My initiation into Tantra began with great reluctance. I had an inexplicable aversion to India and her vast, seemingly contradictory, mystical heritage. Although I was surrounded by acquaintances who had a love affair with the culture, I remained unmoved. My interests were partial to the ancient Near East civilisations, their sacred sites and ecstatic mystery rites of the Goddess and her mortal lover.

So when I discovered, amid my awakening process, the archetypal and cultural parallels in the erotic ritualised worship of early Kaula Tantra, I had to surrender my prejudice and resistance. I appreciated the irony – how could I have trusted my metamorphosis had it been instigated from only a tradition I had envisioned for myself? I would have believed it was wishful thinking at best. Instead, I had to open myself to the study and practice of the unfamiliar, the rejected and the taboo – how fitting for Tantra.