In this TEDx talk, Dr. Seema Anand explores how narratives on arts of seduction have been lost and in the evolution of their vocabulary, the implications have changed. Working with the range of what ‘story’ can mean to an individual Seema facilitates the learning processes of ‘telling’, ‘listening’, ‘acknowledging’ and ‘rejecting’ the narratives that make up our lives and our social interactions to enhance communication, build links and open dialogue.
If we begin with the construct that we are a collection of stories, we are the stories that we tell, the stories that we believe, and equally the stories that we choose to ignore. And so I’m going to revisit some of these old forgotten lost stories today.
Story of Creation according to Hindu beliefs
Let’s start at the beginning. Let’s start with the story of creation. You know, creation is not a simple process and let no one ever tell you other ways.
According to Hindu belief, it is not even a one-man job. You need three people for it. You need one to create; one to preserve and want to destroy. But Brahma is the great Father, the Creator. When Brahma created the world from his mind, he decided in his arrogance that he was also going to be master of life and death.
And for this world that he was going to create, he was going to populate it with beings that were both man and woman in one body, beings that could self-fertilize.
So the plan was – he was going to get these beings to create a child from within themselves without any outside help, feed and look after this child for six years at which point the child would become self sufficient and the parent being would automatically die off. So in Brahma’s world, there was going to be no mess, no overcrowding.
But when he actually created these beings from his mind, he discovered that they were all men. The creator hadn’t quite worked out how to manifest a woman. Shiva came to the rescue. Shiva is one of the Trinity; he’s the destroyer. And Shiva is married to Mother Earth.
Shiva came in and he reached into Brahma’s mind and he pulled out a woman. Brahma’s mind-born daughter. And then he explained to Brahma about men and about women and about the ecstasy of coming together.
Unfortunately Brahma wasn’t listening because he had taken one look at his beautiful mind-born daughter and decided he wanted her. And Shiva had had to sit back and watch the great father lusting after his own daughter, chasing his daughter all over the cosmos because he wanted to possess her.
And he realized what kind of sin he had brought into the world. So to try to mitigate the sin, Shiva castrated himself. He merged with his own wife and he went back to Brahma. And he said “Okay. Look plan A, this is how you create a being that’s both man and woman in one body. Let’s go back to this plan.”
But by now Brahma had known the ecstasy of coming together. So he pried apart Shiva from his wife and he said “From now on men and women will be born a separate entities, they will live a separate entities and they will know the joy of union.”
And then Brahma created a race of men, and a race of women. He paired them up together and he said “Go and populate my world”.
Unfortunately nothing happened, because no one knew what to do. So Shiva once again came to the rescue and he said to the men and women, he said “Go and tickle each other and the rest will follow”.
They did and 7 billion people later, the rest is history.
At this point, Shiva and his wife, Parvati (Mother Earth) went on to write a manual each – the first of its kind. The manual each on the Arts of Seduction.
Now I should interrupt myself here and just say I don’t like the word seduction. It’s going to take on all manner of implications they don’t really belong to it but I haven’t been able to find the [more juice], it is an English. Somebody used the word but I’m going to try and explain the concept to you.
According to Tantra, according to high philosophy, sexual energy is the highest form of energy in the world, and to be able to harness it is to generate the ultimate power. And so the art of seduction was about building up, optimizing and harnessing the power of the mind, the body, and the spirit in order to generate the ultimate power.
Kama Sutra
Okay. So this is a very very loud subject and I’m going to give you about half-a-drop work. But in the Kama Sutra, it says that men and women need to learn 64 skills to become adept at the Arts of Seduction.
Some things make sense. Okay, you know singing, dancing, perfuming of the body, gymnastics. Some things really don’t. I mean what does a skill in mineralogy have to do with the art of seduction? Or a skill in quail fighting, cock fighting, ram fighting and up this one the best – what does a skill in making handicrafts out of thread have to do with the art of seduction? It’s listed in the 64 arts.
Well, okay, 64 was not the number of ways that you could seduce somebody. 64 was the totality of your life. If you take your life and you divide it into four stages, each stage then gets divided into four branches of knowledge that you must acquire during each state. So that gives you 16 branches of knowledge. And then you divide each branch of knowledge further into four to cover all its aspects and you get the number 64.
So a complete knowledge of the art of seduction was equated with complete mastery over your entire life.
Yeah – about optimizing and harnessing the power of the mind, the body and the spirit. And I’ll let you into quick secret.
According to ancient wisdom, this complete knowledge of the art of seduction and the ability to practice it, this was known as the elixir of youth. You know, when Cleopatra decided to seduce Julius Caesar. And she didn’t just want him for one night; she wanted him for keeps and she wanted him to the exclusion of every other woman. This is Caesar – the Emperor of the largest known empire of the time. He’s rich, he’s spoiled. He can have anybody he wants, he can do anything he wants and she wants him or to herself forever.
Do you know what was skill of seduction that she chose to use, aside from the obvious? She decided that he was going to – well, she was going to be completely happy for every single minute that he spent with her. So he would associate her with just his happiest moments in his life.
She decided that he was going to laugh with her more than he had ever laughed with any other woman. And we know from history that a lot.
