Kantian Spiritual Sexuality

Spiritual Sexuality and Women in Absence in Ancient Greek and Indic World Dr. Bimalkumar Subedi

Introduction There are many confusions regarding the term ' Spiritual Sexuality '. In general, the term is understood as an especial form of physical sexuality itself where there thought to be some austere religious ritual practices and observations as its necessary components. In this sense, it is just like the other forms of erotic spirituality of Hindu Tantrism or Dionysian or other ancient ritual orgies. In both cases
above, the presence of physical sexuality is a basic condition, which is to valorized the so called spiritual sexuality so as to separate this from other popular forms of physical sexualities. For the purpose of this book, spiritual sexuality is concern with none of the erotic copulations that have physical connotations with their opposite sexes, but with the non-physical asexual sexuality still resonating in erotic sexual emotional backgrounds. Spiritual sexuality--although physical phenomena-- its physicality is obscured by the oppressed and metamorphosed psychological impulses and only to be reveled in elevated other forms of human passions: viz. religion, patriotism, intellectuality, arts and music. It has always been understood in connection with some nonphysical forms of ontological expressions whereas sexuality tends to curb its path towards mundane physical reality. Nonetheless, Sexuality, whether physical or spiritual, whether covert or overt form, is a brilliant physical force with awesome emotion, quest, thrust and urges. The urge and the splendid thirsty passion of the mind may or may not be recognized directly as erotic or libidinal, the result is the same – it is always sexual in this or that form. Sexuality, in its original or rather natural form, is a rudimentary physical approach, a direct copulation of two sexes, hugging two bodies in one place or like this --as it is in animal worlds-- whereas in its developed and culturally concealed form, it is more abstract and non- physical. Religions, especially in civilized societies, are always in favor of spiritual sexuality. Because they are in favor of sexual austerity and condemning raw physical sexuality and seeking it to be cultured within the norms of socially created religious sexual ethics. In other words, it has an unseen rivalry with the physical sexuality; it cannot digest the direct nudity of the bare nature. Because, nature is the fundamental base where you cannot imagine any plastic ideology of ethics, social norms, code of conduct and divine philosophy. These are all the spiritual matters. Not only religion, but also politics, law, sociology, discourse of power and intellectuality, arts and literature—in other words, all intellectual human mental exercises-- are in favor of spiritual realm of absence. Because they are all inspired and guided by some inner urges which are some undefined quest, unattainable desires, and unnamed forces. In this sense, the whole human civilization itself is, in fact, a reality of spiritually nurtured and spiritually established existence. Spiritual is a sexual fact. As a form of sexuality, spirituality has a rigorous and restless quest for the ultimate satisfaction. It is a divine ejection of an unfulfilled passion of the strived minds. It is in between the dark of undefined unsaturated and unrecognized thrust of nothingness that is to be found in nothingness and aimed still further to get in nothingness alone. However, it is not a void, yet, but a reality of human mind. The nothingness is nowhere but within the mind itself; the sublime is nowhere but within the mind itself; the spiritual absence is nowhere but within the mind itself. That is why, spiritual sexuality is neither asexual nor direct physical copulation. It has, in fact, no direct object to embrace with and to show any forms of libidinal eroticism or tangible copulation. On the contrary, it is a objectless object that is, though derived from the popular notion of sexuality, transformed itself to remote extreme and faded its color of identity just to be resonated in something bizarre and ideal sounding. That is to say, it has the connotation with physical sexuality in emotion, perverse passion, awesome thrust, and sublime devotion but not a real form of sexuality. Nonetheless, it is still an alternative of physical sex – and much stronger than the previous. It is a psychological state of mind subdued in subconscious: an unidentified, undefined, and unexcavated power; an unsolved chaos and a curiosity; a ghostly fear of sublime, which has been there since the origin of humankind. It is pre-linguistic and pre ontological that can be felt but not named. It is a philosophic of absence.
This absence is innate in human; it is the divider to separate humankind from rest of the animal world. Physical sexuality is a natural phenomenon of procreation; common to all creatures. Spiritual sexuality is typically a human. Physical sexuality fulfills its duty of procreation and that is its ultimate goal; beyond and more than this, spiritual sexuality searches something that is not present in tangible, definable physical emotions and passions. It lies beyond the process of physical procreation. Being a matter of human conscious, it is equally applicable to every gender, race, class, and society; nonetheless, it has some especial surroundings and suitability that is more apt to one gender than the other. For example, it is more masculine, and that is why more theoretical, more Apollonian, more arrogant and more self-contained. The development of spiritual sexuality in the history of the evolution of human intellect is , on the one hand, an orderly process of civilization, whereas ,on the other hand, it undermines, suppresses, and hinders the presence of female power and natural sexuality in history . Opposing the physical sexuality, consequently, this form of sexuality blocks femininity and female sexuality to be flourished and enjoying its rights in real. In this book, for example, I have taken ancient Greek and ancient Indic societies, where the women were suppressed by the idealism of male spirituality in different names and forms.
Spiritual Sexuality: A Mannish Domain:
Although spiritual sexuality cannot be bifurcate in male and female gender, it is a trait of common human nature; both men or women, being a psychological creature, are prone to the mental vulnerability, erotic liquidity and its unattainable chaos of unconscious that are beyond the realm of sex and gender. Nonetheless, here, for our rational flow of discussion, if we considered this in a wide sense, because of the patriarchal domination in ancient societies it seems that mostly men but not women led the force of passionate social ideologies—spiritual sexuality in our term. Men, not women, define this, create this, and associate themselves with this. Since it was a male creation and was in favor of patriarchal system of society, consequently, this became a tool for suppressing female sexuality. It acts so, not directly, but with very intricate and finely weaved veil of masculinity to cover the other half co-force and confined this half only in mundane domestic affairs. This was an irony that men were not consciously suppressing their half-opposite sex; nonetheless, they did so. It was a process of evolution that automatically took place; but the inspiring force behind this evolution was something else—that was sexuality, spiritual sexuality that defined itself to be an auspicious austere state of ideological superiority. This was created and the creators were men because they wanted to establish patrimonial society and alter the prevailing matriarchy social systems; they wanted to be in dominating position. Anyway, one could not be sure if the matrimonial, instead of patrimonial, societies had evolved in power would the result be reverse or something else. In comparison to men, women are always near to the nature and its physical laws. They always want to be normal; but spiritual sexuality, overtly or covertly, tends to transcend the normality of natural female sexuality. The patriarchal society formed the sky-gods-- Indra , Thore, Apollo, Zeus, Visnu — who sanctioned the new spirit of sexuality in male dominancy suppressing the prevailing power of natural mother deities.
Before the advent of patrimonial Indo- European societies and the rise of patriarchal people with a male sky-god pantheon, with abundant weaponry, horse-drawn chariots, combative energies to conquer and subdue the matrimonial peaceful people easily, there were Goddess-worshipping matrilineal societies thriving peacefully in agriculture, artifacts and culture usually in the southern belt of fertile lands of Crete in Greece to Mahojodaro and Harrappa in India. Somewhere between fifth and second century BEC, the northern wild people with hunting culture penetrated to South and allegedly invaded the peaceful societies of early native Mother Goddess worshipping cultures viz. : Aryans assailed India; Kurgans, Eastern Europe; Hittites, the Fertile Crescent; Luwians, Anatolia; and Acheans and Dorians, Greece. It can also be taken as the domination of hunting cultures on the planting culture. The northern nomadic hunters—Aryans\ Kurgans—had developed a dominantly masculine culture; on the other hands, the planter culture of Minoans of Crete and Dravidians of the Indus Valley Civilization were more matrilineal, worshipped earth and other native mother goddesses where the ritual physical sex can be traced as in Harrapan tribe of the Indus Valley (4000 BCE --2000 BCE). They were agrarians who worshipped the power of the feminine, which they associated with fertility and birth. Their deity was the goddess, idolized in the form of the yoni (vulva). The Harrapan 's culture was altered by the war-like nomadic Aryans who replaced the existing female deities with their male gods--often represented by the phallic lingam symbol (penis). Female deities were then relegated more to being consorts to the male gods.
It would be hast to say that the dominion patriarchal sexuality was more abstract and remote to the nature in comparison to the matrimonial sexuality earlier. However, in the quest of absence, male sexuality intercept a unique track of ideology and austerity which I should prefer to name it as 'spiritual sexuality ' --- though which still may not be appropriate term to identify that notion of sexuality. This emerged in the history of human social evolution, silently and automatically, when the natural simplicity of early maternal world gradually became insufficient to cope up the need of strength and harsh valor for the growing complicating social existence of the then world. Gradually, the realm of primordial mother Goddess with the power of female sex, womb and breast, subsided to make way for rather the male Gods. The power of physical sex is condemned to valorize the newly inspired psychic sensation of collective male sexuality of absence—the spiritual sexuality. Goddess are imagined with asexual traits, virginity and celibacy in Gods and saints are inspired, physical sexuality was reserved and controlled within the rigid frame of ethics, the natural sexual deities of the old days – like Shiva and Dionysus—are covertly condemned for their blatant manner of nude sexuality. They are the feminine power in the masculine myths. In the same token, when the evolution of male dominancy got momentum and demanded a wide rational and more plastic rigidity on the preliminary simplicity, created a new sphere of sexuality covertly, than, other male gods are needed to represent this phenomena and to suppress the early deities of natural sexuality. Visnu and Apollo, Indra and Jeus, Aritmise and Durga, Athena and Kali are created. Shiva and Dionysus etc. represent the natural worldliness of wild reality, the unbounded physical sexuality, ecstasy, rapture, music, dance and maddening frenzy in Greek and Indic world, in the same token, Visnu and Apollo represent the later space of rationality, light, literature and philosophy, wisdom and divinity, heaven and absurdity. The former represents the beauty of defined shape the later sublime awesome valor, the former represents the tangible physical rapture with unlimited cry of joy, the perverse wilderness of ecstasy; whereas the later represent ethics, rules, politics, order and system. The former represents the Jouissance state what Jacque Lacan describes, the later 'the name of the father ' in his own terms. Apollo and Visnu serve the spiritual side of the sky, the solar power designated for the human welfare, they condemned sexuality in physical status as an inferior mortal business concern with the mortal riff-raff. They are not highly worry about the physical pleasure of the body but with the salvation of the soul. Consequently, and arrogantly, they became the patrons of the aristocracy, established laws regarding the human behavior and propitiation, evolved into protectors of culture. On the other hand, the physical side of divinity, the female power of sexuality, Shiva and Dionysus, represent not the sky but the earth itself; they are the lord of mountain and forests, represent the life-force of animals and vegetation. Like the previous ones, they are not constructing social structure, hierarchy, ethic of power relations, discipline and responsibilities, but, on the contrary to this, the domains of Shiva, Kumar and Dionysus include eroticism and ecstasy; dance and theatre, androgyny and possession. They serve archetypal expression of primal people 's communal relationship with nature --- thus, they support the awareness of unity between self and the cosmos. This research is aimed to explore how the importance natural female sexuality had been subdued by the male dominancy of spiritual sexuality , and consequently how the world civilization itself felt in the masculine court-yard of pseudo sexuality in early Greek and Indic world. Deities like Shiva and Dionysus, Apollo and Visnu, Indra and Jeus, and virgin Goddess from both worlds are considered as and when needed.
Chaos and Absence: the Origin of Spiritual Sexuality
Since spiritual sexuality is opposite of the physical or rather mundane sexuality, it can 't be measured and viewed by the approaches and tools of the later. That is why, all the male discourses of creativity and existence are started from the chaos. This is common to both ancient Greek and Indic world. Hesiod, the divine genealogist of ancient Greek world, tells primordial existence a chaos—not a womb or any natural female reproductive forces. The story is exactly the same in early Vedic hymens as well; there also, the primordial cause of existence is an abstract chaos. The chaos is a undefined and unthinkable mystery where from the creation, or rather the definition and conceptions, started. Chaos is the spiritual side of sexuality where there is no physical presence of female sexuality the natural and real sexual creation; yet, a brilliant power of creation in itself. The almighty is created by himself from the very indefinable chaos; Swyambhuba. In its elaborate sense, spiritual sexuality is a quest of both men and women for the sublime rapture in human unconscious; it is a philosophy of absence. Let us go in details:
Indic philosophy indicates a space where “there the eye goes not” and “the speech goes not, nor the mind” (Kena Upanisad 1.3). Similarly, we have discussed about Zen Buddhism in chapter two above. According to this, Zen Buddhism is a state of mind in which the tension of the opposites is stilled and constant meaning is deserved. For this, that which has been successfully defined has been successfully killed. Its source is in the deep unconscious where from, breaking the iron- roof of thought machine configured by preconceived words and conception, the light and power of the unconscious is allowed to flood into the conscious mind. These two examples above (abstracted from Kena Upanisad and Zen Buddhism) indicate the pattern of reading human unconscious in Indic philosophic tradition.
Man is not perfect. He seeks his perfection in art, in ritual performances, in myth, philosophy and literature -- or rather in his every conscious endeavour of life. However, despite his restless quest, man has always failed to have the object of his quest. He can feel his imperfection and blind forces pushing him towards an amorphous space of existence. He can perceive a far of cry -- the unnamed and unattainable one. He can have a perennial and perpetually existing inner lack that cannot be appeased by any manifested signs and meanings: " the voices resembling roaring bulls from some invisible place, and the frightening sound of drums as of the thunder under the earth". What, actually, is this? Man hears, or tries to hear that latent urge of unattainable lack coming from the far space of absence and try to copy it down in words, in ritual performances, in philosophy and arts -- in laughter and tears, in rapture and fear -- but still fails to recognizes what he has actually heard and what he is actually copying down. Although he gets himself reflected on his own tears but he never recognize the face of his own inner self and try to quest himself in other. This is what the quest of Veda, the quest of heroic Greek epics-- viz. Illiad, Odyssey -- the quest of Mahabharata, Samkhya, Purana and Gita -- the quest of missing self-- a person in other. Whether it is Greek Tragedy or Sanskrit Dukhanta, whether he is Dionysus or Skandakumar, whether he is a rhapsody -- a professional recite of Greek Heroic epics, or an Indic Charya Gayak, whether he is Euripides or Bhasa: whoever he may be, he is just looking for the same absence in his respective unconscious through his respective tools of quest. However, in his restless quest, man has never found his object of quest. The perfect is always imperfect and the inquest is always inadequate to meet the latent need of the quest.
Why is it so? It is because man is unaware of the nature of his own quest -- what actually he is looking for. What is to be perfect? How can it be perceived and what is the nature of this perfection? All these questions are undefined, unmentioned and unravelled. You cannot touch it, have it, shape it or talk to it -- but you can feel it. It is an imminent danger and immanent bliss, immanent terror and solace: an absolute void; nonetheless, it is the one that we are searching for and nothing else can be its alternate. Nonetheless, though we are searching, it is, in fact, a dark rapture of some awesome existence that is both attractive and horrible, both pleasant and painful; Philosophers have said it sometimes sublime, but we do not know what it is actually like. It is a primordial universal rapture and we do not know where is the original source of this. If it is nowhere, then how can we feel it? The question is obvious but the answer is tricky. We feel it because we are the part of it. Although it is nowhere; it is amorphous, shapeless, meaningless, and undefined, but our own subconscious is also structured like the same. The one that is rational, the one that is defined and physically proved, the one that is here and now are insufficient for this. They cannot quench the inner thirst of man. In this unquenchable point of absence, we have the notion of spiritual sexuality—an undefined and unquenchable thrust. What a man could be understood in surface is not proper; man is like an iceberg in the sea -- visible only in the limited crest. All his mind is inside the latency within the sea of undefined chaos of meaning. The sea is human unconscious and the notion of sublime is nowhere but inside that very sea of human unconscious. What we see as "awesome" is not in the matter outside but inside of our own subconscious mind -- if not in our conscious. If it were in our conscious, it would not be a matter of "awesome and sublime"; because in that case we could have seen it, understood it, defined and digested it in our rational common sense. In that case, it would be a matter of commonplace -- rather an odd perhaps. However, things in our subconscious cannot be defined and perceived. To make our notion of thought more clear, let us discuss the term sublime or awesome sublime and absence what the tragedy is concerned with. Kant, in his Critique of Judgement, talking about aesthetic judgement, divides the aesthetic into the dual notions of thought: beautiful and sublime ( 276). Beautiful can be depicted in arts but sublime, being beyond the sphere of conscious imagination of human mind, cannot be depicted in art; because the sublime is unformed and without any figure (253). If beautiful is nothing other than the form, sublime is quite contrary to this. It is not always beautiful -- it is something "negative" and "indirect" presentation of that one which does not present itself. We can have the notion of sublime not in a surface joy of beauty but in a bitter mixture of feeling -- tragic and pleasant at the same time, terror and pity at the same time, attraction and repulsion at the same time. Nonetheless, sublime is again a dreadful fascination of mind, an opium, that can only be achieved in experiences but cannot imagine it or depict it in language. It is beyond the conscious sign of language -- beyond the realm of ontology. Therefore, sublime starts its work when there is failure of the imagination. Before an absolute great object of nature, or mind, the conscious imagination cannot go forth. Conscious is limited in pre-conceived meaning of language. That is why we just cannot locate the sublime; we just cannot locate the ecstatic absence within the conscious endeavour of our limited mind -- in art, which is defined and cultured. That is why Kant says that "sublime is the matter of brute nature" (252-3).
Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said, or a thought ever been expressed more sublimely, than in the inscription over the temple of Isis (Mother Nature): I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and no mortal has lifted my veil. (316)
Why we are depicting the notion of Kantian sublime in context of Spiritual Sexuality?
What is the relation of sublime with spiritual sexuality is a vital question to answer. It is because the sexuality in its spiritual form or rather in its subdued form of absence is in the nature of sublime; the sublime as defined by Kant. Sexuality, in its optimum level, created enters into an immutable order if unattainability—the sublime can also be not attained in defined terms. It is a sensation of majestic awesome terror and valour; it is a sensation of go further and crash yourself into nothing; it is a sensation of intoxicated irrational assumption, a sensation of dark raptures but never to be known to itself. Sublime is the nearest notion of thought that is able to correspond spiritual sexuality – sexuality without sex but still within the realm of sex. In this regard, Kantian sublime is akin to spiritual sexuality.. Apart from Kant, the notion of sublime in spiritual sexuality can best be found with anthropomorphic values. Human being , human mind, is the centre of feeling -- whether it is physically limited and defined, like that of beauty or undefined awesome shapeless chaos, like that of sublime. In spiritual sexuality, the one is led back to one 's own freedom as ones ultimate end to meet the awesome state of inner sublime -- and that is the rapture of mind within one 's anthropomorphic quality. Although indefinable, the awesome absence of sublime is nowhere but within the human mind -- the abode of absence is in the human body and the abode of awesome sublime is in the human mind. The sublime is anthropomorphic. In simple language, if we do not peep into the deep human essence -- the universal anthropomorphic fragility -- we just cannot feel the notion of sublime; and we also cannot feel what is there in absence beyond the sphere of defined ontology -- that is ringing and ringing again in our mind. Man is but mind, a subjective entity; nothing beyond the
mind. Within the mind and within the sphere of anthropomorphic physical man, the unseen hands of spiritual veins spread out and catch us in our unconscious, in our absence, in our chaotic dark of undefined sexual bliss.
We just do not know things in themselves -- the latent side of the matter -- we can only see the manifested side of the things and ideas.
The absence means nothing; because it represents nothing. It is a void. However, it is the antithesis of presence. In that sense, the absence is not absolute in itself -- it is the one which is not present in time and space, not defined, not shaped and not captured within the tangible human approach -- but felt in deep human unconscious. For this, to have the pleasure of that unattainable lack of mind, we have to efface the easily attainable presence of defined materiality, change the story into the trace and travel along that trace of absence. Derived by this traits of mind, ancient people from Greek and Indic world, effacing the obvious and natural defined materiality of physical sexuality, or rather to say undermining the importance of female sexuality as a physical form of derogated sexuality, adopted the sublime nature of sexuality—the spiritual sexuality.
Mother Goddess vs. Spiritual Sexuality
To satisfy their sexuality in spiritual level, men created goddess; a female symbol of bisexuality, attributing the refined power of their male worth and meaning.

