Sakti and Sakta (Essays and Addresses)

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THIS edition has been revised and corrected throughout, and additions have been made to some of the original Chapters. Appendix I of the last edition has been made a new Chapter (VII) in the book, and the former Appendix II has now been attached to Chapter IV. The book has moreover been very considerably enlarged by the addition of eleven new Chapters. New also are the Appendices'. The first contains two lectures given by me, in French, in 1917, before the Societe Artistique et Literaire Francaise de Calcutta, of which Society Lady Woodroffe was one of the Founders and President. The second represents the substance (published in the French Journal "Le Lotus Bleu) of two lectures I gave in Paris, in the year 1921, before the French Theosophical Society (October 8) and at the Musee Guimet (October 6) at the instance of L'Association Francaise des Amis de L'Orient. At this last meeting Professor Dr. Sylvain Levi was present and M. Masson Oursel, also of the College de France, in an introductory speech said that "as one increasingly explored the Tantrik literature, hitherto almost unknown, discovery is made not of more and more dissimilarities, but of a closer and closer connection between these Scriptures and the other religions." The Tantrik cult was not, he said, "a mere superstitious imposition" (Simagree superstitieuse). "Its belief, that man can realize the divine in him and outside him is the postulate also of all those who have divinised the ritual word as Brahman and of all who seek in Yoga a theurgic equivalent." The Press Notices' (to which I might have added various addresses and letters of approval) are reprinted not merely to serve their usual purpose as recommendations to a possible reader but also as showing, firstly, the state of Indian opinion on the Sastra, as an integral part of Hinduism and not merely a pathological excrescence on it and secondly, the effect produced on Western minds to which the Scripture was presented for the first time. Thus, Professor Evola ("Il Nuovo Passe") has recently very truly remarked that the Tantrik system here described 'offers many suggestions to the West in virtue of its accentuation of Will and Power.

**Contents and Sample Pages**