WITCHES AND DAKINIS:

WICCA, PAGANISM, AND TANTRA

by John Myrdhin Reynolds

What I have written here is based on my public lectures, "Wicca and the Practice of Tantra in Tibetan Buddhism," given at the
Equinox Bookstore in Long Branch, New Jersey, in March of 1994. This lecture represented a presentation of some of my ideas regarding
the inner relationship between the Wicca of Gerald Gardner and the practice of Tantra in India and Tibet, especially the Heruka Sadhana I
am familiar with in Tibetan Buddhism. I plan to write more elaborately on this topic in a work in progress entitled Witchcraft, Paganism,
and Tantra.
The more technical aspects of Buddhist Tantra and the process of Tantric transformation known as sadhana I intend to
deal with in a number of other forthcoming books, including The Dance of the Dakinis and The Iconography of Meditation. I
have translated a number of commentaries on Wicca-style Tantric rites, including the Rites of the Goddess by Jamyang
Khyentse Wangpo, by Dudjom Rinpoche, by Jigmed Lingpa, and by other leading Lama-scholars to be included in these and
other future publications.
Because the present monograph was prepared quite in haste for the above lectures, detailed footnotes and bibliography
have been omitted. I hope that the various typos and lapses in style may also be excused by the reader. In any event, this
monograph represents part of my on-going Vidyadhara Project for comparing esoteric, mystical, and magical systems East
and West. As I make clear in this monograph, I believe in the psychic unity of humanity and the oneness of all life: I also
believe~ that the wisdom of the East can be of use and benefit in the West without the necessity of Westerners converting to
some Eastern religion or sect-- this being especially the case where Eastern mysticism and magic can contribute to the revival
of paganism and earth religion in the West.

John Myrdhin Reynolds,

Vidyadhara Institute, Freehold NJ 1994

CONTENTS:
Preface
1. Wicca and Tantra
2. Journey to the East
3. Posing the Question
4. Witchcraft in the Bible
5. Witchcraft in Ancient Greek Tradition
6. Witchcraft in Roman Tradition
7. Witchcraft in the Middle Ages
8. The Archetypal Source of Wicca
9. The Vedic Religion of the Ancient Aryans
10. Dravidian Religion in Ancient India
11. Buddhism and the Shramana Movement
12. Hindu Tantra and the Great Goddess Cult
13. Buddhist Tantra and the Mahasiddha Tradition
14. Buddhism in Tibet
15. Celestial and Chthonic Symbolism
16. The Psychological Dimension
17. Chakrapuja and the Witches’ Sabbat
18. Wiccan and Tantric Rites Compared: Preparations
19. Casting the Circle
20. Sadhana: Tantric Transformation
21. Mantra Recitation and Magic
22. Ganachakrapuja: The Tantric Feast
23. Conclusion

1
1. Wicca and Tantra
The subject about which I will speak tonight is a comparison modern Wicca, as inspired by Gerald Gardner, and certain aspects of the
Tantric Buddhism of Tibet. According to its practitioners, Wicca represents in modern times a revival of the ancient pagan religion of the
Great Goddess and the Homed God. But these divine figures are actually universal archetypes that are not limited to pre-Christian .Europe.
They also appear in the Ancient Near East in the Canaanite fertility cult of Baal and Astarte, as well as in Ancient India as the cult of Siva
and Devi. Particularly, in this Tantric Cult of India, the divine sexual union of the God and the Goddess in ecstatic bliss represents the
unification of male and female energies within the human psyche and the body of the Sadhaka or individual practitioner. This mystical
experience of unity, known as Mahasukha or the Great Bliss, gives birth to a higher and expanded level of consciousness, as well .as to the
potentiality for the development of psychic and spiritual powers. The integration of the divine principles of the archetypal .masculine and
the archetypal feminine in the human being is the basis of the practice of Tantra in both Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism.

2. Journey to the East

Although I have not been myself initiated into the Gardnerian tradition of Wicca, I have been a High Priest for many years in the
eclectic tradition of Western Paganism, specifically the Celtic and the .Egypto-Hellenistic traditions, which, as manifestations of the Pagan
Revival in the West, are strongly influenced by Gardnerian Wicca, as well as by the Qabalistic ceremonial magic deriving from the Middle
Ages. Since earliest childhood, not being raised as a Christian, I had been fascinated by Greek mythology and the mysterious animal-
headed gods of the Ancient Egyptians. When I read my first book on Indian religions, I discovered Hinduism to be also a very attractive
alternative to Christianity because, like the ancient paganism of Greece and the Near East, it was polytheistic, filled with a caste of colorful
divine characters. Nevertheless, it postulated a divine unity behind these many gods and the multiplicity of the world. This book also
described Buddhism of the Theravadin variety, emphasizing the .renunciation of passion and the worldly life, especially sex. Initially I did
not feel attracted to this ascetic religion of monks and .monasteries, with its ideal of an all-male celibate community.
However, later when I was at the university, my readings in Buddhist philosophy, especially the subtle dialectical Madhyamaka
system of Nagarjuna, helped me out of my spiritual dilemma by confim1ing that the materialistic so-called scientific view of the world is
only a conceptual construction fabricated in the human mind, a map, but not the landscape itself. And like all other conceptual
constructions masking reality from us, it was riddled with contradictions. Again I found room to breathe, no longer suffocating from an
omnipresent materialism of Middle Class American life in the fifties that left no room for the soul or the spirit. Furthermore, I concluded
also that, whereas the polytheistic pagan cults of Ancient Greece and Egypt were long dead and gone, totally annihilated by the imperial
monotheism and the church-state totalitarianism of both ~ Christianity and Islam, in India paganism was still alive and well. I detemined
upon making a pilgrimage, a journey to the East. For me -the East represented the source of all light, like the sun rising at dawn, whereas
the West (America) was a land of the abysmal darkness of rampant materialism and soulless commercialism. Although this view on my
part was stereotypic and naive, at the time it made sense to me.
When I moved to California after New York city, I read the.books of Evans-Wentz on the Tantric Buddhism of Tibet, especially his
The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This opened a whole new world to me, in many ways similar to the Ancient Egypt of my dreams, and I
discovered a Tantric form of Buddhism in Tibet which was not just a world of celibate monks and boarding-school style monasteries. I
discovered a world where not only sex was a sacrament and woman were exalted as Dakinis, but one where the most flamboyant magic
rubbed shoulder to shoulder with the highest spiritual and .metaphysical insights. Moreover, this world was a phantasmagoria of images, a
world of gods with many heads and arms, copulating .furiously with their voluptuous naked consorts, amidst great auras of the flames of
wisdom. More than anything else, it was the visuals, this flamboyant iconography of the Tantric gods, that led me into .Tibetan Buddhism.
Furthermore, I went into this Buddhism as a lusty, life-affirming pagan, not as a guilt-ridden life-denying Christian puritan, as is usually the
case with Americans who become involved with Buddhism.
The Tibetan Lamas are the living custodians of this tradition of Tantric Buddhism, and having been driven out of their native land in .
1959 by the Communist Chinese conquest and occupation of Tibet, they became accessible to Western students in India for the first .time.
Thus I decided to go to India, to seek out these refugee Lamas, and take initiation into the Tantras and train in this form of the Ancient
Wisdom. With this end in mind, I returned to the university, first to UC Berkeley in 1963-4 and then to the University of Washington,
Seattle, 1964-1968, in order to study the languages, -Sanskrit and Tibetan, which would allow me to accomplish this more effectively. It
was also in Seattle that I met and studied under my first Tibetan Lama, the Ven. Dezhung Rinpoche. Although himself a Sakyapa Lama, at
least according to his monastic ordination, he was actually Rimedpa or nonsectarian in his practice, studies, and approach to the Dharma
generally. He was an heir to the Rimed or nonsectarian movement of nineteenth century Eastern Tibet to which also belonged many
illustrious Lamas with whom I have had contact, -including the Ven. Kalu Rinpoche. Moreover, it was Dezhung Rinpoche who first
initiated me into the Nyingmapa tradition of Guru Padmasambhava, the Indian magician and master who established in the Tantric form of
Buddhism in Tibet.
Since it was initially the Tibetan Book of the Dead that fascinated me and the school of Tibetan Buddhism that is specifically
connected with the Tibetan Book of the Dead is the Nyingmapa, I determined to research that particular tradition among the Nyingmapa
Lamas living as refugees in India. Deciding to research this Nyingmapa tradition for my PhD thesis, I left for India in 1969. As a result, I
resided in India and Nepal for most of the 1970s and thus missed most of the Nixon years in the US. During my time in ~" ~ Darjeeling
and Kathmandu, I received many High Tantric initiations from Nyingmapa and Kagyudpa Lamas and in a series of retreats in ! 8;
Darjeeling and elsewhere I practiced these teachings and translated a number of practice texts relating to them. In 1974 in Darjeeling I was
ordained as a Ngakpa or Buddhist Tantric priest in the .Nyingmapa tradition, receiving my ordination and robes from HH Dudjom
Rinpoche, Head Lama of the Nyingmapas.
Most people in the West think that Tibetan Lamas are necessarily monks, just as Roman Catholic priests are celibate. But this is not
true. The majority of Tibetans in robes are indeed monks, usually attached to some monastery, but this is not true of the Nyingmapa Lamas.
Their lineage goes back to Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra, Mahasiddhas or Great Adepts who came from India .who were not celibate

2
monks, but yogis and magicians. In the Tibetan usage of the term, not all monks are considered Lamas. Properly speaking, a Lama is a
spiritual teacher and master, this .Tibetan word translating the Sanskrit word Guru, whereas in Tibetan an ordinary monk is called a Trapa
or school boy. But the Mongols, when they converted from shamanism to Buddhism, started calling all Tibetans in robes Lamas, and the
West picked up the habit from them.
During my first years in India, I also lived at a Hindu Ashram in South India for three years. The Swami who was head of the ashram
-was a follower of the Advaita Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism, but his approach to religion in general was very open and non-sectarian.
Crowning the hill above the ashram was a shrine to the god Siva, and in the hills behind there was a hidden grotto with a Siva lingam
(phallic image), together with a large stone image of Nandi the bull guarding the entrance to the cave. I spent many hours practicing and
meditating in this cave. Both the phallus and the bull are symbols connected with the ancient fertility god known as Baal in the Old
Testament of the Bible. Siva wears the horns of the crescent moon in his hair, he is garlanded with serpents, and his earliest appearance in
India is as Pashupati, the Lord of Beasts. The Greeks identified him .with Dionysos, the god of madness and ecstasy. So here in the hills of
India I again encountered the Horned God of the Ancient Mediterranean and Old Europe. Indeed, some South Indian followers .of Siva
assert that their religion is the oldest in the world, going back to earliest Paleolithic times.
But I discovered in Darjeeling and in Nepal that this Siva or Bhairava archetype, so prominent in Tantric Hinduism, was also the :
divine numinous figure at the core of the Buddhist Higher Tantras, where he is known as the Heruka. Fascinated since earliest childhood
by Dlonysos and Pan, I had come east to India only to meet old friends.

3. Posing the Question

Since Wicca.became known to the general public in the 1950s with the publication of Witchcraft Today (1954) by Gerald B. Gardner,
there has been a debate over the question of the real .historical origin of Wicca, the religion of the witches. Is Wicca a survival of an older
pre-Christian tradition as Gamer asserted in his book or was it invented by him in 1939. In Anglo-Saxon Protestant .cultures generally, the
witch has had a very negative image. She is an ugly old crone in a pointed black hat who cooks toads and lizards and other repulsive things
in a cauldron to concoct a poisonous brew. .Or else, she is a seductive young woman, dangerous to a man and out of his control. Or more
traditionally, she is a woman who willfully .enters into a pack with the Devil, attends nocturnal orgies where she has promiscuous sexual
relations, murders innocent children and devours their flesh, works black magic against the community of .mankind, and in general is out
of the control of the patriarchal establishment of church and state. She is perceived as a threat to all that is good and holy, moral and
Christian, a threat to the patriarchal order of society. In Latin, the very word for witchcraft, maleficia, means doing evil. And so the witch is
someone who must be stopped -and eradicated at any cost. [See Rosemary Radford Ruether, New Woman/ New Earth (1975)]
Even in secular social science, the witch has had a negative image. But although American and British anthropologists generally , have
given a negative connotation to the terms "witch" and "witchcraft", reflecting their Protestant cultural heritage, making them refer to the
practice of destructive and harmful magic, there is no necessity to restrict these terms so. After all, magic has both positive and negative
aspects, and in just about all societies, the positive aspects predominate. Black magicians are a small minority in this world, despite the
Christian protests exaggerating their importance. Indeed, almost all the witches persecuted and executed during the European witch craze
were simple mid-wives and practitioners of herbal magic and healing in the countryside. They were not members of a revolutionary
conspiracy against the state or a cancerous Satanic cult that must be surgically removed by the stake and the gallows. These were the
fantasies of their sexually frustrated and paranoid clerical persecutors.
Thus in a true anthropological sense, witchcraft is a universal cultural phenomena, characterized by folk magic, herbal medicine,
divination, and contact with nature spirits. A witch is not necessarily a shaman because the practice of witchcraft does not require the
entering into the state of ecstasy in order to accomplish a healing. [On this question, see Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of
Ecstasy (1964)] On the other hand, altered states of consciousness are not excluded either and, indeed, the witch does have contact with the
Otherworld of the spirits, for these spirits are intimately tied up with the process of healing and the abundance of nature.
Nor is witchcraft, in the proper anthropological sense, a religious cult as Gardner would have it. A witch can easily be a Taoist, a
Hindu, WI a Buddhist, a Muslim, even a Christian (as I discovered in Yugoslavia), for the practice of folk magic and healing is
independent i of theology and religious affiliation, even where, as in the case of .Christianity, the religious establishment condemns and
forbids the -practice of magic. According to old Jewish sources, and even the .Gospels themselves in the New Testament of the Bible, the
Jewish Rabbi from Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth, was a healer, an exorcist, and a magician, even a witch, because he healed others by casting
out spirits and commanded a familiar spirit named Beelzebub. There is~ evidence that he may even have learned his magic in the Jewish
community in Alexandria in Egypt. [See Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician (1978)] However, the later Church claimed that this Rabbi was
not a magician and that he worked his healings, exorcisms, and -miracles by the power of the Holy Spirit of God alone, like the Hebrew
prophets of old. Jesus is thus contrasted with Simon Magus. The early Church felt the necessity to defend itself against the Roman
accusations that it worked magic, which was precisely what it was~ doing. Catholics continue to use the Mass for magical purposes and
practice candle magic. It is the Protestants who, on the other hand, totally reject the world of magic. In fact, in a country like Haiti, the
Roman Catholic Church offers no safe refuge from the attack on an -individual by Voodoo. The individual must convert to Protestantism in
order to escape the dire effects of this magical attack. During my residence in the former Yugoslavia, I met a number of Orthodox .Serbian
priests who were permitted by their church to marry and who were renowned in the Serbian countryside as powerful practitioners of magic.
In the Serbian hills, the veshtitsa or witches that I met all considered themselves to be good Christians and were members of the Orthodox
Church. The magic and divinations practiced by these women was entirely positive and beneficial.
Gardner, however, appropriated the terms "witch" and '~witchcraft" for a revived pagan religious cult, and this confused matters a bit.
A religious cult is not a craft, whereas folk magic and healing is. He called his religion" the Craft", and also explained that it was known as
Wicca. [See, Gerald B. Gardner, Witchcraft Today (1954)] However, in this he was only following the thesis articulated by Margaret
Murray who, in the 1920s, offered the hypothesis that the witches persecuted in the preceding centuries were actually the followers of a
surviving pagan cult. They were the members of a pre- Christian religion and thus were neither Satanists nor Christian ~ heretics. [See her
books The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) and The God of the Witches (1931)] Indeed, it was my reading of the latter book, The

3
God of the Witches, which I found in the early 1960s, that tumed me on to witchcraft as a survival of pagan religion. Prof. Murray saw the
persecuted witches as the last survivors of a pre-Christian cult of the Homed God (a fertility deity) and interpreted the material from the
witch trials accordingly. She also discovered many of the kings of England to be followers of the cult and found certain continental figures
like Joan of Arc to be witches and members of the cult. However, Prof. Murray was an Egyptologist, and most academic scholars felt she
had strayed far from her field of expertise and criticized her research and her conclusions. [See Elliot Rose, A Razor for a Goat: Problems
in the History of Witchcraft and Diabolism (1989) and also Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons (1975)] However, many, including
myself, found Murray's thesis I very attractive and inspiring.
Furthermore, Gardner claimed to have discovered in the New Forest in the South of England just the sort of witches' coven about
which Margaret Murray had written. This New Forest Coven invoked the Horned God described by Murray in her two books and also the
Goddess described by Leland in his book. [See Charles G. Leland, Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches (1897).] Invoking its male and
female deities, this coven practiced healing and fertility magic, at times culminating in ritual sexual intercourse. The existence of a coven of
traditional witches seemed to prove the Murray thesis and Gardner asserted that he was initiated into this coven. However, an examination
of The Book of Shadows circulated by Gardner in its three versions, which contained the rituals of Gardner's coven that had hived off from
the original one in the New Forest, indicates that the basic ritual was largely based on the Mathers' translation of the Medieval grimoire The
Greater Key of Solomon and Aleister Crowley's Gnostic Mass [See S.L. MacGregor Mathers, Greater Key of Solomon (1888) and Aleister
Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice (n.d.).] Then, with Garner’s exaggerated claims and his publicity seeking in the 1950s, many
began to doubt his claims. Scholars of the history of religion dismissed these claims out of hand. Yet Wicca continued to grow and attract
followers throughout the following decades despite defamation in the popular press and the lofty disdain of scholars.
I myself had first read Witchcraft in its popular British paperback edition (Arrow 1966) in 1968 in Berkeley where I was pursuing my
Buddhist studies and making my first translations from the Tibetan. This was five years after I had first taken refuge as a Buddhist (1963)
and three years after I had been initiated into Tibetan Buddhism by Dezhung Rinpoche in Seattle (1985). Nonetheless, I found myself
powerfully drawn to Gardner's claims and clearly perceived the similarity of his Wicca with the Tantric cult I found within Tibetan
Buddhism. However, by Gardner's own admission, the term for this revived pagan religion, Wicca, from which the English word witch
derives, was Anglo-Saxon. It could conceivably designate the survival of an Anglo-Saxon pagan cult, but how could the French-speaking
Norman kings of England belong to a fringe sect of Saxon peasants whom they despised? Yet this was the claim of Murray. Nor could the
term Wicca designate pagan survivals .in Cornwall, Wales, Man, Scotland, and Ireland where various Celtic .languages were spoken and
not English, at least not until the later Norman conquests of those Celtic lands. Yet, because of Gardner's work, the term Wicca has come
to designate, not only the Gardnerian witch cult, but all variety of pagan revivalism, whether directly -based on his work or not. Thus the
word Wicca has now entered into ~ the English dictionary and it provides us with a useful term for the pagan religion (whether
reconstructed or traditional) of the God and .the Goddess. It has a specifically religious connotation compared to the more general term
witchcraft. On whether Gardner was actually initiated into a coven of traditional witches in the New Forest and based his Book of Shadows
on the work of this coven, or whether he simply invented a witch cult in 1939, drawing upon various pre-existing sources, is not for me to
say here. But needless to say, Wicca in its various forms, works and is effective both as religion and magic. An increasing number of
people, disillusioned with Christianity, are attracted to it as a religion and as a spiritual path. Gardner was into something; he had tapped
into an archetype and it is certain that Gerald Gardner did not invent this archetype. [On .Gardner and the problem of the origin of
Gardnerian Wicca, see Aidan Kelly, Crafting the Art of Magic (1991) and Doreen Valiente, The Rebirth of Magic (1989)]

4. Witchcraft in the Bible

Some may be shocked to discover that of the witch cult of the God and the Goddess is dearly present in the Old Testament of the ~
Christian Bible. This may dismay the Christian Fundamentalists, but there it is in the holy scriptures, though they will interpret this fact, no
doubt, as another battle in God's eternal war with the Devil. Most American Christians only know the Bible, including the so-called Old
Testament, in its English translation. But the Old Testament is not a J. Christian book at all, no matter how much the Church has
appropriated it and misinterpreted the text for its own purposes, .including the fabricated claim that the Old Testament prophesies the
coming of Jesus as the Christ, the Jewish Messiah. The Old Testament is a Jewish book, originally written in the Hebrew language, being
.largely an anthology of Hebrew literature, both secular and religious. I Furthermore, it is a history of the Jewish people over the centuries,
a record of the dialogue between the Jewish people and their God. This .Jewish scripture was appropriated by a non-Jewish gentile
movement in the Roman empire when, because of the missionary .activities of one Paul of Tarsus, this movement became convinced that a
certain Jewish Rabbi, executed by the Roman authorities, was in fact a god. This situation was not something unusual among the Greeks
who regarded many of its past heroes, such as Herakles and Perseus, as the son of a god. However, this was never a Jewish idea and is
totally alien to the Jewish religion.
This gentile movement, that in the second century became the Christian Church, claimed to be the only real Israel having a covenant
with God, whereas the Jews represented a false Israel because they willfully and stubbornly did not recognize Jesus as the Christ. Thus,
they became little better than the pagans who also did not recognize the one true religion, but perniciously persisted in the worship of idols
and demons. Once the Christians got into political power under the successors of the emperor Constantine, they persecuted not only the
pagans, but the Jews as well. Because his own people did not recognize Jesus as fulfilling the prophecies concerning the coming Messiah
found in their own holy scriptures, the Jews represented an eloquent refutation of Christian claims. At best, the Jews were an
embarrassment to the Church, at worst, a danger. Thus it would appear that Christianity was inherently anti-Semitic; although this does
mean that any particular individual Christian is anti-Semitic or even considers the matter in this way.
Witchcraft occurs in the Old Testament, but chiefly it was a crime. Not until the thirteenth century of the Christian Middle Ages in
Europe was witchcraft declared to be a heresy. According to the Bible (I Samuel 28-31; II Samuel 1-16), the Hebrew military leader Saul
had previously banished the witches and soothsayers from his newly established kingdom. But now feeling that David had betrayed him to
his Philistine enemies and that his own family had turned against him, he sought the aid of one of the witches he had banished from his

4
kingdom. He went to the Witch of Endor and employed her to practice necromancy on his behalf, in order to call up from Sheol the
deceased spirit of the prophet Samuel. Saul questioned the spirit ~ regarding his fate, for it was well known that the Repha'im or the spirits
of the dead could see future events, but the dead prophet held .out no hope for him. Saul and his sons were slain in the next battle with the
Philistines and David succeeded him as king of the Hebrews. Thereafter David defeated the Philistines in a series of battles and conquering
the Canaanite city of Jerusalem, he made it the new capital of his expanded kingdom.
David was devoted to the cult of Yahweh, the patron deity of the Hebrew tribes, whom, according to legend, Moses had met in '"
person on a mountain in the desert wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. This god, speaking to Moses while concealed in a cloud on the
-mountain, asserted that he was identical with EI Shaddai, the patron deity of Moses' ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Yahweh
thereupon made a covenant or contract with Moses that if the Hebrew people would worship him exclusively as their only god, Yahweh
would free them from servitude in Egypt and grant them a land of their own, the land of milk and honey known as Canaan, despite the fact
that the country was already well populated with Canaanites.
This contract was embodied in the Ten Commandments, which t began "Thou shalt have no other gods except Yahweh. Thou shalt not
-make nor worship idols. Thou shalt not take the name of Yahweh in vain..." and so on. [Exodus 20:1-17] At no time did Yahweh assert
that he was the creator of heaven and earth or that he was the only god that existed in the universe. On the contrary, each foreign nation had
its patron deity and that deity represented its interests in the -heavenly council. In fact, in the Ancient Near Eastern generally, there existed
a belief that there was a war in heaven, a power struggle among the gods, and whichever god was currently in power in heaven, that god's
nation on earth became politically and militarily paramount. Thus, both the Babylonians and the Assyrians rewrote the old Mesopotamian
creation myth in order to show that it was their own patron deity, Marduk and Asshur respectively, who was triumphant in tl1is war in
heaven and was elected the king of the , gods. In those early days, Yahweh was celebrated as a war god .known as Yahweh Sabaoth, "the
Lord of Hosts", a god befitting a nomadic war-like desert-dwelling people. Yahweh went into battle in .heaven against the gods of the
foreign nations. Having defeated the gods of Egypt, he was able to free his client people from the Egyptian yoke and lead them through the
desert wilderness to the promised .land.
Thus, in the beginning the Hebrews were not monotheists, for they freely admitted the existence of other gods, but they were
monolatrous, that is, devoted to the cult of a single deity, in tl1is case Yahweh with whom Moses made a legal contract. To make the
early .Hebrews into monotheists is anachronistic. True monotheism only evolved later among the Hebrews as the result of the preaching of
the great prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries. Moreover, .even in the time of Moses and in the following centuries, many Hebrews
clung to their old polytheistic pagan beliefs. During an absence of Moses from his people, his brother, the priest Aaron, made an image of a
golden calf and invited the people to worship it. The actual Hebrew word here, abir, indicated not a baby cow, but a young phallically
potent three year old bull. [Exodus 32:35] This was .only one instance in the ongoing struggle between the cult of the desert war god
Yahweh and the Canaanite fertility god Baal whose .symbol was the bull.
Once the Hebrews entered Canaan, they were able to overwhelm the small Canaanite city states one by one, until their tribal
confederation ruled over by Judges came to control most of the land. The more sedentary agricultural Canaanites were not all massacred as
the Book of Joshua asserts, but over the course of several hundred years, the Hebrews and the Canaanites intermarried and their cultures
mingled. The Hebrews even came to speak the Hebrew language, which was actually the language of the indigenous Canaanites; Abraham
and his family, having come from Harran in Northern Mesopotamia, were speakers of Aramaic. When the Hebrews took up the pursuit of
agriculture in the newly conquered I land of Canaan, they adopted the agricultural technology of the Canaanites with whom they
intermingled and intermarried. In those days, fertility magic and seasonal fertility rites were part and parcel of agricultural technology.
These fertility rites were conducted at the bemoth or high places, the hilltops outside the Canaanite towns and villages. Here also sacrifices
and other offerings were made on stone altars to the Canaanite fertility god Baal, the deity who brought the autumn rains that fertilized the
earth. Present in the high places as well were wooden pillars or asherim carved in the form of a naked female, the goddess Asherah or
Astarte. Baal and Astarte were the principal deities of the Canaanites and Phoenicians, for they were close to the earth and the every day
affairs of the people, whereas the old Canaanite creator god El resided in a distant heaven and was remote from the affairs of earth. Early
prophets, such as Hosea, referred to these pagan fertility rites as abominations, and saw them -as whoring after other gods, a falling away
from the originally pure and exclusive cult of the ancestral desert god Yahweh.
In those early days, from the time of Moses to the end of the First Temple and the Hebrew monarchy in 586 BC when Jerusalem fell
to the Babylonians, the cult of Baal was the chief competition to the austere official cult of Yahweh. The prophets preached incessantly
against the cult of Baal, no doubt because they felt it as an actual threat to Yahwism, Baalism being so deeply rooted among n the mixed
population of Hebrews and Canaanites. Furthermore, archaeology has discovered that nearly every Hebrew household during the monarchy
period contained images of the goddess Asherah. Not only were her powers invoked for fertility, but at times she was actually elevated to
the role of the consort of the national god Yahweh as the Queen of Heaven. [See Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (1967).] Clearly we
find here among the Canaanites, among the Phoenicians, and even among some Hebrews, the familiar Wiccan-style cult: the Horned God
Baal and the Great Goddess Astarte. At the archetypal level, this struggle among the gods on the I inner planes between the old fertility
religion of Canaan and the patriarchal monotheism from the Sinai desert has continued among us down to this day. Perhaps the priests of
the Ancient Near East were not so wrong about the warfare in heaven.
In fact, in ancient Canaan, there were many Baalim or local fertility deities, though they tended to be assimilated to a single great god
Baal Hadad. The same evolution occurred in India where local fertility deities where assimilated to a single great god Siva. Baal, who
controlled the storm and the fertilizing rains, corresponded to Zeus of the Greeks, Taranis of the Celts, and Indra of the ancient Vedic
Indians. Among all of these peoples is found the same dragon slaying myth. Thus Baal, like his brother storm gods, was fundamentally a
celestial deity and, after slaying the chaos dragon, he established his palace on top of the cosmic mountain of Saphon in the north.
Furthermore, it was Baal's combat with and vanquishing of the chaos dragon Yam, also known as Lohan (the Biblical Leviathan), that
made possible the creation or the ordering of the world as we know it today. But Baal had also his connections with the earth. In the
Canaanite literature from Ugarit on the Syrian coast, it is told how Baal descended into the underworld where he was tricked by Death
(Mot) and became a prisoner there. It was only because of the sagacity and actions of his lover, the goddess Anat, that she was able to
rescue and revive him, thus restoring life and fertility to nature. So Baal also had his chthonic form. Asherah and Anat are both forms of the
Great Goddess; Asherah of the sea became known to the Greeks as .Aphrodite and Anat became known to them as Artemis. The

