Video: Keith Edward Cantú, PhD, Like a Tree Universally Spread Sri Sabhapati Swami and Śivarājayoga

November 15, 2023

On November 15, 2023, author and CSWR Research Affiliate, Transcendence and Transformation Database, Keith Cantu discussed with a panel of respondents his book, Like a Tree Universally Spread Sri Sabhapati Swami and Śivarājayoga.
Three respondents are,

Srilata Raman, Professor and Associate Chair, Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto
Aaron Michael Ullrey, Lecturer, Religious Studies, University of Houston, and CSWR Research Affiliate, T&T Database
Manon Hedenborg White, Associate Professor at Malmö University

Dr. Keith Edward Cantú, Like a Tree Universally Spread Sri Sabhapati Swami and Śivarājayoga

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Like a Tree Universally Spread, book launch and discussion, November 15, 2023.

CHARLES STANG: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Charles Stang and I'm the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. Welcome to this afternoon's event, a panel discussion of an important new book by one of the Center's own research associates, Keith Edward Cantú, who is part of the Transcendence and Transformation initiative.

Keith's new book is entitled, Like a Tree Universally Spread-- Sri Sabhapati Swami and Sivarajayoga. I'll say more about his book in a moment, but first, allow me to welcome our three respondents, who will be commenting on different aspects of Keith's rich and wide-ranging book.

So we are delighted and honored to welcome to the Center, Srilata Raman, Professor of Hinduism and Associate Chair in the Department of the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Professor Raman is a distinguished scholar of South Asian religions, with interests ranging from Sri Vaishnavism to modern Tamil, religion, and literature, among many others.

Our second respondent is Aaron Michael Ullrey, lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Houston, and along with Keith, a research affiliate here at the Center, working on the Transcendence and Transformation database. Aaron is a historian of religion, specializing in South Asian rituals, specifically magical rituals.

And our third and final respondent is Manon Hedenborg White, Associate Professor of the History of Religions at Malmo University, whose research focuses on modern alternative religions, including Western esotericism, New Religious Movements, and beliefs and practices linked to contemporary so-called new age spirituality.

So welcome to the Center, and thank you all for your time and for bringing your expertise to bear on Keith's important new book. Now, allow me to offer a very brief summary of Keith's book so as to orient everyone.

Keith's is the first book, academic or otherwise, entirely dedicated to the study of Sri Sabhapati Swami, a Tamil yogi and prolific author who lived between the 19th and 20th centuries. The Swami had a significant impact on the development of modern yoga in South Asia, as well as the development of the astral body in modern occultism, and yet, his historical context and literature remains little understood.

His works introduced elements of Saiva cosmology and Tantric yoga, from Tamil Nadu to what is today North India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, especially the regions of the Punjab, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Bengal. And he pioneered a universal yogic system that, on the surface, anticipates one later popularized by Swami Vivekananda, about whom, by contrast, there are enough books to published-- I'm sorry-- there are enough books published to fill an entire library.

Keith's book, also, is unique among many books on South Asian religions, in that it recounts Sabhapati Swami's connections with authors known to scholars and readers of global esotericism, including his personal meeting with the founders of the Theosophical Society, Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, as well as how his teachings on yoga were integrated into Theosophy, New Thought, and other religious movements such as Thelema, via the writings of Aleister Crowley.

As such, the book analyzes and critiques a certain tendency in prevailing post-Orientalist scholarship to largely erase or minimize South Asian agency in the development of esoteric spirituality during the colonial period. And the book instead posits that the development of yoga in modern occultisms-- I'm sorry-- in modern occultism was more of a co-creative process that brought together many different interlocutors and competing agendas.

Keith's book was intended to fill a major gap in scholarship, by providing a meticulous examination of the contents of Sabhapati's teachings and publications not only in their local Tamil setting, but across South Asia and abroad in Europe and North America. And it contributes much to an understanding of the long history of cultural entanglements in religious history. It's hoped that it will be useful to a wide range of scholars, yogis, and esoteric practitioners alike.

So thank you all so much for joining us. Here's how the event will unfold. We have an hour and a half together, although, I beg your pardon, because I'm afraid I have to leave after the first hour. But each of our three respondents will speak in turn, and then we will offer Keith a chance to respond, which will, hopefully, lead to a free-flowing conversation among the four of you. So without further ado, then, Srilata, the floor is yours. There you are. Welcome.

SRILATA RAMAN: Thank you so much, Charles. And thank you, Keith, for inviting me to take part in your book launch, which I find-- which is a great pleasure for me to do so. As you know-- as we both know, I've been following your work on Sabhapati with huge interest. And I'm delighted with the final outcome of the work and the way the book has emerged to address the very particular, as well as the much more global aspects of this fascinating and enigmatic figure.

I suppose, in terms of being a respondent, my own approach to the book, obviously, has almost a laser-like focus in some sense on Sabhapati's Tamil Saiva antecedents, and how that contributes to our understanding of the modernization of Tamil religion in a particular period. We can even ask, does it contribute to that modernization? I think that's a question worth asking.

But also, I think, in terms of the tremendously close parallels between your work on Sabhapati and mine on Chidambaram Ramalinga Swamigal, it helps-- I think it helps us think about this landscape of the 19th century into the early 20th, and these figures who emerge are not just one or two but, in fact, several in this period, and what this tells us about what is happening on the ground with Hindu religious traditions.

So the first thing, of course, which your book does, which I think is tremendously important-- of course, it's a contribution at a theoretical level to our understanding of the evolution of modern yoga. But, perhaps, I'm going to leave Aaron and Manon to address more of those aspects, and how, in effect, a kind of postulated rupture, perhaps wittingly or unwittingly, created by scholars-- very fine scholarship, actually-- on modern yoga over the last decades needs to be fundamentally revisited. But what I want to-- but moving away from that, what I think I want to talk about is what research on these figures, like Sabhapati, actually involves, because-- which, I think, it was less recognized.

I look back very strongly at all the research, for example, on Ram Mohan Roy-- again, very fine historical research, but which, overwhelmingly, tended to see his Unitarian connections and see his contribution to, quote unquote, "modern Hindu thought," and to sati debates, and so on, but which did not take on board for a long time, seriously, his training and his education, which was rooted in obvious expertise in pre-modern literatures and the genealogies of those literatures.

So, in effect, what your work does is take very seriously the idea of what one can call the hybrid modernity of these figures. They are not just rooted in the 19th century, they are, in fact, also rooted in some, perhaps, idiosyncratic way, but nevertheless rooted in the pre-modern literatures, in the evolution of their own ideologies.

So we cannot-- and this is something that I think is very vital to acknowledge about your work, and it's an excellent-- I mean, outstanding contribution in that way. We cannot ignore the literatures which go back a couple of centuries before Sabhapati to understand where he's coming from and how his ideas are emerging.

