration. Devi is the creator in the four vedas, other deities are hymned as the creator too.
Male deities are much more frequently invoked in vedic ritual but there is a reason for this. The rituals mainly work with masculine principles. The supreme deities are invoked less then lesser deities who work with man on the spiritual path. A "minor" god in the vedas doesn't necessarily mean minor in cosmological sense, like less important. It means less invoked and less mentioned because less relevant to the spiritual path.
Also, just because a theme isn't common in PIE religion, does mean that if that theme is part of vedic religion, then it must come from another culture. PIE religion and vedic religion are different religions practiced and developed by different people. Religions can develop in different directions to ancestor religions without outside cultural imput, in fact, thats how most religions develop.
Christopher Harris
> Thats not true at all of vedic religion and I don't know why this incorrect notion is so common. There are goddesses in vedic religion and they are very important. That doesn't means that PIE isn't patriarchal and virile as opposed to tantra. There are male spirits in tantra like the dakas. No religion has a fully male or female pantheon.
>Aditi for example, supreme goddess of infinite light. Vak, the supreme goddess of cosmic speech/vibration. Devi is the creator in the four vedas, other deities are hymned as the creator too. That doesn't means that those were PIE deities. Except for maybe Aditi the others are very likely native goddesses incorporated in the Aryan pantheon, like Athena or Demeter in greek mythology who are pre indoeuropean godesses
>PIE religion and vedic religion are different religions practiced and developed by different people. Vedic religion departing from PIE already implies foreign influence. Proto indoiranian religion in fact has influence of the BMAC culture, from which rituals like the soma and other deities were taken. The sex rituals and the praise of woman are explicitly non indoeuropean, they go against the purity norms of the brahmins, no different than in other IE branches
>Religions can develop in different directions to ancestor religions without outside cultural imput, in fact, thats how most religions develop So? There is explicit evidence that "hinduism" has absorbed a substrate religion and people
Justin Turner
>the others are very likely native goddesses Devi is not a native goddess. Even today, in Russian deva and devushka mean women.
Carson Cox
That's an ethimological cognate, it doesn't means that it's an indoeuropean deity or that an indoeuropean name wasn't given to a local deity. There's also diva in latin, as a word for goddess, yet there is no specific goddess with that name.
Kali, for example, has a sanskrit name, yet she's very likely a native goddess from mountain regions. Probably also aryanized in her warrior aspect, much like Atena in Greece
The aspect that explicitly separates tantra as native in origin is the exaltation of the female form, and the divine as female, as in shaktism. In IE the supreme god is male (Dyeus Phter), in fact it can be contrasted to native european peoples like the basques whose pantheon also has a supreme mother goddess (Mari) instead of a masculine one.
Levi Nelson
*etymological
Landon Davis
Bump
William Thompson
Bumpo
Cooper King
Bump
Andrew Perry
Wow great thread. a bumpie from here
Brayden Robinson
bümp
Andrew Price
sepharin they woke they angesl but maxa they could concrtate withiur akrma thats misinterptation of the orignal emsage kiemt krishan intendend to that the wanted us to ego tianforget it and live and see outisde
Adam Perry
Wait, yogis were persecuted by brahmins? When?
Leo Powell
bump
Nathan Morgan
Easy on those, dude
Tyler Rivera
>one of the most interesting threads >barely any replies Bump
Angel Ward
Sources folks!
I want to comment but I have zero idea where to start..
Adam Clark
>tfw you know a lot about Buddhism but know next to nothing about the history of early Tantrism that was later transformed through Buddhism
Benjamin Watson
From David Gordon White: Kiss of the yogini Sinister yoguis
There are 2 other books (other authors) that analyze it from a historical point of view but can't remember the titles now. Gonna check and post it later
Sebastian Adams
*yogis
Jace Powell
From bengal, Here tantra is associated with goddess kali or shaktism. Bump.
Daniel Ortiz
>Vak Moreover, Vak (Para Vac) appears in the Tantric systems as a central godform.
>virile as opposed to tantra I dunno why we'd call systems of Tantra nonvirile.
Also the reliance on "symbolism" is incredibly reductive, and given how much is wrapped up in twilight language ("secrets from the mouth of the guru") you'd probably be best to move on from Kiss of the Yogini, whose early chapters DO try to unpack this as both literal and contemporary.
How much Abhinava have you read? I got a library stuffed with him.
This will be a hard topic until we can get serious reconsturctions of PIE life. The common fantasy is one of a bronze clad charioteer meeting a peaceful young mystic across the river, when the reality is probably something of the opposite, of a lightskinned agrarian charioteer meeting a rather aggressive mystic with her teeth filed down.
We have evidence that a number of the most prominent contemporary Kaliforms come from the mountainous regions of the subcontinent.
