The Erotic Imaginary of Divine Realization

The Erotic Imaginary of Divine Realization
in Kabbalistic and Tantric Metaphysics
In this paper I consider the way in which divinity is realized through an

imaginary locus in the mystical thought of Jewish kabbalah and Hindu tantra.
It demonstrates a reflective consciousness by the adept or master in
understanding the place of God’s being, as a supernal and mundane reality.
For the comparative assessment of these two distinctive approaches I shall use
as a point of departure the interpretative strategies employed by Elliot
Wolfson in his detailed work on Jewish mysticism. He argues that there is an
androcentric bias embedded in the speculative outlook of medieval kabbalah,
as he reads the texts through a psychoanalytic lens. In a similar way, I will
argue that there is an androcentric bias to the speculations presented in
medieval Çaiva tantra, in particular that division known as the Trika. Overall,
my aim is to suggest some functional and perhaps structural similarities to the
characterization of divinity in these two traditions, through brief analyses of
the erotic understanding of the nature of the Godhead.
1. Introduction
In the Jewish view, the orthodox understanding of God is one of distant immutability and
‘unmovedness’.1 For their part, kabbalists follow this view of positing a God that is endlessly
ultimate, as a void that is beyond conception, which they call Ein Sof, and which is
apophatically dark; this means that Ein Sof is hidden from direct human perception.2 In order
to bridge the abyss or gulf between God and human beings kabbalists consequently elaborate
the idea of a dynamic realization of divinity, an immanent fullness that is conceptualizable, to
an extent at any rate. This is achieved through a manifold of potencies or powers, called
sefirot, which are the means by which the human imaginary can visualize the otherwise
concealed and transcendent God. They provide the bounded, cataphatic illumination for
espying Ein Sof.3 Realistically, they are objective aspects of God’s being, and the sefirotic
1
Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in Kabbalah, trans. Joachim
Neugroschel; ed. and rev. by Jonathan Chipman (New York: Schocken, 1991), p. 158. In what follows, unless
otherwise noted, I draw on Scholem’s entry, ‘Kabbalah’, in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan
Reference USA; Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 2007), pp. 585–677 at 622–35. From the first edition, this
was published separately as idem, Kabbalah (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1974).
2
Speaking esoterically, this darkness is equivalent to absolute light; for it is everywhere pervasive, and is not
concentrated at a point source. Nicholas of Cusa recognizes this when he says, apropos negative theology, that
God ‘is most simple and infinite light, in which darkness is infinite light’ (‘On Learned Ignorance’, in Nicholas
of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. and introd. by H. Lawrence Bond [New York; Mahwah: Paulist
Press, 1997], p. 125). He goes on to say that ‘God is unknowable either in this world or in the world to come, for
in this respect every creature is darkness, which cannot comprehend infinite light, but God is known to God
alone’ (127). This may be true in the metaphorical sense that the closed human imagination in so far as it is
opaque to divinity—the ‘sun of darkness’—casts a shadow upon the mind, but for the mystic observer whose
imagination is open and transparent to divinity—the ‘sky of light’—no shadow is cast upon the mind, and it is
possible to realize, or even recognize, the omnipresent radiance of God.
3
The sefirot are generally understood as comprising the following: ‘Keter (“crown”), the unknowable Godhead;
Ùokhmah (“wisdom”), the first stirring of creation, primal Torah; Binah (“understanding”), creation’s first
The Erotic Imaginary of Divine Realization 1

Paul C. Martin. Version 1.02, 9 August 2009
pleroma is depicted as an upside-down tree rooted in heaven and branching down into the
world, or as an anthropomorphic figure—the ‘divine (or primordial) man’, adam qadmon.4
Phenomenologically, they can be considered as qualitied projections by the kabbalistic mind.5
In that regard, these attributive forces represent ‘the imaginal topography of kabbalistic
symbolism’.6 As a whole, the sefirot constitute, or sum up, God; and, moreover, they are the
imaginary numbers with which the kabbalist computes divine consciousness.7 A debatable
issue for the authors and commentators of the kabbalah is whether God created or emanated
the divine forces, as is the ontological association of Ein Sof and Keter. The movement of the
sefirot highlights an interactive divinity—within the godhead, and between God and Earth. In
the divine realm forces can operate in union and disunion, which can be reflected at the
mundane level of existence, as man and woman operate conjunctively or disjunctively. Adam
Qadmon exhibits an androgynous, or two-faced nature (du-parñufin), which appears in
human beings as the bifurcated forms of male and female; in addition, each person also bears
a sexual bipolarity, and this drives the desire for the other, which, according to Mopsik, is no
other than a drive to the self.8 In contrast to the theism of Jewish orthodoxy, kabbalistic
theology tends to be panentheistic, or even pantheistic, in its orientation.9 There is often a
ranging across these ideas. For the kabbalists the world is real, substantial, and valuable, and
it pulsates with the life of God.10
In the general view of Hinduism the apex of divinity is known as brahman, which is
developed in the Upaniñads as the existential ground that cannot be seen, yet as the essence
of truth that can be experienced,11 and then is established in the Vedānta as nirguëa and
form; Ùesed (“benevolence”, “mercy”, “loving-kindness”), divine love; Gevurah (“might”), the strength to
control and punish; Tif’eret (“beauty”), the balance of opposites; Netzaù (“victory”), God’s loving action; Hod
(“majesty”), God’s judging action; Yesod (“foundation”), the divine principle within creation; and Malkhut
(“sovereignty”), the link between God and creation that is also called Shekhinah (“presence”)’. This is the
enumeration as given by the editors, Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, of The Jewish Study Bible, Jewish
Publication Society Tanakh Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 1978. Isaiah Tishby writes
that from the viewpoint of God, ‘there was no need to limit His attributes within the sefirot, which have, as it
were, spatial boundaries. [God] designed the system of the sefirot only that mankind might use them in order to
perceive Him’ (Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts, trans. David Goldstein [Oxford; Portland, Oregon:
The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1989], p. 268).
4
Interestingly, in Hindu thought, the divine being, Puruña, is likened to a tree: ‘This whole world is filled by
that Person, beyond whom there is nothing; beneath whom there is nothing; smaller than whom there is nothing;
larger than whom there is nothing; and who stands like a tree planted firmly in heaven’ (Çvetäçvatara Upaniñad
3.9, in Upaniñads: A New Translation by Patrick Olivelle [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], p. 257).
5
In the view of the rabbi and scholar Alexander Altmann (1906–87) the kabbalists ‘did not realize the character
of the sefirot as a projection of self, but it is nevertheless feasible for scholars to speak of the matter in these
terms’ (Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination [New
York: Fordham University Press, 2005], pp. 479–80 n. 96).
6
Ibid., p. 276. Scholem similarly refers to the sefirot as ‘provid[ing] the key for a kind of mystical topography
of the Divine realm’ (Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism [New York: Schocken, 1995], p. 13).
7
In one stream of thought, ‘the primary connotation of the term sefirot is mathematical’ (Elliot R. Wolfson,
Abraham Abulafia – Kabbalist and Prophet: Hermeneutics, Theosophy, and Theurgy, Sources and Studies in the
Literature of Jewish Mysticism 7, ed. Daniel Abrams [Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2000], pp. 134–35).
8
See Charles Mopsik, Sex of the Soul: The Vicissitudes of Sexual Difference in Kabbalah, Sources and Studies
in the Literature of Jewish Mysticism 15, ed. Daniel Abrams (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2005), pp. 31–34. For
an extensive analysis of the notion of du-parñufin see Moshe Idel, Kabbalah and Eros (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 53–103.
9
Scholem, ‘Kabbalah’, pp. 648–51; idem, Major Trends, pp. 221–25.
10
Scholem, Major Trends, pp. 208 and 230–31.
11
Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduisim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 84–85.

saguëa, i.e., without qualities and with qualities, as abstract and personal.12 The various sects
and schools of the tantras reconceive this basic notion in particular ways, but my interest here
lies in the teachings of the Çaiva tantras, namely those placed under the rubric of Kashmir
Çaivism.13 The renowned philosopher and sage Abhinavagupta (fl. ca. 975–1025) drew
together a variety of tantric teachings to codify the division known as Trika, which sees itself
as superior to other ways to God, or scriptural traditions.14 There are two important schools of
thought here, the Pratyabhijñā, or Doctrine of Recognition, and the Spanda, or Doctrine of
Vibration.15 In the Trika view, the pervasive God is the ultimate reality, referred to as
anuttara, the ‘unsurpassed’,16 or ‘that above which there is nothing’,17 which broadly
speaking corresponds to brahman of the Upaniñads.18 Anuttara appears in universal
12
Eliot Deutsch and Rohit Dalve, eds., The Essential Vedānta: A New Source Book of Advaita Vedānta
(Bloomington, Indiana: World Wisdom, 2004), p. 104. The Vedānta is a philosophical and theological tradition
(darçana) that exposits the Upaniñads, and has three main schools, viz. Advaita (‘Non-dualist’) Vedānta,
Viçiñöädvaita (‘Qualified Non-Dualist’) Vedānta, and Dvaita (‘Dualist’) Vedānta’ (see Flood, Introduction to
Hinduism, pp. 238–46).
13
Tantra, or tantrism, is an umbrella term covering the sects of Çaivism, Çäktism, and Vaiçnavism, in addition
to those of Buddhism. See N.N. Bhattacharyya, History of the Tantric Religion: An Historical, Ritualistic and
Philosophical Study, 2nd rev. ed. (New Delhi: Manohar, 1999).
14
In his grand systematization, the Tantrāloka (‘Light on the Tantras’), Abhinavagupta basically deals with the
absolute reality called Brahman (Navjivan Rastogi, Introduction to the Tantrāloka: A Study in Structure [Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 1987], p. 3). The Trika is marked by its use of metaphysical triads; e.g., the three goddesses
Parā, Parāparā, and Aparā, as well as the central doctrine of ‘Çiva, his Power (Çakti) and individualized
consciousness (naraù, aëuù)’ (Alexis Sanderson, ‘The Visualization of the Deities of the Trika’, in L’Image
Divine: Culte Et Méditation Dans L’Hindouisme, ed. André Padoux [Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique, 1990], p. 56).
15
The Doctrine of Recognition derives from a philosophical work written by Somānanda (fl. ca. 900–50),
namely the Çivadåñöi (Vision of Çiva), for which his pupil Utpaladeva (fl. ca. 925–75) provided a concise
interpretation with his own short commentary (våtti) in the Éçvarapratyabhijïäkärikä (Verses on the
Recognition of the Lord). See Rafaelle Torella, trans., The Éçvarapratyabhijïäkärikä of Utpaladeva with the
Author’s Våtti: Critical and Annotated Translation (Roma: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente,
1994), hereafter cited as ĪPK, with book, chapter, and verse, plus page number. See also the useful translation
and contemporary commentary by B.N. Pandit, Éçvara Pratyabhijñā Kārikā: Verses on the Recognition of the
Lord, ed. Lise F. Vail (New Delhi: Muktabodha Indological Research Institute, 2004). Abhinavagupta provided
an explication of this work in his Éçvarapratyabhijïävimarçiné (Critique of the Doctrine of Divine
Recognition). I have used the English translation by K.C. Pandey, Éçvara-pratyabhijïä-vimarçiné of
Abhinavagupta, Doctrine of Divine Recognition (Repr., Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986), hereafter cited as
ĪPV, with book, chapter, and verse, plus page number. The Doctrine of Vibration is traditionally considered to
be derived from a revelation given by Çiva to the siddha (master or sage) Vasugupta, who lived in the first half
of the ninth century, and who recorded it as the Çiva Sūtras (Aphorisms of Çiva). See Jaideva Singh, trans., Çiva
Sūtras: The Yoga of Supreme Identity: Text of the Sūtras and the Commentary Vimarçiné of Kñemarāja
Translated into English with Introduction, Notes, Running Exposition, Glossary and Index (Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 1979). An alternate commentary, by Bhāskara, is available in translation by Mark S.G.
Dyczkowski, The Aphorisms of Çiva: The ÇivaSütra with Bhāskara’s Commentary, the Vārttika (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1992). Vasugupta, or his disciple Kallaöa, succinctly explained this teaching in
the Spandakārikās (Concise Verses on Vibration), to which Kñemaräja (fl. ca 1000–50) wrote a commentary,
the Spanda-nirëaya (Discernment of Vibration). See Jaideva Singh, trans., Spanda-Kārikās: The Divine
Creative Pulsation: The Kārikās and the Spanda-nirëaya Translated into English (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass,
1980); also published as idem, The Yoga of Vibration and Divine Pulsation: A Translation of the Spanda
Kārikās with Kñemarāja’s Commentary, the Spanda Nirëaya (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1992). A number of other commentaries on this text are available in Mark S.G. Dyczkowski, trans. with intro.
and expos., The Stanzas on Vibration: The Spandakārikā with Four Commentaries (Varanasi, India: Dilip
Kumar Publishers, 1994; also published simultaneously by the State University of New York Press).
16
David Peter Lawrence, Rediscovering God with Transcendental Argument: A Contemporary Interpretation of
Monistic Çaiva Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 37.
17
Alexis Sanderson, ‘Çaivism and the Tantric Traditions’, in The World’s Religions, ed. Stewart Sutherland, et
al. (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 696.
18
The term anuttara is borrowed from tantric Buddhism (Dyczkowski, Stanzas on Vibration, p. 189).

manifestation as a complementary, yet opposed pair, as Çiva and Çakti, and these binary
aspects (which are effectively unitary) constitute the incipient nature of Reality.19
Manifestation is traced out through various factors, known as tattvas (principles), numbering
thirty-six, from the abstraction of Çiva through to the concreteness of Earth (påthivé).20 They
represent the unconcealment and unveiling of the Absolute, which can be understood here as
the supreme Çiva, that is, Paramaçiva.21 At every level of reality Çiva is ensconced, so what
appears as various manifestations is really one, being only an aspect of him.22 As reified and
personified, the divine duo of Çiva and Çakti is conventionally reflected at the mundane level
by the two human sexes, male and female, who also in themselves are said to embody a
polarity.23 Moreover, tantric practice aims at reassimilating, reintegrating, or reunifying the
normally dichotomized, or split, epistemological outlook that human beings hold; in other
words, overcoming the subject-object distinction, which is achieved by recognizing that one’s
own essential self (ātman) is really the same as Brahman (Ātman).24 Philosophically,
19
On the critical importance of the idea of the essential union of Çiva and Çakti, see for example the
commentarial exposition by Abhinavagupta in his Parätriàçikävivaraëa (in Jaideva Singh, A Trident of
Wisdom: Translation of the Parätriçikä-vivaraëa [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989], pp.
204–7). The Parätriçikä is a thirty-six verse chapter of the Rudrayāmala Tantra, a now lost text. N.N.
Bhattacharyya states that the idea of Çakti as being non-different from Çiva, ‘and that they present two aspects
of the same reality’, was solidly theorized in the South of India (History of the Çäkta Religion, 2nd rev. ed.
[New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1996], p. 112; cf. 122). The notion of binarity is a hallmark of
tantric thought, as the Goddess explains in the Lakñmé Tantra (43.54–59):
All objects of this world invariably conceived in pairs—such as those associated with (the
concepts of) cause and effect, with protection and that which is protected, with transparency
and opaqueness, with existence and the essence of existence, with good and bad, with
productivity and non-productivity, with quality and that which is qualified, with the container
and that which is contained, with that which is pervaded by Çakti and the possessor of Çakti,
with that which is enjoyed and the person enjoying, with man and woman, with action and its
agent, with means and ends, with the inflectional forms denoting masculine and feminine
(gender), sound and form—should be envisaged by the yogin as manifestations of Lakñmé
and Näräyaëa.
Lakñmé Tantra: A Pāñcarātra Text, trans. by Sanjukta Gupta (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2000; orig. publ.
Netherlands, 1972), p. 291. See also below, note 115.
20
Swami Lakshman Jee, Kashmir Shaivism: The Secret Supreme (Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1988), pp. 1–
10; also Jaideva Singh’s remarks in the Pratyabhijïähådayam: The Secret of Self-Recognition, 4th rev. ed.
(Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1982), pp. 6–16. The Pratyabhijïähådayam (Heart of Recognition) is a digest of
the Pratyabhijñā system that was prepared by Kñemarāja, one of Abhinavagupta’s pupils.
21
Singh explains that Paramaçiva has two aspects, viz. transcendental (viçvottérëa) and immanent or creative
(viçvamaya). The creative aspect is called Çiva tattva, and ‘is the initial creative movement (prathama spanda)
of Parama Çiva’. He goes on to say, ‘When Anuttara or The Absolute by His Svātantrya or Absolute Will feels
like letting go the Universe contained in Him, the first vibration or throb of this Will is known as Çiva’.
Intrinsically related to this creativity is the Çakti tattva, which ‘is the Energy of Çiva’ (Pratyabhijïähåydam, p.
8).
22
Utapaladeva writes: ‘But when he is completely full of the infinite series of principles dissolved in him, he is
Çiva, solely consciousness and bliss, having as his body the supreme syllable’ (ĪPK 4.1.14; p. 217). See also
below, note 41.
23
John Woodroffe notes that although the word çakti is a feminine noun, and consequently references to Çakti
are gendered female, this does not mean that she is sexed, in theory at any rate; although, inevitably the concept
is reified (Çakti and Çākta: Essays and Addresses, 3rd ed. [Madras: Ganesh & Company, 1927; repr. 2001], 18).
24
The two schools of thought, Pratyabhijñā and Spanda, conceive the notion of the self in different ways, as
Dyczkowski explains (Stanzas on Vibration, p. 38):
Although both agree that it is in fact Çiva Himself, and hence the totality of reality as pure
acting and perceiving consciousness, the Stanzas understand it in substantially ontologically
terms as the “own being” (svabhāva) of every single thing which is one’s “own own being”
(svasvabhāva), that is at once every living being’s identity as Siva and as an individual soul
(jīva). Pratyabhijñā phenomenology is concerned with the phenomenon of consciousness as
that which is directly presented (manifest appearance) and with how it is represented, that is,