So, of course, one of the things you immediately do-- the book does is it plunges into examining exactly that, in terms of his professed lineages, and, therefore, the ideological-- the historical background to his own thoughts actually coming from the Tamil Saiva milieu and, particularly, of course, Tamil Virasaiva traditions, which are emerging very strongly from about the 15th century. And then there's a huge efflorescence in the 17th century with Kumara Devar, whom you then refer to, and the lineage.

So we have in the book the signaling to us that this is what-- this is the milieu we need to understand in order to understand Sabhapati's early writings, particularly. At the same time, I think what you do, in a very important scholarly way, is that you point us towards further questions, which is so important in research like this because there is so much that has yet not been uncovered, not been studied in the case of Tamil Saivism, which needs to be really, really looked at. And you also suggest that that has to be the case.

So when you take the Kumara Devar lineage, you come eventually, of course, to the most enigmatic and complex works of all, the Tirumantiram, possibly 12th, possibly 13th century. And you suggest, well, obviously, a lot of Sabhapati's is also coming from that via its transmission in the Tamil Virasaiva milieu, I think, pointing towards very important future research in bridging the gap between Sabhapati in the 19th century and the 17th century works. So this is a really, really important contribution.

The other very fascinating contribution, of course, is with the other lineage-- oh, by the way, let me just conclude to say that you have that lineage, but what-- I think it also behooves us to ask what the claiming of lineages mean here. You know, we seem to have the idea that he is-- his teacher was Vedashreni Swamigal.

And then we move on to Shivajnana Bodha Yogigal, who is this very enigmatic figure sitting in some cave in the Pothigai Hills, whom, apparently, Sabhapati studies with for nine years or something, and then meditates on his own, and so on, which provides, of course, the fascinating Siddha-- a Siddha connection to Sabhapati's writings.

One is struck simply because of the huge parallels between this life and the life of Chidambaram Ramalinga Swamigal, the need to claim a Siddha connection. How much is Shivajnana Bodha a real figure? You also asked that question. And we are left with the tantalizing possibility that, perhaps, he's not even a real figure. But claiming a Siddha connection seems to be almost vital for the establishment of one's own position in this case.

What is, I think, fascinating, therefore, in the 19th century is the emergence of these charismatic figures, who are creating their own systems, but who still require a certain kind of validation, either from the idea of the Siddhas, of course, being in some way resuscitated in modernity as this almost free-thinker religious spirit for the Christian missionaries-- very fascinating because of this very strong caste critique-- and being picked up in modernity, and being elevated again. And so there's a claim to that.

But, of course, ultimately, the claim is of a self-authority as well. You have a lineage, but the lineage does not tether you to a position. And so, of course, Sabhapati's Sivarajayoga brings in extraordinary elements of-- you know, cosmological elements, all kinds of-- adding tattvas, putting the Samkhya-- not just the Samkhya tattvas, like the Saiva Siddhanta does below, but other tattvas as well, the Saiva Siddhanta tattvas themselves, and so on, and creating an entirely new system. So there's a kind of eclecticism.

What I said about Ramalinga Swamigal, when I quoted EP Thompson, that his reading was both more eccentric and more eclectic than one could fathom, I think applies very, very much to Sabhapati as well. What then becomes-- and, Charles, you have to just stop me when my time is up. How much-- do I have five more minutes? Or should I stop?

CHARLES STANG: You had five. I would say, maybe, two to three, if that's possible, Srilata.

SRILATA RAMAN: Two to three, OK. So I just want to conclude by bringing in the perception, when I compare Ramalinga and Sabhapati, that Ramalinga, of course, has virtually no impact on a global scale, or none in his time and even immediately after that, and to some extent even today, except in the Tamil diaspora. Sabhapati gets picked up by Franz Hartmann, he gets picked up, of course, through a transmission by Aleister Crowley, and so on.

So in some sense, I'm thinking about the kind of theorization which both Manjapra does on the Vernacular Cosmopolitan, which Srinivas Aravamudan does with Guru English, right? Translation, you know, universalizes and globalizes these figures or their writings in some way. But at the same time, that seems to go hand-in-hand with a fascinating amnesia, which you rightly refer to.

In some way, they become lost in their own translation. Particularly, their local rootedness becomes ruptured or lost. There's a local rootedness that remains devoid of the global, and there is the global which remains devoid of the local. So this is, again, something, I think, that your book brings out wonderfully. And I will stop there for now.

CHARLES STANG: Thank you, Srilata. Aaron, would you like to turn on your video.

AARON ULLREY: I met Keith in Santa Barbara, when I was-- toward the tail end of my graduate work. And I remember driving to Los Angeles. It seems like we were always driving to Los Angeles. And I remember lots of things we did in Los Angeles, but I think often about driving back late at night and a lot of the conversations we had. Now, I'm a Sanskrit guy. I like my old. I like my weird. I like Sanskrit.

And Keith-- I kept trying to find my way in to make his work resonate with anything that I was specifically studying at the time. And I really couldn't find a way to do it. But I found that his chosen milieus of the modern and, in many ways, the post-modern have been incredibly fruitful, namely in this book that we have.

Now, Keith began talking to me about his project, and it wasn't completely clear. But I remember a conversation we had, where I had asked him if there was ever an influence by-- well, hold on, let me put that a different way. I remember asking him that we can see a lot of influence by Indic sources onto contemporary esotericism, and I said, is there an instance of there being any other way? And he said, Sabhapati Swami. And now, we can see what that is.

Now, Keith has posited an idea called occult yoga, which I'm still resistant to, but I'm coming around. And De Michelis famously posited esoteric yoga to contrast modern postural yoga. And that esoteric yoga would be represented by people like Yogananda or Swami Vivekananda.

What I find really interesting is that Keith is not studying yoga, he's studying a yogi. And that's something that will take ourselves in a different direction and will inherently lead to looking at local cultures. And I do wonder if this word "occult yoga," what is the secret in it. I do see-- I think esoteric yoga really works better and does more, but I don't-- I might not be so sure.

What Keith shows is a cultic milieu, an old culture that is deeply rooted in local and regional Saivism, specifically Tamil Saivism and the Sri Vaishnavism, but also influenced by Western influences, particularly the Victorian naturism. It seems that Sabhapati Swami was around and drinking in the same waters as Swami Vivekananda, who went West and took Ramakrishna with him.

I was intrigued by the two together, as Ramakrishna was sort of famous for having "practiced every religion" over a period of weeks to come to his conclusion that his Vedanta was the best. I was intrigued that Sabhapati Swami actually had a similar move, practicing all religions to try them out. And I wondered about that move, rhetorically, throughout the god-men culture of the time.

Now, unfortunately, Sabhapati Swami may have had a lot of contacts-- well, maybe not a lot, but had some contacts with the Theosophical Society, namely Olcott and Blavatsky, that Keith writes about, but he never had any grand trips. Swami Vi had his three or four trips to-- Swami Vivekananda-- to the West, and they established Vedanta centers dedicated to religion.

And then back in India, the money from the West went into the missions that are spread throughout India to this day. I wonder, perhaps, if Sabhapati Swami had been more hitched to Westerners, or hitched to the anti-colonial project, if he might be better known right now.