5
Canaanites usually depicted Anat as a nude maiden holding weapons .and riding on a lion, a warrior queen and Amazon, being reminiscent
of the Hindu goddess Durga.
When David became king over the Hebrew people, he .conquered Jerusalem, the fortified town of the Jebusite tribe of Canaanites,
and made it his new capital. He brought there the Ark of he Covenant and planed to built a temple to house it in the town. [II .Samuel 2:6-
9] This was accomplished by his son Solomon. At David's .-court was Nathan, the prophet of Yahweh, and the learned priest Abiathar who
became the royal historian. It may have been this .priest who was responsible for the origin of the Bible and some scholars think that he
may have been the author of the oldest document In the text of the Bible, called "J" because it consistently used the name Yahweh for the
Hebrew god. Apparently, because many Hebrews did not recognize the right of his dynasty to rule over them, David commissioned his
priests and scribes to compile from older sources, both written and ~ oral, a history of the Hebrew people from the time of creation down
the time of David's ascension to the throne. The purpose of this official history was to justify David's monarchy, because previously the
Hebrew tribes had been ruled over, not by hereditary monarchs, but by elected judges. This official history made it appear that the
ascension of David and his dynasty was all part of a divine plan, the fulfillment of Yahweh's promise to his people. The Bible was a
politically ideological document from the very beginning.
Also as part of David's strategy, he employed the Jebusite priests of EI Elyon, the old Canaanite creator god and grandfather of the
gods, whose shrine was in Jerusalem, to develop a Canaanite-type temple cult for the recently arrived Yahweh. David desired a cult and
temple equivalent to those found in all the other civilized kingdoms and cities in the Near East. Since this older deity of the Jebusites was
regarded by Canaanites generally was the creator, this strategy of David facilitated the identification of Yahweh with God the Creator-- for
in origin Yahweh was most definitely not the creator of heaven and earth. This clever move by David gave a fresh impetus to Yahwism and
its struggle against Baalism. Judah and the minority tribes in the south had been in Egypt and had been converted by Moses to the Yahweh
cult, but it appears that the northern tribes had IWI8 never been in Egypt or with Moses in Sinai. They had been much ~ longer resident in
Canaan and practiced, like their Canaanite neighbors, the cult of the high god El. Thus David's strategy also united the Northerners with the
Southerners, even the Canaanites, in a single national cult where Yahweh was identified with the supreme creator god El Elyon the
evolution of the Hebrew religion, see William .F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity (1957.)] In the Biblical text, El is called
Elohim, which is a Hebrew plural meaning "the gods". A variant history written in the north, called the "E" document, .because the name
for God therein is Elohim, was later combined with the J document to form the core of the original Bible. In .subsequent centuries, there
were more additions and revisions of the text under priestly auspices. David's actions, the later prophets, and the evolving text of the Bible
itself, allowed the development of an .imperial monotheism among the Hebrews or Jews. [See Richard E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible
(1987).]
However, the last vestiges of Baalism and the worship of the .Goddess did not disappear among the Hebrews (now called Jews
-because only the southern kingdom of Judah survived the onslaught of the Assyrians) until the Babylonian captivity and the return from
.exile and the building the Second Temple. Nevertheless, neither of these two numinous archetypes, Baal and Astarte, though repressed Q
from surface consciousness, disappeared entirely. The homed god -Baal re-emerged as one element in the composition of the Christian
Devil and the Great Goddess has continued to influence the development of Judaism, especially the Qabalah. [Again, see R. Patai, The
Hebrew Goddess (1967).]
Some modem pagans blame Judaism for the invention of imperial monotheism and the persecution of polytheism-- but this is not
really fair. The real villain is the Christian ideological interpretation and misrepresentation of the rich and beautiful text of the Hebrew
Bible. Judaism is a religious tradition that has evolved ~ for over three thousand years and it is, in fact, the only Ancient Near " Eastern
religion that has survived until the present day, despite -terrible persecutions by Christians and Muslims. Judaism represents much more
than the dry legalism of the Talmud, as necessary as that legal tradition may have been for the preservation of the Jewish .people
throughout the centuries. But more important to non-Jews is the lofty mysticism of the Merkabah and the Qabalah, and it is the latter, in its
Latin translations, that has given form to the Western .Occult Tradition. Whereas most pagan sources in Latin and Greek were
systematically destroyed by the Church, the mysticism and the occultism of the Qabalah has been preserved for our time by the Rabbis. No
modem Western pagan or ceremonial magician should forget the debt they owe to the Jewish Qabalah.
And furthermore, I must say, the real problem is not so much ~ with Christianity as a religion, but with the combining of that religion
with secular political power, namely, the Roman empire-- and the .continuation, even in our own time, of that religio-political heritage.
Intolerance and fundamentalism, especially combined with the political power of coercion, is an evil no matter who practices it. And .as a
pagan, I take much delight in and appreciate the millennia-old Jewish tradition. Even the last pagan emperor Julius desired to help .rebuild
the Temple of Jerusalem before his untimely death at the hands of the Christians.

5. Witchcraft in Ancient Greek Tradition

Witchcraft was known among the Ancient Greeks where it was called goeteia. The witches of Thessaly in Northern Greece were I
especially famous and it was one of them that transformed Lucius, ';J. -the hero of Apuleius' novel The Golden Ass, into a jackass where
from that form he was finally rescued by the great goddess Isis. Elsewhere, images of witches appeared in Greek myth and legend, such as
Circe and Media. All of them were characterized by a willful -independence from the patriarchal order of Greek society. The patron of the
witches was the dark goddess Hekate, she of the three roads. At Eleusis, Hekate was associated with Demeter and the search ~ in the
underworld for her lost daughter Kore. Artemis, originally the Potnia Theron, the Mistress of Animals, became associated in Classical
times with the moon, and Hekate was associated with the dark of the moon.
Each Greek city-state had its own official religion and cult of the Olympian gods, headed by the majestic storm god and king of the
immortal gods, Zeus, enthroned in his palace upon Mount Olympus. This Olympian cult was conducted in the bright sunshine on festival
days at altars set in front of the temples of the gods. Here animals were sacrificed by the priests to the gods. To the accompaniment of
hymns and invocations, their throats were slit and the blood splattered on the stone of the altar. Then the carcass of the animal was
butchered and its flesh roasted in fires upon the altar. The gods received as their portion the burn bones and skin, while humanity received
the succulent cooked flesh, and so had the better of the deal. After the priests received their requisite portion of the cooked meat, the

6
remainder was parceled out to everyone for feasting and joyous partying. Because the animals to be sacrificed were first dedicated to the
gods, the early Christians were totally adverse to eating meat purchased in the agora or open market. Most of the meat available in butcher
shops had come from sacrifices to the gods and the Christians regarded the Olympian gods of their pagan neighbors as being no more than
demons.
The Olympian gods headed by mighty Zeus were theoi ouranioi, the celestial gods of the gods of heaven. Their sacrificial cult was as
described above; it was public and belonged to the day time. But one could not take these gods lightly and deny their existence or
.blasphemy against them, as Socrates discovered to his sorrow. The gods were the protectors of the city and its life. This was a civic cult
.and all members of the polis or community were expected to .participate in it, at least nominally. To refuse to do so could effect the entire
community negatively by drawing down the wrath of the gods .in the form of famines and plagues. When that occurred, an Orphic
magician would be called in to purify the city of its sins. Yet during the Classical Period, the Greek poets progressively trivialized the .gods
in their poetic recensions of old myths. This made for good stories and great literature, but the human foibles of the gods were -played up
and people began to take them less seriously. Zeus became ~ an old lecher, cheating on his shrewish wife Hera and was constantly .chasing
after beautiful nymphs and even human women; Apollo -became a bisexual phallic youth in pursuit of both beautiful boys and girls. This
contrasted with the high moral seriousness of the Hebrew God Yahweh who had no interest whatsoever in pursuing beautiful nymphs. This
frivolous image of the gods hurt the Old Religion grievously when Christianity came to Greece and it was much -employed in Christian
anti-pagan propaganda. The Stoic philosophers -attempted to defend the Old Religion by seeing in the ancient myths certain allegories of
natural processes, a strategy later pursued by Sir ~ James Frazer. But by the beginning of the Christian era, Greek city r- dwellers ceased to
find solace and meaning in the old Olympian gods , and their myths. After the Roman conquest of Greece, Greek civic religion went into
full decline, and city dwellers sought refuge and salvation in cults of Oriental origin, including Christianity. However, the situation was
quite different in the countryside where the indigenous peasant population had been little effected by the mockery of the poets toward the
gods and the skepticism of the philosophers. Among the peasants the Old Gods continued to be worshipped and invoked well into the
Christian era, even until the ninth century in certain remote parts of Greece.
And in both the polis and the countryside, there had existed another kind of cult which was non-Olympian and whose gods were in no
way celestial. These were the theoi chthonioi, the chthonic gods or the gods of the underworld. They were the old gods of the pre- Greek
Pelasgian and Halladic peoples who inhabited the land before the Indo-European Greeks came down from the north. These chthonic deities
of the earth were associated with the figure of the primordial Great Goddess and they were principally concerned with the fertility .of the
earth and of animals. Their major cults were known as the Mysteries, such as those practiced at Eleusis in honor of the goddess Demeter,
the earth mother, and her fair daughter Kore. The Eleusinian Mysteries were conducted at night and included the partaking of a drink,
probably containing the psychedelic substance ergot which induced visions in the participants during the night of vigil in the Telesterion.
The chthonic deities were also headed by a male deity known as Zeus Chthonios, "the Lord of the Underworld," generally identified in
classical times with Pluto or Hades, the grim younger brother of celestial Zeus, the Lord of Heaven. An uneasy truce existed between them.
But the underworld and the realm of the dead was clearly the domain of the Chthonian Lord and the writ of the celestial gods did not carry
there. However, according to Kerenyi, one secret that was revealed during the course of the Eleusinian Mysteries was that Zeus Chthonios
is in actually the mysterious and enigmatic Dionysos. Moreover, he was the real lover of the Great Goddess in her guise of Kore or
Persephone. [See Kerenyi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter (1967).] Furthermore, Dionysos was no upstart and new
comer, recently migrating from Phl')'gia and Thrace into Greece, but was indigenous to Old Europe. His name occurs in Bronze Age
Mycenean inscriptions.
Simple shrines to the chthonic deities, who often in serpent form, were found allover Greece. People went to these shrines and made
offerings in order to secure fertility and prosperity for ~ themselves and their families, and also to seek purification of sins, especially blood
guilt from the slaying of another. These chthonic rites were private and nocturnal. When the animal was sacrificed and its throat slit, the
blood was allowed to flow downward into a ditch or hole, so that its blood was absorbed into the earth. The body of the sacrificed animal
was totally consumed in the fire as a holocaust, with no flesh remaining to be feasted upon by the humans attending the sacrifice. The
spirits of the earth and the spirits of the dead, the latter usually appearing in serpent form at tombs, were nourished by the vital essence of
the blood from the sacrifice. The cult of dead heroes was also chthonic in its rites. Furthermore, the .serpentine chthonic deities were
associated with dreams, visions, oracles, and divination, for which reason the god of healing. Askleipios was accompanied by a serpent.
Apollo, originally not a sun god at all, but a shamanic deity of ecstasy and divination, usurped the role of the oracle at Delphi from the
earth goddess Gaia by .slaying her servant, the great serpent Python. Apollo continued in his chthonic function as the patron deity of
oracles until the end of the pagan era.
Dionysos, although the son of Zeus by the earth goddess Semele, and according to certain traditions the actual heir and future
successor of Zeus, in the civic religion always remained a bit suspect .and dangerous, standing on the fringe of the Olympian community.
His rites, the Bacchanalia, were private, sectarian, and nocturnal. The .participant had to be initiated into them. Dionysos and his drunken
nocturnal orgies outside the city limits were seen as a threat to the civilization and ordered life of the city, as may be seen in the Greek
tragedy, The Bacchae, by the dramatist Euripides. At these nocturnal orgies, the Maenads, the god's female devotees, ran about intoxicated,
their hair disheveled and their clothes tom, dancing madly to the .wild music of flutes and cymbals and drums in honor of their somber god
whose presence was represented by a robed and masked column. These Maenads appeared like so many witches at a Sabbat. Dionysos,
Lord of the Underworld, the Lord of Ecstasy and Intoxication, was clearly the God of the Witches. [On Ancient Greek religion, the
Olympian and chthonic, see Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of the Greek Religion (1903) and W.K.C. Guthrie, The Greeks and
Their Gods (1950).]
Both of these half brothers, Apollo and Dionysos, appear to have been originally shamanic deities: Apollo was the patron of celestial
ascent, for which reason he later became associated with the sun, and Dionysis was the patron of descent into the underworld. As the white
shamans of Central Asia ascended into the heavens to consult the bright god Bai Ulgen and the black shamans descended into the
underworld into the presence of dark Erlik Khan, so it was with the i followers of these two gods of ecstasy. In the very beginning of
things, God and the Devil are brothers; they were to continue to complement each other throughout the ages and that is the mystery. [My
own study in preparation, The Book of the Serpent, deals with the symbolism of ancient chthonic cults in much more detail.]

7
6. Witchcraft in the Roman Tradition
The cult of Dionysos was brought to Italy by Greek colonists in j thsouth of that country and later to Rome itself by Greek slaves. 18
Before long the cult of Dionysos became popular among certain , classes of Romans, especially women, as the famous Villa of the
.Mysteries at Pompeii testifies. [See Linda Frierz-David, Women’s Dionysian Initiation: The Villa of Mysteries at Pompeii (1988).] But the
Romans possessed a public civic religion similar to the Greek city ; states and perceived, with their sober Stoic temperament, these wild Ii
nocturnal orgies of the Bacchanalia as a threat to the civilized order ! of society. According to the Roman historian Livy, these private I.
nocturnal gatherings were actually initiation rites that included wine and feasting, music and wild dancing. In 186 BC the Roman Senate
ordered the police to suppress the Bacchanalia throughout Italy. The Senate regarded the Bacchanalians not simply as celebrants, but as
conspirators and criminals. Vast numbers of Bacchanlians, both nobleand plebeian, were arrested by the police, to be imprisoned and even
executed. Thus, on the very threshold of the Christian era, ecstasy, free love, and orgiastic celebrations were seen as revolutionary 8!1
conspiracies against the very foundations of the state and civilized life-- and this was long before the appearance of LSD and the hippies.
Barely two centuries later, the Roman authorities confused the Christian agape or love-feast with the Bacchanalia, accusing the
Christians of promiscuous and incestuous sex intercourse, ritual .murder, and cannibalism involving children. It is ironic that
Christianity, the most anti-sexual of all the world's religions, should be accused of the ritual sexual abuse of children. Yet nowadays, the
Christians accuse fictional and non-existent Satanists, whom they perceive as a monolithic and world-wide conspiracy, of the very same
crimes that the Romans accused them in the early days of the Church. The real truth is that the underground Satanic cult, with its human
sacrifices and promiscuous sex, is an archetype of the shadow, a paranoid fantasy of the elite ruling classes, the shadow side of the
establishment projected on to the powerless and the undesirable. This archetype readily supplies a rational for the persecution of a despised
group-- whether Blacks, Jews, or women. .For example, the Medieval Christian authorities accused Jews of much the same crimes, the
sacrificing of Christian children and the consuming their flesh in obscene rites. But these fantasies only represent the secret dark desires of
the establishment itself. The Bacchanalians, the Christians, and the Jews were no more guilty to these crimes than modem pagans.
The Romans also outlawed the practices of witchcraft and --t divination, even astrology, despite its obvious popularity. The law code
promulgated by the Christian emperors Theodosius and. Justinian continued to ban witchcraft and divination. Witches, especially, were
accused of being poisoners, and throughout the Middle Ages, as Roman law remained in vogue, witchcraft continued to be a secular crime.
The punishment for practicing witchcraft involved fines, imprisonment, and exile, but not the death penalty. -Theodosius outlawed the
public performance of pagan sacrifices and Justinian forced the closure of the philosophy schools, including the famous Platonic Academy
at Athens, forcing the pagan philosophers .to flee from Christian persecution to the Persian empire.

7. Witchcraft in the Middle Ages

The early Middle Ages represented a continuation of Roman law in the West. Witchcraft remained a crime, but it was not yet a
heresy .at that time. Only in the thirteenth century was witchcraft converted in the eyes of the Church into a secret sect and a heresy. In the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the scholars who commented on the .Bible left little room for the practice of any kind of legitimate magic.
Relying heavily on the writings of St. Augustine and other Patristic authors, they condemned and stigmatized all forms of magic as -heresy,
leading to a universal condemnation of magic by the end of
the thirteenth century. Again and again heretical sects were accused -of holding promiscuous and incestuous orgies in the dark and of
-sexually abusing children, sacrificing them, and eating their remains. The Bull of Pope Innocent VIII in 1484 condemned certain men and
woman who have sexual intercourse with demons, the Incubi and the Succubi, and who by means of their incantations and conjurations
caused mischief and harm to society. These undesirables were the witches. The Pope issued this Bull at tl1e request of two Inquisitors
belonging to tl1e Dominican order, Kramer and Spenger, who in 1486 issued the classic text of the witchcraft persecutions, the Malleus
Maleficarum, "the Hammer against the Witches". The persecutions and burnings now began in earnest and the Holy Inquisition was ever
zealous in connecting witchcraft with Jews, heretics, and women.
Was all this business of witches and Sabbats only the products ~ of the neurotic minds of sexually frustrated clerics? Not entirely.
Christianity came late to certain more remote European countries like Sweden and Lithuania. And in pockets of the countryside pagan rites
continued into the high Middle Ages, even tl1ough tl1e pagan priesthoods had been eliminated when the land-owning aristocracies of those
countries converted to Christianity. Many people continued to practice ancient rituals and superstitions. Even more, pagan and magical
elements entered into the Christian cult of the Saints. In fact, some of these very saints had originally been pagan deities only superficially
Christianized. One of the most famous of these cases was that of St. Brigit of Kildare in Ireland who was originally the pagan c Celtic
goddess Brigit, the daughter of An Dagda, the lord of the underworld.
Much of Mediterranean paganism, both Greek and Roman, had been assimilated by the Roman Church by the end of the Roman
empire in the West. As the power of the Church moved northward .among the barbarian tribes in the fifth through the eighth centuries,
Roman Christianity readily absorbed those elements in Celtic and Germanic religion that resembled Mediterranean paganism. This was .a
deliberate policy. Pope Gregory the Great in the seventh century had advised the missionaries he was sending north to seize the pagan
.shrines and holy places, throw out and destroy the idols, but convert those sites into churches. Thus the Church came to appropriate for
itself the ancient magical power-grid established in Europe since Megalithic times and this insured that the Church would remain in
possession of the land. For example, all of the churches and sites in France and England named for St. Michael had once been sites sacred
-to the pan-Celtic god Lugh who had been assimilated to St. Michael Archangel. Here and in many otl1er cases, a Christian saint replaced a
-pagan deity and took over the functions of the latter. Gregory also advised his missionaries to appropriate the pagan festivals and
transform them into Christian ones. Thus Christmas came to replace the Saturnalia, the Roman harvest festival, as well as the festival of the
sun god Mithra and the midwinter festival of Wotan. The old Druidic new year of Samhain became All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day.

8
 Christianity sought to destroy the indigenous paganism of European peoples by assimilating much of it and co-opting its shrines and
festivals. It also advanced the development of witchcraft during the Middle Ages by convincing those people who remained attached to the
Old Gods that they were actually worshipping demons. Since
the Church decreed demons evil by nature, Christian theology bestowed concrete reality upon the worship of evil. It converted the .old
pagan deities into demons and with a stroke of the pen the Church created Satanism, where no such animal had ever existed .before. As the
Middle Ages progressed, self-conscious pagans ceased to be that and become Christian heretics. Thus, the witches could now be declared
heretics and forced to confess under torture at show trials. And as apostates, they could be condemned to death, whereas, ~ in legal theory
at least, non-Christians, though they could be expelled i and exiled from the country, as the Jews were from Spain, they could not be made
to suffer the death penalty for their pernicious stubbornness in refusing to admit the truth of the Christian religion.
When the warrior aristocracies of the Northern peoples were converted to Christianity, the Church convinced them to destroy the
native pagan priesthoods and to ban the public sacrifices at which these priests officiated. Modeling itself on the secular Roman empire, the
Church could tolerate no rivals. The celestial gods of the Old Religion were also destroyed, either by being assimilated to Christian saints
or reduced in status to the level of demons and evil spirits. For example, the Slavic god Perun and the Lithuanian god Perkunas, both
cognate to the red-haired Germanic storm god Thor and the Indian Indra, became assimilated to St. Elijah, but they continued to function in
popular Slavic and Baltic belief and folklore much as they always .had done. On the other hand, the mighty and wise Wotan or Odin, who
during the Viking Age was actually the king of the gods dwelling in Valhalla, was identified with St. Nicholas, forced by the .Church to
don a red suit, and eventually became known as the jolly and harmless Father Christmas or Santa Claus. Midwinter and Yule were
originally the festival of Wotan. The bringing in of the Yule log .was done in his honor and Yule was the occasion of great feasting -and
partying. Thus during the reign of the Puritan regime in seventeenth century, Cromwell abolished the celebration of .Christmas, just as he
did with May Day, another pagan festival. .Elsewhere, Wotan was identified with the leader of the Wild Hunt, with Old Nick, and with the
Devil. Even to this day, Wotan, attired in a long dark cloak and wearing a large slouch hat, is said to wander at night in remote and desolate
places such as Dartmoor. Wistman's Wood, the oak grove in the center of Dartmoor, which I have visited, remains a site sacred to Wotan,
who has been demoted in folklore to being the Devil of the Moors.
But the pagan deities, whether Greek, Roman, Celtic, or Germanic who gave the Roman Church the most problems were chthonic in
nature rather than celestial. These chthonic cults were more personal and private than the cults of the celestial gods which required
priesthoods that were politically established and sacrifices -that were public ally performed. Thus the celestial cults were much r more
quickly and easily destroyed by the Church. In Ireland, interestingly enough, even the celestial gods, the Tuatha De Danaan, --t"' when
underground and became chthonic deities. Perhaps that is why they survived as a living force, the Aes Sidhe or Faerie People, until -our
own century and continue to control the fertility of the countryside. At first these chthonic cults avoided the political efforts of the
Christians to suppress them by maintaining a low profile. Their rites were simply part of the fertility magic belonging to the agricultural
technology of the early Middle Ages. However, because they were connected with the underworld of the dead and evil spirits, the Christian
clergy found it easier to demonized these chthonic deities than it had the celestial gods of high paganism. Jupiter, Apollo, Mars, Venus, and
the rest of that gang succeeded in maintaining their original celestial character, if only as literary fables and astrological symbols. Even the
popular and literary iconography of the Devil changed as part of this process transformation in the European Middle Ages. From his
original Oriental and Hebrew guise as a winged fallen angel, the Devil became confused with both Pan and the Celtic deity Cemunnos. The
Devil now appeared as the hideous sexually aroused Horned God, a chthonic deity dwelling beneath the earth, part animal and part human,
bearing a trident and accompanied by a serpent and other wild beasts.
A clear Mediterranean element that survived in Medieval IIwitchcraft was the cult of the goddess Diana. Classical literature !
presented Diana or Artemis in the image of a chastehuntress and cold virgin associated with the moon. She despised men and
8 preferred the company of wild animals and similarly chaste young
maidens. But this was only a literary conceit of the poets and did not apply to the actual goddess either in Greece or in Italy. The Artemis of
the Ephesians whom St. Paul encountered in the Anatolian city of Ephesus was anything but a chaste young maiden. She was a many- I
breasted fertility goddess, the Mistress of Animals (potnia theron)
and the guarantor of their fertility. In Ancient Italy, before Diana was identified with the Artemis of the Greek poets, this Italian goddess
was a powerful fertility deity whose cult, at least at Nemi, required human sacrifice. Like her counterpart Artemis, in Roman -times Diana
became associated with Luna, the moon, and with the rhythms of the moon and its effects upon animal and plant life. This lunar affiliation
also led Diana to assimilate elements of the three-faced Hekate, the dread goddess of hell, death, rebirth, and the patroness of magic,
invoked by witches and sorcerers alike. This goddess was worshipped at night at the cross-roads. In the Middle Ages, at least in the minds
of classically learned churchmen, this dark Diana who embodied both sex and death, the European Kali, re- appeared as the leader of the
Wild Hunt.
The Germanic tradition of the Wild Hunt (wilde Jagd) come out of the dim pre-historic past of Old Europe. The Wild Hunt is a
procession of spirits at night who roam through the countryside, revelling, drinking, destroying, killing, eating whatever they find in their
path. Sometimes the leader is male: the Wistman or Wotan, or ~ Heme the hunter, all variations on the Devil and the Homed God. But
usually, in the Latin literature of the Middle Ages, the leader of the Wild Hunt was a female spirit called in Latin Diana or Herodias .
(Aradia), or else in German Perchta, Berta, Holle, or Hulda. In Italy,
she was known as Befana. This pagan goddess of the Germanic .peoples, no doubt identical with the Scandinavian goddess Frejya, lived in
a paradise beneath the earth. She is identified with Venus in the Tannhauser myth and her residence was called there the Venusburg. In the
south of Germany, the goddess was principally a huntress, but elsewhere she was generally connected with agriculture and fertility. Thus in
France, she is known as Abundia and Satia.
A tenth century commentary called the Canon Episcopi, written .by Regino of Prom, c. 906 CE, denounces the belief of certain
wicked women, perverted by the Devil, who assert that at night they ride forth naked upon the backs of wild beasts with Diana, the goddess
of the pagans, as their leader. These women would slip secretly out of ~ bed at night while their husbands lay asleep and, removing their
dothes and anointing their bodies with magical ointments, containing bella donna and other psychoactive ingredients, they would go forth
with Diana to nocturnal revels and worship strange gods. Even by the seventh and eighth century, the cult of Diana in Italy, and fertility
cults of similar deities like the Germanic goddess Hulda in the north, were particularly resistant to Christianization. In ecclesiastical

