Goddesses of Power

Kiss of the Yogini: "Tantric Sex" in Its South Asian Context by David Gordon White; Power of
Denial: Buddhism, Purity, and Gender by Bernard Faure; Encountering Kali: In the Margins,
at the Center, in the West by Rachel Fell McDermott; Jeffrey J. Kripal
Review by: Serinity Young
The Women's Review of Books, Vol. 21, No. 4 (Jan., 2004), pp. 18-19
Published by: Old City Publishing, Inc.
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nature poems of Gerard Manley
Hopkins: Some of these poems are
themselves like huge winged birds, or
like one of the waves of the sea that
Frost's speaker loves so well. Even the
form she uses, with the right edge of
the poem justified and the left surging
back and forth raggedly, gives an
impression of more freedom, and of a
more organic quality, than the usual
left-justiftied verse.
Even though there is only the ghost
of a narrative in this collection, so that
we know very little about the life of the
speaker, when we come to the end of it
there is a wide range of exquisitely
expressed human emotion and
thought. Any one poem may be
immersed in glory and yet fully cog-
nizant of the sadly earthbound and
inglorious. Here are some lines from
"Gull," one of my favorites because of
its inclusiveness:
Every wing, every instant bur-
geoning with wind,
has an attendant grace. The sky
sweats, copper
haze blears the horizon for
tomorrow's storm
the gulls annunciate. Ah (you say),
also consider
the flesh of the turtle burnt black
by strange
decay-turnips gone bad crowd-
ing the air-
and the hoarse whispers of the
sea,
Icarus consumed in the burning
sea. Wild
honey drowned, nymphs, empty
cans, plastic
flip-flops, boats broken from
their moorings,
capsized, all are pulled down.
Who rises?
(p. 7)
The poem goes on to speak of gulls
struggling in the storm, "their cries
hardly angelic," but ends by asserting
their beauty, "stopping in flight, racing,
their breasts/ now pink, now yellow in
fallen sunlight." It is this beauty in fall-
enness that is Frost's great strength.
But she has many strengths. These
poems should really be close-read for
the intricate freefall of their language
and their many and protean layers of
observation, as well as of thought and
feeling. "I will say beauty," Frost's nar-
rator says defiantly in the astonishing
"The Part of the Bee's Body
Embedded in the Flesh." And she
does. This is a spectacular book. e6
Goddesses of power
by
Serinioy
Young
Kiss of the Yogini: "Tantric Sex" in its South Asian Context
by David Gordon White. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003, 360 pp., $43.00 hardcover.
Power of Denial: Buddhism, Purity, and Gender
by Bernard Faure. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 482 pp., $27.50 paper.
Encountering Kali: In the Margins, at the Center, in the West
edited by Rachel Fell McDermott and Jeffrey J. Kripal.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2003, 356 pp., $21.95 paper.
T hese books present three differ-
ent, though equally rich,
approaches to the study of
women, gender, and religion. All three
also raise questions about notions of
centrality and marginality in religious
studies. Bernard Faure argues that studies
of women in Buddhism are still in such
an early stage that recovering as many
female voices as possible remains an
important endeavor. The voices he
recovers are mainly those of marginal
women-shamanesses, courtesans, and
so on-who were often rebellious and
contentious. He contrasts their voices
with traditional Buddhist discourses
about women.
David White focuses on a specific cult
of tantric Hindu practice that involves
the sexual engagement of female semi-
divine beings, yoginis, and their human
counterparts in medieval India and
Nepal, arguing that this form of Tantra
was a central, not marginal practice.
Tantra is a form of supposedly secret and
esoteric religious practices in Hinduism
and Buddhism that involves female
imagery, divine women, and sometimes
actual women. Some scholars and practi-
tioners say Tantra exalts and liberates
women, while others claim it debases and
exploits them. White's book will become
an important resource in this debate.
Tantra has also become quite popular in
the West, and White uses his research to
challenge Western claims to authentic
Indian tantric practices.
