Although Tantric sexual practices were never a prominent part of Loup Blanc’ teachings, they are at the center of the criminal case against him.
by Massimo Introvigne
Article 3 of 4. Read article 1 and article 2.
One of my interviewees, Martine, reported that for years, while attending initiations, she never heard from Loup Blanc the word “Tantrism.” In Loup Blanc’s books, it is used exceptionally only, for example in “Le Pouvoir régénérateur de la Lumière” (The Regenerating Power of Light, 2009), and there to warn that “if you start doing exercises of Tantrism after three or four months you will become crazy. If you are not well guided by somebody, you will compromise your health.”
However, the basic Tantric teachings about Shakti and Kundalini were taught since the beginning. Simply, the word “Tantrism” was not there. The immediate reason for this was that “Tantrism” evokes today among the general public teachings about how to improve sexuality by attending expensive weekend courses. Loup Blanc insists in his 2020 notes for an unpublished (and unfinished) book on Tantrism that “He is not like those who convert Tantra into a profitable business… Yet, it is fashionable: Reiki-Tantra, Tantra Stages, Tantric Shamanism… offered just to attract clients who look for a romantic liaison or a new encounter.”
On the other hand, Loup Blanc confirms in the same text that, while not using the word “Tantra,” it has always given to his students a Tantric teaching: “It is not because you don’t know it, or you don’t see it that He has not taught it. In fact, He has taught it in every initiation, since all the practices that He gives are Tantric… All is Tantric, all the practices He gives are as such.”
In accordance with the academic literature on the subject, Loup Blanc insists that Tantric teachings are not about sexuality only, nor even mostly: “It is an aberration to place it at the sexual level only since Tantrism is much more than this! To limit Tantra to the sexual relation or to the couple just evidences a lack of understanding.”
The scholar wishing to study Loup Blanc’s group is confronted here with a dilemma. To understand the controversies and the legal proceedings against Loup Blanc, it is indispensable to explore the Tantric work he did with a small group of some twenty female students. Yet, by doing this, the scholar is led to devote to this work a space that is out of proportion with its real role in the group, with the risk of giving the false impression that teachings on sexuality had a central position in the path proposed by Loup Blanc. This was never the case. The following in-depth analysis of the Tantric sexual work has been made necessary by the current controversies, but readers should always remember that its role was never central among Loup Blanc’s multiple teachings. It involved a limited number of women, and most students never heard of it. All the women involved were single. Their experiences went from one single session to twenty years of regular Tantric work with Loup Blanc in the case of my interviewee Danièle. No woman was a virgin when she started this particular work.
My interviews evidenced that the limited use of the word “Tantrism” by Loup Blanc is not a simple discursive strategy, since its discourse on sexuality does not have the Tantra as its single source. In the French context marked by Catholicism, before discussing specific practices of sacred eroticism, Loup Blanc believes that it is crucially important to overcome the taboos, “almost 2,000 years of Catholic dust” that have covered and hidden the truth about sexuality. The images of St. Michael defeating Satan, St. George killing the Dragon, and the Virgin Mary trampling the snake under her feet all symbolize the Christian Church’s willingness to control and demonize the force of sexuality.
In “Le Voyageur incorporel,” the Sage tells Loup Blanc that the Catholic Church has preached throughout the centuries the image of “sex as ugliness, a vile and perverted thing that leads to the fall out of Eden, tipping us into hell.” This image, Loup Blanc teaches, is false, but is also a self-fulfilling prophecy that converts sex into a “deadly force… Sex is responsible of the evil you can see on this earth.” If we try to expel sex, it comes back with a destructive vengeance. The Sage tells the parable of a man who has never seen a woman and is told by a sanctimonious neighbor that one is coming to live in a nearby house. Not to be tempted by her, the man ties himself to a pole. When the woman appears, his desire and agitation only grow, until the rope is twisted and he is in pain. The man eventually escapes the temptation of that particular woman, but his reaction to the experience is to start a life of promiscuity and debauchery. The bigot neighbor represents the old religious teachings, and the meaning of the parable is that an “imbecile and unreasonable chastity” is like a cork on a champagne bottle: when it is pulled by an outside force, it pops thunderously and creates unforeseen disasters.