Attributing tantra to either-or is a recipe for sociopolitical shitposting, as is clearly evident in the forward to the poor english edition of Tantraloka, which is written almost as a direct callout to the assumption in KotY that much of this was non-Vedic in nature.
I'd put the actual origin points for Tantra closer to the time of Buddha rather than before, as in the Pali Canon we have tales of Vangisa the Skull Tapper who for all intents and purposes appears to have been a Kapalika.
Kali Kaula by Jan Fries Tantra Illuminated by Wallis Mark D's Journey into the World of Tantras Kapalikas and Kalimukhas Matrikabheda Tantra Hevajra Tantra Tantraloka Paratrisikavivirana Kularnava Tantra Kaulajnananirnaya
Ethan Thomas
>In my "Eastern" folder: That's one hell of an archive there, thanks for the link! The 2014 Rig Veda translation is especially appreciated since it's hella expensive to buy a physical copy.
Gavin Taylor
Thanks, I used to post it on Veeky Forums all the time, but we got banned for being "off topic" and a mod physically moved our threads back to his.
Funny part is the ban text said "all posts must pertain to archaeology...etc." but the library update I posted was academic texts only and contained archaeology of astrotheology texts.
Veeky Forums is apparently only for discussions of exoteric world religions rather than the actual practice of esoterica as presented by a dearth of historical source materials and academic analyses thereon.
Carter Flores
>back to /x/ Pardon, not that it matters this summer's been SHIT for new scans even while confined to /x/.
Joseph Bailey
>namefag shitposter buttmad that he gets removed for shitposting Posting 1 link to a some archeology article doesn't make your post not a shitpost senpai
Jason Perez
>a library with over five thousand academic and source texts, direct from scans of historical documents, some of which being incredibly important that I posted for the first time in public (Tantraloka in English, Yorke Microfilms of the Warburg Collection (aka Crowley's unpublished papers)) is "shitposting" for the Veeky Forums board
>tfw Veeky Forums mods ruined /his+omg/ culture
Anthony Morris
>being this fucking retarded thoth is one of the few good tripfags on this board,
Thomas Taylor
>tfw still about 2000 comments behind Constantine. Holy fuck that guy could shitpost
Charles Robinson
Your library is 95% woo woo hocus pocus and you have the audacity to post it here as "never before seen historical documents. here's my paypal btw :3"
Maybe that works on /x/. Or maybe you're just dumb.
Ian Roberts
>Your library is 95% woo woo hocus pocus My library is about 2/3rds academia and source materials. You'll need to produce some stats to back up your assertion, as I've got literally hundreds of Brill editions, and multiple academic series in a lot of folders.
I've never, ever, asked for a donation, either, which is easily verified on any given archive.
Michael Reyes
Let's take my Gnostic Studies folder as an example.
Of 70 files, 34 are academic, not counting plain source texts or something like a palgrave primer, which will bring the number of "legit" texts up. Add in the fifteen or so sources and that takes us up to about 70% flat worth of material not directly tied to any modern new age bullshit, but actually Veeky Forums related in terms of academic rigor.
Of course, actually checking titles and publishers is too much work for our detractors, hence why I had to break it down by numbers.
Liam Watson
>drudging through an archive to read the posts of an /x/ namefag This honestly made me cringe.
Your library seems to be mainly mystical woo woo, or scholarly documentation of mystical woo woo. Either way, go back to your containment board so we can actually have a discussion about history.
Jace Sullivan
>Tantra Illuminated by Wallis Holy shit, thanksman. I've been wanting that one.
Ian Baker
>Yeah let's talk about the the history of tantra >wtf is this first hand woo woo shit, get back to /x/ with your 'tantra' here we talk about PIE tantra >I'm so deep > let me read the bible, bcus that's not woo at all!
Thoth, i think your library is great - keep on sharing
Daniel Jackson
>if you don't like it that I spam links to irrelevant /x/ fairy-tale collections then you must be a christian! Bottom of the barrel retardation.
Carter Peterson
I just don't understand why people on the Veeky Forums board would be so hostile to source texts and academic analysis thereon w/r/t topics being asked about, or that are inherently relevant to the board.
I mean, either religion and anthropology are on-topic, or they're not.
Landon Scott
>muh jews >*blocks your path* >were X white? yeah nice discussion about history you stupid niggers have here. /omg/ would be the only good thread on this board if your mods werent literally reee-autists. mystical woo woo? enjoy roaming samsara for a billion more lifetimes, faggot.
Jace Peterson
uhh...have you seen most of the posts on this board? id bet any amount of money that at least half the posters here are either extremely autistic, brain damaged, or superficial normies that would reeee at the thought of anything that isnt dead materialism. and then they have the nerve to say that /omg/ is off topic when it's clearly not. i guess they need that one extra slot for better threads. let me guess... >holy >roman >empire fuck off, you morons killed this board within weeks of it getting started.
Kayden Mitchell
>That doesn't means that those were PIE deities. Ushas.
