Magic is lay intransigence in the face of priestcraft. A little tradition of ghosts and hobgoblins, yakshis and yakshas, has always survived beside the great faiths, tugging them back into line from time to time. The appearance of the yogini has been linked with tantric practices about the middle of the first millennium, around the time the gods were beginning to petrify in every sense, practices aimed at allowing the devotee to experience godhead in her own way, ways that transgress the norms of orthodox piety. To this day, tantrism is commonly perceived as a debased version of higher forms of worship, and yet for the 5th-century BCE scholar Panini (he of the first grammar), tantra is the loom on which a person weaves himself or herself. Two thousand years later, the poet-saint Kabir, a weaver, speaks to the hearts of ordinary persons hungry for unmediated access to God. Poem after poem upends fixed notions of the Indian personality as a construct eternally embedded in family and tradition. Take your fate in your own hands, Kabir urges, mocking patriarchs and godmen of every stripe. It is an old and inward voice, another of those recusant folkways a jobbing priest would...
from Scroll.in https://scroll.in/article/1093281/a-new-book-follows-the-figure-of-the-yogini-from-ancient-stone-carvings-to-foreign-museums?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=public https://sc0.blr1.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/article/213734-prygoduzzl-1780396960.jpg
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