3

The Second Root

Christ-Shakti as Divine Activity

And so I saw that God enjoys being our Father, and God enjoys being our Mother.

ST. JULIAN OF NORWICH

He who is Brahman is also Shakti. When thought of as inactive, He is called Brahman, and when thought of as Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer, he is called the Primordial Energy, Kali.

SRI RAMAKRISHNA

As a university student I lived in a Christian seminary community in New York while studying Hinduism and Buddhism to obtain my degree in Asian studies. One of the many benefits of my communal religious life at that time was that various elders would come and visit with us college students, join us for a meal, and offer a workshop or lecture on some aspect of social justice or the spiritual life. On this particular evening, a forty-something priest, with an energetic voice and kind, deep-set eyes, was helping us learn to explore the sacred imagination. As the last rays of sunlight disappeared from the windows of our chapel, he explained how we could tap a profound source of knowledge through the archetypes and holy images of the deep imagination. There were about fifteen of us seated in a circle, all focused on this evening’s visiting guru as he took his seat among us.

First, he had us close our eyes and let our breath become deep and slow. After some minutes of this relaxation, aided by some ambient music, we were invited to imaginatively inhabit a place of peace and beauty, ideally a natural place. I chose an overgrown grotto near my high school where my friends and I would go when we wanted to get away from the pressures of school and family and enjoy the restorative company of plants, grasses, flowers, and trees that all grew along the grotto hill, meeting the lazy waters of the local canal. Using my imagination, I remembered the sights, smells, and textures of the grotto. Soon I was no longer in my chair seated in a circle. I was there in the grotto.

“Now, remain in the place you’ve selected,” our facilitator suggested. “You will have twenty more minutes. Don’t force anything, don’t make anything happen, but just gently hold this suggestion: perhaps, during this time, you’ll have an encounter with Christ. But don’t make it happen.” I settled down on the grass in my imaginative grotto, just looking around, hearing the branches sway in the breeze, again fully transported to my imagined locale. Within what may have been just a few minutes, I heard a rustling in the high grass to my right. Not knowing whom or what to expect, I hoped it would be Jesus. After all, I wanted to succeed in the exercise!

The rustling came closer. I turned to look. The jaw of my imaginal self dropped open as I saw a beautiful woman approaching me wearing a thin and flowy white dress that shone with a light so bright that her figure eclipsed the sunshine that flooded my grotto. She was ethereally graceful, angelically beautiful, with long blue-black hair cascading down her shoulders and framing her almond eyes. Her white dress, made of several layers, was both elegant and alluring. Its long flowing fabric highlighted the gracefulness of her figure and her movements. I was transfixed.

She approached me, standing very close, and looked lovingly into my eyes. She reached for my face and held my cheek with her right hand. I felt my whole body become alive from her touch. She was just a bit taller than I was, and so I looked up slightly to meet her eyes. She leaned closer and kissed me gently, but fully, on the mouth. Immediately I felt a salvo of energy ignite in my body, filling me with an intense pleasure and a vitality I had never known before. What I now understand as an experience of connection with deep eros seemed both momentary and eternal. It was as if the whole grotto existed for this kiss, as if my whole self and life were created for just this moment of unfolding union.

In what seemed just a minute later, the ambient music (which my hearing had lost track of) began to fade out, and a meditation bowl was rung. “Begin to come back now,” the facilitator said. “Bid goodbye to your imagined place, and slowly come back to the circle. Move your toes and fingers, wrists and ankles, and when you are ready, open your eyes.” What a surprise; I had forgotten about him, the circle, the chapel. I had to take my time in coming back. I felt a strange mixture of elation and exhaustion in my body, and in my mind I felt utterly confused. I was supposed to have met Christ. Had I? If so, this was a very different face of Christ than I had been acculturated to expect. If not, then who was this sacred and clearly powerful feminine figure?

Next, we went around the circle to share our experiences. My fellow meditators related stories and images more like what I had expected to find in my grotto. Some had talked with the resurrected Jesus, who repeated some scripture to them and looked just like he did in a children’s Bible. To some he had shown the nail holes in his hands. Others saw him surrounded by a bright light, as in the story of the Transfiguration in the Bible. And then it was my turn to share. I did my best to relate my experience of the woman in white. At some point, I started to weep and lost my words. I think I managed to stammer out the basics of what had happened.

My fellow seminarians, to my surprise, laughed at this experience. “You’re always thinking about girls!” one friend chided. Well, maybe that was true. Even so, I felt dejected, misunderstood. What had gone wrong? What had even happened? These and other questions floated around in my head and my heart, both still partly resident in the grotto, as we got up to leave the chapel at the end of our time together. As we filed out quietly, the facilitator sought me out.

“Don’t be bummed out by your friends’ teasing,” he said. His face became serious and he lowered his voice, as if he were sharing a secret. “What you experienced was real. In fact, you may have been the only person here to have had an authentic experience of Christ tonight. Your friends saw what was already in their conscious imaginations. It sounds like what you encountered came from the deep imaginal, that holy level I was talking about. Go back to that grotto, to that kiss, and explore what it means. It was real, and it was Christ.”

It was real, and it was Christ. This feminine figure, who could communicate in a kiss the very vitality and ecstasy and power of the eros that drives the whole world forward—stones, seas, plants, animals, and people—was real, and was Christ. Now let us explore just how this figure was Christ, and how such a Christ connects us with Tantra.

We have already seen that in tantric thought, the Godhead (Satchitananda or being-consciousness-bliss) is often expressed and experienced as the divine pair Shiva-Shakti. Shiva and Shakti are not ultimately two separable realities. To see Shiva and Shakti as two deities would be as incorrect as to say that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity means Christians have three gods: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (and they do not). Rather, like the “persons” of the Christian Trinity, Shiva and Shakti are expressions or faces (hypostases) of the Godhead, Satchitananda:

I offer my love to the God and Goddess,

The limitless primal parents of the universe . . .

Both are made of the same substance

And share the same food.

Out of love for each other, they merge.

And again they separate for the pleasure of being two.

They are not entirely the same—

Nor are they not the same.

