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’.
The show contains, moreover, some remarkable things. Among these is an 18th-century Tibetan Buddhist painting on silk, or thangka, depicting two deities, Chakrasamvara and Vajrayogini, intimately entwined. In the accompanying book, Imma Ramos describes the picture: Vajrayogini ‘swings one of her legs over his thigh’. He is blue, with 12 arms and a dangling garland of severed heads, miniature skulls and tiger skin. She is red and naked except for ornaments made of bone. Both have fangs and wild, red-rimmed eyes.
An 18th-century Tibetan Buddhist thangka has the sizzling energy of a Jackson Pollock
Altogether, as a work of art, this is quite an eyeful: the sizzling energy of a Jackson Pollock, the chromatic pizzazz of Kandinsky, plus an overall touch of psychedelic freak-out. One thing this exhibition did for me was to reveal the potential power and beauty of thangkas, which constitute an enormous chapter of art history in themselves.
But in this case, what does it all mean: the fangs and wild sex, the skull filled with foaming blood? Ramos explains the spiritual aspect like this: ‘Only the most ferocious deities can abolish the obstacles to enlightenment.’
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