As usual, I like a book that complexifies problems by contextualizing things. His work really does that. That extra layer of complexity to these local situations sheds light onto something that we would like to learn about, but also opens up whole new vistas that we didn't even know were there before. Keith writes that this is like the roots, and the limbs, and the leaves of a tree.

Now, what's intriguing to me, still, is this god-man culture. And I think about, in the 19th and the 20th century, we have Krishnamacharya. Much later, we have Swami Rama. And yogis journeying throughout the Indic world of god-men, and making all sorts of fascinating connections, and often disappearing, often for 9 years, or 12 years, or whatnot, such as Krishnamacharya ending up-- supposedly being in Tibet. Though, who knows where it was.

It's intriguing to me that while he did some of that wandering, he was very much located in the Tamil area, but yet, his Tamil was heavily influenced by Sanskrit. His work was put into or written into Hindi and Bengali. His books were spread throughout India, the cheap books on the rail lines, which when I was there in '99, there was still a bit of. And I remember the vibrant print culture of India at that time.

And, amazingly, it made its way into German, which, probably, wasn't to be expected. And then there were a number of Westerners who wrote about him and took up his ideas, but never met him, the foremost being Aleister Crowley and, of course, Hartmann. But Crowley has Sabhapati Swami in a footnote.

And I know I'd noticed that name before I met Keith, and I just thought it had to be some other Westerner who had just taken on an Indic name for the sense of authority. I didn't realize in that little footnote that there was so much more we were going to find, and that Keith by tracing that same footnote would come to this entire research project.

Another interesting thing about Sabhapati Swami is, unlike the other neos of the neo-Hinduism or the neo-Vedanta, Sabhapati Swami doesn't give up on the paranormal. There are still paranormal miraculous experiences that happen. It's missing the sort of sobriety that you find in so many neos that are just-- often ways to be just, oh, so materialistic.

Now, I've been thinking about this word "co-creation," because I was working on folk religion for a while. Now, a folk religion, you have a strange intersection of information and religious content being handed down from on high, and then people receiving it, innovating, interpreting, and then spreading amongst other people, amongst other folks. Keith was generous enough to write for my edited volume, Living Folk Religions, and he said, it was one of the first chapters published on Sabhapati Swami.

Now, in conversations about folk religions, recently, I've been thinking about sites of co-creation. Sabhapati Swami has plenty of Indic materials handed to him-- not handed-- traditioned to him, he interprets many Western ideas, he innervates in his own practices and writings, and he spreads his work via popular presses and his own lineage of students.

I'm interested in that site of co-creation, where he takes all of that and recreates it into something new and exciting. I would like to have heard a little bit more about his specific engagement with Western thought and Western influences. And the Sanskrit indologist in me really wants all that culture traced back to the roots in the medieval world. But you can't do it all.

I remain terribly intrigued by this Manipravala, this heavily Sanskrit-inflected Tamil. And I'm saddened to think that a notion of pure Tamil that is removed from the Sanskrit influences could be advanced, and in that, would be removing this particular Tamilian from there. And I think about these wildly hybrid cultures that spread across genres and language.

And I think Keith is the first person I've seen that really engages-- in his generation of scholars-- that really goes in and bounces between these wide linguistic vistas. And it's not just being able to do that and having the training, but that's what these same authors were doing. They were bouncing across these wonderful linguistic vistas. And Keith's project shows the vibrancy of this modern 19th and 20th century Indic tradition of literature.

Now, in conclusion, do I think Keith makes too much of Sabhapati Swami? Yeah, I kind of do. But we all make too much of things. If you look at something-- as the occult adage says, if you look at something close enough, you see everything. And I'm amazed at how Keith went from just a name to this entire project.

I think he simultaneously-- I will critique-- I think he simultaneously overstates his points. And then he does this thing where he uses these subjunctive phrases that waffle a little bit, "I contend," "perhaps," "might." I remember chopping those words out of a chapter that he wrote for me. And I look forward to Keith removing some of that subjunctive tense from his writing as he becomes more confident, being the foremost scholar of Sabhapati Swami in the world.

It's funny to me that Keith sees all of this influence of Sabhapati Swami on occult yoga, but Swami Sabhapati is forgotten. Yet, one of those same very orders, with Keith editing for them, that has forgotten him, will soon be publishing his work. And for once, Sabhapati Swami will go far and wide with his name still attached. Not removed from the techniques he has taught, not removed from his literature, not filtered into German and English, but still there. If it's translated in English, it's still him.

My final point is with all of this talk of trees-- and I'm teaching first-year Sanskrit right now-- I find myself thinking about the beloved Sanskrit phrase of anyone who has studied Robert Goldman's grammar, the Devavanipravesika, [SPEAKING SANSKRIT], Rama goes to the forest. Well, Keith-- Keith [SPEAKING SANSKRIT]. Keith went to the forest, and he found the crest-jewel of fine scriptures. Thank you, Keith. Your book has been a pleasure to read.

MANON WHITE: So first of all, my thanks very much to Keith and to the organizers for giving me the opportunity to participate in this event and to act as one of the respondents for Keith's excellent new book. As a historian of religion, specialized in the study of esotericism, and particularly, esotericism in a modern context from the 19th century and onwards, until today, I'm going to focus on the contributions of Keith's book to this field, specifically. And then I'm going to zoom out a little bit and widen the scope to look at the larger ramifications of his work.

As many of you here today will know, the term "Western esotericism" has its roots in the Greek adjective, esoterikos, referring to something that is hidden or inner, in the sense of being reserved for an inner circle, and contrasted with the esoteric-- sorry-- the exoteric or the outer aspects of religion. While use of the adjective form, esoteric, dates to late antiquity, the use of esotericism as an ism dates to the 18th and 19th centuries in German, French, and English.

In academia, the early study of esotericism was pioneered by the Eranos gatherings taking place at Monte Verita in Ascona, Switzerland, attended by figures such as Gershom Scholem, the noted scholar of Kabbalah, and Henry Corbin, the scholar of Islamic esoteric traditions. And these gatherings, in general, were characterized by a religionist or perennialist approach to esotericism, which was seen as the hidden core of all religions.

One of the participants of the Eranos gatherings, the French historian, Antoine Febvre, broke with this approach in the early 1990s and formulated the category of Western esotericism as a form of thought. And Febvre used the qualifier of Western to mark a break with the universalist or perennialist idea, and focusing instead on historical specificity and source-driven research, looking, in this case, at a set of genealogically-linked religious currents, with the center in what may be considered the, quote unquote, "Abrahamic" West.

In the last decade and a half, we've seen intense and, sometimes, quite contested scholarly discussions around the qualifier of Western in the term "Western esotericism." I'm not going to seek to recapitulate this discussion here today as it has been extensively dealt with elsewhere. And also, these arguments on both sides, I feel, are too complex and too important to attempt to squeeze into a brief presentation, such as this one.