The Mother Goddesses worshipping cultures still represent the female sexuality that believes in the physical nature and wide open approach to life. However, after the advent of male sexuality that means to say the spiritual nature of sexuality where the physical sexuality—the symbol of natural reality—would be suppressed by some created ideologies or rather by some male power discourses, the Heaven is created above the earth and the gods of Heaven or rather the gods of the skies like Nordic Thor, Vedic Indra, Babylonian Marduk and Greek Apolllo or Zeus came with their fierce warrior quality carrying with thunderbolts. They killed the goddess figures, rape them like Persephone by Hadas, Europa by Zeus in Greek. The Sumerian Lilith, Babylonian Ishtar and Canaanite Astarte all are tripped of their power demoralized. On the other hand, instead of these creative female mother goddess with abundance of sexual and creative power, the patriarchal male society invaded some goddesses apt to their spiritual sexuality without physical sexual power. These male created spiritual goddesses were almighty and powerful but they condemned to be sexually active. They were valorous for their asexual qualities. Approdity or Diana, Athena, Vesta of Rome and Goddess Durga are all virgin goddesses created by the male discourses to satisfy the non physical urge of spiritual sexuality. Athena is created not by male and female sexual union but by the Zeus himself—the sole masculine product not through any reproductive genital organs but splitting the head of Zeus with an axe. Athena was born already equipped with arms as like Hindu Goddess Durga was born. She was also not born by sexual union but created by the spiritual and especial power of male gods to carryout their works --- to kill the demons Mahisasura, Chanda and Munda, and others.
The creation story of Goddess Durga clearly represents the male psyche of spiritual sexuality. To save the world from the capture of demon, to whom they are not sufficient of defeating with, the gods or rather the elite males on the realm emitted beams of fierce light of their male power from their respective male bodies. From this blinding sea of light, there emerged a female-figure, a virgin goddess, Durga, already equipped with arms . As she was the combined energies of all the gods, each of her weapons was given to her by various gods--- like Rudra 's trident, Visnu 's discus, Indra 's thunderbolt, Brahma 's kamandalu, Kuber 's ratnahar etc. Gods created Durga to fulfill their wishes and to accomplish their works which they are incapable of doing. It was not possible for them to do without the help of Durga who was no one but their own collective powers. Durga, personally, has no sexual thrust and will, but she is a great erotic attraction for the demons. She is so carefully carved as to be able to ignite the erotic fire in demons. Here, her beauty and female attraction is not for the rightful purpose of natural female sexuality but for a foul play. This divine female beauty created by the male divinity as a tricky weapon to fight with the powerful enemy. Here, sexuality is not regarded but the spiritual passion of war. All the passions that leads oneself from ones ' heart are spiritual; they are emotive and libidinal in nature-- so sexual. We will discuss further on this latter. In ancient Indic world, Durga is created by the male aristocracy, by the male patriarchal elites in the domain of masculine intellectuality. Actually, Durga is nowhere but in the concept of her builders—in the male universe of spiritual sexuality. She is attributed to the world not by any female power but by the male divinity. Here, male is creating female discourse of female power and female divinity; male is worshipping its own creation of femininity in Durga, male is recognizing and valorizing his own power and universe in Durga. Durga is nowhere but in the absence of male spiritual sexuality. The absence is never to be quenched, never to be fulfilled and never to be defined. It is beyond the realm of ontology. We just could not name it and read it. It is our wish to let the demons killed by some power dwelling in absence, it is our wish let there be a great light of valor and masculinity in the form of some great female beauty that can attract the evil spirits and burn them into ashes, it is our wishes that we remain safe and secured. It is only our wish but Durga is nowhere except in the absence of our deep and dark unconscious mind. If we try to read Durga in ordinary natural femininity and sexuality, because of her high-voltage power of divinity it would be impossible. She wipes the natural sexual femininity in us and adjusted herself in bizarre spiritual form of sexuality. She is spiritual even in sexuality, an awesome terror of joy and fear, a splendid and sublime approach of erotic unphysical submission; she is spiritual in her sexuality. You cannot imagine her indulging in sex; you cannot imagine her walking bare feet on the garden. She is always mounted up on a fearsome lion—not on the lioness. Her roaring laughter alone is enough to efface the mundane female sexuality of natural world. She is the cause to diminish the real womenhood in her real physical sexuality and reduce her importance of natural sexual creativity. Men worship Durga, their own image of spirituality but do not worship their real wives. Man attributes all his valor and honor to Durga but do not do so to his daughters, mother and sisters. Wife can only satisfy his physical need of erotic copulation for a while but not his pervasive and perennial thrust of spiritual sexuality. No physical woman or man is able to address man 's or woman 's desire hidden in their dark subconscious minds. So he needs Durga; the symbol of power and spirituality. Ironically, man established sexual relationship with the divine goddess, not in the physical form but in the form of devotion and maddening frenzy of sacrifice. We are not satisfied in the rational establishment of ethical power of white Durga, we also create her black side—Kali. Kali, the black one, is the personification of all consuming time, the female mouth and belly of hell. She is not civilized and polished as like Durga but harsh and ugly, cruel and terrible as well—she likes blood. That is why, a river of blood from the beheaded innocent offerings of thousands of goats, water-buffalos, sheep, fowl, pigs and sometime even a man or a woman has been pouring continuously into her mouth for millenniums. Her stomach is a void that can never be filled. It is an absence, a symbol of spiritual chaos or nothingness -- a space where “there the eye goes not” and “the speech goes not, nor the mind” (Kena Upanisad 1.3). Ironically, knowingly or unknowingly, we are performing some sexual intercourses with her when we are beheading some innocent one for her offering. In the sublime terror of beheading the one, ironically, we are blinding our hidden sexuality in the sprinkled blood-drops and covertly beheading ourselves to assimilate ourselves with her, to penetrate ourselves inside her womb. She is our mother in deep dark of our unconscious somewhere, thus, she is our beloved as well in deep dark our unconscious somewhere. For our subconscious, to be the mother or the beloved is the same. It is a psychological fact that is already evident to us. I do not need to revise this again. Nonetheless, we never thought about why we are crazy for the offerings; why there is solace and a feeling of asceticism in offerings.
The same story is there in Greek mythologies on the origin of goddess Athena --especially in Hesiod 's Theogony that tells about the genealogy of the gods and goddesses. The periods when Goddess like Durga and Athena and others were being originated in Greek and Indic world, it seems that there was tensions between new form of masculine patrimonial sexuality and the prevailing form of maternal female sexuality. In Hesiod, the heavenly hierarchy of ancient Greece goddesses at first predominated. Hesiod’s Theogony, which was composed around 700 B.C., described the shift in power from the earlier goddesses, whom he associated with passions and evil forces, to the rational heroic male god, Zeus. Once he had gained power, Zeus established a patriarchal order among the gods. Thenceforth male gods were free to exploit goddesses and earthly women at their pleasure.
All earlier stories indicate us about this tension where the maternal side was still in dominance. Before Zeus, who swallow his first wife, Metis, and confirm his position for ever, both his ancestors Uranes and Cronus were castrated or removed by their wives Gaea and Rhea respectively. Till that time, patriarchy was not considered to be necessary as ultimate truth of the society. Gaea, the earth, is able to produce offspring without a male counterpart. Her husband, Uranes, the sky, was not in favor of this; so he repressed her children. Gaea plots with her son Cronus to free her children from Uranus 's oppression. In the next generation, Rhea, too, displays similar quality of womanly trickery. When Cronus swallows her children as they are born, she tricks him and substitutes a rock in place of her last born child Zeus. However, from Zeus onwards the story turns to the opposite and he became a victor for ever. Till now, female power plays a role in the overthrow of each of the first two ruling gods but Zeus overcome this by swallowing his wife, the feminine sexuality, Metis or rather 'cunning intelligence ' . Earlier gods had only brute masculine strength but no intelligence. Zeus has also the same but because ingesting Meti, the cunning intelligence and absorbing these qualities into himself, now, Zeus has both : brute strength and cunning intelligence.
This story of Zeus on swelling his wife Meti is symbolic; Zeus starts the patriarchal line with spiritual sexuality. Now onwards, the Greek women are to be swallowed by their husbands left their own birth-families and were absorbed into the families of their husbands, where their identities were subsumed into those of their husbands. Since Zeus give birth to Athena by himself through his head and established overall rights on his offspring, now onwards, children were born to their mothers, but they were born into their father 's family and the father had the ultimate right on his offspring. Now, the women as such, giving birth to their children and raring them, are off the scene and they have no rights on their own children. The Greek women in classic Greek were absence. Women had had a derogative status. Hesiod, talking about the creation story of women, says that Zeus, in retaliation of Prometheus who was a benefactor of mankind, by the help of Hephaestus, the craftsman god, and Athena, the goddess of art, construct a maiden, a very beautiful woman and gives her to mankind. She was the first woman, Pandora, and the ancestor of female sex. Although a great affliction for mankind she was the sole evil caused for the fall of mankind. Describing the event how Zeus cheats men by giving them the beautiful evil named woman, he says :