Kashmir Çaivism evinces a monistic (or non-dual) outlook as the whole universe lies within
Çiva.25 While Abhinavagupta accepts that ‘the evolution of the cosmos is a real
transformation taking place within a single reality’, he nevertheless sees this transformative
process as ‘a progressive decline in level of reality from the, as it were, most real to the least
real’.26 In short, manifested phenomena are indeed real, yet ultimately they are not, in the
sense that they are but an attenuation of Çiva’s compact or dense consciousness, which is the
final unit of existence.27 The understanding of the roles played by Çiva and Çakti are
metaphysically contrastive in Çaiva and Çäkta systems: in the former, Çiva is the primary
field in which çakti is constrained, and as his evident power on display, her functioning is his
functioning; while in the latter, Çiva is considered to be thoroughly inactive without the
operational presence of çakti, whose actioning becomes prominent, to the extent that she is
even separable from or superordinate to him.28
Both kabbalah and tantra are symbolic systems, since that which is hidden or
inexpressible, respectively Ein Sof and Anuttara (Paramaçiva), is represented or signalled by
something that is known.29 The proponents of these systems considered the problem of how
determinately conceived in such a way that the specific phenomenal character of each
manifestation can be known and understood. For this to be possible, the perceiver, like the
object perceived, must be localized and finite without this affecting its transcendental
universality which includes within itself all manifestation.
The two approaches were reconciled by Abhinavagupta. See also below, note 242.
25
By contrast, the major sect of Çaivasiddhānta, which flourished in South India, espoused a dualistic outlook
(K.C. Pandey, An Outline of History of Çaiva Philosophy [Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1954; repr. 1999], pp.
15–24). On the Siddhānta see, e.g., Karen Pechilis Prentiss, ‘A Tamil Lineage for Çaiva Siddhānta Philosophy’,
History of Religions 35, no. 3 (Feb. 1996): 231–57.
26
Harvey P. Alper, ‘Çiva and the Ubiquity of Consciousness: The Spaciousness of an Artful Yogi’, Journal of
Indian Philosophy 7 (1979): 345–407 at 374. A contemporary commentator of Pratyabhijñā similarly observes
that ‘[t]he universe, which appears objectively as ‘this’, through the faculty of ideation alone, may neither be
regarded as essentially real, nor as absolutely false. It is not as real as the Ātman, nor is it as false as the son of a
barren woman. Being the reflection of the power of God, it is real in its being identical with Him. But its
phenomenal manifestation, being a creation and a notion, is not absolutely real’ (B.N. Pandit, The Mirror of
Self-Supremacy or Svätantrya-Darpaëa [New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1993], pp. 79–80). I see that
according to Abhinavagupta, who is referring to Çiva in his frightening aspect as Bhairava: ‘It has been declared
by me many a time that there cannot be any change in Bhairava who is always integral, infinite, and
autonomous, for there can never be any excess (or dimunition) in consciousness (which is Bhairava)’
(Parätriçikävivaraëa [in Singh, Trident of Wisdom], p. 120). In the context of a monistic ontology, this
undiminishment would seem to contradict Alper’s statement that Abhinavagupta saw the transformation into
reality as a progressive decline.
27
Paul Eduardo Muller-Ortega, The Triadic Heart of Çiva: Kaula Tantricism of Abhinavagupta in the Non-Dual
Shaivism of Kashmir (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 97. Alternatively, one could say
that the divine realm is amorphous compared with the solid mundane realm, in which case one can accept
Muller-Oretega’s apt allusion: ‘As the infinitely fast vibration of the anuttara systematically coalesces and
condenses into progressively slower and thicker vibrations, tangible, perceptible forms emerge from the void
and formlessness of the ultimate consciousness’ (Paul E. Muller-Ortega, ‘Becoming Bhairava: Meditative
Vision in Abhinavagupta’s Parätréçikä-laghuvåtti’, in The Roots of Tantra, ed. Katherine Anne Harper and
Robert L. Brown, [Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002], p. 218).
28
It is often said that ‘without Çakti Çiva is no better than a corpse (çava)’ (Bhattacharyya, History of the
Tantric Religion, p. 296). The extolling of Çakti that is the special characteristic of Çäkta tantras, and Çäkta
Puräëas, is no more than a valorization of the kinetic aspect of divinity over the quiescent (or potential) aspect.
29
See Scholem, Major Trends, p. 27, where he contrasts allegory and symbolism in regard to the outlook of the
kabbalah. The former is ‘the expressible representation of an expressible something by another expressible
something’, and the latter is ‘an expressible representation of something which lies beyond the sphere of
expression and communication’. Cf. the comments by Moshe Halbertal: ‘The symbol does not hide contents that
could otherwise be expressed directly through concepts, but points and directs us to what cannot be expressed

multiplicity arises from unity. For the kabbalists, it is evidently through the ten sefirot, which
unfold as manifest reality out of the nothingness of Ein Sof,30 but it is also conceived through
the operations of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. In combination, they are the
so-called thirty-two paths of wisdom, and it is said that the whole world is composed of these
sapiential pathways.31 According to the Sefer ha-Bahir (Book of Brightness), the heart of
God contains these mystical windings,32 and since lev (i.e., heart) has the same numerical
value as kavod (i.e., glory),33 it represents a feminine enlivening of divinity.34 In the
kabbalah, the heart is the locus of mystical imagination, and ‘is the throne upon which
Shekhinah dwells’.35 Equally, in tantra, when the mind is centred in the heart (hådaya) a
vision of divine consciousness is emplaced.36 Creation, then, beats in time with the presence
of God.37 Ein Sof generates creation through the sefirot, while Çiva effectuates creation
through the tattvas, and this processual expansion amounts to an emanatory creation or
creative emanation.38 Just as the sefirot are the universal chain that links heaven and earth,39
the tattvas are the bridge spanning that which is above and that which is below. In the same
way that the sefirot are not to be thought of as being separate from Ein Sof40 so the tattvas are
not to be thought of as being separate from Çiva.41 As such, God is dynamically realized as
directly’ (Concealment and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish Thought and its Philosophical Implications, trans.
Jackie Feldman [Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007], p. 57).
30
Scholem explains that while Ein Sof is an ‘inexpressible fullness’ its wilful light, Keter—the crowning
sefirah—effectively transforms it into ‘nothingness’, ayin (Major Trends, p. 217). See also Tishby’s explication
in Wisdom of the Zohar, pp. 279–81. In a sense, Ein Sof ‘disappears’ into the nothingness of Keter, yet none the
less remains. It is a homeopathic transformation.
31
This is originally set out in the Sefer Yeñirah, a proto-kabbalistic work of uncertain provenance (see the
translation by Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation, rev. ed. [Boston, MA/York Beach, ME:
Weiser Books, 1997], pp. 5–13). There is also a linguistic mysticism operating in tantra, in that the fifty letters
of the Sanskrit alphabet mark out the evolutionary reality.
32
Sections 63 and 106, in The Bahir, trans., introd. and comm. by Aryeh Kaplan (York Beach, ME: Red
Wheel/Weiser, 1979), pp. 22–23 and 40. The Bahir is considered to be the first work of the kabbalah, and was
redacted in Provence in the late twelfth century, although it is traditionally attributed to the second century
teacher Rabbi Nehunyah ben ha-Kanah. Gershom Scholem bluntly states that Kaplan’s translation ‘is worthless
and does not contribute anything to an understanding of the book’ (Origins of the Kabbalah, ed. R.J. Zwi
Werblowsky; trans. Allan Arkush [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987], p. 51 note).
33
Section 134 (in Kaplan, Bahir, p. 49). See Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, p. 171.
34
I am assuming the divine glory to be feminine, where it is conflated with the divine Presence, i.e., Shekhinah
(Joseph Abelson, The Immanence of God in Rabbinical Literature [repr., New York: Hermon Press, 1969], pp.
92–93). Shekhinah is conventionally understood as feminine in the kabbalah; however, as will be seen below, it
is Wolfson’s project to nuance this wholesale understanding.
35
Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, p. 122. This means that she is the centre of consciousness.
36
Çivasütra 1.15 (in Singh, Çiva Sūtras, p. 58; and Kñemaräja explains that in this context hådaya ‘means the
light of consciousness [cit prakaça] inasmuch as it is the foundation of the entire universe’ [p. 59]). See also the
exposition by Dyczkowski, Aphorisms of Çiva, pp. 43–46. I note that in the Jayäkhya-saàhitä (a text of the
Pāñcaratra Vaiñëava), a process of visualization is described ‘for establishing the supreme Lord within the heart
envisaged as a throne (antara-mānasa-yāga)’ (Gavin Flood, The Tantric Body: The Secret Tradition of Hindu
Religion [London: I.B. Tauris, 2006], p. 116).
37
Gershom Scholem writes that creation is ‘the pulse beat of the hidden life of the divine’ (‘Colours and Their
Symbolism in Jewish Tradition and Mysticism’, Diogenes 108 [1979], p. 100). This is also to say that he is
sustaining reality through his heart, which is his Self.
38
Epistemologically, in the Trika view, the effect is held within the cause (see the fourth chapter of book two of
Éçvarapratyabhijïäkärikä of Utpaladeva, pp. 175–88). This is comparable to the medieval philosophical
axiom which held ‘that the effect always shares a nature with its cause’ (Wolfson, Language, Being, Eros, p.
179).
39
Idel uses the term ‘sefirotic chain of being’ in Kabbalah and Eros, p. 96.
40
Scholem, On the Kabbalah, p. 35.
41
As Muller-Ortega writes, ‘The entire play of manifestation occurs safely ensconced in the bosom of the
Supreme’ (Triadic Heart of Çiva, p. 132).

being present—as it turns out, psychologically and somatically. The imagination is the
linchpin, the sure medium, for this presentation of divinity.42 In the gathering of supreme
reality, Abhinavagupta states that the ‘highest face’43 of Maheçvara (i.e., Çiva), ‘as the seed
of the universe . . . is called heart, vibration, knowledge (dåk), the highest [level of speech],
essence, nameless, wave etc.’.44 The journey to awareness of Çiva is through the divine
paradigm of Çakti, who is parāvāc, the supreme Word. This way is also Shekhinah, who is
the heart of the divine Word, the Torah.45 The goal of both kabbalistic and tantric thought is
unity with God, although it is realized differently, since Jewish thought is theistic whereas
tantric thought is monistic (in the case of non-dual Çaivism).46 Having said that, kabbalah
42
Wolfson argues that the symbolic imagination of the kabbalist is productive of divine consciousness
(Language, Eros, Being, p. 127):
As I have labored long in previous studies to articulate, kabbalists by and large presume that
images produced by the imagination are symbolic representations through which the invisible
becomes visible and the inaudible audible. The imaginal figuration of God in human
consciousness is always embodied, and consequently the content of the symbol is experienced
(and not merely described postexperientially) in terms of the body…. What is envisioned in
mystical enlightenment is experienced and interpreted in symbols drawn from our shared
phenomenological sensibilities, but what we experience in the everyday world alludes
semiotically to the imaginal world of poetic prisms.
If the sefirot are the phenomenological realizations of divinity, then so might it be said that the tattvas are
psychological categories for the realization of divinity. Here, I would note the remarks by Flood: ‘The tattvas
are not in themselves sentient but are categories that comprise the bodies and coverings of souls, and are also
levels of experience of those souls…. There are, therefore, a number of English renderings of the term tattva
whose semantic field incorporates the notions of “reality”, “essence”, “principle” and “category”’ (Tantric
Body, pp. 127–29).
43
Çiva has ‘five faces’, through which he ‘maintains the light [of consciousness]’ (see Verse 1 of the
Tantrasāra; in Alexis Sanderson, ‘A Commentary on the Opening Verses of the Tantrasāra of Abhinavagupta’,
in Sāmarasya: Studies in Indian Arts, Philosophy, and Interreligious Dialogue in Honour of Bettina Bäumer,
ed. Sadananda Das and Ernst Fürlinger [New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2005], p. 89). These faces represent Çiva’s
five powers, namely consciousness, bliss, will, cognition, and action (ibid., p. 95). The Tantrasāra is a summary
of the Tantrāloka (see Sanderson’s remarks at p. 103). The panoptical and sustaining status of the divine face is
seen in the zoharic notion of Arikh Anpin (‘long countenance’), and Ze’ir Anpin (‘short countenance’), where
the former symbolizes Keter, who is the supernal light of the godhead from which emanation begins, and the
latter all the sefirot from Ùokhmah through to Malkhut (see Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, pp. 245–46).
44
Mālinīçlokavārttika, verses 19cd–20ab (in Jürgen Hanneder, Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy of Revelation: An
Edition and Annotated Translation of Mālinīçlokavārttika I, 1–399 [Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1998], p. 61).
The ‘face’, as ‘the abode from which emission flows’ (v. 18cd) is the emanating articulation of the world. It
stands transferrably for the phallus. In the Çivadåñöivåtti, Utpaladeva writes: ‘This urge [to create] is called a
subtle swelling by Pradyumnabhaööa in his Tattvagarbhastotra and “wave”, “flow” etc. by others’ (cited by
Hanneder, Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy, p. 143). The Mālinīçlokavārttika, or Mālinīvijayavārttika, is a
commentary by Abhinavagupta on chapters 1–17 of the Mālinīvijayottaratantra (The Tantra of Victory of the
Garlanded Goddess). Sanderson argues that this text, which Abhinavagupta used as the basis for his non-dual
theology of the Trika, actually evidences a dualistic tendency (Alexis Sanderson, ‘The Doctrine of the
Mālinīvijottaratantra’, in Ritual and Speculation in Early Tantrism: Studies in Honor of André Padoux, ed. Teun
Goudriaan [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992], pp. 291–306). The title translation is provided
by Kerry Martin Skora (‘The Pulsating Heart and Its Divine Energies: Body and Touch in Abhinavagupta’s
Trika Çaivism’, Numen 54 [2007]: 420–58 at 431).
45
The author of the Bahir associates Shekhinah with Torah (Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, p. 155).
46
On the idea of unity in the godhead in kabbalah see Charles Mopsik, ‘Union and Unity in Kabbalah’, in
Between Jerusalem and Benares: Comparative Studies in Judaism and Hinduism, ed. Hananya Goodman
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 223–42, and in that of Kashmir Çaivism see Elizabeth
Chalier-Visuvalingam, ‘Union and Unity in Hindu Tantrism’, in ibid., pp. 195–222. Mopsik concludes that
comparison between the two traditions is difficult, not least because kabbalah is an historical, while tantra is an
ahistorical, realization: ‘It seems to me impossible, both in principle and in practice, to ignore or suspend the
social and anthropological differences in order to somehow set free the concepts which could be compared’
(241; see also his observation below, note 173). Conversely, Paul E. Muller-Ortega believes ‘that the tantric
map may be fruitfully employed in a great variety of comparative enterprises in the History of Religions’ (see

approaches the non-dual conception of Çaiva philosophy, in which the human soul is
absorptively identical with God.47 The soteriology is similar in respect to the need to realize
and recognize that one is integrally related to the divine, by virtue at least of being captured
by God.48 For both traditions, the world is real and worthwhile, although with some
qualifications for tantra.49
2. The Erotic Nature of Divinity
Kabbalah50
A characteristic of medieval kabbalah is that it portrays ‘religious experience in intensely

charged erotic symbolism’.51 As well, kabbalists are concerned with mapping spiritual reality
onto mundane reality, and indeed vice versa. There is a sacred union, hieros gamos, which
occurs between the sixth sefirah, Tif’eret, and the tenth sefirah, Malkhut, and which is
referred to as the joining of king and queen (malka and maöronita).52 It is an event that
his ‘Aspects of Jīvanmukti in the Tantric Çaivism of Kashmir’, in Living Liberation in Hindu Thought, ed.
Andrew O. Fort and Patricia Y. Mumme [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996], p. 207).
47
As verse 109 of the Vijñānabhairava puts it: ‘“The Supreme Lord is omniscient, omnipotent and all-
pervading; I myself am He”. By such a firm meditation one becomes Siva’ (in Vijñāna Bhairava: The Practice
of Centring Awareness, commentary by Swami Lakshman Joo [Varanasi: Indica Books, 2002], p. 130). Scholem
states that the notion of unio mystica is not generally admitted in Jewish mysticism, but rather that a sense of
distance always remains between God and human beings, even in ecstatic realization (Major Trends, pp. 55–56,
122–23). Moshe Idel argues, apropos ecstatic kabbalah, that the transformation of the human intellect into the
Active Intellect as the mode of God actually illustrates a unifying mysticism (The Mystical Experience in
Abraham Abulafia, trans. Jonathan Chipman [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988], pp. 124–34,
esp. 130–32). On this point, see also Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia, pp. 147–48. It may be argued that the Çaiva
tantras are panentheistic in orientation. Lawrence observes in regard to the transcendental and immanental
nature of God as Çiva–Çakti (i.e., Paramaçiva), espoused by Abhinavagupta and Hindu tantra generally, that
‘these systems may be placed within the class of panentheism’ (Rediscovering God, p. 169).
48
The two types of mysticism, broadly communion and union with God, may be distinguished by adopting the
chemical terms ‘adsorption’ and ‘absorption’. In the former, atoms or molecules attach themselves to the surface
layer of a solid or liquid substance, but do not penetrate or permeate it, whereas in the latter, atoms or molecules
are taken into the substance (Brian E. Bent, s.v. ‘Adsorption’, McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science &
Technology, 10th ed. [New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007], pp. 162–65).
49
In the case of tantra instances of ambivalence and disdain are not hard to find. Consider, for example, verse
102 of the Vijñānabhairava (as translated by Bettina Bäumer): ‘If one meditates on the universe as a magic
show, or as a painting, or as a moving picture, contemplating on everything in this way, one experiences bliss’
(in Vijñāna Bhairava [as in note 47], p. 122; also see v. 133, p. 157). Swami Lakshman Joo (1907–91) boldly
comments that ‘[t]his whole universe is nothing. You have to realize that this world is a magic show and is
baseless. If you meditate on this, it will end in consciousness’ (p. 158). Such a view surely derogates the moral
imperative. (Cf. below, note 213.) On the ambiguous view of the reality of the world in Kashmir Çaiva monisms
see Dyczkowski, Stanzas on Vibration, pp. 198–201. The Mālinīvijayottara describes the practice of ‘yogic
suicide’, employed by those who had reached a certain level of divine consciousness and had developed a
repulsion of the world. Abhinavagupta sought to gnosticize such an understanding by relating it to the falling
away of the limiting body-consciousness (see The Yoga of the Mālinīvijayottaratantra: Chapters 1–4, 7, 11–17,
critical edition, translation & notes by Somadeva Vasudeva [Pondicherry: Institut Français de Pondichéry; Paris:
Ecole Française d’Extrême Orient, 2004], pp. 437–45).
50
There is a degree of repetition in this sub-section, but it is useful in order to clarify the complicated ideas
proferred by Wolfson.
51
Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, p. 261. Scholem remarks on the ‘extravagant’ propensity for sexual imagery
in the classic text of the kabbalah, the Zohar (On the Mystical Shape, p. 170; also see 288 n. 52). This
extraordinary book was written in Castile in the late thirteenth century by Moses de León (ca. 1240–1305), but
is traditionally attributed to a second century Palestinian teacher and mystic Rabbi Simeon bar Yoùai. Daniel C.
Matt is currently undertaking a critical translation, The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2004–); and as at July 2009 four volumes have been published. I have consulted this edition.
52
Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, p. 72.

