ABSTRACT
The early Modernist period, 1880–1930, is marked by many new, ‘non-respectable’ interests: occult and pagan revival (including witchcraft and the Mother Goddess, both reminiscent of the Tantric cult of yoginis and ‘mothers’), resurgent pan-sexualist views of religious origins, elaborate Indo-Tibetan cosmo-conceptions, extraordinary epistemologies, and the darker, vernacular side of the oriental religions. Where the arts availed themselves of these often surprising materials – of strange Eastern cosmologies, of yogic lore and Theosophical doctrines about ‘man invisible’ with their accompanying fluidic, ‘electro-magnetic’, photic, energetic and sonic theologies – the results might be said to amount to a home-grown form of ‘tantra’ (lower case): or at least to converge with the later elite, ‘aestheticized’ Tantric tradition. As defined by White, this form of Tantra is characterized by its ‘progressive refinement of antinomian practice into a gnoseological system grounded in the aesthetics of vision and audition’, and transformation of ‘particles of love’ into ‘particles of speech’ (White 2003: 242).