We cannot say what they really are. ¹

THE SHAKTI OF GOD

Shiva, the masculine face of this inseparable pair, corresponds with those dimensions of divinity that are absolute, impersonal, changeless, pure spirit, and unembodied being. Shakti, the feminine half of the holy couple, embodies those aspects of the Godhead that have to do with manifestation, actuality, particularity, and change. Shakti is, we can say, the “dynamism of God.” It is Shakti who is present within creation and its evolutionary processes, from the great to the small. Shakti is “the Creatrix of the universe,”² the force behind the Big Bang. Shakti is the energy driving bacterial conjugation. Shakti’s voice is the whine of a dog for his master, the low roar of an avalanche, the cries of human lovemaking, the crash of the seashore, and the final rattling exhalation of death. All embodied being, subject to time and change, expresses the nature of Shakti.

Psychological, spiritual, and emotional activity, too, is driven by Shakti. In Indian thought—both Vedanta and Tantra—aspects of consciousness that are changeable and subject to process are considered part of prakriti (nature or created matter) and therefore an expression of Shakti. As Swami Sivananda puts it, Shakti is the kinetic energy of God, God’s activity:

Lord Siva is quite indifferent to the external world. . . . He is absorbed in contemplation of the Self. . . . He has handed over the power of attorney to His consort, Durga [one form of Shakti]. It is Mother Durga only who looks after the affairs of the world. Lord Siva (Purusha) gazes at Prakriti (Durga, His Sakti). She engages herself in creation, preservation and destruction.³

The feminine aspect of the Divine also represents wisdom, power, and delight.⁴ We embody Shakti through our physical and mental processes, including our engagement with holy wisdom. The deep desire that drives us to seek such wisdom in the first place is also Shakti. The curiosity to open and read this book is Shakti. “If Brahman [Godhead] is the goal, Shakti provides both the path and the power to traverse it.”⁵ Shakti lives in the human person in a particularly powerful and catalytic form. Shakti is resident within us, ready to awaken and transform us through a process so powerful and totalizing that it can be best described as a rebirth into a new life, a divine life. In this birthing process and in the gestation period of spiritual practice that leads up to it, it is Shakti who nurtures us and bears us as our mother.

SHAKTI AS MOTHER KALI

The divine feminine has worn many faces across diverse cultures and through the millennia. From the double-tailed mermaid Yemaya of Afro-Caribbean religion to the Indian warrior goddess Durga astride her tiger to the fierce yet loving black Madonnas of France and Germany, each face of Shakti speaks to one, or several, of her characteristics. In many forms of Tantra, Shakti holds a preeminent place; since tantric yoga is about catalyzing transformation, tantric practice itself is an expression of Shakti. Likewise, in its elevation of ecstasy as a spiritual tool, Tantra looks to Shakti.

One particular face of Shakti that is very productive for the tantric yogi, and which relates directly to a Christian Tantra, is the goddess Kali.

Om: Victorious, auspicious Kali, beneficent Kali, who carries the skull, the deliverer, forgiveness, peace, the supporter of all, the Divine offering, the ancestral offering, reverence to You!

Be victorious, Goddess who destroys all passions!

Be victorious, you who remove the afflictions of all beings!

Be victorious, Goddess who pervades all.

As the dark night of time, reverence to You! ⁶

The name Kali is a feminine form of the Sanskrit kala, which means “time,” “black,” and “death.”⁷ The Sanskrit root kal also means “to set in motion” or “to apportion or harmonize.”⁸ In Indian iconography, the goddess Kali is typically black or dark blue (see color plate 1). Kali is dark, like fertile soil, like the infinite night sky, like the womb. And just as black is the absorption of all color, Kali absorbs or destroys the universe at the end of the age, taking all things into herself, bringing to an end each great cycle of existence and then creating the next. This is part of her function as the personification of time.

Dancing mad with joy,

Come, Mother, come!

For Terror is Thy name,

Death is in Thy breath,

And every shaking step

Destroys a world for e’er.

Thou “Time,” the All-Destroyer!

Come, O Mother, come! ⁹

The image of Kali can be as terrifying and off-putting to the uninitiated as is the crucifix, the cross bearing the bleeding, tortured, and dying body of Jesus the Christ. And like the crucifix, for those initiated into her mysteries the image of Kali is a doorway into boundless love, attraction, and devotion. To those who love her, Kali is kalyani, “beautiful,”¹⁰ . . . but beautiful in the way that Rainer Maria Rilke writes about the beauty of angels:

For beauty is nothing

but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,

And we are so awed because it serenely disdains

to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying. ¹¹

Mother Kali is connected with human death, wearing over her blue-black body only a garland of skulls and a girdle of human arms. In one left hand, Kali holds a human head; she has severed the illusion that the ego personality is the ruling center of our identity. In another left hand, she holds a sword, bloody and ready to strike in power to cut away the false attachments that keep us in bondage and ignorance. Her eyes are bulging as if in a frenzy, and her long tongue sticks out from her fanged mouth, dripping with blood. As if this were not terrifying enough, her arms, wrists, and ankles are encircled by snakes, symbols of time, wisdom, and the indwelling divine energy. According to one version of her story, Kali was born from the forehead of the goddess Durga as a more ferocious form of Durga’s own warrior nature in order to conquer a particularly difficult demon, licking up its blood with her tongue so that new demons would not sprout and grow up.

Kali’s right hands make it clear that her fierceness is in service to the tantrikas who worship her: one right hand is in the mudra “be not afraid” while another one directly blesses her beholder. She dances upon the body of Shiva, who lies on his back, naked and sexually aroused. Kali represents the triumph of the Divine over all bonds, fetters, evil, and ignorance. As mistress of time, she governs all processes, including the transformative processes of tantric yoga; she is the great yogini who absorbs all in us that is not aligned with the sacred. Her fierceness is that of a mother defending her children. Her frightfulness is unbridled dynamic power. Her frenzy is the mad energy of love.

