The Gaze and the Sacred Women of Angkor

There are ways of seeing that look outward, and ways of seeing that quietly expose the assumptions carried within the viewer. The gaze belongs to the latter. It is not merely an act of looking, but a structure of perception—one shaped by culture, power, habit, and inheritance.

In critical theory, philosophy, sociology, and psychoanalysis, the gaze (French: le regard) describes the relationship between the observer and what is observed, and the often-unexamined hierarchies embedded in that relationship. To look is never neutral. Awareness of this fact does not negate vision; it refines it.

One of the most influential formulations of the gaze in Western cultural discourse is the concept of the male gaze, articulated by the English art critic John Berger in his analysis of the European painted nude. Berger identified a recurring asymmetry: men are positioned as watchers, women as objects to be watched. In this framework, the male figure acts; the female figure appears. She is aware of being seen, and her presence is shaped by that awareness.

A related critique was advanced by the British film theorist Laura Mulvey, who examined cinematic conventions through the same lens. Mulvey argued that traditional visual media align masculinity with activity and agency, femininity with passivity and display. Together, these analyses describe a visual economy in which power flows with the gaze, and to be gazed upon is to be rendered vulnerable to interpretation, possession, or desire.

Within this Western inheritance, women in art are frequently treated as objects rather than presences. The creators of such imagery have historically been male, and the values embedded in the work reflect dominant social hierarchies. Youth, beauty, sexuality, and availability become elevated traits, while complexity, autonomy, and sacred authority recede. These patterns have travelled far beyond their original cultural contexts, shaping modern expectations of the female form across much of the world.

Yet these assumptions are not universal. When brought to Angkor, they falter.

The Sacred Women of Angkor

From an architectural perspective, apsaras are often described as devices of ornament—figures that soften the severity of stone and lend rhythm to the walls of Khmer temples. This description is accurate only at the most superficial level. Apsaras are not embellishments. They are structural to meaning.

She Who Waits in Shadow
Angkor Wat Temple, Angkor, Cambodia — 2020

While present-day Cambodia exists under strong global and Western cultural influence, the worldview that shaped Angkorian iconography operates according to a very different logic. Here, the female form is not an object of casual viewing but a bearer of potency, auspiciousness, and cosmological function.

The exterior walls of Angkor Wat—its galleries, gopuras, pavilions, and towers—are adorned with more than two thousand apsaras and devatas. Thousands more appear throughout the wider Angkor complex. They stand alone or in small groupings; some dance, others remain poised in stillness. Their presence is systematic rather than decorative, deliberate rather than indulgent.

Their representation draws upon a deep Indic intellectual and ritual inheritance. Textual traditions such as the Lakshmi Tantra—compiled between the ninth and twelfth centuries—do not merely exalt Lakshmi as the shakti of Vishnu-Narayana, but affirm women themselves as manifestations of divine creative power. In these traditions, the feminine principle is not secondary or supportive; it is generative, auspicious, and necessary for cosmic balance. Certain tantric paths even identify liberation itself as requiring the presence of a female partner, not symbolically but ritually.

The sheer abundance of apsara imagery in Angkor is likely explained by two intertwined functions.

First, apsaras were believed to inhabit the celestial realms, attending the gods. Their appearance upon temple walls transforms stone architecture into a heavenly palace. The temple does not merely house the gods; it becomes their rightful environment. The presence of apsaras ensures that the divine occupants are recognised, honoured, and at ease within their earthly manifestation.

Second, women were understood to possess inherent auspiciousness. This quality could be transferred to a structure through representation. Classical Indian texts codifying artistic and architectural practice, such as the Shilpa Shastra, assert the generative potency of the female form, equating it with fertility, growth, abundance, and prosperity. A monument—whether sacred or temporal—could only be fully auspicious if adorned with images of women.

Apsaras were therefore carved by male sculptors not for the gratification of male viewers, but to activate sacred presence. Sensuality, where it appears, is not a lure for the eye but an expression of vitality, fecundity, and divine ease.

This understanding is reinforced by the Shilpa Prakasa, a treatise that provided detailed guidance to temple architects and sculptors and whose principles were followed at Angkor. It states unambiguously that female figures are indispensable to temple decoration, and enumerates sixteen types appropriate to different contexts. It specifies their proportions, their containment within an upright rectangular field, and their gestures: gazing into mirrors, smelling lotus blossoms, adorning themselves with flowers, adjusting anklets, holding flywhisks. These are not gestures of submission. They are gestures of self-possession.

Alongside the apsaras, reliefs of rishis and ascetics populate the same walls. Together, these figures—celestial and renunciate—locate the temple within the mythic geography of Mount Meru. The building is lifted from the human realm into a cosmic one, not metaphorically, but ritually.

To stand before the apsaras of Angkor is therefore to encounter a test of perception. The question is not what they are, but how one looks.

The next time you walk these galleries, it may be worth pausing to notice the habits of your own gaze. What assumptions arrive with you? What expectations do you project? And what changes when you allow these women to appear not as objects of looking, but as presences—sacred, autonomous, and worthy of reverence?

Seen in this way, the apsaras do not invite possession. They invite recalibration. Through them, the temple shifts once more—from stone to sanctuary, from monument to celestial dwelling—and the viewer is quietly asked to follow.