9
literature, Diana, as the leader of the Wild Hunt, appears as a demon in the form of a beautiful naked woman. As queen of the witches,
Diana was the lover and consort of the Devil and her female followers owed loyalty and obedience to her as their Lady, rather than to their
true Lord and Master, Jesus Christ. The Canon instructed bishops to drive out these women from their communities and exile them
forthwith.
At the end of the last century, the American folklorist Leland ..' believed he had discovered just such a cult of Diana surviving in of)'
rural Tuscany in Northern Italy. [See Charles G. Leland, Aradia: or the Gospel of the Witches (1899).] According to his account, in 1886
he had learned of a manuscript setting forth the beliefs of Italian
witchcraft or stregeria. He failed to obtain the manuscript at that time, but he urged Maddalena, a young Italian witch or strega whose
confidence he had won and who served as his informant and collector of folklore, to search for it in Tuscany in Northern Italy. .Leland saw
witchcraft as the survival of the pagan cult of the goddess Diana and as a folklore student his main interest lay in magic and surviving
pagan mythology. He was much influenced by the views of the French writer Jules Michelet who saw witchcraft as
a movement of social protest arising out of the oppressed peasantry .in revolt against the rule of the Church and the land-owning
.aristocracy. In 1897, Maddalena obtained a manuscript from a village near Siena and thus she gave Leland the evidence that
confirmed Michelet's thesis. , .
This manuscript entitled Aradia or the Vangelo, "the Gospel", alleging to give a picture of a secret cult, La Vecchia Religione or
"the .Old Religion", which represented the religion of the oppressed Italian peasants or pagani who stood in opposition to the alliance of the
church and the aristocratic land-owners. The entire manuscript was .written in Maddalena's own hand and Leland confessed that he did
know whether she had obtained these traditions from written L- sources or from oral narratives, though he suspected the latter. But due to
failing health, he did not meet the mysterious Maddalena again, who was at the time living a wandering life in Tuscany, and so could not
pursue this research or establish the authenticity of the Aradia text. Perhaps Maddalena provided him with exactly the type of witch cult he
expected to find.
Leland detected more than one hand in the composition of the Aradia manuscript Maddalena had given him. The pagan goddess Diana
was well known from Medieval Latin texts such as the Canon Episcopi, and the name Diana was often a learned classical gloss in these
texts for the Germanic witch goddess variously called Hulda, Perchta, Holle, and so on. In the Aradia text ,the witch goddess is .referred to
as Diana regina delle strege, "Diana, the Queen of the Witches". But aside from Diana's association with the moon, the .authors of the
Italian text betray no familiarity with the actual ancient Italian pagan goddess or her Greek counterpart. Latin texts .refer to the witch
goddess under two names, Diana and Herodias. But here Aradia, a variant of Herodias, is made into the daughter of Diana by her brother
and lover Lucifer, the Christian Devil. Lucifer is also identified with the sun, just as Diana is with the moon. Taking the form of a cat, the
usual witch familiar spirit, Diana managed to slip into her brother's bed and seduce him. After the birth of Aradia, the .daughter is taught
witchcraft by her mother and then sent to earth in order to teach witchcraft to the peasantry suffering at the hands of church and state.
Obviously the Aradia text is post-Christian. The connection of Diana and her brother Lucifer led scholars to believe that this variety of
witchcraft was not so much a survival of pre-Christian paganism, as an outgrowth of Medieval heresies. The sect of La Vecchia Religione
in the Aradia text is precisely described on the same model as the Medieval heresies, the Cathars and the Waldensians, as depicted by the
Roman Church, with their nocturnal feasts, nudity, orgies, and so on. It is well known that many Cathars sought refuge in tolerant Italy
after the Albigensian Crusade was unleashed against them by Pope Innocent the IIIrd in 1208. By the year 1240 he Cathars in Southern
France had been exterminated in .another one of the Roman Church's acts of genocide. The Aradia text shows many traces of Catharism.
Diana transformed into a cat because of the legend that the Cathars worshipped the cat. Diana's .dividing the light from the darkness, the
agape love feast with bread and salt, the references to Cain, and the putting out the lights in preparation for a promiscuous orgy were all
elements reflecting the .allegations lodged by Church authorities against the Cathars of Provence, the Waldensians of Lyon and Savoy, and
the Luciferians of Germany. It appears likely that the Northern Italian witches of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries either took up
heresy or imitated practices ascribed to the heretics, loosing what might have remained of genuine pre-Christian paganism. As for the
Aradia text, it appears that some one set out to provide the witches with a scripture. The material collected by Leland appears to be the
work of literate, though not learned persons opposed to the established church and state, who relied on a debased Catharism surviving in
Italian folk tradition. [See Elliot Rose, A Razor for a Goat: Problems in the History of Witchcraft and Diabolism (1989) and Jeffrey B.
Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (1972).] And it is well known that quasi-pagan heretical sects did exist elsewhere in Italy, such as
the Benandanti. [See Carlo Ginsberg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and seventeenth Centuries (1983).]
Nineteenth century Tuscany was a hot bed of anti-clerical peasant revolt against the alliance of Church and the land-owning classes.
That same sentiment continues until this day, making Tuscany a center of strength for anti-clericalism and the Communist Party, as I
discovered when living in the town of Arcidosso south of Siena. Arcidosso was also the home of David Lazaretti, the mystic and
revolutionary, who was murdered at the edge of the town in the last century when held a protest march of poor peasants against the land-
owners. Moreover, I was asked to participate in a festival following Christmas in the town of Grosseto in the same district, in which a
joyous procession, accompanied by much drinking and revelry, was led through the local villages by the witch Befana and her companion,
the man in black. Similar processions through the .villages led by the witch Perchta and dancing men in animal masks are still found in the
Italian Alps.
But whereas the Roman church was willing to assimilate and .accommodate paganism to a certain extent, the Protestant Reformation
emphasized a return to an austere and strictly Biblical model of religion and culture. This forced a final break with the pagan past, the
feminine, and the earth. The Goddess joined the Devil in a shadowed realm beneath the earth. The Goddess and the Devil .represent the
repressed fourth function that C. G. Jung makes so much of, and it is no accident that the rise of Neo-Paganism among English speaking
people, as for example, with both Aleister Crowley and Gerald Gardner, is connected with a reaction against a humorless Protestant
Fundamentalism and a stultifying Victorian puritanism that caste a blight over the land and the spirit. In the twentieth century, the Horned
God and the Goddess have returned to haunt the nightmares of both the Vatican and the local parsonage.

10
8. The Archetypal Source of Wicca
Whether Gerald Gardner newly invented Wicca as the religion of the witches in 1939 or actually contacted a pagan survival in the
New Forest, does not really matter in the final analysis. What matters is that he tapped into something. The phenomenal growth of Wicca in
I recent decades, both. in Britain and in the States, testifies to that. This religious movement is meeting the needs of people whose spiritual
longings was not met by the mainstream Christian churches. Nor does I it matter whether Gardner created the rituals in the Book of
Shadows after 1939 or not. The fact is that they work. Unquestionably, these rituals tao ito an ancient source of knowledge and power.
In fact, the cult of the Horned God and the Great Goddess is what Jung calls an archetype, and this archetype pre-existed the
Gardnerian reconstruction. This cult, wherever it is found in time and space, represents a radically different theological model in contrast
.to the model of the imperial monotheism of Biblical religion. Furthermore, this old religion newly resurrected is closely linked with magic.
All of the initiates within the circle are truly consecrated ..priests and priestesses of the God and the Goddess and all of them are working
magicians. This is a do-it-yourself participatory religion, unlike the traditional high church model where the priest is the sole ~ performer of
the holy rites and the congregation sits passively as r- spectators to the Mysteries.
In my view, in the twentieth century there have been three revolutionary developments of tremendous importance to the evolution of
religion in the West:
1. First there is the influx of influence from Asian religions, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, upon Western thinking and religious
practice. This resulted in making the practice of meditation and the belief in reincarnation respectable. This influence began just before the
turn of the century with the activities of the Theosophical Society and the Vedanta Society.
2. Following this is the event of the re-emergence of the Great ,Goddess archetype so .long banned from public consciousness by the
-imperial monotheism of Christianity and Islam. An exception to this was the development of Mariolatry within the Roman Church over
the centuries.
3. Lastly there is the revival of paganism within recent decades and ~ the accompanying polytheistic theologies emphasizing the
importance of the feminine and the earth as sacred. These three developments present a clear challenge to the cultural hegemony of the
Christian Church over the mind of the West.
When Gerald Gardner was defining the cult of Wicca some fifty years ago, he had another model before him in addition to the I
writings of Margaret Murray. This was the cult of Tantra as practiced .in India, especially Bengal, which was known by the 1920s from the
writings and translations of Sir John Woodroffe, a.k.a. Arthur Avalon. His books dealt with the archetype of Siva and Shakti and with the
-cult of the God and the Goddess in India. The Woodroffe material and .even earlier sources were known to Aleister Crowley and he
incorporated Tantric principles in his Gnostic Mass and the higher degrees of his esoteric order, the O. T .0. Gardner had served in the Far
-East and was interested in such esoteric matters, including rI sacramental ritual and sex magic. So he was no doubt familiar with
Woodroffe's writings. Moreover, Crowley's work was quiet influential on Gardner when he was composing the Book of Shadows.
However, the influence Eastern Tantra on the inception of Wicca has frequently been overlooked. This is in line not only with English
chauvinism and racism, but with the Jungian prejudice c against Westerners engaging in Eastern spiritual practices. Dion Fortune in her
writings also makes quite a point of this, while extolling the Western Mystery Tradition. Jung and occult writers like Dion Fortune would
erect an almost unbridgeable separation and barrier between East and West. They claim that the Western racial unconscious is quite
different in its history and development from that of the East. Therefore, Westerners require special Western occult I methods and symbols
that are suitable to our racial history. Eastern methods, as marvelous as they may be in themselves, are distinctly unsuitable for Westerners,
if not dangerous.
The term "archetype" was introduced into Western psychology by Dr. Jung, although the idea itself harks back to Platonic traditions.
According to lung, in the collective unconscious psyche of humanity there exist certain structures, principles, and processes, inherited from
an immemorial past, which are in themselves unknown and invisible to surface consciousness. However, the presence and operation of
these unknown powers become visible to consciousness in dreams, visions, and art. These visible manifestations are called -archetypes and
they recur throughout history and appear in human cultures throughout the world. They are, therefore, universal to humanity. Their
appearance in human experience elicit profound emotional responses and in the process of the maturation of the individual, called by lung
"individuation", these archetypes undergo a development and integration into a higher order. The visible symbol of wholeness and
integration that spontaneously manifests with individuation lung calls the mandala, a term taken from Tibetan .Buddhism. The contents of
both the conscious and the unconscious psyche become arranged in a symmetrical mandalic pattern, the symbol wholeness, around a
transcendent center lung called the Self'. This Self is not to be confused with the ego, our sense of self-identity which forms the organizing
center of conscious experience and with which we identify ourselves. Nor can the ego directly know the Self, but it can enter into a
dialogue with the Self which resides at the core of the individual's being. This represents the culmination of the Jungian process of
individuation and the entering into the fullness of the potentiality of one's being. As a magical process, this notion of Jung's was prefigured
in the Qabalistic knowledge of and conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel. [For lung's views on the .archetypes and the individuation
process, see Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols (1964).]
Some followers of Jung, such as Joseph Campbell in his writings on comparative mythology, would have it that individuality is
really .unique to the history of the Western psyche, as exemplified in the Grail Quest myth, whereas Asians and Africans are somehow less
individualized than white people of European descent. African and .Asians continue to live in twilight world of the collective psyche of the
pre-modem world. [See Joseph Campbell, The Faces of God: Creative Mythology (1968).] Some covens of witches and other occult
groups, especially in Britain, use this Jungian rationale as the excuse to exclude those of African, Asian, and Jewish descent, or even
Americans whom they regard as mongrels of mixed race. Jung himself, according to his autobiographical writings, was unable to assimilate
his African and Indian experiences which threatened and .terrified him. He said that while in India and Africa he felt like he stood before
the outer darkness. But the darkness he feared was only his own unassimilated shadow-side. [For Carl Jung's views on these .matters, see
his Psychology and Religion (1938) and for a critique of Jung's view in relation to Tibetan Buddhism, see the Appendix in John Myrdhin
Reynolds, Self-Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness (1989).]
But much of this prejudice against non-Western methods and .paths was due to the expansionist imperialist politics of the time and
also due to a lesser extent to the excesses of the Theosophical Society. However, the Theosophy of H.P. Blavatsky was, in fact, a

11
Western .occult system, though she claimed it was revealed to her as a channel by certain Masters of Wisdom living in Tibet. This, of
course, was not the real Tibet of geography and history which HPB had never visited, but a terra incognita, a mysterious land of psychic
supermen projected by her own mind on to a blank screen. Her system of neo- -theosophy, with its races and rounds, seven rays, and
inevitable progress through reincarnation, fascinating as it is as channelled material, did not and does not represent the actual Esoteric
Buddhism of Tibet. This tradition is now known extensively for the first time because of direct contact with the Tibetan Lamas, exiled from
their homeland in 1959. Dion Fortune was herself for a time a member of the TS and what she really objected to in the theosophical system
of HPB was not the presence of Orientalism, as much as the absence of Christianized Western symbolism, such as the Quest for the Holy
Grail.
Jung did feel that the psyches of Europeans and Asians were quite different because they had different histories. He did not know ~ II
any Africans or Asians on an intimate personal level and, thus, he .could easily project his own shadow on to them and make dogmatic
pronouncements about what goes on in the minds of those strangers from the East and the South. This is in line with the obsession of
.German Romanticism with sudlichkeit or southerness, which was both so seductive and so terrifying, as one can discover from the novels
of Thomas Mann. But if reincarnation is actually the case, and .Jung could never clearly make up his mind about the matter, then there is
no absolute barrier between East and West. The individual does not always reincarnate in the same family, nation, or race, or even as the
same sex, for that matter. Jung forgets that Christianity itself was in origin an Oriental religion that arose among certain Jewish sectarians
in Palestine before it spread throughout the Roman empire. This Asian religion was then imposed by the Roman Church upon the fragile
psyches of Celtic, Germanic. and Slavic tribesmen in Europe. They survived.
Even the main components of the Western Mystery Tradition, over which Dion Fortune waxes so eloquently, are Oriental in origin:
Neo-Platonism was founded by an Egyptian, Plotinus, and his two immediate successors, Porphyry and Iamblichus, were both Syrians;
Hermetic philosophy and alchemy were of Egyptian origin; astrology was of Babylonian origin; the Qabalah and ceremonial magic were of
Jewish origin. All of these foreign elements were synthesized into the .Western Occult Tradition in the Renaissance and provided the
philosophical and structural basis for later masonic-style ceremonial magic as found, for example, in the Hermetic Order of the Golden
.Dawn. None of these elements is of indigenous European origin, whether Celtic or Germanic. All of the Western Occult Tradition, as well
as Christianity itself, comes from the East, so what is all this talk .that Eastern spiritual methods are unsuitable for the Western psyche?
Such artificial barriers only represent racism at a subtle occult level.
Rather, what we must look to at the end of the twentieth century is the psychic unity of humanity, the whole of the .inhabitants of the
great space ship earth, instead of falling once again into narrow-minded racism, nationalism, and occult fascism, which, let us not forget, is
what gave rise in this century to Nazism and the .horrors of the holocaust. At the level of the collective psyche, the human race is one and
the same archetypes and psychic structures occur everywhere, despite superficial differences at the surface .level of consciousness due to
history, culture, and social conditioning. It is the heritage of our common humanity that we have to draw on. There is no barrier between
East and West, and so we in the West in our efforts to revive Ancient Western Paganism and the Religion of .the Goddess can learn much
from the experiences of Eastern peoples.

9. The Vedic Religion of the Acient Aryans.

Before we can discuss Heruka Sadhana in particular and 0 r Anuttara Tantra generally, we must place Buddhist Tantra in the context
of the history of Indian religion. Although the Indian .subcontinent is now dominated by Hinduism, a term that covers a vast panorama of
creeds and sects, there were many heterodox religious movements that were of great importance there in the past. .This includes Buddhism.
Thus we speak of Indian religion rather than using the more restricted term Hinduism.
India has been inhabited by human beings since the Paleolithic and the Neolithic, but the most ancient extant religious literature
consists of the Vedas, now enshrined as the holy scriptures of ~ Hinduism, though they bare little relationship to the beliefs and -r-- practice
of the majority of modern day Hindus, at least those not belonging to the Bral1man priestly caste. The four ancient texts .known as the
Vedas are considered as .srn1i or revelation, "that which was heard" by the Rishis and communicated to them by the Devas or gods. These
Rishis lived in what is now Northwestern India and Pakistan more than a thousand years before the time of Christ. The Vedas were
composed in an Indo-European language, the oldest .example of Indo-European save the Hittite and related dialects of ancient Anatolia.
The Vedic dialect itself was spoken by nomadic tribes who invaded India from the northwest around 1500 BC, and .who called themselves
the Aryans or "noble ones". They overwhelmed the darker skinned natives of the Indian plains known as Dravidians. The Dravidians, who
represent the dominate .population in South India today, with their own distinct non-Indo- European languages, left abundant traces of their
Dravidian language -in terms of vocabulary, phonetics, and syntax in Vedic language of the ancient Vedas, as well as in the Sanskrit
language that was later distilled out of the original Vedic dialect by the Brahman priests.
The Aryans, like other eastern Indo-European speaking peoples, appear to have originally come from the vast steppes of Southern
Russia and the Ukraine and expanded southward and eastward into non-Indo-European Iran and India. Although, in this and the last
century, the term Aryan was thought of in racial terms, what it really designates is linguistic, that is, the speakers of eastern Indo- 8
European dialects. It does not mean that any of these Aryans were blue-eyed blond Nordics like the people from Northern Europe; rather
they surely resembled modem day Afghanis and Pakistanis in physical appearance: tall, long-headed, Mediterranean type people. .The
expansion of the Aryans was no doubt due to over-population in their homeland, but also to their domestication of the horse and the
~development of the two-wheeled chariot. Thus the Aryan tribes were able to organize themselves into a highly mobile military elite which
could easily overwhelm and conquer the more sedentary agricultural peoples to the south. In the southern countries which they overran
.they imposed themselves as a ruling military aristocracy and characteristically imposed their Indo-European language on the more highly
civilized agricultural population. This first occurred in Anatolia with the Hittites, but the same pattern was soon repeated in Iran and India.
This pattern also occurred in Old Europe with the expansion of the Celtic tribes to the west and with the later expansion of the Germanic
tribes in historical times.
The original Aryans or Indo-European speaking people, at least in Paleolithic times in Russia and the steppes, probably practiced a
form of shamanism and sky religion characterized by a shamanic ascent into the heavens, no doubt being rather similar to the shamanism of

12
the Altaic pagan tribes of Siberia today. This primordial shamanism evolved into the later priestly and patriarchal sky religion we find in
the oldest strata of the Avesta of Iran and the Vedas of India. The shaman, though he never entirely disappeared, came largely to be
replaced by the priest making sacrifices in order to invoke the aid of the bright gods of the sky. These Aryan gods lived lives of hard-
drinking and fighting, much like the Viking warriors of a later age. They differed from human warriors only in being more or less immortal
and possessing great powers.
According to G. Dumezil, ancient Indo-European society was divided into three classes in accord with the three social functions of -the
priests, the warriors, and the cattle-herders. Of these three classes, the warriors were dominant, but since oral tradition was I-transmitted by
the priestly class, they often exalted their own position at the expense of the warriors in myths and legends. In India these three classes
were known as Brahmana, Kshatriya, and .Vaishya, these making up the three upper classes of the Indian caste system. The fourth caste,
which is not twice-born or ritually initiated according to Vedic rites, is the Shudra and was drawn from the .vanquished Dravidian
agriculturalists. The unassimilated native peoples who remained in the hills and jungles became the outcastes and now comprise one-fifth
of the Hindu population of India. Dumezil .finds this same tripartite division of society among the ancient Celts, Latins, Germans, Slavs,
and other Indo-European speaking people. Dumezil points out that the ancient Indo-European pantheon was also tripartite, a case of heaven
mirroring the human world. Or is it the other way around?
Anyway, in the Vedas the priestly function was embodied in the divine companions Varuna and Mitra. Varuna represented the the
priestly function of the magician whose magic maintains the Rta or natural order. His junior colleague Mitra represented the judicial
function of the priest whose laws maintain the human Rta or order. .Thes: two gods stand against the forces of chaos and darkness on the
cosmic and human planes respectively. With the reform of Iranian paganism by the Magian priest Zarathushtra or Zoroaster in the seventh
century BC, Varuna became known as Ahura Mazda, "the Wise Lord", and his junior colleague Mitra or Mithra became the chief of the
archangels .of God in the Zoroastrian religion. But in Vedic India matters remained more polytheistic. The warrior function of society was
represented by the hard-drinking god Indra, who, in India, was .assimilated to a Near Eastern-style storm god battling the chaos I dragon in
the same way as did Baal, Marduk, Zeus, and Yahweh in the West. The third social function of fertility and prosperity was embodied in the
twin gods, the Nasatyas or Ashvins, who were known to the ancient Greeks as the Dioskouroi. By the time the Vedas came to be
composed, Indra had replaced Varuna as the chief of the gods and the majority of hymns in the Vedas are devoted to him. Even to this day
Indra is invoked to bring the monsoon rains and the rain-clouds are compared to his war elephants. Thus it is the case that in the
mythologies of both Hinduism and Buddhism, Indra occupies the place of Zeus ruling over the world and mankind from Mount Meru, the
Mount Olympus of Indian cosmology.
This patriarchal sky religion of the pastoral nomadic Aryan ' tribes was enshrined in the hymns of praise composed by Rishis who
entered into an altered state of consciousness in order to draw near to their gods. This altered state was likely induced by the smoking of
.cannabis (in Central Asia at least) and by the ingesting of soma, an intoxicating drink that included psychedelic substances. These hymns
that resulted from an ecstatic flight of consciousness into the heavens .were combined with the practice of making soma and with the
performance of yajna or the sacrifice of animals to the gods. Gradually the Brahman priest replaced the ecstatic Rishi and the .practice of
sacrifice became more and more elaborated. The practice of yajna remained at the center of the Vedic religious universe. Four collections
of hymns were eventually collected and commentary texts .known as Brahmanas were composed, regarding the rituals accompanying the
recital of these hymns. Originally, none of these texts were written down, but were retained solely in the memories of the priests. In many
ways, the Brahmans were similar to the Druids who officiated as the priests of the Celtic tribes in Western Europe. Vedic paganism was
more or less identical to the Iranian paganism the existed before the reform of Zoroaster. It was this Magian priest and prophet who was
responsible for eliminating blood sacrifice from the cult of the High God and his angels.
In India, because of the predominance of the Brahman priests in the Vedas and thereafter, this style of religious ritualism is now
known as Brahmanism. The term ‘brahman’ originally meant the -magical power engendered by the performance of a ritual. In the final
stage of the evolution of the Vedas, texts known as the Upanishads, the term came to designate the illtimate Reality itself, but this was not
true in the earliest Vedic period.
Around 600-500 BC, a synthesis developed between Aryan belief and practice and the religion of the indigenous Dravidian peoples.
Their religion was characterized by such beliefs as karma and rebirth. Although these doctrines, now thought characteristic of ! Hinduism,
did not appear in the oldest Vedic texts, they are found in the later Upanishads. Most of the Upanishads post-date the time of the Buddha,
but their composition by Brahman sages and ascetics were part of the same intellectual and spiritual ferment in Northern India that gave
rise to the heterodox non-Brahmanic movements of Buddhism and Jainism. The fundamental ideas we now associate with -Hinduism
evolved at this time with the cultural interface of Aryan and Dravidian. Although we can trace Brahmanism back through the Vedas to c.
1500 BC, in a historical sense we cannot speak of .Hinduism until the formation of this Aryan-Dravidian synthesis -around the beginning
of the Christian era. The mythological texts upon which Medieval Hinduism was based, the Epics and the .Puranas, were all post-Buddhist
in date. However, the ancient Vedic rituals, though rarely blood sacrifice itself, are still practiced everywhere in India until this day by the
Brahmans.

10. The Dravidian Religion of Ancient India

As we have said, the Dravidians are still the predominant population in South India. There are four principal Dravidian languages,
among which Tamil possesses the oldest literature, and 8 there are also innumerable small tribal dialects. It now appears that these
Dravidian languages are related to Elamite, the language of ancient Elam in Western Iran, contemporary with the Sumerians and 8 the
Babylonians. It also appears probable that Dravidian is related to the Sumerian language itself which can be traced to 5000-4000 BC. I
From archeological and linguistic evidence it seems clear that the Dravidians carne from the West and entered India in Neolithic times,
having crossed all of Iran. Moreover, although dark-skinned in South India, the Dravidians are Mediterranean in physical type. Entering
India, the Dravidians encountered the Munda, dark-skinned people related to the Australian Aborigines, who spoke Austro-Asiatic
languages. They had come from farther east, that is, from Southeast Asia where they had developed rice agriculture about 9000 BC, and
entering India they settled along the river valleys. The Munda now form a large part of the Indian population also, especially in the south.