In esoteric physiology, Kali abides in the heart chakra (anahata), as well as in the physical heart on the left side of the chest and in the spiritual heart on the right side of the chest.¹² As the great yogini and governess of yogic transformation, Kali inhabits these three heart centers that together form the Great Heart, as this Great Heart serves as the site of tantric self-realization and union with the Divine. As heart-dweller, Kali’s love, like the mystical life itself, is sourced in the erotic, in holy longing. To her disciples and worshippers, Kali is beautiful and magnetic, the object of a desire stronger than that for life itself; in their fervor, her devotees overcome their fear as they seek her presence in cremation grounds during the dark hours of the night:

Who dares misery love,

And hug the form of Death,

Dance in Destruction’s dance,

To him the Mother comes. ¹³

It is her power, and the power of her beloved’s desire for her, that provide the fuel for the explosive work of tantric transformation. Kali, then, for all the shock value of her appearance, is an eminently practical manifestation of God, just as tantric yoga is an eminently practical science. Each aspect of Kali speaks to a facet of spiritual striving in which the aspirant needs the help of Shakti. Without the fierce energy of Kali to decapitate our egos and unbind our fear-based fetters, divinization is not possible. Without utilizing the energy of our deep life of eros, divinization is not possible. Without that powerful grace that surpasses our own ability to engage praxis or change ourselves, divinization is not possible. Sure of her grace and help, however, “we know that all things work together for good for those who love God.”¹⁴ Kali is a sure and loving mother. She is Shakti, the catalyst of salvation for her devotees. For those tantrikas who seek union with God, Kali is indeed a powerful ally helping all things work together for good.

The Bengali saint Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886), likely one of the greatest realized human beings of the modern age, attained his state of yogic actualization primarily through his searing devotion to Kali enshrined in the temple at Dakshineswar, where he served as a priest (though a quite nontraditional one). In her fearsome image in that temple, Ramakrishna saw love and invitation that flamed his desire for union with Kali. Often negligent in the duties of traditional worship, he would spend hours in meditation or singing devotional songs to Kali. Ramakrishna, who engaged in practices from all the global faith traditions, remained fiercely and emotionally tied to Mother Kali. His deep desire for a vision of her, making him feel “as if my heart were being squeezed like a wet towel,”¹⁵ drove him to pick up a sword to end his own life; at that moment, he had his first of many visions of Kali. He described this vision that came as an answer to his primal eros:

I saw a limitless, infinite, effulgent Ocean of Bliss. As far as the eye could see, the shining billows were madly rushing at me from all sides with a terrific noise, to swallow me up. I was panting for breath. I was caught in the rush and collapsed, unconscious . . . within me there was a steady flow of undiluted bliss, altogether new, and I felt the presence of the Divine Mother.¹⁶

The God-intoxicated state became common for Ramakrishna throughout his life, although he often experienced the absence of Kali’s presence. These periods of absence helped fire his deep devotion, his deep desire, for Kali. Disciples tell that sometimes he would nearly collapse due to the emotional intensity of his worship and devotion. Such intense bhakti (devotion) as Ramakrishna practiced brings about not only a temporary state of bliss but more importantly fuels a process of consciousness transformation that Ramakrishna himself explained as the waking of Shakti and her union with Shiva within him: a tantric process.

DIVINE SOPHIA AND THE SHAKTI OF GOD

In the last chapter we looked closely at the first story of Creation found in Genesis in order to unearth how the Christian understanding of the world is a tantric understanding. Closer to the time of Jesus, in the biblical Wisdom of Solomon, the creation story is expressed anew in an even more overtly tantric form. In this text, it is Sophia (the Greek word for wisdom) who is the divine wisdom of God, the creator of the world, the “fashioner of all things.”¹⁷ The narrator recounts how Sophia creates the world, as Shakti does in Eastern Tantra. The author of the Wisdom of Solomon says Sophia is

intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, beneficent, humane, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent, pure, and altogether subtle. For wisdom is more mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things. For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty.¹⁸

The author goes on to say that Sophia can do all things and can renew all things and is an “associate” in God’s works.¹⁹ It is clear here that this Sophia is more than a member of the heavenly court or some type of exalted angel. Saying that she is “all-powerful, overseeing all” and that she “pervades and penetrates all things” the author of the Wisdom of Solomon is functionally establishing Sophia as the divine activity. As Shakti (and Shiva) are both emanations from the pure Godhead Satchitananda, we find that similarly Sophia is a “pure emanation from the glory of the Almighty.” The Wisdom of Solomon is one example of Jewish and Hellenistic writings in the centuries leading up to and including Jesus’s own time that point to a growing understanding of divine activity consonant with the Tantra of India. Sophia in Jewish (and later Christian) theology points to that feminine creative aspect of God, “more mobile than any motion,” as Shakti does in Eastern Tantra.

SHAKTI AND ANCIENT ISRAEL: ASHERAH AND THE FIRST TEMPLE

The introduction of Sophia in the 2nd and 1st centuries before the Common Era was not a new or foreign element to Judaism. According to some scholars, there had been a constant drive among Jews to reimagine and reinstitute the divine feminine into Judaism for centuries ever since Asherah, the consort of Yahweh, was banned from the Temple of Solomon. Supported by much good data, these scholars assert that what became known as the Deuteronomic Reform, led by King Josiah of Judah around the year 623 BCE (chronicled in the Book of Deuteronomy in the Bible), was not a reform of the Temple at all but rather a coup that disrupted its long-standing liturgical life and theological framework.

During a renovation of the Temple, Josiah’s high priest Hilkiah unearthed a scroll that claimed to be the Book of the Law of Yahweh by the Hand of Moses. Josiah and Hilkiah used this scroll to point to the authority of Moses as a support for the religious changes they wrought upon the Temple and upon the peoples of Judah and the neighboring areas. Claiming to be returning Israel/Judah to the original, pure religion of Moses and their ancestors, Josiah destroyed the ancient high places that were sites of worship before construction of the Temple and removed all the various faces of God and objects of worship from the Temple except for Yahweh himself. Included in this “reform” was the removal of the feminine face of the Divine, Asherah, who like the Shakti, was the “other half” of the Almighty. Yahweh, the God of Israel, was now a bachelor, his female consort banished, her priests killed and their bones burned upon her altars.

Much good scholarship supports the theory that Josiah did not reestablish ancient Jewish worship but actually redefined the long-standing religion of Israel and Judah. His work was not a restoration project but a renovation project. It is highly probable that the scroll “discovered” by the high priest Hilkiah (likely quoted in the Book of Deuteronomy in the Bible) was in fact written by King Josiah, or Hilkiah himself, or another accomplice in order to claim the authority of Moses for what were actually new and novel practices. It is well known among Biblical scholars that from the 10th century BCE until exile (586 BCE) polytheism was the norm in Israel.²⁰ Storage jars from the 8th century BCE unearthed in Northern Sinai bear inscriptions with the phrases “Yahweh . . . and his Asherah” and “Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah”²¹ (Samaria was the ancient capital of Israel).

