26 Biography of a Yogipotential liberation that arise from it— and the popular magician who is seen as
the purveyor of spells and concoctions aimed at far more practical ends.^15
In addition to their semi- divine counterparts— whether Vedic ṛṣis or tant-
ric siddhas— Yogis did also have corresponding divine models. Śiva, often called
Mahāyogi, is the ascetic Yogi in prototype. Indeed, the renunciants of many Śaiva
sects model their appearance in imitation of Śiva. Krishna, a favorite model of
Yogananda, also has considerable Yogi credentials to his name and exhibits con-
siderable Yogi- like powers, in addition to his rather orthodox discourse on yoga
in the Bhagavad Gītā. However, as White concludes:
The question— of whether the innovators of the new theism were theo-
rizing their respective deities’ omnipotence and omnipresence in terms
of powers already attributed to yogis, or whether the theorization of the
omnipotence and omnipresence was modeled after the attributes of the
gods— remains an open one.^16For our purposes, the question of which came first may not be ultimately signifi-
cant. Much more relevant is the association of yogic superpower with essentially
divinized, cosmic states. In this sense, the Yogi serves as a literal bridge between
human and divine.
Colonial Yogis
Western accounts of Yogis go as far back as Alexander the Great’s encounters
with the Indian g ymnosophists, or “naked philosophers,” during his military
campaign beginning in 326 bce. Jumping forward to the fourteenth century of
the Common Era, we have accounts from Marco Polo, who spoke of Kashmiri
conjurers who could “bring on changes of weather and produce darkness, and
do a number of things so extraordinary that no one without seeing them would
believe them.” We also have the account of Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan traveler and
guest of the emperor of Delhi, who describes two rather interesting Yogis, one of
whom turned into a levitating cube and another who levitated a sandal.^17
In such depictions, Yogis, fakirs, and traveling magicians become largely
conflated as the performers of all manner of apparently superhuman tricks.
Accounts by European merchants and travelers during the sixteenth, seventeenth,
and early eighteenth centuries— including Ludovico di Varthema, Pietro della
Valle, Duarte Barbosa, Ralph Finch, Jean- Baptiste Tavernier, John Fryer, Jean de
Thevenot, Giovanni Francesco Gamelli Careri, and François Bernier^18 — paint a
consistent if chaotic picture. Various spellings of “Yogi” are found throughout