So for our purposes here tonight, it will be suffice to say, the key argument in favor of leaving the qualifier of Western and speaking simply of esotericism and of the study of esotericism is the ideological baggage that is said to accompany the terms, "West," "Western," and "Western esotericism," which some scholars have argued carry baggage related to eurocentrism, to colonialism, and to racism.

And how these terms also risk obscuring the agency of non-Western actors in the historical development of esotericism and the globally entangled ways in which many esoteric currents have developed through exchanges between the, quote unquote, "West" and other parts of the world.

As a counter to this, other scholars have argued that the qualifier of Western clarifies a scholarly focus on a historically distinct genealogically-related complex of religious currents, and clearly marks a distancing from transcultural essentialism or religionism, and sidestepping the risk of exporting terms developed to discuss specifically Western complexes onto other parts of the world that may have other terminologies that may be more appropriate.

So Keith's new book, as I perceive it, is not a position statement in this debate, pro or con leaving the "Western" in the study of esotericism, or the study of "Western esotericism." However, it is part of a growing body of scholarship that has emerged in the last few years, perhaps going back as far as to the early 2010s, in which we have seen a small but increasing number of scholars, who have worked from meticulous, source-driven, historiographical research, and by looking specifically at sources, has encouraged us to think differently about categories, such as East and West, to think about these categories in a more nuanced way.

So Keith examines, in his work, the spread reinterpretation and relocalization of Sabhapati Swami's thought via esoteric currents, such as Theosophy and Aleister Crowley's Thelema, which I'm really interested in, because that's where a lot of my research has been located, in Crowley's Thelema and its various developments over the 20th century.

And Keith highlights how esotericists based in Europe and North America engaged with Sabhapati Swami's thoughts in ways that, again, require us to think differently about notions such as orientalism and cultural appropriation, which are clearly too vague and too clumsy to really accommodate the ways in which thinkers such as Crowley, such as Olcott, Blavatsky, et cetera, engaged with the thought of South Asian intellectuals, and which often included genuine reverence, and admiration, and actually valorizing South Asian spirituality higher than, quote unquote, "Western" streams of esoteric thought.

Now, esotericists based in Europe and North America, such as Henry Olcott and Aleister Crowley, certainly reinterpreted aspects of Sabhapati Swami's thoughts based on their own agendas, needs, and audiences. But this is arguably true of Sabhapati Swami as well. And I'm shortly going to return to this aspect of hybridity and complexity.

So while Keith's study focuses specifically on Sabhapati Swami and the development of yoga, I think there are also important parallels here to what we can see as the translocalization, or the globalization, if you will, of other aspects of Asian spirituality, such as tantra and various iterations of Buddhist meditation in the 19th and 20th century.

The ways in which tantra and meditation were promoted by intellectuals in South and Southeast Asia can similarly be seen as the results of processes of global entanglement that was certainly shaped and impacted in pronounced ways by colonial inequalities, by missionary logics, but, nonetheless, were processes in which Asian intellectuals played decisive roles, and actually, shaped globalized spiritual traditions.

As has also been shown, for instance, by the work of Henrik Bogdan on the connections between Indian tantra and the sex magical ideas of the British occultist, Kenneth Grant, looking specifically at the influences through David Curwen and the Holy Order of Krishna, which also has a connection to Keith's study, these exchanges were not unidirectional in the sense of "Western," quote unquote, European, or North American occultists appropriating and reinterpreting South Asian spirituality, but instead, ideas flowed in both directions between the so-called West and India. And South Asian intellectuals here engaged in dialogue and mutual adaptation with Europe and North America-based occultists.

And once again, I think this is really important, because it encourages us to think differently about these normative categorizations, distinctions between East and West, but also between tradition and modernity, between traditional or pre-modern yoga or tantra, if we make the connection to that complex of traditions, on the one hand, and modernistic or transnationalized iterations of yoga and tantra.

As Keith shows, drawing a normative distinction between these complexes is not so easily done. And in his meticulously crafted, intertextual, source-driven approach, Keith also, in this way, I think, provides a methodology for investigating global intertextuality beyond normative conceptions of tradition and innovation, East and West.

One thing that I'm particularly intrigued by is the role of gender and the various ideas of the feminine that we see in these contexts, in the transmission of yogic and tantric ideas between India and Europe. So as Keith highlights, a notable aspect of Sabhapati Swami's thought was his, what we might say, universalist approach to yoga, his aim to teach yoga to all, regardless of caste, sex, origin, et cetera, which, of course, also parallels the aims of the Theosophical Society, and also the frequent depictions of female yogic disciples and feminine symbolism in the sources that Keith has studied.

European authors on tantra such as Kenneth Grant, who was, of course, a disciple also of Aleister Crowley, have drawn on ideas from Indian tantric sources to argue that women should have a greater role, that skilled women practitioners should have a greater role in occultist magic, including sexual magic.

Now, scholars of tantra have frequently disparaged Westernized neo-tantric writings such as Grant's, as having little relation to historical tantra. And once again, I think that Keith's work prompts us to think in more nuanced ways about these types of distinctions.

Of course, there are certainly crucial differences between pre-modern yogic and tantric sources and their approach to the feminine, but it's nonetheless interesting to ponder, I think, the valorization of the feminine in various forms of transnationalized yoga and tantra as, of course, we know that women have been very strongly represented in 20th century yoga in North America and Europe, as well, and how this might be a result of globalized or translocalized exchanges.

All of this brings us, in conclusion, to the general contribution of the work. Keith Cantú's Like a Tree Universally Spread is a well-crafted, meticulously sourced, and methodologically careful analysis. By highlighting an under-researched theorist of yoga, Sabhapati Swami, Keith brings into focus and problematizes normative distinctions between East and West, pre-modern and modern, tradition or authenticity, or innovation and modernity.

Keith demonstrates, in this way, a sound methodology for working through, engaging and troubling these categories, by identifying, analyzing, and intertextually tracing the distribution of sources essential to the development of yoga in the 19th and early 20th centuries, an approach that can certainly be extrapolated to other complexes of globalized esoteric thought.

By highlighting the agency of a South Asian intellectual in these processes, he also prompts us to think in more complex ways about binary distinctions, and in this way, engages really crucial, timely, and core discussions in the study of esotericism today. Thank you.

CHARLES STANG: [AUDIO OUT] where that noise is coming from, but Keith, we welcome your response to the respondents.

KEITH CANTU: OK. Well, first of all, thank you so much Srilata, Aaron, and Manon for those responses and very detailed engagement with different themes in the work, as well as subtle things that could also be reformulated, or directions for future research as well. I really appreciate all of that feedback. And I have numerous notes now for future study and engagement with this topic.

So I think I'll start, since Manon's presentation-- Manon was first, I think I'll start with yours. I think it was very, very enticing the way that you are looking, as a scholar of esotericism and gender, at these flows, starting with a genealogy of esotericism. And then also showing how so much of the debates over Western and Eastern are tied to post-Orientalist discourses, and this idea of cultural appropriation, and so on, which really, I think, gets to certain of the implications of the work, when looking at that source material.

