In this first module, we will tackle some of the larger pertinent questions that will set the stage for the entire course, including the development of the academic field of esotericism, questions of how to define “West” and “East,” and how such questions are important to consider in any discussion of modern yoga, authenticity, and orientalism(s). We will then analyze the usefulness of esotericism as a category to describe some of the more obscure yet nevertheless important and recurrent finer features of yogic practice. This will require some discussion on how the term “esotericism” itself can potentially help us more holistically consider how yoga came to be entangled not only with institutionalized currents that have been variously described with adjectives like “occult,” “magical,” “spiritualist,” “tantric,” “new age,” and so on, but also even earlier with Islamic esoteric movements.

In the second part of the module, we will highlight some examples as to how esoteric authorial and poetic engagement with yoga led to a wealth of new terminology that may seem utterly alien to yoga’s Sanskritic foundation yet nevertheless attracted earnest practitioners who continued to work within and develop new systems. We will discuss how this potentially leads to, on the one hand, a traditionalist critique like the Bharatian “pizza effect” that would possibly accept the authenticity of a practice like yoga as related to the authenticity of, say, cultural cuisines: the original is better. On the other hand, we will also introduce some esoteric artists and authors on yoga not only from abroad but also within South Asia itself, each of whom we will cover in detail in future modules, who appear to greatly complicate such rigid lines between authenticity and inauthenticity. 

In the second module, we will look at how Sufi esoteric teachings on yoga in South Asia, with special attention on the Bengali context in India and Bangladesh, both predate and were circulating in South Asia concurrently with the colonial-era esotericism of more well-known movements like Theosophy. To do this we will focus on how key developments in the academic categorization of what is “esoteric” or “exoteric” in Islam are directly relevant to the songs of Lalon Fakir, one of the most famous non-sectarian Baul poets who simultaneously engaged and attempted to humanize prior Sufi Islamic esoteric teachings on the body, Allah, and the Prophet Muhammad and other four Holy People. 

We will then engage the phenomenon of how Buddhist and Vaiṣṇava tantric teachings on the body were gradually “esotericized” in Lalon’s songs and harmonized with an Islamic vocabulary that includes teachings on prophets and angels. We will also discuss what this rural syncretism or innovation implies for our subsequent discussion of yoga as esoteric in urban Indian colonial contexts. Finally we will show how these teachings, combined with other strands of local humanistic currents, went on to inform the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, the independence movement in Bangladesh, and even the Beat poetry of Allen Ginsberg.

In the third module, we will look at the lives and contributions of several theosophical authors, including Sris Chandra Basu, Rama Prasad, and Tallapragada Subba Rao, who were responsible for a wealth of nineteenth-century publications and teachings on yoga, even after the theosophical “founders” H.P. Blavatsky’s and Henry Olcott’s fall-out with the Arya Samaj and Damodar Saraswati. These Indian theosophical authors on account of their publication efforts have had a sustained impact on contemporary yoga in North America and Europe, although the complexities of their own positions on yoga are often mostly ignored or overlooked, including the way they used adjectives like “esoteric” in their writings and translations.

In the case of Sris Chandra Basu, we will look at how he framed his influential yet problematic translation of the Śivasaṃhitā as esoteric and examine the context for his complex relationship with Haṭhayoga, which at that time in the theosophical imagination was often stigmatized. In the case of Rama Prasad, we will look at how his popular work Nature’s Finer Forces repackaged a medieval Śaiva text called the Śivasvarodaya as the “occult science of breath” and how his commentaries on nasal prognostication appear to have inspired later American authors like Yogi Ramacharaka and other authors who went on to inform contemporary movements. Finally, in the case of Subba Rao, we will show how his friendly disagreement with H.P. Blavatsky over the structure of the tattvas set the stage for an alternate and oft-overlooked stream of “esoteric” yogic teachings both within and outside of Theosophy.

Shifting to the exchange between South India and Europe and North America in this final module, we will look at the Tamil yogi Sri Sabhapati Swami and show how his esoteric teachings on Śivarājayoga, or the “Royal Yoga for Śiva,” were gradually adopted by European occultists, theosophists, and even a New Thought guru. First, we will examine the Tamil Vīraśaiva and Siddha historical contexts of Sri Sabhapati’s teachings on “divine pilgrimage,” and then some brief engagement with other religions and points of departure from Theosophy. 

We will then shift into a discussion as to the specific ways in which aspects of Sabhapati’s yogic teachings came to be interpreted and appropriated among Anglophone and German authors of modern magic such as Aleister Crowley, Franz Hartmann, and a range of their students and followers both male and female. This intriguing byway of yoga will enable us to better contextualize the pervasiveness of such popular topics as “astral projection,” “subtle bodies,” and “chakras” (cakras) in literature that on the surface would appear to be completely unrelated to yoga yet often blend yogic (or “yogesque”) techniques with other religious, magical, or scientific terminologies not found in Sanskrit or Indic vernacular texts until at least the modern period. In one startling example of the prominence of this particular pizza effect, we will also consider how some yoga societies like the Latent Light Culture then “re-appropriated” some of these blended yogic methods and even praised their efficacy.