Rachel McDermott and Jeffrey Kripal
present a collection of essays on the
many facets of the Hindu goddess Kali,
an important tantric deity, in her Western
and Asian manifestations. The essays
examine both women and men as devo-
tees of Kali and pay careful attention to
when and where Kali worship has been
central to a culture's religious identity and
when it has been marginal. McDermott
and Kripal, too, are attempting to reach
Western tantric practitioners and devo-
tees of Kali in the hope that their book
will ground them in the historical realities
of her cult and practice.
All three works have a historical con-
text. Faure and White are reinterpreting
history, while McDermott and Kripal
question the historical agenda of Asians
and Westerners, and they focus on pres-
ent day Hinduism in Asia and the West.
One of the Buddhist discourses
probed by Faure is the "rhetoric of
equality," a discussion that was based on
the idea of "two truths," an important
concept in the Mahayana Buddhism of
South and East Asia. In the relative truth
of everyday reality, duality flourishes:
mine and yours; female and male. In con-
trast, from the point of view of ultimate
truth, there is no difference between self
and others, women and men. Faure sees
this discourse as an attempt to solve the
Buddhist problem with women by deny-
ing that it exists: The belief that ultimate-
ly there is no gender distinction translat-
ed into ignoring the day-to-day reality of
discrimination against women. Thus, the
Buddhist discourse on equality had little
impact on social reality, and Faure offers
many examples that establish the
Buddhist belief in gender difference.
One is from tantric tradition of Indo-
Tibetan Buddhism, in which the inclu-
sion of women in religious images and
rituals was for transgressive purposes
that served to confirm women's polluted
status and highlight their difference
from men. In most of Asia women's
bodily fluids are deemed to be polluting
and should be separated from sacred
spaces, but in tantric practices visualiz-
ing or having actual contact with pollut-
ed substances is believed to be the
means to power and a higher reality. So,
women's lower status because of pollu-
tion is reified and ritually used to further
empower men.
Another of Faure's examples is from
Chan/Zen Buddhism, in which lineage is
all important. Although male heads of
lineages, such as Dahui Zonggoa (1089-
1163), named women among their suc-
cessors, the women's names do not
appear in the official lineage of the
school. Indeed, although a male lineage
holder might espouse egalitarian lan-
guage, this did not mean he actually put it
into practice. Woman disciples were
always kept in their proper female place.
Buddhist monks' exclusion of women
from sacred places as ritually impure
because of menstruation and childbirth
was enforced with particular stringency on
mountains where monks built their
monasteries. Faure points out that this is a
complete inversion of ancient Japanese
practices, where shamanesses served and
represented the (often female) mountain
deities. When Buddhist monks took over
these sites they drove out the shamanesses.
There are many Buddhist tales about
shamanesses who attempted to climb
these mountains and were turned into
stones that can still be seen today. The
stones mark the point on the sacred path
to the top of the mountain beyond which
women were not allowed to go, and such
markers often became the focus of female
devotion. In this way, the mountain deities
were incorporated into Buddhism but
demoted to its lower levels, where they
were served by women who maintained
the archaic female rites, reestablishing their
own base of power. Faure sees women's
marginal presence in the now Buddhist
sites as both empowering the sites and
defining their precincts. In his view, the
presence of women on the periphery, in
the non-sacred, affirms for the monks that
they are in the sacred. For them, women
are the threshold to the sacred.
I n The Kiss of the Yogini, David Gordon
V White argues against existing histo-
ries of Tantra that state it was a mar-
ginal practice in pre-colonial India. He
presents compelling evidence to show
that much of Tantra was public, not hid-
den, and that Tantra was directly con-
nected to royal power.
Flying, semi-divine yoginis evolved
from ancient Indian bird-goddesses,
whose highly ambiguous nature they
share, sometimes appearing as wild,
devouring goddesses who consume the
sexual fluids and/or fetuses of their
human victims, and at other times con-
ferring blessings and powers. Their role
in tantric practices can be traced back
to the eighth century. Rituals were cre-
ated to draw the yoginis down from the
sky into their human counterparts, the
tantric female consorts of male adepts.