occurs symbolically in the Temple space, the holy of holies, which figuratively speaking
designates the vagina,53 as that ‘secret space wherein the phallic foundation is laid’.54 The
sacred union on high exemplifies an intimate consciousness of divinity,55 and is a concourse
in which human beings can participate. The knowledge of God, in other words, as it is
revealed through the sponsorship of Tif’eret, who is ‘the blessed Holy One’, can be attained
by copulation, since ‘the Hebrew word yedi‘ah can be used to denote both cognition and
conjugal intimacy’.56 As Wolfson explains, ‘[c]oitus is considered a form of imitatio dei in so
far as the unity of the divine anthropos is imaged as the coupling of masculine and
feminine’.57 For as long as Tif’eret and Malkhut are disunited, there is an imbalance, but
when brought together again by the sacramental coupling of husband and wife, Malkhut
(Shekhinah) is redeemed from her exile. This notion of exile has both a cosmic dimension, in
that it refers to the original sin of Adam, and an earthly dimension, in that the fall of
Solomon’s Temple marked the separation of God’s Shekhinah (Presence) from Israel.58 It just
illustrates the theosophical–theurgical nature of kabbalah, where mundane activity affects,
and even effects, divine activity.59 By propitiously conjoining with his wife the kabbalist as
master is exemplifying his integrity, and is a righteous man.60 The kabbalah is a secret
regime, and is characterized by a double capacity for revealing that which is hidden while at
the same time concealing it.61
There is an element of satisfaction in the emanatory creativity of the divine nature,

deriving from a mythic tradition in which God plays with his wisdom, and this betokens an
‘erotic engagement (sha‘ashu‘a) with the feminine Torah’.62 It signifies moreover an eros of
self-contemplation. Wolfson argues that kabbalistic thought, which lies within a
philosophical tradition of binary logic, where difference is innately ascribed to notions of
gender, demonstrates a ‘fearful asymmetry’ in that gender difference is elided, and realized
parochially in the godhead.63 This is to be seen as God experiences a delight with himself
before creation, which is achieved before the female ‘other’ is engendered. He asserts that the
53
Ibid., p. 134.
54
Ibid., p. 355.
55
Idel, Kabbalah and Eros, p. 138.
56
Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, p. 315; also see p. 269. It is noteworthy, comparatively speaking, that in
tantric sexual ritual (maithuna) the so-called ‘mouth of the çakti’ is the source for acquiring knowledge of
divinity, since it is the medium by which the guru conveys his teachings to his disciples (Tantrāloka 29.122–23,
in John R. Dupuche, Abhinavagupta: The Kula Ritual, As Elaborated in Chapter 29 of the Tantrāloka [Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 2003], pp. 264–65). The ‘mouth’ is a euphemism for the female sex organ (see below, note
226).
57
Language, Eros, Being, p. 312.
58
See Moshe Hallamish, Introduction to the Kabbalah, trans. Ruth Bar-Ilan and Ora Wisking-Elper (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 84. Cf. Scholem, ‘Kabbalah’, pp. 657–58; and idem, Major
Trends, p. 182. As noted above (n. 3), Shekhinah is a synonym for Malkhut.
59
Idel, Kabbalah, pp. 223–24, 231; Scholem, Major Trends, p. 233; idem, On the Mystical Shape, pp. 110–11.
There is a general division of kabbalah into two streams, namely ecstatic and theosophical-theurgical, which
was first mooted by Abraham Abulafia (1240–91). These historical categories have been expanded by Idel as
‘two phenomenological trends in Jewish mysticism more generally’, but Wolfson cautions that while this
typology is useful, ‘it is also necessary to avoid a rigid reification of these divisions’ (Abraham Abulafia, p. 3;
cf. 94–96).
60
The model here is the biblical patriarch Joseph, who maintained his sexual purity despite the sexual advances
of Potiphar’s wife (Gen. 39:7–12), and in so doing he was crowned with the rung of Holy Covenant, that is,
Yesod (Zohar 1.194b [Vol III, p. 191, and see Matt’s gloss there at note 79]).
61
Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, p. 2, and references thereto at p. 399 n. 6. He refers to this in terms of a
‘hermeneutical duplicity’.
62
Ibid., p. 274.
63
Ibid., pp. 177–89, where he elaborates on this point. He uses the term ‘fearful asymmetry’ at p. 177.

‘desire [to project] necessitates the othering of the one, a division of the male androgyne into
the masculine potency to overflow and the feminine capacity to receive’.64 This movement of
divine light is homologized with the mundane discharge of the male seed, and relates to ‘the
traditional notion of thought arising in the will of God’.65 So the initial act of creation is
tantamount to a mental copulation; however, given that the female is not yet revealed, it
becomes a singular act, and ‘assume[s] the character of masturbation’.66 This image of
sha‘ashu‘a, Wolfson remarks, can be translated by the Lacanian expression jouissance,
which refers to ‘the happiness that does not concern an other, the drive that has no other, the
surplus enjoyment that defies signification’.67 It follows that ‘jouissance is an expression of
the phallic impulse for an other that is identically different in the identity of difference, an
other that can be realized only in the fantasy-space of the (homo)erotic imagination of the
male seeking himself in the mirror of the other’.68 This act of self-contemplation is a self-
reflexive enjoyment that ‘is poetically captured in the mystical image of the uroboros, the
serpent biting its tail, consciousness contemplating the self as other in the unconscious prism
of the other as self, parting of one in unity of two’.69 The knowledge of the transcendent that
is sought by the kabbalist comes to him mediated through the prism of desire.70
On the basis of the importance of the practice of circumcision, which is mandated upon
Jewish males as a sign of the covenant between God and Israel (Gen. 17:13–14), the ninth
sefirah of the divine anthropos—who, or which, is understood as an icon of the male body—
occupies the site of the penis, and is projected as the Lacanian phallus. Indeed, for the
kabbalist, Yesod is the focus of contemplative envisioning of God.71 The phallus itself is of
an androgynous nature, and as an object of veneration it forms an ‘imaginal body’, which is
‘the incarnate form of YHWH’.72 This androgynous phallus stands metonymically for the
body,73 and is engendered as both male and female, with the shaft of the penis (yesod)
symbolizing the male component, and the corona (aöarah) symbolizing the female
component.74 Spiritual coupling is reflectively achieved by the mundane coupling, and hence
by the kabbalist erecting his intention (kawwanah) to be with God.75 By this means he
64
Ibid., p. 183. Wolfson borrows the notion of the ‘male androgyne’ from the investigations by Wendy Doniger
O’Flaherty into Hindu mythology (p. 448 n. 122).
65
Ibid., p. 184.
66
Ibid., p. 271.
67
Ibid., p. 278.
68
Ibid., p. 279.
69
Ibid. For a parallel in tantric thought see below, notes 178 and 206.
70
Ibid, p. 288.
71
See Wolfson’s discussion on this issue in Language, Eros, Being, pp. 128–41.
72
Ibid., p. 128. Wolfson notes that he has ‘discussed the symbol of the androgynous phallus in a number of
studies’ (ibid., p. 567 n. 123).
73
Ibid., p. 481 n. 117; also, p. 492 n. 39.
74
Ibid., p. 133. See also below, note 217.
75
The Zohar takes the view that the sanctifying act of sexual intercourse involves an intentional homology with
the action of the divine couple (2:11b, and Matt adduces a telling passage by the Safedian Kabbalist Moshe
Cordovero (1522–70), from his tract, Or Yaqar: ‘Their desire, both his and hers, was to unite Shekhinah. He
intended that he was in Tif’eret and his wife in Malkhut [Shekhinah], and his union was for the coupling of
Shekhinah. She intended, corresponding perfectly, that she was Shekhinah, uniting with Her Husband, Tif’eret’.
Matt notes in this regard that ‘[t]his matches the Tantric ritual of maithuna, in which the human couple focuses
on identification with their divine models’ [Vol. IV, pp. 51–52 n. 223]). An internalized parallel is given by
Abinavagupta, as he refers to the practitioner worshipping the divine couple, Çiva and Çakti, and ‘reposing in
the bliss of [their] union’ (Tantrāloka 29.50). Jayaratha glosses this çloka (in Dupuche, Abhinavagupta, p. 212):
When çakti, facing Bhairava, pours forth and when Bhairava, for his part, faces çakti: at that
point, [the practitioner] fully worships such a couple…. [He does so] by reposing in the bliss,

reconnects with the divine man; but the result of this theosophical formula is that the female
is contained in the male, is ontologically subsumed by the male. Effectively, the female is
‘restored’ to the male.76 Wolfson argues furthermore that inasmuch as the godhead,
epitomized as the ‘divine man’, shows no differentiation, it is predicated on what is in truth a
male androgyne.77 In medieval kabbalistic texts one gender is allocated, and this is the
masculine, which is composed of both male and female: ‘Once the male androgyne splinters
into binary opposition, we can speak—functionally and not ontically, correlatively and not
substantively—of two disparate genders to which fixed characteristics are attributed’.78
Wolfson does not ‘deny that gender dimorphism is a central component of the kabbalistic
perspective’, but rather, he affirms ‘that since the feminine is ontically derived from the
masculine, in the unified ground of being there can be no real difference to speak of but the
difference of indifference, wherein same and other are no longer distinguished as contrary’.79
It is the ‘difference of identity (A + B) as opposed to the identity of difference (A = B)’.80
From the standpoint of the kabbalist, ‘there is one gender with two sexuated instantiations’.81
In this process, ‘the woman is accorded a critical, albeit instrumentalist, role in [the] drama as
the vessel to receive the seminal fluid whence the new being will be engendered’.82 The
purported androgyny of the divine is actually skewed towards the male pole; indeed, Wolfson
reiterates that ‘androgyny in kabbalistic theosophy is primarily and essentially male, the
female being a secondary entity with a lower ontological and axiological status’.83 He
concludes that ‘[t]he depiction of the male containing the female is obviously an androcentric
inversion of the physiological fact that the male is contained in the female, in relation both to
his mother at birth and to his partner in the act of intercourse’.84 In general, kabbalistic ‘texts
were [not] written by women and thus they do not convey the perspective of feminine
i.e. in the amazement at one’s own self, which arises because of their union, i.e. their coming
together.
This is the touchstone for his self-awareness.
76
Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, p. 165. I have elsewhere considered more closely the role of the prismatic
imaginary in kabbalah and tantra (unpublished paper).
77
Mopsik argues to the contrary that the sefirot are androgynously feminine or masculine depending on the way
in which they receive and transmit the divine influx (Sex of the Soul, pp. 25–27). Wolfson notes and responds to
this viewpoint (Language, Eros, Being, pp. 447–48 n. 122). Be that as it may, Mopsik interestingly suggests that
‘[t]he masculine/feminine difference is a question of rhythm’ (ibid., 26). In a way, the same idea might be
applied to Çiva and Çakti, taking Çiva as a periodic wave of the form y=cos x, and Çakti as a periodic wave of
the form y=sin x, who are in quadrature phase and mutually orthogonal; in other words, the phase angle between
these two is 90 degrees, which indicates their polarity. At an earthly level, one might say that the feminine and
masculine are parametrized by wavelike behaviour, as the functions of sine and cosine; from a mathematical
point of view, the male and female are alternating together through space and time. This is in accord with
Irigaray’s assertion that sexual difference is based on an ontological rather than biological reckoning,
specifically that there are different rhythms of perceptual and passionate being in men and women (see Alison
Stone, ‘The Sex of Nature: A Reinterpretation of Irigaray’s Metaphysics and Political Thought’, Hypatia 18, no.
3 [Fall 2003]: 60–84).
78
79
Ibid., p. 465 n. 327.
80
Ibid., p. 104.
81
Ibid., p. 146.
82
Ibid., pp. 148–49. Wolfson observes that she constitutes the ‘body of engenderment’, which is a term
employed by Mopsik to describe the imbricated cultural and religious factors that serve to frame the body (see
Sex of the Soul, pp. 53–74); also idem, ‘The Body of Engenderment in the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbinic Tradition
and the Kabbalah’, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One, ed. Michel Feher with Ramona
Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York, N.Y.: Zone Books, 1989), pp. 48–73.
83
Language, Eros, Being, p. 176; cf. 289–90.
84
Ibid., p. 188.

experience’, and moreover they do not ‘challenge the dominant patriarchy of rabbinic
culture’.85
The act of conjugality on the eve of Sabbath (Friday night), whereupon the kabbalist
inseminates his wife, corresponds analogically to the impregnation enacted by Tif’eret upon
Malkhut (via the agency of Yesod).86 In the ceremonial symbolism that is given here,
Shekhinah, modelled as feminine, appears as a bride who comes to the master and crowns
him as the bridegroom.87 This then suggests a heterosexual dynamic.88 However, Wolfson
argues that it actually involves a homoerotic dynamic, on the basis that the crown refers to
the corona of the circumcised penis, and so by ‘crowning’ him, Shekhinah is sacralizing the
kabbalist as the mundane analogue of Tif’eret.89 In short, ‘to be crowned’ means to have
sexual intercourse, or its culminating union,90 and the ‘peak mystical experience is to be
understood in symbolic terms as cleaving to the corona of the male organ’.91 The seeming
heterosexuality betrays a homoerotic orientation, ‘for if the other is naught but a
manifestation of the same, love of other is in truth an expression of love for the same’.92 This
implies that ‘[t]he ontological problem of the feminine is resolved by locating the ultimate
source for the female other in the phallic potency itself’.93 As the female is ontically restored
to the male androgyne, it indicates a ‘transmutation of the signified into the signifier’.94
Consequently, the female is ‘transvalued’, both at the mundane and supernal levels, and this
is achieved because she is rendered ontically as the corona of the phallus. It all serves to
typify a ‘destabilization’ of the gender boundaries.95 Another image of the transformative
process involves the rainbow, which is biblically a metaphor for the covenant between God
85
Ibid., p. 87.
86
Ibid., pp. 314–20. That the phallic Yesod is agentive implies that the male phallus is agentive. Rab Judah
remarks that ‘[t]here can be no compulsion in sexual intercourse since erection depends entirely on the will!’
(Yevamot 53b, in The Babylonian Talmud. Seder Nashim, ed. I. Epstein, Vol. 1 [London: Soncino, 1936], p.
356).
87
The kabbalists are known as the masters of the covenant, for they are the ones who may partner the Bride,
Shekhinah, and so are fit to practise the secret kabbalah (see Zohar 1:8a, with Matt’s gloss at Vol. I, p. 53 n.
382). In a similar fashion the tantric adept (siddha) sees Çakti as his bride. Swami Lakshman Joo likens
harmonizing with the divine breath (präëaçakti) to being ‘married to the supreme Energy of Lord Çiva’
(Vijñāna Bhairava, v. 155, pp. 179–80). See also below, note 122.
88
Shekhinah is identified ‘with the Queen of the Sabbath, and therefore with every Jewish housewife who
celebrates the Sabbath’ (Scholem, On the Kabbalah, 140–1). As a matter of course, in the Çäkta Tantra
perspective, ‘[a]ll women symbolise Çakti’ (Bhattacharyya, History of Tantric Religion, p. 297).
Philosophically, it may be questioned what this symbolism means in regard to the (tantric) definition of female
and woman. If a woman is defined in terms of her having a womb, and as capable of giving birth, what does that
mean for a woman who cannot conceive, or who has had a hysterectomy (without having children). Does it
mean she does not embody, or stops embodying, Çakti? What of transgender or transsexual women, or those
born with ambiguous genitalia? If Çakti is a supernatural force, it is also surely a culturally and socially bound
force.
89
See Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish
Mysticism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 357–68; idem, ‘Coronation of the Sabbath
Bride: Kabbalistic Myth and the Ritual of Androgygnisation’, Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 6
(1997): 301–43; idem, Language, Eros, Being, p. 376, 389.
90
Wolfson, ‘Coronation’, p. 332 n. 82.
91
92
I have mislaid the citation for this sentence.
93
94
Ibid., p. 186; cf. 128.
95
See Elliot R. Wolfson, Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1995), pp. 80–110.

