Modernity and Neo-Tantra

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.