#  Om-gnosis Episode 1: Introducing Om-gnosis 

 



Om-gnosis is the first online podcast dedicated to the academic study of occult South Asia. Occult literally means “hidden.” But the idea has gone through many phases. Today, what we call the occult often has deep ties to South Asian teachings and practices, including, but not limited to modern yoga, Hindu and Buddhist tantra, and even Islamic esotericism. Occult South Asia is full of intercultural transfers, and many authors and practitioners from around the world played a role in formulating this category. These transfers are hinted at in the name Om-gnosis itself.one goal of this podcast is to provide a case in point that there is no reason to fear moving beyond tradition. While this move may create antagonism, at times, the dialog that it fosters can be productive and useful for scholars and practitioners alike.



 



 

 

 



 

 

 

##  Transcript 

Hello and welcome to On-gnosis. I'm Keith Edward Cantú. I am a postdoctoral fellow in Asian religious traditions at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. Om-gnosis is the first online podcast dedicated to the academic study of occult South Asia. Occult literally means “hidden.” But the idea has gone through many phases.

Today, what we call occult often has deep ties to South Asian teachings and practices, including, but not limited to modern yoga, Hindu and Buddhist tantra, and even Islamic esotericism. Occult South Asia is full of intercultural transfers, and many authors and practitioners from around the world played a role in formulating this category. These transfers are hinted at in the name Om-gnosis itself. The Sanskrit syllable “ohm” in our logo, written using three distinct Indic scripts, is derived from the Vedas, Upanishads, and tantras, and represents the Hindu idea of creation, preservation and dissolution. While in our usage gnosis, etymologically cognate with jñāna in Sanskrit, also meaning knowledge, stands for regeneration and cyclical return. Instead of only promoting any one single religious perspective, author, or path, Om-gnosis welcomes viewers and listeners of all backgrounds and religious or non-religious identities as we critically analyze occult South Asia and seek to build bridges between scholars and practitioners around the world.

To that end, this podcast aims to engage alternate views, whether pre-modern and contemporary, and to foster a rich public and collegial discourse. So you might be asking yourself, “What is occult?” While the name has evolved so much since its original etymology as meaning “hidden” from a Latin past participle, occultus, and it started to mean the occult sciences fairly early on in medieval Europe, where you had astrology, alchemy, and magic.

And later what started to happen is it got co-opted and expanded into this notion of occultism, partially in French circles in the fin de siècle Paris—or Paris—of the late 19th century. And it kind of became this identifying marker. Gradually, as a society called the Theosophical Society emerged, founded in 1875, in New York, they saw these earlier meanings of the word “occult” as denoting hidden knowledge, but also these hidden sciences, the philosophy. There was an occult philosophy as well, from authors like Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, and theosophical founders were essentially wanting to distance themselves. At some point from that occultism, and they posited instead a gupta-vidyā, or “hidden science” that they felt could replace occultism by taking it to its roots, which they found in South Asia, believe it or not.

As time went on in the 20th century, this idea of occult as hidden started to take on more of this idea of “the” occult. So it started to transform into “the” occult, which basically meant anything kooky, weird, strange: UFOs, spirits, ghosts, the paranormal, X-Files, you know, you name it. And it's important to look at how that transformed without ever really taking South Asia out of the picture. It's sort of lingered in the background behind the transformation of this word. And so in that case, what is South Asia? Well, South Asia is a modern regional designation. It refers to countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, sometimes Afghanistan. You have the island nation of the Maldives, sometimes Burma—Myanmar—is included as well. So this notion of South Asia, however, has sort of a shared colonial past and also really rich histories of independence movements, freedom fighting, and today, in modern contexts, contemporary contexts, it's really important to see that the occult never quite went away.

There are still remnants, as we'll see in the series, that really emerge in certain places and certain locations. And the historical currents are also really strong, since many movements that developed in South Asia itself moved, became globalized, or as I sometimes call it, “translocalized.” They became this movement that transcended any single region or locality and survived or even thrived in pockets elsewhere in the world, often mediated by occult movements. So there are examples of this in modern yoga. There are examples of this in certain occult meditative practices, practices like astral projection. The list goes on and on. And the more deeply you look at the intercultural transfers at play within occult South Asia, you start to see that there are many, many voices that are helping to formulate this category. It's not just a single country. It's not just a single race, ethnicity, nationality. It's really communities and groups who are helping to co-create and to co-develop this idea of what it means to understand, access, engage with a hidden world, or a hidden substance, or a hidden aspect of the human body. Several scholars have written about occult South Asia so far, and that includes Gordan Djurdjevic, “India and the Occult,” a book that he and Henrik Bogdan co-edited called “Occultism in a Global Perspective.”

You have a book by Hugh Urban, “Magia Sexualis,” a pioneering work. And you also had this conference called “Occult South Asia,” that took place in Vienna, and that was hosted by Karl Baier and Mriganka Mukhopadhyay. And lately you have developments in Islamic esotericism, this attempt to extend the idea of occultism into an Islamicate, meaning that even though the majority of the area, or kingdom, or country might have been Muslim, there still was a cultural spread that pervaded even areas that were not fully Muslim, but they had this kind of veneer of Islamic practice, and cultural customs, and dress. And so that's what some people call Islamicate.

And so you have Liana Saif and Matt Melvin-Koushki, who have really been at the forefront of looking at that as applied to the Islamic contexts. You have a book by Julian Strube called “Global Tantra” that it really explores the Arthur Avalon collaboration, this judge John Woodroffe who was collaborating with Bengali and other Indian pandits and also had a guru named Shivavhandra Vidyarnava.

And then more recently, you have some of the work of yours truly. “Like a Tree Universally Spread: Sri Sabhapati Swami and Śivarājayoga. This book explores another really, really rich intercultural transfer in which you have a yogi who is born in what is today Tamil Nadu help influence the Theosophical Society's idea of an astral body. And also his system makes its way into the Thelema of Aleister Crowley.

The connections go on and on. I can talk about Sabhapati’s editor, Sriṣa Chandra Vasu, who edited tantras such as the Shiva Samhita that then were translocalized, and some of the first translations of yogas and tantras that were widely available in printed publication. And Rama Prasad, whose idea of the tattvas, these sort of principles—reality principles—but in his case these elements that could be associated with shapes and used for divination as pulling from the Sanskrit text, the Shivasvarodaya. And his works basically being integrated into an order like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in Victorian and Edwardian England, which has this reputation for being this magical occult order. But here they're using an occult South Asian idea as part of their practice of rising on the planes, or what they called tattva meditation.

There are so many intercultural transfers that I hope to explore in this podcast. The name Om-gnosis really encapsulates, I feel, occult South Asia. The “om” is the tradition part, and one could say that the word “gnosis” as well conjures up tradition. (Although I'm not a specialist in traditional Gnosticism.) But the innovation in *om*—this *gnosis*—really is something that goes beyond tradition. And so one goal of this podcast is to provide a case in point that there is no reason to fear moving beyond tradition. While this move may create antagonism, at times, the dialog that it fosters can be productive and useful for scholars and practitioners alike.