13
In some places, in the hills and in the jungles, they remained .as independent tribes outside the fold of Hindu society, such as the Santals in
West Bengal, preserving their own languages and pagan .religions. A few Munda words occur in the oldest Vedic texts, such as the
Sanskrit word for the grain "rice".
Unlike the war-like pastoral Aryans, the Dravidians in India .were more settled and agricultural. In contrast to the strictly patriarchal
Aryans, Dravidian religion and society tended to be more matriarchal and women afforded a high social status. This is still true .in South
India today, in contrast to the Aryan north. Dravidian religion included temples, images, and puja (vegetarian offering .ceremonies), none
of which were known in Vedic religion, but which were known in the Ancient Near East. The Aryan cult was aniconic I and the,ritual was
conducted outdoors around a sacred sacrificial fIre. There was no image or temple. As a ritual, puja is quite different in structure than
yajna. Moreover, it seems clear that the Dravidians were the authors of the mysterious Indus valley civilization with its great cities of
Mohenjodaro and Harappa, c. 2500 BC. Not only is Dravidian found in the oldest strata of the Vedic language, but even today in Pakistan,
to the west of the Indus river, there are tribes speaking the Brahui language which is Dravidian. So it seems clear that the Aryans had
contact with the Dravidians in that region when they first entered India.
From cylinder seals found in Mesopotamia that clearly depict India animals like the elephant and the humped bull, we know that -the
Indus valley civilization had direct commercial contacts with Ancient Sumer, probably by sea. Sumerian legends speak of the mysterious
land of Dilmun from which the gods carne, that lay across the sea. Although some modem archaeologists would locate Dilmun on the
island of Bahrain in the Persian gulf, since it took three months to reach Dilmun and return by sea, it appears more likely that India and the
Indus valley was the location of Dilmun. Dilmun, described by the Sumerians as a kind of garden of paradise, was ruled over by the great
mother goddess Ninhursag, assisted by her consort Enki, the god of wisdom. Enki, himself half human and half -serpent or fish, came to the
town of Eridu at the head of the Persian Gulf, sailing in his ship from Dilmun. It is this serpentine god of wisdom who then teaches
humanity the arts and crafts of civilization and who is the consistent benefactor of humanity. When the sky god Enlil determined to destroy
humanity in a great flood because they had become too numerous and too noisy, it was Enki who advised Ziusudra or Utnarpishtlm (the
original Noah) to build an ark in order to save himself and his kin, hence preserving from the flood waters the seed of future generations of
humanity.
In the time of the beginning, it was Enki who acted as the councilor to the gods in their primeval war against the Great Old .Ones, the
forces of chaos and darkness who dominated the cosmic waters before creation. These dark forces were led by the chaos dragon of the
deep, Tiamat. It would appear that in the original Sumerian myth of creation, at least the creation myth from the city of Nippur, that it is the
sky god Enlil who slays the chaos dragon and thus establishes cosmic order. However, in the later creation myth of Babylon, the Enuma
Elish, it is the young hero god Marduk, the r patron deity of that city, who replaces Enlil, slaying the chaos dragon and thus becoming the
king of heaven and the chief of the gods. In the Book of Genesis in the Bible, it is Yahweh who usurps the role of Enlil, Marduk, and Baal
as the slayer of the dragon and of Enlil who .sends the flood against mankind in his wrath. Also in Genesis, Dilmun appears as the Garden
of Eden, Enki as the wise serpent, and the earth mother goddess Ninhursag as Eve. Eve's name in Hebrew, .Hawwah, originally referred to
an earth goddess. Also, although he is associated with wisdom and with water, the name Enki in Sumerian literally means the lord (en) of
the earth (ki), and he is consistently .at odds with the lord of heaven Enlil.
In the physical remains of the Indus valley civilization there is abundant evidence for a cult of the Great Goddess. Although almost ,
totally absent from the Vedas and early Brahmanical literature, the Dravidian Great Goddess re-emerges into prominence in Medieval
..India, especially in her independent and aggressive forms of Durga and Kati. But the presence of her peaceful form as the lotus goddess,
variously known as Lakshmi in Hinduism, as Padmavati in Jainism, and as Tara in Buddhism, is also well attested in the ancient Indus
valley. In India the lotus corresponds to the Ancient Near Eastern -symbol of the Tree of Life. The lotus blossom arises immaculate and :p-
untainted out of the dark waters of chaos into the sunlight of consciousness, for which reason Indian deities are usually depicted p sitting on
a lotus seat. [On the symbolism associated with Hindu and..Buddhist deities, see Heinrich Zimmer, Myths and Symbols of Indian Art and
Civilization (1946).]
Parallel to this cult of the Great Goddess in the Indus valley, although at present their relationship is obscure, is the cult of a Horned
God. He is depicted on cylinder seals as sitting in meditation, surrounded by many wild animals. This deity closely resembles the Celtic
horned god Cernunnos who also appears as a lord of animals and as a lord of the underworld and its wealth. Like the Great Goddess, this
Horned God is unknown in the sacrificial cult of the Vedas, though he re-emerges in the Epics and Puranas as Siva who evolves into one of
the two Great Gods of Hinduism. Although some , later Indian sources identified Siva with the wild red-haired storm god Rudra, who does
appear in the Vedas, this identification is obviously an afterthought and Siva has his origin among the non- Aryan and pre-Vedic
indigenous people of India. In the earliest -literature of the Siva cult and its practice, the Agamas, which are non-Vedic in content, Siva is
known as Pashupati, the Lord of i Animals. In Puranic tradition, his symbols are the trident and the .erect phallus called the Ungam. In the
Christian tradition, of course, i these symbols are allotted to the Devil. His attendant is the bull : Nandi. Siva goes about naked, smeared
with ashes from the ..cremation ground, draped in a tiger skin, adorned with serpents as his ornaments, a crescent moon tied in his top knot
of long matted -hair, and he is accompanied by troops of ghosts and wild spirits. His preferred residence is in the wild mountains of the
Himalayas where he practices his meditations and austerities. He is the lord of yoga -and taught that esoteric science to humanity. His
consort is the lovely daughter of the mountains Parvati, who in her wrathful aspect becomes Durga and Kali. The love making of Siva and
his consort goddess sustain the world. When the Greek ambassador Megesthenes came to the imperial court at Pataliputra, he observed that
the .Indians there principally worshipped the hero Herakles and the god , Dionysos. Herakles clearly meant Krishna and Dionysos was
Siva. Elsewhere the Greeks recount the legend of Dionysos proceeding to .India and founding the city of Nysa. [On Dionysos and Siva, see
Alain Danielou, Shiva and Dionysus (1982).]
So we see that what is today called Hinduism evolved out of a -number of currents in earlier Indian religion, especially Brahmanism,
and thus it represents a synthesis of the Vedic cult of the Brahmans and the popular Dravidian religion. Around the time of Christ and
-especially thereafter, this synthesis gave birth to a number of Bhakti cults reflecting popular devotion to a personal deity. In Sanskrit
bhakti means devotion and bhakta means a devotee. The two principal deities worshipped in the Bhakti Movement, both of them -non-
Vedic, were Siva and Vishnu, the latter especially in his avatar or incarnation as the hero Krishna. The sectarian literature of the sects
devoted to these deities, the Shaivas and the Vaishnavas, exalted their respective gods as the Supreme Being. In particular, the Vaishnava
system shows many parallels with Christianity-- both of them, for example, assert the existence of a divine savior, whether called Krishna

14
or Christ, who incarnates among humanity in order to bring salvation. The principal difference is that the Christians assert that God only
incarnated in the flesh once in order to accomplish this task, whereas according to the Vaishnavas, God or Vishnu has incarnated many
times on earth to save the world and humanity. Among modern day Hindus, Vaishnavism is the predominant .denomination, well known in
the West in the form of the subsect : Hari Krishna. But Shaivism is also very wide-spread and popular. Those who are particularly devoted
to the cult of the Goddess, being especially predominant in Eastern India, are known as Shaktas. But unlike the intolerance of the imperial
monotheism of the West, although these individual religious sects elevate their particular patron deity to the status of the Supreme Being,
they do not deny the existence of the other gods in suitably subordinate roles. Thus, in Hinduism there is room for all the gods and each
religion is but another valid path to spiritual rea1ization. But historically speaking, around the time of Christ the Bhakti Movement of
devotion to a personal deity came to replace the older Vedic ritualism of the Brahman priests, who, in turn, became the priests of the new ~
religion, the priests officiating at the temples of Siva and Vishnu. [On the Vedic tradition and Hinduism generally, see A.L. Basham, The
Wonder that was India (1954).]
This paralleled what had occurred in Ireland. Unlike Britain and the Continent where the Romans had systematically destroyed the
-Druids, Ireland had never fallen under Roman occupation, The Druids were not persecuted or driven forth, rather they gradually became
the priests of the new religion as Christian monks. In this role, they .combined their Druidic traditions with Christianity to form a hybrid
Celtic Christianity. Christ simply usurped the place of the principal god of the Druids, Lugh. Early Celtic saints, such as Columba, sensed
.the continuity of Druidic tradition with Christianity. The existence in Old Europe of the archetype of a god who sacrificed himself upon
the Tree of Wisdom and Life and thereafter was resurrected, whether he was called Lugh or Wotan, was a situation that facilitated the
conversion of Europe to Christianity. And this god, who died and was resurrected, did not necessarily just represent the agricultural cycle
of tthe year, as Sir James Frazer would have it on the model of a Stoic allegory of earlier myth. [See James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough
(1890).] This is something important to consider in relation to the meaning of Wicca.

11. Buddhism and the Shramana Movement

However, in India before the time of Christ, the Vedic rituals of the Brahmans were not the only form of religious practice nor were
the Brahman priests the only religious professionals operating in the countryside. Brahmanism flourished mainly in the western region
of .Northern India and had its center in the holy city of Taxila in what is modern day Pakistan. It was here that the priests sent their sons
to .be educated, only later was Taxila replaced by Varanasi (Eenares) as the holy city of the Brahmans. On the other side, in Eastern India,
there flourished another kind of religious practitioner known as a.Shramana or ascetic. These Shramanas taught a variety of non-Vedic
belief and practice and were in active opposition to the practice of blood sacrifice; tlley were probably heirs to traditions going back to .the
Dravidian Indus civilization. In any event, though speakers of Indo-European popular dialects called Prakrits, from which modern .North
Indian languages descend, their teachings were radically different from the ritualism of the Vedas. For example, the Shramanas taught the
doctrines of karma and rebirth and the .methods of asceticism and meditation in order to attain liberation from Samsara, the cycle of death
and rebirth. These Shramanas, in contrast to the Brahman priests who were householders and family .men, lived the life of homeless
religious mendicants. They wandered from place to place and begged for their food. They generally observed vows of celibacy. They were
the prototype for the later Sadhus or mendicants of Hinduism found throughout India in the Middle Ages and modern times. These world-
renouncing ascetics formed themselves into a number of mendicant orders around charismatic teachers and were especially important in the
axial period of 700-400 BC. This Shramana Movement gave rise to a number of important ascetic orders and philosophical schools and
represent a parallel to what was happening at the same time in Greece. Some of these orders, such as the Ajivikas, disappeared centuries
later, while others like Samkhya were absorbed into Brahmanical Hinduism. Yet others like Jainism and Buddhism became .independent
communities, easily distinguished from the surrounding Hinduism. In modem India, it is often said that Buddhism and Jainism were
nothing more than attempts at reforming Hinduism. This is not true because Buddhism arose out of the ascetic Shramana Movement and
not out of Vedic ritualism. Nor did it arise out of the speculations of the Upanishads, since most of these texts are post- Buddhist. The
Aryan-Dravidian synthesis called Hinduism did not fully emerge till around the beginning of the Christian era, some five .hundred years
after the time of Buddha and Mahavira, the founders of Buddhism and Jainism respectively, and so it is anachronistic to speak of them as
Hindu reformers.
In their theology the Shramanas were agnostic and non-theistic. What they denied was not the existence of the Devas or the gods,
which they readily admitted as one type of sentient existence, but that a .supreme transcendent God created the world. Rather, they asserted
that the world came into existence by way of the evolution of a natural process called by the Buddhists and Jains karma and by the Ajivikas
Niyati. Karma means causality, that is to say, that causes inevitably bring about their consequences, like the shadow follows the body. And
these causes and consequences occur not just on the material plane, as with modem science, but on the psychic and spiritual planes also. In
particular, the law of karma asserts that the condition of the individual in this present life is the result of deeds committed in past lives and
the deeds committed in this present life will determine one's future lives. That free will and moral choice are inherent in in this process was
emphasized by both Shakyamuni Buddha and Mahavira. Other Shramana sects asserted a total determinism or even predestination. like
modern day Theosophists, the Ajivikas postulated a universal scheme of progressive evolution by way of reincarnation. The individual
must experience a whole series of animal and human reincarnations in various races before one is ready to enter on to the spiritual path to
liberation. Once becoming human, it is impossible to fall back into animal existence because of Niyati or the inevitable law of progress.
Both the Buddha and Mahavira attacked this view as denying the free will component .of karma and for its encouraging spiritual sloth. If
progress is inevitable and we will inevitably evolve into spiritual beings, then it is not necessary to strive for enlightenment. Influenced by
the .modem Theosophical Movement, much of American occultism, and the New Age Movement generally, is Ajivika in nature, ignoring
the shadow side of life and the real possibility of decline for humanity .and the natural environment. This naive optimism and belief in
inevitable progress (at least up to the time of America's defeat in the Vietnam war) has been very much in American character and, until
-recently, it underlies much of theosophical and occultist writing. But the notion of progress is not a genuine occult teaching of the Ancient
Wisdom, but was introduced in the eighteenth centul)' by the French philosopher Condorcet.

15
 The philosophy and metaphysics of the the Shramanas was distinctly dualistic in character and in many ways reminiscent of the
Gnosticism that arose in the West around the time of Christ. These dualistic philosophies postulate two separate orders of reality, spirit and
nature, which somehow come into association, whether this event is explained metaphysically or mythically. But the effect is the same--
the denigration and denial of the physical body. One's true essence is the immaterial spirit, now existing in exile from its original home in
the heavens and imprisoned in the physical body on earth. The earth is the realm of matter, the sphere of suffering and death, whereas the
spirit is the real of freedom and true life. On the one ~ side stand nature, matter, darkness, death, unconsciousness, passion, bondage, and
femininity; on the other side stand spirit, mind, light, life, consciousness, reason, freedom, and masculinity. The spiritual path, therefore,
consists of asceticism, a renunciation of the world and a rejection of the material, the emotional, and the feminine. The ideal spiritual
community is all male and celibate one because it is the feminine that brings the male spirit into the world through motherhood and birth
from the mother's womb and which imprisons the spirit in the worldly life through involvement with wives and lovers. Liberation is only
found through renouncing and avoiding the feminine. The Fall was originally brought about by woman, whether called Eve or maya
(illusion), and bondage to the world is perpetuated by involvement with women. Salvation is Kaivalya, that is, escape from this world, the
clutches of women and matter, into a total isolation of the spirit from the material and the feminine in the highest heavens. Escaping the
Mother below, the spirit return to the light of the Father, and to an all male fantasy heaven world. Like Christianity in general and also
many Gnostic sects, the Shramana Movement was radically anti-feminine and misogynist. A very similar dualistic spirit is found in
Platonism and in earlier Orphism.
This radical world-denial and retirement into all male celibate orders of mendicants and monks was in radical contrast to the Vedic
religion. The Brahman priests sought worldly benefits and prosperity through the performance of their rituals in this present life and the
.attainment of Svarga or paradise in heaven in the next life. But with Indian religion, unlike our imperial monotheism in the West, the
.principal is inclusion, rather than exclusion. So within the bosom of Hinduism, room is found not only for the ritualism of the Brahman
priests, but the theism and popular devotion of the Bhaktas and the asceticism and world-denial of the Shramanas. According to Brahmanic
tradition, the Brahman after completing his studies and , -fulfilling his duties as a father and householder, may then renounce the worldly
life and become a mendicant and forest recluse. These are called the four ashramas or stages of life. Of course, non- -Brahmans can opt to
become Sadhus of wandering mendicants at any time. [On this ascetic dualism, see Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India (1951).]
The origin of monastic Buddhism lay in this world-denying Shramana Movement and this original ascetic Buddhism is known as
Hinayana or the Lesser Vehicle. In the centuries immediately after the time of the Buddha, there came into existence eighteen different
philosophical schools of Hinayana Buddhism, though only the Theravadin school of Southeast Asia survives until this present day. The
other schools are only partly known from old texts extant in Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan. The Theravadins are now widely .known in the
West, especially in English speaking countries, for the teaching of Vipassana or insight meditation. The English especially feel comfortable
with the asceticism of the Theravadins, relating it to .their own Puritan heritage. Although relatively few become monks or nuns, many
Western Buddhists tend to behave as if they had taken monastic vows. However, since the time when king Henry the Eighth eliminated
monasticism in England, it has proved difficult to live a monastic life in a Protestant Christian society.
Nevertheless, Buddhism soon underwent changes and transformations when it left its heartland in Northeastern India. ..Hinayana
remained the dominant form of Buddhism for centuries in . this heartland. but in the borderlands a different form of Buddhism arose, the
Mahayana or Greater Vehicle. This schism first occurred a I century after the Buddha's time over the issues of whether the Arhat or
Buddhist ascetic saint was actually perfect or still a fallible human being and over whether laymen and women were eligible for .salvation
or not. To the first question, the Mahasanghikas, those belonging to the greater assembly, they being the prototypes of the later
Mahayanists, replied that the Arhat was flawed and his spiritual experience was something far less than the actual enlightenment of a
Buddha. The Arhat, the culmination of the Hinayana path, represented a lesser goal. And to the second question, -they replied that the
potentiality for realizing Buddhahood exists within all living beings, both human and animal, and not just human males. Therefore, one
does not have to first become male and a monk before one can practice the path to enlightenment. Not limited to a single dead male
historical Buddha, the Mahayana opened up a vast vista of a starry fIrmament filled with an infinity of enlightened Buddhas, including
countless Buddhas in female form.
When Buddhism spread to the Dravidian south, it assimilated the cult of the Great Goddess which was thriving there. Every village in
South India had its local form of the Goddess called Amma, but all of these are merely local forms of a single Great Goddess. Around the
beginning of the Christian era, the Buddhist master Nagarjuna journeyed to the subterranean world of the Nagas, the serpentine spirits who
control the powers of water and fertility. It was to the Nagas that the Buddha had conferred the custodianship of his teachings concerning
the Perfection of Wisdom because in his own time the men of Northern India, dedicated as they were to the ascetic path, were not ready for
these teachings. The Naga kings and their queens presented these scriptures, the Perfection of Wisdom Sutras, to Nagarjuna and he returned
with them to the human world. He propagated these teachings among humanity and distilled their essence into a philosophical system
known as Madhyamika. This system provided a methodology or dialectic that was able to undercut and demolish logically all of the
intellectual conceptual constructions created by the human male intellect. This had a great liberating effect. Moreover, the Perfection of
Wisdom itself, the Prajnaparamita, was clearly identified with the primordial Pan- Indian Great Goddess and the Perfection of Wisdom was
declared in the scriptures to be the Mother of all the Buddhas of the three times of the past, present, and future. A Buddha becomes one
only by virtue of the Perfection of Wisdom. Thus Nagarjuna and his followers restored and emphasized the feminine side of Buddha
enlightenment which is wisdom. This paralleled the contemporary developments in the West where, in mystical Judaism and in
Gnosticism, Hochmah or Sophia, the holy wisdom of God, was elevated to the status of being the eternal consort of God. [See Raphael
Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (1967) and Edward Conze, Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies (1968).]
But Buddhism had also spread rapidity to the northwest to Kashmir and further into what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here
Greeks and Iranian speaking peoples soon became Buddhists. It was Greek Buddhists who gave the real impetus to Buddhist art, creating
the first plastic image of the Buddha, basing it on the foml of the Greek god Apollo, with whom they identified the Buddha. This style of
Greco-Buddhist art is now known as Gandhara art since that kingdom was ruled over by the Greeks at that time. In the same region, Iranian
paganism was rapidly assimilated into Mahayana Buddhism and Iranian deities became Buddhas and Bodhisattvas in the Mahayana
pantheon. Ahura Mazda (the Vedic Varona), the High God of Zoroastrianism, became Amitabha, the Buddha of InfInite light who dwells
in the celestial paradise of Sukhavati in the the West and the Iranian savior god Mithra became Maitreya, the future Buddha and savior of

16
humanity. The parallels with Christian mythology are also obvious here. According to Zoroastrian theology, the future savior called the
Shoshyant will be born of a virgin when there is a jupiter-Saturn conjunction in the heavens and he will be sought by three wise men from
the East. St. Luke appropriated this prophecy for his own Gospel. Solar and light symbolism are distinctly associated with the Buddha in
the Mahayana scriptures under Iranian influence.
There are also clear connections of Mahayana Buddhism with the Gnosticism of the Eastern Mediterranean. In the time of Christ and
in the two centuries thereafter there was a thriving Indian Buddhist colony at Alexandria in Egypt. The first century Christian teacher
Clement of Alexandria referred to the Indians living in Alexandria in his day as worshiping the god Buddha.
Also in the first century of our era, the Neo-Pythagorean philosopher Apollonius of Tyana journeyed to India in order to study with
Brahman and Buddhist teachers. In the next century, the philosopher Ammonius Saccus opened a school in Alexandria where he taught
Platonic teachings influenced by Buddhist philosophy. Plotinus, the founder of Neo-Platonism was his student, as was Origen, the Christian
philosopher who succeeded Clement of Alexandria as head of the Christian Catechumen school in Alexandria. Later, the Iranian emperor
Shapur (241-272 CE), who defeated and held captive the Roman emperor Valerian, referred to the full eastern third of his Sassanian empire
as being Buddhist. Also under Shapur, the Iranian mystic and religious teacher Mani, the founder of Manicheanism, a rival to Christianity,
journeyed to Sindh in India to study with the Buddhists there. He based his own religious community in part on the Buddhist Sangha or
monastic community. So there exists much evidence of Buddhist contact with the West at the beginning of the Chris tian era.
In Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, Mahayana Buddhism was destroyed by militant Islam, an imperial monotheism from the
West, when the Arabs overran the Sassanian empire in the seventh century. The monks were slain, the books burned, and the monasteries
destroyed utterly. But even nowadays Buddhist ruins are everywhere in Central Asia. Nevertheless, many Buddhist ideas percolated into
the less orthodox fringes of Islam among the Sufis and the Ismailis, as may be seen for example, in the writings of Bayazid and
Suhrawardi. And it is probably that many elements of Iranian Buddhism survived in remote Tibet among the pre-Buddhist Bonpos who
locate the land of the Buddha, not in India to the south, but in Tazik in Central Asia to the west. This would be modern day Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan in the former Soviet Union. Then in the thirteenth century Buddhism was destroyed in Northern India by rampaging Muslim
armies who slaughtered the unarmed monks and burned the monasteries. like imperial Christianity, Islam cannot tolerate the existence of
other religions or spiritual paths. And the Buddhism of that time had made the tactical error of concentrating its intellectual elite in large
monastic universities which were easy targets for the invading Muslims. By contrast, the Brahman priests and the Jain ascetics maintained
a low profile, living among the villagers in the countryside, and so their presence was overlooked by the Muslim fanatics. Thus they
survived in India to this day, whereas Buddhism disappeared in its homeland. However, now in the twentieth century, there is a revival of
Buddhism in India, especially among the Harijan outcaste groups. This has also been stimulated by the presence of large numbers of
Tibetan refugees in the country. [On Buddhism generally, see Edward Conze, Buddhism: Its Essence and Development (1959).]