Forthwith he ( Zeus) made an evil thing for men as the price of fire; for the very famous Limping God (Hephaestus) formed from earth the likeness of a shy maiden as the son of Cronus willed. And the goddess bright-eyed Athena girded and clothed her with silvery raiment, and down from her head she spread with her hands a embroidered veil, a wonder to see; and she, Pallas Athena, put about her head lovely garlands, flowers of new-grown herbs. Also she put upon her head a crown of gold which the very famous Limping God made himself and worked with his own hands as a favor to Zeus his father. On it was much curious work, wonderful to see; for of the many creatures which the land and sea rear up, he put most upon it, wonderful things, like living beings with voices: and great beauty shone out from it.
But when he had made the beautiful evil to be the price for the blessing, he brought her out, delighting in the finery which the bright-eyed daughter of a mighty father had given her, to the place where the other gods and men were. And wonder took hold of the deathless gods and mortal men when they saw that which was sheer guile, not to be withstood by men.
For from her is the race of women and female kind: of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble, no helpmeets in hateful poverty, but only in wealth. And as in thatched hives bees feed the drones whose nature is to do mischief -- by day and throughout the day until the sun goes down the bees are busy and lay the white combs, while the drones stay at home in the covered skeps and reap the toil of others into their own bellies -- even so Zeus who thunders on high made women to be an evil to mortal men, with a nature to do evil. And he gave them a second evil to be the price for the good they had: whoever avoids marriage and the sorrows that women cause, and will not wed, reaches deadly old age without anyone to tend his years, and though he at least has no lack of livelihood while he lives, yet, when he is dead, his kinsfolk divide his possessions amongst them. And as for the man who chooses the lot of marriage and takes a good wife suited to his mind, evil continually contends with good; for whoever happens to have mischievous children, lives always with unceasing grief in his spirit and heart within him; and this evil cannot be healed.
In these lines of Theogony above, Hesiod is trying to show how Zeus solidified his reign of patriarchal hegemony. Zeus defeats an attack by the Titans led by his father with the help of his step-brothers – Hundred Handers. Titans are cast down below. To establish the patrimonial domination, he also defeated Typhoesus, the hurricane like force which was in favor of matrimony and was created by the mother earth. All this shows the conflicts in between patrimonial and matrimonial sexuality. To win the existing system of natural dominancy of feminine sexuality, Zeus , the symbol of sky gods or rather the symbol of spiritual sexuality, hit his best and derogated women, Pendoras, just to valorize his realm of absence – his realm of sky.
Actually speaking, ancient Athens was spiritualized in all its domain of human consciousness—art, philosophy, literature, culture, and others. The classic Greek world was so much spiritualized within the realm of human wisdom dominated by the aristocratic male citizens, the presence of real physical women became nearly invisible in real. Although they were there, but their actual presence was mystified by the female spiritual symbols created by the male according to their own inner libidinal wishes and according to their own imagination. They, covertly or overtly, translated their physical women into the imaginative nonphysical myths. In such myths, the actual female sexuality was valorized to the spiritual sphere—in this or that ways.
Athena displays both masculine and feminine qualities. The daughter of Zeus, she remained a virgin but never married. She was a goddess of war and had temples on the citadels of many Greek cities -- in both Athens and Sparta--- where she was protecting deity. Her main attributes were spear and aegis (breastplate). She shares control of war with Ares, but Athena was morally and militarily superior, in part because she represented the intellectual and civilized side of war and the virtues of justice and skill, whereas Ares seems to have been associated with blood lust. Athena was also a goddess of crafts, especially the feminine crafts of spinning and weaving but also of carpentry, pottery, and metalworking.
The archetypal myths of Great Goddess and her fertility consorts, preliminary, indicate that we are, in flesh and bones, are the parts of the earth 's body, a female power, which, the feminine impulse, binds us to nature in one pack. We revel this planate as home and this body as its un separated continuum. It is female sexuality that creates and nurtures us as a physical body. However, for the human world, this much is not enough. Something more and something obscure is also there that makes different and that is male in nature. If we accept this fundamental concept, than, it would be easier to go further and discuss how the spiritual sexuality works on human society. Collectively, men and women in general are only biological beings; their genders are discriminated by the societies latter. That is why, in ancient Greek and Indic world, there are female deities in male bodies and male deities in female bodies. In the earlier period, Shiva was more female that a male God like Dionysus in Greek. Latter, after the evolution of sexuality from physical to spiritual, they both turned to be the spiritual one and played more male roles. Shiva is called to be the ardhanariswor, half-male and half-female god, and that is exactly true for the Greek Dionysus as well.
Spiritual Sexuality: a Realm of Sex beyond the Sex
The notion of sublime, a blind of awesome terror, limitless pleasure and breath-taking majestic valor and wonder—the sensation of pleasure beyond the approach of ontological expression—is near to the subdued notion of spiritual sexuality.

