ABSTRACT
This chapter refers to the 'global outreach of Tantra', and how its thoroughly sensory ritual praxis could even conduce to the 're-enchantment' of the globalised world of Western modernity. The pervasive ritual use of traditional mandalas of male and female deities in union neatly encapsulates author's three themes. First, these mandalic deities model the theme of the yogic construction of the divinised self-image of the Tantric, based on her meditative experience of the unio mystica. Second, the conjoined deities enact the lila or erotic sport that underlies Indic cosmogony, its vivid play and pleasure pointing to the theme of bhoga or wellbeing that Tantric praxis generates. Finally, the complementarity of the two deities renders the theme of gender-mutuality, as graphically represented in the iconography of Ardhanariswara/Ardhanariswari. The chapter shows how these themes#8212;and particularly that of pleasure/play—can enable the transmutation of the individual practitioner's world through his or her experience of shringara-rasa, or the hedonistic-aesthetic experience of Tantric ecstasy.
