The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  Eugenia had told Nehru, a bit flirtatiously, that she wanted a picture of him but didn’t like any of those for sale in the markets. The next day, he mailed her a photo of himself that he thought was flattering. (Until the end of her life, she kept a picture of him taken at around this time. In it, he wears a white tunic and a white cap. His hands are clasped behind his back, and there’s a hint of a melancholy smile on his lips.) “As you seemed to be interested in my pictures I am taking the liberty of sending you a copy,” he wrote. “It was a delight to see you for dinner yesterday. I hope the pleasure will be repeated.” He seems to have thought she was single, since the letter is addressed to “Miss Peterson.” In subsequent letters, he just called her “Jane.”

  “Certainly I would like to see you again,” he wrote to her a little while later. “Are you free tomorrow? If so come in the morning about 8:30 am. Today I have got a number of meetings and interviews.” Soon they developed a warm friendship. She saw him when he passed through Bombay, and she made many trips to Allahabad, the city where he was born and where he continued to be based. There, she stayed at the home of a nearby maharaja and frequented Anand Bhawan, the Nehru family mansion, a luxurious forty-two-room estate that often served as the nerve center of the Indian independence movement. It was so crowded with admirers, it seemed more a place of pilgrimage than a private home.

  Once, she arrived when Gandhi was there. It was one of the Mahatma’s days of silence, and he was sitting on a carpet under a pergola in Nehru’s garden. Nehru took her by the hand and brought her to the Mahatma’s side. Sitting by the small, frail-seeming, immensely strong man in the loincloth, looking into the merry eyes behind his round spectacles, “I felt that I was being initiated into a sacramental mystery,” she writes.

  Being close to such extraordinary people was exhilarating, but it also reminded her how meaningless her own life had become. She’d traveled to India to pursue the secrets of yoga, but had not gotten anywhere close. Instead, she’d ended up a society wife. She had friends who were fully engaged with life’s deepest problems, while she watched from the sidelines, feeling irresolute and frivolous. “Was this why I had come to India?” she writes. “To become a popular hostess and party-goer?”

  Other women filled their lives with children, but Eugenia had no interest in motherhood, and she considered the fact that she’d never become pregnant to be an enormous blessing. (In her last years, reproductive rights was one of the few political issues she took a strong stand on.) She wanted to devote herself to her own projects, her own quest, but what was that? She no longer knew. She was thirty-two and lost.

  Soon she was sick as well. Later, she would describe her illness in occult terms, though a more plausible explanation lies in her terrible ennui. Sometime in 1932, Jo went south on a hunting trip, and Eugenia was having dinner with a friend. He seemed torpid and unwell. Then, on their way home, he doubled over in pain. Eugenia had read about so-called “Magnetic Healing” in Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism, by Yogi Ramacharaka, a.k.a. William Walker Atkinson. (That she still believed this book was authentic testifies to how little she’d managed to learn about yoga during her first years in India.) The yogic healer, writes Ramacharaka, “passes his hand over the body of the sick person, and by an effort of will, or strong desire, generates within himself a strong supply of Prana which he passes out to the patient.”

  Eugenia was inspired to try it out. They went to her friend’s house, where, just as Ramacharaka instructed, Eugenia had him sit in an armchair while she moved her hands above his body in circles, concentrating as hard as she could on making him better. Then she gave him some magnetized water, a remedy popular in Theosophical and other natural-healing circles.

  The next day, as she later told the story, her friend called to say that he felt much better. She, however, awoke with a terrible pain in her chest, one that refused to subside. She saw a doctor, but he could do nothing for her but give her pain pills and prescribe liver injections, which she consented to despite her vegetarianism. She went home, took to her bed, and stayed there day after day, convinced that she’d absorbed her friend’s bad energy into herself. When Jo returned, he was horrified to see how ill she was, though he didn’t agree with her on the cause. He arranged to take her to Europe to confer with cardiologists on the Continent.

  None of them, however, could find anything wrong with her, and after six months, the couple returned to Bombay. As the hot season began its annual siege on the capital, Eugenia deteriorated. From her description of those days, it sounds like she was being crushed by a combination of clinical depression and anxiety attacks, perhaps like those she’d had as a child. She was nervous, irritable, tearful, and listless. She felt too tired to accompany her husband to most of his engagements, or to swim, dance, or ride horseback. She gained weight, and her skin looked dull and lined, though she scarcely had the energy to care. Once so audacious and vibrant, now she alternated between impotent misery and dull resignation.

  For the next four years, she moved in and out of this wretched fugue. Occasionally, she would rouse herself to attend a party or take a dance lesson, but most of the time she was too exhausted to do anything at all. She’d become a sickly housewife, her ambitions utterly circumscribed.

  This sort of thing, of course, happened to many women—decades later, Betty Friedan would catalyze second-wave feminism by describing the plight of intelligent women who were driven half-crazy by the boredom, banality, and lack of purpose in their lives. For middle-class European women in India, the stifling heat and frequent illnesses compounded the housewife’s languor. “Less energetic women lapsed into an almost permanent lethargy,” writes historian Margaret MacMillan. Eugenia had always been plenty energetic, but as her life veered into a cul-de-sac, she felt spent.

  Given her esoteric interests, it’s not surprising that she viewed her troubles in occult terms—and it was through occultism, of a sort, that she eventually found relief.