It is a general believe that spirituality and sexuality are different things; thus, incomparable. Spirituality always deserves an austerity of philosophic dignity and pride; it has its connotations with the heaven, skies, the elevated ones, unpolluted and unscratched ones. On the contrary, in comparison to the former, sexuality has a derogative status as a mundane day-to-day business that is mainly related for procreation. Sexual attraction, devotion, longing and passions have been discarded by the spiritual holy men as the trivial sin of human 'Achilles ' heel ' that may caused dirt to the austerity of spiritual being-- since long. Except few, all religions have some strict reservations, code of conduct and curved eyes towards sexuality. However, it is a great secret of human mind both are un separated and take a great concern with one another. It would be a matter of havoc if I say that fundamentally, spirituality and sexuality are the same and one—the differences are only in their external fabrication and mode of presentation. Modern psychology and the philosophy of human mind has had a great corpus of knowledge on human mind that all tend to prove the fact above; nonetheless, it is the tradition of believe, culture of living and the track that we had traveled earlier that hindered us to accept spirituality and sexuality as an single entity. There is certain demarking line in between of them that bifurcates them tangible and force us to conceive them separately. One is physical in nature and the other is rather a shapeless abstract--a feeling, longing and a strong passion of ecstasy. They can only meet to each other if we just erase the divider line in between of them. For this, we should be able to see the physical sexuality in the realm of spiritual absence and spirituality in tangible natural physical presence. In this situation, the difference would not be a great secret but just a play of presence and absence. It has already been practiced. Materialist philosophers, like Marx, had already defined that spirituality – or similar other terms that are not physically presence but can be materialized them in physical sense and utility by especial mental manipulations under some terms: viz. law, ethics, philosophy, religion, literature, art and other intellectual forms of human physical civilizations which are supposed to be in the superstructure of the society—are the product of physical material presence. Physical material world is a natural tangible rational existence that serves, according to the Marxism, as the base structure of the above. In the same manner, some psychologist of 19th and 20th centuries present astonishing facts on sexuality-- which had been considered as pure physical reality of nature—that tends the notion of sex not only confined in defined physical viz. biological boundaries but also, more effectively and brilliantly, in the subconscious of nothingness. Freud discovered human unconscious-- although it had a long history of acquaintance since ancient Greek and Indic intellectuality. Similarly, he revealed on the child sexuality that was not conceived before. He discussed on dream, on repressed form of sexuality, on the latent effect of sexuality and open the curtain to the world to show the form of sexuality collectively hidden inside the dark-rooms of human minds. It is a great starting to mingle the presence of sexuality into the absence of unconscious spirituality. Human unconscious is the home of human activities whether in presence or in absence. Sexuality and spirituality both have a common point of origin – that is human unconscious. Both share some common nature of psychic- characters and show common effects -- rather on different grounds in different modes. It seems that one is the developed side of the other and the other is the origin of the one. The continuity of the same passion on the same continuum is named differently in different time and positions as sexuality or spirituality. They are both connected with some rudimentary traits of human unconscious like: desire, passion, pleasure and lack. Jacques Lacan, a French Philosopher and psychoanalyst, sees the origin of desire connected with the unconscious and that desire actually structures the human world ( Seminar II, P. 299 ). The unconscious is characterized by discontinuity and uncertainty that is associated in turn with language ( Ecrits 224). Since the unconscious is merely arbitrarily connected to conscious, there is an ontological gap between them that makes it extremely difficult to recover the unconscious, even though it does become manifested in speech it is still difficult to distinguish, because it takes the form of a chain of signifiers. Desire also travels with the language but it is beyond the language. Because, in Lacan 's views, it is associated with inexpressible lack. He says : " Desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It is not the lack of this or that , but lack of being where by being exists" ( Seminar II, p 223). For Lacan, " this lack is beyond anything which can represent it. It is only ever represented as a reflection on a veil (ibid ). Since desire is pre-ontological, the desire of the other is the subject 's desire that enter into the mediation of language. It is not that the other holds the key to the objects desire but the first object of desire is to be recognized by the other ( Speech and Language 31) . Desire, in fact, is beyond language itself; because desire wants nothing that it can name in language ( Seminar II, p 223).
Lacan talks about castration, which forced to give up jouissance, primordial level of sexuality that is in absence as an undefined objectless desire; castration is caused by the language, the name of the father, the socio-ethical meaning which is never to be achieved. There is no sexual intercourse in physical sense; there is no direct relationship between men and women. The act is performed in symbols of others, by passive metaphor of sexuality—each sex is defined by the third term and that is by the phallic function. A phallus is not a penis but a general metaphor of sexuality hidden somewhere in unconscious desire inside: both in a man or in a woman. A phallus is more a concept built by the language on others body. A man is not defined and controlled by his biology but by the phallic function. He is wholly alienated within the language and a subject of symbolic castration by the language. However, there is one man, a symbol of spiritual sexuality, where the phallic function does not apply – the primal father who never to castrate. Because, he is beyond the ontological realm of language. The primal father does not exist but ex-sists. Man cannot enjoy a woman as a woman , but always as a fantasy of her. Only the primal father has a true sexual relationship with a woman. All other men, the actual physical men, are to be castrated and every man has a sexual relationship not with a woman but with the abject desire . The abject sexual woman is a undefined symbol dwelling in his unconscious. She is, in fact, inaccessible. Every man defines the accessible women through the inaccessible women through the realm of primal father. In that sense, every man is a bit of primal father—who has no boundary, no guilt and who is not castrated. This union of ideal non-castrated primal father and the inaccessible woman is, in fact, more spiritual than physical. It is spiritual in the physical bodies and physical sexuality. Because, here, the physicality is castrated by the name of the father. It is essential to regularized the spiritual sexuality of absence into the tangible ethical social code of physical sexuality. It is a vital process of transcending the absence in favor of rational ethical presence.

( to be continued ).

Shiva, Kumar and Dionysus: The Female side of Sexuality
The 'female sexuality in male body ' is a popular notion. In sexuality, male and female are the two opposite side to perform the act; nonetheless, they are intermingled and fluid in nature. There is no rigid demarcation line in between these two and one can trans the border easily to be on the other side. The concept of biological gender and sexuality are different things. Sexuality is more influenced by the mental phenomena than its gendered and\ or biological urges.
Dionysus and Kumar, although deities with religious spiritual connotations, nonetheless, they represent the natural side of sexuality—pure, open and nude. They are more associated with the physical tangible emotions and rapture, violence and thunder, rudimentary impulses of primitive wildness hidden in man or woman. They are the deities of earth before the arrival of sky deities—Zeua or Indra, Visnu or Apollo. They are the apirory symbols of spiritual sexuality.
Indic Shiva or Skanda and Greek Dionysus both supposed to be male deities; nonetheless, they represent the female sexuality in the sense that female sexuality represents the natural fundamental physical realm of simplicity and the reality of the earth. That is why, these gods are clamed to be both male and female on one place –ardhanariswar. How the Indic Shiva,his son Kartikaya Kumar, and the Greek god Dionysus share their influences to each other and linked in a similar effects by representing the same thing – nature and natural sexuality—is an interesting point.
Medieval Greek scholars, like Megasthenes, Flavius Arrians, clearly writs about the presence and influence of god Dionysus in Indic theatre. Megasthenes, who visited India between 302 and 288 B.C. as an envoy of Seleucus Nicator to the royal court of Emperor Chandragupta Maurya, wrote a fascination account of ancient India which has survived in the form of elaborate quotations in the works of later Greek writers.
I tremble to speak the words of freedom before the tyrant.
But let the truth be told: there is no god greater than Dianysus. ( Euripides, IV, Bacchae 775-778)
Mentioning about the early history of the country, he says: "Father Bacchu was the first who invaded India and was first of all who triumphed over vanquished Indians -- from him to Alexander the Great 6451 years are reckoned with 3 months"
( qtd. in Varadpande 66). Following Megasthenes, Arrianus, born towards the end of the first century, also, have the same idea:
Indians have been particularly distinguished among the nations as lovers of dance and song ever since Dionysus and his attendant Bacchanals made their festive progress through the realm of India. [ . . . ] The Indians worship other Gods and Dionysus himself in particular with cymbals and drums, because he so taught them; and that he also taught them Satyric dance, as the Greeks call it Kordax. (66)
However, this idea is discarded even by the Greek scholars afterward. It seems that the myth of the Dionysian expedition to India is largely talked about after the invasion of Alexander in India. Talking about India, neither Aeschylus in his play The Suppliants, nor the Greek Historian Herodotus in his book of history, who were earlier than Alexander, talk anything about Dionysus in India. Nonetheless, Greek writers actually identified some of the Indic deities with their own deities viz. Dionysus and Heracles with Shiva and Krishna. They must have struck upon the similarity between some of the Indic cults and Dionysian cults. (For example, the cult of Kumar, Kartikya, and Dionysus ). Some scholars say that perhaps this analogue took the form of myth and Greeks tried to explain similar Indian phenomena in their own way ( 69). Actually speaking, it is not so easy to assume the nature and structure of pre-historic inter-continental cultural transformation. In fact, Dionysus is a universal phenomenon, a happy, boisterous, uninhibited nature-sprit that took different forms in different cultures civilizations at different times in different moods of presentation in female sexuality. Phallic worship is the common ritual in Indic tradition. It seems that because of such ancient Dionysian rites phallic festivals like Masana Mahotsava, Vasantotsava, Kama Mahotsama were common with phallic connotation -- abound in dance, wine and music. The ancient cult of Yakshas and Yakshis are supposed to be the deities of fertility and vegetation. They are Dionysian in many ways -- they are pleased by the offerings of wine, flowers, incense and music. In Taittiriya Samhita, there is one song full of dramatic essence of Dionusus:
Yoke the plough, stretch apart the yokes
Here sow in the womb made ready for seed
Thorugh our son be there audience with profit for us may the ripe grain be brought low by the sickle. . . . ( 71)
The Indic traditional notion of Panchamakar--wine, meat, fish, dance, and copulation, -- in tantric Bamamargi cult -- is notorious to mention here. These are all Dionysian in nature. Lakulis Pasupata, an extent religious cult of Shiva , used to pray their gods, Shiva, by hasita, (laughter), gita (singing songs), nritya (dancing), Hudukkar (roaring like a bull) etc. (72). These all are similar to Dionysian. Roaring like a bull is typical Dionysian trait.
The mythical life of Dionysus is a symbol of man 's understanding that he is a part of nature and nature is a part of him. Originally, the tragic hero was a projection of the god Dionysus himself; whenever tragedy fulfils its proper function, the tragic hero retains an affinity with his Dionysian origin.
Those rituals were characterized by incestuous sexual urges, scarified with ritual celebrations and ecstatic dramatic performance of death. The analogue between the rituals of Horse Sacrifice Ashvamedha Yajna in ancient India and the Inieros game of the mythic Greek rituals performed by the Queen of Athens with the fertility god Dionysus ( Campbell, Oriental Mythology 424-26) are considerable. Let us elaborate these two ancient fertility sexual rituals, Attic and Indic, where the queens, the female side of the creation got the divine intercourse with the god himself, symbolically with the horse, Ashva, and bull that are to be sacrificed later.
In the second day of vine flower festival -- Anthesteria, the rituals of sacred marriage or Hieros Gamos, there take place the sacred marriage festival -- the marriage of a mortal woman to the god Dionysus. In this festival, a public procession (Pompe) set forth, in which Dionysus 's image was paraded through the streets of Athens in a ship driven on wheels. Accompanying it were bands of participants dressed as Satyrs ' and maenads. On reaching the temple of ' Dionysus some distance outside the walls -- there took place the ritual marriage of the Queen to Dionysus. Dionysus was formerly wedded to the Basilinna, wife of the Archon Basileus (King Archon). The bride was escorted from the sanctuary of Dionysus in the Marshes to a building celled the Boukoleion or Ox-herd building, in or near the Agora. Before the ceremony, fourteen noble women celled Gerarai or ladies of honor made offering at fourteen alters in the Sanctuary. The union of the queen and god took place just after the sunset at the end corner of the bull stable. The bull is significantly considerable in the context of the rituals. The role of the bull is considered as a sacred animal for many millennia. The wedding, a fertility rite, is explained by the myth that in earlier time the Athenian hero Theseus gave up his bride to Dionysus. To be Queen would be a great honor at the only a woman in the room when rites were administrated . ( Burket 239)
Here, the role of the bull is significant; because the bull is the symbol of the god Dionysus -- a god of resurrection who was strongly linked to the bull. In a cult hymn from Olympia, at a festival for Hera, Dionysus is also invited to come as a bull. Quite frequently he is ported with bull-horns, and refers also to an archaic myth in which Dionysus is slaughtered as a bull-calf and impiously eaten by the Titans (64).
In the same manner, in Ashvamedha Yajna in ancient India, same type of sexual fertility rituals is depicted where the queen celebrated the symbolic sexual intercourse with the horse that was to be sacrificed later -- like the bull in the former case.
As like in ancient Greek mythic world, Dionysian traits like intoxicating music and dance, trance of ecstasy rapture in frenzy drunkenness, dramatic dialogue and incest sexuality is found in ancient Indic literary tradition as well. In fact, Indic theatre has been evolved not by the Sanskrit nataka but by the folk tradition of Dionysian like ecstatic singing and dancing of primitive groups like Yaksha, Nagas, Vighnavinayakas, Guhyakas, Daityas, Danavas, Rakshasas, Lokapalas, etc. Aryans, the speakers of classic Sanskrit, had borrowed the theatrical arts from these earlier non-Aryan habitants of this ancient land (Varadpande, History of 7). These tribes certainly had had their own forms of dramatic entertainment and festivals in which the Dionysian ecstasy was performed. Even Bharata, in his Natyashastra, indirectly acknowledges the association of the theatrical art with different ancient cults, pre-Vedic in their origin (8). This per- Aryan folk, tribal and urban cultures had developed their own form of dramatic, or to be precise semi-dramatic forms of entertainment in festivals held in the honors of deities like Yakshasm Nagas. These and other festivals on local Fertility goddesses were full of ecstasy celebrated by offerings of flowers, incense, wine, intoxicating music and dance. It is natural that their profound Dynastic influence was not escapable for the Aryans. Discussing about the origin of Indic theatre, Horowitz, in his famous book The Indian Theatre, Varadpande says:
The oldest Indian dramas, or rather colloquies (sanvadas) were not composed in Sanskrit, but in Prakrit. Indeed, originally the Prakrit Snvadas were mysteries too, either Krishna or Shiva acting or dancing the principal part. Favorite episodes from Govinda 's eventful life were the 'Slaying of Kansa ' and 'The Binding of the Heaven Storming Titan '. Large crowds came to witness these open air spectacles. The grand finale, a merry rounded play of the bright eyed Gopis, proved a special attraction. Rival worshippers flocked in equal number to the wanton bacchanals held in the honor of Shiva. Vedic dialogues reflect the afterglow rather than the first morning flush of the rude representation, staged in a vulgar tone, of Krishna 's and Shiva 's ancient mysteries. (7-8) Later literature speaks of Dionysian traits of festivals like Yakkha Maha, Naga Maha, Nadi Maha, Bhuta Jatra, Rudra Jatra, Giri Jatra etc. where people used to assemble to worship the deities and enjoy ecstasy songs and dances (9). Even in the developed era of Sanskrit drama, some remains of Dionysian traits are found. Ganika is one of the best examples for this. Dionysus represents the symbol of art, drama along with intoxicating music, sexual frenzy, and drunken rapture.
… and so, along all Asia 's swarming towared cities where Greeks and foreign nationals mingling, live, my progress made.
There I taught my dances to the feet of living men, establishing my mysteries and rites, that I might be revealed on earth for what I am: a god. (Euripides IV, The Bacchae 524)
Dionysus is not simply a beauty of rational smoothness; but rather a course and wild pleasure of painful reality. Music, drama and sex are all in favor of the latter. Ganika, the professional actors, rangopajiyani, represent all in classic Sanskrit culture of dramaturgy. As it is evident from the Arthashastra and other works, ganikas were the custodians of the theatrical arts in classic India. They were engaged in the dual profession of acting and prostitution. Kautilya enjoins that the sons of a ganika should be made chief professional actors and dancers expert in rhythm, talavachar.

