The rewriting of a Tantric tradition: from the Siddhayogeśvarīmata to the Timirodghāṭana and beyond

The earliest surviving scriptural sources that teach the Hindu tantric worship of goddesses and female spirits (yoginīs), the Siddhayogeśvarīmata and the Brahmayāmala (composed around the 7th century CE), belong to a corpus of texts called Bhairavatantras. Subsequently, a new current, kaulism, developed from these yoginī cults, perhaps around the 8th or 9th century CE. It internalised the whole ritual system as well as the pantheon: the yoginīs became the goddesses of the senses in the body (kula) of the practitioner, and the rituals, such as pūjā or fire rituals, all came to be performed as internal worship in the body, based on yogic practices and meditation. In this paper I focus upon borrowings, changes and transformations that occur between an early text of the yoginī cult, the Siddhayogeśvarīmata ('The Teaching of Powerful Yoginīs') and an early kaula text, the Timirodghāṭana ('The Removal of the Darkness [of Ignorance]'), whose codex unicus was discovered and transcribed by Somdev Vasudeva. I hope to show that despite the fact that some of the textual changes seem minor, they often imply significant transformations of doctrine and practice.Cette étude démontre, à travers une analyse de passages parallèles, que le Timirodghāṭana (inédit) est probablement parmi les premiers ouvrages de l'école tantrique ésotérique kaula. Il se fonde, en partie, sur la doctrine du Siddhayogeśvarīmata (VIIème s.), dont il est, en maints endroits, la réécriture, et il sert de source à des textes tantriques plus tardifs comme le Kubjikāmata