It’s been… a couple of weeks since I wrote Part 1 and Part 2 of this series about Introvigne’s book. Between US politics, Romanian politics, US fires, US airplane crashes, work stuff, book club stuff, fandom stuff, and more, I took a long break from Introvigne’s book, “Sacred Eroticism. Tantra and Eros in MISA”. But now I’m back, yay!

On to the second chapter, “Sacred Eroticism and Contemporary Esoteric Groups”!

Chapter 2: Sacred Eroticism and Contemporary Esoteric Groups - The Roots of Sacred Eroticism

This post’s barely started and I’ve written “sacred eroticism” so many times already that I feel like I’m doing SEO. Which I’m not. But the situation requires it.

I’m starting to hate the phrase even more than I already did, which is saying something. It’s probably because of MISA that I hate “eroticism” as a word - it feels saccharine-sweet, cloying around the tongue. E-ro-ti-ci-sm: the tongue starts high in the mouth, just beneath the teeth, only to crash down as if falling through a trap door into raw prurient interests, before rising up high for the single plosive of the “t”, then falling again just slightly, darting between the “i”, the “s” and the “z” (I wonder why so many syllables, does a simple “erotism” not do for the mighty English? MUST it have an “ic” to it?), before finally ending in an “um” that’s more suggestive of a schysm than of self-doubt. A schysm from what? Common sense, it feels like. I abhor the word. It’s altogether too much. Adding “sacred” to it is like adding insult to my injury.

But never mind. Don’t let my grumbles against the word “eroticism” affect your opinion of the word, or worse, of the book. I also have a bone to pick with “squirrel”, for what it’s worth - the animals are fine, but what even is that combination of sounds and letters?

Introvigne provides us with a short history of what he calls “sacred eroticism”, going back to the 3rd century BCE in China, forward to the late 20th century in the West, back to 19th century in the West, the late Middle Ages in Europe, then the US, then Belgium. It feels chaotic, to be honest. At least it’s brief. Just 3 pages.

A few notes.

I don’t know a lot about esotericism and occultism, so Introvigne’s research might be good - I don’t know. However, until now he hasn’t felt like the most thorough researcher, so I would take this section with a grain of salt, even if most of it doesn’t contradict my (limited) information on the topic.

Otherwise, Introvigne cites Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), a historian of religion with a quasi-mythological status in Romania whose major scholarly works were published between 1933 and about 1980. In terms of historical research on religion, this makes him dated.

Eliade was part of an older school of cultural research, which derived from the lofty, universalistic aspirations of colonial thought. He wanted to find a grand theory of religion, a link of common religious ideas that were universally valid - this, as far as I’ve heard, led him to misinterpret various religious ideas in ways that allowed them to fit his wider theory. It’s not that he was bad at what he did (he wasn’t), it’s that his initial theories were invalidated through the progress of science. The world turned out to be more complex, and “grand theories” are insufficient to describe it.

In other words, Eliade-like scholars laid the necessary groundwork for their domains to move on to better things. We can be grateful to them, while seeing the flaws in their work thanks to having the benefit of hindsight. It’s a similar situation to Newton: in order for him to revolutionize physics and realize that objects in motion tend to stay in motion, he needed something to revolutionize. And that something was provided by people like Aristotle, who said things like “objects in motion tend to come to rest”.

On the history of Tantra in the West, Introvigne says:

Several Tantric techniques initially came to the West through the books of Arthur Avalon (pseud. of Sir John George Woodroffe, 1865–1936). Avalon, as Julian Strube has observed, “is credited with almost single-handedly founding the academic study of Tantra, for which he served as a main reference well into the 1970s. Up to that point, it is practically impossible to divide his influence between esoteric and academic audiences” (Strube 2021, 132; see also Strube 2022). Avalon was later accused of having “invented” a somewhat orientalist construction called “Tantrism,” and certainly influenced countless occult movements. On the other hand, he had done his homework, and his books had a great impact on the academic world as well (including on Eliade: Strube 2021, 154–55) for decades.