12. Hindu Tantra and the Great Goddess Cult

But mere was anomer important underground religious movement mat arose in India in me early Middle Ages, in contrast to me oilier
mree existing movements:
1. The Vedic Ritualism of Brahmanism, which is me most ormodox,
2. The ascetic Shramana Movements as exemplified by Buddhism and Jainism, and considered heterodox by me Brahmans,
3. Te devotional theistic Hindu sects of the Bhakti Movement, especially Shaivism and Vaishnavism, considered more or less ormodox by
the Brahmans, and finally
4. The rise of Tantra among bom Hindus and Buddhists.
These are me four principal religious movements found in India before me advent of the Muslims into Indian history. And behind these
movements, of course, lay me whole panorama of Indian folk religion, with its local gods, demons, and spirits.
As we have said, the primordial cult of me Great Goddess was suppressed and ignored in the scriptures of the Vedic religion of the
Brahman priests. But this does not mean mat, at me popular level, the Goddess cult did not continue among the Dravidians throughout the
Vedic period. But only later in me early Middle Ages did it once more emerge into me light of history, in the sense of producing its own
scriptures. But then, history is somthing created by men, the priests and scribes and chroniclers who recorded history, and this history is
largely written from the viewpoint of establishment males. They, of course, recorded what was of interest to them and ignored or omitted
what was not or what conflicted with the predominant patriarchal ideology. Scholars not infrequently fall into the error of believing that
something did not exist if it was not written down in some text. But in India, like among the Druids, there was a bias against the written
word--lore and tradition were memorized by rote learning. An incredible amount of material could be stored in memory, a feat we tend to
forget in our literate Bible-based civilization. The texts of the Vedas were not even written down until the eighteenth century, at the behest
of the new British overlords of India. The discourses of the Buddha were not put into writing until at least a hundred years after his death.
So it is not surprising that we do not find writings devoted to the Goddess cult until the Middle Ages, but this does not mean that the cult
was invented at that time. These scriptures are known as Tantras and they contain a great deal of material on ritual, magic, and cult practice
that is non-Vedic in content. And so we find here a ritual system different from that of the Vedas, and so in India the distinction is made
between the Vaidika ritual procedures that are in accord with the Vedas and the Tantrika rituals that derive from the Tantras.
As we have seen in the Bhakti Movement of the early Middle Ages, the popular cults of non-Vedic deities like Siva and Krishna came
to the fore and won the patronage of Indian kings. Rather than combat the new religions, the Brahmans co-opted them and actually became
the priests of these sects. It was the Vaishnava Movement that was the most easily Brahmanized and the Brahmans set about to compose
vast collections of myth and legend known as the Puranas, or records of ancient times. Much historical material was mixed in with myth,
legend, and cosmology, and each of the eighteen major Puranas covers much of the same material as does the Christian Bible, from
creation to the advent of the savior Krishna and his followers. Prophesies of the future dark age of the Kali Yuga are also given,
culminating in the appearance of Messiah known as the Kalki Avatara. The account of the career of Krishna corresponds to the Gospels in
the New Testament. The important early Puranas were all composed by sectarian Vaishnavas, therefore exalting the roles of Vishnu and
Krishna in the cosmic economy, just as the Christian Bible exalts the roles of Jehovah and Jesus. Soon the Shaivas began composing their

17
own Puranas which exalted Siva and his cult. In India, apart from the Buddhists and the Jains, it was largely the Brahmans who were the
literate intelligentsia and who composed books. Only when the primordial Goddess cult began to influence the upper classes in the early
Middle Ages, especially in the east and the south, but also in the northwest, do we find writings exalting the Goddess beginning to appear.
Thus the myth of the local goddess Durga from the Vindhya hills in the South finds an entrance into the texts of the Puranas, no doubt
because of the popularity of her cult which eventually spread throughout all of Northern India. Her great festival, Durga Puja, is still
celebrated in October in India and Nepal. In Nepal especially, her rites at Durga Puja are accompanied with the sacrifices of many goats
and buffalos, a distinctly un-Brahmanic practice. However, in many places Brahmans even became the priests of the Goddess, especially in
Bengal.
In the Puranas, the goddess Lakshmi, the ancient India lotus goddess and mistress of fertility, is made the consort of the great cosmic
god Vishnu, but in Vaishnava literature she has a rather colorless and subordinate role. But the position of the Goddess in the Shaiva
system is quite active and colorful. Not only does the Great Goddess appear as Siva's girl friend, lover, and wife, variously called Parvati,
Sati, and Uma, but she appears on her own in the exceedingly wrathful and terrifying forms of Durga and Kali. Here she embodies the
collective divine energy or shakti of all the gods, which alone can overcome the Asuras or demons who threaten the cosmic order. Even
Siva and Vishnu have to acknowledge her superiority. In the Tantric system the feminine is not docile and subservient to the male, but
active and independent. She is the embodiment of shakti or the creative energy of consciousness. Her consort Siva, who symbolizes chitta
or consciousness, cannot bring the world of form into manifestation on his own unaided. He must rely on Shakti, the Goddess, and enter
into union with her in order for creation to come about. It is this union of the God and the Goddess, united in the ecstatic bliss of love, in
the center of the Mandala of eternity, that brings the universe into existence and sustains it throughout the cycles of time. [See H. Zimmer,
Myths and Symbols, etc.]
Since prehistoric times the cult of Tantra has been associated with the luminous divine figure of the Great Goddess. But she was not
alone. From the very beginning there was associated with her the Homed God, Siva or Bhairava, in his myriad forms. The particular
practices of the cult of Siva are recorded in early non-Vedic texts known as the Agamas, and th~ myths of Siva and the methods of his
worship, particularly those relating to the lingam or stone phallus, were much elaborated in the Puranas. In time the Tantras appeared that
were specifically devoted to the worship of the god Siva and his phallic symbol. Furthermore, the earlier Shaiva theologies, such as those
of the Pashupatas (the followers of the Lord of Beasts) and the Shaiva-siddhantins, now predominant in South India, were distinctly
dualistic in character. However, the later Shaiva philosophy of Kashmir and the Shakta Tantras devoted to the cult of the goddess Kali, are
monistic in character, speaking of a single Ultimate Reality beyond all dualities. Unlike the monistic Vedanta of Shankara (8 cen. CE)
which asserts Mayavada, the world is mere illusion, these Tantras assert Shaktivada, the world is a manifestation of the energy of
consciousness. This view is quite similar to the Tibetan Buddhist philosophy of Dzogchen, the Great Perfection. Those sects, especially in
Eastern India, which are devoted to the worship of the goddess Kali are known as Shakta, from shakti, “energy.” The great saint
Ramakrishna, who lived in Bengal in the last century, was a devotee of Kali, whom he invoked as the Mother. In the Shakta system, the
creative energies of the Goddess or Devi manifest as the Dasha Mahavidya, the ten great knowledges.
The group worship of the Goddess is conducted by casting a circle, such a rite being known as Chakrapuja, where chakra means
"circle" and puja means "ritual or ceremony". Within the circle, the center of the ceremony is the Tantric Feast where the participants
partake of the pancha-trattva or the five sacramental substances, which includes maithuna or ritual sexual intercourse. The ritual is
supervised by the Guru or Chakresha, the lord of the circle, who functions as the high priest, and by his consort and partner, the Shakti,
who seated to his left. She functions as the high priestess. This is in contrast to Vedic rites where only the male Brahman can officiate.
Furthermore, when one enters the chakra or circle, all social and caste distinctions are suspended. There are no social or gender restrictions
on participation in the Tantric cult, again unlike Vedic rites where lower caste people are barred from participation.
In Bengal, this practice of Chakrapuja, because it involves ritual sex or the Great Rite, thoroughly scandalized the Victorian British
ruling India. Chakrapuja always was a secret rite, restricted to initiates only, and therefore was private and not public, but under the rule of
the Puritan Victorians it became even more so. This was especially the case since the majority of upper class Indians adopted the same
puritanical attitudes that were held by the Victorians and that situation continues in India even today. The style of Tantric practice where
meat and wine were actually consumed ritually and where participants actually engaged in the Great Rite is known as Vama-marga or "the
left-hand path". This has been misunderstood by Western occultists, such as H.P. Blavatsky and Dion Fortune, who think that it means the
practice of black magic, that is, harming and killing other people. This is a gross error and reflects a Christian obsession with a Satanism,
which, in actuality, is its own shadow-side and a cult concocted by the feverish imaginations of celibate or otherwise sexually frustrated
Christian priests and missionaries. In the Indian context, the left-hand path, "left" referring to the emphasis on the feminine or goddess side,
simply designates a style of practice using the actual prescribed sacraments, whereas Dakshina-marga, "the right-hand path" refers to a
style of practice where substitutes are used in place of the real sacraments, such as grape juice in place of wine. Vama-marga is
predominant in Bengal and Assam, while Dakshina-marga is predominant in South India.
The cult of Tantra is primordial and pre-Aryan, going back to the earliest times in India, but as texts, the Hindu Tantras, appeared to
have been composed at a later time than the Buddhist Tantras which began to be composed in the second and third centuries of our era. The
Tantras also show many elements of foreign influence both Gnostic and magical. Certain Hindu Tantras even show clear borrowings from
Tibet. According to the Tara Tantra, the Brahman sage Vashishtha, meditating by the river in Bengal, was advised by the goddess Kali in a
vision to proceed to Mahachina or Tibet in order to discover the true and most efficacious fornl of her worship. Vashsishtha did so and in
Tibet he discovered the Buddha, here regarded as a manifestation or avatar of the god Vishnu, drinking large quantities of wine and
disporting himself sexually with a bevy of beautiful Yoginis. The young Brahman was shocked, but then the Buddha explained the
symbolism behind the practice. Once initiated by the Buddha, he returned home to Bengal to instruct his followers in the cult of Ugra Tara,
which is one of the ten wisdom fornls of Kati. This practice was known as Chinachara and was centered at the pilgrimage site of Tara-pith,
near where I lived in Bengal. The site was famous for the cremation ground near the river where there was a house made of human skulls,
inhabited by a yogi practitioner of the Kati cult.
The terrms "left-hand path" and "right-hand path" belong strictly to Hindu Tantra and have no application in Buddhist Tantra. Also,
the Sanskrit term shakti is not used in Buddhism, where the female energy and consort of the deity is variously referred to as Prajna,
Mudra, or Dakini. Western writers are often quite careless in this matter. In Buddhism, the emphasis is placed on the wisdom aspect of the

18
archetypal feminine and so she is designated as Prajna or "wisdom". Mudra means symbol and Dakini means "sky-goer" or "she who
moves through space". This is what energy does; it is active and moves, hence the Dakinis are depicted as dancing. The Siva or Bhairava
archetype is also at the center of the Buddhist Tantras where it is called Heruka. The Heruka is attired in the same attributes of the
nocturnal and chthonic Siva: the matted hair, the ornaments of serpents and human bone, the cremation ashes, the tiger skin, the trident, and
so on. However, whereas both the Hindu and Buddhist Tantras grow out of the same primordial non-Vedic tradition, the Buddhist Tantras
have their own way of explaining the symbols of Tantric cult and practice

13. Buddhist Tantra and the Mahasiddha Tradition

The contact with the aboriginal cult of Tantra transformed Buddhism from the practice of celibate ascetics and monks into something
quite different. While it is true that the theory of Buddhist Tantra is based on Mahayana philosophy, the methods of practice of Tantra, in
terms of meditation and ritual, go far beyond the asceticism of the monks. In particular, the methods of Tantra work with energy and its
various transformations, in a way which is not done in the Sutra teachings of Buddhism in its Hinayana and the Mahayana forms. In Tantra,
magic is closely linked with spirituality, rather than being excluded as something distracting or dangerous. Tantra, unlike the methods of
Sutra, does not deny the world or seek to renounce it in order to escape to a purely spiritual all-male realm, but rather, it seeks to transform
the world through working with the occult energies that sustain it. Tantra regards the world as the external manifestation of an internal
principle of enlightenment, the Buddha nature, which has been pure from the very beginning. The world appears to be impure and filled
with suffering because our vision of it has become distorted and obscured-- it is basically a matter of transforming our impure karmic
vision, obscured from ages past, into the pure luminous vision of enlightened awareness. Thus the pure Buddha nature concealed within
becomes externally visible as the Mandala of the Wisdom Deities.
Tantra is fundamentally a process of alchemical transmutation, where the base substances of ignorance and the neurotic passions
(kleshes) are transformed within the vessel of one's own physical body into the luminous divine elixirs of enlightened awareness and
knowledge (jnana or gnosis). This is accomplished through the process of Tantric sadhana. Sadhana is this alchemical process of
transformation and realization and it consists of two principal phases, the Generation Process and the Perfection Process. In the
Utpattikrama or Generation Process, the practitioner transforms one's present body, the result of impure karmic vision, into the pure form
of the Deity, a body of light like the rainbow, and one's immediate environment is transformed into the celestial temple of the Deity. This
transformation is accomplished through meditation and visualization, so that the accomplished practitioner actually enters into the virtual
reality of the Mandala consisting of this celestial temple surrounded by the gardens and landscapes of paradise. It is within this consecrated
space of the Mandala that the ritual and magical acts are performed. The Mandala is in reality a great magical circle or sphere and the
transformation corresponds to the adopting of a god-form in ceremonial magic.
In the Nishpannakrama or the Perfection Process, the practitioner transforms the interior of the body so that all the deities in the
pantheon are visualized to reside therein representing all of one's vital energies and processes. This provides the adept with conscious
control over all of the involuntary processes of the body. Now the body is full of gods and the microcosm is correlated to the macrocosm.
Then the practitioner proceeds with various esoteric yogas such as the raising of the Kundalini energy. Immediate benefits are health and
rejuvenation, and ultimately one can create a mayic Body of Light which even survives physical death.
The way of Tantra is also known as Vajrayana, "the adamantine or diamond-like vehicle to enlightenment"; this is because the Nature
of the Mind is like the vajra or diamond: its is clear, translucent, suffused with the light of transcendent awareness, yet it is unchanging and
indestructible. Here a clear distinction is made between "mind", consisting of the ordinary thought processes and the stream of transient
mental experiences that arise to consciousness, which is impermanent and "the Nature of Mind" which is beyond time and conditioning.
For example, the Nature of Mind is like the clear mirror and the mind is like the reflections that appear fleetingly in it. No matter whether
these reflections or light or dark, beautiful or ugly, good or bad, they in no way effect, change, modify, or corrupt the nature .of the mirror.
It is the same with the Nature of Mind which is the individual's inherent Buddha nature beyond time and space. During the course of the
fourth Tantric initiation, a crystal and a mirror may be shown to the disciple in order to illustrate the Nature of Mind. In Tantric ritual, the
vajra or diamond-scepter is used by the Vajracharya or high priest as the symbol of male energy and the bell as the symbol of female
energy. The union of vajra scepter and bell represents the union of male and female, like the union of athame and chalice in Wicca ritual.
Vajra and bell also symbolize the male and female sides of the enlightened awareness of Buddhahood.
All of the teachings and practices of Buddhism may be classified into the three vehicles to enlightenment or the Triyana. To illustrate
the differences of approach found here, there is the example of the poisonous plant, such as poison ivy. When the follower of the Hinayana
comes across the poisonous plant of the passions in his path, his method of handling the situation is to avoid that plant because he fears the
effects of contact with the poison of the passions. Thus he renounces the worldly life and avoids contact with women and the pleasures of
the world. Next there comes along the path a follower of the Mahayana who encounters this same poisonous plant. However, he does not
need to avoid the plant and does not fear its poison. This is because he knows the antidote to the poison which is the meditation on
emptiness or Shunyata. He knows that the poison is unreal and empty, lacking any inherent existence, so he is detached and remains
unaffected by it. He can then go safely along his way. Finally a follower of the Vajrayana comes along the path and he also encounters this
plant. He does not avoid contact with the plant like the Hinayana practitioner nor does he apply an antidote to where he has contact with the
poison. He has no fear of touching the plant and may even do so deliberately. This is because he knows how to take the poison and
transform it alchemically into nectar, transforming the passions (klesha) into gnosis (jnana). Thus the energy of the passions and the
emotions, instead of being suppressed and denied, the method of the ascetic, is taken up and transformed by way of Tantric sadhana and
thereafter that energy may be used to accomplish psychic and spiritual effects of a positive nature. So the passions, which for the monk
represent a source of bondage, are for the Tantrika the very means to liberation. The Sutras as texts, whether belonging to the Hinayana or
the Mahayana, represent the philosophical, psychological, and ethical dialogues of the Buddha. For the Tibetans, the Tantras also represent
revelation or the authentic word of the Buddha. However, the contents of the Tantras are radically different from those of the Sutras. The
Tantras contain a vast amount of esoteric material concerning meditation, ritual, and magic. The Sutras are public, whereas the Tantras are

19
private and secret; one must be initiated into them and the texts themselves are often written in a mysterious "twilight language" which is
opaque to the uninitiated. Like the Sutras, the Tantras are composed in the form of dialogues of the Buddha with his leading disciples. But
whereas the Sutras present the historical Buddha Shakyamuni in the mundane world of sixth century North India largely teaching ordinary
human beings, the Tantras often present the Buddha in some transcendent realm or inAll of the teachings and practices of Buddhism may
be classified into the three vehicles to enlightenment or the Triyana. To illustrate the differences of approach found here, there is the
example of the poisonous plant, such as poison ivy. When the follower of the Hinayana comes across the poisonous plant of the passions in
his path, his method of handling the situation is to avoid that plant because he fears the effects of contact with the poison of the passions.
Thus he renounces the worldly life and avoids contact with women and the pleasures of the world. Next there comes along the path a
follower of the Mahayana who encounters this same poisonous plant. However, he does not need to avoid the plant and does not fear its
poison. This is because he knows the antidote to the poison which is the meditation on emptiness or Shunyata. He knows that the poison is
unreal and empty, lacking any inherent existence, so he is detached and remains unaffected by it. He can then go safely along his way.
Finally a follower of the Vajrayana comes along the path and he also encounters this plant. He does not avoid contact with the plant like the
Hinayana practitioner nor does he apply an antidote to where he has contact with the poison. He has no fear of touching the plant and may
even do so deliberately. This is because he knows how to take the poison and transform it alchemically into nectar, transforming the
passions (klesha) into gnosis (jnana). Thus the energy of the passions and the emotions, instead of being suppressed and denied, the method
of the ascetic, is taken up and transformed by way of Tantric sadhana and thereafter that energy may be used to accomplish psychic and
spiritual effects of a positive nature. So the passions, which for the monk represent a source of bondage, are for the Tantrika the very means
to liberation.
The Sutras as texts, whether belonging to the Hinayana or the Mahayana, represent the philosophical, psychological, and ethical
dialogues of the Buddha. For the Tibetans, the Tantras also represent revelation or the authentic word of the Buddha. However, the contents
of the Tantras are radically different from those of the Sutras. The Tantras contain a vast amount of esoteric material concerning
meditation, ritual, and magic. The Sutras are public, whereas the Tantras are private and secret; one must be initiated into them and the
texts themselves are often written in a mysterious "twilight language" which is opaque to the uninitiated. Like the Sutras, the Tantras are
composed in the form of dialogues of the Buddha with his leading disciples. But whereas the Sutras present the historical Buddha
Shakyamuni in the mundane world of sixth century North India largely teaching ordinary human beings, the Tantras often present the
Buddha in some transcendent realm or in other dimensions dialoguing with high initiates and adepts, or even with his lover and consort, the
Great Goddess. She has different names in different Tantras, but she always embodies the Perfection of Wisdom. This is similar to the
Hindu Tantras where Siva and Shakti engage in such dialogues. This is also reminiscent of Gnostic texts where, in contrast to the Four
Gospels, Jesus dialogues with his disciples, including his consort Mary Magdalane, after his
resurrection in a Body of Light. The Buddha who speaks in the Tantras is not really the historical Buddha, but a transcendent Buddha
beyond profane time and history. He represents the archetype of Buddhahood beyond time and space, the very principle of enlightenment
which can manifest at any point in time and history. Thus, the Buddha principle and the revelations that come to humanity from that
principle are not restricted to one place in space and one period in history. This transcendent Buddha that dwells in eternity on the highest
plane of existence at the center of the nexus of realities is variously known as Vajradhara, Vajrasattva, and Samantabhadra in different
Tantras. The external iconographic forms may differ, but in essence the meaning of all these Buddhas is one. All of the Buddhas or
enlightened beings who are now appearing on all of the planets inhabited by intelligent life throughout the universe, who have appeared in
the past and who will appear in the future in every universe, are but manifestations of a single central principle of enlightenment which is
simultaneously at the core of every single living being without exception.
Historically speaking, the Tantras which are extant on this planet, were reveled by the transcendent Buddha to certain Mahasiddhas or
great adepts who lived in Medieval India and in adjacent countries. These Tantras were not composed by scholars using their learning and
their intellects, but they arose as mystical revelations, appearing in the visions of the Mahasiddhas. The source of these revelations was not
the historical Buddha existing at some dateable time in the past, but the Primordial Buddha existing in eternity at the center of all existence.
And this Buddha manifested to the Mahasiddhas, not as a patriarchal father figure with a long white beard, or a king sitting on a throne in
heaven holding a sceptre and an orb, but as the God and the Goddess in sexual union, in the loving embrace of Mahasukha, the Great Bliss.
This is a radically different manifestation of the Godhead than we are used to in our conventional monotheistic tradition in the West with
its strictly patriarchal Father God. This primordial tradition, in both Christianity and Islam, has disappeared from view, where the feminine
side of the Godhead is more or less totally suppressed,' except for Mariolatry in the Roman Church and certain Qabalistic and Ismaili
teachings. But the union of the God and the Goddess was well known in the pagan traditions of pre-Christian Old Europe.
In the early Middle Ages of India, the monks, who represented the intellectual elite of Buddhism, were concentrated in the large
monastic universities of Northern India, such as Nalanda, Vikramashila, and Odantapuri. This also became the situation which developed in
Tibet after the eleventh century. These large monasteries, with their hundreds, even thousands, of monks, depended for their upkeep and
support on the local kings and land- owning aristocracy. With a surplus of wealth, such a large idle population could be supported and
scholasticism prospered correspondingly. But there was a problem over how the cult of Tantra could be introduced into such a world.
Those scriptures which are the Lower Tantras of Buddhism represent, to a great extent, a further development of the Mahayana Sutras,
with the addition of the elaborations of Brahmanic ritualism. This is not surprising since many from the Brahman caste had converted to
Buddhism over the centuries because of its intellectual and spiritual appeal. These Lower Tantras are full of the symbolism of solar
mysticism, perhaps reflecting Iranian influences on these scriptures. Even so, the method of spiritual realization is still largely one of
purification, only in part that of transformation. But the situation is quite otherwise with the Higher Tantras, or Anuttara Tantra.
It was especially these Higher Tantras that were revealed to the Mahasiddhas in their ecstatic visions and the forms manifested by the
principal deities in these visions were far more lunar and chthonic in character than solar and celestial. These deities spoke of a different
world, not the warm sunlit world of daytime consciousness, but the nocturnal dream-like world of transformation, the dark subterranean
depths of the soul-- the twilight world of the unconscious psyche.
The Buddhist Mahasiddhas were not monks, but adepts, magicians, and alchemists. They were eccentrics and non- confom1ists, the
hippie drop-outs of their time, who rejected the conventional society of both the Brahmanic priestly establishment and the scholarly elite of

20
the Buddhist monasteries. Like the modem day Hindu Sadhu, they wandered from place to place, and usually, like Muslim dervishes,
earned their living by pursuing humble trades and crafts. They consorted and cohabited with low caste women.
For example, the young Brahman Saraha (5-6 cen. CE) received a traditional Vedic education in Bengal. But secretly at night, he
practiced Tantric Buddhist rites under the moon in the cremation grounds by the river, into which he had been initiated by his teacher, the
alchemist Nagarjuna. According to Tibetan tradition, this Tantric magician and alchemist was the same Nagajuna the philosopher who
lived in South India around the time of Christ and who journeyed to the dimension of the Nagas in order to retrieve the Perfection of
Wisdom teachings. Since he had mastered the arts of alchemy or Rasayana, he had prepared the elixir of longevity and so prolonged the life
of his physical body for some seven hundred years. Even among the Hindus today, Nagarjuna is revered as the author of the principal texts
of Rasayana upon which the Siddha system of medicine is based. These alchemical texts were also translated into Tibetan.
However, unfortunately for Saraha, certain Brahmans in his community observed him slipping out of the house and, spying upon him
from concealment, they observed his activities in the cremation grounds. They denounced him to the local king for the crime of practicing
heterodox rites, whereupon he was arrested by the police. At his trial he was forced to undergo certain trials by fire and water in order to
prove his innocence of wrong doing. Since he was not burned by the fire and did not drown in the river when dunked in its waters, the king
concluded that he was innocent of the charges and dismissed the case. Unlike the usual case with the witch and heresy trials in the West,
Saraha was found innocent and freed because India had no Holy Inquisition or established Church. Moreover, Saraha was only charged
with heterodox practice and not with holding unorthodox beliefs which in India at no time was not a crime. There never existed a thought-
police in India as there had in the Church-dominated West. So long as Saraha observed the Brahmanic codes of conduct and performed the
requisite domestic rites, no one cared what philosophical beliefs he held or which strange gods he invoked. In this regard, Hindu law is
more like Judaism than Christianity. The emphasis is on orthopraxis, on observing the proper rules of one's caste.
At a later time, Saraha came to a village in the country and there he observed a young naked outcaste girl making arrows. Watching
her closely, he suddenly understood the real meaning of Mahamudra, the culminating stage of Tantric transformation. Furthermore, he
recognized this dusky-skinned naked arrow-smith girl to be in actually a Wisdom Dakini, that is, a woman who embodies wisdom and
gnosis. He became her disciple and the two of
tl1em retired to the jungle and, taking up residence in a thatched hut, tl1ey practiced the secret yoga of the Tantras. Later the Buddhakapala
Tantra was revealed to Saraha, and his name is also found in the lineages of transmission of many principal Tantras, such as the
Guhyasamaja Tantra and the Hevajra Tantra.
Other Mahasiddhas such as Virupa and Naropa began tl1eir careers as monks in a monastery. Virupa secretly practiced Tantric rites in
his cell in the monastery, but without success. He did not realize any siddhis. Then one day, in a fit of frustration, he threw his rosary into
the toilet, whereupon a Dakini appeared to him and revealed the real meaning of his esoteric practice. Now he became successful at
sadhana. But when he celebrated this success witl1 a Tantric Feast or Ganachakrapuja, certain other monks spied upon him in his cell to
discover him partaking of meat and wine and disporting himself with Dakinis. They immediately denounced him to the Abbot and he was
promptly expelled from the monastery because wine, meat, and women were strictly forbidden to monks.
Virupa crossed the river by walking on the surface of tl1e water and went immediately to find the nearest tavern. He ordered several
cups of wine. But being a defrocked monk, he had no money with which to pay his bar bill. So he pointed at tl1e sun witl1 his finger and,
for tl1e next three days, the sun remained stationary in the sky while Virupa continued drinking wine. Fearing that the earth itself would be
burned up, the king of that country came to tl1e tavern and paid tl1e bar bill of tl1e ex-monk. Virupa was quite content with this, so he
released the sun which thereupon resumed its course in the sky. Through his success at sadhana, Virupa had realized such siddhis as he
exhibited above, though some scholars interpret this story as an allegory of Kundalini practice.
Naropa was once a professor and chancellor at Nalanda, the largest university in India and even in the world at the time. Nalanda was
very famous and students came from as far away as China to study there. Naropa was a brilliant intellectual and a great scholar, but this
only filled him with pride and his arrogance became quite insufferable to all around him. One day while he was in his office, a Dakini
manifested to him in the guise of the cleaning woman. Politely she asked tl1e professor what text he was reading and whetl1er or not he
could explain it to her. When he did so, she began to weep and, much astonished, the professor inquired why. She told him tl1at she was
weeping because he was deluding himself tl1at he had understood the text. Outraged, the professor asked who did understand the real
meaning of the text. She replied that her brother Tilopa did and that he could be found living in the cremation ground down the road.
Immediately Naropa recognized in her the thirty- seven signs of ugliness and therefore concluded that she must be a Dakini. He resigned
his position at the university, gave away all his possessions, including his beloved books, and set out on the road to find the elusive
Mahasiddha Tilopa.
Naropa wandered about for several years in search of his master who would appear to him unrecognized in a variety of guises, only to
disappear once more. Finally he met Tilopa in the guise of a fisherman by a river in Bengal. After further ordeals, the master initiated
Naropa into the Chakrasamvara Tantra system, which among the Tibetans is recognized as the chief of the Mother Tantras. Tilopa himself
had years before journeyed to Uddiyana, the mysterious land of the Dakinis to the northwest of India, and there was initiated into the higher
esoteric meaning of the Tantra by the Queen of the Dakinis herself, the goddess Vajravarahi (the Buddhist Aphrodite).
According to Tibetan accounts of the history of Buddhism in India, the Anuttara Tantras did not originate in India proper, but in this
same mysterious land of Uddiyana which some scholars locate in the Swat valley of Pakistan, but which probably referred to a much larger
area, including parts of Afghanistan. It was a region where Greek and Iranian influences were firmly felt. In the time of Shakyamuni
Buddha this country was ruled by king Indrabhuti. It is said that one day he looked up into the sky and saw a large flock of yellow birds
flying toward Mount Kallas in Tibet. When he asked his minister about them, the latter explained that these yellow birds were actually five
hundred monk disciples of the Buddha attired in yellow robes. Every morning they would fly to visit Mount Kallas and the Anavatapta lake
and every evening they would return through the sky to the city of Varanasi in India. The king was duly impressed by this and resolved to
invite the Buddha and his disciples to his palace.
Eventually the Lord Buddha and his entourage arrived, and after making sumptuous offerings, the king requested teachings from the
Buddha. Thereupon the Buddha explained the Sutric path of the renunciation of the world. At the end of the discourse, the king explained
that he could not renounce the worldly life because of the love of his queen and because of the duty he owned to his subjects and kingdom.
He inquired if there was not some other way to practice the Dharma without leaving the world to become a monk. Thereat the Buddha

21
transformed himself into the Heruka embracing the Dakini, seated in the center of an ornate immeasurable temple in order to initiate tlle
king, his queen, and his people into the mysteries of the Guhyasamaja Tantra. After the Buddha and his retinue departed from Uddiyana,
king Indrabhuti built a replica of this temple or mandala in the gardens of his palace and inside it the king, the queen, and the people
practiced the sadhana of the Guhyasamaja or Secret Assembly. Attaining siddhi or realization, it is said that all of them realized bodies of
light and went to traverse the sky. They thus became invisible to mundane vision and the entire countryside appeared deserted of its people.
Only the Nagas inhabiting the lakes and rivers remained. But then gradually the counuy was repopulated. The texts of the Guhyasamaja
Tantra had been concealed in the ruins of a temple in Uddiyana, but these were later recovered by Nagarjuna and Saraha and brought to
India. By the Tibetans, this Tantra is considered to be the chief of the Father Tantras.
In Sanskrit the name Guhyasamaja means "the secret assembly" and refers to the ritual circle which gathered when the Buddha
revealed the esoteric teachings of the Tantras. In the text itself, it says that when the elder monks first heard these teachings they collapsed
into a dead faint. This was because the Buddha explained that the practice of higher sadhana required the Great Rite to be performed,
whereas the monks had believed that the highest spiritual path was that of renunciation and celibacy. For this reason the Anuttara Tantras
were not practiced inside of the monasteries in Ancient India, but secretly in places far removed from human habitation. This nocturnal
Secret Assembly, presided over by the Heruka and the Dakini, together with a retinue of bizarre and animal-headed deities, as well as hosts
of madly dancing naked Dakinis, resembled nothing so much as the Witches' Sabbat. It is the same archetype.

