Modern scholarship on tantra has often treated it as a sophisticated religious system rooted in elite textual traditions and later integrated into high philosophical frameworks. In Buddhist contexts, especially in Tibetan scholastic traditions, tantric practice is frequently interpreted through the lens of Madhyamaka philosophy and incorporated into systematic doctrinal models. In these settings, tantra is positioned as the highest and most effective form of religious practice, supported and rationalized by philosophical analysis. There is truth in this account, but it reflects a later stage of development, the priorities of literate traditions that preserved texts, not necessarily the conditions under which tantra first emerged.
A growing number of scholars have challenged this retrospective model. Ronald M. Davidson’s study, Magicians, Sorcerers and Witches: Considering Pretantric, Non-sectarian Sources of Tantric Practices, offers a particularly forceful corrective: tantra cannot be adequately explained as the product of elite intellectual systems alone, nor as a simple inversion of orthodox traditions such as the Vedic corpus or the dharmasūtras.¹
Instead, Davidson argues that tantra must be understood within a much broader social and ritual field, one that includes non-literate practitioners whose activities long predate the emergence of tantric traditions as such. These figures, magicians, sorcerers, witches, and seers, were not marginal anomalies. They formed a durable and widespread presence in Indian religious life, operating across ancient, medieval, and even modern periods.² Their repertoire included healing, cursing, divination, spirit invocation, and various forms of ritual manipulation. These were not abstract techniques but effective practices. Some were performed in cremation grounds, involving work with corpses or restless or malevolent spirits: textual sources describe specialists who could animate a corpse or compel it to speak, a practice later associated with so-called vetāla rites. Others performed rituals to harm enemies, cure illness, or divine hidden information by invoking local deities or spirit beings. Such practices circulated widely and were recognized across Buddhist, Jain, and Brahmanical sources, even when criticized or prohibited. Many of these practices including corpse animation, harmful spells, and spirit work, would today be grouped under what is often called ‘witchcraft,’ though they were not understood as a single category in their original context.
Crucially, these practitioners were not “tantric.” They did not articulate soteriological goals of liberation, nor did they belong to the sectarian, lineage-based systems that later came to define tantric traditions.³ Their work was primarily practical rather than philosophically systematized, oriented toward immediate results rather than metaphysical coherence. Yet it is precisely this domain of practice–pragmatic, adaptive, and often non-literate–that Davidson identifies as a significant source for the later development of tantra.
This argument challenges a longstanding assumption in the study of Indian religions that authoritative origins must be found in texts. Much of the scholarship on tantra has privileged literate, intellectual traditions, in part because these are the sources that survive. But this creates a methodological distortion. If literacy rates in premodern India were extremely low, as Davidson notes, perhaps in the range of five percent, then any account of religious development that focuses exclusively on textual production necessarily excludes the overwhelming majority of practitioners.⁴ Tantra, emerging in such a context, cannot be reduced to what its later textualizers said about it.
The alternative Davidson proposes is not a single counter-origin, but a different model altogether. Rather than tracing tantra to one source, whether Vedic, Buddhist, or Śaiva, he describes a “multi-nodal” formation, meaning a network of multiple, overlapping sources in which diverse practices and traditions contribute to its development over time.⁵ Among these, the ritual activities of non-sectarian specialists play a crucial role. These practitioners developed techniques, terminologies, and ritual logics that were later appropriated by tantric communities. The process was neither systematic nor uniform. It was selective and intermittent, shaped by local needs and conditions.
In this light, tantra appears less as a coherent invention and more as a process of accumulation. Davidson characterizes this process in terms of bricolage: the assembling of new systems from pre-existing materials.⁶ Tantric traditions did not create their ritual repertoire out of nothing. They drew upon an already existing pool of practices—many of them associated with figures who operated outside the boundaries of orthodox religion—and recontextualized them within new ideological frameworks.
This perspective also clarifies why attempts to define tantra in purely oppositional terms have limited explanatory power. Some scholars have suggested that tantra emerges as a deliberate inversion of orthodox norms, particularly those codified in the dharmasūtras. Yet Davidson points out that such a model fails to account for the diversity of tantric practices. If inversion were the governing principle, one would expect a consistent pattern of reversal. Instead, the evidence reveals a heterogeneous collection of rituals, many of which do not correspond neatly to any orthodox counterpart.⁷
What this suggests is that tantra is not primarily a reaction against orthodoxy, but a reconfiguration of practices that existed alongside it. This is an important distinction. The categories of “orthodox” and “heterodox” begin to lose their explanatory clarity when we consider the extent to which ritual knowledge circulated outside formal institutions. The activities of magicians, sorcerers, and similar figures were not simply deviations from a normative system; they constituted an alternative domain of religious practice with its own internal logic.
The implications of this shift are quite significant. If tantra is, at least in part, a product of such practices, then its later intellectualization represents a secondary development. The philosophical frameworks that now define tantric traditions, whether in Buddhist or Hindu contexts, may be understood as attempts to systematize and legitimize practices that originated elsewhere.
It also complicates modern efforts to present tantra as a purely elevated or refined system. The desire to align tantra with high philosophy, particularly in contemporary interpretations, risks obscuring the conditions of its formation. Davidson’s analysis suggests that tantra’s roots lie not only in monasteries and scholastic debates, but in cremation grounds, village rituals, and the magical practices of specialists who worked with forces that formal religion often sought to regulate or marginalize.
To acknowledge this is not to reduce tantra to merely “magic,” nor to deny its later philosophical sophistication. It is to recognize that its development cannot be understood without taking seriously the contributions of those who operated outside the textual and institutional frameworks that scholars have traditionally privileged. Tantra, in this view, is not the product of a single tradition or a moment of divine revelation as is often taught. It is the outcome of a long process of interaction, appropriation, and reinterpretation across multiple domains of religious life, many of them outside the philosophical and textual traditions that later claimed to define it. In other words, tantra begins exactly where most scholars have not been looking—in the diverse and often non-literate ritual practices of magicians, sorcerers, and other specialists in ancient India.
Notes
- Ronald M. Davidson, “Magicians, Sorcerers and Witches: Considering Pretantric, Non-sectarian Sources of Tantric Practices,” Religions 8, no. 9 (2017): 188.
- Davidson, 2017, pp. 1–2.
- Davidson, 2017, p. 1.
- Davidson, 2017, p. 4.
- Davidson, 2017, pp. 2–3.
- Davidson, 2017, p. 1.
- Davidson, 2017, p. 2.
Tantric Deception 