What is a Tantra?
Tantra (Sk.). Lit., “rule or ritual”. Certain mystical and magical works, whose chief peculiarity is the worship of the female power,
personified in Sakti. Devî or Durgâ (Kâlî, Siva’s wife) is the special energy connected with sexual rites and magical powers—the worst
form of black magic or sorcery.
[The language used in such works is highly symbolic, and the creed formulas are little more than algebraic
expressions without any profitable key to the present. (Râma Prasâd).
Most of the Tantras are dedicated to
one of the many forms of Ziva's wife, and are written in the form of a dialogue between the two divinities.
These books are very useful, helpful and instructive; find in them all the hidden science; but they can be
divided into three classes; those who try white magic, those who deal with black magic and those who try what
we can call gray magic, a mixture of one and the other. The Tantras contain everything related to Magic,
the hidden side of man and nature, the means by which discoveries can be made, the principles by which man
can create himself again; All this is found in the Tantras. The difficulty of the case is that such books
are very dangerous if one does not have a teacher to guide him, especially if he tries to put the methods
in them into practice. Another difficulty is that the tantric works contain several "veils" that prevent
seeing the truth clearly and nakedly; either with regard to the accuracy of the chakras and padmas (lotuses or plexuses)
of the human body, or as regards the colors of the various tattvas, or the true number of these. (Doctr. Secr., III, 509).
On the other hand, these works often use the name of an organ of the body to represent an astral or mental center.
There is some reason for this, because all the centers of the various bodies (physical, astral, mental) are in mutual
relationship and correspondence; but no trustworthy teacher will allow his disciple to work on his bodily organs
until he has acquired some mastery over the higher centers and even carefully purified the physical body. "Read the Tantras,
if you want, by way of teaching; they are really interesting, but don't practice them without an explanatory explanation:
the health of your body goes into it." (A. Besant, Introduction to Yoga, 22-23).
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