And I think it is very important to see Sabhapati Swami's agency as an author, with his own motivations in this discourse. And that it's not something that's unidirectional, I completely agree. And one anecdote is him meeting with Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott, and then praising Helena Blavatsky as, basically, someone who has this occult knowledge, someone who has this yogic knowledge, and validating her approach.

But what's interesting is that sometimes, we have to read between the lines in terms of where these directions go, in the sense that he doesn't do the same for Henry Olcott. Now, that's not to say that Henry Olcott didn't have the same occult power as, say, Madame Blavatsky. But it is very interesting that when looking at these sources, we have things that we can look at and read between the lines.

There were ways in which-- even though certain yogis, or swamis, or authors during the colonial period could not say certain things openly, or could not possibly write and publish certain books and obtain a large audience, there were subtle ways of injecting opinions and responses, and swaying cultural opinion. And so it's very important, and I love how your response is sensitive to that.

And in terms of gender, I think the gender flows are also extremely interesting. And that's one of the reasons I'm a huge fan of your own work on the goddess Babalon, and the formula, and in Thelema. And I think that, as used by Kenneth Grant-- it's interesting that Kenneth Grant, in his library, even has a copy of Sri Sabhapati Swami. But at the same time, it's interesting that he's choosing to incorporate and use extant scholarship.

Like, in looking at some of his works, you'll find reference to Sanskrit and indological sources from the 1960s and 1970s. And what this makes me think about is a tension between going back to sources 100 years ago or 150 years ago versus, say, esoteric practitioners or occultists, looking and trying to find more up-to-date contemporary scholarship. And then that can also lead to the source amnesia that we've talked about.

And it's interesting as well, in the implications that Sabhapati, as you mentioned, did accept and celebrate female practitioners, who also were able to compose poetry, and obtain equal status as students and as yogis, and also participate in these same kinds of flows, which I think has a lot of implications for the esoteric currents you study.

This idea that there can be masculine and feminine polarities in a single gendered body, regardless of biologically male or female, is very important. And I think that the notion of the Shiva Lingam and the interplay with the yoni in a cosmic sense is definitely food for further research through a gendered perspective and gender studies lens.

Aaron, I-- yeah, as you know, we've talked about this topic for a long time now. And thank you for recognizing that I might have found the Chudamani or the crest-jewel there, somewhere in the rough. And I think that you're absolutely right to cite that there are certain arguments that, maybe, I should have pulled back on, the subjunctive, and been more direct in claiming.

At the same time, so much of this material seems so nuanced, in terms of when we're talking about something as abstract and subtle as influence, right? And Karl Ernst writes about this in talking about Sufi influence on yoga, for example, or Islamic yoga. Like, how do we talk about influence going one way or the other?

And so what I found was really engaging with some of the source material, like what Manon also brought up-- the source material, and then making claims based on what I could see in the either published sources, or diary entries, or so on, that are in the archives. And I think it's very interesting as well, this idea that it's going both ways. And I think you're the only panelist who brought that up, that, OK, well, what is the theosophical and esoteric implications on an Indic yogi, like Sabhapati Swami?

And I think that we can see that in numerous ways, such as his trying to use print culture to create these network of meditation halls, encouraging people to join the Theosophical Society, while never joining himself, but still creating his own currents that are mirroring what Theosophy was doing with different lodges, and so on, and, possibly, Freemasonry, and Unitarian thoughts also there in the background.

But this gets also into Srilata's point, which I'll come to in a moment. It's interesting that he's also bridging this engagement of universalism that he's getting from Theosophy with the Tamil Virasaiva idea of universalism that Manon also brings up. Like, regardless of caste, gender, people can practice yoga as this universal platform for religion.

And then the last thing I wanted to bring out, which I thought was really interesting, is the notion of Sanskrit and the Tamil-inflected Manipravala, or the jewels and coral. I think that's really fascinating and important to think more clearly about, especially since when you have the notion of a syntagma or the purified-- you know, pure Tamil, as wanting to take away a lot of the Sanskrit. As we saw in a movement, in the early 20th century, figures like Sabhapati come across then as old-fashioned, archaic. And I think that leads to one of the reasons why he's been gradually forgotten over time.

And lastly, do I make too much of Sabhapati? I admit it, I live and breathe Sabhapati Swami all day long, and I will wear that flag. But I mean, of course, his-- talking about "influence" in general terms, it has limits. He's not the only yogi that Aleister Crowley was engaging, for example. He's not the only yogi who was important in the Theosophical Society. He's not the only Tamil Saiva important reformer, like we saw in Srilata's mention of Chidambaram Ramalinga Swamigal.

At the same time, he's covering all of these bases to such an extent that-- I think that it makes his "influence," as spoken broadly, really, really compelling in all of these various directions and an important figure to trace, even if he's not the end-all, such a huge figure as he might-- say, as a figure like Swami Vivekananda, for example, elevated to celebrity status or something. At the same time, he's everywhere, but nowhere. And that phenomenon really, really speaks to me.

And getting to Srilata's response, thank you so much for that really deep engagement and recognizing the importance of the Tamil Saiva material. And your own work on Ramalinga Swamigal certainly mirrors and reflects a similar sort of engagement and commitment to understanding these genealogies, and different lines, and paramparas, and the impact on Tamil religion, both particular and global.

And, I think, it's also interesting that there's a claim in his hagiography that Sabhapati had met Ramalinga Swamigal, possibly in Vadalur, and I'm wondering-- you know, no one has been able to confirm that or deny that they met. But I mean, if they did, then there's clearly a more sort of intertwining and exchange between the two.

And I was really interested in your notion of a hybrid modernity, that these figures, they have one foot in the 19th century-- you know, colonial discourses-- and then they also have really one foot, so to speak, in this deep tradition, textual, transmission, knowledge, religious knowledge from Hindu Saiva currents that inform what they're doing.

And this notion of claiming lineage, I think, is also very, very important. We have-- as you brought up, Sabhapati claims one lineage, which is very-- on the scale of historical verifiability, much more plausible, that of his guru, Chidambara-- sorry-- Vedashreni Chidambara Swamigal. And Vedashreni Chidambara Swamigal is associated with his family, where Sabhapati was brought up, in Velachery. And he can be traced back. His tumulus or shrine still survives.

By contrast, as you brought up, the Shivajnana Bodha Rishi, this mythological figure, I'm wondering if the claiming of lineage really is also an attempt to really go back to Agastya, and the Rishi Agastya, and the-- I use this phrase lightly, I'm not super committed to it, but the idea of a tantric mythology, or a borrowing from David Gordon White, this alchemical mythology that goes back to the Siddhas, and about Agastya as associated with the Pothigai Malai, the Agasthyamalai.

