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Snakebite &
Religious Healing
in South Asia
SCIENCE STUDIES

SOUTH ASIA

November 27, 2012 - 3 comments

A review of Grua Medicine: A

History of Snakebite and Religious
Healing in South Asia, by M ichael
James Slouber.
In his dissertation, Michael Slouber
introduces the reader to a branch of
aiva tantric literature called the Grua
Tantras, works associated with the deity
Garua (the Lord of Birds and natural
enemy of snakes and poison) that are
primarily concerned with the cure of
snakebite and poisoning through the use
of mantras and herbal or mineral
remedies, but that also touch on broader
medical and religious matters.
The dissertation is divided into two parts.
The first part provides a general
introduction to Grua Tantras and the
themes presented in them, as well as a
discussion of how their contents are
positioned within the aiva corpus of
works and how they relate to other
schools of thought. The second part
consists of an edition and translation of
chapters 1- 7, 30 and 34 of the
Kriyklaguottara, a previously
unpublished Sanskrit text that preserves
archaic material from the Grua Tantras
and that probably dates to before the
eleventh century.
Part One, Chapter 1 introduces and
contextualizes Grua medicine, the
method of treating envenomation and
poisoning with mantra systems and herbal
or mineral cures expounded in the
Gruda Tantras. Sloubers focus is on the
treatment of snakebite with mantras, an
aspect of Indian medicine that has not
received much scholarly attention in the

past despite it being a popular and

widespread practice. Slouber cogently
argues that the scholarly bias against
practices such as mantras and ritualized
medicine has resulted in an inaccurate
understanding of Indian medicine. The
second chapter gives an extensive survey
of primary textual sources in Sanskrit,
Pali, and Prakrit that relate to or
incorporate elements of Grua
medicine, tentatively establishing the
relations of influence between the texts.
The impressively wide range of sources
include Vedic texts, the Epics, Ayurvedic
treatises, Puras, aiva Tantras and
aiva compendia, Pcartra Tantras
and other Vaiava texts, Jain and
Buddhist sources. In Chapter 3, Slouber
delineates Grua mantra systems,
describing and analyzing selected
mantras and their use in some detail.
Emphasizing the cultural importance of
mantras as well as the coherent inner
logic of their use, Slouber advocates a
more detailed study and serious
consideration of mantras.
Chapter 4 examines the role of snakebite
goddesses in the GruaTantras and
their incorporation into the later kta
traditions of the ninth to twelfth centuries.
There is also a discussion of the use of
vidys, i.e., sonic spells understood as
the embodiment of the goddess and as
the female equivalent of mantras. In
Chapter 5, Slouber explores Garuas
non-sectarian identity as an independent
deity in aiva, kta, Buddhist, and Jain
traditions and discusses why Garua is
today mostly associated with Vaiavism.
He also describes in some detail how the
visualization of Garuas specific qualities
is used by the practitioner, the Gruika,
to bring about possession and cure
snakebite. The sixth chapter concludes
Part One, summarizing the findings of the
previous chapters and suggesting
directions for further research.
As mentioned, Part Two contains the
edition and translation of chapters 1- 7,
30 and 34 of the Kriyklaguottara. The
edition is based on three of six available
manuscripts of the Kriyklaguottara,
the three others being directly dependent
on the prior three, as Slouber proceeds to
explain in detail. Slouber has chosen
Devangar fonts for the edition, which
makes the text more accessible to Indian
scholars. The clear and concise
translation concludes Part Two.
The study of Tantric traditions and
literature, long a neglected area in
scholarship, is now emerging as one of
the key, if also specialist, areas of South

Asian studies (see Dominic Goodall and

Harunaga Isaacson, Tantric Traditions,
in Jessica Frazier (ed.), The Continuum
Companion to Hindu Studies. London:
Continuum, 2011, pp. 122-137). Many of
the previously unavailable Tantric source
materials are gradually being made
available through the archiving
(cataloguing, microfilming and digitization)
of important manuscript collections, and a
small number of editions and translations
of seminal Tantric scriptures have been
published in recent years. However, the
corpus of Tantric literature is vast, and
while solid inroads have been made in the
history of Tantric thought, much more
remains to be discovered. Sloubers
dissertation can be seen as part of a
larger project of understanding Tantra,
specifically aiva Tantra and its influence
on South Asian culture, providing us with
another piece of the puzzle, as it were.
Key to this understanding is the
examination of a central aspect of Tantric
thought, namely the meaning and use of
mantras (and vidys) to which Slouber
dedicates a great deal of attention. As
Slouber points out, this is an area that
has been more or less purposely
overlooked or ignored in studies on Indian
medicine and that certainly deserves
more attention. His edition and translation
of parts of the Kriyklaguottara provide
a much-welcomed glimpse into Grua
literature and into snakebite medicine.
This dissertation substantially adds to our
understanding of Tantric thought and
practice, and vitally complements our still
incomplete picture of Indian medicine.
Dr Dagmar Wujastyk
University Research Priority Program Asia
and Europe
Zurich University
dagmar.wujastyk@uzh.ch
Primary Sources
The author made use of a great number
of primary source texts (in Sanskrit, Pali
and Prakrit), many of which are available
in print editions or as e-texts. However, a
number of texts Slouber has consulted
are only available in manuscript form. The
manuscripts in question are archived at
the National Archives Kathmandu (NAK) in
Nepal. Several were digitized or
microfilmed as part of the Nepal German
Manuscript Preservation Project (NGMPP,
now the Nepal German Manuscript
Cataloguing Project).
Dissertation Information
University of California, Berkeley. 2012.
331pp. Primary Advisors: Robert P.

Goldman and Alexander von Rospatt.

Image: Manuscript leaf of the

Tvaritamulasutra in the Kaiser Library in
Kathmandu, and wood-carving of Garuda
bought in Bhaktapur, Nepal. Photo taken
and created by Michael Slouber.
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Tags: 2012 Dissertation, Alexander von

Rospatt, Robert Goldman, UC Berkeley
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