This brings me to the other story which I find is going out literally and that is that you know – the skills of the arts of seduction would not just meant as a skill for women, it was equally important for the men. And that is a story that’s becoming completely obsolete. Because every time I do this, what can I say, well for a woman to be truly seductive, she had to be intelligent, amusing, beautiful, fragrant, sexy, subtle, discrete, porcelain skin, good at singing, good at dancing, good at playing musical instruments, well-spoken, well-behaved, well-read, nails painted, toes polished, lips red, legs waxed –
And what did a man have to be? And every time the answer is rich. He just has to be rich. But he is rich, he doesn’t have to do anything else; not so. Then you have these hideous websites which tell a woman: be completely perfect. And if the man is doing something you don’t like, don’t complain, smile and pretend.
Or if he is boring you to tears, don’t complain. Smile and pretend. No, no, no, if we say that the arts of seduction were about building up, optimizing and harnessing the energy of the mind, the body and the soul to generate the ultimate power, it was equally important for a man to participate fully. Not just with a man supposed to participate fully and know all about the skills of seduction, he also had to be able to understand the nuances, the expertise, the finesse with which he was being seduced in order to maximize his sexual energies. Yes?
You know, there were lots of books written about the role of the man. And there’s a prelude to one of these books which I absolutely love the story and I am going to share it with you.
So there was a king sitting in his court. He was surrounded by all his ministers. And this woman rushes into the court and she stopped naked. There is complete mayhem in the court: a woman naked in broad daylight in the presence of the king. Uhhh, so people rush forward to try and kill her. And she stops them and she says, “No. I have decided that I will no longer ever wear a stitch of clothing till my wish is fulfilled”.
So the king – I mean it’s a matter of pride. He is the king. He can make things happen. He says, “Go ahead. Tell me what it is that you want”.
And she says, “Well, I am completely fed up because in all my life there has never been a man who has taken the trouble to try and satisfy me in bed, not one, not ever. And I have decided that till I am satisfied completely, I will not get dressed”.
Now the king, he’s given his word. He looks at his ministers expectantly. The ministers look at the King expectantly. They have a little hurried discussion and they discovered to their complete dismay that there is not one man in that room who can say with any conviction that he is going to be able to satisfy a woman completely.
Now ladies and gentlemen, imagine the level of panic. What if this form of rebellion took? What if all their wives took to the streets naked demanding sexual satisfaction? Don’t worry; the story has a happy ending.
The king put out a reward. A man came forward out of nowhere. He took this woman by the hand. He took her away and the next morning she came back to the king’s court completely dressed from head to foot.
And she confirmed that she had been completely satisfied. The king immediately commissioned this man to write a book putting down all his knowledge so that it would be available to every single person in his kingdom and never would a woman have to walk the streets naked again.
Actually we love this story. But I have to say I am in awe of the kind of wit of experience, the detail, the research that went into these books. Specifically on the role of men.
Do you know there is even an old book that talks about the shifting of a woman’s erogenous zones according to the movement of the moon, not the idea of being that a woman’s sexuality is liquid. So it’s affected by the phases of the Moon. And again it’s a huge subject, so I’m just going to give you a couple of examples in broad strokes.
So they said that on the 14th day of both the waxing and waning moon for instance, the most sensitive part of a woman is her head and her hair. And the best way to get a sexual energy up is to massage the scalp gently.
On the 13th day, it’s the eyes. And so the eyelids should be kissed. So apparently the right eye is more sensitive during the waxing moon and the left eye eyelid during the waning moon.
On the 7th day – on this I’m not going to give you all of the details because I don’t have that much time. But on the 7th day, it is the navel that is most sensitive, and ideally it should be tapped with an open palm.
On the 4th day, it is the knees, his knees suppressed against her knees.
The 5th day is the lazy man’s day. The man doesn’t have to do very much on the 5th day. The woman is pretty much self-sufficient on the 5th day of both the waning and waxing moon.
And just for your little bit of information, today is the 7th – no, today is the sixth day of the phase of the moon. And apparently today’s is the bottom, the buttocks which should be gently tapped with a fist. Well and then of course it goes further into the permutations and combinations. It’s an incredible piece of work.
But as I said there is just so much information and it gets lost because the word seduction having been a victim of evolution. So I don’t have very much more time. So I am going to actually finish with a little tiny example of my favorite parts — one of my favorite parts of the arts of the seduction. And that is about the perfuming of the body.
Now the perfuming of the body was supposed to be a subtly shifting phenomenon. So you at a certain dye it to get a base scent and then you apply different perfumes to the rest of your – every part of body. So the hair had to be perfumed with hush. Hush for those of you who are not from a South Asian background, is the smell of fresh rain as it falls on scorching hot soil. Okay, it’s the ultimate aphrodisiac in the work. So hair with hush, neck with Jasmine, arms with mint, there’s a reason for everybody part of the body. Okay, the belly button with a very heavy musk that you draw somebody in. The curve of the waist with a very subtle extracted roses, so you have to press your face into it, and the back is my favorite — the back had to be dotted, not rubbed over, dotted with little dabs of sandalwood. So you created a trail for someone to follow, because at the end of it, you had to be like a banquet of taste, of textures of smell.
And ladies and gentlemen, in closing, can I just suggest that this is a story you should try at home.
