28 Biography of a Yogialmost continually perambulate the country, make light of everything,
affect to live without care, and to be possessed of the most important
secrets. The people imagine that these favoured beings are well acquainted
with the art of making gold, and that they prepare mercury in so admi-
rable a manner that a grain or two swallowed every morning must restore
a diseased body to vigorous health, and so strengthen the stomach that it
may feed with avidity, and digest with ease. This is not all: when two of
these good Jauguis meet, and can be excited to a spirit of emulation, they
make such a display of the power of Janguisism [sic], that it may well be
doubted if Simon Magus, with all his sorceries, ever performed more sur-
prising feats. They tell any person his thoughts, cause the branch of a tree
to blossom and bear fruit within an hour, hatch an egg in their bosom in
less than fifteen minutes, producing whatever bird may be demanded, and
make it fly about the room, and execute many other prodigies that need
not be enumerated.^19Here we see a conflation of several different groups under the general label of
“Jaugi” or “Fakire.” They include assorted types of ascetics, some certainly belong-
ing to a variety of Śaiva traditions, others perhaps being Vaiṣṇavas. They include in
all likelihood both genuine practitioners as well as those posing as such as a means
of obtaining alms. Later in the account, which Bernier highlights as describing
something “totally different,” we also see alchemical specialists who are, for our
purposes, to be distinguished from the concurrently mentioned street magicians
who demonstrate seemingly superhuman powers purely for entertainment.^20
Of note here is the variety of models that could be reasonably recognizable
as Yogis. Over the next three centuries, these “faces” of the Yogi— in particular,
the ascetic, the mystic, and the magician— would continue to emerge, converge,
and diverge in the Western imagination. It should be noted that, as White has
argued, the Westerners who originally encountered and therefore reported upon
Yogis were not only outsiders but, by virtue of this fact, were likely to experience
these encounters in public places such as markets, temples, and pilgrimage sites.
They were consequently exposed to very specific kinds of Yogis who might have
been expected to congregate around such locations.^21 The Yogi’s public relations,
at least as far as the first three centuries of his exposure to the West are concerned,
are thus characterized by two converging phenomena: the tendency of publicly
visible Yogis to behave in shocking, ostentatious, and sometimes unscrupulous
ways as a matter of livelihood, and the desire of Western audiences for the shock-
ing, the exotic, and the possibly magical. It is then no surprise that Yogi ascetics
and magicians occupied more than their share of the limelight through the end
of the nineteenth century. It is largely only with the arrival of self- proclaimed