74 Biography of a Yogiherself continued to exhibit a highly ambiguous attitude about her phenomena
even after the damning SPR report, sometimes wholeheartedly upholding them,
while at other times cynically threatening to disavow them. The trickster arche-
type may fit her personality best, making her quite at home among the Yogis, if
not the Mahatmas, whose mysteries were titillating the Western imagination of
her day. Indeed, though her corpulent female frame defied both the contempo-
rary and modern images of such a figure, she might be cautiously regarded as the
first of the Western Yogis.
Vivekananda and the Scientific Rehabilitation of the Yogi
For the purposes of this study, of far greater importance than the admittedly
unique person of Blavatsky or her phenomena is the metaphysical framework
upon which those phenomena relied. This framework would survive the effects of
the SPR report and would be elaborated on and propagated by Theosophists and
Theosophical sympathizers of both Western and Indian backgrounds. In India,
as in America, Theosophy has persisted as an influential, albeit not demographi-
cally significant, tradition. Its membership figures, even if they could be effec-
tively documented,^43 reflect rather little of its actual impact, which is far more
diffuse in nature. For instance, Yogananda’s guru, Sri Yukteswar, was an honorary
member of the Theosophical Society despite exhibiting no notable Theosophical
inclinations or influence in any of his known work. On the other hand, his con-
temporary, Vivekananda, to whom we will now turn, evidences the opposite ten-
dency despite his vehement opposition to any association with the Theosophical
Society.
Although the influence of Theosophy on Indian metaphysical thought can
hardly be understated, it was certainly not the only wellspring of Western eso-
tericism to make its contribution to the Bengali Renaissance. Adding to David
Kopf ’s work on British Orientalism and the modernization of Hinduism as
effected by the Brahmo Samāj, Elizabeth De Michelis argues for the already
existing prevalence of Western esotericism within Brahmo Samāj ideolog y.
Specifically, she points to the established presence of Freemasonry as well as what
she considers to be pseudo- esoteric elements of Unitarianism and the ways in
which these influences contributed to an occultization of Neo- Vedāntin thought,
most evident in Keshub Chandra Sen’s “New Dispensation” (Nabo Bidhan)
of the Brahmo Samāj.^44 De Michelis characterizes Sen as “chronologically and
ideologically positioned between [Debendranath] Tagore’s Neo- Vedāntic
Romanticism and Vivekananda’s Neo- Vedāntic occultism.”^45 Certainly there are
seeds of both Tagore’s and Sen’s iterations of the universalistic “scientific religion”
in Vivekananda’s work. However, what De Michelis identifies as his “occultism”