Siegel 2014: 28– 35. Siegel particularly distinguishes between the powers of vaśitva,
or mastery over one’s own mind and being (one of the classic eight siddhis), and
vaśīkaraṇa, or power over the minds of others. The latter particularly can be related
to the traditional yogic talents of illusions, such as yogamāyā or indrajāla, and the
more modern usage of sammohan, which more directly translates as hypnotism.
Pinch 2006: 16.
See Jain 2014b.
Sarbacker 2011: 198.
Pinch 2006: 66.
See especially DeMichelis 2004; Strauss 2005; Jain 2014a.
See, for instance, Hanegraaff 1996.
Albanese 2007: 13– 15.
See Jacobsen 2011: 2. Jacobsen’s volume as a whole offers a complex overview of the
roles of supernatural powers in a variety of yogic traditions.
This usage is briefly adopted in Kripal 2011: 172.
Although the first explosion of American superhero narratives does not properly
come until the 1930s, these characters thereafter absorb and appropriate much from
the mystic powers associated with the Yogi. See, for instance, Kripal 2011: 171– 72;
211– 16.
Vivekananda 1915: 142.
“Fakir” tends to appear more frequently when the tone is derogatory and was
indeed fairly common in contemporaneous parlance and often suggestively pro-
nounced as “faker.” For a more complex analysis and the more positive valences held
by the term, see Dobe 2015.
Iwamura 2011: 6.
Said 1978: 3.
Iwamura 2011: 9.
Isaacs 1958: 29.
Isaacs 1958: 45.
Singer 1972: 21.
Pollock 1993.
King 1999: 93.
King 1999: 97.
See Dehejia 1986 and White 2002.
Although female practitioners are instrumental to key tantric ritual practices, the
scholarship on such traditions has viewed these women as just that— instruments
or assistants present to complement male practice but rarely having much agency
of their own. There are some notable exceptions to this within the scholarship of
Miranda Shaw (1995) and Loriliai Biernacki (2007), but the overwhelming trend
is clear.