Greek Dionysus and Indic Skanda Kumar
Here, we are to compare Greek god of fertility, wine and ecstasy, the god of female sexuality—Dionysus-- with its Indic form, the Skanda kumar, the son of Lord Shiva. As we have indicated some hints about Indic Dionysus in Shiva, this is to prove the mythical co-existence of Dionysian culture, the cult of Dionysus in any name or form, in Indic sub-continent as well. Skanda or Kumar is supposed to be the son of Shiva means it is the continuity of the Indic cult of female sexuality, Shiva, in different time and space latter. Shiva is the patron god, Mahadeva, who has been gradually transformed into the masculinity after the arrival of patrimonial culture in Indic world. Nonetheless, the Dionysian essence of female sexuality, or rather the sexuality in natural reality and tangibility, survived in Kumar Kartikaya – a new deity to represent the same Dionysian sexuality that was previously symbolized in Shiva. To see Dionysus in Kartikya is to see the ancient Greek female sexuality in ancient Indic world and vise versa. This is important, because this was later suppressed by the male traits of rational intellectuality, the Apollonian and Visniva cults, the Sky deities of Greek and Indic world who represent spirituality in sexuality. After the invent of these rational sky gods, physical sexuality had been gradually derogated by the sublime austerity of religion, philosophy, wisdom and social ethics. Instead of Maenads and Abadhutas, Dionysian and Karikaya 's followers, philosophers and Rishies evolved to explain the natural sexuality in obscure ethical philosophy. Whether Plato or Socrates, whether Yajnavalka or Gautama, all talked the same thing – spiritual sexuality in essence. They talked about the Logos, Om, and Mahat all indicate the realm of absence. They theorized their imagination on absence and dictate people to obey their theories of absence. The origin of absence was in the human subconscious where the sexuality was already there. Sexuality is apriory fact. Thus, Kartikya and Dionysus are the a priory deities that represent the natural sexuality.
There are astonishing similarities in between Dionysus and Skanda kumar \ Kumar Kartikya. It is a fact that since not much works have been done in context of the migrations of mythic patterns and cult ideologies across the ancient world, it is natural for these similarities not to be well considered to prove the possibility that these mythic figures, Dionysus and Skanda, as being one and the same. However, works are done to compare Lord Shiva with Dionysus. Alain Danielou, for example, has compared Shive and Dionysus in his work, Shiva and Dionysus (34-42). Of course, he is right in finding similarities in between these two ancient gods from the two vastly different parts of the world: both are identified with ecstatic possession, wine, mountains, wild animals, frenzied women, frenzied dancing, fertility etceteras; nonetheless, he is still incomplete as not addressing the after-influences when Shiva was forcedly changed to be the masculine deity of spirituality and indicating the new innovation of Female god Shiva in Kartika. Although structural evidences from literature and popular mythology have been cited in comparing Shiva and Dionysus, that is all right, but Kartikaya was left behind who genuinely and effectively Dionysian than his pre-deity Shiva. Kartikaya is more near to Dionysus than Shiva because he is new and relatively fresh to the Dionysian types of natural sexuality. For example, Dionysus is called "twice born" or Dithyramb, but the god Shiva is not born at all: he is unborn, eternal and unchanging. This may be attributed to Shiva when the male discourse of spiritual sexuality evolved. Dionysus possesses strong feminine association or rather there is much womanly quality and tenderness in Dionysus. On the contrary, Shiva is a masculine ithyphallic deity, surrounded by troops of ghouls. We can take Shiva, as wel as Zeus, as a father figure: as both are mountain dwellers -- Zeus dwells on Mount Olympus and Shiva on Mount Kailas-- both are the greatest gods -- the god of the gods etcetera. Shiva 's proximity with sky gods like Zeua, Thore, Indra shows the effect of masculine discourse created by the patrimonial pundits and rishies. Instead of Shiva there are many similarities in Skanda Kumar with Dionysus.
The first similarity of Dionysus and Skanda is that both are kumara -- a state of being perpetuating young, neither child or man but, eternal adolescent; occupies a place somewhere between the two. That is why, a name of Skandha is called Kumar (in Sanskrit, Kumar means one who is in the adolescent age). Same thing can be called on Dionysus (Charles Segal 12). Both represent the spirit of lucid energy and the power of transformative play full of cunning, deception and strategies that are at once diabolical and divine (343).
The story of origin of these two deities is also same. Both are born directly from their fathers: Zeus or Shiva, both are born from the fire, Skanda from the fiery element of his father’s third eys, that is why Skanda is called Agnibhu or one that is originated from the fire and Dionysus is called ‘Purigenes,’ the one born in fire. Both are twice born; that is why Dionysus is called "Dithyrambos" twice born, and Skanda Kartikya is called Sharadhajanma, born in a reedy marsh. Both are born first from the fire and second from the water. As Skanda born first from his father’s third eyes which is fiery and second time from reedy marsh that represents water or Saravana, in the same manner, Dionysus also born second times in reedy marsh and nourished by the nymphs or water spirit (Danielous 27). As Dionysus is delivered to twelve nymphs or the Hyades, and later, for their service, they are exalted to the heaven where seven of them shine as the constellation Pleiades, in the same manner, Kumar Kartikya is also given to the Krittika maidens (that is why one name of Skanda is Kartikya), who serve as the god’s wet-nurses and later are exalted to heaven as the Krittika constellation. In this regard, Krittika is not other then Pleiades constellation.
Both gods are inherited with feminine power. Both are the gods of femininity and fertility. Shakti is the svabhava or rather the power is the inherent character for Skanda kumar. Shakti is a feminine attribute in Sanskrit and it personified a female deity. Shakti is the synonym of fertility or creation, too. Fertility is the main character of Dionysus. Although both gods are identified with the fringe of civilized society: with wilderness, ‘crazy’ or roguish behavior, sudden possession or intoxication and underground or otherwise vaguely subversive activities (l 13), nonetheless, they are also the lords of water, life and fertility as well. Both are closely associated with fruit, blood and semen. Skanda Kumar, like Dionysus, is the god of fertility. In Sanskrite, the term skand refers primarily to the spurting of semen; hence Skanda means "Spurt of Semen" (Monier 1256). Dionysus is also well known in Greek mythology for his association with water, plant, sap, sperm and wine. According to the Greek belief, Dionysus was the lord of all moist nature (Otto 156). The scholars agree that the "sovereignty of Dionysus was not only to be regarded in the juice of fruits whose crowning glory was wine but also in the sperms of living creature" (164). Same is the case for Skanda Kumar. He has been worshipped by the fermented juice of paddy, fruit, honey, coconut and the blood of sacrificial rams since prehistoric time (Clothey 30). The association of blood and fertility finds expression in the importance of the color red in both. In Indic tradition, blood or vermilion powder (sindur) mutually symbolize each other and evoke their close connection to shakti, the feminine principle. Red color is also associated with the mother goddess, the goddess of creativity and female sexuality. They simultaneously symbolize both life and death and this also a powerful quality of female deities. We have already discuss about the two opposite side of goddess Durga and Kali—creative and distructive forces in one body. In the same manner, red color is very favorable to god Dionysus. Like that of Skanda, the image of Dionysus were commonly colored with vermilion and his Maenads in their frenzy were known to rip apart and devour the raw flesh of male goats and even men unwary enough to intrude upon their torch-lit festivities upon the mountains. It is said that the god himself was an omestees or rather "eater of raw flesh" (Otto 109).
Although they are the gods of fertility, ecstasy and joy, they are both the gods of wine, madness and frenzy. This represents the atmosphere of irrational underworld. Neither Dionysus nor Skanda dwells in a celestial heavens, but rather in shadowy underworlds; the realm of the dead and the source of life ( 83). They are not sky-gods but the god of earth, gods of natural reality and natural emotion of pure sexuality—in both creativity and destructivity. In fact, because of their juxtapose nature they are difficult to understand. Both deities are gods of epiphany who repeatedly manifest themselves. Both appear mysteriously from the watery or chthonic depths in disguise to shatter the conventional social order and to fill with terror and wonder the hearts of those who behold them before incomprehensibly disappearing again. Dionysus is thought to be "the god who comes, the god of epiphany, whose appearance is far more urgent, far more compelling than that of any other god. He had disappeared and now he will suddenly be here again" ( 79). Same is the influence and story of Skanda ( Robert Knox 75). Skanda Kumar is the god of love, romance and Eros. In the same manner, Dionysus, too, is closely associated with love-fulfillment and sexual perversion. “O Lord, whose playfellows are the mighty Eros and the dark-eyed nymphs and violet Aphrodite!” (Otto 33).
Both Dionysus and Skanda are also famous for the dramatic play and art. We have already discussed the role of Dionysus in the development of Greek tragedy; in the same token, we can also see the leela , the dramatic performances , of Skanda kumar. In Sanskrit, leela is the word to denote ‘divine play’. In South India and Ceylon, there are lots of mysterious rites and plays that are associated with Skanda Kumar being performed yet ( Obeyesekere 381). They perform mystery, secrecy and dangerous power. Great care is taken to ensure these performances as they are felt to foreshadow the peace and fertility; they might be the cause of misfortune if they were performed rashly. Being enthralled, thousands of devout pilgrims and causal spectators behold these performances (382). The key point to remember here is that they are the visual masks of the invisible imagination. For many years, Dionysus had been played in Greek theatre in different masks. In the same manner, there are different masks and traditional of rituals of Skanda kumar. The verities of masks or personas are not real but the underneath essence of mask-making is real.
Like Dionysus, Skanda Kumar is also symbolic in many forms. The symbol of sphere and satkona yantra (six-cornered magical diagram) of Skanda denote both his image and philosophy. It seems that in early time, Skanda was not represented in anthropomorphic images or temples dedicated to the god; on the contrary, the existence of the god and his message might have understood in abstract symbols. Actually speaking, all myths are symbols of abstraction to denote the obscured essence of the past; they are the obvious tools of presence to read the secret of latent absence. We should bear in mind that the myths and stories of Dionysus or Skanda Kumar are the same and one: except in their forms, names and places. Because both are concerned with an unknown and perhaps unknowable principle or agent acting in an unseen and unrecognized way with and invisible power or efficacy upon the visible realm of multiplicity and manifestation -- the phenomenal world, the theoretical ethical society of spiritual sexuality. Both represent the deep secret of human mind: the natural sexuality of physical reality, and as a natural being man is the center for them both.