14. Buddhism in Tibet

The Mahasiddhas also brought Tantric Buddhism to Tibet. In the eighth century of our era, the Tibetan king Tisong Detsan desired to
establish Buddhism in Tibet. To his mind that meant creating monks and monasteries. At that time, most of the Tibetans were still
adherents of the old pagan religion of Bonpo shamanism. So the king invited the great monk-scholar Shantirakshita from India and, under
the latter's guidance, attempted to build the first Buddhist monastery in Tibet at Samye. Each day the king would dispatch work crews out
to the land in order to begin erecting the walls of the monastery. But each night the local gods and demons of Tibet, who opposed this
project to establish Buddhism in their country, would come and tear down the walls again. After several weeks, the king felt very frustrated
by this situation. The monk Shantirakshita admitted he was no match for these fierce gods and demons, and so he advised the king to invite
the famous sorcerer, exorcist, and Tantric adept Padmasambhava from India in order to subdue these hostile spirit entities. A native of
Uddiyana, Padmasambhava was living at that time in a cave just south of the Kathmandu valley in Nepal. By way of his clairvoyance, he
knew of this invitation of the king and immediately set off for Tibet.
Crossing the high passes of the Himalayas, the master was immediately confronted by the great mountain god Yarlha Shampoo In the
form of a giant white yak, breathing blizzards and lightning out from his nostrils, the god charged down the glacier at the Master from
Uddiyana. But Padmasambhava immediately recognized the entity confronting him and subdued him with a terrifying gesture. Now lying
prostrate at the master's feet, the mountain god begged for his life and the master granted it on the condition that the god act henceforth as a
protector of the Buddha's teachings. Padmasambhava then proceeded to Samye to meet the king. Leaping up into the air, he performed a
vajra dance in the sky and where his shadows fell upon the earth, they demarcated the dimensions of the future monastery. Thereafter he
entered into magical combat with the gods and demons, and defeating them, he bound them by fierce oaths to act henceforth as guardians
and protectors of the Dharma of the Buddha. Thereafter Padmasambhava, in the company of his Dakini consort, the Tibetan princess Yeshe
Tsogyal, travelled throughout all of Tibet, subduing by his terrible magic the local spirits, thus making the land safe and suitable for human
habitation. Binding them also with oaths, he converted them into protectors of the Dharma and its practitioners. Thus the old pagan deities
of shamanistic Tibet, rather than being demonized or denied existence, were converted into guardians of the new religion and incorporated
into the Buddhist pantheon as Dharmapalas or protectors of the Dharma. Padmasambhava began the process of assimilating the pre-
Buddhist shamanistic and animistic religion of Tibet to the higher spiritual teachings of Indian Buddhism. This would be as if the old gods
of Olympus and Valhalla were converted into guardians of the Christian religion rather than being euhemerized or reduced to the status of
minor demons. It is this syncretism of Tibetan shamanism and Indian Tantric Buddhism that gives Tibetan Buddhism its unique character.
After completing this task of subduing the local gods and demons, Padmasambhava called his circle of twenty-five disciples into the
Chimphu cave near Samye and initiated them into the Tantric system of the Eight Herukas, as well as into the mystical teachings of
Dzogchen, the Great Perfection, the quintessential esoteric doctrine of the Buddha. With Yeshe Tsogyal acting as his scribe, he dictated a
series of Tantric and Dzogchen teachings for which the people of Tibet were not yet ready. Then he and his Dakini partner concealed these
texts in various places throughout Tibet and the Himalayas to be recovered in later centuries by the reincarnations of his original group of
Tibetan disciples. These texts are known as Termas or hidden treasure teachings and they continue to be rediscovered until this very day.
Padmasambhava then departed from Tibet and went to the island of Chamara or Madagascar to the southwest of the Indian subcontinent
where he subdued the demonic and cannibalistic Rakshasas who dwelled there. Tibetans believe that the Master from Uddiyana dwells
there in concealment on the holy copper-colored mountain until this very day. However, on the tenth day of every lunar month it is
believed that he comes to visit his disciples in Tibet who have faith in him and pray to him with the Seven Line Prayer.
However, in the time of king Tisong Detsan and his successors over the next century, the Higher Tantras revealed by Padmasambhava
and other Mahasiddhas, remained outside the pale of the official state-supported Buddhism of the monks and the monasteries. On the
contrary, they were preserved and spread as part of an unofficial occult underground led by Ngakpas or Tantric adepts who were married
Lamas. Among the most famous of them was the black hat magician Nubchen Sangye Yeshe in the ninth century. These Ngakpas, living
not in monasteries, but with their wives, families, and small groups of disciples were unaffected by the persecution of Buddhism launched
in that century by the Tibetan king Langdarma who closed down all the monasteries in Central Tibet and defrocked all the monks, forcing
them to return to lay life, find jobs, and take wives.
For more than sixty years there was an eclipse of all official Buddhist activity and during this dark age the Tibetan monarchy itself
collapsed and the countryside fell into chaos. Then in the eleventh century there began a revival of monastic Buddhism, beginning in
Western Tibet, as well as a renewed contact with Buddhist India. Tibetan students flocked to India in search of teachers, teachings, and
texts. Among the most prominent of these students was Marpa the translator, who after learning Sanskrit and collecting sufficient gold,
resided some sixteen years in India. His principal teacher while there was Naropa. After receiving the Tantric teachings in India from

22
Mahasiddhas such as Naropa, Maitripa, and Kukuripa, Marpa returned home and established one of the most important Tantric lineages in
Tibet, the Kagyudpa.
But Buddhist teachers were also invited to Tibet; most prominent among them was Atisha, who was both a Tantric master and a
scholar-professor at Nalanda university. However once in Tibet, his chief disciple Dromton, giving voice to his strong puritan sentiments,
prevented his master from teaching the Higher Tantras to his Tibetan disciples. like others spear-heading the monastic revival in West
Tibet, Dromton disapproved of the Anuttara Tantras and Dzogchen. Although he could not say that the Anuttara Tantras were not the
teachings of the Buddha because in his time they were widely practiced among Buddhists in India, yet he held they were inappropriate for
the Tibetans in view of their lascivious sexual symbolism and practices. Much criticism was leveled by the puritan reformers against the
Ngakpas who followed the earlier traditions of Padmasambhava. On all sides they were accused of fornicating in the temple. Thus, in the
beginning of the Buddhist monastic revival, only the Lower Tantras were officially sanctioned and supported by the state.
However, there existed a major problem for these new puritans like Dromton who sought to re-establish a purified monasticism in
Tibet. The renewed contacts with India brought forth new translations of the Higher Tantras which testified to their wide-spread popularity
in India. And these Tantras in their original state could not be practiced by celibate monks in the monasteries. This is because the
Ganachakrapuja or Tantric Feast is an integral part of the practice of the Anuttara Tantras and no Ganachakrapuja is possible without the
presence of wine, meat, and women. The rite cannot function ritually, spiritually, or magically without them because of the requisite
merging of energies. However, monks would break their vows by drinking wine and having sexual relations with women. In India, as we
have seen, the Mahasiddhas conducted their nocturnal rituals outside the precincts of the monastery. But in Tibet, the native Tibetan
Ngakpas were not so restrained and conducted Ganachakrapujas in their own temples; hence the accusations of fornicating in the temple.
The solution hit upon by the puritans was to change the style of the practice, that is to say, to practice the Higher Tantras in the style of
the Lower Tantras. In this way, the Higher Tantras could be converted into a congregational activity suitable for celibate monks. Wine and
meat, in the course of the ritual, underwent a process of transubstantiation, so that the monk participant in the feast was not really eating
meat and drinking wine in a profane sense, but partaking of ambrosia and nectar in a sacred dimension. He, therefore, did not break his
monastic vows. The requirement of the Great Rite or ritual sexual intercourse was even more problematical. However, although Yoginis
were banned from the temples in the
monastery, yet their presence at the feast could be visualized by the monk and even the rite of sexual union could be carried out purely on
the level of visualization. Thus for the Yogini, a real woman in the flesh, there was substituted a Yid kyi Rigma or mind-consort. The Great
Rite required by the third degree or Wisdom Initiation was replaced by visualization and a purely symbolic Great Rite with a union of the
vajra and bell. And during the third degree initiation, the actual presence of a Yogini representing the Wisdom Dakini and the ritual
intercourse with her in the Mandala at the center of the temple was replaced by the candidate merely being shown a picture of a naked
woman with a green scarf draped over her shoulders. This picture represented the Karmamudra or initiatrix. A picture was substituted I for
the actuality and, thus, no monastic vows are broken. The same event occurred with the Dakshana-marga or right-hand path of Hindu
Tantra in South India. And also in some American Tantric initiations I have witnessed this substitution has occurred, where wine is
replaced by non-alcoholic grape juice, meat by vegetarian soy burgers, and the Yogini by a Playboy centerfold. This new style of Tantric
practice is what prevails in almost all Tibetan temples. That is at least in terms of congregational practice. However, Guhyacharya or
"secret conduct", that is, sexual practice as part of sadhana, is still performed as a private yoga practice, especially in the Nyingmapa
school. And even if the practitioner is a monk, it is sometimes said that if he can really attain pure vision, a kind of virtual reality, he does
not break his vows. Or at least, that is how the matter is rationalized.
After his master Atisha passed away, Dromton Rinpoche founded his own monastery and established the first sect of Tibetan
Buddhism, the Kadampa. This school was characterized by its strict monasticism where pursuit of the Sutra teachings was combined with a
practice of the Lower Tantras. The characteristic teaching of this school is Lam:: rim, "the Stages of the Path" of the Sutra system.
Not long after that, the Khon family founded the great monastery of Sakya which, after the first generation, was refomled and
reorganized, basing itself on new translations of the Higher Tantras, especially the Hevajra Tantra according to the tradition descending
from Virupa. This monastery gave birth to the second new school in Tibet known as the Sakyapa. This school is still headed by a
descendent of the original Khon family, HH Sakya Trizin. The characteristic teaching of the school is known as Lam-dre or "the Path and
the Fruit".
The third new school is that of the Kagyudpa which descends from Marpa the translator and his Yogi disciple, the famous Milarepa.
But the actual organizer of the school was Gampopa, originally a Kadampa monk before he became the disciple of the eccentric recluse
Milarepa. Gampopa founded his own monastery where he combined the monasticism of the Kadampas with the Tantric teachings Milarepa
had received from Marpa. Here the characteristic teachings are the Mahamudra and the Six Yogas of Naropa. The disciples of Gampopa
and their disciples in turn founded their own monasteries and established separate lineages of transmission and hence subsects. Best known
among these subsects are the Kanna Kagyudpas headed by HH Kannapa, the Drugpa Kagyudpa headed by HH Drugpa Rinpoche, and the
Drikhung Kagyudpa headed by HH Drikhung Kyabgon.
The fourth among the new schools is the Gelugpa established by the great fourteenth century monastic and scholastic reformer
Tsongkhapa. This school did not come into existence as the result of any direct contact with the masters of Indian Buddhism as had the
previous three schools, but resulted from a combining by Tsongkhapa of strict Kadampa monasticism with Sakyapa scholarship. The
Gelugpas were so successful in their enterprise that the Kadampas were absorbed by them and ceased to exist as an independent sect. The
Gelugpa school, renowned for its scholarship and its fondness for debate, is headed by HH the Dalai Lama. In the time of the Fifth Dalai
Lama, the school made an alliance with certain Mongol tribes who then invaded Tibet and defeated the native Tibetan army. They then
placed the Dalai Lama in charge of the Tibetan government at Lhasa and this theocratic state continued until 1959 when it was overthrown
by the Chinese Communists and Tibetan independence came to an end.
The above four schools are collectively known as the Sarmapas or the New Tantra Schools, because they are based on the new
translations of the Tantras made in the eleventh century and thereafter. In the beginning, the followers of Padmasambhava did not think of
themselves as a distinct school of Buddhism until the rise of these newer schools in the eleventh century who rejected the older translations
of the Tantras made in the eighth and ninth centuries. By contrast, the former became known as the Nyingmapas or the Old Tantra School.
Because of the repeated discoveries of Termas or hidden treasure texts over the centuries, there came into existence among the Nyingmapas

23
a large number of monastic lineages. There was, however, no single head of the Nyingmapa school in Tibet. But in exile in India, the late
HH Dudjom Rinpoche was elected as head of the Nyingmapas in order to represent this school with the Tibetan Government in exile at
Dharamsala. The characteristic teachings of this school are the Termas and Dzogchen.
The Nyingmapas classify the teachings of the Buddha in a way different from the Newer Schools, and this classification is known as
the Nine Vehicles to enlightenment. The first three vehicles belong to the Sutra system of the Hinayana and the Mahayana and the second
three vehicles comprise the Lower Tantras. The final three vehicles principally consist of the Old Translation Higher Tantras known as
Mahayoga, Anuyoga, and Atiyoga. Mahayoga Tantra is more or less identical with the Anuttara Tantra of the newer system in terms of
method of practice. Atiyoga or Dzogchen is the highly sophisticated esoteric mystical system that lies behind the Tibetan Book of the
Dead. [See John Myrdhin Reynolds, Self-Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness (1989) and The Golden Letters (1994).] The
main difference among the sects, both old and new, is over which among the Higher Tantras they emphasize in practice and employ as the
basis of monastic liturgy.
The Sarmapas or Newer Schools do not recognize nine vehicles, but only three: Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. The Vajrayana
consists of four classes of Tantra:
1. Kriya Tantra emphasizes external ritual practice (kriya) and where the deity is visualized outside of one self in the sky in front. One
prays to the Deity and receives blessings and wisdoms from it, but there is no mystical union with the Deity or transformation of the
practitioner into a deity. The attitude is that more or less of conventional religion. However, there is an abundance of magical rites found
existing in the Tantras at this level.
2. Charya Tantra emphasizes purity of conduct (charya). The relationship between Deity and practitioner here is much more intimate, like a
friend addressing a friend, rather than as a servant addressing his master as above. Charya Tantra is more like the devotional mysticism
known in theistic systems where there is close intimacy, but no merging with the essence of the Deity in mystical union. This Tantra is little
practiced in Tibet, but forms the basis of Shingon, the Tantric school of Japan.
3. Yoga Tantra emphasizes internal yoga practice where a true mystical union (yoga) is achieved with the Deity. First the deity is invoked
and visualized in the space in front of oneself and then, at a later stage, the Deity is absorbed into oneself and the practitioner transforms
into the Deity. This Tantra is a true monistic mysticism where the mystic becomes one with God. The practitioner then acts and behaves as
the Deity in the center of the Mandala. At a lesser level, this is the ceremonially adopting of a god-form for the purpose performing further
ritual actions. In Yoga Tantra, the symbols are predominantly celestial and solar, with the Buddhas appearing in the guise of solar deities.
The practice is based on the motif of celestial ascent to the sphere of the sun and, in addition, there is a fivefold solar transformation, the
process of apotheosis being reminiscent of Mithraism and Ancient Egyptian solar mysticism. These three classes of Tantra are the same as
the Lower Tantras in the Nyingmapa system.
4. Anuttara Tantra, or the Higher Tantra, which is purely the path of transformation. This is subdivided into the Father Tantra which
emphasizes the male side of enlightenment and the Generation Process, or the process of visualization for the Deities and Mandala, and the
Mother Tantra which emphasizes the female aspect of enlightenment and the Perfection Process or processes of internal esoteric yoga, such
as the raising of Kundalini. The chief Father Tantra is the Guhyasamaja Tantra and the chief Mother Tantra is the Chakrashamvara
Tantra. The Kalachakra Tantra is some times classified as a Mother Tantra and some times as a Neutral Tantra. The methods and
symbolism of the Father Tantras are the same as the Mahayoga Tantra in the Nyingmapa system, whereas the methods and symbolism of
the Mother Tantras correspond to the Anuyoga Tantra according to some authorities, or else to Mahayoga Tantra according to others. In the
Kagyudpa school, Mahamudra and Dzogchen have been linked together.
In terms of the comparison with Wicca, it is the Mother Tantras, where the Goddess aspect predominates, that is
most significant. The most elaborate descriptions of Heruka Sadhana are found in the Mother Tantras.

15 Celestial and Chthonic Symbolism

Let us first look at the symbolism involved with the Anuttara Tantra in general, for this has great significance bearing on tile
comparison with Wicca. From tile point of view of conventional Christian religion, Wicca, as well as all other pagan and non-Christian
religions, are the handiwork of the Devil. And this Devil is Satan, the Prince of Darkness, the Lord of this World, the Evil Spirit, the fallen
angel Lucifer who rebelled against God in heaven and was cast down, tile Adversary who is the opponent of God's rule on earth and over
humanity, tile corrupter of all that is good, and so on. Although in theory, a creature and a fallen angel and, therefore, subservient to God's
will, the Devil at times looms so large in Christian mythology and Calvinist theology that he almost seems an independent operator apart
from God's will and providence.
This is not surprising because Calvin based his theology on the writings of St. Augustine who, before his conversion to Christianity,
was a Manichean and in Manicheanism the Devil is held to be of an absolutely different nature and origin than God. Manicheanism is an
thoroughgoing dualistic view of the world. The theology of the American Puritans who founded New England was derived from Calvin
and Augustine and, through them, Manichean dualism came to color American consciousness and world-view. From almost the very
beginning of things, there has been a perennial struggle of the angels, the forces of light, with the demons, the forces of evil and darkness,
the same old melodrama of the good guys against the bad guys, which makes for good fiction, but for bad theology. This struggle between
light and darkness will not be resolved until the end of the world, the triumphant return of Jesus Christ, and the Last Judgment. Thereafter
the Devil and his demonic minions, as well as all human sinners, including all non-Christians, will be cast down below and bound in
chains, where they will suffer everlasting torment in the flames of hell. Then creation will be renewed and evil totally eradicated from
existence; there will only be light without shadows.
Also, on the personal level, there is an ongoing struggle within the soul of each individual Christian against the temptations of the
flesh and the wiles of the Devil. For the recent fate of certain 1V evangelists, it appears that this struggle with the Devil and temptation is
not even resolved by a born-again conversion experience. Only the death of the physical body, it would seem, will remove temptations of
the flesh. So, for the devout Fundamentalist Christian, witches and pagans, indeed non-Christians in general, are all on the side of the

24
prince of Darkness, either willfully or through ignorance, and will after death be judged and sent to eternal damnation in hell where the
Devil is said to have his residence. Any pagan deity, past and present, are either manifestations of the Devil or one of his minions. Any
magic worked that is not through the so- called Holy Spirit, is the work of the Devil, no matter how healing or beneficial it may be. This
includes all of the New Age Movement, for example. Although not all modem day Christians are as extreme as this, Fundamentalists are
people who take their mythology very seriously and feel compelled to act on these feelings, taking actions against those who do not share
their beliefs. Tolerance and live and let live are not Christian principles. The heathen must be evangelized; heretics and apostates must be
condemned.
From the psychological point of view, the Devil is really the dark twin of God, the veritable shadow-side of God. To be a true Satanist,
one must really be a Christian, immersing oneself in the Christian mythology and cosmology, but with all the values inverted. The pagan,
on the other hand, is the follower of an earlier non- Christian religion with a totally different mythology, theology, and cosmology. Yet, we
find in the image of the witch that there exists a certain element of darkness that is not just Christian stereotyping and propaganda, for this
is found in non-Christian cultures as well. This element of darkness is not evil as such, but something that belongs to the twilight-side of
consciousness and to the night and the underworld. And the symbol of the witch is something very significant and important in the ecology
of world consciousness.
In Buddhism this same symbol is called the Dakini. She does not belong very much to the sunlit world of the Yoga Tantras; rather she
belongs to the night, to the nocturnal world of the Anuttara Tantras. Her troop of naked sisters ride upon fantastic beasts through the
nighttime sky under the moon led by their queen Vajrayogini, familiar to us as Diana or Aradia. They gather on a remote mountain top, far
from the prying eyes of priest and magistrate. To the sound of cymbals, drums, and flutes, they dance wildly in the presence of the Homed
God, whether he be called the Devil, or Dionysos, or Bhairava, or Heruka. This is something wild and uncontrolled, something beyond
social convention and decorum, something beyond reason-- something feared by the patriarches who rule society. The witch runs with the
wild beasts of forest and field; she is the wild woman outside the control of patriarchal society. She is the Witch and the Dakini. And for
this reason she is dangerous to the male- dominated social and intellectual order. Therefore, she must be suppressed. She is on the night
side. Yet she is as much a part of human existence as the other archetypes who walk forth in the sunshine world: king, magistrate, priest,
warrior, child, matron, maiden, and all the rest. But the witch belongs to the shadow, that part of the total psyche that the ego rejects and
denies about itself. That is why the Dakini must first appear to the future Mahasiddha before he can discover the truth about himself and
receive initiation. The Dakini is the true initiatrix for all the Yogis. To use lung's terms, to become whole he must first acknowledge and
accept his own Shadow and Anima. The Dakini is a man's Anima or repressed feminine side, and correspondingly, the Daka is the Animus,
the suppressed masculine side in the woman. But since in Ancient India and even today in Tibet, histories and biographies are written by
men, the story begins with the male practitioner's encounter with his Dakini, as was the case \\lith Saraha, Virupa, and Naropa above. [For
the feminine side of Buddhist biography, see Tsultrim Allione, Women of Wisdom (1984).]
And Jung also pointed out that the Christian Trinity is incomplete in itself, because the Shadow is excluded from it. Indeed, both the
feminine and the Devil are excluded from the Trinity; they belong to the rejected fourth function, thrust into the darkness beneath the earth.
Yet to the sunlit world of male consciousness, the feminine is associated with earth and \\lith darkness. Beneath the earth is a dark place
filled with serpents and goddesses; nevertheless, it is from that very place that life emerges. The practitioner of Tantra enters that dark place
of serpents and goddesses and transforms. It is the cauldron of rebirth.
As we have seen, Ancient Greek pagan religion distinguished two kinds of cults, but both of them were complementary and necessary
for the well being of humanity: the uranic cult of tl1e Olympian deities of the civic religion and the chtl1onic deities of earth and fertility
surviving from the old Goddess religion of the pre-Hellenic inhabitants of Greece. These chthonic deities were not evil or demons, but their
mode of operation and epiphanies were clearly different than the bright celestial Olympians. These old chthonic deities were associated
with the Mysteries, such as those at Eleusis, and with fertility magic generally, as was usual in ancient agricultural societies. Only with the
suppression of the chthonic earth religion of the Goddess by the invading patriarchal Indo- Europeans from the north and the triumph of the
patriarchal imperial monotheism of the Church millennia later, where the gods of life and fertility were demonized and thrust down into the
shadows.
But neither was this chthonic cult of fertility and its repression unique to Greece or to Europe, as we have seen in the case of India
with its pre-Aryan Goddess religion. The religion of the dark chthonic gods is a nearly universal phenomena, not just among agricultural
peoples, but also in the shamanism of hunting and gathering tribal peoples. In the latter, there is always a Lord of Heaven and a Lord of the
Underworld who were originally brothers, and the Great Goddess was the lover of one of them or of both. In the Celtic myth of the seasons,
these two gods battle over the Goddess till the end of time. But more usually the god of the underworld becomes demonized as the result of
the activities of prophetic and priestly reformers, like Zoroaster, who would elevate their principal celestial god to the status of the sole lord
and creator of the universe.
This gives rise to the theological problem of evil. If God is the supreme, all-powerful, all-knowing creator, how can he permit evil
to exist? If God is good, from where does evil originate? What usually occurs is that evil, the shadow-side of God, is projected on to an
alien figure, the despised and denigrated lord of the underworld, what ever may be his name in a particular culture. He becomes the Devil
of the reformed religion or the new religion. This is a wide-spread pattern. But to only accept as valid the sky religion, the uranic cult of the
celestial gods, is to deny something within ourselves. This represents a denial of earth, matter, emotion, and the feminine. It is a denial of
the chthonic world, the world of water and the womb, of all that has given us birth. It is a repudiation of motherhood and the rule of the
mothers. Coming to the time of puberty, the male child leaves the care of the mothers to receive initiation and enter the world of the fathers.
This procedure is only natural in the life of the male, but to make this the norm of all existence is unbalanced and one-sided. The world of
the Father is exalted to the detriment of the world of the Mother. A realm of pure spirit, light, intellect, and consciousness is exalted and
made the goal of celestial ascent and the spiritual path, even the abode of eternal salvation itself. But this gives rise to a fear of
unconsciousness and of death. Death of the body and especially death of ego consciousness represents the ultimate denial of the Father, for
it is a return to the womb of the earth and the cauldron of rebirth. Both the cult of the sky gods and the cult of the earth gods require their
offerings and their proper due.
Both the Goddess and the Devil continue to exist, secret lovers in the dark night, while God remains alone on his throne in heaven
sexually frustrated. These two slandered against deities, exiled from heaven and the light of consciousness, need to be called back from the

25
outer darkness to which they have been banished by the churches of the celestial gods. Let them return to the daytime world and take their
rightful places in the sun within the temples of humanity. [On patriarchal religion and the suppression of the Goddess generally, see Merlin
Stone, When God was a Woman (1976).]
When the Goddess and the Devil return to the sunlit world of human consciousness and are again acknowledged with their proper
cults, they will cease to be demons and the embodiments of evil, the role to which patriarchal religion and imperial monotheism allots
them. Only then can the troublesome schism within mankind's psyche be healed, the split between spirit and nature. For both spirit and
nature, masculinity and femininity, are part of our human nature and they are complementary. The presence of both is necessary in order to
realize our full potential. The one-sided exaltation of the spirit and the denial of the flesh is ultimately self-defeating because we are
denying something that is part of our own being-- the external physical world is not some alien planet and the physical body is not a prison
of the spirit. Both the world and the body are manifestations of an inner principle that transcends the dichotomy of spirit and nature. The
external is a manifestation of the internal. Monotheistic religions assert that evil and materiality will be overcome by a radical alienation--
there will be a cataclysmic end of the world, a resurrection, and a final judgment. For those judged worthy, they will thereafter abide in a
purely sexless spiritual existence, in a new world of light without shadows, without evil, without matter, and without the feminine. But this
is not possible because both the light and the shadow are created by the nature of mind. The light and the shadow require each other;
otherwise there would only be stasis, an endless boredom and ennui for all eternity. In Buddhist terms, both Samsara, the world, and
Nirvana, the celestial paradise, are ultimately of the same origin-- they both proceed out of the same Nature of Mind. Not even the gods
know this, for it is the Great Secret of Secrets. And that realization lies behind the teachings and the methods of the Tantra.
Tantra is the Way of the Serpent, because the serpent is the archaic symbol of change, transformation, and and rebirth. The serpent is
the companion of the earth Goddess; the serpent lives beneath the earth and in the dark waters of chaos. But it is from these same waters
and the womb of the earth that all forms come forth into manifestation and enter the sunlit world of consciousness. The chthonic deities not
infrequently manifest in serpent form. The spirits of the dead may also appear as serpents.
Moreover, the serpent is the bearer of Wisdom and the Gnosis to humanity. Whereas the celestial God would have kept primitive
mankind in ignorance within the gardens of paradise during the great summertime of the world before the ice ages descended, it was the
serpent (called by the Sumerians Enki, the lord of the earth) who gave to mankind the Gnosis of self-knowledge, for only with self-
knowledge could this walking ape evolve into a god. And the the transmission of this Gnosis was only possible because of the alliance
between the serpent and woman. It is only the Gnosis that can liberate humanity from bondage and servitude, for the slave is neither
liberated by faith nor obedience to the tyrant in heaven.
However, these are the images of myth, and myth does not represent a factual chronology of events in a profane history. Rather myth
is a sacred story of the gods and their deeds at the very beginning of time, those divine creative acts which brought the world as we know it
into manifestation. But at a higher level, myth tells us in narrative form some essential about the human condition--myth is a primordial and
fundamental way human beings organize their experience of the world and understand themselves. Theology and philosophy come later;
religion and self-understanding begin with vision and myth. [On the meaning of myth, see Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth
of the Eternal Return (1959).]
Characteristically, as exemplified in the dragon combat myth, the patriarchal sky gods suppress the older chthonic gods. The great sea
serpent Yam (Lohan or Leviathan) is driven back and bound beneath the earth or else slain by the young celestial warrior god Baal, in the
same way as did Babylonian Marduk with the dragon Tiamat, or as did Grecian Zeus with the dragon Typhon and Apollo with the serpent
Python, or as did Indra with the serpent Vritra, and so on. Yet in later Biblical religion, mighty Baal himself became demonized and retired
beneath the earth to become a chthonic god of sex and death, banished from human consciousness by triumphant Yahweh. The prophets
commanded that the Old Gods be expelled from the temple and their idols destroyed, being ground to dust, so that none might even know
their names. Yet the Old Gods have lived in the shadows for far too long, and now the stars have turned in their courses once more, and the
priests in their temples shall have nightmares of their return. [I deal with these topics and chthonic religion in more detail in my
forthcoming book, The Book of the Serpent.]