And it seems like that has been reflected in this southern mountain of Kailasa, or a reflection of the south and the north, is very, very important for Sabhapati's claim, perhaps, to have a kind of knowledge or a system of yoga that can help him stand out in what must have been a very competitive field of-- you know, people publishing knowledge, and releasing and disseminating different works.

And in that, we also see that in his translation, which you pointed out, the lost in translation. I think his attempt was also to expand as widely as he could, his audience, by embarking on translation into Telugu, Bengali, Hindi, all these sorts of translations.

And the last thing that I want to point out is that, I think, it's very important as well, and notable, that Sabhapati was also concerned with this notion of jnana-- jnana, or knowledge, gnosis, that you point out was also very much linked to some of the Tamil Saiva discourses, and Chidambara Ramalinga Swamigal.

And the notion that that knowledge can lead to a release or moksha, that seems to be something that also allows this yoga to have a religious and soteriological importance that's grounded in these two steps, not just the colonial modernity engaging with Vedantic discourses, but also-- I mean, from my own perspective, when I first read Sabhapati Swami, I thought he might just be a Vedantic author who is not really engaging in some of the practical methods, not really deeply engaged with the Saiva occurrence.

And so I think that's-- you know, one of the things that your response brings out is looking at these words with fresh eyes. And how these terms like jnana and moksha are used in the Tamil Saiva contexts might be much more evocative of a wider tradition of texts and spirituality than just seeing it, oh, he's just pulling on a surface level from a Sanskrit text or something.

And so I think that speaks to the discourse of authenticity that we've also been talking about in this panel. So with that, I'll leave it open for a discussion between us and then possible questions as well.

SRILATA RAMAN: I just want to take on Aaron's thing about, does Keith make too much of Sabhapati Swami? So Aaron, I was struck by that comment because-- and, of course, the self-evident, yes, of course, he does, whatever. Anybody who writes a whole book on a figure, as Keith does, or as I have done, making too much of them.

But I think it points to the deeper issue of the creation of canons, right? And in this case-- I mean, one of the things, of course, in terms of a canon of figures of Hindu modernity, the canon has been created with figures like Ram Mohan Roy, the father of modern Hinduism, Vivekananda, Dayanand Saraswati, and Gandhi, the list goes on, right?

But what that has done, of course, is to prioritize two things. One is to prioritize the North versus the South. The South is always the periphery. But it's also prioritized translation and the ability-- not just the fact for the works to be translated, but the figures themselves, basically, reflecting the post-colonial predicament in the subcontinent. Who has control of English and who doesn't, right?

So in some way, the fate of Sabhapati long-term, or the fate of Chidambaram Ramalinga, or other very interesting figures, has been the fate of those who's not had that access, right? So in some way, to do the job of retrieval, I think, and to make too much, or a great deal of these figures is, I think, to try to redress that imbalance in the historiography of modern Hinduism as well-- maybe. I mean, I'm just speaking-- thinking about it, because I'm sort of on the same bandwagon as Keith. But I don't know. Aaron, what do you think?

AARON ULLREY: I would thoroughly agree with you. I was being very much tongue-in-cheek about that. One of the things that's the most exciting to me about Keith's work is it does give you a little bit of derridian archive fever. You really look at it and you go, whoa! If you just go from this one footnote into-- and then it expands into the Tamil context, the Bengali context, the English context, the Hindi context, you wonder-- or, at least, I wonder, who else were there.

Like you said, why is this canon closed? And I think that Roy is interesting and Swami Vivekananda-- they're interesting, but I'm amazed by Sabhapati Swami who's-- his writings, as Keith has recovered them, have not been watered down. Vivekananda loses his wonderful, weirdly, yogic perspectives as he's translocalized.

So it's almost like because Sabhapati Swami wasn't known as well, or picked up as widely, he's able to maintain that glorious Virasaiva perspectives, the tantras, running through the Tamil Saiva, everything. I'm fascinated by him. And I'm also-- I get the archive fever. I get scared and I quake. I think, well, what if Keith had never come along? Well, then where would this guy be? And who are the other people? Who are the other women, in fact, who have written likely so much that have been lost to time?

And without scholars that can not only read the local languages, but can bounce between them, especially people who don't study any of the Southern languages-- I mean, it seems incomprehensible to think about Indian literature only through Sanskrit. When I first learned Hinduism, it was all Sanskrit. There was no Kannada, Mallihalli, Tamil. The stuff that are not languages I work with, but I just see such incredible richness coming out.

And Keith is showing that it's not just going into the past, the far past of those languages and finding complexities, the complexity is there in the modern world. And the cool thing, as I was kind of saying in there about this material, is that it's not just that Keith can read these different languages that allows him to uncover it, it's that the people who are writing could read those languages as well.

MANON WHITE: I think these are really good points. And I also liked what you said, Aaron, about if you look at something closely enough, you're going to see everything eventually. And that's one of my favorite approaches to historical research, is taking something that's ostensibly quite niche, and then gazing at it long enough to turn it into this amazing prism that shows all of these wider dynamics. So I think that's really, really pertinent to what Keith has done here.

And also, Srilata, what you said about the idea of the canon, I think is really applicable. Also if we look at the context of esotericism, because until very, very recently that canon has been incredibly narrowly defined. We've had-- I mean, Hermes Trismegistus, Paracelsus, Jakob Boehme, Swedenborg, Pico della Mirandola, et cetera, Eliphas Levi, and Blavatsky. And even the inclusion of someone like Kirlian in that canon is actually quite recent, because he was denigrated for a really long time by the more highbrow, older generation of scholars of esotericism.

And now, having-- with someone like you, Keith, or the both of you as well, Aaron and Srilata who have the specialized language skills to look at how ideas have developed through these global exchanges much more broadly, but also in a much more specialized way, is really, really exciting.

And what you're saying there as well, Aaron, in terms of the archive fever, and what else is out there, and what if we take another footnote somewhere, and just go down that rabbit hole, and see where it takes us. I mean, probably, there's so much that we don't even know yet about how these intertextual connections are built.

And that's so exciting as well, and definitely, probably, more women authors as well, that we don't know about. And so I think all of that is really important and so exciting for all of these different fields as well.

AARON ULLREY: And as a textualist, somebody who works with Sanskrit manuscripts, one of the most thrilling and ridiculous things for me, and joyous things in Keith's book, is the story of him finding texts. Going around and getting-- could I get into that archive? Couldn't I? Could I get a photocopy? Wouldn't I? I think it might be there, but I think it might not.

And I've spent a lot of my time doing just that, but in the pre-modern world. So people have joked and called me Indiana Aaron, as Indiana Jones over there looking for texts, and hopefully not doing what Indiana Jones does. But the whole explorer of text that is not white guy finding this incredible thing about himself through this, but finding it gets bigger, and deeper, and wider.

And he's not reducing anything. He's just opening the box up further and further, and there are just more and more voices that are being pulled in. And I think that's a model for how we should do scholarship, especially in the Indian modern era, when everything was so hybrid, the word we keep bringing up.

