The History of Modern Yoga: Patanjali and Western Esotericism

Author(s): Elizabeth de Michelis

Source: Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Vol. 9, No. 3
(February 2006), pp. 141-142
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/nr.2006.9.3.141
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NR0903.qxd 1/9/06 9:57 AM Page 141

Book Reviews

The History of Modern Yoga: Patanjali and Western Esotericism. By Elizabeth

de Michelis. Continuum Press, 2004. 256 pages. $125.00 cloth.

Given the recent popularity of yoga in mainstream America, not

only is de Michelis’ scholarly study of the ideological roots of “Modern
Yoga” timely and important, it also fills an obvious lacuna in the field.
While many contemporary practitioners of modern yoga and meditation
think that these practices are direct descendants of ancient South Asian
and classical Hindu religious practices, de Michelis has traced the reli-
gio-philosophical underpinnings of modern yoga practice to the
blended esotericism of late eighteenth century Bengal. De Michelis
concurs with other scholars that modern yoga emerged as a direct out-
come of the publication of Swami Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga (1896), in
which he restructured the ancient text of Patanjali’s Yoga sutras to fit the
modern West, with its secularized, individualized, and therapeutic-based
religiosity. But she traces the roots of Vivekananda’s neo-Vedanta further
back to a composite blending of Eastern spiritual, and Western post-
Enlightenment esotericisms. The author’s detailed exploration of the
cultural mixing of ideologies in the eighteenth century makes for
thought-provoking reading in an era of globalization. Rarely does one
come across a book that is not only informative but palatable, and I
enjoyed reading de Michelis’ complex and skilful reconstruction of the
history of modern yoga.
The book is divided into two sections. In Part One, titled “The
Prehistory of Modern Yoga,” de Michelis traces the intellectual roots of
modern yoga to a cultural and ideological exchange between East and
West through Western esotericism and Eastern occultism, culminating
in the Neo-Vedanta of the Brahmo Samaj Movement in Bengal, and par-
ticularly to the work of Swami Vivekananda. She argues that it was
Vivekananda’s own “turn West” that led to his blending Western and
Eastern esotericism together to form the ideological underpinning for
the institutionalization of the practice of modern yoga.
In Part Two, “Modern Yoga Theory and Practice,” de Michelis exam-
ines Swami Vivekananda’s comprehensive work on yoga and its impli-
cations for the form, structure, and content of modern yoga. Here, she
organizes the field of modern yoga into four types of practice: Modern
Psychosomatic, Modern Meditational, Modern Postural, and Modern
Denominational. She then focuses on Modern Postural Yoga and one of
its leading practitioners and proponents, Dr. B. K. S. Iyengar. In study-
ing the form and practice of Iyengar yoga in the U.K. and the U.S.A., De

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Nova Religio

Michelis analyzes the typical western postural yoga session, leading the
reader to her unique thesis that modern yoga is now seen as a “healing
ritual of a secular religion” (248).
De Michelis’ own twenty-year history of yoga practice gives her work
an authority when discussing the format of modern yoga practices, and
I see it as having wide currency. Not only is it of interest to scholars of
contemporary yoga practice, but also to those interested in alternative
views on the body and bodily practices, in historical and cultural links
between Western New Age religion and Eastern “spirituality,” and in
“modern” and “reform” Hinduisms.
Given the significance of this work, it would have been helpful if de
Michelis had spent more time early in the volume giving the reader an
overview of the different philosophical and ideological schools she ref-
erences in the text—for example, “Western esotericism”; “Western
occultism”; “Eastern occultism”; and “spiritualism”— as well as the the-
oretical and intellectual links between them. The diagrammatic tables
she provides are helpful, but since she argues that the concordance of
these ideas led to the creation of a “cultic milieu” in which Vivekananda’s
Neo-Vedantism was spawned, these ideas and the links between them are
central to the flow of the argument, and could be made somewhat clearer.
It would also have been helpful to set the book against other recent works
in the field (e.g., Rambachan 1994) that also trace modern yoga to Swami
Vivekananda’s philosophies, and to see how de Michelis agreed with or
differed from these authors.
Some scholars have argued that Vivekananda’s blending of the
philosophies of East and West have lead to a “down grading of scriptural
scholarship” (Coward, 1994) but as de Michelis has rightly shown, it has
also opened the door to formulating a link between Eastern and
Western philosophies through the physical and institutionalized practice
of yoga. De Michelis’ book is a significant work, not only to open our
eyes to the practice of modern yoga, but also as a critical examination
of the intellectual roots of contemporary yoga practice.
Tulasi Srinivas, Boston University

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