Historians of Islamic occult science and post-Mongol Persianate kingship in the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires have in recent years made clear just how central this body of knowledge was to the exercise of imperial power. Alongside, scholarship on tantra has pointed to its diffuse persistence in the early modern period. But what dynamics beyond courts and elite initiates did these investments in occult science and tantra unleash? Through a focus on the seventeenth-century Mughal court and the Rajput polity of Marwar in the eighteenth century, this article weaves together the history of animals with that of harmful magic by non-courtly actors. It demonstrates the blended histories of tantra, Islamicate occult sciences, and folk magic to argue that attributions of liminality encoded people, animals, and things with occult potential. For some, like the owl, this liminality could invite violence and death and for others, like expert male practitioners, it could generate authority. By the eighteenth century, the deployment of practical magic towards harmful or disruptive ends was a political tool wielded not only by kings and elite adepts for state or lineage formation but also by non-courtly subjects and “low”-caste specialists in local social life. States and sovereigns responded to the popular use of harmful magic harshly, aiming to cut off non-courtly access to this resource. If the early modern age was one of new ideologies of universal empire, the deployment of occult power outside the court was inconsistent with the ambitions of the kings of this time.

Of all the myriad aspects of Indian learning to be incorporated into Tibetan Buddhist scholarship, one of the least likely would seem to be the Indian science of sensual pleasure, kāmaśāstra. Even so, we do find traces of Sanskrit kāmaśāstra transposed into Tibetan Buddhist idiom. The most innovative example is the Treatise on Passion (’Dod pa'i bstan bcos) written by Ju Mipam Jamyang Namgyel Gyatso (1846–1912). This article investigates the reasons why the polymath monastic scholar Ju Mipam included kāmaśāstra in his expansive literary output, as well as his sources and influences for doing so. It argues that Mipam's work builds on an intertextuality already apparent in late medieval Sanskrit tantric and kāmaśāstric works, but one that took on new importance in the context of the non-biased outlook (Tib. ris med) that characterized Ju Mipam's nineteenth-century eastern Tibetan milieu.

This article is one of a series that reassesses the dhāraṇī texts of Mahāyāna Buddhism. The article seeks to examine dhāraṇī texts by using the linguistic tools of pragmatics, especially historical pragmatics, to assist the understanding of their statements. Rather than the meaning of the term dhāraṇī as a subject term, the domain of truth-conditional semantics, this paper examines statements in texts labelled dhāraṇī. Pragmatics examines meaning in context, and the categories of speech acts developed by Searle has been especially helpful in mapping out differences within such texts and the formalization of statements across texts. The grammaticalization of specific speech elements, especially interjections, in the context of mantra-dhāraṇīs is also discussed.