Tantric Sexual Rituals

Tantrism was a "movement appearing in India about AD 400 and operating within both Hinduism and Buddhism. The word tantra means a work. It may simply mean a book. But it also has an implication of the right way to do something, to perform ritual, for example. And there seems to be allusion to weaving and spinning, the skilled work of women: the world too is woven like a tissue."
- John Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions

"It uses meditation, ritual, symbolism, and magic. Although magic was not part of the Buddha's teaching, Tantric practitioners regard Tantra as a faster way of attaining the Buddha-nature than the path of the bodhisattvas. The forms of Tantra using mantras, powerful sacred sounds, are known as Mantrayana. Tantra tries to realize the continuous connection between all human states and conditions, including ones that are usually thought polluting or dangerous; all are the Buddha-nature, if perceived and experienced rightly. Thus hatred and revulsion, which are the oppositions of love and desire, dissolve in the realization that all states are equally the undifferentiated Buddha-nature and are without real characteristics of their own."
- John Bowker, World Religions: The Great Faiths Explained and Explored (1997), p. 74

"Not to all and any should this hymn be revealed
For be it made known to one who is unworthy,
Then ill falls upon him.
Therefore should it be carefully concealed."
- Tantras

"Their principal theme is ritual and worship; they are involved with what one critic calls 'baroque forms of yoga'; women, goddesses, and fertility and sexual energy generally are important for religious understanding; wine and meat are also important. Tantric ritual has in fact been summed up as 'the five ms' - madya (intoxicating drinks), mamsa (meat), matsya (fish), mudra (ritual gestures), maithuna (ritual sexual union). Thus whereas Hinduism tends to deny this world, Tantrism in general affirms it."
- John Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions

"Another name for Tantric Buddhism is Vajrayana, the Vehicle of the Thunderbolt. The vajra is a double-headed ritual implement, used with a bell. Held in the right hand, it represents the masculine, skillful means, and compassion. The bell in the left hand represents the feminine, wisdom, emptiness, and nirvana. It is especially common in Tibet. In the Vajrayana the five Jinas, eminent ones, also known as the dhyani-Buddha, are a major focus of meditation. they are Akshobya, Amitabha, Amoghasiddhi, Ratnasambhava, and Vairocana."
- John Bowker, World Religions: The Great Faiths Explained and Explored (1997), p. 74

"In the creative process, initially the sexual pair, Shiva and Shakti, within both man and world, are so deeply joined in sexual union they are unaware of their differences and beyond Time. They then become aware of their distinction and the female 'objective' separates from the male 'subject'. She performs her dance of illusion, persuading the male 'subject' he is not one but many, and generating from her womb the world of multiplied objects in what seems to be a sequence in time. These 'subjects' now each perceive a differentiated reality, seeming to be composed of separate particles of objective fact, and live lives that seem to be extended in time."
- Philip Rawson The Art of Tantra

"What yogis see as the eternal, unwasting, solitary, pure, supreme Brahman, that is the ultimate state of the Great Goddess [Shakti]. That all-embracing existence, higher than the highest, universal, benevolent and faultless, which is in the genitals of Prakriti, that is the ultimate state of the Great Goddess. That which is white, spotless, pure, without qualities and distinction, that which is realized only in the self, that is the ultimate state of the Great Goddess."
- Hindu Text (from An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions)

"A close analogy was found by Shellon [Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the Hindus] between the rituals of the Hindus and those of the Egyptians. He equated Shiva with Osiris, and Shakti with Isis, represented by the same equilateral triangle with a dot in the center, the same emblem of the generative power - two coexisting principles of nature, active and passive, linga and yoni.

"Shellon describes Hindu Tantric sexual rituals as being performed with naked temple courtesans or yoginis, young and beautiful, representing the goddess Shakti, or power, reciting mantras, becoming sexually excited and inducing promiscuous orgies among the votaries which he qualifies as 'very licentious' but constituting a mysterious initiation. He further describes Shakti as represented in coitu sitting on Shiva's erect member, just as Isis 'the goddess who grants all desires' did with the dead Osiris."
- Peter Tompkins, The Magic of Obelisks

"...Not only initiation, but the very capacity to reach to Tantric goal can only be transmitted along a line of female 'power-holders'... Tantra demands that every bond with the everyday conventional world must be broken if one is to obtain enlightenment."
- Philip Rawson The Art of Tantra

"In all Tantric magic, the essential requirement - whether in the ecstasy of couples or the solo rituals of a priestess - involved the raising of the energy known as the serpent of fire, or kundalini....The excited chakras are seen clairvoyantly as whirls of multicolored lights, glowing and pulsing along the spinal column, with lesser lights 'pulsating like stars throughout the ganglionic network of nerves which constitute the subtle anatomy of man.' The aroused chakras are described as petaled lotuses, tuned as receivers of powerful cosmic rays to link the microscopic body to the macroscopic universe."
- Peter Tompkins, The Magic of Obelisks

"...All the faculties - the senses, the emotions, and the intellect - should be encouraged and roused to their highest pitch, that the person's store of memories and responses can be awakened and re-converted into the pure energy from which they all originated. Feelings and pleasures thus become the raw material for transformation back into enlightenment."
"Raise your enjoyment to its highest power, and then use it as a spiritual rocket fuel."
- Philip Rawson The Art of Tantra

"The ambrosia is the nectarlike reproductive secretion which, at the highest point of ecstasy, pours into the brain with such an intensely pleasurable sensation that even the sexual orgasm pales into insignificance before it. This unbelievably rapturous sensation - pervading the whole of the spinal cord, the organs of generation and the brain - is nature's incentive to the effort directed at self-transcendence, as the orgasm is the incentive to the reproductive act."
- Gopi Krishna

Kenneth Rextroth, in his introduction to the works of the seventeenth-century alchemist Thomas Vaughan, states "that the 'Vessel of Nature', the vessel in which the alchemical operation takes place, is a 'menstruous substance'. 'It is the matrix of Nature, wherein you must place the universal sperm as soon as it appears beyond its body. The heat of this matrix is suphureous, and it is that which coagulates the sperm...This matrix is the life of the sperm, for it preserves and quickens it.' And he ends his postscript by stating that he is convinced that this basic secret of alchemy was originally 'revealed' to man, 'for it is the secret of Nature, even that which the philosophers call "the first copulation"...' Such sexual symbolism is not rare in alchemy (i.e., the sexual yoga of Chinese alchemy and Tantrism). It looks as though either Vaughan is hinting that the 'vessel' is the female vagina, or the alchemical operation closely parallels sexual intercourse."
- Colin Wilson, Mysteries

"The 'left-hand' worshippers, who follow the destructive principle and claim that they can utilize it, worship [Kali] in secret. In the higher levels of initiation, worship is changed, for both the Tantra (left hand) and other worshippers
"The Tantrics explain that the physical license of the worship of Kali is needed for brutish mankind in this evil (Kaliyuga) time. This is because only a few can liberate themselves from the flesh and reach divinity direct. Kalipuja (Kali-worship) gives the brutish man and woman an outlet and an idea of how intoxicating true communion with the divine could be. For this reason, according to the priest, it is not uncommon for mass orgies to be held in the early stages of initiation of even the right-hand worshippers, so that they may get a glimpse of the physical reflection of the true ecstasy which comes with acceptance by Kali."
- Arkon Daraul, Secret Societies