I don’t know Avalon’s work, but reading between the lines, I see we’re back to the topic of someone laying the groundwork so that others can see the flaws in the initial approach. “Single-handedly founding the academic study of Tantra” doesn’t mean he single-handedly ended it, or that the things he said are necessarily all correct. Science isn’t about who’s right and who’s wrong - it’s a long, slow process to discover what is right.

As for Avalon being “orientalist”, I wouldn’t know. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case. Avalon wouldn’t be the first Western scholar to think of an Eastern culture as static and reducible to a sort of fictional, stereotypical essence. After all, he’s writing during the era of great empires, about a British colony. Post-colonial studies and Edward Said’s “Orientalism” (1978) are still a long way in the future in his time.

Introvigne makes it sound like Strube is offering nothing but high praise to Avalon, but this is the one article he cites that I did check: “Tantra as Experimental Science in the Works of John Woodroffe”. Strube also says there:

What Woodroffe presented to his many readers as “Tantra” was the outcome of a complex tangle of exchanges between different South Asian (especially Bengali) intellectuals, Western orientalists, missionaries, esotericists, and other participants in the struggle about the meaning of, and the relationship between, religion, science, philosophy, and national identity. It is well known that it was not Woodroffe alone who stood behind Arthur Avalon, but that this name represented a collaboration between him and several learned Indians, a fact which he openly admitted himself.

I don’t have the inclination to go deeper into this, but it sounds like Avalon’s Tantra is very much a phenomenon of its time - doing his homework or not, he very much captured a moment in Indian thought, baking it into the Western perception of Tantra.

Religion and philosophy are one thing, but science and national identity are part of the cultural hot topics of the late 19th and early 20th century. At the time Avalon was interested in Tantra, India was a colony, its people struggling under British rule and trying to prove their legitimacy in the terms of the modern world. This is likely to lead to the transformation of the very thing they’re discussing - Tantra itself might have been traditionalist, but the insistence on experimentalism, which Strube stresses, is in line with the scientific obsessions of the time. It sounds to me that while presenting authentic, traditional, old religious practices to the West, Avalon baked modernism into the West’s perception of them.

(This is nothing new; look deep into Christianity and you can see the Greek philosophy baked into it from the time it split from Judaism under hellenistic cultural dominance.)

I don’t know why Introvigne chose to be vague and admirative in this section, instead of being more informative. Oh, well. Missed opportunities, I guess.

Chapter 2: Sacred Eroticism and Contemporary Esoteric Groups - Three Main 20th Century Traditions

Usually, I’d be thrilled to find out more about the history of esoteric groups, but I’m prudently skeptical of Introvigne’s perspective. I don’t have the mental energy to read everything he cites in his bibliography, nor to dispute every claim, so I’ll skip analyzing most of this subchapter.

To summarize, he mentions Aleister Crowley’s movement (Ordo Templi Orentis) and its obsession with consuming sperm as a magic tehnicque. Then he moves on to the Brotherhood of Myriam (an Italian movement) that apparently performs sexual rituals on certain astrological dates (practicing abstinence on all others) and consumes sperm and other secretions. And thirdly, he mentions the Universal Gnostic Church, that believes men shouldn’t ejaculate and both men and women should transmute bodily secretions to build up a strong astral body (this one sounds a bit like MISA).

I’ve only ever heard of Crowley and his Order before, not the other two, but that’s not saying much - as I’ve mentioned, occultism isn’t my strong point. Feel free to drop me a note on social media if you have more info, but otherwise I don’t care enough about wacky men and their sperm-eating ways to visit a library for it (even a virtual one).

I’ll stop here for now - the next 12 pages are dedicated to the Czech Guru Jára Path. Introvigne seems to have given it more than a passing thought, so I want to go through that section more carefully.