Pussy-dripping goddesses with chainsaws

This is my second post about Michael Roach and Christie McNally, who tried to teach Buddhist tantra and made a mess instead.

It is about gender-bending, violence, and black magic in Buddhist tantra. It’s about manic pixie dream girls and eating your shadow—and pussy-dripping goddesses with chainsaws. Understanding how Roach and McNally got these things wrong can help understand how to do tantra right.

(My previous post explained some background: about Buddhist tantra, the shadow, and Roach and McNally’s training—or lack of it—in the Geluk school.)

The shadow of the “opposite” gender

Nina Burleigh writes in Rolling Stone:

[Their] students were taught the tantric practice of picturing [the goddess] Vajrayogini as a 16-year-old in the flush of a sexual awakening, with “her vagina dripping to the floor”…

Great sensationalist journalism—but also totally orthodox.

The actual practice is experiencing yourself as Vajrayogini. This works on many levels simultaneously, but one important function is to overcome gender identity. For a man, it explodes the limited conception of yourself as inherently male. (Women can experience themselves as a god with a massive hard-on.) Gender is a major part of the shadow—the unseen “not me.”

Burleigh quoting McNally: “Roach was interested in embracing his feminine side.” That is a traditional aspect of tantric wholeness; Vajrayogini is a fine way of accomplishing it.

Roach encouraged male adherents to… honor Vajrayogini by dressing as women. Roach himself… dressed as a “preppy girl,” with eye shadow, eyeliner, skirts and blouses.

Although untraditional, this is also a fine way to do it. Once a friend of mine had me put on her black lamé cocktail dress. It fit perfectly. When she pointed me at her full-length mirror, my instant reaction was I want that girl NOW. That was seriously weird—and a transformative experience.

Roach was layering another American-style improvement on the ancient teachings: equality. “In Tibetan Buddhism, women are worshipped as divine, while they are told they are lower than men,” says McNally. “[Roach] did a radical thing asking me to teach beside him.”

This is another thing they got right, in my opinion. It’s also traditional—if you go back far enough. In the earliest days—according to the traditional histories—women were the primary teachers of tantra. Only later did men seize control; and only later than that did monks get involved.

Monks and the shadow of gender

Before his relationship with with McNally, Roach spent most of his adult life in strict Geluk monasteries. Geluk practice is particularly anti-female, anti-sex, and anti-enjoyment. [Update: some people say that Roach’s claim to have spent much of his life in monasteries is not true; in which case my account here needs revision.]

Femaleness, and heterosexual intercourse, are part of the institutional shadow of monasticism. In that celibate, intensely male environment, they are rejected as utterly not-me. This is perfectly consistent with principles of sutra—but antithetical to tantra.

It seems likely that Roach’s initial swerve from Geluk orthodoxy was an authentic recognition of this. He could no longer pretend that he had no feminine characteristics, nor that he had no sexual desire.

To deepen that realization, he would need to relate to an actual woman. Unfortunately, at this stage in his development, that was probably too scary. Instead, he found a manic pixie dream girl.

Manic pixie dream girls

Laurie Penny’s “I was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl” explains. This is a role some women can play for some men. The man is geeky, dutiful, mopey, and has no idea how to enjoy himself. (Many monks fit that bill.) The job of the manic pixie dream girl (MPDG) is to open him up to the wonderful adventure that is life. She magically transforms him by being cute and excitable and girly and zany and sweet and full of fun.

No one can be that all the time. MPDG is an act, not a human being. Some women try to be a MPDG, because some men love that. The MPDG has to put most of her personality—anger, depression, and practicality—into the not-me. MPDG is all light—no scary darkness allowed. This is psychologically and spiritually harmful.

Relating to a MPDG may help some guys for a while. A MPDG actually can help a man retrieve fun, adventure, and sensual enjoyment from his shadow—if he has exiled them there. However, because the MPDG has hidden so much of herself in her own shadow, the relationship is extremely limited. This sort of relationship actively colludes to keep a man’s fear, sorrow, and rage hidden from him.

This seems to have been the dynamic of McNally and Roach’s relationship, from what I have read. (Here I’m psychoanalyzing people I don’t know, which is error-prone, but it’s based mainly on their own writing.) Roach was not ready to relate to a full-spectrum woman, with her own power, agendas, lusts, and rages. That would be far too scary. Instead, McNally could act out the MPDG archetype. In return, she got high social status and a somewhat insane level of devotion.

Around the time they split up, she dropped the MPDG act, and started to reclaim her shadow. That is a difficult, dangerous business. Accepting your own dark side is hugely valuable—an essential part of the tantric Buddhist path—but during the process everyone makes mistakes. Those can be seriously harmful. There are ways of minimizing the danger, but McNally apparently had little or no instruction, and few if any of the usual safeguards were in place.

Angels and witches

Roach’s teaching made constant reference to “angels.” This was an explicitly Christian borrowing. Mostly, though, “angel” was a highly distorting translation of “dakini.”

A better translation is “witch.” Dakinis are ferocious cannibals. They are, also, the enlightened females (ambiguously human or supernatural) who first made tantric Buddhism available to humankind. Either way, they are enormously powerful, prone to lust and rage, and beyond full male comprehension.

In other words, dakinis are women who have completed the work of eating their shadows. “Witches” are also, in Laurie Penny’s essay, women who refuse to play MPDGs. (I’ve written more about dakinis here.)

An “angel,” on the other hand, is all light, no shadow. Nearly the opposite of a dakini.

Dakinis play a central role in Buddhist tantra, particularly its scary shadow-eating aspects. Systematically replacing dakinis with “angels,” as Roach did, is a sign that he was unwilling to do the shadow work. This might have been intelligent: he may have been psychologically unready, or lacked the necessary instructions. Or, it may simply have been cowardice, and unwillingness to take the next step in his spiritual development.