Many female figurines have been unearthed from ancient Israel and provide more support for scholars who suggest that Asherah was worshipped as a goddess, as the consort of Yahweh, and as the Queen of Heaven.²² In the biblical Book of Jeremiah, Yahweh asks the prophet Jeremiah, “Do you not see what they are doing in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes for the queen of heaven.”²³ And in a later chapter of Jeremiah we read:

Then all the men who were aware that their wives had been making offerings to other gods, and all the women who stood by, a great assembly, all the people who lived in Pathros in the land of Egypt, answered Jeremiah: “As for the word that you have spoken to us in the name of the Lord, we are not going to listen to you. Instead, we will do everything that we have vowed, make offerings to the queen of heaven and pour out libations to her, just as we and our ancestors, our kings and our officials, used to do in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. We used to have plenty of food, and prospered, and saw no misfortune. But from the time we stopped making offerings to the queen of heaven and pouring out libations to her, we have lacked everything and have perished by the sword and by famine.”²⁴

So we see that the Bible itself bears witness to the importance of the worship of Asherah in the lives of the people of ancient Israel and Judah and mentions in many of its books the existence of “Asherah poles,” sacred trees or poles erected to honor the Mother Goddess Asherah. Jews living in Egypt, who had their own temple in Elephantine, also worshipped Yahweh together with his consort, the name Asherah modified to Anath among Egyptian Jews.²⁵ Asherah/ Anath represented the dynamism and activity of God, the Shakti power: she was the goddess of fertility, sexuality, and war. One of her main symbols was the dove.

The distinguished scholar Margaret Barker in her Temple Theology teaches that at the time of Solomon’s Temple and earlier, Yahweh as the national god of Israel was understood as the Son of the Most High (El Elyon) and as the consort of Asherah. Most importantly for our discussion, she asserts that these elements of the ancient worship of the Yahweh-Asherah pair, and of First Temple liturgy in general, survived beyond Josiah’s “reform” of the Temple, went underground, and found a home in Christianity. Barker sees Christianity as one attempt (among others) to resurrect a theology akin to the ancient Shiva-Shakti understanding—a tantric understanding—of God’s nature as celebrated in Solomon’s Temple.

The divine couple, a central element of tantric philosophy, was likely central to ancient Judaism (Judaism before the Deuteronomic Reform), which Jesus-based groups as well as other 1st-century Jewish groups (perhaps unconsciously) sought to recover. It is an ancient, tantric understanding that underlines the importance and reality of the created world and its creatures, including the human person in all his or her particularity. Speaking about this insight in Celtic Christianity, scholar and poet John Philip Newell says that

[t]he attraction between the sexes, and the attraction between masculine and feminine, was so essential to life . . . that it must also manifest something of the nature of God. The desire for union, for a coming together between masculine and feminine . . . which are fundamental to the goodness of creation, are reflective of God at the very heart of life.²⁶

Barker argues convincingly that much in the Book of Revelation and in the gospels (as well as in extra-canonical texts such as the three Books of Enoch and some of the documents from Qumran) is written to try to “bring back” the divine feminine, the Asherah, to the New Jerusalem (in the Book of Revelation) or into the New Temple (in the Qumrani writings) after her banishment during the “reforms” of Josiah. Christianity, then, according to this eminent scholar, is one of the inheritors of the tantric stream banned from much of Jewish life by Josiah and his accomplices. Asherah was related to the lion, the serpent, and the tree as well as to the dove;²⁷ one title of Christ, especially in the Semitic Christianity of Ethiopia, is “the Lion of Judah,” and Jesus’s crucifixion is likened to a serpent lifted on a pole (a stylized tree) in the Gospel of John.²⁸

Rabbinic Judaism, the other great tradition arising from the dust of the destruction of the Second Temple in the 1st century CE (not to be confused with Solomon’s Temple), also evidences the reemergence of the personified divine feminine as the Shekinah, the dwelling of the divine presence. The Shekinah, while not mentioned by name in the Bible, became important in later rabbinic writings such as the Talmud, where she is understood as the feminine aspect of God. As early as 1897, biblical scholars had connected the term Shekinah with God’s presence in the Temple of Solomon.²⁹

Related to the Shekinah as the dwelling of divine presence, there exists in rabbinic Judaism a long-standing tradition of speaking of the Sabbath (Shabbat) itself in feminine terms, explicitly as the queen and consort (of Yahweh), as we see in the Zohar, a medieval text of mystical Judaism:

One must prepare a comfortable seat with several cushions and embroidered covers, from all that is found in the house, like one who prepares a huppa [canopy] for a bride. For the Sabbath is a queen and a bride. This is why the masters of the Mishna used to go out on the eve of the Sabbath to receive her on the road, and used to say: “Come, O bride, come, O bride!” And one must sing and rejoice at the table in her honor. And more than this: there is yet another mystery. One must receive the Lady [i.e., the Sabbath] with many lighted candles, many enjoyments, beautiful clothes, and a house embellished with many fine appointments.³⁰

This preparation for the coming of the Shabbat into the home recalls perhaps the presence of Asherah in the Temple. Here the home has taken the place of the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem.

We see, then, that there was a stream of Judaism that understood, and understands, the presence of God, the dynamism of God, as the divine feminine. Margaret Barker writes convincingly that this stream, buried over by King Josiah, continued to flow in the hearts and religious consciousness of the Jewish people, emerging in multiple movements of Jewish renewal in the centuries around the beginning of the Common Era. Christianity was one such movement, and we will now focus on how this ancient impulse emerged through the early church’s contemplation of Jesus’s life and identity.

CHRIST JESUS AND THE SHAKTI OF GOD

We will leave for another chapter the exploration of the tantric nature of Jesus’s teachings, and here will look at how early Christian writers and texts understood the person and being of Jesus Christ to be, in tantric terms, the Shakti of God. Let us begin by looking at the Prologue of the Gospel of John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life.³¹

In this opening passage, John describes the beginnings of Jesus as the incarnate Word (Greek: Logos) of God in a way that is clearly reminiscent of the creative Sophia, who likewise was “with” God as the creative, dynamic activity of the Godhead. From Philo, a Greek-speaking Jewish philosopher from around the time of John’s Gospel, we come to understand that this Logos was not a “word” in the sense of a part of speech alone: Philo defined the Logos as the dynamic creative power of God.