Roofless, circular temples were con-
structed to enable the yoginis' easy
descent. The male adepts, called siddhas,
were similarly possessed by semi-divine
siddhas, after which they would offer
theyjoginis their semen, for which the
yoginis exchanged their own sexual dis-
charge. The sexual discharge of the
yogini was understood to be the divine
fluid of the universe, and receiving it
was the point of the ritual. Ritual sexu-
al practices involved drinking the sexu-
al fluids, "either through 'mutual oral
congress' or through a form of genital
sex called vzajroli mudra ('urethal suc-
tion'), by which the male partner was
able, following ejaculation, to draw up
into himself the sexual discharge of his
female partner." The female consort
was able to convert the semen she
received into the high energy fuel that
powered her flight-flight being one of
the goals of the human siddhas and yogi-
nis. The basic idea is that through sexu-
al encounters, males fed yoginis the bod-
ily constituents they craved, and in
exchange, the yoginis bestowed worldly
powers and bodily immortality.
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1
8 The Women's Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 4 / January 2004
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White's sources make clear, however,
that
[R]egardless of the innate power
of the Yogini, the prime Tantric
actors in South Asia have always
been male, and the historical
record of Tantric practice, in lit-
erature, architecture, and the arts,
has always been told through the
eyes of a male protagonist, who
sought or claimed for himself the
status of Virile Hero or
Perfected Being. (p. 160)
The powers granted by yoginis were
sought by men from all walks of life,
from kings to merchants to foot soldiers.
Between the 10th and 12th centuries
these practices were marginalized in elite
religious circles in India in favor of prac-
tices that did not transgress purity regula-
tions and that assured the subordination
of the feminine to the person of the
male practitioner-the male guru in par-
ticular. An important part of this process
was the internalization of theyoginis into
yogic practices involving the subtle body
(an imaginary internal body system acti-
vated for enlightenment) and the rejec-
tion of actual female partners.
he Great Goddess Kali is usually
depicted in a dynamic pose sug-
gestive of continual movement,
with black skin, a bright red tongue pro-
truding from her mouth, many arms, and
a voluptuous nude body ornamented by a
necklace of decapitated heads and a
short skirt of severed arms. She is
destructive, sexual, and redeeming-an
all-powerful goddess who slays demons,
resides in cremation grounds, and gets
drunk on the blood of her victims. In
India animals are sacrificed to her, yet she
is familiarly and lovingly referred to as
Ma, mother, by her devotees.
The articles in McDermott and
Kripal's Encountering Kali locate Kali in
both her indigenous and Western set-
tings. The essays in the book's first sec-
tion suggest some of the many ways in
which Kali has evolved and changed in
South Asia during her 2,000 year history.
Some Hindu traditions have denied or
reinterpreted the confrontational aspects
of Kali: her fierceness, sexuality, and
martial nature. In Bengal, in northeastern
India, her image is softened and beauti-
fied, and she is thought of as the cosmic
mother. Kali has also been reinterpreted
in Orissa, further south in eastern India.
The image of a fierce, naked Kali stand-
ing on a supine Siva, the great god and in
some stories her husband-an unthink-
able act for an Indian wife-"is used to
uphold Hindu family values, especially
those encouraging female self-control
and self-restraint." Trhis contradictory
interpretation of her image is supported
by stories that stepping on Siva shamed
Kali out of her wild state. Not all Hindus
in Orissa accept this interpretation.
Knowledgeable tantric interpreters refer-
ence older and more authentic meanings,
but both sets of interpreters agree that
Kali is performing her dance of destruc-
tion, in which even the gods will be
destroyed, before beginning her dance of
creation when the world will be made
anew. Their differences begin with inter-
preting her protruding tongue, which the
tantrics say is a sign of her divine rage
and their opponents say is a display of
shame at having stepped on her husband.