In fact, sexuality according to Loup Blanc may be both a force of life and a force of death. He teaches that sexuality operates at four levels, which he calls Cocoon, Caterpillar, Chrysalis, and Butterfly. The Cocoon level corresponds to hell, and the repressed sexual force erupts in crimes such as rape and murder. The Caterpillar level is better than the Cocoon’s, but still includes perverted and degraded practices. It is at the Chrysalis level that one starts living sex in a liberated and loving way, until the Butterfly level of Divine Love is achieved. The ascension to the Butterfly level also corresponds to the Tantric path that allows the Kundalini to rise up the spine until the top of the head.
According to another scheme, included in an additional note for the book he was preparing on Tantrism, sent to Claudine who shared it with me during our interview, there are three levels of the Tantric work. “The first level is the knowledge of the phantasms or the ghost of desire, a way to live them and transcend them and use them as a liberating means!… The second level is the expansion of the four senses by the obstruction of a fifth one, which is the sensitive and sensory exploration of the double energy! The last level is the EXTASE of YANG and YIN, or of SHIVA and SAKTHI, how to open our souls to the cosmic soul of creation!”
There is also a “fourth level which is the INTIMATE UNION WITH OURSELVES!” Since in general, “in the MAN there is a WOMAN and in the WOMAN there is a MAN,” at the end of the Tantric work a woman may experience the intimate union of her male and female parts within herself, without a sexual encounter with Loup Blanc or any other man. This is the experience related to me by Claudine. After two years of Tantric work, she continued to sleep often in the home of Loup Blanc, but sexual relationships stopped. She just benefited from his presence and energy for what she described as “an encounter between my male and female parts,” through which the Tantric work in fact continued for seven years, but in a different way.
A Tantric work on sexuality with Loup Blanc may follow a request by a female student or the fact that an invitation from the master has been accepted. As Martine told me, however, as it happened in her case, when Loup Blanc proposes the work to a woman it is because she had sent to him signals he had perceived and understood as a non-verbal request. I also found cases of women who asked to be taught this Tantric work and were told by Loup Blanc they were not ready. In fact, in more than twenty years less than 10% of the female students went through the Tantric initiations.
A scheme of the Tantric work that Loup Blanc himself shared with me is as follows: “There is an individual at the center (the Point), surrounded by circles (1. Phantasms, 2. Taboos, 3. Non-limit). Catholicism has put a lot of prohibitions in the minds of humans. All these prohibitions have caused a lot of drama, and continue today. Although repressed, this sexual energy is a creative energy. Phantasms can develop neuroses and deviations. The soul is feminine and the spirit is masculine. Love is a wave that travels through the Universe, it is impersonal and it becomes personal by passing through the human filter. Taboos are security locks, or sources of slavery. The last circle allows a liberation at the sexual level, we are free, we feel more energy and we develop spiritually, creativity is expressed at all levels of the being.”
He admits that, “It is certain that the White Wolf way of working is different from the traditional Tantric model, but are there not ‘many mansions in my Father’s House’? (John 14:2).”
The first work to do to avoid the catastrophes connected with sexual repression and recover a healthy sexuality is to overcome the phantasms and taboos. As one female student told me, in France they affect even women who have been educated in secular, non-Catholic families. While in the criminal case against Loup Blanc this has been reconstructed as evidence of abuse, the interviewees explained that they perceived what in a written summary of their Tantric experiences some of the listed as “sexy clothes; videos, photos and ‘explicit’ exchanges sent from a distance before the encounters; videos, photos and ‘explicit’ exchanges during the encounters” as part of a shock therapy to liberate them from fears and taboos about sex. They say it worked so well that, as the Tantric work continued, some of these experiments were eventually proposed and initiated by them rather than by Loup Blanc.