and Israel.96 It is a symbol of God’s redemptive presence, Shekhinah, who is the Angel of
Covenant—the angel, that is, of Yesod, who is known as Covenant.97 In the kabbalah, this
return from the exiled state is portrayed in nuptial terms; and so she is characterized as
‘shin[ing] in bright colors like a bride adorned before the bridegroom’.98 Reading this
connubial allusion semiotically, Wolfson argues that Shekhinah is not ‘an autonomous female
persona but [is] the diadem that encircles the head of the male’.99 Since women have no penis
they can only participate in kabbalistic praxis by virtue of being the revealed object of the
male gaze. The male, in spectating the female, via a phallomorphic gaze, projects his phallic
desire on to the other, and his look ‘transforms the feminine to the point that she is
reincorporated into the phallus in the form of the corona’.100 The wreathing upliftment of
Shekhinah signifies her gender transposition.101 Essentially then, the herald of divine glory
that is symbolized by the rainbow ‘signifies the restoration of the female to the male in the
form of the corona of the phallus’.102 The return to the cleft of Shekhinah is a perfect union
for the kabbalist, an endearment he earnestly cultivates.103
In the usual understanding, the kabbalist engages with divinity in a heterosexual dynamic
as he lies in relation to the feminine Malkhut (Shekhinah), who herself lies in relation to the
masculine Tif’eret.104 However, Wolfson argues for a more nuanced approach. So, although
the divinizing erotic relationship is heterosexually gendered, owing to the reputedly feminine
Shekhinah over against the male kabbalist, it is also indicative of a homoerotic bond. In the
adamic state, the kabbalist penetratingly looks upon the face of Shekhinah, but to do so is
only to adore the sign of the covenant, which is the crowning object of vision.105 By dint of
his elevated position, he sees the corona as the bright countenance of God. From a
metaphorical angle, the kabbalist comes to know God (Tif’eret) through a mystical eclipse, as
96
According to the Bible God established a rainbow in the sky after the floodwaters had ceased, and promised it
to Noah as a continuing sign that he would not again bring destruction on the earth in this way whenever rain
clouds gathered (Gen. 9:12–16).
97
Zohar 1:102b (and see Matt’s gloss on this at Vol. II, p. 129 n. 102). Elsewhere, Shekhinah is referred to as
‘mystery of covenant’ (1:200b), and Matt glosses that this is ‘a designation usually applied to Her partner, Yesod
(the divine phallus and site of the covenant of circumcision)’ (Vol. III, p. 229 n. 307).
98
99
Ibid., p. 375.
100
Ibid., p. 378.
101
As Wolfson writes: ‘The adornment of the rainbow as bride, which heralds the coming of messianic
redemption, denotes the initial gesture that will culminate in the uplifting of Shekhinah, which signifies her
gender transposition’ (Language, 378–79). See also his ‘Coronation of the Sabbath Bride’, pp. 337–39.
102
103
According to the Zohar: ‘When a soul is perfected in this world, when it ascends to that place to which is
linked—then [it is] complete on all sides, from below and from above’ (1.235a; and Matt glosses here that this
‘refers to the soul’s return to Shekhinah upon death, but it may also allude to the possibility of union during
one’s life’ [Vol. III, p. 425 n. 601]).
104
In this manner, Tif’eret is wielding his royal authority, and extending his ‘scepter of love’ to Shekhinah (on
these allusions see respectively Zohar 2:23a and 2:46a; in the former, it is said that Jacob, who symbolizes
Tif’eret, intimately relates to Shekhinah, although ‘he did not succeed in wielding it like Moses’, and Matt
glosses that ‘“in wielding” renders ‫( לאשתמשא‬le-ishtammasha), “to use, perform”, and (based on rabbinic
idiomatic usage) “to have sexual relations”’ [vol. IV, p. 78 n. 29]; in the latter, Matt glosses that the ‘“scepter of
‫( חסד‬ùesed), love” apparently symbolizes Yesod, who conveys the emanation from Ùesed to Shekhinah, and
through Her to those who engaged in Torah from midnight’ [Vol. IV, p. 217 n. 61]).
105
Language, Eros, Being, p. 137. Elsewhere, Wolfson explains that ‘[b]eholding the face of the Shekhinah
becomes in the Zohar an actual embrace or penetration of the mystic into the divine feminine’ (Circle in the
Square, p. 30). It is notable that in the phallomorphic ocularcentrism of various Jewish mystical traditions ‘the
eye itself corresponds to (or substitutes for) the penis’ (Wolfson, Through a Speculum, p. 5; cf. 93 n. 85).

he stands in the umbra of Shekhinah’s shadow.106 Put another way, the kabbalist is
‘coronified’ by his joining with Shekhinah, for at that moment he is facing the sun of Yesod,
and taking up his phallic shield.107 Shekhinah is ‘constructed as masculine’ in the sense that
in abiding with those who study Torah she is referred to as Kenesset Yisra’el, ‘Community of
Israel’, which is just made up of the kabbalistic fraternity; moreover, the ‘face’ of Shekhinah
is taken on by the assembly of exegetes, as is her voice.108 Heterosexual language such as
speaking of king and queen is used to describe an actually ‘homoerotic relationship between
God and kabbalist’.109 Wolfson concludes that nominally heterosexual images ‘must be
decoded as a veiled allusion to the homoerotic bond between the male mystic and the
reconstituted male androgyne in the divine realm’, and as such it shows the ‘phallo-
narcissistic vision that has informed kabbalistic ontology apparently from its inception’.110
The somatic reflection by the human form of the divine anthropos, which is the ‘imaginal
shape of God’, and which indicates the reunification of Tif’eret and Malkhut, following the
split of God’s unity by the act of creation, is effected by a man’s ‘knowing’ a woman, namely
his wife, but it is also indicated by the kabbalist’s devoting himself to studying Torah, for
gazing at the latter is akin to gazing at one’s beloved.111 As a ‘cleaving to the supernal . . . [it]
is depicted as an augmented luminosity of the face and as being garbed in the Holy Spirit’;
and hence the soul is lit by the streaming rays of Shekhinah.112 For the kabbalist, the lustrous
knowledge of God is recognized through the argent fire of divine consciousness.113
106
According to the Zohar, the sun symbolizes Tif’eret, and the moon symbolizes Shekhinah (Vol. IV, p. 5 n.
20). When the divine couple pass into each other, as the kabbalist and his wife come together, the master in his
oblique reductive (and reflective) mode is able to glimpse his God (Tif’eret). Astronomically, in a total eclipse,
when the moon occults the sun’s disk, the outer solar atmosphere, or corona, is seen as a crown of fiery light:
the sun is hidden, but it is revealed to human eyes in its peripheral glory. On the various astronomical features of
the sun’s corona see Jay M. Pasachoff, ‘Solar Eclipses as an Astrophysical Laboratory’, Nature 459 (11 June
2009), pp. 789–95.
107
The Zohar exegetes some biblical passages: ‘Rabbi Abba said, “What is meant by facing the sun [Numbers
25:4]? Facing the covenant, called sun. Concerning this is said: For YHVH of Hosts is sun and shield (Psalms
84:12)—sun and shield is holy covenant. Just as the sun shines and illumines the world, so holy covenant shines
and illumines the human body’ (2:3b; and see Matt’s gloss at Vol. IV, pp. 10–11 n. 41).
108
Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, pp. 329–30; cf. 355. According to Ezra of Gerona (d. 1238 or 1245), the
kabbalists generally as a group receives the presence, which alludes to the rabbinic idiom: ‘to receive the face of
the presence’ (ibid., pp. 388–89).
109
Ibid., p. 331.
110
Ibid., pp. 366–67.
111
Ibid., p. 275, 312.
112
Ibid., p. 253. Wolfson actually writes here in reference to Nahmanides’ understanding that eating the manna
of heaven is ‘an act that occasions (concretely and not figuratively) the unitive experience of the soul and the
light that streams from Shekhinah’.
113
Rabbi Hiyya proclaims in a vision of Ezekiel: ‘From my Lord’s luster the field glows!’ (Zohar 1:151a; and
Matt glosses that the translation of ‫( קסטוטירא‬Qastutira) as lustre apparently derives from the Aramaic ‫קסטרא‬
(qasitra) and the Greek kassiteros, ‘tin’ [vol. II, p. 343 n. 195]). Also compare the proclamation of Rabbi Yeisa:
‘I have heard that whoever sees Jacob in a dream, scintillating in silver, will be granted prolonged life’ (Zohar
1:168a; and Matt glosses that the translation of ‘scintillating in silver’ is a rendering of ‘‫( בקוספוי מקסטר‬meqaster
be-quspoi), a neologistic phrase incorporating the Zohar’s favourite letters: ‫ר‬, ‫ק‬, ‫פ‬, ‫ס‬, ‫ט‬. The first word may
derive from Aramaic ‫( קסטרא‬qasitra) and Greek kassiteros, “tin”…. The second word is perhaps an intentional
misspelling of Aramiac ‫( כספא‬kaspa), “silver”’ [Vol. III, p. 17 n. 121]). The sefirah known as Ùesed is
symbolized by silver (vol. IV, p. 86 n. 59), and is also identified as the first light of creation, which is
overwhelmingly brilliant (Zohar 1:31b; and Matt’s gloss at Vol. I, p. 192 n. 687).

Tantra
There is, in the Trika an impetus to eroticism, and indeed it ‘is thoroughly permeated with
sexual symbolism’.114 The cosmic union of Çiva and Çakti, which is the polarizing
conjunction of the pure light of consciousness (prakaça), and its own self-awareness
(vimarça), is directly reflected at the mundane level in the joining of male and female.115 At
the highest creative level Çiva is inseparably united with his çakti, as he proceeds to utter the
emanation of the universe.116 Çakti is said to rest, or repose (viçränti), in Çiva, who qualifies
as an effortless act of retirement.117 This means that divinity is fundamentally known as the
synthesis of Çiva and Çakti.118 The yogin recognizes his substantial affinity with Çiva
through knowing a woman—his consorting partner (dūtī)—and exercising his emissive
power (visargaçakti), hence he is a creator, an expounder of life.119 In cosmic terms, Çiva
wilfully manifests himself, and in so doing he expresses his freedom, his sovereign power in
the act of emission (visarga).120 Although Çiva is considered to be inert he is none the less
able to execute the process of reality, and to remain unaffected by that service.121 His
generativity is phenomenal, and it is a spontaneous flash of light, an ‘efflorescence’ or
114
André Padoux, Vāc, the Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1990), p. 263. For a detailed examination of the erotic nature of divine consciousness as it is
realized in the Trika Çaivism of Abhinavagupta, see Kerry Martin Skora, ‘Consciousness of Consciousness:
Reflexive Awareness in the Trika Çaivism of Abhinavagupta’ (PhD Thesis, Department of Religious Studies,
University of Virginia, 2001).
115
Skora, ‘Consciousness of Consciousness’, pp. 281–82. As he points out, there is a raft of polarities associated
with the fundamental polarity of Çiva and Çakti: ‘male practitioner and female partner; penis (liìga) and vulva
(yoni, kuëòa); outward and inward notions of lovemaking; male and female sexual emissions (or white semen
(çukra, retas, bindu) and red blood (rakta, çonita)); white yogic drop and red yogic drop; emergent (udita) and
quiescent (çänta) aspects of universe and of consciousness; bindu and visarga as visual representations, or the
two dots of the visarga; phoneme A and phoneme H as sounds; and right and left yogic energy channels
(näòis)’ (ibid.).
116
As Abhinavagupta writes in the Parätriàçikävivaraëa (in Singh, Trident of Wisdom, p. 42):
Çiva intent on creativity in the form of expansion by means of the energy of the great mantra
of the Supreme primal word, viz. the perfect I, in union with Çakti, in whom the urge for
expansion is implicit, and in whom abounds the bloom of the compactness of their energy,
becomes engaged in the act of creative expansion.
He writes elsewhere that ‘[t]he Lord (always coupled with His emanatory Energy) emanates the universe’ (ibid.,
p. 174).
117
Dupuche, Abhinavagupta, p. 39. The tantric practitioner (sādhaka) aims at achieving the state of equilibrium
in blissful meditative absorption, in the heart of consciousness (Muller-Ortega, Triadic Heart, pp. 137–38).
118
It is the name of God (Paramaçiva). In his commentary to the Tantrāloka, Jayaratha (fl. ca. 1125–1175)
explains that ‘[k]nowledge, according to the Kula tradition, consists of the perfect fusion of Çiva and çakti’
(Dupuche, Abhinavagupta, p. 184). The known God in kabbalah is designated as the essential union of Tif’eret
and Shekhinah, and is a composite of the two divine names, ‫( יהוה‬YHVH) and ‫( האלהים‬ha-Elohim) (1:91a; and
Matt’s gloss at Vol. II, p. 73 n. 564).
119
On the nature of the visarga (emission) see Muller-Ortega, Triadic Heart, pp. 124–41; and Padoux, Vāc, pp.
277–86.
120
As Utpaladeva glosses: ‘The knowing subject, that is essentially consciousness, having infinite power, the
Lord, by means of his volition makes those entities manifest in this way. And it is precisely in this power of
volition (icchäçaktiù) that his activity, that is, his being creator, consists’ (ĪPKV 2.4.1, p. 175). By comparison,
Scholem adduces Cordovero who understood that the decision of Ein Sof to appear in manifestation ‘is a free
decision which remains a constant and impenetrable mystery’ (‘Kabbalah’, p. 625).
121
Çiva is not actually completely still, for all the while he experiences a subtle resonance (nāda). An analogy
from subatomic physics would be that if the ordinary state of atomic motion in matter represents çakti, then the
quantum state of matter as it is cooled to near absolute zero, when ‘virtual’ fluctuations of energy occur, is akin
to Çiva.

‘upsurge’ of consciousness that irradiates the universe.122 The power of emission is a
throbbing consciousness, an agitative vibration (spanda), and a palpitating radiance
(sphurattā), which is the heart of Çiva.123 This process of divine realization, as an explication
into reality, merely shows that Çiva is engaging in an act of self-recognition, and that it is
therefore a self-reflexive, or self-reflecting act of cognition.124 Now the Çaiva adept, who
identifies with Çiva, consequently has the same understanding as he recollects his self-same
god-nature. Carnal knowledge is the way to God, and to recognize the collocated nature of
divinity entails the eradication of ignorance; in short, this realization gives an understanding
that one is harmonized with Çiva. As Abhinavagupta explains: ‘The act of bringing about
recognition of the Lord, is not the act of [a] causal agent, nor that of one who makes things
known. It is simply the removal of the ignorance’.125 This active recognition of unifying I-
consciousness shows ‘the state of anuttara, [and is] the very heart of the universe’, he
declares in the Parätriàçikävivaraëa.126 Accordingly, the lack of ‘recognitive judgement’
means to be in exile from God, i.e. Paramaçiva.127 The standard motif of tantra is that as a
graphic effulgence of divine realization it is a secret gnosis.128
For the exponents of tantra, the universal reality is understood to be composed of the
thirty-six tattvas, which unfold as manifest reality out of the absolute fullness (void) of
Paramaçiva.129 In this manner, Çiva is deploying his unbridled power, his svātantrya çakti,
122
Çivasütra 1.5 and comm. (in Singh, Çiva Sūtras, pp. 29–30; also Dyczkowski, Aphorisms of Çiva, p. 22). The
highest level of spiritual practice, or çämbhavopäya, follows this pattern of resounding assimilation in
Bhairava. It is the quickest route to divine consciousness, which is achieved without recourse to meditating or
reciting Mantra, and which only ‘[c]ertain individuals are fit to practise’ (see the anonymous commentator’s
remarks to this sūtra, and Dyczkowski’s exposition at ibid., pp. 22–23).
123
See Padoux, Vāc, p. 290. Muller-Ortega writes of the heart-machine: ‘The perpetual effervescence,
ebullition, and incandescence at the center of Çiva’s being provides the motor, as it were, that drives the entire
process of manifestation; or, as Abhinavagupta terms it, of emission of the entire universe’ (Triadic Heart, p.
83).
124
See Lawrence, Rediscovering God, p. 20, 85, 95. See also Navjivan Rastogi, ‘Recognition in the Pratyabhijñā
School’, Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 58–59 (1977–78): 41–61.
125
ĪPV 1.1.2, p. 13.
126
Singh, Trident of Wisdom, p. 211. On the central place of the heart in Abhinavagupta’s extensive works see
Muller-Ortega, Triadic Heart of Çiva (as cited in note 27).
127
On the term ‘recognitive judgement’ (and ‘recognitive apprehension’), see David Peter Lawrence, The
Teachings of the Odd-Eyed One: A Study and Translation of the Virüpäkñapaïcäçikä with the Commentary of
Vidyācakravartin (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), p. 137 n. 42.
128
This undoubtedly is the case with the original forms of tantric praxis (see David Gordon White, ‘Tantric
Sects and Tantric Sex: The Flow of Secret Tantric Gnosis’, in Rending the Veil: Concealment and Secrecy in the
History of Religions, ed. Elliot R. Wolfson (New York: Seven Bridges Press, 1999), pp. 249–70. In his recent
work, Kiss of the Yoginī: “Tantric Sex” in its South Asian Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003), he expatiates on the specific approach of the Kaula, a heavily ritualized and sexualized tantric
orientation. He argue that the tantric tradition has undergone an historical development involving an
aestheticization, an internalization, and a semanticization, resulting in an apparent subordination of the feminine
(pp. 7–17, 219–257). He explains that while early practices involved virile male practitioners who were
‘heroically’ intent on controlling female divinities (yoginīs) and attaining supernatural abilities through the
means of arcane sexual rituals, including the consumption of sexual fluids, a subsequent (tenth century onwards)
tradition of commentary sought aesthetically to transform these sexual practices for an audience of high-caste
Kashmiri householders and Smārta Brahmins in Tamil Nadu. This ‘high Hindu’ tantric mysticism, so called, has
so far been studied only cursorily by Western scholars, according to White, and represents ‘a secondary
development, a hermeneutical transformation of an earlier body of practice into a mystical metaphysics, which
often systematically distorts the meaning of the original practice itself’ (16).
129
Paramaçiva has been reckoned as the thirty-seventh tattva, and as the ‘transcendent absolute’ (Padoux, Vāc,
p. 81 n. 140; also see p. 91). Bettina Bäumer states that ‘the thirty-seventh level is anuttara, the
“unsurpassable”’ (‘The Lord of the Heart: Abhinavagupta’s Aesthetics and Kashmir Çaivism’, Religion and the
Arts 12 [2008]: 214–29 at 216). He (or It) is the beyond of the beyond, which makes Çiva as the thirty-sixth

