Supervision:
- Marion Rastelli
- Judit Törzsök
This doctoral project is being conducted as a cotutelle de thèse between the University of Vienna and the EPHE - Université PSL Paris.
The proposed doctoral project shall concern itself with the Indian oracular scrying ritual most commonly referred to as prasenā (likely from Skt. praśna – “question”) and its influence on South, South-East and East Asian spiritual traditions. A particular focus will be prasenā’s rise to prominence within the different branches of Śaivism of the Mantramārga and its subsequent appropriation by tantric Buddhism between the ca. 6th–12th centuries CE. The ritual is one of several which employ a state of possession by a deity (āveśa), but it is distinguished from other similar practices by the visual means of obtaining information and the use of a shiny or burnished surface to that end, most often a mirror or a lac-smeared thumb. In the course of a prasenā, a ritual officiant makes a medium (most often a young girl) be possessed by a deity (most often a goddess), who then looks at the mirror and provides otherwise inaccessible information about the past, future or present events, which are invisible in some way, such as being far away or in the realm of the dead. Usually appearing within a set of divinatory practices employing an altered state of consciousness, there are cases where prasenā is regarded as more reliable or definitively authoritative should the others fail. Building on the doctoral candidate’s previous work (Krastev 2022) and the limited scholarship that is available on the topic (e.g. Orofino 1994, Strickmann 2002, Smith 2006, Vasudeva 2014, McGrath 2019, Van Schaik 2020, among others), this thesis aims to cast light on the formative influence of prasenā and its related ideas, spanning an area beyond the borders of the Indian Subcontinent and its immediate cultural sphere. The research will consist of a multi-text philological and cultural analysis centred on prasenā’s many incarnations throughout Indian history, whereby the primary Sanskrit material will provide information on the particularities of the ritual practice and its different adaptations. In so doing, it will provide a solid basis for extracting and formulating the reasons for the ritual’s popularity and its wide diffusion throughout South, South-East and East Asia, likely due to the extraordinary perceptual faculties of supernatural perception it was regarded as affording and the high regard in which they were held. While this analysis will concentrate itself primarily on Śaiva and Buddhist sources, it will also pay special attention to the origins of prasenā from a possible mixture between divinatory practices of Mediterranean Hellenic origin and the archaic cultic practices of ancient India, and the ritual’s subsequent spread to Tibet, China, and Japan, particularly via the southern maritime routes in the 8th–9th centuries CE.