Historically, in the earliest versions of
Kali's story, she is not naked, and Siva is
not added until the 15th century. Kali's
shame is an even later addition, one told
today. Essayists Usha Menon and
Richard Shweder see this newer version
of Kali's story as enabling men to main-
tain their sense of superiority and their
social power over women while acknowl-
edging that female power, when encapsu-
lated by self-restraint, is the supreme
force in the universe.
Patricia Lawrence has written a superb
essay on the increase of Kali worship in
war-torn Sri Lanka among the minority
Hindus. During two decades of civil war,
innumerable people have been arrested,
tortured, killed, or disappeared. Recently,
ever greater numbers of Kali worshipers
walk over beds of hot coals to gain the
goddess's protection and strength, while
others, especially men, choose to swing
from hooks inserted into their flesh.
These austerities have a cathartic effect
that enables participants to speak openly
about their experience of torture and
fear of captivity and death. In this sense,
Kali temples have become sites for
"unshielded expressiveness" in a society
dominated by fear and silence, and places
where information can be shared.
Lawrence makes the additional point that
for those whose bodies bear the marks of
torture, these austerities redefine their
bodies as graced by Kali and imbued
with her strength.
The second part of the book turns to
Western constructions of Kali, begun by
the British during the colonial period.
Essayist Cynthia Humes explains that the
British used Kali worship as part of the
imperial discourse to justify their rule.
They associated Kali with the thugs, sup-
posed bands of murdering thieves. (This
construction was carried over into the
crazed Kali worshipers of Indian Jones and
the Temple of Doom, who practiced human
sacrifice.) The British used eliminating
the thugs as their excuse for entering new
areas of India. Humes shows that from
the beginning, British writings about the
thugs were fabrications.
Hugh Urban adds that such ideas were
spread in India and England by mission-
aries and later by popular novelists, who
were fascinated by the tantric rites of
Kali and saw her as the inspiration for
revolt against British rule. This fear came
to life during the nationalist movement
of the early 20th century in Bengal,
which explicitly saw Kali as Mother India
chained by the British and reinterpreted
her preference for receiving the sacrifice
of a white goat to mean a white person.
Current Western interpretations of
Kali are revealed by a rich assortment of
websites, including those about feminist
interpretations of Kali as empowering to
women; tantric views of her as the
patron of sexual fulfillment; South
Asians from Asia and the West who offer
an "'authentic" Kali; and discussions
about cross-cultural borrowings. The
book concludes with an annotated list of
films and videos on Kali.
From wild mountain women to
blood-drinking yoginis and goddesses
like Kali, Asian religions contain a
bewildering complex of female images
that astonish, repel, and attract all at
once. Together these books are thought-
provoking guiides through a rich maze of
women 's history and human religious
life. All are historically well grounded
and sensitive both to women's voices
and to the patriarchal restraints on
them. They demonstrate the richness of
so-called marginal religious practices for
studying women at the same time that
they show the meaninglessness of dis-
tinguishing the marginal from so-called
central practices. Religion is very much
what one makes of it-that is, within
the particular social restraints and needs
of the culture.
The Bookshelf
Attentive readers will note that we now have a new format for the Bookshelf, which
aims to provide you with a little more information than in the past about books we've
received in our office recently. As always, the Bookshelf is only a partial listing of the
books by and about women published each month.
Paula Bernat Bennett,
Poets
in
the Public
Sphere: The
Emancadtor
Proect of Amerian
Womexn's Poetry, 1800-1900. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003, 264
pp., paper. Through the use of various sources, including regional newspapers,
Bennett examines how and why poems by ordinary women involving personal and
social injustice, politics, and economics found their way into print. Bennett places these
works into the broader historical context of women's poetical works.
Wendy Buonaventura, I Put a Spell on Yo: Dancng Women from Salome to Madonna.
London: Saqi, 2003, 312 pp., hardcover. A dancer herself, Buonaventura discusses
the history of women's dance and the social and religious constraints upon it. Using
examples from icons such as Isadora Duncan, as well as personal experience, history,
and contemporary documents, Buonaventura paints a vivid picture of how dance has
evolved and women have both defied and complied with the demands of society
regarding their bodily expressions.
