Introduction to Tantra Sastra - Aghori
Introduction to Tantra Sastra - Aghori
Introduction to Tantra Sastra - Aghori
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156<br />
EDITORIAL NOTE<br />
There are other caveats which perhaps need <strong>to</strong> be entered in<strong>to</strong><br />
in respect of this author’s writings. While most of what was published<br />
in English previously on the subject of Śākta Tāntrik doctrine<br />
and ritual was largely worthless, a partial exception being found in<br />
the writings of Edward Sellon (see his Annotations on the Sacred<br />
Writings of the Hindüs and “Remarks on Indian Gnosticism, or Śakti<br />
Pūjā”), Woodroffe, who in his day job was a lawyer, seems <strong>to</strong> have<br />
appointed himself counsel for the defence of the Śāktas against the<br />
suspicion of heresy and immorality (the latter considered both by the<br />
lights of Vaidik orthodoxy and the standards of a Britain <strong>to</strong> which<br />
more than a trace of the mire of the nineteenth century still clung)<br />
and thus argued strongly in favour of the Śākta faith’s orthodoxy<br />
while minimising, glossing over, or when all else failed relegating <strong>to</strong><br />
the realm of “abuses” of a minority, any practices which English<br />
readers of the time might have found distasteful. To gratui<strong>to</strong>usly<br />
alliterate, where Sellon sensationalised and other Vic<strong>to</strong>rians vilified,<br />
Woodroofe whitewashed (in Śakti and Śākta, cap. 6, he asserts that<br />
Sellon “for reasons which I need not here discuss, did not view [the<br />
mysteries of the Śākta faith] from the right standpoint.”). One other<br />
thing <strong>to</strong> remember is that Woodroffe did not write from a “comparative<br />
religion” perspective of an outsider attempting <strong>to</strong> analyse and<br />
critique other peoples’ belief-systems in familiar terms, but rather<br />
sought <strong>to</strong> expound the Śākta doctrines more or less in their own<br />
terms, for which purpose it was necessary <strong>to</strong> adopt their position.<br />
This will go some way <strong>to</strong> explaining the seeming credulity of a<br />
number of passages in his works.<br />
Love is the law, love under will.<br />
T.S.<br />
Leeds,<br />
April 2008 anno tenebrarum