ABSTRACT

Āveśa and Deity Possession in the Tantric Traditions of South Asia: History, Evolution, & Etiology

by

Vikas Malhotra

In South Asia divine power is believed to manifest in a variety of ways and through a variety of means. One of the most fascinating manifestations of this is deity possession, involving the incorporation of divine power into the human body. While deity possession remained historically on the margins within the classical literary tradition, in the Tantric literature of the medieval period, āveśa, meaning the "entrance" or "fusion" of oneself with the deity, becomes a central paradigm of religious praxis, used for both pragmatic (bhoga) and liberative (mokṣa) purposes. The first part of my thesis explores pre-Tantric accounts of worldly, oracular, and divinatory practices and the various spirits beings and deities employed. Much of this data is found within South Asia's shared apotropaic and demonological (bhūtavidyā) traditions embedded in early Vedic, Buddhist, Jain, and Epic texts. I argue that certain groups of these shared deities described as bhūtanāthas ("Lord of Spirits"), often assimilated from local cults, gain growing importance in a variety of protective, exorcistic, and sorceristic rites during this period. I contend that it is these groups of deities and associated traditions which become central in the subsequent tantric traditions. Part two examines the medicalization of possession in early Ayurvedic/bhūtavidyā literature, which provides emic interpretations of possession etiologies, symptomologies, and mechanics. Many of these ideas, continue into tantric and yoga texts and influence the development of new possession conceptualizations and technologies, such as parakāyapraveśavidyā, “The Science of Entering Another’s Body.” Such practices were associated early on with the Śaiva Pāśupatas, and other renunciant traditions, who I argue began to model their behavior and practices on these earlier bhūtanātha deities and were key to the formation of later tantric groups and their institutionalization of deity possession rites. Part three, which comprises the bulk of the dissertation, examines the various discourses surrounding the adaption of the term āveśa and its use in the Tantric Śaiva literature from the 5-11th centuries. Throughout this literature we see an evolution and reformulation of āveśa in terms of techniques (e.g., nyāsa, mantra, mudrā), interpretation (its congruence with śaktipāta) and mechanics (e.g., as a phenomena involving the subtle body). Thus, the semantic understanding of āveśa expands not only to refer to deity possession, but a host of high spiritual states, including liberation. I will argue this is one of the distinguishing features of Tantric Śaivism and Tantric Buddhism, manifested in practices associated with samāveśa and Deity Yoga, respectively. While possession remains marginal in Jain Tantra, tantric techniques of divinization were also used for liberative purposes by Jain ascetics, albeit minimally. The concluding chapter includes data I collected from my fieldwork on various possession rites I witnessed in Kerala. I use Teyyam as a case study to trace how some of the concepts and techniques developed during the Tantric period were filtered back down to these low-caste groups, leading to the "Tantricization" of their particular practice. The final part of this chapter then takes insights gleaned from the data presented on Tantric deity possession in order to bring it into conversation with recent research from the larger field of possession studies, including the social and medical sciences. I end with a series of questions regarding possession etiologies for future research.

Magic tantras, despite their ubiquity in South Asia, have been woefully ignored by Historians of Religions in South Asia. Magic operations or pragmatic rituals, as opposed to transcendental rituals, reveal the lives and anxieties of medieval South Asians. I identify three categories of rituals that constitute a typology of magic in the tantras: (1) six-results rituals (ṣaṭkarman), (2) fantastic feats and enchanted items (kautukakarman, indrajāla), and (3) conjuring (yakṣinīsādhana). I focus primarily on the six-results in this dissertation: tranquilizing (śānti), subjugation (vaśīkaraṇa), immobilization (sthambhana), bewildering (mohana), dissension (vidveṣaṇa), eradication (uccāṭana), attraction (ākarṣaṇa), and murder (māraṇa). No matter having six, nine, or ninety-nine constituents, these are called the six-results. Three scholars have written on the six results previously: Teun Goudriaan, Hans-Georg Türstig, and Gudrun Bühnemann, though only Bühnemann describes the six results without proposing a universal structure and system of magic throughout South Asia, a proposal that is ultimately non-existent.