Women in Absence in Ancient Greek and Indic Literature:

If we imagine the great Trojan War without Helen, obviously, it would be an absurd thing. Traditionally, and historically as well, Helen is the central cause of the war; the war was fought just to regain the most beautiful women of the world, the queen of Sparta, the wife of Menelaus, the most powerful man of Greek power constellation: Helen. Nevertheless, there is no real Helen in Euripides ' tragedy- play of Helen. For him, Helen never reach to Ilium; she has no any affection with Paris, the story was false and all who fight in the name of rational reason -- Helen -- were just fighting for a great unreason; the war itself was an absurd absence. The story is not true. Homer, as well as all the other people, says a false. That is why, he has to make apology with the real Helen saying like this:
That story is not true.
You never went away in the benched ships.
You never reached the city of Troy .( 3: 438) Helen, for who millions of men sacrificed their valuable lives in Troy, was a fake imagination. She was not real but a 'breathing image 'of the real Helen. Helen, herself, says:
. . . made void the love that might have been for Paris and me and gave him, not me but in my likeness fashioning a breathing image out of the sky 's air, bestowed the son King Priam 's son, who thinks he holds me now but holds a vanity which is not I. (3: 435)
Symbolically, Helen is the best and most appropriate site of contrast to show physical vs spiritual sexuality. She is the focal point to commence the contrast in between self and the other self within a man or a woman. That is why, in addition to the traditional story or molding the same towards the designated end, by effacing the epic Helen from the story, contrast is deliberately originated in the drama just to create confusion in between real and the other real. The sexual Helen is the real and the Helen who is in absence and who is created by the male discourse is a spiritual Helen; they represent the physical and spiritual sexuality, respectively. In sexual Helen, the meaning is clear and simple; there is here her physical sexual body that is lucrative, alluring and erotic for opposite sexual partner—Paris—and only to get that sexual body of Helen, Paris fall in love with her. On the contrary, in Euripides 's Helen, the spiritual Helen is supposed to be real as the meaning is not so simple and direct. It has been proliferated into the absence—thus meaning is not fixed as Helen herself is not fixed. It is the endless transmigration or shifting of the meaning into the other and yet next other along the endless continuum. To indicate the sublime rapture of chaotic dark-absence, hidden deep somewhere in human unconscious, the spiritual sexuality, Euripides, as the whole Greek tragedy as well, shows the relation between presence and absence, defined and undefined, fixed and unfixed, centre and margin, meaning and its perpetual shifting, heaven and earth, divine and mortal. All these contrasts are to create the ability of human mind to look its own nature inside its unwritten blank space of absence -- the trace, the spirituality. Not only in Greek tragedy, it is equally applicable in classic Sanskrit drama as well. The same story is there in Ramayana where the spiritual Sita, the divine part of heaven, the goddess Sita is hidden inside the fire and only her physical associate, the sexual Sita, went to Lanka. Ravana is real because he is lured with sexual Sita to have a physical sexual intercourse with her. But all in vain; the male discourse makers of patriarchal ancient Indic world or classic Greek do not like Ravana or Paris indulging sexually with Sita or Helen. Because they want to valorized the story by effacing the physical triviality viz. tangible sexuality and want to make the story complex. They are inspired by there inner impulse of their unconscious mind, the dark unattanability, the desire of lack, the pre-ontological indefinite. Therefore, they curved the physical sexuality of Sita and Helen into the spiritual absence. That is why they effaced the real sexual Sita or Helen with their power of abstract spirituality, and hide Sita inside the spiritual fire or Helen inside the cave in Italy – the physical female sexuality of Sita and Helen is spiritualized – now, they are absence. It is obvious that there would be no two Sitas or two Helens just to represent their physical and spiritual forms. Nonetheless, it was done so just to efface the physical femininity and establish spiritual non-femininity of absence. The spiritual form of Sita or Helen are created by the male discourse makers—whether he is Euipides or Veda Vyasa or Valmiki or Vasista. More evidences of created discourse of spiritual sexuality and the effacement of real feminine sexuality are found in ancient Indic Sanskrita dramas:
The negative and villain personalities of Karna, Duryodhana, Ghatotkacha and many others, as depicted in epic, are effaced in Thirteen Plays of Bhasa. Here, Karna is throughout more saintly than the epic Karna. He is not the object of hate and negativity but a symbol of reverence: "O Karna, eternal as the sun, the moon, the Himalayas, and the ocean be your fame." (Karna Bharam 17). He shows no any enmity with Arjuna but treats as if his other self -- the latent and tragic self. He is indifferent and calm even after his failure of weapons, and even ill-omens of "horses stumbling helplessly among blinded by misery, " ( 11) and even after "elephants reeking like the Seven-leaf tree with excitement" (11) as they are all heralding the disaster of the battle. That is why he says: "Slain, one goes to heaven, victorious one wins glory. The world thinks much of either, so one must win something in a battle." ( 12). He is passionately looking for Arjuna but the purpose is different than as it is described in the eight book of the Great Epic called the Karnaparvam. In the epic of Mahabharata, Karna, as well as Duryodhana, is depicted as chief commander, full of rage with retaliation, anger, ambition and dissatisfactions. This is a natural state of reality, which is more mannish and real. However, the poet spiritualized this and curved the natural ones. The saintly Karna or Duryodhana is just impossible to think for the epic; if one had done so, the whole story of Mahabharata would have been turned into the chaos. Contrary to the epic, Salya, the driver of Karna, of Bhasa in his Karna-bharam is very polite and obedient to Karna. He is advising, suggesting and helping to Karna. "King of Anga, you have been cheated.\ Karna: By whom? | By Indra." (123). In epic, Salya is not so; he dislikes this subordinate position, but agrees provided he may say what he likes Karna. In the whole of the war, Salya is depicted to be cautiously abusing Karna with inferior honor. He is not helpful. On the contrary, in Bhasa, Salya is depicted as if another person -- not of the epic Salya. Here, both the original Karna and Salya are effaced and there is only their traces to excavate the lack that is left in the battlefield -- the un pronounced notion of absence that feels by Karna. Here, the notion of natural emotions and characters with the rudimentary original passions are made absent in favor of establishing unreal Idealism. This is a trait to create something holy, pure and ideal; something heavenly and elevated in nature, something spiritual in nature – whether or not real or unreal. This tendency of male discourse makers is background of spiritual sexuality that create something ideal against the natural physical reality. Now, there is only trace of real, and the reality is now a matter of absence. The real one is effaced to make the trace of absence.
The notion of trace and absence caused by the effacement of the story proper is deliberately depicted in Europides ' Helen. There are two Helens in Euripides ' Helen ; one , the real one that is hidden somewhere in a cave-like Tomb in Egypt and the next has been causing the great war inside the story -- sharing herself with Paris, loving him and making romances with him. The first is passive, coy to the surrounding, regretful, and virtuously faithful to the ethic and created sexual ideology of the day whereas the next is just the antithesis of the first. Two Helens represent the self and the next self; physical and the spiritual. The spiritual Helen has her own sexuality in her ideal spiritual realm whereas the physical Helen is tangible and real. Her sexuality is natural she wants to be in physical sexual intercourse with Paris. Her passion of physical sexuality is the actual cause of the war. Nonetheless, confusion is created in discourse that made the real Helen absence-- as like other contemporary women in classic Athens. Because of the created story of spiritual sexuality, the spiritual Helen, it is vague to distinguish for the audience, which one is real: whether the Helen in Troy is real or this hidden Helen. Both have the same degree of velocity and rational tangibility; both claim to be real. As it is a contrast between two logically rational positions, here, the contrast starts -- not only in the story but also in audiences, because this position of Helen bifurcate the respective selves of the audience into two. Perceiving two Helens in the same story in different roles and in different spaces at the same time, an audience would naturally feel two selves in him: the one and the next one—the physical one and the spiritual one. The one, the hidden self inside the dark cave "in Egypt" , claims to be the real and virtuous one, but the next or the other self which is tangibly present in the war of day-to-day worldly affairs, evokes the physical emotions -- making loves, enjoying the erotic pleasure, seems to be real Helen, indeed. The other self, who is inside the Trojan Warfield causing the great war, is transcending the ethical bondage of coarse rigidity and consciously consuming the pleasure of worldly affairs -- the desire -- for whom men are dying in the day-to-day battlefield, reasons are collapsing and boundaries are breaking. Since this phantom Helen is not an inert statue -- as the hidden Helen wish her to be -- but a breathing image, alive and real; you cannot disregard that image by condemning her to be a fake stuff. As per the Helen in hide, although the Helen in Troy is not real for her, says: " The Phrygians fought for me (except it was not I but my name only) held against the spears of Greece," (42-44), yet, you just cannot discard her. Because of her, the real Helen is suffering, because of her, the real Helen is hiding, and because of her, the real Helen is in tragic state. Because she cannot abandon her other self -- the Helen in Troy -- but regrets:
Because of me, beside the waters of Scamander, lives were lost in numbers; and the ever patient I am cursed by all and thought to have betrayed my lord and for the Hellenes lit the flame of a great war. ( 3: 455)
For the poet, the male discourse maker, the Helen in hide, the Helen in absence is real; because she represents the spiritual sexuality of Helen. That is why, in drama, the so-called real or rather hidden Helen feels guilty. Although she is innocent and never committed any sin that is against the ethics; she is responsible with the other self , she is but the self of ethic and austere sexuality -- she is responsible with the other self or rather the physical Helen in Troy. She is very sorry for the unnecessary lost of Phrygians and Hellenic sons. She wants to be effaced out from the scene but the reality is that she just cannot. "I wish that like a picture I had been rubbed out \ and done again, made plain, without this loveliness" (262-3) . It means that the spiritual Helen is not free as she is answerable to the acts done by her physical image Helen -- our sexual natural desire, the primordial human fact, the Helen who is nature. On the other hand, the Helen in nature never concern with this spiritual Helen, because she does not know the existence of any original Helen beside and above of her. Conscious mind is always alert to be rational but not the unconscious. This is a contrast between being and becoming, the phenomenal Helen and the Helen in herself—the spiritual Helen and the physical Helen. This is also a contrast between Apollonian ethical Helen in Egyptian tomb and the Dionysian Helen in Troy, the principal of individuality and the metaphysic of matter in real. The contrast is pervasive, it is designed to efface the story of Helen and go to the absence, -- to the traces-- to be rubbed out and made the traditional story of Helen be plain.
Many are the forms of what is unknown. \ Much that the gods achieve is surprise.\ What we look for does not come to pass;\ God finds a way for what none foresaw.\ Such was the end of this story. (3:686)
The contrast is there because one is either unaware with the existence of the other or suppressed by the existence of the other. One is equally reasonable, virtuous, and logical than the other. Still, one cannot accept the existence of the other -- and thus, there is contrast of existence. Because subject, Menelaus, is single and the duel forms of Helen is not acceptable for Menelaus -- the subjective body. The subject is singular.
There is one Zeus; in heaven. \ And where on earth is Sparta except only where\ Eurotas ' waters ripple by the lovely reeds? \ Tyndareus is a famous mane. There is only one. \ And where is there another land called Lacedaemon or Troy either? ( 3: 491)
Menelaus tries his best to obtain the other self of Helen -- the manifested illusion of presence. However, the presence is not perfect in itself; ultimately, he has to shift himself to the hidden Helen – the spiritual Helen or the other meaning of presence, the being or rather the primordial absence of human mind. He knows it when the Helen says: "It was an image of me. I never went to Troy" (482); and the image was built by the air -- no solidity is contained in itself (484). He, after being aware of the irrational absurdity of war, fought without the cause, Helen in real, and after wondering seven long years worthlessly as a shipwrecked foreigner, arrived in the barbarians ' land only to invent the void of the war. Now, the subject, Menelaus, knows that the war itself was a fake as there was nothing to win, the prize had already been effaced from the sight, and the story was blank. Actual physical Helen was not there for Menelaus " to seize her by the hair and dragged her off " (3: 417), after the long and worthless war, "moon after moon, until it came to ten full years " (3: 418). In his quest for Helen the real, Menelaus never finds her -- but the continuous shift of meaning form one place to another, one space to another, from one Helen to yet unexplored another Helen, from one reality to another. Menelaus believes the Spartan queen Helen to be the real-- but she flees to Troy; Menelaus goes to Troy and wages the most terrible war in the history of the world, but still she just cannot sustain the meaning. She vanished herself beyond the Illum, the great walls of Troy. When he was about to intercept the track of the story and returning home -- his origin of meaning -- along with Helen, the rational side of his existence, the signifier shifted again to be some illusion of Helen. As Lacan says, the incomplete signification perpetually shifting to yet another unexplored meaning (Waugh 286-87), he is off-traced again as a storm split them and drove them variously -- the meaning is not found. Helen is lost and this makes the situation more tragic. " . . . always, as I make bear home, the wind buffets me back again, nor ever fills favorable my sail to bring me home again" (3: 498).
Phrygians and Hellenic soldiers fought in vain, in a great unreason, without the meaning, not for the essence or substance but for the mere ideology, for the name only: "it was not I but my name only" (3: 583). The cause of war, the self of war has no real because it is a mere name; the self of the war was in remote that can only be defined reflecting it into the other -- the hidden one. The war cannot be defined independently; because it has no real self, the Trojan Helen is fake. Thus, it is not a war but the simulacrum of a war; men who died there are actually dying fake- deaths. Thus, there is contrast in between life and death, physical and amorphous, present and absent, real and fake, self and other, space and distance, meaning and void, being and becoming, Phrygians and Hellenic. Here, Menelaus is not a hero but a tragic figure: week, tired, helpless and fate- bitten one. He is himself the symbol of contrast to the heroic epic figure of Menelaus. Contrast to the traditional epic figure, here, Helen is not a real personality -- the most beautiful woman of the world, the heavenly beauty, but a helpless women who is jailed inside a tomb and captive to a barbarous chieftain. Contras make the meaning more obscure and caused it always shifting towards still further space of some remote absence—and this absence is near to the spiritual sexuality. .

