A complex body of religious practices that spread throughout the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions; a form of spirituality that seemingly combines sexuality, sensual pleasure, and the full range ...of physical experience with the religious life—Tantra has held a central yet conflicted role within the Western imagination ever since the first "discovery" of Indian religions by European scholars. Always radical, always extremely Other, Tantra has proven a key factor in the imagining of India. This book offers a critical account of how the phenomenon has come to be. Tracing the complex genealogy of Tantra as a category within the history of religions, Hugh B. Urban reveals how it has been formed through the interplay of popular and scholarly imaginations. Tantra emerges as a product of mirroring and misrepresentation at work between East and West--a dialectical category born out of the ongoing play between Western and Indian minds. Combining historical detail, textual analysis, popular cultural phenomena, and critical theory, this book shows Tantra as a shifting amalgam of fantasies, fears, and wish-fulfillment, at once native and Other, that strikes at the very heart of our constructions of the exotic Orient and the contemporary West.
Scientology is one of the wealthiest and most powerful new religions to emerge in the past century. To its detractors, L. Ron Hubbard's space-age mysticism is a moneymaking scam and sinister ...brainwashing cult. But to its adherents, it is humanity's brightest hope. Few religious movements have been subject to public scrutiny like Scientology, yet much of what is written about the church is sensationalist and inaccurate. Here for the first time is the story of Scientology's protracted and turbulent journey to recognition as a religion in the postwar American landscape.
This article examines the changing nature of Tantra in the digital era by focusing on three online
tāntrik
practitioners from Assam. The region of Assam has a long reputation as the quintessential ...“land of black magic,” and this reputation has continued in the realm of the internet and online
tāntrik
services. The article argues that these Assamese cyber-
tāntrika
s reflect at least three key transformations in the practice and representation Tantra. First, they represent a profound challenge to traditional forms of
tāntrik
authority and a new kind of digital authority—what Heidi A. Campbell calls “alogorhythmic authority”—whereby one gains status and reputation not through established religious institutions but rather through the amplifying power of social media platforms. Second, they reflect the ways in which Tantra in the popular imagination has been largely identified with black magic and also combined with a wide variety of other magical practices from around the globe, most commonly with a (highly stereotyped) version of Voodoo. Finally, they reflect a kind of “Americanized” version of Tantra, which is defined primarily in terms of sex, love, and romance—though also with a uniquely Indian twist and a special focus on the dynamics of marriage, family, and caste relations.
Sexuality and the occult arts have long been associated in the western imagination, but it was not until the nineteenth century that a large and sophisticated body of literature on sexual magic—the ...use of sex as a source of magical power—emerged. This book, the first history of western sexual magic as a modern spiritual tradition, places these practices in the context of the larger discourse surrounding sexuality in American and European society over the last 150 years to discover how sexual magic was transformed from a terrifying medieval nightmare of heresy and social subversion into a modern ideal of personal empowerment and social liberation. Focusing on a series of key figures including American spiritualist Paschal Beverly Randolph, Aleister Crowley, Julius Evola, Gerald Gardner, and Anton LaVey, Hugh Urban traces the emergence of sexual magic out of older western esoteric traditions including Gnosticism and Kabbalah, which were progressively fused with recently-discovered eastern traditions such as Hindu and Buddhist Tantra. His study gives remarkable new insight into sexuality in the modern era, specifically on issues such as the politics of birth control, the classification of sexual “deviance,” debates over homosexuality and feminism, and the role of sexuality in our own new world of post-modern spirituality, consumer capitalism, and the Internet.
This article examines the modern transformations of the temple of the goddess, Kāmākhyā, and her most important festival, Ambuvācī Melā, in Assam. Since at least the eighth century, Kāmākhyā has been ...revered as one of the most important 'seats of power' or centres of the goddess that dot the landscape of South Asia. However, during the last century, this temple and its festivals have undergone a series of profound transformations-first, in the context of Hindu nationalism and attempts to imagine a unified sacred landscape of 'Mother India', and second, in the context of spiritual tourism and efforts to develop the Northeast region as a new economic powerhouse for the twenty-first century.