Magic existed prior to the tantras in the form of (1) aggressive lethal magic (abhicāra); (2) ritual enhancements, often child-bearing (abhicāra); (3) conjuring dreadful female witches (kṛtyā, kṛtyābhicāra); and (4) herbal magic pertaining to erotics and sorcery (mulakarman, auṣadhi). I explore these techniques in the Atharvaveda, Manusṃṛṭi, Arthaśāstra, Kāmasūtra, and the Mahābhārata. While the language and many of the techniques found in these pre-medievel sources are echoed in the magic tantras, there is no coherent, unified ritual system that stretches from earlier ritual cultures into the magic tantras.

I located a battery of six results rituals in the Uḍḍīśatantra edited and glossed by Tripathī that is reproduced in two other Uḍḍīśatantras; those other two are edited, glossed, and commented upon by Śivadatta and by Śrivāstava. I present each category as described by Tripathī, translating the full operation including mantras, ingredients, ritual actions, and results. I add to Triapthīs description any unique rituals from the other two tantras. I conclude each treatment of the six results rituals by presenting Śrivāstava's lively Hindi-language interpretations of these techniques in contemporary times. A full translation of Tripathī's Uḍḍīśatantra is appended to this dissertation.

But magic was not unique to Śaiva sources. Two circa tenth-century Digambara Jain tantras from Karnataka describe all the six results procedures, namely the Bhairavapadmāvatīkalpa and the Jvālāmālinīkalpa. The two Jain tantras represent a curious backwater of medieval Jain ritual culture in which pragmatic rituals for aggressive, martial, and even erotic ends are prescribed without concern for normative Jain ideology on non-violence and asceticism. Titular goddesses Padmāvatī and Jvālāmālinī are Jain deities suited for the agonistic, medieval world in which Śaivas, Buddhists, and Jains competed to secure royal patronage and vied for popularity in contentious religious marketplaces. Presenting six results lore in these texts uncovers a Jain tradition of magic that has never been thoroughly studied and demonstrates contiguity with Śaiva tantra traditions, especially Śrividyā. A full translation of the Bhairavpadmāvatīkalpa is appended to this dissertation.

Finally I depart from Śaivism and Jainism and turn to the Buddhist Bhūtaḍāmaratantra, whose main ritual concern is conjuring, the third constituent in my definition of magic. The tantra opens by describing Buddhist Vajradhara/Vajrapāṇi dominating Maheśvara, forcing to Śaiva god to convert to Buddhism and to support Buddhism, to support Buddhists, and to protect all those who practice the rituals in this text. After the conversion narrative, the text describes numerous sequences of goddess spirits who are dominated via spells, hand gestures, and ritual exertions. When presenting conjuring materials in this Buddhist text I note parallels deities and practices, especially yakṣinī spirits and yoginī sādhana practices, that are found throughout the magic tantras. A partial critical edition of the Bhūtaḍāmaratantra created from Nepali manuscripts is appended to this dissertation; its contents are either translated or glossed in the body of this final chapter.

Ending the Śaiva Age: The Rise of the Brāhmaṇa Legalist and the Universalization of Hindu Dharma reconstructs the largely unfamiliar site- and community-specific life-worlds that defined the religious mainstream in the early medieval western Deccan in all of their nuanced particularity, resituating them in a robust intellectual, social, and material context. It then recovers the concrete history, mediated by text, document, and stone, of how and why in the middle of the thirteenth century, as part of a conceptual revolution emerging from within the tradition of Brāhmaṇical Dharmaśāstra and situated in the court of the Seuṇa Yādava kings of Maharashtra, these lived realities were deliberately rendered mostly provincial and subaltern, making possible the centering of the more familiar Brāhmaṇical imaginaries of early modernity and the colonial era.

