Tantric Object as Tantric Subject: Material Agency and the Feminine Tantric Body

Objects of worship in Tantric ritual vary, such as iconic or aniconic murtis, or yantras, but they can also be living human bodies. Such bodies most often belong to cisgender woman and girls. While the Tantric body is typically theorized as a philosophical construction beyond gender, this paper argues for an expansion of the concept of Tantric bodies to include the feminine ritual participant who is the object or tool of ritual worship. This paper explores these Tantric objects as Tantric subjects—Tantric bodies that are explicitly gendered, and possess material agency, the power of objects themselves to enact effects on the world. Drawing on numerous Kaula texts from a wide range of periods, traditions, and locations, this paper argues for a new lens for understanding gender, power, and agency in Tantric ritual.

This paper aims to broaden the scope of typical discourse on “women” and Tantra, which tends to unconsciously align feminine Tantric ritual participants with modern Western constructions of the legally adult cisgender female. This construction of “women” has discursively obscured the wide range of ages and gender presentations of feminine Tantric ritual participants over time. While the academic investigation of “women” and Tantra has in recent years been shifting away from an almost laser focus on their role as sexual ritual objects for male ritual subjects, there remains a problematic focus on largely adult participants as well as a theoretical gap in understanding the many ways in which the bodies of feminine ritual participants are understood to have significant ritual power to enact effects on the world around them, including outside of explicitly constructed ritual spaces, even as the individuals inhabiting those bodies typically have comparatively little social agency.

Because the notion of agency in relation to “women” in Tantra is typically focused on social agency, it results in a thorny and unnecessarily binary formulation, particularly in texts written by and for men, where women’s voices are absent. There have been a number of useful approaches to grappling with this problem. For example, in Renowned Goddess of Desire (2007), Loriliai Biernacki instead “reads” the constructed identities of women in Tantric discourse to reveal their subjectivity rather than their agency. In her book Given to the Goddess (2014), Lucinda Ramberg challenges the binary framing of agency—that is, a woman either has agency or she doesn’t—as it can obscure the multiple complexities of women’s lived experiences. Instead she uses the framing of sexual economies to equitably compare the gifting of girls and women to the goddess and the gifting of girls to husbands. Using value rather than agency creates space for the complex ways in which women navigate difficult lives in structurally oppressive and exploitative systems, without implying they are “alienated from themselves as persons, or without agency.” (164)

Turning to material rather than social agency to theorize feminine power creates space for complexity, and exploring feminine and feminized rather than strictly female bodies demonstrates nuances through which gendered forms of material power act and move. In Tantric traditions, this kind of material agency can be seen in a wide variety of ritual contexts, but also beyond strictly contained ritual bounds. A staggering range of Kaula-oriented Tantric literature from the early Brahmayāmala to much later literature such as the Kālītantra, Gandhārvatantra, and Yoginītantra feature ritual practices engaging the material feminine body such as the ritual recognition and construction of divinity in feminine bodies both as objects of worship and ritual sexual partners; collection of reproductive fluids—particularly menstrual blood, which possesses its own material agency via its material substance together with its association with the female body—from post-menarche female ritual participants; and even the veneration of feminine bodies outside of ritual bounds. 

This study is built on the investigation of over sixty Tantric texts, largely produced by various Kaula-oriented traditions, produced over the span of a millennia—such as the Brahmayāmala, Kālikapurāṇa, Kālītantra, Gandharvatantra, Yoginītantra, and others—together with extensive ethnographic fieldwork in India and a wide variety of secondary literature. While many texts represent female ritual participants as little more than ritual tools, a broader view demonstrates a pattern of associating the feminine body with creative potency and limitless cosmic power, crystallizing in later Śākta traditions as a material understanding of feminine bodies as living representations of divine feminine power. This paper theorizes the bodies of  feminine ritual participants as Tantric bodies with material agency and material subjectivity. This approach elucidates not only Tantric traditions but also a wide variety of ritual and social phenomena in Hindu traditions, from the social exclusion of menstruating and widowed bodies, as well as the modern conservative re-storying of that exclusion, to the power of hijrā or kinnar bodies to enhance the reproductive power of cisgender female bodies. In male-centered and male-dominated religious contexts, a lens of material agency and material subjectivity also suggests theoretical implications for questions of social agency, as those who seek to wield limitless power must first develop systems to obtain, limit, and control it.

Extending my previous research on material agency in the bodies of young girls in Tantric ritual, this paper uses Tantric literature and field interviews to argue that the material agency inherent in feminine Tantric bodies reflects a power that exists prior to and beyond the scope of the role and ritual construction of the female body, as well as beyond its employment by male practitioners for the production of fluids. This constitutes a powerful new lens for theorizing and understanding feminine power not only in Hindu Tantra, but in a wide variety of Hindu religious contexts.