Modernity and Neo-Tantra
- LAST MODIFIED: 07 January 2025
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195399318-0299
- LAST MODIFIED: 07 January 2025
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195399318-0299
Introduction
Tantra is one of the most important but also most widely misunderstood and misrepresented currents within Asian religions. An incredibly diverse body of lineages, texts, and traditions, Tantra spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions of South, Central, East, and Southeast Asia from roughly the sixth century CE onward. Historically, Tantra has had a significant influence not only on the religious practice but also on the art, architecture, literature, and political life of these regions. However, when European Orientalist scholars, Christian missionaries, and colonial administrators first encountered these traditions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they initially had an intensely negative view of Tantra. Denounced as black magic of the crudest and filthiest kind, Tantra was typically regarded as a perverse mixture of superstition, sorcery, and sexuality. These negative perceptions of Tantra were often internalized and repeated by many South Asian authors of the colonial era, particularly by Hindu reformers such as Rammohun Roy, Swami Vivekananda, and many others. Beginning in the twentieth century, however, a growing number of authors in the United States, England, and Europe began to embrace Tantra in a more positive form, now re-imagining this as a liberated path that celebrates the human body and sexuality. Throughout the twentieth century, Tantra was also combined with a variety of occult practices emerging from European esoteric traditions, such as techniques of sexual magic and modern forms of Satanism. By the 1960s, Tantra had become an important part of the counterculture and sexual revolution, now reimagined as “neo-Tantra” by global gurus such as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (also known as Osho). Finally, by the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Tantra had also become a part of modern global consumer culture, often mass-marketed as a “cult of ecstasy” and “yoga of sex” through a wide array of best-selling paperbacks, videos, and Tantric sexual products.
General Overviews
While there is quite a lot of popular literature on Tantra and neo-Tantra, there are only a couple of good scholarly overviews that examine these phenomena from a critical historical perspective. Urban 2003 traces the genealogy of Tantra as a modern category as it developed through the crisscrossing play of representations and misrepresentations between Asia, Europe, and the United States over the last 200 years. Another good, though narrower, overview is Strube 2022, which examines the role of Tantra in the early twentieth century, particularly in relation to intellectual, religious, and political movements in northeast India. Urban 2012 and Urban 2024 also trace the modern development of Tantra in Europe, the United Kingdom, and United States, with particular emphasis on its role in the development of modern forms of magic, occultism, Satanism, and New Age spirituality. From an art historical perspective, Ramos 2020 provides an excellent historical overview of Tantra in visual representations as it evolved from traditional Asian contexts to popular cultural expressions in England, Europe, and the United States.
Ramos, Imma. Tantra: Enlightenment to Revolution. London: Thames and Hudson, 2020.
A beautiful and heavily illustrated volume based on an exhibit at the British Museum. Traces the history of Tantra through visual representations, showing its transformations from premodern Asian contexts to modern British, European, and North American contexts, where it became increasingly redefined in terms of sexuality, freedom, and revolution.
Strube, Julian. Global Tantra: Religion, Science, and Nationalism in Colonial Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197627112.001.0001
A very good analysis of the role of Tantra in modern discourses on Asia, particularly in relation to questions of nationalism, science, and religion. Highlights key figures in the modern study of Tantra, such as “Arthur Avalon” (actually a joint pseudonym that included Sir John Woodroffe and his Indian collaborators) and members of the Theosophical Society. Makes a compelling case that Tantra lay at a key intersection of many different dynamics in modern India, such as orthodoxy, reform, nationalism, race, and a number of new religious movements.
Urban, Hugh B. Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics and Power in the Study of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
A broad general overview of the imagining of Tantra as a category in the study of religion, which traces its genealogy from South Asian sources through its representations in European Orientalist literature to its re-imagining as neo-Tantra in the twenty-first century. Argues that the category of “Tantra” as we understand it today was formed through the complex dialectical exchange between Asia, Europe, and North America over the last 200 years.
Urban, Hugh B. “Tantra, American Style: From the Path of Power to the Yoga of Sex.” In Transformations and Transfer of Tantra in Asia and Beyond. Edited by Istvàn Keul, 457–494. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012.
DOI: 10.1515/9783110258110.457
An historical essay that traces the transformation of Tantra primarily in the American context. Examines the basic shift from South Asian forms of Tantra as a path of power or energy (śakti) to Americanized forms of Tantra that define it primarily in terms of sexual pleasure.
Urban, Hugh B. “Modernity and Neo-Tantra.” In The Oxford Handbook of Tantric Studies. Edited by Richard K. Payne and Glen A. Hayes, 1153–1172. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.
A more focused article that examines the role of Tantra in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Urban traces its trajectory from early Orientalist scholarship, through developments such as 20th-century British occultism, the Tantrik Order in America, modern Satanism, the Osho-Rajneesh movement, and New Age spirituality.
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