Part of Roach’s practice was regarding McNally (and all other women) “as angels.” Seeing all women as dakinis is, indeed, a key tantric practice. That means potentially taking them as terrifying teachers of black magic—not simpering dream girls.

I suspect that refusal to deal with his shadow—his greed, fear, and anger—helps explain Roach’s so-called “cult leader” actions.

Black magic

Web discussions make much of McNally’s practice of “black magic.” That sounds sensationalistic, but is probably accurate in a sense. There is much in Buddhist tantra that could be described as “black magic” reasonably accurately. I’ve written about this at length on Buddhism for Vampires. Eating the shadow, particularly if you do it abruptly, can seem much like “black magic.”

This does not imply harm, nor harmful intent—though it does risk harmful effects. “Black magic” can sometimes be transformative, in a positive way, for individuals and communities. It is rarely the best approach, however. It’s a last-ditch approach to cutting through fundamentalist conditioning.

Diving into black magic probably took guts, and was an authentic move toward wholeness for McNally. It’s tragic, though, that she seems to have had no guidance. This was an unforeseen bad consequence of the suppression of Buddhist tantra.

It also recklessly endangered her students. Shadow-eating is work a teacher absolutely must complete before leading a three-year retreat. Sorting out your psychological issues while leading one is very wrong.

It appears that McNally was very ready to start learning tantra—if anyone had been willing to teach her. She was not nearly ready to start teaching it.

Violence

After her marriage with Roach ended, McNally married Ian Thorson—who eventually died unnecessarily, setting off the media circus. Thorson was Roach’s opposite in many ways. One was that Thorson was prone to violence.

I suspect this was McNally’s way of working with shadow material in a relationship. She was starting to explore her witchy self—the dark feminine—which includes violence. In the incident that got her and Thorson ejected from the retreat, she cut him with a knife shortly after starting martial arts training. In her own account:

Well, there is this big knife we got as a wedding present… thus began our rather dangerous play. If I had had any training at all, the accident never would have happened. I simply did not understand that the knife could actually cut someone.

There is another reason why I wanted to study martial arts. I was actively trying to raise up this aggressive energy, a kind of fierce divine pride, and I asked my holy Love [Thorson] to be my Teacher for this.

Why did I ask him to teach me? Well, he had been having a lot of physical aggression at the time (nothing too serious), and I simply didn’t relate to it, and wanted to understand it better- I wanted to understand how he felt.

Understanding, incorporating, and transforming violence into compassionate action is an absolutely authentic tantric Buddhist practice. It’s also difficult and dangerous. Unfortunately, McNally was apparently just winging it. In this letter, she comes off as extraordinarily naive; a pixie who has just dipped her toe into the black river of death for the first time. “I simply did not understand that the knife could actually cut someone!”

Goddess with a chainsaw

In 2009, Roach and McNally led a “Kali initiation” ritual they made up. It seems to have been very loosely and partially based on a ritual for a superficially similar Buddhist goddess (Maksorma), but Roach and McNally consistently referred to “Kali” instead. Kali is a Hindu goddess, not a Buddhist one. Her eternalist-dualist function in Hinduism is antithetical to Buddhism.

According to one participant, “The initiation was divided into two parts. I must say that [Roach’s] part was very sweet and beautiful.” (This is consistent with Roach’s general sweetness-and-light approach.) The participant continues:

On the other hand, Christie’s initiation occurred at night… Christie sat on some sort of a throne. One of my friends said she started crying as soon as she entered because she was so frightened. My own thought was “Oh, how theatrical.”

This Kali initiation included blood sacrifices, knives, samurai long swords, a temple full of every imaginable weapon… Rifles, AK47, bows, cross-bows, chainsaws, wicked looking garden implements… People were grabbed, blindfolded, walked up the wash (stream bed) and stuffed into a box.

Christie: “Kali requires something from you. She requires your blood.”

I was given a little medical device to stab my finger with. It was rather dull from use and I had to make several attempts to get a drop of blood.

Christie swaggered up to me holding a long knife and ran her finger over the sharp edge in a threatening way, saying, “Kali requires more of you.” She reminded me of a beautiful swashbuckling pirate.

Some participants were apparently horrified. Others report that they found it silly and amateurish. I imagine some enjoyed it. (I might have.)

Although the details are unconventional, this is not utterly unlike a “wrathful empowerment” in the Tibetan tradition. For instance, diverse weapons, including guns, are absolutely part of Buddhist tantra. Dakinis often carry several. (Not chainsaws, as far as I know, but that’s a splendid extrapolation!) The blood sacrifice is a Hindu thing, probably; I don’t know of anything like it in Buddhist empowerments. It seems harmless, though, so long as the lancet was sterile.

I am not defending McNally here. Apparently she sprang this on students who were psychologically unprepared for it, without adequate explanation. I suspect the ritual had more to do with her exploring her witchy self than something likely to benefit participants. And it seems to have made Kali a transcendent Other—a dualist eternalism that does not work in Buddhist tantra.

[Update: I’ve explained how and why it matters that this was a non-Buddhist ritual for a non-Buddhist goddess here.]

How not to reinvent Buddhist tantra

As far as I can tell, Roach and McNally didn’t know what the hell they were doing.

In my view, the main problem was not that they were unauthorized and innovating—although that is risky and difficult.

The main problem was also not that they were ignorant of technical specifics—although that certainly didn’t help. If you understand the essential principles of tantra, you can improvise details. Great lamas routinely do that. Even Roach (who is not stupid) and McNally (who is not cowardly) managed it to some extent.

The main problem was that they had hardly begun their personal work of tantric transformation, while leading a supposedly advanced tantric retreat.

Some lessons about how to reinvent Buddhist tantra