Review

Reviewed Work(s):
Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahāvidyās
by David Kinsley
Review by: Hugh B. Urban
Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 79, No. 1 (Jan., 1999), pp. 179-181
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1207085
Accessed: 25-04-2024 15:51 +00:00

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 Book Reviews

religious reformers in nineteenth-century India. Thus, in her fascinating accou

of Khan's prophetology, she explores how he internalized Sufi attitudes of love
and devotion and the Sufi notion of the pir as intermediary between this worl
and the next. Khan's discipleship with the Barkatiyya pirs of Marahra, who wer
descendants of the Prophet as well as renowned Sufi pirs, allowed him to create
unique blend of personal devotion and reformist legal rhetoric. Sanyal proves
convincingly that there is no simple dichotomy between reformist Islam and Su
practice, as is frequently (and simplistically) depicted in the literature. The iss
of Khan's attitudes to colonial rule and to technology is less clear. He was conten
for the most part to acquiesce in the British presence and did not condemn ad
vances in the fields of print, communications, and travel. However, Sanyal me
tions in passing that "when mailing a postcard he would deliberately affix th
stamp (which had a picture of Queen Victoria on it) upside down as a mark of
disrespect to the Queen" (p. 298).
All in all, this is a book that marks a welcome direction in studies of religion
By focusing on religious conflict and debate, Usha Sanyal succeeds commendabl
in moving the discussion toward the complex constitution of religious identity
toward historical conjunctures and personal agency, and toward the all-importan
question of politics and religion. One hopes that there will be many more book
like it in the future.
ADITYA BEHL, University of California, Berkeley.

KINSLEY, DAVID. Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahdvidyds. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. x+318 pp. $45.00
(cloth); $16.95 (paper).

Amid the vast and rapidly growing body of literature on goddesses, sacred sexual-
ity, and Tantrism, it is a welcome relief to come upon a book that is as thorough,
well researched, and yet also as refreshingly readable as David Kinsley's latest
work, Tantric Visions of the Divine. As his subject, Kinsley has chosen to focus on
what is, to most Western readers, perhaps the most perplexing, even shocking
and disturbing, collection of Indian goddesses-the ten Mahavidyas, or "God-
desses of Great Wisdom." Displaying the most violent, terrifying, and offensive
aspects of the Hindu religious imagination, the Mahavidyas are goddesses who
wear garlands of human skulls, who sever their own heads, who prefer to be
worshipped with offerings of blood and semen, or who have sex astride their male
consorts in the midst of cremation grounds. In this rich and provocative study,
Kinsley assembles a wide range of important textual materials while at the same
time offering some intriguing insights into their deeper religious significance.
In part 1, Kinsley gives us a broad overview of the Mahavidyas as a group, with
general accounts of their mythological origins, their worship, and their icono-
graphic representations. Typically identified as the goddesses Kali, TPar, Tripura-
sundari, Bhuvaneivari, Chinnamasta, Bhairavi, Dhfimavati, Bagalamukhi, Ma-
tafigi, and Kamala, the Mahavidyas as a group represent the fiercest and most
aggressive side of the Hindu goddess, associated in may cases with violence, im-
purity, sexual immorality, and antinomian behavior. In part 2, Kinsley then turns
to a more detailed analysis of each of the ten Mahavidyas. Here, in what is per-
haps the most informative portion of the book, Kinsley provides a large amount
of important material on some of the lesser known of these goddesses-such as
the more obscure and seldom worshipped figures of Bhuvaneivari, Chinnamasta,

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The Journal of Religion

Bagalamukhi, or Matafigi. Finally, in part 3, he offers some concluding reflections