which is responsible for differentiating his mass of light-consciousness into the (discrete)
objects of manifestation.130 The godhead is dynamized by the productive energy of çakti (i.e.,
kriyäçakti), which revelates Çiva into manifestation as the intelligible reality. The velocity of
convergence of Çiva and Çakti makes a frictional union, a ‘banging together’ (saàghaööa).131
Çiva takes joy in the contemplation of reality, as he savours the bliss of his creative
emanation.132 Abhinavagupta explains in the Parätriàçikävivaraëa that the highest reality,
Bhairava, ‘who is beyond all appellation or description, whose essence is supreme
amazement of beatitude’, brings himself into view by virtue of his excellent power, his çakti,
which he possesses.133 In this event, Çakti is the musing object of Çiva’s desire to expand
himself into manifestation, and as such she is the delightful play (līlā) of his consciousness in
phenomenal reality.134 Creative emanation occurs as the mantric knowledge classified by
Çiva penetrates the circle of Çakti, and the ‘many light-drops of great splendour’ are
‘churned’ in her womb.135 There is a homology between the supernal act and the mundane
tattva the initial (spiritualizing) visibilizing factor of that beyond beyond. The appeal to a supernumerary is also
seen in kabbalah, in a thirteenth century kabbalistic tract, Sefer ha-Temunah, which postulates that the original
divine alphabet had 23 letters, one of which is invisible in this aeon (Scholem, Major Trends, p. 179; idem, On
the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1996 [1965]), p. 81).
130
As Abhinavagupta explains: ‘This activity of manifesting [objects] is called “power of action” in the Çästras.
It is responsible for the self-differentiation (kalanā) [of light] into various tattvas etc. How could this
manifestation possibly take place in something unmanifested (anavabhāte)? Therefore the inner appearance of it
is the “power of knowledge”, which is called “I”’ (Mālinīçlokavārttika, verses 90–91 [in Jürgen Hanneder,
Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy], p. 73; the bracketed interpolations in the translation are by Hanneder).
131
Skora explains that the term saàghaööa literally means ‘rubbing or clashing together’, ‘friction’, ‘collision’,
or ‘union’, but he employs the translation ‘banging together’ in order, he says, ‘to emphasize the sexual
connotations of the terms: with each usage of the term [Abhinavagupta] wants to evoke the image of sexual
intercourse’ (‘Consciousness of Consciousness’, p. 68). He asserts in this respect that ‘[t]here is no such thing
for [Abhinavagupta] as a merely cognitive experience of God’ (72).
132
As Abhinavagupta puts it in the Mālinīçlokavārttika (vv. 42–44):
As soon as Bhairava who is knowledge becomes entirely identified with the flood of waves of
objects (tat), but [remains] beautified by universal bliss, [when he] as the proprietor of his
power is satisfied with no less than the plenitude of things, when this state of having a power
is subordinated by means of his full, own power alone, then such a stream of knowledge
consisting of articulation (vimarça), in which an extraordinary bliss (hläda) appears through
instruction in enjoyment (bhoga), pervades [everything]. (In Hanneder, Abhinavagupta’s
Philosophy p. 67.)
See Hanneder’s pertinent commentary at p. 152.
133
In Singh, Trident of Wisdom, p. 164. Çiva is known as Çaktimän, that is, ‘possessor of çakti’, and therefore
she bears his attributes (Vijñānabhairava, v. 18; in Jaideva Singh, trans., The Yoga of Delight, Wonder, and
Astonishment [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991], p. 16). Dupuche explains that ‘[t]he term
çaktimän, means, literally, “the person (masculine gender) who possesses energy”’ (Abhinavagupta, p. 37). In a
similar vein, Shekhinah is ‘owned’ by Tif’eret, and is the final outcome of divine realization. Cordovero refers
to the union of Tif’eret and Malkut by the locution of ‘the Holy One, blessed be He, and His Shekhinah’ (Ira
Robinson, trans., Moses Cordovero’s Introduction to Kabbalah: An Annotated Translation of His Or Ne’erav
[New York: The Michael Scharf Publication Trust of the Yeshiva University Press, 1994], p. 42). This is
equivalent to saying ‘the Great Lord (Maheçvara) and his çakti’, for both—Shekhinah and Çakti—are merely
inherent aspects of the male God.
134
Verse 1 of Vijñānabhairava (in Singh, Yoga of Delight, p. 1). This performative interpretation is
acknowledged by the tantric master, for as Vasugupta (or Kallaöa) puts it, the one ‘who has this realization (viz.
identity of his Self with the whole universe), being constantly united with the Divine, views the entire world as
the play (of the Self identical with Çiva), and is liberated while alive’ (Spanda Kārikā 2.5; in Singh, Yoga of
Vibration, p. 119). The Vijñānabhairava is a basic ‘āgama’, or revealed text, of Kashmir Çaivism.
135
Kñemaräja is here adducing a passage from the Tantrasadbhāva, in the context of his commentary to
Çivasütra 2.3 (in Singh, Çiva Sūtras, pp. 91–92). Singh translates this sūtra as, ‘The luminous being of the
perfect I-consciousness inherent in the multitude of words whose essence consists in the knowledge of the
highest non-dualism is the secret of mantra’ (in ibid., p. 88). For a corresponding notion in kabbalah see below,
note 173.

emission of semen.136 The male adept is the one who can fully identify with God, i.e., Çiva,137
since he envisages himself as emanating the seed that leads to new life, and as being the
possessor of çakti (that emanatory power), whereas the female yogin (yoginī) is the one who
is possessed, the actuating mechanism.138 The male practitioner (sādhaka) moreover
participates in the cosmic delight when he recognizes the undivided consciousness of
Maheçvara (i.e., Çiva) the fusion of ‘I’ and ‘this’ (aham idam).139 The soteriological goal of
divine recognition for the male practitioner just means that he is able to acknowledge himself
as the all (sarva); and, moreover, as the instantiation of divinity, he can truly announce that ‘I
am Çiva’.140 It is said that for the yogin the blissful state of awareness is characterized as one
of wondrous joy (vismaya) at the expansion of his complex of senses.141 That the universe
appears diverse, or manifold, is due to the tattva of māyā, which is the innate power of Çiva,
and which allows him to represent himself as plural while hiding his real nature as unity.
Māyā is described as ‘the receptacle of the universe’ (jagato nidhiù),142 since she is the form
in which the divine light of consciousness is conceived.
It is arguable that there is (often enough) a defective understanding of the feminine

evidenced in the tantras.143 A central aspect of maithuna (sexual ritual) involves the use of
sexo-yogic postures designed to arouse the kuëòaliné, which is the contracted form of çakti,
and which is usually depicted as a coiled snake lying dormant at the base of the spine in the
so-called etheric, or subtle, body. As kuëòaliné-çakti stirs and metaphorically slithers up the
spinal canal vitalizing the various cakras (wheels of energy), she enables the realization of
divine consciousness.144 Accounts of this procedure are generally written from a male point
136
Muller-Ortega cautions that although Abhinavagupta’s use of the term visarga may allow it to be translated
as ‘ejaculation’ simply in relation to sexual orgasm, to do so elides the cosmic meaning (Triadic Heart, p. 127).
137
When the yogin achieves transcendental consciousness he ‘becomes like Çiva’ (Çivasütra 3.25 [in Singh,
Çiva Sūtras, p. 185]). Kñemaräja glosses that ‘So long as the body-aspect does not vanish, he is like Çiva.
When the body perishes, he is veritable Çiva’ (p. 186).
138
Lawrence, Rediscovering God, pp. 53–54. The male is the agitator and the female is that which is agitated.
Abhinavagupta writes: ‘Being a seed [seminality] is being an agitator; being a yoni [matrix] is being a bearer of
agitation. Consciousness has the form of an agitator; it is agitated and it also agitates. Agitation would be the
inherent [intrinsic] nature of knowable objects; the process of agitating is the removal [extrincization/extracting]
of that [inherent/intrinsic nature]’ (Tantrāloka 3.82a–83a [in Skora, ‘Consciousness of Consciousness’, p. 132;
the bracketed interpolations are his]).
139
See ĪPK 4.1.1, p. 210. Utpala opines here that ‘[t]he one, full of the “savouring” (camatkāra) of the
undivided perceiving subject, of the undivided perceptible object and of the fusion of the two, in the fourth state
which is to be sought first, the Self common to all living things, whose form is all, is Maheçvara’. In the School
of Pratyabhijñā, the term camatkāra is an important keyword, implying as it does the astounding sense of divine
consciousness (see Torella, Éçvarapratyabhijïäkärikä, pp. 118–19 n. 23).
140
David Peter Lawrence, ‘Remarks on Abhinavagupta's Use of the Analogy of Reflection’, Journal of Indian
Philosophy 33 (2005): 583–99 at 588.
141
Çivasütra 1.12 (in Singh, Çiva Sūtras, pp. 51–52). It is, if I might appropriate a remark by Torella in a
different context, the ‘juice’ of conscious dynamism (in Éçvarapratyabhijïäkärikä, p. 185 n. 2). Consequently,
for the yogin who is delighting in his awareness of divinity, he is metaphorically being squeezed by God; and
the orange soul releases a flowing consciousness.
142
Mālinīvijayottaratantra 1.26, cited by Sanderson, ‘Doctrines of the Mālinīvijayottaratantra’, p. 301.
143
As Loriliai Biernacki points out though, it is unwise to treat tantra as a monolithic category, and given its
diverse nature there is room for varying representations of women (Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex,
and Speech in Tantra [New York: Oxford University Press, 2007], pp. 24, 30, 70, and 144). She analyses eight
tantric texts of north-eastern India from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, and finds a positive approach
towards women demonstrated in the ‘Kālī Practice’.
144
For an introductory text see Ajit Mookerjee, Kundalini: The Arousal of the Inner Energy, 2nd ed. (New
York: Destiny Books, 1983); and for a scholarly treatment see Lillian Silburn, Kuëòaliné: The Energy of the
Depths, A Comprehensive Study Based on the Scriptures of Nondualistic Kaçmir Çaivism (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1988). The role of kuëòaliné in powering divine consciousness lends itself to

of view.145 The sādhaka endeavours to realize his identification with Çiva through the
objective personification of Goddess Devī in human form, who appears mundanely as his
female partner, his çakti.146 The adept is to see her ‘as a mental screen onto which is
projected a series of personifications’, write Mookerjee and Khanna, and this apparently has
the effect of altering his view of her ‘into a special kind of perception’, namely Çakti.147 He
is to adore her specular form as a shaping of the formless Çiva, whose symbol (sign) is
otherwise the ithyphallic liìga. Semiotically, it seems she is the material signifier to his
conceptual signified. Furthermore, in Lacanian terms, for the sādhaka woman is the phallic
other of the symbolic order, and a subjectless reification of male projective fantasy.148 She is
the access point to the jouissance of the divine Other, Çiva; the object a, ‘not a Real object,
but the “presence of a hollow, a void, which can be occupied . . . by any object”’.149 She,
woman, is that inscrutable object of desire, and the imaginary instrument (yantra) of the male
tantric’s narcissistic contemplation of the symbolic divine.150 I emphasize the demonstrative
‘that’ because this empty and idealized conception of woman is the way in which the sādhaka
many contemporary understandings; for example, its action is like a supernova and pulsating neutron star.
Astronomically speaking, a supernova (of Type II and Ib/c) occurs when a massive star exhausts its nuclear fuel
and the iron core undergoes gravitational collapse; the catastrophic release of kinetic energy leads to the
expulsion of a substantial fraction of the star’s mass into the circumstellar medium, which produces radio
synchrotron and x-ray emission (see J. Craig Wheeler, s.v. ‘Supernovae’, Encyclopedia of Astronomy and
Astrophysics, editor-in-chief Paul Murdin (Bristol; Philadelphia: Institute of Physics Publishing; London; New
York: Nature Publishing Group, 2001), pp. 3252–55; A.M. Soderberg, et al., ‘An extremely luminous X-ray
outburst at the birth of a supernova’, Nature 453 [22 May 2008]: 469–74). The remnant compact core is a
superdense field of neutron rich matter, which rapidly spins on its axis; and when the magnetic and rotation axes
are misaligned, the magnetic poles will sweep around at the star’s rotation period, giving rise to precisely
regular pulses of radio frequencies (Malcolm S. Longair, Our Evolving Universe [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996], p. 73). Correspondingly, if our soul is like a stellar body, then intense spiritual practice
can lead to the death of the bloated self, in an ‘explosion’ of bliss, which leaves the core of the unlimited self
spinning with God; the rotational energy of kuëòaliné powers the cyclic pulse of energy that beams out to the
universe. In truth, the call to God is a synchrotronic realization, and a beacon of divine recognition.
145
David Gordon White otherwise confirms that ‘the prime Tantric actors in South Asia have always been male,
and the historical record of Tantric practice, in literature, architecture, and the arts, has always been told through
the eyes of a male protagonist, who sought or claimed for himself the status of Virile Hero or Perfected Being’
(Kiss of the Yoginī, p. 160).
146
See for example the discussion by Ajit Mookerjee and Madhu Khanna, The Tantric Way: Art, Science, Ritual
(London: Thames & Hudson, 1977), pp. 163–84.
147
Ibid., p. 175. (I have previously referred to this statement in my MA thesis, ‘The Dynamic of Sexuality in the
Mystic Way: A Comparative Investigation into the Divine Imagery in the Texts The Flowing Light of the
Godhead and Saundaryalaharī’ [Adelaide: University of South Australia, 2000], p. 127.) In this process the
adept is acting like Çiva, who projects the cosmic order on the screen of his own nature (see Dyczkowski,
Stanzas on Vibration, pp. 229–30). As Kñemarāja remarks: ‘[Çiva] adorned with the Highest Power (paräçakti)
endowed with universal energy, desires to display manifestation in different forms, on the screen of His own
Self’ (Spanda Kārikā 3.13 [in Singh, Yoga of Vibration, p. 155]). See also Kñemarāja’s commentary to
Çivasütra 1.6 (in Singh, Çiva Sūtras, p. 33), and the remarks by an anonymous commentator to Çivasütra 1.20
(in Dyczkowski, Aphorisms of Çiva, p. 51). Essentially then, çakti just is that screen, and the male tantric is
running the film of his own desires upon her blank space.
148
Wolfson adduces Judith Butler in relation to ‘the feminine [as] a projection of the masculine insofar as the
other is demarcated as lack or absence, the space wherein the phallus thrusts its presence’ (Language, p. 482 n.
125).
149
Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 78, citing Jacques
Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis (London: The Hogarth Press, 1977), p. 180.
150
The yantra is a diagrammatic representation of the deity that instrumentalizes the presence of God (see
Madhu Khanna, Yantra: The Tantric Symbol of Cosmic Unity [London: Thames and Hudson, 1981]). Probably
the most famous example of the kind is the Çré Yantra (or çrécakra), which is made of a combined square,
circular, and triangular arrangement, and is designed to incorporate an androgynous consciousness.

points toward his absent, or made-to-be-present, God.151 She is a matter of determination,
who is held before the spirit of indetermination. In the epistemology of Pratyabhijñā, the
ordinary perception, such as in ‘this is a jar’, is a determinate cognition (adhyavasā—a
feminine word), and it refers to differentiated manifestation, which is nothing other than the
realm of çakti.152 By contrast, the divine perception, which acts to unify reality, is an intuitive
insight (pratibhā), and as such is a non-dual consciousness. Abhinavagupta succinctly
explains that ‘[d]eterminacy is the act of constructing many images (in consequence of
contact with one object) and then differentiating the object of cognition from all else’.153 This
means that çakti operates as the cognitive rule by which the sādhaka is able to calculate the
infinite light of Çiva (more correctly Paramaçiva, or Brahman).154 Like Çiva in his erotic
dimension, the sādhaka aligns himself with the cosmos by using his measuring stick.
The idea that Paramaçiva, as the Absolute, is a concurrence of Çiva and Çakti—the god
and his hypostatized energy—might suggest an equality; however, on a critical analysis, it is
seen to be not so. In this juncture of opposites (coincidentia oppositorum), God is to be
understood along androgynous lines, and Çaivaçäkta theology provides a scheme by which
to impute a(n) (un)balanced divinity.155 Çakti is the utilitarian means by which Çiva as pure
light-consciousness (prakäça) reveals himself as the world of objective reality, and as such
she merely constitutes his self-awareness (vimarça). In effect, he contains within himself a
feminine, ‘othering’, aspect, which is his power, his çakti, and which acts at his behest—it is
a demonstration of his free will.156 This means that Çakti is the self-disclosure of Çiva, and
the apparent limitation of his perfectly full consciousness.157 Çiva harnesses his power as a
creative tool, and invests Çakti as the mother of the universe.158 Actually, Çiva is himself the
father and mother of the universe, given that by consorting with his own energy (çakti) he is
151
I have elsewhere examined in more detail the demonstrative placement and specularity that obtains in the
ideology of kabbalistic and tantric thought (unpublished paper).
152
ĪPK 1.4.7, p. 110. Cf. 1.5.18, where it is said that the infinite consciousness is differentiated as ‘the object of
memory, imagination (saàkalpaù) and determination (adhyavasäyaù)’ (p. 124).
153
ĪPV 1.6.1, p. 87. This is a gloss on ĪPK 1.6.1, which says: ‘The (universal) I-consciousness, though it is the
very life of the light of consciousness and is embodied in the transcendental speech, is not determinancy,
because determinancy is certainty, which implies two’ (translation by Pandey, in Éçvara-Pratyabhijïä-
Vimarçiné, p. 86; cf. Torella’s translation: ‘The reflective awareness “I”, which is the very essence of light, is
not a mental construct (vikalpaù), although it is informed by the word (vägvapuù). For a vikalpa is an act of
ascertainment (viniçcayaù) presenting a duality (dvayäkñepé)’ (in Éçvarapratyabhijïäkärikä of Utpaladeva, p.
128).
154
Kñemaräja writes in his opening benediction of the commentary on the first verse of the Spandakārikā:
‘Çiva, whose glory is unmeasured (akalita), measures out (kalayati) in His Heart, the universe from Earth to
Sadäçiva and, variously conjoining (aspects of His nature), He emanates the wonderful play of emission and
withdrawal. He, the One, pulsating and established in Himself, is victorious’ (in Dyczkowski, Stanzas on
Vibration, p. 61). Interestingly, there is an old esoteric doctrine, known as Shi’ur Komah, which sought to
measure the body of God, or his appearance on the divine throne as the ‘body of the Shekhinah’, guf ha-
Shekhinah. Alternatively, it was understood to be a description of the angel Meöaöron, or the primeval Adam
(Adam Kadmon) (Gershom Scholem, s.v. ‘Shi’ur Komah’, Encyclopaedia Judaica, Vol. 18, p. 491).
155
For a recent study of the evidently masculine bias in the androgynous divinity Ardhanäréçvara, i.e., Çiva–
Çakti, see Ellen Goldberg, The Lord Who Is Half Woman: Ardhanäréçvara in Indian and Feminist Perspective
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), esp. pp. 87–90, 113–32.
156
Abhinavagupta explains in the Mālinīçlokavārttika (vv. 69ab–70ab) that ‘[t]he highest Çiva alone . . . shines
with inconceivable power and moves around without restraint because of his autonomy. In this way he is not
impaired by the various forms in which he appears’ (in Hanneder, Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy, p. 71).
157
Skora, ‘Consciousness of Consciousness’, pp. 177–79.
158
Çivasūtra 3.18, to wit, ‘(Çiva) fashions the world by means of His mother’ (in Dyczkowski, Aphorisms of
Çiva, pp. 125–26; and see Bhāskara’s commentary).