In choosing to call the preexistent Christ the Logos, John clearly shows that he understands Christ to be the Sophia of God, the Asherah, resonant with the Shakti of the East. In the quote above the pronouns related to the Logos are masculine, and this can be misleading; in Greek, the noun Logos is grammatically masculine and so demands masculine pronouns. If we look from the perspective of Tantra at the description of the Logos (in John and in Philo), the Logos who is the creative force permeating the world, the Logos who is the igniting spark of causality and divine presence in embodied particularity, we find the defining attributes of Shakti, the feminine face of God: “And the Word [Logos] became flesh, and lived among us.”³² This means that, from a tantric perspective, the Logos (Christ) of God is feminine (the maleness of Jesus not withstanding), as the Logos holds the same place as the Shakti, the dynamic, ever-creating power of God.

John is not alone in ascribing to Christ Jesus the characteristics of Sophia (and therefore of Shakti). In the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, those hearing Jesus teach in the synagogue ask about the Sophia within him and link it to his “deeds of power,” consonant with an understanding of Jesus as Sophia. As a face of the divine feminine, Sophia is about action and power, just as Shakti is the dynamic doer of the Shiva-Shakti duo. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke also include elements of “wisdom Christology” that would allow a 1st-century reader to connect Christ Jesus with the living Sophia of God. Paul, too, in the biblical First Letter to the Corinthians, writes that Christ is “the power of God and the wisdom [Sophia] of God.”³³ For Paul, Christ bears a great resemblance to Sophia: Christ is the image of the invisible God, the radiance of the glory of the Godhead, the creative power of God. In Eastern tantric terms, Paul clearly understands Christ in a way suggestive of Shakti, as the first to emanate from the Godhead (as Shakti and Shiva emanate from Satchitananda).

Most scholars agree that the Gospel of Mark is the earliest written gospel in the biblical canon. In its first chapter, the narrator gives us a brief account of Jesus’s experience of being baptized by John the Baptist:

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”³⁴

In this account, in which Jesus undergoes a ritual that clearly suggests a new birth from the Great Mother (being brought naked out of the water, as traditional iconography illustrates), Jesus is marked as the “Son” of the divine feminine. It is important to note that the spirit descends “like a dove.” The Gospels of Matthew and Luke agree with Mark on this important detail. This dove was a primary symbol of Asherah, the analog of the divine Shakti of ancient Israel, and later became a symbol of the Shekinah as well.

So it is not Yahweh or Shiva who comes to claim Jesus but Asherah, Shakti. We are better to imagine the voice above as the strong female voice of the Shekinah rather than as the voice of Yahweh, the male tribal God of Israel. As the Son of Shakti, Jesus would be one with the essence of Shakti, the Christ. Children were assumed in the 1st-century Mediterranean world to inherit not only the characteristics but the very identity and nature of their parents. If Asherah publicly claims Jesus as her “Son” then he himself is one with the Asherah, one with Shakti.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus’s first sign is to turn water into wine at a wedding feast in Cana after having a discussion with his mother about the need for more wine. Here the tantric symbolism is unmistakable. The turning of water into wine is a movement away from the spirituality of John the Baptist (the world-denying ascetic) toward the sacrifice of the ancient priest Melchizedek, who as we read in Genesis, offered a sacrifice of bread and wine—the very sacrifices scholars believe were used to honor the divine feminine as Asherah in Canaan and pre-Josiah Judaism.³⁵ It is significant for us, too, that this first sign of John’s Gospel occurs at a wedding. The merging of male and female, the celebration of the embrace of Shiva-Shakti, is the setting for the transposition of world-denying asceticism (water) to the higher key of Tantra (wine). Finally, the presence and activity of Jesus’s mother in this scene can be interpreted as a sign itself of the generative, creative feminine principle active here.

In Logion 22 of the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus himself talks in barely veiled language about what we could call the tantric nature of the kingdom of heaven. Both in terms of the primal, erotic desire necessary to enter the kingdom and in terms of a reconciliation of opposites, the story below sounds like pure Tantra:

Jesus saw infants being suckled. He said to his disciples, “These infants being suckled are like those who enter the kingdom.” They said to him, “Shall we then, as children, enter the kingdom?” Jesus said to them, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same, so that the male not be male nor the female female . . . then will you enter the kingdom.”

CHRIST AND KALI

We have already looked at the important face of Shakti as Kali, the black goddess of transformation. While the image of the Indian goddess Kali would have been quite foreign to 1st-century Jews living in Palestine, the attributes and aspects of the tantric path that are readable in the image of Kali are in fact discernible at the crucifixion of Jesus. The terrifying yet loving face of the Mother reveals herself at the death of Jesus.

Golgotha, the place where Jesus was crucified, is painted in the gospels as a liminal place and likely this would be true: criminals were crucified in the no-man’s land outside the safe walls of the city, typically near the refuse dump. This Golgotha parallels the cremation grounds haunted by the tantrikas dedicated to Kali, who sit in meditation amid the ritual pollution caused by the remains of corpses and the animals that feed upon them. Tying Golgotha even more closely into the scene of Kali’s cremation ground is the tradition in Eastern Christianity that Golgotha was the burial ground of Adam and Eve. The skull shown buried in the ground below the cross in typical Crucifixion icons points to this tradition. Golgotha was the Jerusalemite parallel to the cremation grounds along the Ganges. On the day of Jesus’s death, the gospel writers tell us the sky became dark and thunderous. They describe earthquakes and other elements that in tantric tradition are linked to the activity of Kali as time, as destroyer, as the eater of worlds.

My own guru, B., an Episcopal priest, once had a vision of Kali as he listened to the solemn Good Friday chanting of the gospel story of Jesus being crucified on the hill of Golgotha, “which means the place of a skull.”³⁶ “She appeared,” he told me, “a necklace of skulls around her neck, dancing upon the hill as I pondered life’s mysterious mingling of joy and sorrow, love and hate, goodness and destructiveness. Her frenzied form rippled with the agony of Jesus on the cross, an agony that gathered into itself all of the suffering in creation.” As the scene became more and more frightening, more and more destabilized and chaotic, Kali paused in her dance, burned her gaze into B., and then raised her hand in the “do not be afraid” mudra.

This vision, blending an image of the fierceness of divine love incarnate (Jesus on the cross) with the fierceness of creation itself (Kali and her dance), was a watershed moment in B.’s own understanding of the nature of the Holy. “The ‘do not be afraid’ was an assurance that creative grace can be found even in what appears at the moment as destruction and death.” Golgotha, like the cremation grounds along the Ganges, points to the productive destruction attributed to Shakti and yet also to the promise of a groundedness in Shakti herself as she who exists through the aeons. This vision helped B. be at greater peace with issues of chaos and regeneration happening within and without during this phase of his life, to “bow before the Mystery,” he said.

