Tantra: The Cult of the Feminine

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 385 pages
• Published by: Weiser Books October 1995
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0877288585
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0877288589
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Weighs: 1.7 pounds

Product Description
For Tantra, creation is not a single event that took place some billions of years ago, it’s a continuous process. Creation is here and now!

Known only for the virtues of its sexual practice, ancient Tantric ideology is a universal and wide-reaching ideology virtually ignored in the West. In Tantra: The Cult of the Feminine, one of Europe’s foremost Tantric authors and teachers, André Van Lysebeth, gives readers a balanced, well-informed, modern examination of the secret teachings and symbolism of Tantra.

Espousing no dogma, Tantra involves a search for reality that contradicts neither science nor religion. For Tantra, all of the myriad energy forms in the universe — gravity, nuclear cohesion, electromagnetism — exist throughout the cosmos. "Scientifically speaking, the universe is a gigantic continuum ranging from sub-atomic to astronomical dimensions. Tantrists have perceived this unity for over thirty-five centuries," points out Van Lysebeth in his introduction.

Originally published in 1992 and now being released in paperback for the first time, Tantra has become the classic text on the subject, the source for serious students. Eight full-color illustrations and 36 line drawings complement a comprehensive and contemporary explanation of Tantra, complete with meditations. Van Lysebeth has done a remarkable job of bringing ancient theories into the modern world. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Tantra: Cult of the Feminine (Paperback) This is the best introduction to the tantric worldview I have encountered. The other reviewer'sabout "lifting the veil" is extremely appropriate - there is NO estotericism here at all. Lysbeth cuts through all of the linguistic and cultural/contextual barriers that tend to pose such difficulty for Western students of Tantra. No mumbo jumbo. There are, however, several things for the propsective reader to be aware of. First, this is a book about "tantra per se" and not about any particular tradition therein. This is a guidebook to tantra as subjective experience and not an objective anthropological account of tantra as a cultural practice of the East. As such, the author has a wonderfully non-scholarly habit of distilling the essence of the teachings and blithely ignoring the specific historical details when they might be confusing or boring. I found this very refreshing, since authors with more "scholarly" approaches (e.g. Feuerstein) seem to lose the forest for the trees. This is something I want to learn - not just learn ABOUT - and for this purpose Lysbeth is absolutely peerless. Moreover, a lot of the material here will be not immediately recognized as relevant to tantra at all. The author is well-versed in science and the history of philosophy, and about a third of the material here is a scientific apology for the tantric worldview. If you -like me- are the sort of person who feels its necessary to square your mysticism with contemporary psychology or thermodynamics, then this is likely to be very satisfying reading. But not everyone agrees that mysticism should have to explain itself in scientific terms, and this sort of rationalism is likely to turn some readers off. Finally, this book has a very New-Agey feel to it. The author gushes about Goddess and matriarchy in ways that some may find off-putting. The first ten pages read like "the Chalice and the Blade" and I (being a sort of anachronistically sexist male) was a little bit self-conscious reading it. Push a bit farther into the book, however, and the reader will discover that there is absolutely no man-hating undercurrent here. When all was said and done, I even found myself a bit persuaded by the author's sweet romanticism for "matri-focal" societies. Nor is any interest in marathon sexual acrobatics necessary to enjoy this book. It has a surprisingly satisfying "big think" feel to it. The book is, on one level, just an argument for what western philosophers have called "pan-psychism" - the notion that everything in the cosmos is imbued with some level of consciousness. If the reader is open to the experience, he or she will walk away from this with a of interesting insights into metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of mind. It is especially recommended for anyone who has enjoyed Ken Wilber (Sex, Ecology, Spirituality), Robert Wright (Nonzero) or Howard Bloom (Global Brain). Incidentally, this book also happens to kick the bejesus out of Julius Evola's unreadable "The Yoga of Power," which I also reviewed (and panned) in my quest for a good tantric initiation. This book is crystalline, and makes Evola look all the muddier by comparison. Indeed, what little I could actually understand of Evola's book now seems laughably wrong! (Surprisingly, Lysbeth actually cites Evola in his bibliography, but they don't seem to have been working from the same page.) Given the choice, skip Evola and get this book instead.