propagating himself.159 Çiva creatively, indeed magically, emanates the universal reality, and
in this self-conscious experiment he is recognizing himself; or, put conversely, Çiva’s act of
recognizing himself is what gives rise to the universal reality. As a recognitive apprehension
it is one in which the tantric can participate by engaging in yogic practice (sādhanā), and
mindfully attending to that source of light, which is his own conscious nature, and which is
the luminous seedbed of creation.160 The enlightened yogin, with his expansive
consciousness, is like the Lord (Sadäçiva), for whom the whole universe is his body.161 The
human body may only be a fragment, or shard of divinity, but it wholly reflects the
perceptible cosmos. Abhinavagupta praises the body as the supreme liìga and maëòala
within which there is the worship of both the god and the goddess.162 Ultimately liberation is
achieved by, or through, the grace (anugraha) of Çiva. The notion of divine grace, or the
‘descent of energy’, çaktipäta, assumes prominence in Çaiva schools of thought, and
therefore in the Trika analytic.163 It seems that the realization of divine consciousness is
vouchsafed by the grace of Çiva, not achieved through personal effort.164 The happy state of
divine recognition can be attained in this life, and is called jīvanmukti, or liberation of the
soul.165
According to the ideas of Spanda, the universe as a complexification of Çiva’s unified

being fundamentally involves a vibrational consciousness, a pulse of self-awareness. The
universal reality alternately expands and contracts in line with the rhythm of Çiva and
159
Padoux, Vāc, pp. 285–86. Abhinavagupta writes: ‘In this way, by the penetrating of Sound (nāda), having
reflexive awareness as his own nature, Çiva, being the Mother and the Father, abides always and everywhere as
the creator’ (Tantrāloka 3.200b–201a [in Skora, ‘Consciousness of Consciousness’, p. 152]). This creative
capacity of Çiva is called jïänaçakti—the power of knowledge, and is fully grasped by the sādhaka. A
corresponding pair in kabbalah would be Ùokhmah and Binah as divine father and mother, yet the latter is
subsumed by Ùokhmah.
160
Çivasütra 3.15 (in Singh, Çiva Sūtras, pp. 161–62). Bhāskara’s gloss on this sūtra (sc. bījāvadhānam,
‘Constant attention to the seed’) is explanatory: ‘The supreme seed of all the universe is said to be the conscious
nature (cidātman). The attention (the yogi) pays to it with an alert mind is the reflective awareness (inherent in
it). The clutches of delusion and the rest destroyed, it is the attainment of the plane of eternity’ (translated by
Dyczkowski, Aphorisms of Çiva, p. 122). Dyczkowski exposits that ‘[a]ccording to Kñemaräja the “seed” is
“the supreme power (paräçakti) which is the pulsing radiance (of the light of consciousness) and the cause of all
things”’ (ibid., p. 123). Cf. the way in which the primordial point of Ùokhmah is likened ‘to the mystical seed
which is sown into Creation’ (Scholem, Major Trends, p. 219).
161
Çivasütra 1.14 (in Singh, Çiva Sūtras, pp. 57–58). As Lawrence observes, ‘[t]he monistic Çaivas thus
employ various tantric techniques for what may be described equally as the “universalization” of the human
body and the “corporification” of the universe…’ (Teachings of the Odd-Eyed One, p. 16).
162
Tantrāloka 29.170–76 (in Dupuche, Abhinavagupta, pp. 295–97).
163
On the issue of grace as realizing divine illumination see Paul E. Murphy, Triadic Mysticism: The Mystical
Theology of the Çaivism of Kashmir (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1986). Murphy seeks to draw parallels
between the theologizing of Trika and Catholic commentators, arguing that Triadic ‘mystical realization’ is the
same as Catholic ‘infused contemplation’.
164
As Abhinavagupta writes: ‘The All-Inclusive Universal Consciousness is spontaneously realised by him, on
whom the higher Grace of God has fallen, and personal effort plays no part in it’ (ĪPV 1.1.1, p. 2). Although
grace may be requisite it does not mean that work is not required; for, as the contemporary exegete Jaideva
Singh has observed, ‘grace is not the outcome of caprice. It has to be earned by moral and spiritual discipline’
(Pratyabhijïähåydam, p. 28). In short, one has to do the work before one can receive the grace—actually to
move into the sunlight, or moonlight—for otherwise if one is touched by God one might be destroyed, or
mentally disrupted, so to speak.
165
ĪPK 3.2.2, pp. 197–98; ĪPV 3.2.2, pp. 203–4. This state of liberatory being (mokña, mukti) just means
freedom from the round of rebirths (saàsära), or the cessation of wandering through the world unaware of
one’s intimate and vital connection with God (Çivasūtra 3.18 and comm. [in Singh, Çiva Sūtras, pp. 168–70]).
For a useful examination of this concept in Kashmir Çaivism see Muller-Ortega, ‘Aspects of Jīvanmukti’ (as
cited in note 46).

Çakti.166 It is the perduring sound of energy in the field of consciousness.167 In the
Kāmakalāvilāsa (The Play of Passion and its Power),168 creation is delineated as a phonic
and semantic interaction of Çiva and Çakti. It is encapsulated in the ‘two transdimensional
points of absolute consciousness (bindu)…. [where] Çiva is represented by a white point
(çuklabindu) and Çakti by a red point (çoëitabindu)’.169 The yogin sets his mind towards
divine knowledge, as enshrined in the mantra, which is ‘the highest light (the light of
Supreme I-consciousness)’.170 As a drop of light-consciousness (bindu-prakäça) it appears
in human form as semen, and so it is masculine; but, because it is energetic—that is, has the
flowing force of çakti—it is at the same time feminine.171 The root of non-dual awareness is
found in the secret of mantra, ‘the being of the body of knowledge’, which is the shimmering
power of words.172 Kñemaräja alludes to the activation of kuëòaliné by the churning power
of divinity, and he cites the Çrétantrasadbhäva (Essence of the Tantras): ‘O beloved, She is
awakened by the resonance of supreme awareness and churned by the spontaneous rolling
(bhramavega) of Çiva’s seed (bindu) within Her. Pierced (in this way), that subtle power of
Kuëòaliné is aroused, accompanied initially by brilliant sparks of light’.173 Practically, sacred
166
See Mark S.G. Dyczkowski, The Doctrine of Vibration: An Analysis of the Doctrines and Practices of
Kashmir Shaivism (Albany: State University of News York Press, 1987), pp. 99–101.
167
Metaphorically, it might be said that Çiva and Çakti are a sonoluminescent divinity. Sonoluminescence is a
physical phenomenon that is observed as high-intensity ultrasonic waves irradiate a liquid, causing the
formation, oscillation and collapse of bubbles (a process known as acoustic cavitation). As an imploding shock
wave compresses the gas inside the bubble it generates extreme pressures and temperatures, which results in the
emission of brief flashes of light (see Kenneth S. Suslick and David J. Flannigan, ‘Inside a Collapsing Bubble:
Sonoluminescence and the Conditions During Cavitation’, Annual Review of Physical Chemistry 59 [2008]:
659–83).
168
This is an important text of the Çäkta Çrévidyä tradition, which appeared in the period of the twelfth to
thirteenth century. Dyczkowski provides the translated title (Doctrine of Vibration, p. 102), although I note that
Skora translates it as the ‘Play of the Power of Love’ (‘Consciousness of Consciousness’, p. 416).
169
Dyczkowski, Doctrine of Vibration, p. 102; Padoux, Vāc, pp. 112–13. This is explained in verses 6 and 7:
‘The two Bindus, white and red, are Çiva and Çakti, who, in their secret mutual enjoyment, are now expanding
and now contracting. They are the Cause of the creation of Word (Vāk) and Meaning (Artha), now entering and
now separating from one another. Bindu, which is Ahaàkära (Ahaàkärätmä) is the Sun which is the union of
these two (white and red Bindus)…’ (in Ramayana Prasad Dwivedi and Sudhakar Malaviya, ed. and trans.,
Kāmakalāvilāsa of Çrémanmäheçvara Puëyänanda Nātha along with ‘Cidvallī’ Sanskrit Commentary of Çré
Naöanänanda Nātha and English Translation [Delhi: Chaukhamba Sanskrit Pratishthan, 2004], p. 28). In his
commentary on this passage, Puëyänanda remarks, inter alia, that the interpenetration of the red and white
bindus, Çakti and Çiva—who are the ‘divine Husband and Wife’—produces a ‘mixed form’, Miçra-rüpa (ibid.,
pp. 34–35). Dyczkowski, in his analysis of this text, comments on this symbolic ‘mixed point’ (miçrabindu),
namely that ‘[i]t represents both the integral unity of the absolute and the fertile potential of consciousness
which, like a seed, is swollen (ucchūna) ready to germinate into cosmic manifestation’ (Doctrine of Vibration,
p. 102). Skora cites Dyczkowski’s analysis here, noting that ‘Çiva and Çakti in nondual union are symbolized
by the “drop of mingling” (miçrabindu), represented by the Sanskrit bindu, described as pure potential, ready to
shoot forth like a fertilized swollen (ucchūna) seed’ (‘Consciousness of Consciousness’, pp. 418–19; cf. his
earlier observation ‘that [Jayaratha] glosses the term emission (såñöi) as “bursting forth” (ullasita), a term with
obvious sexual connotations’ [p. 286]). It is interesting that the Zohar alludes to the observation by Rabbi
Shim’on of ‘men drawing the bow taut with the shaft of a centaur’ (1:57b), which Matt explains is ‘[a] cryptic
reference to masturbation’, citing for comparison a rabbinic saying: ‘Shemu’el said, “Any emission of semen
that does not shoot forth like an arrow does not fructify”’ (Vol. I, p. 328 n. 1610). One wonders if Skora was
familiar with this saying from the Babylonian Talmud when he wrote his gloss on Dyczkowski’s remarks?
170
Çivasütra vimarçiné 2.2 (in Singh, Çiva Sūtras, p. 87). On this issue see Padoux, Vāc, p. 110
171
Wolfson notes, without elaboration, but in the context of the feminine kuëòaliné-çakti being associated with
the male tantric’s endeavour to redraw his semen and thereby reintegrate the feminine and masculine:
‘Similarly, in Zohar, the vital energy is depicted as a coiled snake that is feminine in nature yet incarnate in the
male’s semen’ (Language, Eros, Being, p. 572 n. 205).
172
See Çivasütra 2.3, and the commentaries (in Dyczkowski, Aphorisms of Çiva, pp. 69–70).
173
Dyczkowski provides this translation as part of his exposition of Çivasütra 2.3 (in ibid., p. 73). According to
the kabbalah, the divine man, adam qadmon, emits the ‘supernal drops’ (Scholem, On the Mystical Shape, p.

union is achieved by having çakti in the serpentine form of kuëòalinī ‘proceed’ to the
ultimate knower, who is just the ‘supreme male’ without attributes.174 The presence of Çakti
allows the sādhaka to speak the nature of his reality, to enunciate his synoptic knowledge.175
The switching of the electric power that is kuëòaliné-çakti ‘always takes place at two levels
simultaneously: cosmic and human’,176 and so the engagement above is reflected in the
engagement below. Indeed, the unification of Çiva and Çakti is signalled by the conjoining of
man and woman, as a deliberate act that brings about redemption, i.e., liberation, for the
sādhaka, inasmuch as it collimates the power of kuëòaliné.177 The metaphysical thought of
Çaiva tantra is predicated on vanity, as Çiva interposes himself as the mirror of reflection,
which is just the reductive process of creative emanation. In this manner, he urges to see
himself, in his own mirror, which is known as Çakti.178 As the twelfth-century commentator
Maheçvaränanda puts it: ‘He (i.e., Çiva) Himself full of joy enhanced by the honey of the
three corners of his heart, viz., Icchā or Will, Jñāna or Knowledge, Kriyā or action, raising up
His face to gaze at (His own splendour) is called Çakti’.179 It appears that the feminine is
valued to the extent that it is subordinately related to the masculine, although in Çäkta tantra
this subordination may not be immediately obvious.180 Even when the force of çakti is reified
as a hypostatic entity, as Goddess Devī (Çakti) she has an illusorily subjective nature, since
she is only an expression of the reflective consciousness of Çiva, in his own paramount act of
self-awareness. It is a narcissistic enterprise inasmuch as Çiva sees himself reflected in the
tāntrika as the tāntrika sees himself reflected in Çiva, for they are after all identical.181
221). This is said in relation to the ordinarily mentioned ‘sparks of light’. Mopsik discusses the particular
kabbalistic and tantric viewpoints on sexual union in his chapter, ‘Union and Unity’, pp. 237–40 (as cited in
note 46), where he opines that ‘the cultural and ethical horizon [may be] extremely different, but very many
structural homologies remain intriguing’ (238). There is a longstanding correlation between semen and light (see
Mircea Eliade, ‘Spirit, Light, and Seed’, History of Religions 11, no. 1 [1971]: 1–30).
174
Nityäñoòaçikärëava, comm. to 4.14 (in The Kulacüòāmaëi Tantra and the Vämakeçvara Tantra with the
Jayaratha Commentary, introduced, translated, and annotated by Louise M. Finn [Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
1986], p. 331). The Nityäñoòaçikärëava, literally ‘The Ocean of the Sixteen nityās’, is a major text of the
Çrévidyä tradition (Douglas Renfrew Brooks, Auspicious Wisdom: The Texts and Traditions of Çrévidyä Çäkta
Tantrism in South India [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992], p. 38).
175
At the divine level kuëòalinī is identified with parāvāc, supreme speech, and so the expressive
materialization of çakti means that it is evocative of a discursive reality. For an informative analysis on the
linguistic aspect of kuëòaliné see Padoux, Vāc, pp. 124–46.
176
Padoux, Vāc, p. 125. Needless to say, Padoux is not adverting here to kuëòaliné-çakti as an electric power;
but it is a profound analogy, and I have elsewhere sought to correlate it with the holy spirit (unpublished paper).
177
As a coherent focus of mindfulness, liberatory consciousness (mukti) is akin to a laser beam, with the
kuëòaliné as a directed flux of energy that intensifies the cakras and burns up the limited ego. (I have
previously remarked on the laser-like action of kuëòaliné in Martin, ‘Dynamic of Sexuality’ [as cited in note
148], pp. 113–14.)
178
As Skora writes: ‘In terms of Çiva alone that urge is simply the urge to come out of one’s self and turn back
to look at oneself. This urge is known as “Sakti”, and in particular the “Sakti” or “Power” that is Reflexive
Awareness’ (Skora, ‘Consciousness of Consciousness’, p. 50; see also below, note 206). Following Wolfson’s
allusions, it is meaningful to say that it is a uroboric consciousness.
179
Cited by Singh, Pratyabhijïāhådayam, p. 9.
180
As Douglas Renfrew Brooks points out in the case of Çrévidyä, it is clear that Çakti is still subordinate to the
control of Çiva, for whom she is his energy, his creative and emanatory appearance in the world (The Secret of
the Three Cities: An Introduction to Hindu Çäkta Tantrism [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990],
pp. 73–74).
181
The term tāntrika means a follower of the tantras (Singh, Pratyabhijïïähyådam, p. 136 n. 79; and Flood,
Tantric Body, p. 8).

Correlations
Both the kabbalist and tantric schemes employ the idea of sympathetic activity, with a
parallel between the eroticized divinity and human reality. Each highlights a sexual
hermeneutic, which underscores a recognition of the presence of God.182 In the case of
kabbalah the conjoining of the master and his wife replicates the conjunction of Tif’eret and
Malkhut, while in the case of tantra the conjoining of the adept and his female consort
replicates the union of Çiva and Çakti.183 There is a pronounced, theurgical sexual
connotation to the creative process as the kabbalistic God shows his representative presence,
his shekhinah, which corresponds to the way in which Çiva shows his representative power,
his çakti. In the Parätréàçikävivaraëa Abhinavagupta correlates divine consciousness with
‘seminal energy’ (vīrya); but the orgasmic joy felt in sexuality only ‘serves as a token of
remembrance of the inherent delight of the Divine Self’.184 It is actually in the space between
the potential energy of Çiva and its realization as the kinetic energy of Çakti where the point
of I-consciousness lies.185 For in that instant of equilibrium the yogin reposes in blissful
awareness of his own divinity, in an astonished consciousness. In his commentarial gloss,
Swami Lakshmanjoo states that it is necessary to rest the mind ‘in between the energy of will
and knowledge’, and he corresponds this to ‘the rise of sexual excitement and the appeased
state of the act’.186 So the height of divinity, that supreme I-consciousness, is found in the
interregnum of being, a passing becoming.187 Just as the tāntrika must remove the shroud of
ignorance which is the covering of Çakti in order to acquire the bare recognition of Çiva, so
the kabbalist must remove the garment of Shekhinah in order to reveal the naked light of
Tif’eret. The sexual act and its ritualization may be understood as a control process that
182
In the Parätriàçikavivaraëa Abhinavagupta describes four levels of sexual intercourse: that which does not
require contact with a female, because of the free-flowing delightful movement of kuëòaliné; that which
involves physical union (saàghaööa) and sexual stimulation, involving orgasm but not ejaculation; that which
involves a single person concentrating on the ‘essential delight of the Self’; and that which involves run-of-the-
mill sexual intercourse (Singh, Trident of Wisdom, p. 206).
183
In the early period of tantra (from around the 6th century), the consort was not usually the tantric’s wife, but
in later ‘domesticated’ versions it may have been. Biernacki argues that the transgressive practices of the sexual
rite involving a woman other than one’s wife gain their efficacy, or ‘sexiness’ because the goddess ‘is more like
an “other” woman, elusive and distant’ (Renowned Goddess, p. 104). In the particular texts that she examines
the tantric’s wife is accepted as a valid participant in the sexual rite (see pp. 93–109).
184
In Singh, Trident of Widsom, p. 44. Abhinavagupta routinely describes the nature of reality—that is,
consciousness and language—in spermatic and orgasmic terms (Skora, ‘Consciousness of Consciousness’, pp.
66, and 224–25; see also 395–400).
185
The Vijñānabhairava advises that spiritual realization, or god-consciousness, is to be found by centring one’s
awareness, apprehending the in-between of perceptual knowledge (vv. 61 and 62 [in Singh, Yoga of Delight, pp.
57–60]). Elsewhere, in his elucidation of Stanza 1 of the Spandakarika, Kñemaräja states that unified
consciousness is found in the ‘juncture (between cognitions)’ (Stanzas on Vibration, p. 63).
186
Vijñāna Bhairava, pp. 75–76. Similarly elsewhere he opines that the way of cit-kuëòaliné involves
‘concentrating on the center between any two breaths, two thoughts, or two actions’, and maintaining this
medial state, which will initiate the action of kuëòaliné in the mūlādhāra cakra, the sensation of which is akin
to that just before sexual climax (Kashmir Shaivism [as in n. 20], pp. 120–1; the quoted passage appears on p.
120). Writing in another context, but of relevance to this present idea, Padoux says that ‘Abhinvagupta’s
mention of worldly pleasures alludes to that brief moment of standstill in the spasm preceding the creative
emission, a moment of utmost pleasure’ (Vāc, p. 259). Idel refers to a ‘complex theory’ by Cordovero regarding
the functioning of the supernal realm, ‘dealing with the divine delight, sha‘ashu‘a, which describes the joy the
highest aspects of the world of the divinity feel as part of the pre-emanational events. Thus, some form of
preliminary joy was understood to precede a sexual act, understood as related to the process of emanation’
(Kabbalah and Eros, p. 207).
187
It is a Deleuzian moment, one that is energetically embodied by the presentative consciousness of Çakti–
Shekhinah. I have explored this sensibility in an unpublished paper, ‘Highlighting the Sensible Topography of
Divinity’ (currently under review at Feminist Theology).