If we contemplate the traditional icon of the Crucifixion, one of the most important events of the gospel story, we can, thinking in tantric terms, see the resonance of Christ on the cross with Mata (Mother) Kali (see color plate 2). We notice, first of all, that the image is in general populated by the feminine; there are four women present as witnesses to the crucifixion and only two men (the soldier Longinus and the disciple John, who as a beardless male, is nearly androgynous). Jesus has been crowned with thorns, his head wounded right around the area of his thinking organ, a sign of the removal of the ego from the driver’s seat, mirroring the decapitated head held by Mata Kali. Before being crucified, Jesus had been whipped, crowned with thorns, then wrapped in a mock royal cloak. Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea who sentences him to death, points at the humiliated Jesus and says, “Behold the man.” This is at least as clear an image of ego destruction as the severed head and bloody scimitar.

Kali overcomes death from within the experience of death,³⁷ similar to the crucified and risen Christ who “tramples down death by death,”^*5 according to the ancient hymnody of the church. “Those who have surrendered to Kali can never die. For them, death is no enemy but simply a reflection of her deathless light,”³⁸ just as Jesus in the Gospel of John affirms for those who believe in him: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”³⁹

The clearest pointer linking Kali with the crucified Christ comes from the wound in his side. Longinus, the soldier present in the icon, pierces Jesus’s side with a lance, ensuring that he is dead. From this wound comes blood and water. Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342–1416), an English anchorite, mystic, and theologian, saw in the image of the crucifixion “Christ our Mother.” For Julian, Christ on the cross was equivalent to a woman on a birthing bed:

We know that our mothers only bring us into the world to suffer and die, but our true mother, Jesus, he who is all love, bears us into joy and eternal life; blessed may he be! So he sustains us within himself in love and was in labour for the full time until he suffered the sharpest pangs and the most grievous sufferings that ever were or shall be, and at the last he died.⁴⁰

The sequence of labor, full-term pains, and death was a common one among medieval women of Julian’s time, the mortality rate of birthing mothers being quite high. Julian sees in the cross the birthing bed and sees in the wound of Christ the birth canal of Christ our Mother. Blood and water pour from Christ’s wound, just as blood and water issue forth from our natural mothers at our physical birth. At our mystical birth in Christ, however, we are “born again” into the divine life, life in God, bathed in water and “washed in the blood” as one 19th century hymn puts it.

Just as Mother Kali blends birth (our spiritual birth) with death (the decapitated head of the ego), Jesus on the cross—in an image as equally macabre as Kali’s dance—blends death (his own) with new life (our spiritual birth through him). The power of Kali and Christ crucified, expressed through images that blend love and sacred violence, seem able to capture the deep eros of their devotees in a way other God images are unable to do.

Part of the attraction to images such as dancing Kali and the crucified Christ is the blend of violence and love, of chaos and promise, of death and new birth, which speaks both to our lived experience as well as to a deep, preverbal knowledge within us. Yet Julian is clear that our birth through Mother Christ is meant for our joy and happy actualization, surpassing but related to our natural birth:

And [God] who made man for love, by that same love would restore man to the same blessed state, or to one more blessed. And just as we were made like the Trinity when we were first made, our Maker wanted us to be like Jesus Christ our Saviour, in heaven without end, by the miracle of our remaking.⁴¹

Our spiritual birth by our Mother Christ through the wound of his pierced side occurs with Christ lifted up upon the cross.

The Gospel of John directly links the image of Jesus lifted up upon the cross to the curative bronze serpent lifted up upon the pole (an Asherah pole?) by Moses in the Book of Exodus to cure the then-wandering Hebrew people of snake bites. The bronze serpent itself is suggestive of the indwelling Shakti, typically portrayed as a serpent (the kundalini, explained in more detail in chapter 4), and if so, the likening of Jesus by John to that bronze serpent represents another bridge of archetypes between Jesus and Kundalini-Shakti.

A SHOOT FROM THE SECOND ROOT

Resonances of the Shiva-Shakti Embrace in the Christian Liturgy

There is a saying in the Western church: lex orandi, lex credendi, meaning, “the law of praying (is) the law of believing.” The church believes as the church prays. This deep truth reminds us that our worship life is first and central as Christians: there was common Christian worship (though quite diverse) before there were creeds or a universally accepted canon of scripture. Our worship influences who we are and what we believe, as it should: any tantric practitioner knows that we are woven into divinity not solely or even primarily through an intellectual process but through a holistic constellation involving engagement with ritual, breath, body, and the many layers of our consciousness. Deep and healthful worship involves all this. Therefore, if we are to say that something like the principles of Shiva and Shakti exist naturally within Christianity, we should be able to find aspects of the divine embrace within ancient elements of Christian worship. And indeed we do. We will look at just two examples here.

The Great Vigil of Easter is the most important and most holy liturgy of the year (if one can say one liturgy is “holier” than another). It occurs ideally around the midnight hour, or at least in the dark, and begins with the great fire of Easter. The paschal candle (a large, thick candle often five or more feet tall) is lit from the paschal fire, typically a large firepit burning outside the church. Special rituals and prayers, such as the piercing of the candle by five pins containing incense (recalling Jesus’s crucifixion), are done by the priest/minister in the presence of the congregation who surround the paschal fire. This great candle is then processed into the dark church, and from it the small candles held by the faithful are lit, bringing light into the dark church. With everyone now inside the candlelit church, a lone cantor sings the Exsultet, a beautiful and ancient chant that recounts the story of God’s saving action.

From this beginning sequence of this central liturgy it should be clear that the paschal candle is a central symbol of the rite. Another element in the Great Vigil of Easter is the sanctification of water for baptism. This water is contained in a large font (a bowl or tub), which represents the spiritual womb. The action of baptism represents a new, spiritual birth. And here we see one of the great symbols of the Shiva-Shakti embrace in the liturgy: during the prayers over the waters of baptism, in preparation for baptizing new members, the paschal candle is dipped three times into the font as the priest thrice chants the words, “Now sanctify these waters, we pray you.” Just as the font represents the spiritual womb, the paschal candle represents the spiritual phallus. This all-important Christian liturgy, occurring on the most holy night of the year (no, Christmas Eve is not the holiest night of the Christian year!), includes what is in principle a tantric ritual: the honoring of God through ritually joining symbols of the sacred yoni (female sex organ) and the sacred lingam (male sex organ) as a sign of divine fructification and spiritual birth. In the Great Vigil of Easter, the salvific fecund power of God to bring us to new birth occurs through the divine embrace of God in a way analogous to Shiva-Shakti. Lex orandi, lex credendi: if this is what we do, then this is what we believe.