Ending the Śaiva Age demonstrates that a tradition of epistemic pluralism—which on methodological grounds asserts that the rules and norms that animate both knowledge systems and embodied lived realities necessarily vary from context to context, necessitating a proliferation of discrete modes of authority and authoritative agents whose autonomous sphere of operations must be protected—forms an integral facet of classical Sanskrit thought from its inception. Transposed into the realm of the juridical, such a framework manifests as a capacious legal pluralism that defers to the sovereign right of communities to manage their own affairs in accordance with their own values. Drawing on a vast array of mostly unpublished and unstudied source materials, including documentary records, in Sanskrit, Aiśa, old Kannada, and old Marathi, complemented by ethnographic work and surveys of material culture at over two hundred locations, I argue that it is this juridico-religious imaginary that forms the conditions of possibility for the lived realities that stand behind what Alexis Sanderson has characterized as the Śaiva Age—a period essentially coterminous with the early medieval in South Asia—during which Tantric inflected modes of knowledge shaped the religious mainstream. What we discover when we move from prescriptive revelation to its quotidian instantiation in particularized time and space is that the story of classical Tantra as lived religion embedded in well-respected and well-funded transregional institutions is very much a tale of the pervasive influence within such spaces of non-Brāhmaṇa—even Dalit—agents acting as juridical and religious authorities, playing central roles in both the production and dissemination of religious and cultural meaning as well as enacting the enforcement of disciplinary norms. Indeed, as the present work demonstrates, the documentary sources, built spaces, and material culture that form our primary sites for encountering the early medieval are largely the product of Śūdra and Dalit social agents thoroughly embedded within Śākta Tantric imaginaries. The stories that emerge seriously call into question core presumptions of our standard historiography and pedagogy, which almost exclusively center Brāhmaṇas as hegemonic social and religious authorities at best periodically challenged by subaltern dissenting voices. As I demonstrate in some detail based on my fieldwork, they are also essentially consonant, both theologically and sociologically, with contemporary localized traditions of non-elite Deccani religion in Maharashtra and Karnataka. Against such a backdrop, it is not an alleged “fragmentation” of a previously unified “Brāhmaṇical normativity” but the curious and sudden muscular assertion, on the cusp of early modernity, of an almost iconoclastic drive for unification and standardization—the universalization of Hindu dharma—that needs to be accounted for in highly particularized historical terms. Ultimately, what will emerge out of our sources, especially the vast dharmanibandha, the Caturvargacintāmaṇi, which is here examined in detail for the first time, is the counterintuitive story of an internal revolution in Brāhmaṇical jurisprudence, ritual theory, and statecraft that abruptly called into question and overturned the longstanding radically pluralistic episteme. The result is the sudden unmaking of the institutions and life-worlds that the older consensus had made possible, the Śaiva Age so prominently featured in our title. In other words, to think historically in a particularized fashion about the conditions of possibility for the Indian encounter with early modernity is essentially to tell the story of what was the Śaiva Age and how did it end.