supports divine recognition.188 In other words, a manipulation of sexual energy will involve
divinization of the self—or more accurately, it will do so directly for the male practitioner, as
according to the bias of the literature. (If there is any divinization for the female it is surely
only as a proxy.) Eroticism and asceticism are intertwined in the praxis of desire for God.189
Sexual intercourse may involve the interruption of ejaculation to allow the reverse flow of
semen to the brain, for in medieval society it was thought that seminal fluid originates in that
organ.190 Further on this point, Wolfson writes that the kabbalist in refraining from the act of
sexual intercourse ‘at the precise moment that he contemplates the divine in his imagination’,
intends to attain that ‘moment of mystical assimilation into the Godhead’.191 He refers here to
a certain practice in haöha yoga meant to facilitate the reabsorption of the feminine çakti to
the masculine Çiva.192 There is clearly an emphasis on textual knowledge in kabbalah, where
the written word sketches the divine path; however, within a milieu of secrecy, oral teachings
have some importance. The situation is reversed in tantra, where oral teaching, as mediated
by the guru, has great importance, although that is not to say that the transmission of
188
In the rendering of the kulayāga ritual outlined in the twenty-ninth chapter of the Tantrāloka, the bonding of
the sādhaka with his sexual partner (dūtī) is not meant to excite lust, but rather is to be done without pleasure, so
as to demonstrate a steady state of mind, a non-fluctuating awareness (see Dupuche, Abhinavagupta, pp. 249–
51). As Skora writes in this context: ‘The purpose of the sacrifice is to test the sādhaka to see if he is able to
control the mind during enjoyment’ (‘Consciousness of Consciousness’, p. 268).
189
Wolfson argues that medieval kabbalists employed an ascetic lifestyle that sought to sublate fleshly passion
into a spiritual copulation (ziwwug ruùani), and it was linked to a particular understanding of the biblical Song
of Songs. In the end, they could not escape completely the divine injunction to procreate (see Language, Eros,
Being, p. 265 and 267). He further argues that while there is a mystical tradition in which the soul’s yearning for
God takes the place of carnal eros, ‘[i]n the writings of kabbalists, the convergence of the mystical and erotic
renders it necessary to speak of the symbolic transformation of sexual energy in place of the displacement of
eros’ (ibid., p. 298; and he notes that ‘[t]he nexus between eroticism and asceticism is an integral aspect of
Tantrism, which bears interesting comparisons to kabbalistic spirituality’ [p. 559 n. 17]).
190
Wolfson remarks on the correlative ideas of the ‘sexual arousal of a contemplative sort, [and] the rising of
phallic energy/light to the brain’ (Language, Eros, Being, p. 275, and in this respect he notes that there is ‘here a
resonance of Tantra’ [p. 551 n. 84]). He refers to the Galenic view that seminal fluid originates in the brain and
that it was employed in the Sefer ha-Bahir (ibid., p. 269 and 271). Idel likewise writes of the connection
between intellectual and sexual seed (Mystical Experience, p. 191, as well as noting the connection between
seed and light in the Zohar and tantra [p. 215 n. 82]).
191
Language, Eros, Being, pp. 322.
192
Ibid., pp. 322–23. On this esoteric practice of ‘vajrolī mudrā’, as it is called, which involves redrawing the
ejaculate admixture from the vulva, see David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in
Medieval India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 198–201; and idem, Kiss of the Yoginī, where
he writes that in this technique of ‘urethral suction’, ‘the Tantric yogin, having ejaculated into his partner, draws
his semen together with her sexual emission back into his penis’ (p. 82). In this context, Wolfson writes of
‘reintegrating the feminine power of sakti and the masculine power of siva’ (Language, Eros, Being, p. 323), but
it is not clear to me what he means by this, since the power of Çiva is just that which is called çakti. Perhaps,
however, this relationship can be understood mathematically. Power is the rate at which work is done, P=WΔt,
but at the darkest level of Çiva there is no time—understood as a succession of moments—and so Çiva has no
‘power’; here, Çakti is silent, or silently running. (As Utpaladeva remarks, succession only pertains to ordinary
action, but at the level of the Lord there can be no succession because the power of Time is absent [ĪPK 2.1.2; p.
153].) When Çiva chooses to exert his creative will (his will-to-power), icchäçakti, it acts as an interactive force
within his own field of consciousness; and the displacement of this force in the becoming of the universe is just
the work that is done, W=FΔx. Thus Çiva only has power where his desire, or wish (icchā), for movement into
manifestation is realized as a dynamic force, çakti: this is the manifest work of creative emanation, hence P =
FΔx/Δt.

knowledge by textual means is inconsequential.193 At the very least, it can be said that both
traditions value wisdom, as the fountain of knowledge.194
As in kabbalah, tantra presents a divine androgyny, but it is one that is equally

problematically realized. Even though the process is quite different, the result is the same,
namely the transvaluation of the feminine into the masculine. Wolfson confidently ‘speak[s]
about the male androgyne as the engendering symbol of kabbalistic theosophy’.195 Overall, he
is critical of the lack of appreciation of the symbolic issues associated with gender in the
scholarly study of kabbalah, and the insufficient acknowledgement of the homoerotic
orientation.196 However, his particular approach to the issue of gender construction in this
literature has been regarded with some scepticism by other scholars, not least on the basis that
he employs a contemporary psychoanalytic understanding in critiquing medieval notions.197
He robustly defends himself against charges of anachronism, and appeals for support from
feminist analyses on gender.198 I would argue that cross-cultural support for his position of
the bent androgynous nature of the kabbalistic imaginary can readily be found in the tantras
(and is otherwise a religiously widespread phenomenon). So when he writes that
‘[o]ntologically, the being of the female is constituted by the phallic energies derived from
the male; [and that] indeed, the female comprises within herself the thirty-two paths of the
masculine wisdom’,199 it just parallels the way in which Çakti is constituted as the phallic
energy of Çiva, as she pervades the thirty-six tattvas of existence, which are all situated (or
enfolded) within Çiva. If the status of Çiva is that of being undifferentiated, because fused
with Çakti, it might suggest an androgynous nature, yet Paramaçiva—the nexus of Çiva and
Çakti—is often rated as a male androgyne.200 Furthermore, if the male androgyne is ‘the
engendering symbol of kabbalistic theosophy’, as Wolfson asseverates, then it can be said to
be quite so in tantric theosophy. Wolfson’s stated aim ‘of deconstructing and destabilizing the
gender categories that have dominated the worldview espoused by transmitters of the chain of
kabbalah’,201 can equally be applied to the need to deconstruct and destabilize the generally
male-biased tantric worldview.
193
Gavin Flood argues that ‘the act of reading is of central importance in the tantric traditions. The fact that the
texts were written is important and has sometimes been underestimated in focusing on orality/aurality in the
transmission of texts’ (Tantric Body, p. 13).
194
The kabbalist draws on the biblical and apocryphal Wisdom traditions in his metaphysical elaborations. In
tantra, the state of spiritual realization is described as a blissful flood of divine consciousness (devi divyaugham-
āpnuyāt) (Vijñānabhairava, v. 83 [in Singh, Yoga of Delight, p. 77, where he glosses that in a yogic context it
refers to a ‘continuous tradition of wisdom’]). This is especially evident in the Çäkta text, The Saundaryalaharī,
whose first 41 stanzas are a eulogy of the cosmic glow of Çakti and Çiva, and is therefore known as
Anandalaharī, ‘Flood of Bliss’ (see W. Norman Brown, ed. and trans., The Saundaryalaharī or Flood of Beauty
[Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958).
195
196
Ibid., p. 324. At the same time, he does not deny that a heterosexual element is present (p. 585 n. 135).
197
He retorts, validly it seems to me, that ‘the study of religions (from a variety of methodological perspectives)
cannot be treated in isolation from the psychological’ (ibid., p. 125). He notes that in fact Lacan himself adduces
the kabbalah (p. 482 n. 119). For further responses see p. 136, 486 n. 191, 487 n. 194, and 591 n. 16.
198
Ibid., p. 448 n. 122 (cf. 493–94 n. 47). He has sought to counter the criticism of anachronism by positing a
‘hermeneutic of time reversibility’ (ibid., pp. xv–xxxi). Idel pursues his own criticisms of Wolfson’s position in
his recent book Kabbalah and Eros (as cited in note 8), pp. 22, 141, 147–48, 255 n. 16, 269 n. 2, and 273 n. 33.
199
Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, pp. 161–2.
200
As Lawrence observes, Somānanda emphasizes the ultimate identity of Çiva and Çakti in his Çivadåñöi,
although he none the less argues ‘that it is more correct to speak of the highest deity as the former rather than
the latter’ (Rediscovering God, p. 210 n. 15).
201

Although God is undivided in itself, this wholeness is lopsidedly imagined as the so-
called male androgyne. A consequence of this is that in tantra, as in kabbalah, the feminine is
open to derogation, and subordination, as the othering that is not othered. In the Pratyabhijñā,
objects are ideally to be realized as not being separate from the cognizing subject, and this
entails that the otherness of people as functionally separate is illusory: everyone is imbued
with the same light.202 However, agency is invariably accorded the male as the observer and
possessor of Çakti, while non-agency is accorded the female as Çiva’s screen and container.
The ultimate realization, which is to say brahman, is putatively understood as a neutral, non-
polarized state, as a fusion of knower and known; but it is the male who is the knowing
subject (pramätå) and the female who is the known object (prameya).203 Put another way,
Çakti, and her localized presence in the human female, is ‘this’ (or ‘that’), and moreover is
the differentiated world of objects that can be pointed out; but this ostensibility just indicates
an ignorance, a lack of recognition that the object is not really distinct from the subject, since
both are encompassed by the light-consciousness (cit) of Çiva. In other words, to think
differentially is to demonstrate a non-recognitional judgement, an ignorance, which equates
to an ‘unknowledge’ (ajñāna). If then, in the liberated state, Çakti is negated it means the
feminine is being negated, because she is being assimilated to Çiva. Wolfson argues that in
kabbalistic thought the female is not independent of the male,204 and he remarks that ‘[t]he
principle of femininity relates to the quality of division, separation, distinction’.205
Abhinavagupta accepts a phenomenological position that just as the experience of another
becomes the object of one’s awareness, so this knowledge itself becomes an object.206
Moreover, states like pleasure and pain shine as ‘this’ (idam), in distinction to ‘the light of
consciousness, [which is] self-luminous, [and which] shines as ‘Aham’ (‘I’) only’.207 The
implication is that these states are transitory, and therefore perhaps unreal.208 In the case of
the sādhaka the female consort shines as ‘that’ too, because she is the external object, but
also as ‘this’, since she is the phenomenological object of his pleasure—or, more accurately,
the means to his own deferred pleasurable realization.209 If the Çaiva treatment of women is
202
As Dyczkowski points out, ‘The world of people and things is the concrete projection of an idea or intention
within consciousness that assumes objective form as consciousness perceives itself in the form of the objective
world through the activity of the senses’ (Stanzas on Vibration, p. 38). Cf. the scriptural verse at note 233.
203
Abhinavagupta ‘defines Brahman as anuttara, as a fusion of knower and known’ (Padoux, Vāc, p. 238). The
term pramätå literally means ‘measurer’, while prameya literally means ‘to be measured, measurable’ (Singh,
Pratyabhijïähådayam , p. 126 n. 23, and n. 25).
204
Language, Eros, Being, p. 154. Whereas Moshe Idel accepts the feminine as an independent entity
(Kabbalah and Eros, p. 144), Wolfson is doubtful about her independent nature, and I find his position to be
directly paralleled in the Çaiva metaphysic.
205
Language, Eros, Being, pp. 76–77.
206
ĪPV 1.4.4, pp. 45–47. As Skora explains, in the context of the realization of the practitioner’s own authentic
nature as the back-story to divinity, ‘One applies reflexive awareness to consciousness itself; in other words
consciousness becomes an object to itself, or, again, consciousness turns back on itself’ (‘Consciousness of
Consciousness’, p. 176).
207
ĪPV 1.4.5, pp. 47–48.
208
See Spanda Kārikā 1.5, with its commentary and exposition (in Singh, Yoga of Vibration, pp. 45–51). As
Kñemaräja opines, ‘when in that noble person who attentively pursues the teaching, the Spanda principle,
whose quintessence is flashing, throbbing consciousness, becomes manifest, then even when experiences of
pain, pleasure, object, subject or their absence occur, they are considered by him as naught, because to him
everything appears only as the quintessence of the delight of Spanda’ (ibid., p. 48). Cf. Dyczkowski’s exposition
on this kārikā and the various interpretations offered by the four commentators (Stanzas on Vibration, pp. 196–
201).
209
Cf. Vijñānanabhairava (v. 69): ‘At the time of sexual intercourse with a woman, an absorption into her is
brought about by excitement, and the final delight that ensues at orgasm betokens the delight of Brahman. This
delight is (in reality) that of one’s own Self’. In other words, as Singh glosses, ‘[t]he woman is only an occasion
for the manifestation of that delight’ (Yoga of Delight, p. 67).

flawed then it can be asked if the Çākta treatment is more congenial, and the answer here is
ambivalent.210 There is it seems a certain ambiguity and qualification in this sect’s
understanding of the supremacy of Çakti.211 If Çiva as the ground of being (and thereby
conflated with Brahman as Paramaçiva) is recognized as prakäça, or pure light-
consciousness, and is self-luminous, undifferentiated and unknowable, then Çakti, according
to Jayaratha, is only supreme because she is accessible, perceptual and conceptualizable—‘it
is the Çakti resplendent in the reflection that is supreme “I” who is to be desired’.212 Overall,
for the male tantric, and the male kabbalist, the ‘other’ in his consideration is not other than
himself, writ large upon the universe.213
Both approaches evince a ‘phallo-narcissistic vision’, to use Wolfson’s term, since the
kabbalist and the tantric gaze at the female as a transposition of their own desire for
eternality. As he points out, kabbalistic lore is characterized by a fascination with the phallic
import of divinity, as the husbandman for creation, where the focal point of contemplative
visualizing is the potency of Yesod.214 This enchantment with a phallicized divinity is shown
as well in the tantric tradition, with the adoration of the liìga, and its complement, the
yoni.215 Here, Çiva is worshipped in the form of the liìga, which is an iconic representation
of the phallus, and the sign through which he bestows grace.216 Although there is not a direct
correspondence in tantra to the corona of the liìga, since circumcision is not generally
practised in India (amongst the Hindu population), perhaps there is this analogy:217 according
to the mythological account in the Kubjikāmatatantra, the goddess Kubjikā empowers a
sacred stone (çilä—a feminine word) on the Mountain of the Moon (Candraparvata),
whereupon ‘the world is enveloped in her energy and merged into her as she assumes the
210
Brooks, Secret of the Three Cities, p. 75 (see above, note 180).
211
This is hardly surprising, given that the Çākta tantras are influenced by Çaiva thought. Padoux refers to this
derivativeness in Vāc, p. 249 and 278.
212
Nityäñoòaçikärëava, comm. to 4.8 (in Finn, Kulacüòāmaëi Tantra, p. 325).
213
Nagel opines that there is no room for an Other in terms of ethical appeal, apropos Levinas: ‘One must admit
that this [sc. Pratyabhijñā] is not a philosophy of intersubjectivity in the strict sense. And the other as other is
considered here only as a limitation of the identity of the Self’ (Bruno M.J. Nagel, ‘Unity and Contradiction:
Some Arguments in Utpaladeva and Abhinavgupta for the Evidence of the Self as Çiva’, Philosophy East &
West 45, no. 4 [1995]: 517–18).
214
According to the Zohar Noah was born already circumcised and thus ‘inscribed with the sign of Shekhinah;
he saw Shekhinah cleaving to him’; and then, following Genesis 9:20, where Noah is called ‘‫( איש האדמה‬ish ha-
adamah), man of the soil’, it calls him husband of the soil (see 1:58b; and Matt glosses that ‘Noah was not
simply man of the soil, but husband of Shekhinah, who is symbolized by earth’; moreover, Noah ‘fulfilled the
role of Yesod, known as Righteous, uniting with the divine feminine’ [Vol. I, p. 332 n. 1635]).
215
This alignment is ‘the most common conjunctio in India’, writes Mark S.G. Dyczkowski (Journey in the
World of the Tantras [Varanasi: Indica Books, 2004], p. 186). The association of vulvar and phallic
representations is an ancient one (see Paul Mellars, ‘Origins of the Female Image’, Nature 459 [14 May 2009]:
176–77). This report is in the context of the recent discovery of a sexually explicit figurine 36,000 years old,
‘where the vulva with pronounced labia majora is visible between the open legs’ (Nicholas J. Conard, ‘A
Female Figurine from the Basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in Southwestern Germany’, Nature, ibid., pp.
248–52 at 250). Such a sexualized interpretation is disputed by Anna McDonnell, who suggests that it is more
likely to be a depiction of late-stage pregnancy, and hence ‘the figurine speaks across the ages of fertility, not
sexuality’ (‘Ancient Ivory Figurine Deserves a more Thoughtful Label’, Nature 459 [18 June 2009]: 909).
216
D. Dennis Hudson, ‘A Hindu Response to the Written Torah’, in Between Jerusalem and Benares, pp. 61,
63–64.
217
For his part, Wolfson sees ‘an interesting phenomenological parallel’ between the kabbalistic idea of the
androgynous phallus—where ‘the organ itself corresponds to the male and the corona to the female’—and ‘the
symbol of the androgynous linga in tantric doctrine’ (Language, Eros, Being, p. 323).