16. The Psychological Dimension

Of all the world religions, Buddhism is the most psychological in its approach to religion, salvation, and the human predicament in
general. The Sutras or the discourses of the Buddha contain an abundance of psychological material. This was systematized after his death
in the Abhidharma literature composed by various early masters of the Buddhist tradition and which served as the bases of the firs t
Buddhis t sects and schools. The type of psychology represented in the Sutras and the Abhidharma is largely a phenomenology of
consciousness, dealing with the stream of consciousness and the sunlit surface of the waters of the psyche.
However, the psychology associated with the Buddhist Tantras is properly a psychology of the depths of the psyche, and in many
ways it anticipates the depth psychology of lung. The Tantras describe the world of the unconscious psyche, a twilight world of dream, and
vision, an archaic world of myth and symbol, which belongs not only to the individual practitioner, but to the vast collective unconscious of
humanity and even beyond. like the shaman before him, the Tantric adept wanders through the twilight world of the landscape of the mind,
encountering mysterious and numinous figures, both celestial and chthonic, who unveil the mysteries for him or her. The adept seeks
initiation and instruction and receives both, as shown, for example, in the journey of the Mahasiddha Tilopa to the mystically erotic land of
the Dakinis in Uddiyana, or again the journey of the Mahasiddha Tsilupa to the mysterious mountain-girt land of Shambhala. Returning to
the mundane world of daytime consciousness, the adept brings this knowledge back from the other side and this gives him power to effect
transformations. He has gained the knowledge of the serpent. That is, this knowledge from the Other World can concretely effect and
transform things and events in the everyday existence of ordinary life in accordance with will. Shamans, Tantrikas, mystics, and poets all
tap into the hidden wellsprings of the creative, just as did the god Odin in his descent to the well of wisdom and inspiration at the roots of
the Tree of life. It is this knowledge and inspiration, retrieved from the Other World, that brings about the creation of culture. And this has
been the case since the very beginning of the human race in the Paleolithic. The culture-creator is one who can walk between worlds.
In terms of Tantra and ceremonial magic, the practices of meditation and ritual open the gates of the mind, so that the practitioner may
pass from this world to the other side in order to enter into the dimension of the Other World where dwell the gods, the spirits, and the

26
shades of the dead. This is the landscape of the collective unconscious psyche of the humanity of our planet. For this purpose of exploring
the psyche, lung employed his technique of Active Imagination, but Tantra and ceremonial magic use a more directed method, a program
structured as a symbolic and mythic journey called path-working. Unlike lung's method which relies on free-association, the path-working
structures the imaginative experience, drawing on traditional symbols and motifs, until the point of encounter with a certain figure of event.
Then this virtual reality is allowed to unfold and develop freely and spontaneously. If the journey is successful, new and genuine
knowledge is revealed, and the adept or magician returns to the mundane world of ordinary consciousness with treasures of knowledge and
power. Or at least, with an expanded understanding of oneself and the meaning of life. Past life regression works on much the same basis,
for whether the past life memories that surface are genuine memories of a past life or just a wish-fulfillment fantasy, the narration tells
much about the
psyche of the individual concerned and that individual's problems in this present life.
In this way, the practitioner moves beyond the confines of the mundane world for a time, in order to seek encounter and dialogue with
the gods, the divine figures of myth. For the the Tantric practitioner, this is usually something done in private and solitary retreat, not with a
group of other people, as is generally the case now with Western methods of guided meditation. However, in a traditional society, many
safe-guards are provided which we do not possess in our Western society. Then also, the shaman makes a public performance out of his
ecstatic journey, principally because the chief social function his activities is healing and that necessarily entails the presence of other
people, at least the patient and immediate family. In the traditions of ceremonial magic, the mystic journey of ascent to the heavens may be
orchestrated and enacted as a ritual drama, as was the case with Mithraism, which served as a prototype for both Freemasonry and
ceremonial orders like the Golden Dawn. Furthermore, such a visionary and ritual drama of solar ascent is also at the foundation of the
Buddhist system of initiation in the Yoga Tantra, where the candidate re-enacts the vision of the celestial ascent experienced by the
historical Buddha. Like the soul of man being led upward through the planetary spheres by the savior god Mithra, finally to partake of the
mystic Eucharist of the Sun, and then pass on to liberation through the Gates of Capricorn, so the Buddhist initiate ascends through these
same spheres before transfom1ing into the mystic sun Vairochana and transcending Samsara. [See my Iconography of Meditation,
forthcoming]
In psychological terms, the process of sadhana or Tantric transformation brings about a psychic integration, What has been lost,
alienated, or denied within oneself, is purified, transformed, and reintegrated, being given its proper and rightful place in the individual's
personal Mandala. This Mandala is organized around a transcendent center that has existed from the very beginning, prior to and outside of
time and history. Indeed, it is prior to the beginningless series of rebirths in various different worlds that the individual has experienced as
the cycle of Samsara. This transcendent center is one's True Self or primordial Buddha-nature. This Buddha-nature is, at the time, the
Nature of Mind; it lies beyond the individual's chain of incarnations just as the miITor is beyond the reflections. And yet, all the reflections
are contained within it, without changing or modifying the mirror in any way. The Buddha- nature or Nature of Mind is, therefore, the
source of both Samsara and Nirvana, of both the beginningless cycle of death and rebirth here below and the ascension to salvation within
the celestial paradise. They are but the reflections or holographic projections of the same Nature of Mind, the source of all images. But this
Buddha- nature is not a self or substance like the ego or some entity existing in time and space. On one side, it represents pure potentiality,
emptiness, and infinite space, and, therefore, it is common to all ,. sentient beings and to all sentient existence; on the other side, it it
represents clear luminosity, energy, and manifestation and this is individual. So there are these two sides to primordial Buddha
enlightenment, empty space and luminous awareness, and in terms of fruition and realization, these two simultaneous and complementary
sides are the Dharmakaya and the Rupakaya, the universal and the individual. [This is the explanation according to Dzogchen mysticism;
see my Self-Liberation through Seeing with Naked Awareness (1989) and my Space, Awareness, and Energy, forthcoming.]
The symbol of psychic integration is the Mandala, the sacred temple or the celestial palace of the gods. Each of the deities present in
the Mandala symbolizes a different aspect of the psyche. Of course, in Buddhist texts the Mandala is described in ideal terms, but, as
explained, previously, each principal Tantric Deity and its Mandala arose spontaneously in a vision to a particular Mahasiddha in the
course of his pursuit of sadhana or psychic reintegration. Buddhahood is not something that is developed or evolved or acquired from
somewhere else. It is not something that can be developed by a some kind of spiritual body-building. Rather, it is something discovered
within oneself where it has been present from the very beginning, even though it has gone unrecognized. Just as the sun is present in the
sky, even though its face is not seen and goes unrecognized, yet the sun is present above the clouds. If it were not present, unseen above the
clouds, the world would be in total darkness and nothing at all could be seen. It is the same with the Buddha-nature. Without the presence,
unrecognized, of the Buddha- nature or Nature of Mind, there would be no awareness at all anywhere in the universe. During the course of
our beginningless series of past lives, we have forgotten who we really are, our real nature, and have become psychically fragmented and
alienated from our true center.
The practice of sadhana is a bringing of things back together and harmonizing them, a process of becoming whole. But this wholeness
is something that extends beyond this present lifetime, our present embodiment (referred to by Jung as the individuation process), but
purifies and integrates all the karmic traces inherited from past lives. From the standpoint of our present lifetime things appear linear in
terms of past lives and future lives. However, from the standpoint of the center, all of these lives are simultaneous, like the view of the
circumference of the circle from the center. Ego consciousness in any particular lifetime places us at a point on the circumference and not
at the center. All of these lives occur on the same curved plane of karmic causality and in no way provide a way out of Samsara or a
cessation to the process of rebirth. Only by moving to the center of the circle or the sphere can that be accomplished. All existence off-
center elsewhere is illusory and impermanent. The problem is that we live not at the center of our being, but at the periphery, thinking that
we embody only this temporal and spatial reality, this present life alone. At the level of ordinary ego consciousness, we are unaware of the
totality of our other parallel dimensions and realities that we inhabit. Our vision is linear, circumscribed and limited by time and history.
Thus, we live in the reflections and not in the mirror. But this center has not moved, ever remaining beyond time and history; it has never
entered into incarnation. Yet, it is primordially present, without which there would be no awareness, life, or consciousness anywhere
whatsoever. We do not recognize the center, our True Self, however, because of the obscurations inherited from time without beginning.
They are like the clouds obscuring the face of the sun in the sky. The path to spiritual realization is the purification of these obscurations,
the dissipating of the clouds till the sky is clear and all is visible. We are also unaware of this situation intellectually because our thinking

27
and our models are so linear and two-dimensional, whereas what is required for our models is a mystical intuition that is multi-
dimensional.
At the time of our initiation into the Tantra, our True Self, our inherent Buddha-nature, is perceived as residing at the center of the
Mandala. The Deity there represents the visible manifestation of our invisible transcendent Buddha-nature which is inconceivable by the
finite intellect and inexpressible by words or concrete images. Yet somehow the transcendent is suggested by the presence of the symbolic
form. The True Self resides at the center in the Adytum, whereas the ego consciousness of our present life stands at the eastern gateway or
pylon in the outer courts of the temple. Not until the third initiation, the Wisdom Initiation, is the veil concealing the inner sanctuary pulled
asunder, and the candidate brought from the outer court and admitted into the Adytum and enthroned there, consecrated and coronated.
This higher initiation is only possible because the candidate encounters the Dakini, the embodiment of wisdom, and it is she who allows
him access to the inner precincts. She is the initiatrix. And entering into union with the Dakini at the center of the Mandala, the candidate
becomes whole; he integrates his own Anima or feminine side. When the third initiation is completed, the the fourth initiation proceeds,
where the Nature of Mind is directly introduced by way of symbols and explanations. This direct introduction belongs to the Great
Perfection beyond the Perfection Process.
Thus, the Tantra uses the language of myth, symbol, and poetry, a more archaic and fundamental language than that of philosophical
discourse. It is a language which speaks to our unconscious psyche, rather than the rational intellect. The initiation enacts a mystical ritual
drama, a coming home, a descent into the underworld and an ascent into the heavens, a uniting of heaven and earth, a coming forth of the
day. As with any spiritual tradition, the images and symbols employed in the mystical drama reflect the dominant culture where that
tradition is found, in this case Ancient India. For example, in the West the archetype of the king is depicted as an old man with a beard,
crowned, sitting on a throne, holding a sceptre and an orb, as on the Tarot card. In the Tantra, the same archetype is depicted as a young
prince, attired in the silks and jewels of an ancient Indian Maharaja, but the meaning is the same in both cases. He is young because he is at
the very beginning of his reign, a crown prince, now enthroned as the successor of his father, and indeed, the first or Vase Initiation is
based on the Vedic royal consecration ceremony. The king and the queen, the rulers of the four quarters, are now enthroned at the center of
the palace. His ministers, attendants, and courtiers gather about him, ready to obey his every command and royal decree. And at the gates in
the four directions, and in the outer courts as well, appear the madly dancing and intoxicated Dakinis and the other demonic and animal-
headed deities of the Shadow. All are present somewhere within the Mandala and within the gardens of paradise and the cremation grounds
that surround the Mandala palace. These figures represent the reintegration of the shadow-side of the nocturnal world of the witches and the
chthonic deities into the totality of the Mandala.

17. Chakrapuja and the Witches’ Sabbath

In Tantra, both Hindu and Buddhist, the principal collective or group ritual is the Chakrapuja or Circle Ritual, and it is this that most
closely corresponds to the Western Witches' Sabbat with its Homed God and Moon Goddess figures. Iconographically, at the center of the
circle is the Homed God as Heruka (the usual Buddhist term) or Bhairava, "the terrible one" ( the usual Hindu designation). Bhairava is
either alone in his terrible and chthonic splendor: naked, ithyphallic and attired in ornaments of human bone. Or else, the goddess Devi sits
on his left side as his Shakti, also attired as a Yogini in the garb of the cremation ground.
In Buddhist art, the Heruka or the Homed God is usually shown sitting on a tiger skin in sexual union with the Goddess. He holds such
ritual instruments as the vajra and bell, while she holds in her right hand a curved blade used to butcher bodies in the cremation ground and
a human skull cup filled with blood and intoxicating substances. Or else, the Heruka and the Dakini are wildly dancing amidst the flames of
wisdom and somehow managing athletically to engage in sexual intercourse. Both of them, male and female, are experiencing the great
bliss of Mahasukha, the threshold of simultaneous orgasm. The Heruka and the Dakini occupy the Mahasukhachakra, the Circle of Great
Bliss. The other deities of the circle are similarly engaged in sexual intercourse and the experience of bliss. They are dancing because dance
signifies the manifestation of energy in space. And besides its usual meaning, the bliss of sexual union signifies the knowledge of the union
of space and bliss, that is, the experience of being totally identified with the deity, inside of its skin and in the realm of all its senses, which
is the culmination of the Tantric path of transformation.
Beyond the center of the circle, and especially at the four gateways to the circle, are various dancing Dakinis and animal- headed
deities. Some are dancing alone or engaged in sexual intercourse. There is also a great cauldron resting on three severed human heads. The
cauldron itself is made from the top of a skull cut from a human corpse by the Dakinis. Into this skull cauldron, the Dakinis toss parts of
human bodies which they have butchered in the cremation ground, the site of this Tantric Feast. Within the cauldron, a mixture of ambrosia
and nectar is prepared with which to feed all the guests invited to the feast. Thus, like the Christian fantasy of the Witches' Sabbat and the
view Christians have of underground heretical and Satanic cults generally, this nocturnal and orgiastic cult involves ritual murder,
cannibalism, and promiscuous sexual intercourse. This is the symbolism and the iconography of the Tantirc Feast that is represented in art
and worked with in meditation. It does not mean, however, that all of these Tantric representations are actually carried out in practice,
especially ritual murder and athletic sexual intercourse while dancing.
The Buddhists, including Tantric Buddhists, because of the Buddha's injunction against the shedding of the blood of any living
creatures, do not practice blood sacrifice. There does, however, exist a method in certain Buddhist Tantras, for the practice of Drolwa, or
"deliverance", where one can kill a living being, either as a sacrifice or as an enemy harming the Dharma, but just as the blow is struck the
Tantrika must transfer the consciousness of that being to a higher plane of existence. This transfer of consciousness is known as Phowa and
is usually done for oneself as a preparation for death or it is done by the Tantrika for someone who was just died of natural causes. But
since the coming of Buddhism to Tibet the practice of blood sacrifice, which had been an integral part of their earlier shamanic religion, has
been totally abandoned by just about all Tibetans.
The sacrifice of goats and buffalos is still widespread among Shaktas in Eastern India and Nepal, especially at Durga Puja in October.
This sacrifice is often a public rite at the shrines of Kali in Calcutta and Kathmandu and I have witnessed this a few times. And even human
sacrifice is still occasionally practiced by Tantric sectarians in India and Nepal, which is, of course, against the law in both countries. If the
priest is caught, he is charged with murder and punished accordingly. The human sacrifice is either a decapitation of a volunteer male made
in honor of the goddess Ka1i at some remote shrine, or else, basically a magical act done to ensoul some building or shrine, or to use the

28
human flesh in the preparation of certain incenses and potions which thereby have magical properties. Human sacrifices among the Druids
and Aztecs where not such obscure affairs, but public rituals making offerings to the celestial gods. The eating of human flesh is still a
regular practice of the Aghori Yogis, followers of Siva, who frequent cremation grounds to obtain this human flesh from the bodies
disposed there. But they are not a sect of assassins like the Thuggis destroyed by the British authorities in the nineteenth century. The
Thuggis were Kali worshippers who sacrificed their victims, usually travelling merchants, to their Goddess by strangling them in
preparation for robbing their victims. Thus they combined religion with their criminal activities. I lived for two years in West Bengal at the
center of former Thuggi activity and visited many of their now deserted Kali shrines in the countryside near Santiniketan.
In most Chakrapujas the meat consumed in the feast is only symbolic of human flesh, and it has been usually obtained from the local
butcher shop like any non-sacramental meat. In any event, it is the ritual which transmutes the meat and the rest of the food offerings into
divine ambrosia. The wine and liquor consumed is also obtained in the usual way. The leader of the circle or high priest, the Chakresha, is
seated in the center of the circle together with his high priestess or Shakti. In Buddhist monastic rites, there is only the presence of the high
priest or Vajracharya. The presence of the high priestess, the Dakini, is simply visualized. This keeps the monks out of trouble at the rites.
In Bengal and Assam, ritual sexual intercourse or Maithuna is still practiced in the circle, either by the high priest and priestess alone, or by
all the couples present in the circle. Of course, these "wild orgies" are limited by human physiology and endurance-- although no such
limitations are imposed in art or in the fantasies of the churchmen concerning the Witches' Sabbat. Not everyone is up for having sexual
relations with scores of different partners during the course of a single night, accompanied by wild dancing and copious feasting and
drinking. This is more fantasy than physical possibility. Accounts of the witch trials in Europe led some scholars to propose that the high
priest in the guise of the Devil, wearing horns and animal skins, employed a dildo to have intercourse with large numbers of woman.
Accordingly, that is why the Devil' s penis is reported to be icy cold to the touch. Perhaps the Devil is perpetually erect, but no human male
is.
Anyway, feasting, drinking, singing, dancing, and ritual sexual intercourse, either actual or symbolic, are all part of the Tantric
Chakrapuja and the Witches' Sabbath. The Chakrapuja like the Sabbath and the Bacchanalia is nocturnal, lunar, chthonic, orgiastic,
Dionysian, and illicit in the eyes of patriarchal church and state. The image of Bhairava at the center of the nighttime revels closely
resembles the pillar of Dionysos, draped in robes and surmounted by a mask of the god. Here we have the same archetype both in fantasy
and in actuality. Now let us look a little more closely at the the structure and the methods of the Chakrapuja, though we can only do this
rather schematically here.

18. Wiccan and Tantric Rites Compared: Preparations

Just as witches are said to gather in remote places far from human habitation, such as mountain tops like the Brocken in the Hartz
mountains of Germany and the Blokula in Sweden, so the Tantrikas are said to assemble in remote places in the forests and in the
mountains. Although the Northern European climate clearly prevents such large outdoor gatherings when involving ritual nudity, for most
of the year except at Midsummer, that is not the case in India with its largely tropical climate. The favorite site of Tantric practice is the
cremation ground next to the river, where the bodies of the dead are burnt and human bones are readily available for ritual purposes. The
cremation ground corresponds to the Western cemetery where traditionally certain forms of necromancy and ceremonial magic were
performed. Both the cremation ground and the cemetery are sites where the realm of the dead and the realm of the living interface and were
access may be had to the underworld and its chthonic powers. The place of the dead is a place of power. Even in the Roman Church and in
Islam the tomb of the saint is an important site of pilgrimage, a place where blessings and healings may be obtained. The performance of
the Tantric rite accesses the unconscious psyche represented by these chthonic powers and so, what better place for the rite than at the
gateway to the underworld itself? Of course, in actual practice, both Indian Tantrikas and European witches perform their rites where it is
practical in terms of the climate and the social restrictions of their respective countries.
Yet the nature of these Tantric rites are secret and hidden from public view. As a general rule, no one who is not an initiate is admitted
to them. This was also the case originally with the Buddhist Tantric Feast or Ganachakrapuja, but these rites, now appropriately decorous,
may be witnessed in Tibetan monasteries by non-initiates and even by non-Buddhists. They have been transformed into a purely monastic
affair.
Both the Hindu Shakta Tantras and the Buddhist Anuttara Tantras provide lists of certain pithasthanas or auspicious places of
pilgrimage for the performing of Tantric rites. The four principal ones in both Hindu and Buddhist Tantras are Kamarupa, Purnagiri,
Jalandhara, and Uddiyana. In addition, the Hindu Tantras provide a myth explaining the origin of these various places of pilgrimage. When
the god Siva's first wife Sati, whom he loved deeply, threw herself into the sacrificial fire of her Brahman priest father Daksha out of
humiliation because her father had abused and slandered her husband Siva and refused to admit him to the Vedic rites as he had the other
gods. Upon learning of his wife's death, Siva became mad with grief. After destroying the sacrificial fire and decapitating his father-in-law,
the god Daksha, he hoisted his dead wife's body on his shoulders. He leapt up into the sky and danced madly above the earth. All the gods
trembled with fear because they feared that Siva's dance, becoming wilder and more uncontrolled as he was maddened by his sorrow,
would destroy the universe. So the god Vishnu took up his discus-weapon and threw it at the dancing god. The sharp edge of the discus cut
through Sati's corpse, whereupon her limbs and the other parts of her body fell to earth. Relieved of the weight of his wife's corpse, Siva
regained his sanity and the universe was saved from a fiery destruction. Wherever a part of the body of Sati fell to earth, that spot became a
place of power and a place of pilgrimage for the Shaktas or followers of the cult of the Goddess. The vagina of the goddess fell to earth at
Kamakhya in Assam and today this is the most sacred pilgrimage site of the Shaktas. Assam was anciently known as Kamarupa, the land of
kama or sexual desire.
The Buddhist Tantras also speak of twenty-four places of pilgrimage, a list including the above four. According to the Buddhist myth,
these twenty-four sites originated in India and the Himalayas because the self-originated phalluses or Lingams of the god Siva manifested
at these sites in the distant past. On the external plane, these power spots and places of pilgrimage are found in the external world and, on
certain nights of the phases of the moon, the Yogis and Yoginis gather there to practice Guhyacharya or secret rites of Tantra. But