This dissertation examines the life and works of a nineteenth- to early twentieth-century Tamil yogi named Sri Sabhapati Swami (Śrī Sabhāpati Svāmī, Capāpati Cuvāmikaḷ, ca. 1828–1923/4), specifically the “translocalization” of his unique vernacular literature on a system of yoga known as Śivarājayoga (Tamil: civarājayōkam), or the “Royal Yoga for Śiva.” Sabhapati’s translocalized literature had a significant impact on the development of Early Modern Yoga, and there is a growing number of authors who have written about him over the past decades, even if he remains largely forgotten today both in India and abroad. His works introduced elements of Tamil Śaiva cosmology to North India (especially British Punjab and Bengal), and he pioneered a yogic system that—on the surface—anticipates one later popularized by Swami Vivekananda. Yet Sabhapati, whose first work was published over fifteen years before Swami Vivekananda’s Rājayoga, was also a major figure in a larger movement to publish and disseminate editions of yogic texts in Indic vernacular languages as well as English in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India. Through his editor Shrish Chandra Basu he was known to the Indologist Max Müller and, in addition, he had close contacts with some of the founding members of the Theosophical Society who later distanced themselves from him. His yogic techniques were subsequently integrated into the thelemic “Magick” of Aleister Crowley as well as books by Franz Hartmann and William Estep. This dissertation therefore fills a major gap in scholarship by providing a meticulous examination of the contents of Sabhapati’s teachings and publications both in their local South Indian settings and abroad in their new mesolocal and translocal contexts in North India as well as internationally. The methodology behind this dissertation is historical-critical, and offers a solution to the problem of Sabhapati’s neglect in scholarly literature by centering the discussion on Sabhapati himself and his own writings. The research methods are accordingly qualitative, and the claims are constructed based on Sabhapati’s primary texts, secondary academic literature, biographical accounts, archival data, ethnographic fieldwork and recorded interviews, photographic evidence, nineteenth-century temple epigraphic inscriptions, colonial-era geography, religious art history, and other related sources. To adequately treat on all these levels of Śivarājayoga’s local and mesolocal contexts, translocalization, and relocalization, the dissertation is divided into seven thematic chapters: 1) A biographical account of Sabhapati and his students as gleaned from his textual sources, library and archival records and my ethnographic field work at extant sites of relevance to Sabhapati’s yoga, including an analysis and historiography of his web of relationships, with special attention to his collaboration with his Bengali editor Shrish Chandra Basu (S.C. Vasu); 2) A philological treatment of the three main textual “streams” of Sabhapati’s writings, their terminology, and their translations, with special reference to his vernacular works and translations in Tamil, Hindustani, and Bengali; 3) A comprehensive treatment of the Śaiva cosmology outlined in Sabhapati’s literature, including an analysis of its sources in North and South Indian milieus, and his philosophical engagement with other religions and with Atheism; 4) A thorough analysis of Sabhapati’s system of Śivarājayoga, including an overview of the role that subtle physiology such as the Tantric cakras plays in his literature; 5) An analysis of Sabhapati’s aesthetic integration of music, mantric chanting as well as an evaluation of his use of visual diagrams; 6) An evaluation of the role of “science” in Sabhapati’s literature, including a Bengali prologue by his translator Ambikacharan Bandopadhyay that engaged the Victorian naturalist worldview, and a consideration of his literature’s relevance to the cognitive science of religion (CSR); and 7) An analysis of several late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century occult authors who met with Sabhapati and/or published his work, such as Henry Olcott and Helena Blavatsky, Franz Hartmann, Aleister Crowley, and William Estep, as well as of Sabhapati’s legacy.

To these are appended: 1) a never-before translated alternative account (T2) of Sabhapati’s life found in his Tamil work MCVTS; 2) a lexicon in table-form that compiles some archaic variants and Roman transliterations of technical terms used in his work; 3) a critically-edited passage that refers to his innovative technique of Śivarājayoga, which included visualizing the yogic central channel as a lithic “pole” ; and 4) a never-before translated introduction to the Bengali prologue to his work BRY, which includes his engagement with Victorian naturalism and also a song composed in Bengali in a folk metrical style that exemplifies Sabhapati’s works’ relocalization even within various regions of India itself.

This study focuses on the ways in which various forms of embodied performances—dramatic, devotional, ritual, and dancing—engender bhāva in South Asia. Bhāva is variously understood as a mode of being, an emotional change, a disposition, a mode of distributed experience in relationship, a processural transformation or becoming, and a substance that can be shared and that emerges in performance. In its various manifestations bhāva involves affective changes, embodied practices, and heightened awareness of lived experiences, sociality, and relationships, and it thus serves as a means of reshaping the world. The range of bodies that temporarily hold and are shaped by bhāvas include human and divine, organism and landscape, material and virtual in form. This study attempts to chart how bhāvas function as affective forms in performances, modulating the bodies and relationships that emerge in the process of enactment across thresholds that separate domains and worlds normally seen as distinct. I refer to performances therefore as affective ecologies.