Zorba the Buddha Urban, Hugh B
2016., 20160126, 2016, 2016-01-12
eBook
Zorba the Buddhais the first comprehensive study of the life, teachings, and following of the controversial Indian guru known in his youth as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and in his later years as Osho ...(1931-1990). Most Americans today remember him only as the "sex guru" and the "Rolls Royce guru," who built a hugely successful but scandal-ridden utopian community in central Oregon during the 1980s. Yet Osho was arguably the first truly global guru of the twentieth century, creating a large transnational movement that traced a complex global circuit from post-Independence India of the 1960s to Reagan's America of the 1980s and back to a developing new India in the 1990s. The Osho movement embodies some of the most important economic and spiritual currents of the past forty years, emerging and adapting within an increasingly interconnected and conflicted late-capitalist world order. Based on extensive ethnographic and archival research, Hugh Urban has created a rich and powerful narrative that is a must-read for anyone interested in religion and globalization.
The Third Wall of Fire Urban, Hugh B.
Nova religio,
05/2017, Letnik:
20, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article examines the role of secrecy in the Church of Scientology, focusing on one of the most confidential and least studied aspects of the Church’s advanced auditing levels—Operating Thetan ...VIII. I use this example as a way of highlighting the complex ethical and epistemological problems in the study of secrecy in new religions. Here, I suggest an alternative approach to the study of secrecy by shifting our gaze away from the attempt to uncover the content of the secret and instead focusing on the more visible forms and strategies through which secrets are maintained, transmitted, revealed and concealed. I trace the “history of a secret” by examining five periods and five key strategies in the Operating Thetan materials from the late 1960s to the present: the advertisement of the secret; secrecy as an adorning possession; the litigation of the secret; the liability of the secret; and the irrelevance of the secret. Finally, I conclude with reflections on the comparative implications of this example for the study of new religions more broadly.
New Age, Neopagan, and New Religious Movementsis the most extensive study to date of modern American alternative spiritual currents. Hugh B. Urban covers a range of emerging religions from the ...mid-nineteenth century to the present, including the Nation of Islam, Mormonism, Scientology, ISKCON, Wicca, the Church of Satan, Peoples Temple, and the Branch Davidians. This essential text engages students by addressing major theoretical and methodological issues in the study of new religions and is organized to guide students in their learning. Each chapter focuses on one important issue involving a particular faith group, providing readers with examples that illustrate larger issues in the study of religion and American culture.Urban addresses such questions as, Why has there been such a tremendous proliferation of new spiritual forms in the past 150 years, even as our society has become increasingly rational, scientific, technological, and secular? Why has the United States become the heartland for the explosion of new religious movements? How do we deal with complex legal debates, such as the use of peyote by the Native American Church or the practice of plural marriage by some Mormon communities? And how do we navigate issues of religious freedom and privacy in an age of religious violence, terrorism, and government surveillance?
Este artículo analiza el tantra hindú y la adoración de la diosa en el noreste de la India. Para esto se vale de varias de las ideas de Bataille sobre el erotismo, el sacrificio y la transgresión, al ...tiempo que las repiensa de manera crítica. Específicamente, analiza la adoración de la diosa Kamakhya y su templo en Assam, que es venerado como uno de los más antiguos «centros de poder» o asientos de la diosa en el sur de Asia y como el centro del órgano sexual de la diosa. En muchos sentidos, el trabajo de Bataille es extremadamente útil para comprender la lógica de la transgresión y el uso de la impureza en esta tradición. Al mismo tiempo, sin embargo, este ejemplo también pone de manifiesto algunas tensiones en el trabajo de Bataille, especialmente, la cuestión de la sexualidad femenina y la representación de las mujeres. En el caso del tantra asamés, la sexualidad femenina juega un papel central e integral en los fenómenos más amplios de la transgresión, los gastos y el éxtasis en la experiencia religiosa. Como tal, se puede poner fructíferamente en diálogo con el trabajo de Bataille para una «teoría de la religión» crítica en la actualidad.Abstract: This article examines Hindu Tantra and goddess worship in northeastern India, by using but also critically rethinking several of Bataille’s insights into eroticism, sacrifice, and transgression. Specifically, the article examines the worship of the goddess Kamakhya and her temple in Assam, which is revered as one of the oldest “power centers” or seats of the goddess in South Asia and as the locus of the goddess’s sexual organ. In many ways, Bataille’s work is extremely useful for understanding the logic of transgression and the use of impurity in this tradition. At the same time, however, this example also highlights some tensions in Bataille’s work, particularly the question of female sexuality and women’s agency. In the case of Assamese Tantra, female sexuality plays a central and integral role in the larger phenomena of transgression, expenditure, and ecstatic religious experience. As such, it can be fruitfully put into dialogue with Bataille’s work for a critical “theory of religion” today.
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