and interpretations, suggesting that these powerful, often shocking, goddesses
represent the "liberating nature of antimodels"-that is, the power of such images
to shatter our conventional conceptual or social structures, to break apart our
typical way of seeing the world, and to open the space for new freedom.
On the whole, like all of Kinsley's work, this is a well-written, often quite enter-
taining book that assembles a large amount of valuable textual material and offers
some provocative insights into the meaning of these goddesses in the Indian reli-
gious imagination. The Mahavidyas are at once an inherently fascinating and
historically significant set of goddesses that have seldom if ever been treated sys-
tematically by either Western or Indian scholars. But perhaps most provocative
are Kinsley's interpretive insights and his comments on the liminal and poten-
tially subversive nature of the Mahavidyas-their power to challenge our estab-
lished way of seeing the world, to shatter normal social structures, and to awaken
us into a different way of experiencing reality (pp. 6-7, 251 ff.).
Despite its undeniable importance and general enjoyability, however, Kinsley's
work is somewhat disappointing in several respects. The first is simply that it
offers so little that is new and retreads so much of the familiar ground that Kin-
sley has already covered in earlier books. Kinsley has dealt extensively with Kali
and with the liminal, antisocial, liberating aspects of the goddess in at least three
other books, and, apart from the useful material on the individual goddesses, this
book offers few original theoretical or comparative insights.
Second, and more important, Kinsley's approach is generally quite ahistorical,
ignoring the changing significance of the individual Mahavidyas amid the shifting
course of Indian history. He never raises the central questions, for example, of
why these goddesses might have emerged when they did in Indian history, how
they have changed and been transformed through time, and how their follow-
ing-which has ranged from tribals and untouchables to Brahmins and Rajas-
might have changed in different historical periods.
The third and perhaps most troubling problem with Kinsley's work is its lack
of social and cultural context-that is, just who is it really that worships these
goddesses? In numerous places throughout the text, Kinsley suggests that the
Mahavidyas are associated primarily with low-class or marginal groups, wor-
shipped primarily by "criminals, tribals and members of low castes in uncivilized
and wild places" (p. 70); they are, moreover, said to be "liberating and empow-
ering" for women in particular, for whom they "violate approved social values,
customs, norms or paradigms" and transgress "the approved model for Hindu
women" (pp. 6-7).
This raises two troubling problems: first, Kinsley provides no real solid social
or historical evidence to support his claim that these goddesses are in fact wor-
shipped primarily by lower classes, nor does he ever acknowledge the striking
fact that many of these goddesses-such as Kali or Tripura-sundari-have long
been worshipped by affluent elites and upper classes as well as by those on the
lower end of the social hierarchy. Indeed, many of the texts he cites-above all,
the great Sanskrit Tantras-were composed not by criminals and outcasts but
rather by high-class, and in many cases very respected, Brahmins. Second, even
if these goddesses were worshipped by lower and marginal classes, this does not
necessarily mean that they provide a source of social freedom or liberation from
the boundaries of the caste system. On the contrary, one could just as easily ar-
gue-as have many scholars in the case of "carnivalesque" festivals such as Holi
or in the case of goddess worship more generally-that they may only function

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 Book Reviews

as a temporary outlet or safety-valve for social tensions, thereby reinforcing socia

and gender hierarchies in a more subtle form.
Despite these and other minor weaknesses, however, Kinsley's work is both a
highly readable and very useful discussion of an important body of mythic trad
tions that have seldom been treated by previous scholarship. As such, it is a te
that should be taken seriously, not only by South Asianists but by any historian o
religions who enjoys a provocative and entertaining book.
HUGH B. URBAN, Ohio State University.

IRWIN, LEE. The Dream Seekers: Native American Visionary Traditions of the Great Plain
Civilization of the American Indian, vol. 213. Norman: University of Oklahom
Press, 1994. xii+306 pp. $13.95 (paper).

The goal of the The Dream Seekers is to understand the content of Great Plain
visionary accounts in terms of their mythological, ecological, personal, and soci
worlds. In this sense, Lee Irwin's study represents an important empirical contr
bution to worldview analysis. The analysis is an eloquent portrait of the entiret
of individual visionary experience and shows how dreaming contributes to bot
cultural innovation and continuity (p. 5). Irwin demonstrates the profoundly di
logical complexity of the search, attainment, actualization, and sharing of th
visionary experience, and he shows how dreaming plays an essential role in the
formation and maintenance of Great Plains mythology (p. 7).
Irwin's strategy in uncovering the elusive aspects of visionary experience is
tripartite analytical scheme. The first or descriptive level explores the ethno
graphic and religious contexts of 550 dreams recorded in the Great Plains an
other regions during the nineteenth and up to the middle of the twentieth centu-
ries. The second or intentional level concerns the context of "meaning and pur
pose in the life of the visionary" (p. 5). Intentionality refers to the lived experi
ence of the dreamer and the way dreams pattern social behavior and "enhanc
religious identity" (p. 4). The third or interpretive level concerns "meaningfu
structures of communication in a context of highly divergent perspectives" (p. 5
The result is an elegant interpretation of Great Plains visionary worlds and
topologies. In the process we gain insight into Great Plains cosmography, the
organizing principles of visionary episteme, the acquisition of dreaming power
the formal aspects of the vision quest, encounters with beings in the religiou
topology, the transfer of power from such beings to the visionary, the dialogic
aspects of dream telling, mythic discourse as an expression of the visionary epi
tem6, and the role of enactment and artistic media in conveying visionary expe
rience.
I have a few friendly, but critical, comments on Irwin's methodology. His study
is broadly comparative and is a welcome alternative to the literature. But as Irwin
himself indicates, there is no linguistic control of the text material, which is all in
English, and the texts have not been subjected to critical evaluation. Further-
more, the analysis is not supported by Irwin's own fieldwork. Thus, focusing on
content and the idealized role it plays in indigenous discourse, Irwin is hardly in
the position to show how Great Plains religions are actually lived.
Irwin wishes to support a "religious interpretation of dreaming as primary and
irreducible to other interpretive models of a nonreligious sort" (p. 7). But his
subsequent claims about the Native American visionary episteme, however cor-
rect they may be in the experience of Great Plains visionaries, are clothed in the

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