This study of the Bengali Kartabhaja sect and its place in the broader movement of Tantrism, an Indian religious movement employing purposely shocking sexual language and rituals, looks at the relationship between the rise of the Kartabhajas and the changing economic context of colonial Bengal.

'When the wheel of sexual ecstasy is in full motion, there is no textbook at all, and no order.' The Kamasutra is the oldest extant Hindu textbook of erotic love. It is about the art of living - about finding a partner, maintaining power in a marriage, committing adultery, living as or with a courtesan, using drugs - and also about the positions in sexual intercourse. It was composed in ...

The earliest of the four Hindu religious scriptures known as the Vedas, and the first extensive composition to survive in any Indo- European language, the Rig Veda (c. 1200 900 BC) is a collection of over 1,000 individual Sanskrit hymns.

First published in 1951, Shamanism soon became the standard work in the study of this mysterious and fascinating phenomenon. Writing as the founder of the modern study of the history of religion, Romanian emigre-scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) surveys the practice of Shamanism over two and a half millennia of human history, moving from the Shamanic traditions of Siberia and Central Asia - where

Recorded in sacred Sanskrit texts, including the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata, Hindu Myths are thought to date back as far as the tenth century BCE. This book contains seventy-five seminal myths that features the many incarnations of Vishnu, who saves mankind from destruction.

Offers an encyclopaedic representation of human life in the world, and how it should be lived. This work encompasses topics as wide-ranging as the social obligations and duties of the various castes, the proper way for a righteous king to rule and to punish transgressors, relations between men and women, birth, death, taxes, karma, and rebirth.

Many cultures have myths about self-imitation, stories about people who pretend to be someone else pretending to be them, in effect masquerading as themselves. This book offers a cross-cultural exploration of the theme of self-impersonation, whose widespread occurrence argues for both its literary power and its human value.

Our Miniature Edition abridgment of one of the world's best-known texts is accompanied by lush, sensuous illustrations. The oldest existing Hindu book of erotic love, the Kamasutra still has much to offer modern lovers looking for new paths to pleasure and enlightenment.