My methodology examines key text in South Asian theories of rasa, including Bharata’s Nāṭya-śāstra, Bhoja’s formal work on literary analysis (Śṛngāra-prakāśa), Abhinavagupta’s “new dramatic art” (Abhinava-bhāratī) that utilizes an audience-response stance, and Rūpa Gosvāmin’s aesthetic theological text on developing devotion to Kṛṣṇa, (Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu). I examine these framings of bhāva show performance is a medium of modulating affects toward culturally-recognizable forms as dispositions (sattvas). Next I examine one dramatist and poet, the seventeenth-century Bengali Gauḍīya devotee Kavikarṇapūra and his works on Caitanya, the Caitanya-candrodaya. In this hagiography, the author imbues his devotional affect into its creation alongside his techniques from aesthetics. In particular I examine how līlā functions as a semblance to allow for variation in the stable forms of the tradition. Next I turn to an inset play within the Caitanya-candrodaya to examine audience and performer relationships. As mutually-implicated in a larger constellation of embodied forces, both sets of performative roles have to engage persons affectively in a shared habit or style (vṛtti). In particular I examine costuming, economic theories of affectivity, and how we are shaped by social forces in performance. Lastly, I turn to the performed works of the famed twentieth-century Bharatanāṭyam dancer, Thanjavure Balasaraswati to examine the way a single person could master these strategies of personal, social, and national affectivity to carve out a space for living in the modernizing world around the time of Indian Independence. In particular, I focus on how her mastery of abhinaya (“gesture”) allowed her to consciously adapt her subaltern position as a devadāsī banned from her traditional way of life into one of the most recognized subaltern performers in the world. In the conclusion, I extend these findings to suggest how illness and other forms of non-aesthetic affectivity are combined with performance traditions in the worship of the regional goddess Śītalā, the “Cooling Lady.” As pandemics and epidemics are becoming a common concern for the entire world, I suggest this goddess’s textual and performed embodiments suggest ways of radically reorienting social values and norms following a more interconnected, ecological view of the world we find ourselves in today.

The puruṣa—the “person” addressed throughout Indic texts—is not a microcosmic replication of the macrocosmos; he is the phenomenal world itself. This dissertation provides a textual and historical examination of the puruṣa concept in the Vedic Saṃhitās, Brāhmaṇas, Upaniṣads, Pali Nikāyas, pre-classical Saṃhitās of early Āyurveda, and the Mahābhārata. I argue that, contrary to the dominant scholarly position, the cosmos is only ‘in’ the person insofar as the person expands to be the same measure as the cosmos. In the political and religious poetry of the Vedas, the person is modeled after Indra, who creates the world by swelling to its limits in the guise of the Sun. In the Brāhmaṇas, the sacrificer toils to become like Indra, to discover the puruṣa in the Sun, and thereby attain the immortal expansiveness of svarga-loka. In the Upaniṣads, the person is the recursively reproducing, blissfully autophagous eater of the world, who transcends space and time by “yoking” up to ever greater expanses through yoga. In the early teachings of the Buddhist Pāli canon, the person is non-different from the “empty” elementality of the world, and the bhikkhu meditates on this fact to extinguish his belief in self, person, or world. These earlier views of the person are synthesized and given paradigmatic expression in the pre-classical Saṃhitās of Āyurveda and the Mahābhārata, where the logics of Yoga and early Sāṃkhya dictate that person and world are “identical” and “the same measure.” In the words of the foundational Caraka Saṃhitā, the pre-classical person who is fully realized, “bears the yoke” of the world as the sovereign master of its materiality, harmoniously conjoined to the phenomenal totality that is named puruṣa.