SRILATA RAMAN: You know, but more than even him hunting around for texts and archives, I really kept grinning when I thought of him scrambling over the Pothigai Hills, trying to find a cave, or actually seriously thinking of digging up a tumulus. I mean, for God's sake, Keith.

AARON ULLREY: I almost dropped my digital book, when you were talking about digging up that tumulus.

SRILATA RAMAN: Yeah. I thought your insatiable curiosity is really going to get you into trouble one of these days.

KEITH CANTU: It almost did. There was a serious discussion over the implications of what would happen if we dug that up.

SRILATA RAMAN: Exactly.

KEITH CANTU: Yeah.

SRILATA RAMAN: Yeah. So obviously, your attitude is, I'll stop at nothing to get to my sources.

KEITH CANTU: That is the attitude. And I have to say, I think that it's really nice when these sorts of mentions and-- like you all were mentioning a footnote, right? I think that this gets into a distinction between, one, there's an emic practitioner, or belief, or doctrine, that lens by which we might access these texts or these ideas.

But then there's also, just on the general academic level, the ways in which occultists or esoteric practitioners have preserved almost entire fields of knowledge almost by accident, right, just by mentioning some of these footnotes, and people, and webs of information, who have been forgotten over time.

And so for me, as a historian, that was really-- not a historian, but a historian of religions really, really interested in how that could be traced back, and using a variety of methods to try to figure out and connect the dots, really, with communities who are still living in that world. It's not that those worlds have disappeared, it's just that they've been made static in a text, in a printed text. And those worlds are still living on.

And so I was very surprised to find out that there was even a living Sabhapati Lingeshwarar Temple in Konnur and Villivakkam, where Sabhapati had created his meditation hall. And so just connecting those dots was really fascinating and was wonderful too. I would say, it was very humbling in a way, but also very, I would say, affirming of my place.

Not trying to be put on a pedestal or anything, but seeing that there were these traditions, and cultures, and religious practices that were living on, alongside, and seeing the welcome by which Sabhapati's writings were received in these communities was really heartwarming to me, and that people were really viewing-- and they still do.

They view Sabhapati Swami as their guru-- you know what I mean-- and they view Sabhapati Swami as this figure. And so I think that just speaks to the importance of seeing the local and the translocal or global as these parallel tracks.

SRILATA RAMAN: There's a question from Arni Narendran, Keith. You can see it in the chat?

KEITH CANTU: Yes. Yes. Thank you for pointing that out. So Arni Narendran is asking about Franz Hartmann. And, yes. So this is in, maybe, the second chapter, as well as the seventh chapter of the book. So Franz Hartmann did go to Adyar in Chennai, and he spent time at the Theosophical Society headquarters.

And there-- I'm not exactly sure when-- but he was exposed to Sri Sabhapati Swami's works. I don't know if they met personally, but he did end up translating a good amount of Sabhapati Swami's initial lectures that were published in English, with Sanskrit archaic transliterations into German.

And so Franz Hartmann also added lots of footnotes, comparing Sabhapati's philosophy with Christian mystics, Meister Eckhart, and then also Helena Blavatsky, viewing also him through the lens of Shankaracharya, and so on. So yeah, definitely, definitely, Franz Hartmann was aware of Sabhapati and interested.

SRILATA RAMAN: [INAUDIBLE] There was something I found fascinating in looking at the chapters, which is in terms of the fact-- am I wrong in thinking that Sabhapati in his writings and the whole yoga stuff is not really dwelling at all on the transformation of the physical body?

KEITH CANTU: Hmm, that's a great--

SRILATA RAMAN: Because, of course, this is so huge in Kumara Devar, that the practice of Sivarajayoga actually transforms the physical body. But it seems to oddly be completely missing in this-- which, of course, would then be a huge major difference between Sabhapati's version and what he took it from. So am I wrong in thinking that?

KEITH CANTU: I don't think you're wrong. But I would say it's de-emphasized and not entirely absent, since if you look-- and this is the importance of the visual culture, which I'm only now getting into analyzing and commenting on his diagrams. That will be, actually, part of my postdoc project at the Center for the Study of World Religions starting in June is analyzing his diagrams more specifically.

And these diagrams sometimes contain anatomical parts of the body, like brain, skeleton, bones, that are also part of the yogic body. So that's not entirely made subtle and abstract, if that makes sense. And so there is a transformation of some of these bodily constituents into, basically, a divinized, cosmic Shiva Lingam, if that makes sense, or like a Linga Swaroop, an essential form of the linga. And so that becomes very important in his works.

And also, this notion that different parts of the body can be touched, and then meditated on, and given in dedication to Shiva seems to be a transformation of the ears, and then the nose, and the mouth. And then even the lower regions, the lingam, or the yoni, even the anus is even referred to. Like, the whole body is sacred in a way, or is given this sacrality through these practices.

But I'm not sure if that's what you're referring to in the body centric. But there is a transformation, while at the same time, it's seen as illusory. Maybe that's what you're getting at, the--

SRILATA RAMAN: Yeah, I think it's-- I'm getting at the fact that the bodily transformation in Kumara Devar, and then, of course, in Ramalinga Swamigal is very real. The body actually becomes-- the physical body actually becomes either adamantine or-- it changes. The physical body actually changes through the yoga in Kumara Devar. And that doesn't-- at least, in the materials you've quoted, but-- yeah.

KEITH CANTU: It's one-- it does come up just briefly, in the idea that yogis transform themselves into the Shiva Linga. And so those stones are transformations of the body. So that comes up as yogis, but not much else.

AARON ULLREY: So Keith, I have in my notes that I didn't get to, that I wanted to say to you, the visual media culture could use a book in and of itself. So you made me very happy when you just told me that you're going to do that. So my question is for you and Manon, in particular, together. And that's when I was looking at all this visual media culture and the diagrams, I kept thinking, this looks similar but not the same to a lot of stuff I've seen.

So I was wondering if the two of you could reflect on the visual media culture in Sabhapati Swami, and its continuities or differences from other Tamilian and Indic sources at the time, and to and from other sort of wider esoteric writing in the 19th, 20th century, specifically writing that has pictures.

KEITH CANTU: Manon, do you want to take that first, or--

MANON WHITE: Um, I might need to think about that for a second. Do you want to start, Keith, while I gather my thoughts. That's a really good question.

KEITH CANTU: In the index side of the material, I can say that the paintings predate-- you know, there is this tradition of paintings of the yogic body, and having all of these different stations, and chakras, or wheels, or knots in the body, different locations, and nadis. You're familiar, maybe-- there's a book-- Debra Diamond did this exhibit, yoga and transformation, where she exhibited all of these at the Smithsonian Institute, and there's a volume that shows this very, very plainly.

So the paintings were there, but Sabhapati strikes me as the first person to have done this in print culture, to have done diagrams so widely-- and, possibly, the first printed diagrams of the yogic body, or the subtle body, if you will. And he also appears to have been a pioneer-- I haven't found any earlier sources in which the diagrams are numbered.

