on the social level, the Kartābhajās bring together members of all classes and social factions, rejecting caste distinctions and proclaiming the divinity of all human beings; and third, on the gender level, the Kartābhajās offered a new social space in which men and women could mix freely, even providing new opportunities for women in roles of spiritual authority. The result is a rather ingenious religious fusion – or “subversive bricolage,” which skilfully adapts and reconfigures elements from a wide range of sources – a kind of poaching or pilfering by poor lower-class consumers in a dominated religious market that demanded the subtle use of secrecy, both, as a tactic of appropriation, and as a key social strategy or way of life.
The Economics of Ecstasy - Tantra, Secrecy and Power in Colonial Bengal
Much like the early Agape Feasts of the Christians and their predecesors in the Mithras Cult. Religions of the Ancient Lowly are democratic in nature in their earliest forms, since they exist outside and against the dominantant Religious State. They offer a safe place for a declasse melange of participants, and women are notably amongst them.
These 'Love Feasts' offered the participants the free exchange of goods; potlach, a sharing of communal supper, and after that convivality, socializing, and all that could be found scandalous by the salacious.
In ancient Greece the Bacchanae were a rebellion against the rigid State Religion
(see Themis by Jane Harrison) embracing the life affirming spontaniety of nature, in the form of a dead and ressurected god; Bacchus/Dionysous/Pan.Once Christianity lost its spontaneous inclusiveness it became a State religion of Constantinople the Byzantine seat of power of the former Hellenic world. The State declared Jesus the one and only dead and ressurected god, no others need apply.
Thus the myth of the death of Pan was created by neccisities of the State. The peoples religion of ancient Rome was now the State religion of Rome, Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire.
Also see
Wikipedia: Tantra
Sacred Tantrik Texts
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