num_pages: 44
description: Since their first discovery of the complex body of texts and traditions known as “Tantra,” Western authors have been at once horrified and tantalized, scandalized and titillated, by this seemingly exotic form of Eastern spirituality. Above all, Western authors have been particularly obsessed with the use of sexual rituals in Tantric practice—phenomenon that was a source of disgusted revulsion for most Christian missionaries and Orientalist scholars, even as it was a source of erotic allure for many European esoteric groups. By the end of the nineteenth century, in fact, Tantra had begun to be appropriated by various European authors and increasingly fused with Western methods of sexual magic.Here is an examination of Tantra’s complex journey to the West in the nineteenth century through one of the most important and today little-known esoteric groups of this era, the Ordo Templi Orientis.
language: English
title: The Yoga of Sex: Tantra, Orientalism, and Sex Magic in the Ordo Templi Orientis
publisher: Academia.edu