Yoga Is a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing?

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 18 pages

Five articles from The Theosophist of 1880 onward, gathered as Blavatsky's commentary on Dr N.C. Paul's Treatise on the Yoga Philosophy — a rare 1850 work by an assistant surgeon in the Indian medical service that attempted a physiological account of the ascetic feats. The question mark in the title is doing real work: this is not a denunciation of yoga but an argument about which yoga, and about what the hatha practices actually accomplish.

It opens with a grievance. When she had reported in America and Europe, on eyewitness testimony, the quasi-miraculous physical endurance of certain Indian ascetics — Jains who would suspend breathing for twenty-two minutes until a dead trance came on, men who fasted forty days and lived — the general public received it with incredulity and the physicians with contemptuous sneers, and some of the most humorous articles ever printed in New York were written at her expense. Then Dr Tanner of New York announced his disbelief in the medical theories of starvation, fasted from 28 June to 7 August 1880 under observation, and survived. Blavatsky quotes the Reuter's telegram in full, and the remaining articles proceed from that opening with some satisfaction.

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