Yogis, Magic and Deception – IV

Posted by Phil Hine in History, Occult, tantra  |  October 29th 2020  |  About poster:

“The great classic of Sanskrit literature is the Aphorisms of Patajañali. He is at least mercifully brief, and not more than ninety or ninety-five percent of what he writes can be dismissed as the ravings of a disordered mind.”
Aleister Crowley, Eight Lectures on Yoga

Given the general disdain with which physical yoga was viewed at the turn of the twentieth century, Aleister Crowley’s incorporation of yoga into Western Esotericism is all the more remarkable. (He’s also, by the way, the first western esotericist to develop practical exercises relating to the chakras.) However, in bringing elements of yoga practice into his formulation of magic, Crowley left a good deal out – including any suggestion that yoga practices could lead to the flowering of extraordinary abilities ranging from flight to being able to enter the body of another person. In fact, he seems to have been decidedly skeptical of the very idea.

Crowley first practiced yoga in what used to be called Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1901 with Alan Bennett, and from this developed his approach to the practice. One of his key insights was that experiences of states such as Dhyāna or Samādhi belonged to the same esoteric path of the magic of the Golden Dawn. His experiences with Yoga could therefore be viewed as initiations.

Yoga = Union?
A key theme in Crowley’s approach to Yoga is his understanding that “Yoga” means Union (he repeatedly stresses this in the first of his Eight Lectures on Yoga) – with the implication of Union with the Absolute, or the Divine. ¹

In 8 Lectures he points out that the term “Yoga” shares the same Indo-European root as the English word “Yoke” – hence “to join”. This root is sometimes given in modern texts as referring to the yoking of two oxen together – a rather peaceful or bucolic image. But the earliest references we actually find to this Indo-European root “yuj” – “to harness” is in the Vedas, in the context of the yoking of war-horses to a chariot – a rather more strenuous activity. It is in the Katha Upanishad that this harnessing becomes a metaphor for the restraining of the senses – the horses are the senses and the reins are the mind.

It is this understanding of “Yoga” as Union which enables Crowley to assert that like magic, it allows the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel and that the two disciplines lead to the same goal. Magick, for Crowley, is outwardly directed – toward the world, whilst Yoga, as he says, is “wholly inward” – recalling the orientalist stereotype of the otherworldly and quiescent yogi – and the division between magic and mysticism.

The assumption that Yoga meant “Union” was a fairly popular idea at the time, and I think it indicates the influence of Crowley’s own religious background and the influence of the translations of Yoga texts (and their interpretation) that would have been available to him.

But does Yoga necessarily mean “Union”?

For some kinds of yoga, one of the results of the practice may well be union with the divine or Absolute or with a particular deity, as we find for example in traditions of Tantric Yoga. But this is not the case for all yoga traditions. Crowley, as with many of his peers (and nonspecialists in general) treats “yoga” as a single monolithic “system” – perhaps unaware or uncaring that there is a considerable time gap between the Yogasūtra (4th century) and the Śivasaṃhita (14th century). In fact, there’s nothing really in the Yogasūtra that directly states that its overall object is union with an Absolute quality or principle, and it might be more appropriate to think of the “yoking” in terms of joining the mind with an object of concentration without deviation.

Crowley sees practices such as Dhyāna and Samādhi as states or results rather than processes. Samādhi, for Crowley, is related to his concept of religious genius. Religious genius – out of which new religions spring is the result of a transformative experience, in which the distinction between subject and object in consciousness is annihilated. He says: “a vision of God, a Union with God, or “Samadhi” or whatever we may agree to call it”. What one calls the experience may differ according to culture, in Crowley’s view, but it is all the same phenomena.

What is important though is that an individual returns from this life-changing state sufficiently inspired to bring about a new religious movement, and empowered by the confidence and certainty which springs from that experience. Of course, Crowley had this experience of Samādhi, and so was qualified to found a new doctrine. Crowley also speculates in his Confessions, that it might be possible “to devise some pharmaceutical, electrical or surgical method of inducing Samadhi; create genius as simply as we do other kinds of specific excitement?” He apparently discussed this possibility with the psychiatrist Henry Maudsley. ²

The Universality of Yoga
Another key theme in Crowley’s discussion of Yoga is its universality. Something he stresses time and time again is that the methods and results of systems of mysticism are the same all over the world, and the only differences are those of “religious prejudice and local custom”. This view was not unique to Crowley, of course. The rise of comparative religion and the romantic enthusiasm for the orient in the nineteenth century had made such assertions very compelling. JFC Fuller, for example, in his essays on Yoga in The Temple of Solomon the King (serialized in The Equinox) quotes extensively from a 1898 book Yoga or transformation by William Joseph Flagg which asserts that Yoga is a transnational practice and a form of magic.

It’s a curious feature of universalism that once a particular concept is deemed to be “everywhere” then it doesn’t really belong to anyone – local versions are just that, and the default setting for analysis is, inevitably, that of Western science or logic. It is the claim of universality that Crowley’s ‘scientific’ presentation of Yoga rests upon, and at the same time allows him to dismiss or ignore anything that does not fit his one-boot-fits-all-sizes schema as “oriental jargon” and anything he disagrees with as merely “the mistaken and malignant ingenuity of the pious Hindu.”

”All this is filth”
But what of the powers of yoga? In the first installment of this series I explored how the powers of yoga, over the course of the nineteenth century, became increasingly associated with fraud, deception, and “native credulity.” In the second part, I examined the antipathy towards “physical” yoga which circulated amongst Theosophists and their fellow travellers. Crowley would have been aware of these views. Indeed, Vivekananda’s 1896 book Raja Yoga and Rai Bahadur Srisa Chandra Vasu’s 1887 Shiva Sanhita (sic) are both on the A∴A∴ Student Reading Curriculum.

Crowley was very keen on bringing a rational, scientific perspective to the occult – spelling magic with a “k” in order to distinguish it from stage magic. As he says of his efforts in Book 4: Magick, his general aim is to “formulate a method free from all dogmatic bias, and based only on the ascertained facts of anatomy, physiology, and psychology.” Yoga powers did not fit into Crowley’s project of making yoga practices acceptable to the scientifically-minded reader. Part of the task of making yoga “intelligible to, and acceptable to, European minds” as Crowley states in the second of his Eight Lectures, is the airy dismissal of most of Patajañali’s Yogasūtra as “the ravings of a disordered mind”.

The siddhis are only mentioned in the Eight Lectures series on two occasions. Firstly, when Crowley comments that “as the Yogi advances, magic powers (siddhi the teachers call them) are offered to the aspirant; if he accepts the least of these – or the greatest – he is lost”. This was a common view at the time – reinforced by orientalist stereotypes and by theosophically-inflected accounts of yoga that tended to denigrate any suggestion that yoga practices could be oriented towards worldly pursuits or power. Although it is certainly the case that such powers are not the ultimate goal of yoga in the Yogasūtra they are nonetheless signs marking attainment in particular practices. Although there were attempts to account for yoga powers in scientific explanations drawing on theories of hypnotism or suggestion, the predominant view was that they were merely evidence of superstition or Indian credulity.

Secondly, during a discussion of the alleged power of levitation, he comments that “on three occasions at least comparatively reliable people have said that they saw it happening to me. I do not think it proves anything.” ³

I’d hazard a guess that since, by the time that Crowley became interested in yoga, the magical powers that it was often linked to had become so associated with trickery, stage magic, spiritualist excesses and “native supersition” that he wanted to avoid any association with them.

Yoga and Morality
An example of Crowley’s approach to Yoga which, I think, highlights his preconceptions is his treatment of the Yamas. This is what Crowley has to say, in the second of his 8 Lectures on Yoga:

“Yama is the easiest of the eight limbs of Yoga to define, and corresponds pretty closely to our word ‘control.’ When I tell you that some have translated it ‘morality,’ you will shrink appalled and aghast at this revelation of the brainless baseness of humanity.”

A little further on, he says:

“We shall not be surprised therefore if we find that the perfectly simple term Yama (or Control) has been bedeviled out of all sense by the mistaken and malignant ingenuity of the pious Hindu. He has interpreted the word ‘control’ as meaning compliance with certain fixed proscriptions.”

There’s an echo here again of the orientalist view (shared by both scholars and esotericists) that Indians had lost touch with their own esoteric traditions and need to be corrected by Western adepts.

Crowley, naturally advises the reader to abandon convention and develop their own ethical principles. In Book 4, he says:

“We may then dismiss Yama … with this advice: let the student decide for himself what form of life, what moral code, will least tend to excite his mind; but once he has formulated it, let him stick to it, avoiding opportunism; and let him be very careful to take no credit for what he does or refrains from doing — it is a purely practical code, of no value in itself.”

This idea, that the Yamas are virtues, or that Yoga practice is linked to moral prescriptions, is something that Crowley returns to time and time again (see the previous post for some comment on the relationship between the Yamas and magical powers).

Perhaps one of the most telling comments Crowley makes concerning the magical powers arising from Yoga is in Magick: Book 4, where, during a discussion of the nature of dhyāna he cites a quotation from the Sivasaṃhita which runs: “he who daily contemplates on this lotus of the heart is eagerly desired by the daughters of Gods, has clairaudience, clairvoyance, and can walk in the air.” Another person “can make gold, discover medicine for disease, and see hidden treasures.”

Crowley says of this quotation:
“All this is filth. What is the curse upon religion that its tenets must always be associated with every kind of extravagance and falsehood?”

Crowley is often praised by later occult authors who use his approach in terms of having freed yoga from dogma and tradition. But it should be recognised that his recontextualisation of yoga draws on popular period stereotypes about the “mystic east”. His rational approach to yoga practice makes it something which can be understood in familiar western terms, and anything that does not seem to fit can be ignored or discarded.

With thanks to Keith E. Cantú, Gordan Djurdjevic, Richard Kaczynski and Kugan Vijayatharan for their helpful suggestions.

Sources
Aleister Crowley, Eight Lectures on Yoga (Sovereign Sanctuary Press, 2004).
Gordan Djurdjevic, “The Great Beast as a Tantric Hero: The Role of Yoga and Tantra in Aleister Crowley’s Magick” in H. Bogdan & M.P. Starr (eds) Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism (Oxford University Press, 2012)
Richard Kaczynski, Perdurabo:the life of Aleister Crowley (North Atlantic Books, 2010)
Suzanne Newcombe, “Magic and Yoga: The Role of Subcultures in Transcultural Exchange” in B. Hauser (ed) Yoga Traveling: Bodily Practice in Transcultural Perspective (Springer, 2013)
Marco Pasi, Varieties of Magical Experience: Aleister Crowley’s Views on Occult Practice (Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, Winter 2011, University of Pennsylvania Press)

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