Spectacular and mind-expanding: Tantra at the British Museum reviewed

A great temple of the goddess Tara can be found at Tarapith in West Bengal. But her true abode, in the view of many devotees, is not this sacred structure itself but the adjacent, eerily smoking cremation ground. There she can be glimpsed in the shadows at midnight, it is believed, drinking the blood of the goats sacrificed to her during the day. Many holy men and women live in that grisly spot too, adorned with dreadlocks, smeared with ash, and dwelling in huts decorated with lines of skulls painted crimson.

As a domestic setting this wouldn’t suit everybody. But the varieties of religious experience (to borrow the title of a celebrated work by William James) are many and extremely diverse. Tantra: enlightenment to revolution, a new exhibition at the British Museum, does a good deal to explain imagery and practices such as these, which are hard to comprehend for someone brought up to think of religion in terms of George Orwell’s ‘old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’.