Kritik am Buch „The Shadow Of The Dalai Lama ... - Neues von Shi De

the black Kali.
The religious studies scholar Doniger O’Flaherty traces them all back to the archetypal ritual of an
insect, which bears the name of “preying mantis”. This large locust bites off the head of the smaller
male during copulation and then consumes it with relish (O’Flaherty, 1982, p. 81). Although the tales
do not say that the goddess rips off the head of her lover with her teeth, she does decapitate him with a
saber.
Such female cults are supposed to imitate vegetative events in nature. Just as the plants germinate,
sprout, blossom, bear fruit and then die back to arise anew from seed, so death appeared to them to be
a necessary aspect of life and the precondition for a rebirth. When the ancient cosmocentric mother
goddess donates fertility, she demands in return bloody sacrifices. It was mostly animals and humans
of male gender who had to surrender their lives to preserve and propagate the plant, animal and
human kingdoms (Herrmann-Pfand, 1992, p. 102; Neumann, 1949, p. 55). It is not said, however,
whether this vegetative orientation to the cult was the sole motive or whether there was not also a
bloody demonstration of power within a religiously motivated struggle between the sexes involved.
The cruel rites of Kali in no way belong to the past. As the Indian press currently reports, in recent
times more and more incidents of human sacrifice to the goddess have accumulated, in which it is
primarily children who are offered up. The ancient and universal myth of the Earth Mother, who
consumes her own progeny and fattens herself with their corpses, who greedily laps up the blood-seed
of humans and animals, who lures life into her abyss and dark hole in order to destroy it, is actually
celebrating a renaissance in contemporary India (Neumann, 1989, pp. 148–149).
The vajra and the double-headed ax
Initially, men may have reacted with fear and then with protestation to such bloody matriarchal rites,
as we can conclude from many patriarchal founding myths. Perhaps some kind of masculine anxiety
neurosis, derived from long forgotten and suppressed struggles with matriarchy, lies hidden behind
the seemingly pathological overemphasis accorded to the vajra and thus the “phallus” in Tantric
Buddhism?
In a cultural history of the “diamond scepter” (vajra), the Tibetologist Siegbert Hummel mentions that
the vajra was worshipped both in Vedic India and among the Greeks as a lightning symbol. The
symbol entered Buddhism via the Hellenistic influence on the art of Gandhara. The current form only
evolved over the course of centuries. Formerly, the vajra more resembled a “double-headed ax with
lightning-like radiance” (Hummel, 1954, pp. 123ff.).
Hummel, who has also examined matriarchal influences on Tibetan culture in other works, surmises
that the symbol had a Cretan gynocentric origin. But let us quote him directly: “Vajra” and “doubleheaded
ax” presuppose “images of the Cretan mother deity, who carries a double-headed ax, as not
just a sign but also an embodiment of her sovereignty and power as well as a magical instrument, a
privilege, incidentally, which male deities significantly did not receive” (Hummel, 1954, p. 123). The
Minoan cult object is said to have been used as a weapon with which the sacred bull was slaughtered.
This bovine blood ritual, which according to reports and myths of antiquity was widely distributed
among the matriarchal cults of the Near East, brings the ancient male sacrifice into the discussion
once more. Then the bull is considered a historically more recent substitute for the husband of the