form of a Liìga (liìgarüpä)’.218 When the god Bhairava praises her, Kubjikā is roused ‘from
the oblivion of her blissful introverted contemplation and she bursts apart the Liìga to
emerge from it in all the splendour of her powerful ambivalence’.219 This is her androgynous
form as the ‘Yoni-Liìga’.220 As for Shekhinah—a nominal, and nominated, goddess—she is
symbolized as a ‘supernal stone’, upon which Tif’eret builds his house of creation, for ‘he
raised Her as a supernal pillar, attributing to Her all the glory of this, since this sustains below
only through the house of Elohim’.221 This means that she is co-extensive with Yesod as the
phallic foundation of the world. In her unmanifest form as the liìga, the goddess is ‘round’,
but in her manifest form as the yoni, she is triangular.222 This arrangement is represented
iconographically in the yantra, as a point in the centre of a triangle, where the point
corresponds to the phallus.223 By way of comparison, Shekhinah—who is the mother of
physical creation, and therefore by metonymic association a womb (yoni)—is depicted as ‘the
point standing in the center’, in which rests YHVH.224 This refers to her enclosure within a
square within a circle, which is meant to designate a gender balance; moreover, ‘the point in
the middle, the midpoint, the locus of the phallus in the womb yields the phallic womb, the
extending line of engenderment’.225 In these schemata the circular kind of representation is
symbolically realized as a mouth, with its associated sensual and sexual connotations; for
example, in tantra, the centre, or heart of consciousness, which is the Abode of the Absolute
(anuttara-dharam), is given as the ‘mouth of the yoginī’.226 It is said that the yogin aims at
experiencing the nectar that flows from the ocean of consciousness, which is ‘savored by the
inner mouth’, and which ‘bestows perfect bliss’.227 Similarly, Malkhut is imaged as the
mouth of the penis.228 If Shekhinah as corona of the penis signifies an ontic dependence, I
218
See Dyczkowski, Journey in the World, pp. 177–78; the quoted passage is on p. 178. Kubjikā is a ‘crooked’
or ‘humpbacked’ form of Çakti, in the so-called Western (paçcima) tradition, which is now found only in
Nepal. Dyczkowski devotes a perspicacious chapter to her at pp. 175–92.
219
Ibid., p. 179.
220
Ibid., p. 183.
221
Zohar 1:151a (Vol. II, p. 342). The reference of ‘this’ (zeh) is Yesod, who is the gate of the sefirotic body,
specifically of Tif’eret (Zohar 1:150b, and Matt’s gloss at Vol. II, p. 338 n. 150).
222
Dyczkowski, Journey in the World, p. 179.
223
Dyczkowski cites Daniélou to this effect (p. 179 n. 10).
224
See Zohar 1:6a (Vol. I, p. 35). YHVH is the sacred name of God, and is symbolized by Tif’eret (see below,
note 241).
225
Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, p. 188. In both kabbalah and tantra, the construction of divinity is marked
by a geometrical consciousness. Consider that the sefirot might be configured as a yantra, inasmuch as the
kabbalist registers the universe in the same way that the tantric represents the universe in the çréyantra. I am not
suggesting that there is a direct analogy, but rather that the understanding of reality fostered by kabbalists and
tantrics is that of a mathematical figuration, a scoping visualization of God. It seems fair to say that Çakti–
Shekhinah is the articulated diagram on which Çiva–Tif’eret is installed, or that Çakti–Shekhinah is the
diagrammatic enunciation in which Çiva–Tif’eret is imprinted.
226
Dyczkowski, Stanzas on Vibration, pp. 331–32 n. 9. This ‘is identified with the highest form of Çiva’s phallic
symbol known as the Unmanifest (avyakta) Liìga’ (ibid.). In the Tantrāloka, Abhinavagupata identifies the
female sexual organ as yoginīvaktra, the ‘mouth of the yoginī’, the place from which knowledge comes (see
29.124, in Dupuche, Abhinavagupta, p. 266).
227
From the opening benedictory verses by Kñemaräja in his commentary on the first stanza of vibration (in
Dyczkowski, Stanzas on Vibration, p. 61). This ‘inner mouth’ is the so-called Heart of the Yoginī, which is, as
Dyczkowski notes, the ‘power of awareness’ correlated with the act of sexual union, in which the triangular
vulva is penetrated by the straight liìga (ibid, pp. 331–32 n. 9). This equates with ‘the extending line of
engenderment’, mentioned above. In erotic terms, the nectar refers to the sexual fluids (Skora, ‘Consciousness
of Consciousness’, p. 210).
228
Wolfson suggests, in adducing a pregnant passage from the mystical text, Sifra di-Ñeni‘uta, that ‘the female
element [is] found in the image of the mouth of the penis, that is, the corona’ (Language, Eros, Being, p. 180).
The Bahir makes plain the association: ‘The covenant of circumcision and man’s mate are considered as one’
(section 82 [in Kaplan, Bahir, p. 30]).

would suggest that a similar dependence obtains in respect to the correlation of çakti with
visarga (emission), as visargaçakti—the emissive power.229 The ascension of the feminine
crown to the head of the kabbalist, and the semiotic interpretation Wolfson gives for this
action, is analogous to the way in which kuëòaliné, as the feminine concatenation of vitality,
ascends to the sahasrāra, the so-called ‘crown’ cakra, above the head, which transforms the
tantric into the phallic glory of Çiva.230 Therefore, just as Shekhinah is the beautiful aureole
of Tif’eret, so Çakti is the exalted halo of Çiva.
In both systems, neither Çakti nor Shekhinah is an irreducible other.231 The contention
that Çiva undergoes division and thereby presents his power before himself as his divine
consort, with whom he sexually engages, is only to say, as with kabbalah, that the
‘androgynous’ divinity is androcentically oriented and an identity of difference.232 There
appears to be in tantra a gender dimorphism, but it is a misleading one, since it all returns to
the notion of Çiva embracing Çakti as his ownmost forceful energy, as the power by which
he comes to know himself. This again is like kabbalah, where the feminine is, at the end,
ontically incorporated in the masculine, as per Wolfson’s cogent arguments. To put it another
way, from the tantric viewpoint everything ultimately devolves to the masculine, whether it
be objects or persons, just because, according to the Çaiva Trika conception, the world
externally and phenomenologically shines by virtue of being contained within the Lord
Çiva.233 Similarly, in kabbalah, the male is taken to be the basis of all, and just as the phallus
is the consummation of the sefirotic body, so it is of the male body. In the creation, Tif’eret is
the central pillar of light from whom the foundation of the world, Yesod, is extended. As the
Zohar explains: ‘All was united in the central pillar, generating the foundation of the world,
who is therefore called ‫( כל‬Kol), All, for He embraces all in a radiance of desire’.234
Similarly, Çiva is the architectonic light by, or in, which he erects his potent will (icchäçakti)
to become the world of manifestation, and hence he can be doubly correlated, with Tif’eret,
and with Yesod. In the worldview espoused by these male-based systems, both Çivaliìga and
229
In short, there is an emissively ontic dependence of Çakti on the phallic Çiva, which is implied in the
comments by Jayaratha, who avers that ‘the emitting reality . . . consists of the uniting of [Çiva and çakti]’,
which connotes that ‘those who are aware that the whole world is just the outflow of the pulsation of [Çiva and
çakti] . . . are firmly established at the undivided level’ (Dupuche, Abhinavagupta, p. 268). Sanderson notes that
‘[t]he common sense of the term visargaù is “emission” meaning either “the action of emitting” or “that which
is emitted”’ (‘Commentary on the Opening Verses’, p. 98 n. 28).
230
The technical term for the divine glory has, according to Wolfson, a phallic connotation (Language, Eros,
Being, p. 163). He writes (ibid., p. 271):
[T]he ascetic practice of retaining the discharge of semen from the corona of the penis (aöeret
berit) and elevating the sexual energy to the top of the head, whence it is transformed into the
crown of royalty (keter malkhut), [is] at once the crowning object of visualization, the subject
who is crowned and thereby empowered to see, and the medium by which the former is
envisioned and the latter envisions, an aspect of kabbalah that bears close phenomenological
resemblance to Tantric practice.
231
Lawrence remarks that ‘[i]n monistic Çaivism, Otherness is itself ultimately subsumed within Çakti’
(Teachings of the Odd-Eyed One, p. 40). Wolfson concludes that ‘the alterity of the feminine in relation to the
masculine is not an irreducible other’ (Language, Eros, Being, p. 176).
232
Skora tellingly writes that in Abhinavagupta’s understanding, ‘[w]hen Bhairava and his consort are “sweet
talking”, it is true, logically speaking, that it is really Bhairava “talking to himself”, that is, the one Pure
Consciousness turning back on itself’ (‘Consciousness of Consciousness’, p. 183).
233
See ĪPK 1.5.1, p. 111; and ĪPV 1.5.1, p. 55. Pandit translates the verse: ‘The external manifestation of
entities (objects) currently appearing [in one’s perception] actually becomes possible just because they are
already present internally [as “I”]’ (Éçvara Pratyabhijñā Kārikā, p. 49).
234
Zohar 1:17a (Vol. I, p. 126). The word kol can also signify the tenth sefirah, Malkhut (Wolfson, Abraham
Abulafia, p. 130).

Yesod represent the cosmic connection, the luminous column, between heaven and earth.235
The recognition of divinity by the yogin is redolent of a glinting consciousness—‘the
fragrance of supreme glittering (sphuraëa)’, as Lakshmanjoo puts it;236 similarly, the
kabbalist accepts the proverbial saying that the path of the righteous is like gleaming light.237
In paradise, it is to wander in the leafy grove of holiness with the glancing light caressing
one’s soul.238 The tantric can realize the indistinction of God through being with the present
state of çakti (energy), for she is the way of entrance to Çiva (çaivé-mukham); literally, she is
like Çiva’s ‘face’.239 By comparison, the kabbalist acknowledges God through Shekhinah, the
Divine Presence, who is known as ‘the face of YHVH’.240 As God is said to delight in his
own image when it is reflected in the sheen of the kabbalist, so Çiva delights in his own
image as it is reflected in the splendour of the tāntrika. Moreover, Shekhinah is the veil that
begauzes the shining beauty of God (Tif’eret),241 just as Çakti is the partition that bedims the
shining perfection of God (Çiva).242 In conclusion, what appears to be a favourable
understanding for the feminine in the Godhead is on closer inspection problematic. The
apparently positive, elaborated meanings and connotations given to personified Çakti and
Shekhinah are only biased cultural constructions of a deliberative nature.
235
As the Zohar states, Yesod is ‘the nexus of all’ (1:150b, and Matt glosses that ‘Yesod is the cosmic link,
joining all the higher sefirot together and uniting them with Shekhinah’ [Vol. II, p. 340 n. 164]).
236
Commentary to Çivasütra 3.22 (in Çiva Sūtras: The Supreme Awakening, with the Commentary of
Kshemaraja, revealed by Swami Lakshmanjoo; ed. John Hughes [New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2007], p.
184).
237
Proverbs 4:18, as cited in the Zohar 1:179a (Vol. III, p. 84). Adducing Isaiah 58:11, the zoharic author
promises that the righteous soul will be satisfied in the terrestrial Garden of Eden, ‘amid aromas of spices’,
‘saturated and nourished by precious lusters’ (1:224b; and Matt glosses that in the biblical phrase, ‘He will
satisfy ‫( נפשך‬nafshekha), your thirst [or: soul] ‫( בצחצחות‬be-tsaùtsaùot), in parched regions’, ‘Rabbi Yehudah
understands the rare word tsaùtsaùot to mean “with radiancies”, based on the root ‫( צחח‬tsùù), “to gleam”’ [Vol.
III, p. 349 n. 258, and 352 n. 268]).
238
The Zohar states that the union of Ùokhmah and Binah ‘generat[ed] trees, supernal, grand cedars, from the
light, that supernal luster’ (Zohar 1:29a; and Matt’s gloss at Vol. I, p. 172 n. 510). Singh writes that for the mind
of the liberated yogin, the world ‘appears as a gleam of Çiva-consciousness or an expression of the wondrous
delight of self-consciousness’ (in his introduction to Pratyabhijïähåydam, p. 24).
239
Vijñānabhairava, verse 20 (in Singh, Yoga of Delight, p. 17). See also the translation provided by Bäumer:
‘When one who enters the state of Energy realizes the non-distinction (from it), then he becomes one with Çiva.
Çakti (Energy) is called the entrance (leading) to Siva’ (in Vijïäna Bhairava, p. 18); and see the comments by
Lakshman Joo: ‘Çaivé means Çakti [and this very] Energy is mukham [the mouth of or the entrance to Çiva]’
(ibid., pp. 18–19). Abhinavagupta remarks in the Parätriàçikävivaraëa on this view of Çakti as ‘the entrance
door in Saiva philosophy’, as he writes that ‘Çakti is the medium through which Çiva passes into phenomena’
(in Singh, Trident of Wisdom, pp. 13–14).
240
Zohar 1:150a, and Matt’s gloss at Vol. II, 337 n. 137. In kabbalistic texts the face functions ‘as a euphemism
or symbolic displacement for the phallus’ (Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, p. 136). Similarly, Shekhinah ‘is
called “gate” or “door” to indicate its role as the entrance to the divine domain’ (Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar,
p. 955).
241
Tif’eret symbolizes the sacred name of God, the Tetragrammaton, YHVH, which is ineffable and can only be
pronounced as Adonai (Lord). This epithet is ascribed to Shekhinah when ‘she receives the overflow from the
masculine potency, Yesod, designated adon’ (Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, p. 71). As Wolfson explains:
‘the prohibition of pronouncing the name as it is written secures the fact that the epithet preserves the
ineffability of the name just as the veil conceals the face it reveals by revealing the face it conceals’ (ibid., p.
291).
242
It is important to note that according to Pratyabhijñā philosophy the aim is not to destroy the ego, but rather
to exhilarate it; which is to say, the ‘fettered soul’ (paçu) is to be delivered into absolute egoity, ‘perfect I-hood’
(pürëähaàtä) (see Dyczkowski, Stanzas on Vibration, pp. 39–44; and Lawrence, Teachings of the Odd-Eyed
One, pp. 11–13). Lawrence writes: ‘For this mode of thinking, the human ego is an immanent expression of
God’s identity that must be universalized and transfigured into its essential nature as perfect I-hood’ (ibid., p.
12). According to one scholar, ‘Pratyabhijñā etymologically means “Perfect cognition”’ (B. Bhattacharya,
‘Çaivism and the Phallic World’ [New Delhi: Oxford & IBH Publishing Co., 1975], p. 664).

Conclusion
In this paper I have argued, if only in a preliminary and tentative way, that there are some
correspondences between medieval kabbalah and tantra in regard to the imaginary and
phenomenological construction of divinity. That there may be such parallels has been noted
by various scholars in kabbalah studies. The understanding of God, or the nature of the
divine, is realized as a sexualized hermeneutic in both kabbalistic and tantric thought.
Characteristically, God—that is, Ein Sof, and Anuttara (Paramaçiva)—is supremely obscure,
but is made limitatingly clear through the categorizing forces of the sefirot and tattvas, which
enable the invisible absolute to be conceptualized. They represent the alighting of the dark
transcendence through the tracking of the conscious mind. There is an erotic dimension to
this awareness, which is informed by the activity of human beings, and which is transposed to
the divine realm; indeed, the sexual conjunction of male and female on earth generates and
signals the intimate conjunction of forces in the godhead; equally, the movement on high is
reflected below. Following the lead of Elliot Wolfson, who convincingly argues that the
androgynous nature of divinity in the classical kabbalah is preferentially gendered as male, I
have tried to show comparatively that the godhead of the non-dual Çaiva tantras is
preferentially gendered as a male androgyne emanating the becoming of his own reality. The
male practitioner takes on the mantle of his god, and likewise emanates his own reality.
Consequently, the kabbalist master and tantric adept each approach divinity through a
phallocentric apperception. In other words, the creative power reduces to a phallic action,
which then makes Shekhinah and Çakti the energetic or forceful presentations of divine
consciousness. They are both the algorithmic rendition of a penetrating gaze. I extrapolated
Wolfson’s argument, namely that the homoerotic bond between God and the kabbalist is
expressed in heterosexual images, to that of the tantric orientation; for, just as the feminine is
ontologically contained in the masculine in the thinking of the kabbalist, so it is in tantra,
where the divine power (çakti) is only a subsumption of Çiva’s being. That the apparent
autonomy of Shekhinah (who is nominally eulogized as the divine feminine) hides an
ontological dependence is an idea that is echoed—perhaps even more strongly—in the way in
which Çakti (who is more or less eulogized as the divine feminine) is ontologically
dependent on Çiva. In showing how gender types are imaginarily constructed, Wolfson’s
analysis has proved invaluable for disclosing the engendering bias of tantric thought.
Copyright Paul C. Martin

9 August 2009
I welcome any comments or feedback: pcmartin@internode.on.net.


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The Erotic Imaginary of Divine Realization

in Kabbalistic and Tantric Metaphysics

In this paper I consider the way in which divinity is realized through an

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2. The Erotic Nature of Divinity

A characteristic of medieval kabbalah is that it portrays ‘religious experience in intensely

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There is an element of satisfaction in the emanatory creativity of the divine nature,

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It is arguable that there is (often enough) a defective understanding of the feminine

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According to the ideas of Spanda, the universe as a complexification of Çiva’s unified

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As in kabbalah, tantra presents a divine androgyny, but it is one that is equally

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Copyright Paul C. Martin

I welcome any comments or feedback: pcmartin@internode.on.net.

The Erotic Imaginary of Divine Realization 32

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