Some traditional Indian Tantric schools would insist that romantic love is not needed when working on sexuality with a master and may even be a distraction. Some female students, however, testified that they fell in love with Loup Blanc and felt loved by him, although they understood it was not the kind of love you may experience in a usual couple, and they knew the relationship was not exclusive. Corinne wrote in her testimony that Loup Blanc “is not a man you can own. He teaches us and frees us from possessiveness and jealousy.” For Corinne, this is compatible with a loving relationship. Other women, however, made a distinction between love and what they call “l’affectif” (the affective element), which in our society is never free from an “attachment” that leads to dependence and jealousy. Loup Blanc, they say, would let the “affectif” develop but women who become “attached” would quickly understand that the work is “something else,” sometimes in a painful way. “He does not create affective dependence, Juliette said, he frees you from it.” Loup Blanc himself answered me on this subject that “in the Tantric way, it is logical that there is no ‘affectif.’ The ‘affectif’ is the prison in which a large part of humanity is locked. The ‘affectif’ brings jealousy, suffering, slavery, it is a feeling of blackmail.”
This is a wall, Danièle told me, through which women in the Tantric work with Loup Blanc at some stage should learn to pass. Not all succeed. Without judging them, she feels that those who left the group and became plaintiffs in the criminal case simply did not manage to pass through that wall. Other interviewees told me they had mistaken the Tantric work for a “normal” couple relationship with Loup Blanc, despite being repeatedly told that this was precisely what this path was not.
The majority of the testimonies report that their non-possessive relationship ended quietly when both Loup Blanc and the student felt that the work had been completed, and the admittedly peculiar relationship they had established had run its course.
What comes straight from Tantrism is the teaching and practice of continence, i.e., sexual encounters without male ejaculation. One Western mistake about Tantrism is to reduce it to teachings about sexuality only. Another mistake, sometimes found among early Western academic scholars who tried to make Tantrism “respectable,” is to remain silent on its sexual teachings. Tantrism does include teachings about eroticism. According to American scholar Shaman Hatley, while they have criticized pseudo-Tantric “New Age ‘tantric sex,’” Indologists have sometimes “provided inadequate corrective in the form of detailed studies on sexuality in traditional tantric practice systems.” In the introduction to a 2015–2018 edition and translation of the “Brahmayamalatantra,” one of the oldest (7th-8th century) surviving goddess-oriented tantras, Hatley distinguishes among seven different paths of sacred eroticism. He criticizes the theory that “coital practices [with ejaculation] in which sexual fluids were collected and consumed […] have historical precedence,” and argues that in Tantric Shivaism the path based on continence “finds earlier attestation.” The “Brahmayamalatantra” itself teaches retention of seminal fluid as a way to gain miraculous powers (siddhi) and the knowledge of past lives.
In a nutshell, the Tantric doctrine of continence teaches that when ejaculation is avoided, the male semen and the female sexual energy can travel inward up to the crown chakra located on the top of the head, which has a number of physical, psychological, and spiritual positive effects for both the male and the female partners. This teaching is common in many Tantric and neo-Tantric schools, and is an important part of Loup Blanc’s Tantric work. He teaches that, “When you understand that wasting Energy does not help you, it just tires you out and gives even more strength to your Ego by locking you in the cage of envy, then you will make the decision to work on that level, to raise the Life Force along the Spinal Channel. At that moment, the Spiritual Journey will begin for you, as you will understand that, instead of letting the Life Force go downward, you will raise it upward and thus heal yourselves in depth.”
This comes from a confidential, unpublished text. However, Loup Blanc occasionally hinted at this Tantric teaching in his published books. In “Le Pouvoir régénérateur de la Lumière,” he explained that to “use the sexual energy for spiritual purposes… it is enough to bring up the energy inside”: “there is a complete technique to bring the essence up to the top of the head.”
Unlike in other Tantric groups, however, continence is not mandatory for male students. Loup Blanc extols its benefits and practices it himself, but also warns it is not useful for those who are not prepared. Interviewees reported that between 2015 and 2023 three children were born to couples of students. According to them, that there were no more children did not derive from a generalized practice of continence, which did not exist, but from the fact that most women in the group were in their forties or fifties. Men I interviewed told me that teachings on continence were given privately to a few students, some of whom had an interest in the subject even before joining the group, and were almost never mentioned in the public lectures.