@ As we have discussed about the quest of traces and the effacement of meaning in spiritual sexuality and talked about the nature of effacement, how meaning concealed itself in the traces. The point where from the effacement of story starts is the beginning of traces—and the beginning of spiritual sexuality. This point is the end of rational and obvious simplicity and the start of the complexity of meaning. This is the point, where the audience approach in the drunken ecstasy of absence -- the rapture of tragic space what actually the spiritual sexuality is seeking for. We have the evidence of this point both in Indic as well as Greek traditions. Writing about Ras Lila, a form of traditional theater in India, Darius L. Swann in his book Sanskrit Drama highlights how in the performance the audience get themselves in ecstasy.
The Ras Lila is performed in an atmosphere thick with religious devotion upon which it draws and to which it contributes. Especially associated with the Braj region, the place of Krshna ' birth, childhood, and youth, the Ras Lila is performed to made real and present to the spectator the divine love of Radha and Krishna. The spectator-celebrants are an intimate community of faith, for the action takes place among the. Highly charged poetry, vivid with the imagery and symbolism of the Krshna myth, fine singing , lively rhythmic dancing, and the spectators ' attitude of reverence create an atmosphere in which people respond fervently to the shout: " Victory to Bihari Lal of Vrndaban !" or ' Radha Syam!" or are caught up in singing hymns ( kirtana), Hail to Govinda, hail to Gopal, Hail to Radha, the Beautiful one !" Individuals sometimes stand up and join in the dance, swaying as if in trance. On one occasion I observed an old holy man (sadhu), gray-bearded and balding and clad in a single saffron cloth, dance, doing fast pirouettes (cakkar) as though he were a youth of thirteen. The spectators, transformed into participants, turned round and round, clapping and singing until the atmosphere of the occasion rivaled that of a black Baptist revival meeting. The audience sang in response to the sadhu 's clapping and singing, and as the clapping got faster and faster and the drum rhythms more and more insistent, the emotions of the audience-approached ecstasy. With eyes closed, their hands clapping rhythmically, bodies swaying as one, they seemed unconscious of their surroundings. ( 267)
This description of Ras Lila is, in surface, seems to be resonating the old ritual orgies, Dionysian or Tantirk, and equipped with lots of essences of physical sexuality. Dionysian and Tantrik orgies are also spiritual in the sense of their religious rituality and traditions; nonetheless, they are more close to the nude naturalness of physical sexuality. However, the hero of Ras Lila is Krishna, a rational sky-god like Apollo, but not Shiva or Kartikya or any deities representing the wild nature of earth and similar wild and coarse performance of sexuality. Here, Krishna is very gentle, disciplined, and silent. He is not physically active for the sexual intercourse with Gopies. He is spiritual as he trances the singularity and divided himself with each of the Gopies individually. It is just a cultured and symbolic dance – not an orgy. It is a revised edition of the earlier wild orgies, to substitute the irrational rituals of physical nude and wild sexuality by the austere and disciplined form of sexuality which is more an fine art than sex. The adoption of old matrimonial sexual culture by the new dominant power of male spiritual sexuality of sky gods is Ras Lila where there is only trace is available and the actual travel is absent. Krishna is copied with Gopinies only to revive the glory of ancient orgies.
In The Bacchae of Euripides, there is similar kinds of description, dance in the memory of god in trance -- as if the Ras Lila of India. Both are the primitive forms of drama, both indicate the ritual ecstasy and both intend to trance the normal one -- the meaning -- and intends towards some intoxicating space of sexuality. Here are some lines extracted from The Bacchae:
Suddenly\ I saw three companies of dancing women (. . .) ; First they let their hair fall loose, down\ over their shoulders, and those whose straps had slipped\fastened their skins of fawn with writhing snakes\ that licked their cheeks. Breasts swollen with milk,\ new mothers who had left their babies hehindat home\ nestled gazelles and young wolves in their arms,\ suckling them. (. . . ) With one voice they cried aloud:\ " O Bacchus! Son of Zeus!" " O Bromius!" they cried. (. . . ) And then \ you could have seen a single woman with bare hands\ tear a fat calf, still bellowing with fright,\ in two, while others clawed the heifers to pieces.\ There were ribs and cloven hooves scattered everywhere,\ and scraps smeared with blood hung from the fir tree, (. . . ) sir, \ than you could blink your royal eyes. Then\ carried up by their own speed, they flew like birds (. . . ) . (Euripides 3: 345-390)
This Dionysian frenzy, intoxicating music and dance, ecstatic maddening frenzy and trance of the Athenian women, including the queen Agave herself, in the honor of Lord Dionysus -- as like Ras lila in the honor of Lord Krishna -- shows the original essence of Greek tragedy. Both are same and both are in the trance; metamorphosed into the realm of subconscious rapture -- although there is tragedy as Agaves tears up her own son, Penthouse, assuming him as a lion 's cub. The trace is started to be build up where its pervious story begins to efface by the frenzy sword of drunken ecstasy -- the Dionysian impulses. Here is no arguments, no demands, no meaning and affirmation or negation -- but sexuality in feminine nature. Men and women, to be the mortal ones; what next and we should achieve, but death. "You are also in the process of dying. We are all in the same process of dying. Tomorrow, nobody would be here to tell the story of our deaths. By then, we all will have gone. (Subei Bimal 279). The pleasure of death is natural; the pleasure of humility is natural; they are all in the side of mortal being , thus, resonating the physical sexuality.
They humble us with death\ that we remember what we are who are not god,\ but men. We run to death. Wherefore, I say, \ accept, accept : \ humility is wise, humility is best. (Euripides 3: 365)

