eBook Blood of the Goddess download

One's liking of this book will be strongly influenced by one's attitude toward this kind fiction, depleted of events and full of speculations.
The actual plot, written in a simple unprepossessing way, would probably have needed one third of the actual book.

Set mainly in India, this novel depicts an entirely new kind of vampirism, rooted in the worship of the allmighty, allknowing primeval goddess sometimes named Kali.
What little I know of Hindu culture and the little more I know about religious theory fits in the frame pictured here, but I shall leave more competent readers to decide whether Mr Schindler knows what he is saying or is making it all up according to his taste.

If one is looking for the usual (gay) bodice ripper with fangs one should probably avoid this particular read which by the way is rather difficult, some religious explanations being quite hard to grasp.
Personally I was never particularly drawn by Hindu-and Buddhist- thinking that one has to renounce the world to achieve real freedom from pain and sufferance nor was I ever much interested in forms of meditation. It goes without saying that the kind of sublimated gay sex described here as ideal has no appeal for me.

Gay men with a thorough knowledge of Indian culture might want to give this book a try: I shall be pleased to read their reviews and comments.

This book is amazing. The author has integrated spiritual teaching in the form of fiction. The story is deep and mysterious. It is mystical. The characters are real. This book delves into the mysteries of Kaula Tantra in Hinduism in a way that the reader can understand.

A seamless mesh of Hindu spirituality, gay love, and vampirism. "Blood of the Goddess" is a good read and would make a great movie.

Blood of the Goddess is a remarkable novel: a work of mystical writing, an introduction to Tantric Hindu mysticism and myth, a series of various ecstatic raptures, a lush travelogue of India, a meditation on death and dying—and all wrapped into a vampire novel. It's Christopher Isherwood's Sri Ramakrishna meets Anne Rice's Vampire Lestat—or the other way around. Seriously, though, this is a beautifully written, if somewhat unsettling, horror novel that places the whole horror genre into its place in the history of religions.

William Schindler is an Indianologist and practitioner and teacher of Tantric Hinduism. He runs an ashram in Los Angeles. He has done numerous posts and videos on the Internet about Tantra. This is not the sexy pop fad Tantra to teach people how to use yoga to improve their sex lives. Schindler's Tantra is serious theology coming out of a millennium-old ascetical and monastic tradition.

Hindu gods and goddesses traditionally have both a beneficent and a wrathful appearance, often also both male and female consort of manifestation. The wrathful, female side of Shiva is the goddess Kali. Shiva is the creator, Kali the destroyer. Kali is the Blissful Mother Goddess who cradles and suckles her children, leading them ultimately to liberation. But she is also often shown wearing garlands of human heads with blood dropping from her mouth. For Kali is the mythical manifestation of "nature, red in tooth and claw" and of the simple reality of time. Kali is the Great Mother who by giving birth in human flesh dooms her children to physical decay and death. Death is part of life. Our words "thugs" and "assassins" come from the history of death and murder cults in India who in one way or another explained their violence as manifestation or worship of the Goddess Kali.

William Schindler has worked the Eastern European myth of the blood-sucking, undead vampire into this historical tradition. His first-person character is a gay man who falls in love with a strikingly handsome but mysterious character he meets in the year 1612 in India where his job as a merchant marine has taken him. This stranger reveals to the merchant marine that he is an immortal being and that they were lovers in a previous incarnation. He leads him then into the Himalayas where he himself then becomes an immortal, a "vampire" through a mystical, bloodletting experience with the Goddess herself. Some 300 years pass and our newly-inducted immortal moves to New York. There's much more to the story, but it is the mythical/mystical philosophy that stands out. Our protagonist "vampire" learns that his role as taker of lives is an almost "angelic" function; it is to bring the gift of death to those who are karmically ready to go or stuck in an incarnation they need out of. He's more like the wolves who improve the life of the herd by taking the sick and dying than serial murderer—though there is a glorification of death and anonymous random murder in this novel that is unsettling, even if it is recognizably religious.

Coincidentally/synchronistically, I have been reading Jeffrey J Kripal's Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom at the same time as Blood of the Goddess. Kripal's major argument is that writing—and reading—about mysticism is itself a kind of mystical practice. William Schindler's book really demonstrates this point. There isn't a lot of plot in this novel, but there is a lot of mystical experience and shared insight into the nature of consciousness. When Schindler's blood-drinking immortal takes a life, it is to incorporate that life into his own immortality and his own experience of oneness with the Goddess. He brings rapture and completion and relief to his "victims" and, in their experience of passing over, experiences the mystical oneness himself.

There's nothing really gory in this book, just as there is nothing particularly sexual, even though sex and gore surround the story. It's a beautiful expression of visionary experience. Fans of traditional vampire horror novels might find it slow, too talky and woo-woo. But fans of Ramakrishna's might likely find it rapturous and inspiring. And certainly fans of Jeffrey Kripal's will find it solid evidence of Kripal's comparative religion and modern gnosticism.

Reviewed by Toby Johnson, author of Secret Matter, Getting Life in Perspective and other novels and books