Susan Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, 245 pp., paper. Gillman analyses the
emergence of "race melodramas" between Reconstruction and World War I. This lit-
erature ranged across the literary and political spectrum, from sentimental novels and
travelogues to the works of W E. B. Du Bois. She discusses its entanglement with
occultist fads, Freemasonry, spiritualism, and dream interpretation.
Judy Yaeger Jones and Jane E. Vallier, eds., Sweet Bells Jangled: Laura Redden Searin&
A Deaf Poet Restored. Washington, DC, 2003, 212 pp., paper. Gallaudet University
Press. Searing (1839 - 1903), who became deaf as a result of illness at age 13, wrote
journalism and poetry under the pen name of Howard Glyndon. A sympathetic biog-
raphy and brief analysis of Searing's writing introduce this collection of her poems.
Brooke Kroeger, Passing: Wben People Can't Be Wbo Tbhy Are. New York:
PublicAffairs, 2003, 280 pp., hardcover. Focusing on six people and their stories,
Kroeger examines the various ways people "pass" in today's world. She explores the
circumstances that lead some to deny a part of their identity, whether for social accept-
ance, adventure, or personal safety. She goes on to explore the various consequences
of the decision to deny a part of oneself.
Mich61e Le Doeuff, The Sex of Knowving.
New York: Routledge, 2003,242 pp., paper.
In this work translated from the French, Le Doeuff crafts a passionate and persuasive
argument regarding the damage caused by gendered education. From popular senti-
ment to classroom politics, she outlines the difficulties women have faced in the past
and continue to face today in the pursuit of knowledge.
Patricia A. McDaniel, Shrinkixg Violts axd Caspar Milquetoasts: Shyxess, Power, and
Ixtimay in the United States, 1950-1995. New York New York University Press,
2003, 213 pp., paper. McDaniel explores the social significance of "shyness" in the
20th century US in relation to gender and race, financial and political changes, and
other developments in the social climate. McDaniel details the ways in which the defi-
nition of shyness has changed from an admirable trait among so-called femnne
women to a "curable" social anxiety disorder.
Victoria C. Olsen, FromW Life: Jula Margart Cameon and Victorian Photogrphy. New
York: Paigrave Macmillan, 2003, 320 pp., hardcover. In this engaging biography of
the Victorian photographer, Olsen draws on unpublished letters, new scholarship, and
the artist's work itself. This book places Cameron's life and work firmly in relation to
the times, highlighting the social and technological developments that enabled her to
succeed in a new and exciting medium
Betsy Prioleau, Sedtres Wome Who Res&shed
the WorldandThir LestA, *Lm New
York: Viking, 2003, 366 pp., hardcover. In a lively and engaging book, Prioleau
delves into the stories of several of those whom she calls the world's most successful
"seductresses." Their strength and vitality shines through as they use everything at their
disposal to live life to the fullest and ensnare the hearts and libidos of those around
them. Prioleau argues that what these women have in common is their success at expe-
riencing their sexuality on their own terms.
Jenny Sharpe, Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Block WomenC's Lives.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003,187 pp., paper. Through
oral tradition, songs, letters, and historical records, Sharpe pieces together the stories
of three very different Caribbean slave women, examining how each rebelled against
the constraints of slavery. Acknowledging the lack of unfiltered first-person narratives
from these women, Sharpe tackles the question of how a reader can see, without the
aid of a satisfactory literary voice, the ways in which these women fought against their
oppression.
Amy Villarejo, Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2003, 235 pp., paper. Beginning with the image of
Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett, Villarejo examines how imnages are labeled "les-
bian" in nature or not, often outside the jurisdiction and even the intent of the creator.
She also examines how this works both to heighten the visibility of lesbians in society
and to create stereotypes or sets of visual indicators of sexuality.
- Bethany Towne
The Women's Review of Books / Vol. XXI, No. 4 / January 2004 19
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