By David Gordon White
Since the Sixties, yoga has develop into a billion-dollar within the West, attracting housewives and hipsters, New Agers and the old-aged. yet our smooth perception of yoga derives a lot from nineteenth-century eu spirituality, and the genuine tale of yoga’s origins in South Asia is way richer, stranger, and extra wonderful than so much folks realize.
To discover this historical past, David Gordon White makes a speciality of yoga’s practitioners. Combing via millennia of South Asia’s mammoth and various literature, he discovers that yogis are typically portrayed as wonder-workers or sorcerers who use their risky supernatural abilities—which can contain elevating the useless, ownership, and levitation—to gather strength, wealth, and sexual gratification. As White exhibits, even these yogis who aren’t downright villainous undergo little resemblance to Western assumptions approximately them. At turns rollicking and complicated, Sinister Yogis tears down clone of yogis as indifferent, contemplative lecturers, ultimately putting them of their right context.
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