An equally important marker of the presence of something like a Shiva-Shakti understanding of God within Christian ritual occurs at the Eucharist (Holy Communion). Here we will consider the “elements” (bread and wine) that become carriers of the real presence of the Body and Blood of Christ (the Bread and Wine) through the prayer and actions of the presider and the assembly. The red wine is in a chalice, a drinking vessel shaped like a goblet. The bread is typically in round form and (in Western liturgy) often served as a pressed, perfectly circular white wafer. One common practice is for the faithful to dip the wafer into the wine and then consume it. And it is here that we see through our principle of lex orandi, lex credendi that the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion speaks to the tantric principle of the divine embrace.

In Indian Tantra, one symbolic representation of Shiva-Shakti is that of the white and red bindu (dot or point). In the Yoga Chudamani Upanishad, a round white bindu represents the divine seed (shukla, or sperm) and is correlated with Shiva. The red bindu represents the divine menses, the maharaj and is correlated with Shakti. The chalice containing the wine is, like the font, reminiscent of a womb. As with any living ritual element, we cannot simply say that the bindu, or even divine fructification and embrace, is what the Bread and Wine “mean.” Symbols do not have one defined meaning, but are meant to generate meanings. Yet from a tantric perspective, the picture of divine fructification, of the Shiva-Shakti embrace, is clearly present in these elements. Supporting this from a historical perspective is the fact that bread and wine were central elements used in Yahweh-Asherah worship in Solomon’s Temple.

Physiologically, the white bindu represents the bindu visarga (sending forth, discharge), an organ existing within the head, beneath the crown, from which a liquid containing the holy nectar (amrit) drips down into the heart. The red bindu correlates with the muladhara or root chakra, an energy center at the base of the spine linked to our deep rooting in eros. Muladhara is often considered the “sleeping place” of Shakti within us. Bringing together and harmonizing these energies is a central focus of tantric processes, as we will see in the next chapter. The nature of God as Shiva-Shakti is enacted in the world and within the microcosm of the human body. We enact and remember this process every time we dip the Bread into the Wine, whether we realize it or not. Lex orandi, lex credendi.

Additionally, in the pre–Vatican II Roman Catholic Church, the round pressed bread (host/bindu) was placed upon the tongue of the recipient, who would press it up onto the soft palate of the roof of the mouth. While the purpose of this was often explained in terms of taboo (i.e., the sacred Body must not be chewed), what’s happening here can remind us of the Indian tantrika who pushes the tongue up and against the soft palate as far back as possible in order to stimulate the flow of the amrit. This tongue placement is known in Tantra and yoga as kechari mudra and is a recommended practice for the serious adept. The Buddha, too, recommends pressing the tongue up against the soft palate to control hunger and the mind.⁴² In terms of hunger, it is well known in Indian Tantra that the trantrika who gains conscious control of the flow of the amrit through kechari mudra no longer has need for much physical food. We are reminded of St. Catherine of Siena, who supposedly lived for long periods of time only on the Bread of the Eucharist and would have received the Eucharist in the manner described.

Shiva-Shakti and the Christian Trinity

Christianity describes God as Trinity, and this understanding represents a tantric insight into God, affirming an understanding of the Godhead akin to knowing Satchitananda as Shiva-Shakti merged in loving embrace. The foundational theology of the Trinity was worked out in the Greek language and within the thought culture and vocabulary of Neoplatonic and Aristotelian philosophy. Early theologians came up with a formula that expressed God as three distinct expressions (hypostases in Greek, personae in Latin) sharing one substance or nature (ousia in Greek, substantia in Latin).

The hypostases are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the ousia they share is the fullness of the Godhead. In the mythopoetic language of theology, the Father is the unbegotten, the Son is begotten of the Father, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (in the West, also from the Son). There is no language that can fully circumscribe the reality of the Trinity. As the great theologian St. Gregory Nazianzen says,

What is the procession of the Holy Spirit? Do you tell me first what is the unbegottenness of the Father, and I will then explain to you the physiology of the generation of the Son, and the procession of the Holy Spirit, and we shall both of us be stricken with madness for prying into the mystery of God.⁴³

Gregory’s snarky humor highlights an important point for us: when it comes to language about the Divine, we can point, suggest, and poetically allude but can never fully explain. As St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out in the Middle Ages, all our language about God is metaphorical.

Yet this does not mean we cannot say anything of value about the Trinity. For instance, Christian theology affirms that all three hypostases of the Trinity have one will and one ousia and exist within one another (in theological language, they coinhere). That means that while the Son and the Holy Spirit come from the Father, they are not less than the Father.

This idea of coinherence can be woven into our understanding of Shiva and Shakti in Eastern Tantra. Shiva and Shakti, the divine pair, come from Satchitananda. Applying the Christian principle of coinherence, we would affirm that the fullness of Satchitananda resides in Shiva and in Shakti each, yet comes to greatest expression for us in their divine embrace. For the tantrika, the Shiva-Shakti pair is not a duality that emanates in a hierarchical way from Satchitananda; rather, the Shiva-Shakti pair points to the very nature (ousia) of Satchitananda through sharing fully in the nature of Satchitananda. The Shiva-Shakti pair tell us what the Godhead is like.

Another perhaps surprising aspect of the Trinity is that the Trinity is not about the number three. Vladimir Lossky, commenting on the writings of St. Basil the Great, affirms that “there is no question here of a material number which serves for calculation and is in no wise applicable in the spiritual sphere, where there is no quantitative increase. The threefold number is not, as we commonly understand it, a quantity.”⁴⁴ If the threefoldness of the Trinity is not a quantity, then what is it? In tantric terms, we can understand it as the ability to experience tantric embrace, the ecstasy of unitive bliss without the loss of differentiation. St. Gregory Nazianzen says that Trias (Trinity) is the “name which unites things united by nature, and never allows those which are inseparable to be scattered by a number which separates.” He says too that “the triad contains itself in perfection, for it is the first which surpasses the composition of the dyad.” In his commentary on Gregory, Lossky adds that “[t]wo is the number which separates, three the number which transcends all separation”⁴⁵ and explains duality as the root of multiplicity, whereas trinity is the expression of what we might call blissful intersubstantiation. Therefore, the insight that Shiva and Shakti are continually in loving embrace is the insight not of duality but of Trinity. The loving tantric embrace of Shiva and Shakti does indeed transcend all separation.

