num_pages: 352
description: Since the 1960s yoga has become a billion-dollar industry in the West attracting housewives and hipsters New Agers and the old-aged. But our modern conception of yoga derives much from nineteenth-century European spirituality and the true story of yogas origins in South Asia is far richer stranger and more entertaining than most of us realize. To uncover this history David Gordon White focuses on yogas practitioners. Combing through millennia of South Asias vast and diverse literature he discovers that yogis are usually portrayed as wonder-workers or sorcerers who use their dangerous supernatural abilitieswhich can include raising the dead possession and levitationto acquire power wealth and sexual gratification. As White shows even those yogis who arent downright villainous bear little resemblance to Western assumptions about them. At turns rollicking and sophisticated Sinister Yogis tears down the image of yogis as detached contemplative teachers finally placing them in their proper context.
language: English
title: Sinister Yogis
publisher: University of Chicago Press