Introduction to Tantra Sastra - Aghori

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