29
internally, these twenty-four sites correspond to twenty- four locations within the human body where the goddesses or Dakinis,
representing specific psychic energies, gather at different times during the lunar month. This sacred geography of the body is known as the
Kaya-mandala, the mandala of the body, and this geography is especially important for the internal yoga practice of the Perfection Process.
Tantric rituals are nocturnal and at certain times the Yogis and Yoginis gather under the moon to feast and sing and dance. Of course,
there are ordinary rites like puja that may be performed at any time during the day, but the Chakrapujas for initiates are performed at night.
Night is the time when the unconscious psyche and the otherworld of the spirits is more accessible. For the same reason, the guardian
spirits are invoked after the sun has set. Tantric rituals and feasts are conducted according to the lunar calendar which is older than the solar
calendar we now use for civic purposes. In ancient Indian astrology, there are twenty-eight Nakshatras or lunar mansions through which the
moon moves during course of the month. In India, like the rest of Asia, the moon is male, the god Chandra, and each night he makes love
with a different star goddess residing in these mansions. The energy generated by their love making confers a certain quality on each day of
the lunar month. According to the Buddhist Tantra, the male energy is in ascent during the waxing moon and the female energy is in ascent
during the waning moon. Thus, the performance of certain rites and the invoking of certain deities are allotted to different days during the
lunar month.
Once an appropriate site has been selected and an auspicious time for the performance of the rite has been determined, then the
precinct of the ritual is prepared. In the Buddhist system, first the Vajracharya or high priest offers a Vighna-bali to the local gods and
spirits. A bali is a sacrificial cake made of dough and other ingredients and is often sculpted into ornate forms. It represents a substitute for
an animal sacrifice. Moreover, the bill is offered as a bribe to the local spirits, securing their permission and non- interference with the rites.
If the spirits resist this bribe and still seek to cause trouble and make disturbances, the Vajracharya assumes the form of the wrathful
magician-deity Hayagriva and performs an exorcism, banishing all negativities and evil spirits with this three-bladed magical dagger. This
exorcism is performed only where necessary.
Then the altar is set up and the offerings arranged in an attractive manner. While this is being done by the assistant or Karmacharya,
the Vajracharya or chief officiant performs the meditation practice called the Guru-sadhana where he or she identifies with the chief deity
who will superintend the rite. This will especially be the case if an initiation is to be given after the circle has been cast. When all in
readiness, the other participants come in procession to the site of the ritual. Especially if initiations are to be given, a ritual bath is taken
before entering the sacred precincts. In Tibet this is done by the Karmacharya giving each entering participant a few drops of saffron-
colored water from a ritual vase in the hollow of the hand. One puts a bit of this water on the top of the head as a symbol of the ritual bath
and a mantra of purification is recited during this process. Then they enter the sacred precincts through the eastern gate of the Mandala, at
least symbolically the east.
Once all of the participants are assembled within the sacred precincts and have taken their seats in front of the altar, there are a number
of invocations and meditations performed by the entire congregation. The first of these is the Sharana, the taking of refuge in the Three
Jewels of the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, that is to say, in the teacher, his teachings, and the community of practitioners of the
teaching. The Sharana is a way of accessing and linking up with the ultimate Source of all wisdom and spiritual power. In Buddhist Tantra,
this transcendent Source is the Buddha, not just the historical Buddha, but the Primordial Buddha, the principle of enlightenment within
each living being. So when one takes refuge in the Buddha, one is not doing homage to some external deity or worldly god, but but
unreservedly opening oneself to the ultimate principle of enlightenment beyond time and space that is concealed within one's own heart.
This principle is none other than one's own inherent Buddha-nature which is uncreated, timeless, and present from the very beginning. The
second meditation is the Bodhichitta, meaning "the thought of enlightenment". This is done in order to establish an altruistic motivation in
the heart of the practitioner, that is to say, the intention to attain the realization of Buddhahood, not just for one's own personal salvation,
but for the sake of helping all living beings to escape the sufferings experienced in Samsara and realize their potential for Buddhahood.
Both the Sharana and the Bodhichitta are performed as a meditation practice and as invocations and recitations before a visualization
the great Tree of Wisdom, which is at the same time the Tree of life. This Tree is represented by the lotus growing out of the waters of
creation. The various deities of the Buddhist pantheon are then seen sitting upon lotus blossoms amidst the stems and leaves of the great
tree that reaches up to the summit if heaven. This Tree is the axis mundi, the tree at the center of the world, which links the three cosmic
zones of heaven, earth, and underworld. The details of the Tree and the iconography of the deities arranged within it vary according to the
Tibetan Buddhist sect or tradition the Tree represents. So the Tree can only be briefly described here in a very generalized way.
In the center of the Tree, corresponding to the sephirah of Tiphareth in the Qabalistic scheme of the Tree of life, is seated the Buddha
in one of his many forms, such as the historical Buddha Shakyamuni with his monk's robes and begging bowl, or the transcendent Buddha
Vajradhara in the guise of an ancient Indian prince, or the great Tantric master, Padmasambhava, who established Vajrayana Buddhism in
Tibet and who is regarded as the Second Buddha by the Nyingmapa school. In any event, Tiphareth is occupied by the Guru principle
which is, at the same time, identical with the Buddha principle in either its immanent Ninnanakaya form or its transcendent Sambhogakaya
form. Both Shakyamuni and Padmasambhava represent immanent Nirmanakayas, that is, Buddhahood manifest in our world on the plane
of time and history. Vajradhara represents the transcendent Sambhogakaya, that is, Buddhahood manifest beyond time and history on the
highest plane of existence, enthroned at the center of eternity. Also, Vajradhara is depicted in the sephirah of Kether, at the summit of the
tree and the zenith of heaven. His rich attire, in terms of precious jewels and exquisite silks, symbolize the inexhaustible effulgence of the
Sambhogakaya from which all wisdom and enlightenment flow. The Christian Qabalah places the Christ in Tiphareth, and in Christian
terms the Nirmanakaya is Christ and the Sambhogakaya is God the Father. Beyond the Sambhogakaya or Godhead is empty space and
light, symbolizing the Ultimate Reality or Dharmakaya. This is the En soph and the En soph aur of the Qabalah.
Surrounding the Buddha on his lion throne and lotus seat are the symbols of the Dharma or teachings, in the form of stacks of books
spontaneously admitting sounds, and the Sangha or spiritual community in the form of the Congregation of Saints of Hinayana Buddhism
and the Congregation of Great Bodhisattvas of Mahayana Buddhism. The latter are headed by the Lords of the Three Hierarchies and the
Arya Sangha (the Buddhist version of the Great White Brotherhood). Above the giant central figure of the Buddha are ranged in ascending
choirs the celestial hierarchies of all the Masters of Wisdom who have brought enlightenment to humanity throughout history. Below and
to the sides of the Buddha are ranged concentric circles of Meditation Deities, Dakinis, and Dharma Protectors. This vast assembly of
luminous divine figures is clearly visible in the sky before the practitioners and in their numinous presence one opens one's heart and
recites the Sharana and the Bodhichitta. The practitioner should think that this Vision of the Tree embodies the essence of all of the Masters

30
who have given one teaching in this present life and in all other lives. At the end of the meditation, the Tree is dissolved into light and this
light is absorbed into one's own heart. This is the moment of Guru Yoga or unification with the Master, the mystical union of the
practitioners with the Wisdom of all the traditions one has received. This is an integration and unification beyond all narrow sectarianism.
Now the practitioners have been purified and made fit vessels and can proceed with the process of Tantric transformation.

19. Casting the Circle

This is an important practice because it defines a sacred space removed from the profane world. Gardner's circle derives in part from
the Greater Key of Solomon where its function is to protect the magician from the negative effects of the spirit entities he evokes in the
Triangle of the Art outside the circle. The circle is marked with powerful Words of Power (the names of God) that serve to fend off these
baleful influences. However, Gardner emphasized a second function, that of defining a vessel to contain the higher spiritual energies
invoked during the ritual. Since, unlike the Greater Key, the Wicca practitioner is not evoking demons and lesser evil spirits, a protective
magical circle is not of the same importance it holds in Solomonic magic. In the Buddhist Tantric rite, the first function is effected by the
Raksha-chakra and the second by erecting the Mandala.
Raksha-chakra means" circle of protection" and is created through meditation, incantation, and gesture as a crystalline sphere of light.
The surface of this sphere is as hard as diamond, so that no external negativities can penetrate inside and the sphere is surrounded by the
flames of wisdom which consume utterly any negativities that come into contact with it. Outside the sphere stand certain fierce sentinels
who bear three-bladed daggers and other weapons. These sentinels will attack and subdue any evil spirits who would assault the sphere.
This provides a safe secure space for the practice of meditation and ritual. Such a Raksha-chakra is conjured where needed, but it is not
needed in every case since the Mandala possesses its own diamond-wall and exterior flames of wisdom that repel negativities.
Tantric Buddhist rites also possess the equivalent of the Invocation of the Watch Towers and the Four Guardian Angels. The sacred
precincts where the rites are to be performed are regarded mystically as being at the center of the world, which in Indian tradition is marked
by the cosmic mountain Meru like the Tree of Life which grows upon this mountain, the sacred mountain at the center links the three
cosmic planes of heaven, earth, and the underworld. The mystic, by journeying in meditation and visualization to this mountain at the
center of the world, then has access to all planes of being and all dimensions of existence. Moreover, creation and evolution move from the
center outward, like the concentric ripples in a quite pond when a pebble is tossed into it. Thus the magician assumes his stance at the
source, the center, the place of origin., and thus can evoke and manipulate the very forces of creation.
On the slopes of the Meru mountain stand the Four Guardian Kings who rule over the four troops of elemental spirits and these four
kings and their elemental armies guard the sacred precincts from the assaults of the Asuras or demons coming up from below. The Asuras,
the race of elder gods or Titans, represent the forces of darkness and chaos that would storm the ramparts of heaven. In primeval times, in
the cosmic wars before the creation of humanity, they were cast down in defeat to Patala below the earth, just as Zeus had imprisoned the
Titans in Tartaros or as St. Michael Archangel chained the rebel Lucifer in the pit of hell. Corresponding to the ,four Archangels of the
Qabalah: Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, and Uriel, are the Four Guardian Kings, with their corresponding attributes and elements, and they are
evoked and visualized in sequence:
1. in the east stands Dhritarashtra, the king of the Gandharvas or sylphs, the spirits of air;
2. in the south stands Virudhaka, the king of the Kimbandhas or salamanders, the spirits of fire;
3. in West stands Virupaksha, the king of Nagas or ondines, the spirits of water; and
4. in the north stands Vaishravana, the king of Yakshas or gnomes, the spirits of earth.
The evoking and positioning of these kings and their hosts gives the practitioner command and control over the energies of the four
elements.
Then beyond these Four Guardian Kings are evoked eight or ten additional guardians at the edge of the circle. These Lokapalas,
"guardians of the world", or Dikpalas, "guardians of the directions", are as follows:
1. in the east is Indra, the god of storms,
2. in the southeast is Agni, the god of fire,
3. in the south is Yama, the lord of death,
4. in the southwest is Nirrita, the demon lord,
5. in the west is Varuna, the god of the oceans,
6. in the northwest is Vayu, the god of the winds,
7. in the north is Kubera, the god of riches,
8. in the northeast is Ishana, the god of the moon,
9. at zenith is Brahma, the lord of heaven, and
10. at the nadir is Vishnu, the lord of the earth.
This same list of the guardians of the directions is found in the Hindu Puranas. At the end of the rite, these guardians are thanked for their
presence and are then dismissed, so that they may return to their own places.

20. Sadhana—Tantric Transformation

Either at this point or even before a circle is cast, the Guru Yoga is performed. This entails the visualization of the Guru in the form of
the Buddha in midst of the Tree of Wisdom as described above. In a special meditation, one enters into a mystical union with the Guru who
is the embodiment of the all of the Masters who have given the practitioner the transmissions of the teachings of the Ancient Wisdom.
Actually, the Tantric practitioner performs Guru Yoga once a day as a means of keeping linked to the transcendent Source and maintaining
all one's transmissions of the Wisdom or Gnosis. The Guru Yoga is a general practice and is performed prior to the erecting the Mandala
which is the casting of the Circle in the proper sense as a vessel to contain the wisdoms and spiritual energies invoked called adhishthana.
In the Buddhist Tantric system, the Mandala is a particular temple where a particular Meditation Deity or Yidam resides. Each of the
principal Anuttara Tantras is devoted to the cult of a specific Meditation Deity. In Buddhist perspective, the Homed God and the Great
Goddess are Yidams. The principal male Yidams in these Tanttas are known as the Heruka, which, according to various interpretations, is a

31
Sanskrit term meaning "the naked one" or "the blood drinker". The Heruka, as I have indicated previously, has the same attributes as the
European Horned God and other chthonic deities. The practice of the meditations and the rites of the Heruka are known as Heruka
Sadhana. This process of Tantric transformation will be briefly described below. Thus, in Tantric Buddhism there exist a series of aspects
or forms of the Homed God which may be practiced for various purposes. For example, Chakrasamvara and Hevajra are particularly
connected with Kundalini Yoga, Mahamaya with dream practice, Guhyasamaja with the illusion body, Vajrakilaya with the overcoming of
obstacles, Kalachakra with astrology, and so on. It is the same with the Goddess or Dakini. Each Tantric practitioner has a personal Yidam
(either a god or a goddess) which is one's special tutelary deity and protector, functioning much like a Holy Guardian Angel in the
Qabalistic system. The practitioner remains linked with that deity throughout life and for general ritual and magical work adopts it as one's
special god-form.
The Mandala is actually a three-dimensional structure, a temple or a celestial palace which is the place of residence of the Heruka and
the Dakini, whereas the Mandalas depicted in thangkas or Tibetan scroll paintings represent only the floor plan of the Mandala temple. The
Mandala is square or cubic in form with four gates in the four directions, the principal entrance way being the gate in the east. The altar and
throne of the adepts is at the center of the Mandala. It is here that the Heruka and the Dakini sit in the center of the Mahasukhachakra, the
Circle of the Great Bliss. The precise iconography of these Mandalas vary, and in some of them the architecture is much less, and certain
natural features predominate. In summery, the Mandala is the sacred dimension of time and space in which the Deity manifests.
The process of the erecting and visualizing the Mandala recapitulates the cosmogony, that is, the creation and evolution of the world.
In the beginning there was only the dark void of space called Shunyata; then there arises the manifestation of light suffusing all of space,
representing the energy of love or Eros. In the midst of infinite space and light, there manifests vibration and from this manifests the primal
seed or Fiat out of which the universe will be born. This is the Adibindu. Thereupon the evolution of the universe passes through a series of
discreet stages. First, to the accompaniment of vibrations or mantras, the elements are successively generated, then appears the golden
foundation of the earth upon which rests the cosmic mountain Meru. On top of this mountain springs up the great lotus Tree of Life, and
resting upon the principal lotus blossom is the Mandala. At the center of the Mandala is the multi-storeyed vihara or temple. It is
surrounded by the gardens of paradise and the the eight cremation grounds of the world that represent the eight types of mundane
consciousness. The vihara or temple signifies the immaculate ninth consciousness of pure vision. Beyond the cremation grounds are the
crystalline walls of diamond and the swirling flames of wisdom.
Then in the center of the Mandala temple are successively generated the Heruka, the Dakini, and their entire retinue of gods and
goddesses, who are all dancing and singing and making love. Dancing and singing signify the spontaneous manifesting of energy and
making of love signifies the experiencing of inexpressible bliss, the Mahasukha. Then a ritual drama unfolds with the making of offerings,
the singing of praises, and so on. In the more elaborate form of this Utpattikrama or generation process of the Mandala and of the Deities,
the Sadhaka practitioners first visualize these events of creation, cosmogony, and theogony occurring in the sky before them. Then this
visualization of the universe dissolves into rainbow light and is absorbed into one's own heart chakra, whereupon the practitioner is
transformed into the Deity sitting at the center of the Mandala. This is the procedure adopted from Yoga Tantra which requires a twofold
transformation, first in the space in front and then of one's own being into the deity. The second transformation is the adopting of a god-
form, such as is done in ceremonial magic. In the practice of Anuttara Tantra, this first preliminary transformation in the space in front may
be omitted, and the Sadhaka, sounding the appropriate seed mantra, may immediately transform into the guise of the deity. Throughout the
course of the rite it is crucial for the practitioner to see oneself as a deity and see everyone else in the circle of Mandala as a deity. All
mantras uttered within the Mandala are the incantations and sacred invocations uttered at creation by the gods to bring forms into visible
manifestation out of space; all ritual actions are actions performed by the gods at the beginning of time which brought the world and the
cosmic order into manifestation. By entering into the sacred time and sacred space of the Mandala, the practitioner finds oneself at the point
where creation began at the time of the beginning. Thus one can access and tap into once again that creative energy which first brought the
universe into manifestation.
However, according to the theory of Tantra, even though the practitioner has adopted the god-form by way of the Generation Process
for the Mandala and the Deities and would now perform the appropriate ceremonies and magical actions, the experience of mystical union
or being the deity has not yet been actualized or made real. This visualization of the temple and the god-form is only something created by
the finite human mind; we are only pretending to be gods in a fictional temple. The visualization of the Mandala and the Deity is called the
Samayasattva or the Symbolic Being. It is not the real Deity, but a mental construct and so its magical effectiveness is limited.
What is necessary now is the real "Drawing down the Moon" or invoking the actual presence of the gods, the great archetypes. This is
akin to spirit possession, but here it is not some ghost or minor spirit of nature or the Otherworld that is invoked, but one of the great gods.
The foregoing visualization process which created the Symbolic Being is necessary for transforming the practitioners within the Mandala
into pure vessels for the actual descent of the gods. If the pure vessel is not properly prepared first, then the descent can shatter the vessel,
for an impure vessel cannot hold and contain the divine wisdom and power that descends. From out of the infinite sky of the Mind (the
collective psyche of humanity), the jnanasattvas or Wisdom Beings are invoked with rays of light and they descend as celestial images of
light to enter into the Sadhakas who are the prepared vessels. And to accompaniment of a cacophony of drums and bells and horns, as well
as censing with exotic incenses by the Karmacharya, the divine spirit descends and takes up residence in the vessels. This is the moment of
true mystical union and divine possession. But when the procedure is worked properly, it is not some external entity or spirit that takes
possession of the Sadhaka, but rather the manifestation of an archetype that is an aspect of one's own inner enlightened nature.
The practitioner is guarded against inflation and other dire psychological effects by the precise structure of the liturgy and the ritual.
The divine union is only maintained for a strictly delimited period of time; the safe-guards are in place and at the end of the rite the divine
union is dissolved and the practitioner returns to mundane consciousness and the everyday world. This is the theory, but, of course, this
apotheosis occurs rarely, and it is far more difficult to attain than one may realize. For this reason, Tantric adepts have traditionally
undergone long retreats involving sensory deprivation and prolonged sessions of meditation practice, so that one's visualizations become
real and concrete like eidetic images. The Sadhaka is then, during sadhana practice, living in a virtual reality. Once the power of the gods
has been accessed by way of transformation, then the divine presence is properly greeted and honored, presented with the appropriate
offerings that delight the senses, extolled with hymns of praises, and entertained by sixteen beautiful naked offering goddesses. All of the

32
symbolic actions and implements in this ritual drama have precise meanings. This completes the first phase of the sadhana which is the
Utpattikrama or the Generation Process.

21. Mantra Recitation and Magic

This is followed by the Mantrajapa, the recitations of mantras to authenticate, stabilize, and make real the experience of being the
Deity. Mantra is sound and sound is energy. Sound is what brings form into manifestation out of the pregnant void of space. In the
beginning was the Word and the Word was mantra. At the beginning of the sadhana, the panorama of the mundane world is dissolved into
emptiness, a minimal sensory deprivation experience accomplished by closing the eyes. Then, sounding their respective seed mantras, the
Deities appear as luminous forms in the dark void of space, like so many stars in the sky. First there is void or silence, then subtle inaudible
vibration, then sound, and finally visible image. One becomes the Deity not only in the dimension of vision, but in the dimension of sound
as well. Progressively the Deity becomes real in all of the realms of the senses. With the practices of the Perfection Process, this virtual
reality includes the sensations of touch, therefore, the sexual practices occurring as a part of sadhana. Eventually, with the realization of
Mahamudra, the Great Symbol, the Sadhaka fmds oneself inside the skin of the Deity. Then at the time of death, having lost one's physical
body, one can awaken into this divine form in the Bardo and journey consciously to other dimensions of existence, circumventing the usual
karmic rebirth process.
With the realization of the above Generation Process, the practitioner has indeed accessed the divine power, but now that psycho-
spiritual energy must be augmented and increased before it can be applied to Karmayoga or magical operations that transform the external
world in accordance with conscious will. This is first accomplished through the process of Mantrajapa, or repeated recitation of the
mantras. Within the center of one's heart chakra is a spark of light, the core of one's being, and around this revolves a rosary of mantra, the
Mantramala, like electrons revolving around the nucleus the atom. This nucleus and ring of electrons represents a kind of dynamo. As the
electrons revolve faster and faster about the mantric nucleus, more and more energy is generated and lights flash out in every direction,
bringing about the transfonnation of beings into deities and the natural environment into the gardens of paradise in terms of the
practitioner's visualization. The overflow of this psycho-spiritual energy can be used for healing, for attracting good fortune and prosperity,
or for any other positive purpose. Often these magical energies are visualized as miniature Dakinis or goddesses who accomplish these
magical actions. But whether this has any effect on the external world or not depends on the capacity of the practitioner.
Psychic energy in itself is formless, whereas the visualization and the ritual gives a structure and a direction to the flow and movement
of energy-- thus the importance of visualization in Tantric practice. Generally children have an easy time with visualization. Our education
in the West plays down this ability to visualize and stresses verbal skills and linear thinking. For most of us the ability to visualize declines
as we grow into adult life and thus the difficulty many Western Buddhists experience with the meditation practice of Tantric sadhana.
Many Americans prefer the formless meditations of Zen and Vipassana. However, there are certain practices which can help develop the
ability to visualize and also ritual can be used as a method to access and channel psychic energy. This process is familiar to anyone who has
practiced ceremonial magic, but generally there is a strong bias in American Protestant culture against any sort of ritual and the sheer
amount of ritual in Tibetan Buddhism has also been an obstacle for American Buddhists. People from Catholic and Orthodox backgrounds
do no suffer from the same disability because these Christian traditions stress the visual and ritual aspects of spirituality.
Once the higher sources of energy have been accessed, then that energy may be channeled to specific magical ends. In general, the
Buddhist Tantric distinguishes four types of magical activity:
1. white magic which has the function of pacifying disturbances and imbalances, such as healing the body;
2. yellow magic which has the function of increasing wealth, prosperity, good fortune, and general worldly benefits;
3. red magic which has the function of seducing and winning the hearts of others, bringing them under one's power, such as love magic;
and
4. black magic which has the function of vanquishing obstacles and destroying negativities.
The principal mantra of each Deity serves to invoke the particular wisdom and power characteristic of that Deity. This mantra is called
the Heart Mantra of the Deity and it is this mantra that is repeated in the course of the Mantrajapa practice. These Heart Mantras represent
the Secret Names of Power of the various gods and spirits. The Tantrika, by knowing these secret names, has command over those powers,
just as Solomon the king could command the spirits because he knew their secret names. However, a Yidam or meditation Deity is not an
external entity, but an archetype and a fragment of one's own psyche. Hence the Sadhaka invites that archetype to dominate his
consciousness during the course of a specific sadhana; but this is a unio mystica and not the spirit possession experienced in certain forms
of shamanism, mediumship, and possession cults from Africa. In fact, the adopting of a god-form in sadhana and ritual is also a form of
protection in that it prevents an external entity from taking possession of oneself when the threshold of mundane consciousness is lowered.
Therefore, the cult of the Guardians or Dharma Protectors proceeds much in the same way as Western ceremonial magic. Just as the
ceremonial magician in the magical circle identifies himself with the arch-magician king Solomon and then conjures the spirits to visible
manifestation within the Triangle of the Art out side of the protective circle, so the Tantrika first assumes an extremely powerful magical
form, such as Padmasambhava, Hayagriva, or Vajrapani, and then evokes the guardian spirits to appear before him.
If one neglects this preliminary self-transformation and accessing of magical powers, there is a problem. At best, the spirits will ignore
the practitioner because he is obviously a personage of no power and go their own way. At worst, they become irritated and cause
imbalances in the practitioner's personal energy field which may lead to physical illness. Also, the spirits exist on a lower order of being
than the Deities or the great archetypes who one may approached with religious devotion. These archetypes are manifestations of
enlightened awareness and, even where they appear fierce and terrifying, as is the case with certain aspects of the Homed God, for
example, the intention of the Deity is benevolent. The same cannot be said of the spirits, because they are not enlightened beings, but
another form of sentient life. While the Great Gods are infinitely patient and tolerant of our foibles, the spirits are often quick to anger and
take offence. Thus one must always be careful to behave correctly toward them. Also, whenever their presence is evoked, appropriate
offerings must be presented to them, otherwise they may take offence. Moreover, these offerings represent a kind of bribe and one must
bargain and negotiate with the spirits. If we offer them such and such, then they can be requested to do such and such for us in return. And

33
a magician of sufficient knowledge and power may even be able to threaten and coerce the spirits, as, for example, when an exorcism is
performed. Magic is a serious business and not a fantasy or a child's game.
In sadhana practice, after completing the Generation Process and the. recitations of mantra, then the Perfection Process follows. This
entails the visualization of the Kaya-mandala or the residing of the hosts of deities in the body and this is followed by the raising of the
Kundalini energy. Also the practices of sexual yoga belong here as well as certain other esoteric yogas. But the practices of the Perfection
Process are generally done in private and are not part of a group practice. These practices must be discussed elsewhere.

22. Ganachakrapuja—The Witches’ Sabbath

The principal collective practice in the Anuttara Tantra is the Ganachakrapuja and it is this which directly corresponds to the Witches'
Sabbath in our Western mythology. This ceremony is basically a Tantric Feast and has the function of restoring and strengthening the
samayas or Tantric connections among the members of the circle or Mandala. Here the preliminaries, Guru Yoga, and Generation Process
are performed as above, including the mantra recitations. Then the outer, inner, and secret offerings of the feast are consecrated. The outer
offerings consist of such things as vegetarian foods and sweets, perfumes, incense, lamps, flowers, and so on. The inner offerings consist of
wine, meat, and the sacrificial cakes which were originally substitutes for blood sacrifices. The secret offering is the bliss experienced in
sexual activities, particularly the uniting of the red and white elements. The first plate of food is offered to the Buddhas and the Deities at
the altar. The second plate is offered to the chief officiants of the rite. Then plates of food and cups of wine are distributed to all
participants within the circle. The meat and wine have been purified, consecrated, and transmuted during the course of the preceding ritual,
so that they no longer represent mundane substances, but the ambrosia and nectar of the gods that confer life and longevity. They are
sacraments and all participants must partake of them. In this way, the Chakrapuja is similar to the Eucharist. Singing and dancing precede
the feasting. Of course, among the monks this is mostly symbolic and long liturgies are substituted for these celebratory activities, so that
complete solemnity and decorum is preserved within the walls of the monastery. After the initial feasting, the Great Rite takes place as the
secret offering; nowadays, in almost all cases, this is merely symbolic. In the initiation system associated with the Anuttara Tantra, the
transformation into the Deity is associated with the first or Vase Initiation, the commingling of the white and red elements of the male and
female in the liquor contained in the skull cup is connected with the second or Secret Initiation, and the Great Rite proper or ritual sexual
intercourse pertains to the third or Wisdom Initiaition.
After the partaking of the outer, inner, and secret offerings has been completed, then an offering of the remainders is presented to the
local deities and nature spirits. This offering is placed outside the circle of the Mandala. Also, before this remainder offering, the Rites of
the Guardians may be performed, employing special invocations and offerings. Thereafter the Charge is given to the Guardians regarding
their activities in the world. Furthermore, any special magical operations may be performed at this time. At the conclusion of the rite, the
guardians of the circle are thanked and dismissed and the visualization of the Mandala is dissolved into the state of formless contemplation.
After some moments in the state of contemplation, the sights and sounds of the mundane world return return to consciousness. Both the
inception of the sadhana and the conclusion of the sadhana are marked by these states of formless contemplation, so that the levels of
reality are not confused. Before the departure of me participants to mundane everyday life, the Dedication, the Commitment, and the
Benediction are recited by the entire assembly.

23. Conclusion
Of course, there are differences in detail between the Wiccan circle in its various forms: Gardnerian, Alexandrian, Georgian, Faerie,
Dianic, and so on, on the one hand, and the Tantric Chakrapuja, on the other hand, because Gardner and others created their rituals using
different literary sources, such as the Greater Key of Solomon, the Aradia text, and the Gnostic Mass of Aleister Crowley, and so on. And
as well, there exist differences between Hindu Tantric and Buddhist Tantric circle rituals, and, indeed, differences among the circles of the
different Herukas found in the various Anuttara Tantras. Each major Anuttara Tantra represents a complete system of cult and magical
practice. But I maintain that the principles involved in these various circles and their symbolism are much the same in all of these traditions
because they are all based on the pre-existing universal archetype of the Cult of the God and the Goddess, a cult that is nocturnal, lunar, and
chthonic. This is something that transcends history and particular cultures.
The re-emergence of Wicca and Neo-Pagan earth religions generally in the twentieth century are part of a vast subterranean despised
and suppressed archetypes of the Homed God and the Great Goddess into the collective consciousness of humanity after a period of
eclipse. This is part of the evolution of human consciousness world-wide in general, an evolution toward greater psychic wholeness. And
this, I also believe, is a cause for rejoicing and celebration. Blessed be!

34
35
36