With the publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud concluded that all our instincts fall into one of two major categories: Eros (life instincts, including sexual instincts) or Thanatos (death instincts). Sex and Death are undoubtedly two potent forces that drive humankind, but what if the power of these energies could be harnessed and used to produce enlightenment? This is one of the central questions, but by no means the only one, explored in Tantra: enlightenment to revolution, a major exhibition of more than 100 objects, curated by Imma Ramos and currently on show at the British Museum.
Prior to this, the first exhibition of its kind to be held in the West –named simply Tantra – was curated by Philip Rawson (1924-1995) at the Hayward Gallery in 1971. At the time, Rawson was Keeper of the Oriental Museum (then known as the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art and Archaeology) at the University of Durham, where there were galleries devoted to both Tantric and Daoist art. He was also a lecturer on the undergraduate Indian Civilisation course and the author of many books on art, including two definitive volumes on Tantra. In one of them, Tantra: The Indian Cult of Ecstasy (published by Thames & Hudson, 1973), he writes beguilingly:
Tantra has no dealing with fantasy. What it describes and maps is a world of realities, a world which may only be visited by following the maps. It is there to be found; but someone who has not visited it can have no idea what it is like. For there is no way of examining it from the outside. It is what we are – although we don’t usually realise the fact – and we can never step out of it to take an analytical view.