And so the diagrams are numbered, and the numbered parts go back to the book. And so at first, this wasn't as huge of a part of his initial lectures. But then as you go on, the pictures almost become the whole book, and the rest of the book is almost describing the pictures, rather than the other way around.

AARON ULLREY: That's fascinating. But my little nuance here, who are the artists?

KEITH CANTU: The artists, only a few of them signed their names. So there are a few Telugu artists, who I mention in the book. I forget exactly their names. But normally, there are people who were devotees in the shrine.

And even today-- that's the importance of the fieldwork and ethnography side is going to this temple that survives with Sri Sabhapati Swami-- there are temple artists who are commissioned with making portraits of these Swamis or Siddha figures. And that's a whole culture in and of itself, where they get their inspiration from, how they're patronized by the devotees, and everything.

AARON ULLREY: But just depictions, or depictions of these figures with subtle bodies?

KEITH CANTU: I've seen, more rarely now, but mostly figures. But then there are also in some of these more modern Siddha milieus, or Siddha-like medicine milieus-- there are diagrams that deal with the body in more subtle ways. Yeah, I've seen--

AARON ULLREY: And I've seen that a little bit in Maharastra, but-- so that's fascinating.

MANON WHITE: I think it's really interesting. Also, the question about who the actual artists were is really interesting to think about, as well. In comparison, I'm actually shamefully bad at esoteric visual culture, I feel. I'm very text-focused. So I'm always like, oh, yeah, images also. Yes, many things going on in the images. And then I get back to the texts.

But one thing I notice about the diagrams, if we look at the ones particularly pertaining to the subtle body, is that they're incredibly elaborate and complex. And my just very spontaneous reaction is that they're a lot more intricate than a lot of-- if we compare to Theosophy and ways of visually illustrating conceptions of the subtle body, for instance, is that if we look at these diagrams, there's a whole lot more going on than this quite simplified system of the chakras that gets mostly circulated through Pulaski, and in that tradition, in Westernized context. So I think that's really interesting.

And of course, there is-- I mean, this is really outside of my specialty, but I know there is a whole lot more going on in that context as well, in terms of the subtle body. There is a recent doctoral dissertation about contemporary yoga, particularly, in Sweden, and looking at yoga teachers' concepts of the subtle body by Malin Fitger at Stockholm University.

And who looks at Theosophy and Blavatsky's work in her scholarship as a key channel for various South Asian conceptions of the subtle body into this remarkably standardized model of the colors of the rainbow correlated to the chakras that we see in post-Blavatsky and Theosophically-inspired esoteric maps. So I think that's really interesting.

SRILATA RAMAN: Aren't a lot of these lithographs, Keith?

KEITH CANTU: They are. So like pen and ink drawings, there are pen and ink drawings that are then made into, I think, woodblock--

SRILATA RAMAN: Yeah. Yeah.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Yeah, because I'm also thinking of this fascinating development-- it can't be earlier than the 19th century, it could be earlier-- of, of course, the lithographs for the prayer books which emerge in the Saiva and Vaishnava context. And also for things like the Periyapuranam, you have lithographs illustrating the stories, and so on, right?

And in a way, the lithographs are meant to do what? Of course, give you a visual sense, but also reinforce through another medium doctrine, maybe-- things like that. Anyway, the project will be very interesting, if you think of it in connection with lithographic work in this period.

KEITH CANTU: I will do. And I think a lot of it, it has to do with-- as you say, reinforce the doctrine. It's like pedagogical styles in a way. And Sabhapati was not just trying to teach an audience of students, it's very clear that he was trying to teach other gurus, like other teachers, and to train other teachers in that, both male and female. And so it's really interesting that these diagrams were used.

You could even purchase the diagrams separately to use as teaching aids. And that's evident from his work. And also, some diagrams even were-- as these lithographs, it could be substituted for being physically initiated by Sabhapati Swami. So you can meditate on the image, and he could give you a diksha, which then he translates as mesmerism, which is a whole other thing, getting into esotericism. But you could use these diagrams as an aid to get in touch with Sabhapati Swami.

I don't see any questions, any other questions. There's also one other interesting thing about this dichotomy, I think, of text and image, just an anecdote in looking at the archives of the Theosophical Society in Adyar, trying to trace back Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott's meeting with the Swami in Lahore.

It was interesting that Henry Olcott kept a regular diary, every day, pretty much. And so every day, it had a date, it had the year, and then it had what happened. And so it was very linear, like very text-based, you know. And I could see how-- maybe some of our brains are more oriented in that direction, sort of every day.

But then Helena Blavatsky didn't keep that kind of diary at all, or journal. But what did she keep? She kept a scrapbook, and the scrapbook was full of images. And the images, though, were in chronological order. So you could actually find these things that she had saved, and cut and then paste it, and then trace back what was going on through images, rather than text. And so that was really interesting to me.

SRILATA RAMAN: I have one other-- maybe final question. Was he ever photographed?

KEITH CANTU: That I have-- I do not believe so. I do not believe so, which is fairly rare. There is a reference to a picture, but it's just using patam in Tamil, that a picture that he had mailed to his student Om Prakash Swamigal, whose ashram survives in Ooty in the--

SRILATA RAMAN: Yes, Kandal. The reason I'm asking is, of course, about the whole-- because he lived very long for one thing. But the other thing, of course, is the whole-- which Chidambaram Swamigal-- the whole idea that the photograph, photography extracts something from the person and, therefore, is dangerous. And so, of course, a great yogi actually can't be photographed. I mean those kind of ideas.

I was just wondering-- it's very interesting that there exists no photo of him. Another reason why something is obviously lost, right? There are all these drawings, and the visual, and yet, something very central to the visual is completely absent, which is a photograph of him from all this period. That's very, very interesting.

KEITH CANTU: That is very interesting. And it makes me also think of a similar figure during that time period, in what is today West Bengal and Bangladesh, Lalon Shah, Lalon Fakir. He also-- there's no photograph of him in his lifetime. And he also didn't allow even drawings of him. And the one drawing that does exist of him was made by one of the Tagore brothers, associated with Rabindranath Tagore. I think Tagore's brother. And even that wasn't apparently done with Lalon's consent.

And so I think you're right to speak of this, maybe, as more of a tradition of not wanting to be depicted, perhaps, or even not wanting to be photographed, unless there's a reason for this kind of initiatory connection. Any more questions before we wrap up? I know we're right at 5:30, so maybe I will wrap up then.

So thank you all for joining this book launch for Sri Sabhapati Swami, Like a Tree Universally Spread: Sri Sabhapati Swami and Sivarajayoga. I really have appreciated talking with each of you, Srilata, Aaron, and Manon. And I look forward to keeping the conversation going and seeing where these future strands of research go in the future. And thank you all, to the audience, for joining either now, or remotely, or online, watching in the future.

SRILATA RAMAN: Thank you. It's a pleasure.

MANON WHITE: Thank you so much. That would be nice, thank you.

SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions.