Biography of a Yogi Paramahansa Yogananda and the Origins of Modern Yoga

8 Introduction

characteristic of a deity. Through this process, the yogin or yoginī becomes

radically “other”— which is an affirmation of the salience of the compara-

tive category of the numinous and a modification of it, as the human has

become radically other. This transformation is presented in the symbolism

of Indian asceticism, such as the association between the practice of yoga

and the theriomorphic figure of the nāga, or mythic serpent.^11

The practical reality of the Yogi’s social marginalization is thus reflected in the
symbolic representation or even literal understanding of him as something other
than human. For Pinch, such understandings have very real political implica-
tions.^12 Even if his superpowers were mostly bunk, the Yogi could, as Pinch has
argued, still be considered armed and extremely dangerous in the conventional
sense. However, the aura of the superhuman, real or imagined, gave the Yogi a
significant practical advantage when it came to everything from battlefield per-
ceptions to political patronage. Thus, the Yogi’s otherness and his power are his-
torically deeply interrelated and indeed mutually dependent.
When the Yogi enters the Western imagination, he is subjected to yet another
layer of othering. Such Yogis were both distillations of the varieties of Indian
Yogis as well as consumable commodities or characters who played to Western
assumptions about the Orient. Among them was the emaciated ascetic reclining
on his bed of nails or contorted into an impossible posture along with his near-
polar opposite, the turbaned magician, berobed and bejeweled. The former was
to be regarded with a kind of morbid curiosity, while the latter could provide a
measure of light entertainment, but both were generally reflective of a society in
which worldly luxe and world- denying poverty reached absurd extremes. Both
the ascetic and the magician were in their own ways unnatural to the point of
appearing supernatural. The magician was more obviously so, since his trade was
in things that seemed to defy the established laws of nature. The ascetic’s attrib-
uted powers were subtler but ultimately no less fascinating, as Western imagi-
nations attempted to comprehend austerities so extreme that no normal human
being should be capable of them. From among their midst, however, emerged
another figure: the mystic. The mystic became distinguishable from his two coun-
terparts insomuch as his austerities, which were far more civilized, and his acts of
magic, which rose above charlatanry, were seen to stem from a legitimate form
of spiritual attainment. He finally found his embodiment in the figure of Swami
Vivekananda, the “cyclonic monk” who, for many Americans, became the first
Yogi with both a name and a voice.
Moreover, through these Western faces of the Yogi, we see the blurring of
White’s definition into Siegel’s. Although European and American audiences had
no notion of Indian metaphysics, the concomitant concepts of the transference