ABSTRACT
The author argues that South Asian Tantra—'the true "great tradition" of South Asian religion', according to White—functions as a powerful hologram, which encapsulates three core themes in the Indic civilisation. First, the said deities function as a template for the ritual and experiential construction of a divinised self-image, based on a mystically generated sense of identity. Second, Tantric sadhana aims to ritually replicate the overt ecstasy of our conjoined deities, and parlay it into the realm of enstasy, which is Eliade's term for the experience of mystical union. Third, the visual symmetry of the united deities neatly posit the third theme of gender-mutuality or -complementarity. This is based on the pan-Indic ideology of Samkhya, which underpins the whole yoga complex and ipso facto the Tantric traditions, such that it lies at the very core of the Indic axiology, as captured in the iconography of the divine hermaphrodite Ardhanariswara—or Ardhanaariswari.