However, the immortality of life and the divinity of the existence are spiritual. Although human being is a sexual creature of natural reality, nonetheless, the patrimonial pundits and philosophers changed this natural physical sexual reality into the spiritual one. Greek philosophy, for the first time, seeks reason and arise questions on the superstitious belief in supernatural beings -- depicted in Heroic epics and myths previously -- to establish the realm of scientific and logical human reasons. Humanist philosophers inspired the poets and artist to express themselves in some mega voices -- the corporal human voice in divinity of spirituality. Hear, the intellectual realm of classic Greece merged both poets and philosophers in one -- and that was not the realm of man but his idealized sex—spiritual sexuality. Although general people were freed from them, although superstition and gods were in the supreme position yet, these things were not the absolute master and they can enjoy their natural sexuality. In classic Greek , the intellectuality was inspired by the then masculine psychology of valor and dignity, power and intellectuality, elite ness and spirituality.
What is god, what is not god, what is between man \ and god, who shall say? Say he has found \ the remote way to the absolute, \ that he has seen god, and come \ back to us, and returned there, and come \ back again, reason 's feet leaping\ the void? Who can hope for such fortune? (4: 325) A unique trend in classic Greek literature, especially in Greek Tragedies, was the taming the spiritual sexuality in favor of physical sexuality—it was a new trend where the gods, the symbols of spirituality, are treated in the footing of man, the symbol of physical sexuality, through rewriting the divine stories in anthropomorphic alphabets . Now, the mortal men are challenging gods. Because, gods are no longer transcendental being dwelling somewhere on the peaks of the obscure -- and physically nowhere exist-- Apollonian mountains but they are anthropomorphized; playing equal roles, as like a man or a woman, in Classic Greek literature. The Gods and Goddesses are inaccessible in the Archive Greece because they are more spiritual and more patriarchal. They are like the inaccessible woman of Lacan, physically untouchable but still within the realm of sexuality. However, the classic gods are, comparatively, not far beyond the horizon of human space but just like a man competing with the human being for their comfortable positions in mortal affairs of mortal sexuality. As, time and again, their supremacy had been challenged by the mortal men -- as like Ajax, as like Hyppolytus -- they are not the master but mere competitors of man. They are questioned, their laws are not supposed to be absolute now and they are told to be right judge without being indifferent. Homeric picture of gods was idle. The gods were the absolute authority and human being were the mere tools of them -- like satellites moving just by gods with no proper power in their own. No one can raise questions against them; because it was forbidden -- as if a sinful act. But Euripides, in Ion, questions the gods as if he is questioning not an almighty one but the person in power who sometimes abuse the power or rather apply some corrupt kinds of laws in his realm of power:
O this is monstrous! The laws of god for men\ Are not well made, their judgment is unwise.\ The unjust should not have he right of refuge\ At altars, but be driven away. For gods\ Are soiled by the touch of wicked hands. The just -- \ The injured man, should have this sanctuary. Instead both good and bad alike all come, receiving equal treatment from the gods. (3: 31)
In Homeric ancient Greek ages, gods are supreme and all their conducts, whether right or wrong, are supposed to be unquestionable; no mortal being is supposed to be authentic to raise question against the ethical abuse of gods. They were the icons of ideal sanctity and the absolute authority of their holiness. However, in his play Ion, Euripides raises questions against the ill conduct of ethical sexuality of God Apollo.
But since\ You have the power, seek the virtuous path.\All evil men are punished by the gods.\ How then can it be just for you to stand\ Accused of breaking laws you have yourselves\ Laid down for men? But if -- here I suppose\ What could not be -- you gave account on earth\ For wrongs which you have done to women, you,\ Apollo and Poseidon and Zeus who rules\ In heaven, payment of your penalties\ Would see your temples empty, since you are \ Unjust to others in pursuing pleasure\ Without forethought. (3:28)
Unlike the traditional Homeric Hesiod 's discourse on divinity, tragedians are equally conscious of ethical boundaries of gods. Now, gods are not supposed to be above the social norms created by human beings -- they are bounded by and influenced from this. Now the divine law has been diminished to be mingled with the social ethical norms of the mortal human beings. For their misconducts done previously and which are not according to accord the social norms of present ethic, the gods must feel same now. Now, the gods are anthropomorphized with the essence of human shame on them. Like man, they have also something secret and private about themselves to hide, to prevent and to pretend. Now, the illicit sexual affairs of gods are drawn into the human sphere and treated to be a questionable shame:
Ion: Will Phoebus tell the secret he wants to hide?\
Creusa: If oracles are open to all Greeks.
Ion: Do not press him to reveal his shame.
Creusa: His shame means suffering to her!
Ion: No one will give this oracle to you\ convicted of evil here inside his own temple,\ Apollo would justly take vengeance on\ His prophet. Think no more of it : avoid \ A question which the god himself opposes. This foolishness we should commit in trying \ By any means to force reluctant answers,\ Whether by slaying sheep before the altar\ Or taking omens from the flight of birds. ( 3:25)
Not only this, women, victim of sexual abuses by the gods, are raising their voices against the sexual monopoly of the gods -- injustice of power. The sexually abused mortal girl -- Creusa-- who was made pregnant by Apollo before her marriage, demands her rights with Apollo:
. . . Unhappy women! Where shall we appeal\ For justice when the injustice of power \ Is our destruction? (3:18) or
Apollo! Then and now unjust to her,\ The absent woman whose complaints are here.\You did not save the child you should have saved.\ A prophet, you have no answer for its mother.(3:25)
The poet is critical of the ill-tradition of sexual abuses by the Gods and the results by this. Voicing against the Gods depicted in the past in favor of mortal man, he says:" Our legends, our tales at the loom,\ Never tell of good fortune to children \ Born of a god and a mortal." (3: 29). In Hippolytus, Euripides depicted Goddess Cypris as the rival of Hippolytus -- who, neglecting Cypris, the goddess of love, worship Artemis the goddess of chastity, wilderness and hunting. This makes Cypris a jealous soul; because the goddess is not supra-human what she should be in proper when she is alien to the human sphere but now she is anthropomorphized in her nature. She has also a mind-- with all fragility and delicacy of feelings -- just like a man or a woman has. "But those whose pride is stiff-necked against me\ I lay by the heels,\ There is joy in the heart of a God also\ when honored by men. " (3: 163). She feels dishonored by Hypolytus because he neglects even to address her supremacy. So, she is plotting a plane of revenge." But for his sins against me \ I shall punish Hippolytus this day." (3:164). Not only gods but also men are the compradors of gods. Airtimes, the Zeus 's daughter, the maiden goddess, and Hyppolytus, a mortal man, hunt in green woods, together. "They hunt with hounds and clear the land of wild things,\ mortal with immortal in companionship." (3:163). The mortal takes part in favor of some gods and discards other some. Hyppolytus is in favor of Artemis: " Follow me singing\ the praises of Artemis,\ Heavenly One, Child of Zeus,\ Artimis! \ we are the wards of your care.\" ( 3:163), but discarded the goddess of love -- the Cypris. Discarding Cypris, he says to his servant that gods are not the compulsion but choice for man: " Man make their choice; one man honors one Gods,\ and one another" ( 3: 167).

Status of Women in Ancient Greece and India
( to be continued)

The Status of Women in Mahabharata and Trojan War:
Talking about the position of women in ancient Greek and Indic literature, it is essential, to have a glance in two ancient epics of that worlds. It would be a matter of astonishment that in the both, whether in Mahabharata or in Trojan wars, the status of women is same—depicted in the same frame where the actual position of woman is obscured by the pathetic and derogated status of them. On the one hand, men are regarded heroes and fighters, the dominating power, the force and valor , on the other hand, women are the stuff of weeping tears. They never wage the wars, never take any risk, never participated or allowed to participated in the actual life, actual battlefield of power. Patriarchal male are the masters and all women are the slaves to weep for their masters. Describing the last seen of Tarjan war, Euripides writes:
Ah! hapless wives of those mail-clad sons of Troy!
Ah! poor maisens, luckless brides, come weep, for Ilium is now but a ruin; and I, like some mother-bird that o 'er her fledglings screams. will begin the strain. ( Hecoba 498).
These words that fell from the lips of Hecuba, queen of Troy, on the Athenian stage when Euripides staged it in 416 BC. In The Mahabharata, Stri Parva, similar verse can be found. Both stories took shape around the same time -- the same social situation of women is depicted in both. Women have been celebrated as the greatest piece of anti-war literature in both. Although Veda Vyasa had no idea about the Trojan War neither Homer could have any idea about Mahabharata, still, they wrote the same thing. Both stories present women as prizes that men can do anything they want with. When Duryodhana wins Draupadi in the game of dice, he exclaims this to be his happiest day of his life-- as Draupadi was their slave. In The Iliad, captured women are given to the solders as prizes for their brave and skilled fighting. For instance, Briseis, a Trojan, is awarded to Achilles during the Trojan War because of his tremendous contributions to the Achaean army. These stories are rewritten in Greek tragedies and Sanskrit nataka later. When the Kurukshetra holocaust is over, among the 18 armies only 10 warriors survive. The immense scale of slaughter is recounted by Yudhishthira to Dhritarashtra as numbering ten arbuda, sixty six corers and twenty thousand dead (1,660,020,000). A huge cremation rite is held for all of them ( The Mahabharat, Stri Parva7). The end of the Mahabharata is depicted as follows:-
When the wives of Dhritarashtra 's grandsons huddle together, Keshaca- Krishna, having lost their protectors, their sons, and their husbands,
And lament in the presence of Gandhari, With dogs and vultures roaming the battlefield, that will be the Yajna 's final bath, Janardana-Krishna. (The Mahabharata, Udyoga Parva 141.50-51)
We can depict the same seen in Hecube of Euripides . Depicting the destroyed Troy and scornfully lamenting women the poet says:
Hecuba: O grief\ What can I say?\ What are the words for loss\ O bitterness of age,\ slavery not to be born,\ unendurable pain!\ To whom can I turn? Childless and homeless,| my husband murdered,\ my city stained with fire. . . \ Where can I go?\ What god in heaven,\ what power below\ will help me now?\ O Women of Troy,\ heralds of evil,\ bringers of loss,\ this news you bring is my sentence of death . (1555-165)
Sanjaya, consoling Dhritarashtra, makes this even more clear:
Into the sacred fire
Of the sacrificed bodies
Of the heroes, were poured
The ghee oblations
Of the arrows
Of their enemies. ( The Mahabharat, StriParva 2.17 )
Ladies, who never seen outdoors, now stream forth, clad in single white garments (as Draupadi had cursed after the dice-sabha), like screeching ospreys onto the corpse-strewn field, their complexion turned copper-brown by the sun as they frantically seek to match limbs to bodies and heads - often fruitlessly.
Abruptly, with Duryodhana 's death, the heroic aura disappears and the survivors stand before us as ordinary men, terrified of the victors. Dhritarashtra and the widows, en route the battlefield, are met by Kripa, Ashvatthama and Kritavarma who give him the news and flee on horseback, splitting up lest the Pandavas catch them. Yudhishthira leads his brothers and sorrowing women to meet his blind uncle and aunt on the banks of the Ganga. The Kuru widows put to him a rhetorical question which he will echo later, wishing to abdicate:
You have killed father, brothers, and gurus, sons and friends …
What good is this kingdom to you without fathers, brothers , without valiant Abhimanya,
And Draupadi 's sons? (12.7, 9)
Besides Gandhari, we would have expected Draupadi to lament at length. Instead, it is limited to two verses addressed to Kunti who helps up the prone Draupadi and takes her to Gandhari who greets her coldly:
What good is grieving?
All dead. Grief is useless.
You and I are the same- victims of grief… .( 15.44)
In the same manner, depicting the after-war conditions of women in ancient Sparta and Troy, the chorus, who generally represents the citizenry in the play, in Euripides ' Hecaba says :
War, slaughter, and the ruin of my house, while in her house the Spartan woman mourns, grieving by the wide Eurotas, and mothers mourn for their sons, and tear out their snowy hair and dredge their cheeks with bloody nails. ( Euripides 522)
Like Gandhari in Mahabharata accusing Draupadi, there is none of the loathing that throbs in Hecuba 's reference to Helen: "A thing of loathing, of shame to husband, to brother, to home. She slew Priam, the king, father of fifty sons; she wrecked me upon the reef of destruction." The same thing accusing Gandhari to Draupadi -- .(Stri Parva 44 - 15) ( To be continued)

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