The Tantrik 'immortality of the body' 'tis but a metaphor - one should never read a literal meaning into the Tantras - read them literally, and one will quickly end up on a quiet evening rendezvous with only Kenneth Grant for company and a long dark slippery tunnel to Set...
Tantrik practice is mentioned in the Rig Veda; look up Eliade's theory on the Vratya, who are clearly proto-Tantric (and of course, in Eliade's opinion Shamanic also).
It is indeed a curious little quotation; I don't see how he can equate the few (obviously) female deities in the Rig Veda as demonic? With Nirrti I can see the statement standing, but not with others such as Vac and Usas.
vandermok <vandermok@...> wrote:
The difference between the gold-making process and the one concerning the elixir and/or body of immortality is apparent, because gold, diamond, cinnabar, rainbow, radiance, and so on, are all images of that golden embryo or body.Alchemy, being the Ars Regia, the regal art of the Khsatriya, looks closer to the solar-Aryan principle and far from the lunar one, even if we got the merry alchemist 'Mary the Jewess or the Egyptian', legendary mistress of Cleopatra, who invented the famous Bain Marie…Only apparently Coomaraswamy does not agree, considering mostly androgynous the human nature, in fact, in the attempt to relativize the racial meaning of the word Aryan, he writes:"We are all Aryans from the paternal side and all not Aryans from the maternal one, because the feminine principle is always demonic (Asura's) in the Rig-Veda; we are child of the day and of the night, of the fire and of the water, our existence itself coming from an exogamy and a double generation, and by consequence we are heirs of a bilateral symmetry; see correlation between the right eye and Indra, and the left eye and Indrani in Sh. Br. X, 5, 2, and the Upanishads" ('La doctrine du sacrifice', Dervy, Paris 1978).I wonder if Coomaraswamy realized that considering the male-paternal heritage Aryan and the feminine-maternal (and demonic!) one not Aryan, is going even beyond the racial significance. A curious comment, from the mouth of an author (apparently ignored by Evola) always eager to please to the West by his parallels between Bible, Rig-Veda and Upanishads.
Three heavens there are; two Savitar's, adjacent:
In Yama's world is one, home of heroes.
As on a linch-pin, firm, rest things immortal:
He who hath known it, let him here declare it.
- Rig Veda I.35 (Griffith)
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