Keith Edward Cantú

Keith Edward Cantú is an academic, musician, and polyglot with a deep professional and personal interest in South Asian religion and spirituality. He completed a PhD in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is currently employed as an Assistant Professor (postdoctoral research associate) at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He has both extensively researched and directly engaged Tantric and Baul Fakiri currents over the course of his eleven years of fieldwork in and writing on India and Bangladesh, including pursuing initiations in both Hindu and non-sectarian esoteric and artistic traditions that blur religious boundaries and celebrate the embodied potential of human beings. His additional interests also include modern occult movements such as Theosophy and Thelema, yoga, Sufism, and medieval alchemy in India and Europe. He has delivered talks and lectures on a wide variety of topics related to Tantra and feels privileged to contribute knowledge on its practice to participants at Esalen.