IV. The Worldly Side of Power: Sorcery, Malign Magic and the attainment of Supernatural Powers

The danger risked by boundary transgression is power. The vulnerable margins which threaten to destroy order represent powers in the cosmos. ..Ritual which can harness these...is harnessing power indeed.

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger⁸¹

The presence of malevolent rituals, so-called "black magic" and the acquisition of occult powers within the Tantras has long posed a troubling problem for Western scholars. For the early Orientalists, this was a clear sign of the corruption and degeneracy that had infected the Tantric tradition, rotting it to its very core. For more recent, more apologetic scholars, who wish to defend the more philosophical side of Tantra this has posed more of an embarrassment. Most Western scholars have downplayed the importance of the siddhis in Indian yogic and Tantric traditions, writing them off as a kind of by-product or dangerous hindrance to yogic practice. If the true aim of Tantric yoga is spiritual liberation, then such worldly attainments can only be "later degenerations," or "secondary accretions on the path to liberation."⁸² But in fact, as David Lorenzen and others have shown, the siddhis are truly of central importance to most yogic schools, and above all to the tāntrikas.⁸³ Rather than dismiss them as mere accretions or distractions, I would argue that these sorts of occults powers are an integral part of Śākta Tantra and its very this-worldly notion of power. Tantric practice does not simply liberate the sādhaka into some otherworldly state of bliss, but rather, it infuses him with a mastery over the temporal world and the categories of the social order.⁸⁴

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