So far, we have seen how concepts from Trinitarian theology can help us deepen our understanding of Shiva and Shakti. It is also true that contemplating Shiva and Shakti in embrace helps us more clearly illuminate tantric aspects of the Christian Trinity. For example, since each hypostasis of the Trinity is never separated from the others, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit each have something akin to a Shiva aspect and a Shakti aspect. And since there is a single will and activity of these three, we can affirm that the Shiva and Shakti aspects of divine nature and activity exist in each hypostasis of the Trinity. Thus, the Father as the Ground of Being, as the preexistent reality, is Shiva; as maker of worlds and lover of humankind, the Father is Shakti. The Son as the creative and incarnate Logos is Shakti; as the cosmic fiber of all creation, the Son is Shiva. The Holy Spirit as the dove (Asherah) is Shakti; as the “male agent” in Jesus’s conception in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, is Shiva.

Shiva is the great Absolute, pure potential, spirit without limit and within itself; Shakti is the divine dynamism, the driving force for the great cycles of creation and destruction, the dancing divine soul of the universe. The Christian Godhead as a whole exhibits these characteristics of Shiva and Shakti. St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) developed a Christian language that describes complementary aspects of the Trinitarian Godhead resonant with the tantric understanding of Shiva and Shakti. Interestingly, the theology of Palamas was developed in defense of the practices and mystical experiences of the Christian monks of Mount Athos in the 15th century, whose spiritual practices we today would see as tantric yoga.

The monks of Mount Athos, informed by their tantric practices, spoke in terms of God being present within the human person as light. The question then arose among Christian thinkers as to how God’s light might exist within a human while still allowing for God to exist in Godself. For if we simply say everything is God or God is everything, we end up taking away God’s ability to be God, and we deny our own very real experience that at present not everything and not everyone has awakened to the divine life. We both are—and are not yet—experiencing the parousia (a Greek word meaning “presence,” “arrival,” “official visit”), the time when all will be divinized by the Father through Christ and in the Holy Spirit. And even then, God will be more than the divinized world.

As we mentioned earlier, we can say that everything is in God and God is in everything, but saying that everything is God or God is everything invalidates that important nuance of mystical experience in which we unite with God yet still experience God partially as “other,” breaking into our small consciousness. This experience of God breaking in is just as it sounds: both Krishna and Jesus talk about themselves as thieves who break into the “house” to bring freedom and bliss through transformation. Without this partial otherness—this not-twoness yet not-oneness—we lose our ability to inhabit the Shiva-Shakti reality of God.

While God is God, it is also true that we participate in the nature of God. We both do and do not become part of God. Only the immature ego that has not experienced unitive consciousness could imagine being “part” of God in the same way that each of the hypostases of the Trinity is “part” of God. The real experience is not that, neither in Indian Tantra nor in Christian Tantra. This was Gregory Palamas’s dilemma: how to affirm the experience of the mystical lives of the monks on Mount Athos, who were experiencing divine unitive consciousness, deification in this life, what scripture (2 Peter 1:4) calls being “participants in the divine nature,” while allowing God to be God. And in answer to this riddle, he further developed ideas already existent in Christianity—tantric ideas that spoke of the same reality as does the picture of Shiva-Shakti.

Gregory affirmed that we do not participate in the essence of God; that is, each of us is not a “member” of the Holy Trinity, no matter how far we progress in the divine life. Apart from us, Shiva and Shakti have their own embrace and exist as God within one another by their essence. This essence is God in Godself. Yet it is equally true that the Christian tantrika experiences in this life the promise of the scripture that we can become deified, divinized: we become “participants in the divine nature,” verily gods:

I say, “You are gods;

children of the Most High, all of you”

PSALM 82:6

Yet while we do not participate in the essence of God (we are not a “third wheel” in the Shiva-Shakti embrace, nor are we fully consumed by Satchitananda), we are called to participate in God’s nature, and Christian tantrikas have had through the centuries the experience of being transformed so to consciously share in God’s nature, which is the goal of Tantra. Gregory affirmed this reality against other theologians (typically more aligned with Western theology than Eastern Christian theology) who said this was impossible. Gregory affirmed that we share in the energies of God (also called the operations of God), that God’s energies dwell in us and in all creation.

He says that “[t]he divine and deifying illumination and grace is not the essence but the energy of God.”⁴⁶ These energies are not-otherthan the essence of God, yet God’s essence is God’s essence, and God’s energies are God’s energies. And again, these are not-two, as God is one. Thus, Gregory defends the experiences coming from the tantric practices of Christian mystics in a way that is homegrown to the Christian understanding of Who God is: “The doctrine of the energies, ineffably distinct from the essence, is the dogmatic basis of the real character of all mystical experience.”⁴⁷

Gregory clarified an understanding of God that parallels the picture of Shiva and Shakti in embrace. God’s essence: God as the Absolute, as pure spirit, God in God’s self, the face of Shiva deep in mediation, eyes turned upward and inward. The energies: God as the activator, as dynamic, as engaged, as unitive with all reality, as Shakti, the creatrix, destroyer, and sanctifier of worlds, Kali in ecstatic dance, attracting us and inhabiting us. Gregory further affirmed that God as essence and energies (as Shiva and Shakti) is who God is. Even if the world were not, God would be essence and energies.

In the symbolic language of Indian Tantra, God by nature is Shiva-Shakti; Shakti is not a by-product of the material world. The world, rather, comes about through the reality of Shakti. Essence and energies, Shiva and Shakti: in writing in defense of Christian tantric practice, Gregory Palamas develops from earlier sources (for these ideas were present among much earlier theologians) an understanding of the Holy Trinity that resonates with our understanding Satchitananda as Shiva-Shakti.

Now we turn to the process of deification itself. We will look at how it is that the human person becomes, in this life, a god—and how in reality this is the goal not only of the tantric yoga of the East, but of Christian discipleship since the beginning.