  It came not in India but in Prague, where she’d gone on vacation with her husband. There Strakaty, as the commercial attaché, had to go see a new kind of Czech handloom, presumably for possible export to India. Eugenia accompanied him, and the inventor dragooned her into taking a weaving lesson with him. She wanted to get out of it—she had no interest in handicrafts and couldn’t even sew a button—but somehow couldn’t extricate herself. During the class, she had some sort of nervous attack. As it turned out, one of her fellow students was studying to be a doctor. Feeling her pulse racing, he had her lie down, gave her some brandy, and put a cold compress on her chest.

  Afterward, she told him her whole history, starting with her attempt at healing her friend. The medical student, Mr. Rypka, was interested in yoga—or, at least, what he understood to be yoga—and appalled by the way she’d attempted to dabble in the body’s hidden powers without proper training. “Just like electric energy, they can cure or kill—it all depends on the way you use them,” he told her. He asked her if she’d consulted a yogi about her illness and was surprised when she said no. Upon thinking about it, she was surprised as well. Why hadn’t she? She wasn’t sure. Perhaps her depression had eclipsed her initiative.

  Rypka resolved to treat her himself—indeed, he promised he could cure her in seven days. She was skeptical but willing. Like her, it seems that he was influenced by Ramacharaka. During five fifteen-minute sessions, he rubbed his hands together to produce heat and electricity and then passed them over her body. After each session, she slept deeply and awoke feeling improved. On the final day, she told him she felt much better, though not completely well. He promised her that by the next day she would.

  “The next morning I woke up with a wonderfully light feeling and a sense of well-being,” she writes. She felt suffused with health and ran around dancing and singing with relief and joy. Her husband didn’t take this revival seriously and expected her to revert, but Eugenia was confident that she’d made a miraculous recovery.

  On
e needn’t have faith in the validity of Rypka’s methods to believe that he made Eugenia feel much better. Psychosomatic maladies are particularly responsive to faith healing. Rypka gave her confidence in her future by reawakening an old passion, one that she’d given up on ever realizing. Once again, she had a goal in life. Returning to Bombay, Eugenia was determined finally to start studying yoga seriously. Finding the right teacher, though, wouldn’t be easy.

  · CHAPTER 7 ·

  IN AUGUST OF 1932, more than five hundred wandering Hindu holy men, or sadhus, camped out on Bombay’s Chowpatty Beach after attending a festival in the city of Nasik, about one hundred miles away. (In order to get rid of them, Nasik officials had offered free transportation out of town.) As the weeks went by and the ash-smeared mendicants, some entirely naked, showed no sign of leaving, Bombay authorities got worried. They couldn’t forcibly remove the sadhus without creating a backlash among poor Indians who admired them, but much of the middle class found them mortifying, while the Europeans were alternately titillated and appalled. At a meeting about the problem, one municipal official fretted that crowds of people were going to see the holy men. “No respectable people will go there,” responded another, M. A. Karanjawalla.

  Over lunch one day, a German girlfriend of Eugenia’s proposed an outing to see the sadhus, and Eugenia immediately agreed. So, on a steamy summer evening, with the lights of Bombay glowing behind them, they joined the carnivalesque throngs wandering “through the rows of mushroom-like umbrellas stuck in the ground,” each one sheltering a wild-looking ascetic. They were, as far as Eugenia could tell, the only Europeans there.

  Eugenia was fascinated. The men were naked or nearly so, their skin smeared with holy ash. Some were bent into impossible-seeming contortions or frozen in precarious balances. “They resembled a group of jugglers and acrobats in gray tights and make-up,” she wrote. “Their fantastic coiffures towered on their heads like huge birds’ nests, stiff as wigs and yellowish from the application of cow dung.”

  One of them stood on his head the entire time they were there.

  “Why on earth is he doing that?” Eugenia asked.

  “To please God,” answered a bystander.

  Eugenia made a remark about God’s peculiar taste and said she’d always imagined genuine Indian yogis quite differently from these showmen.

  “But these are not yogis,” exclaimed a passing student. “These filthy loafers and mischief makers only ruin India’s good name with foreigners such as yourselves.”

  Such was the reputation, during her first years in India, of hatha yoga, the body-centric yoga practice Eugenia would later make famous. It was widely seen as the province of magicians, con men, and sideshow contortionists. Even champions of Indian religion typically dismissed it. When educated people, whether Indian or Western, spoke respectfully of yoga, they usually meant a system of breathing, meditation, and philosophy, not physical postures.

  Madame Blavatsky had described the “torture and self-maceration” of hatha yoga as “the lower form of Yoga.” Swami Vivekananda, the Bengali monk who became an iconic figure of the Hindu renaissance, was largely dismissive of it. Vivekananda’s hugely influential 1896 book Raja Yoga inspired educated Indians and catalyzed a Western fascination with Indian spirituality that has yet to abate. But Raja Yoga—which means “Kingly Yoga”—dismisses hatha yoga. “We have nothing to do with it here, because its practices are very difficult and cannot be learnt in a day, and, after all, do not lead to much spiritual growth,” he writes. “Many of these practices—such as placing the body in different postures—you will find in the teaching of Delsarte and others. The object in these is physical, not spiritual.” (He is referring to François Delsarte, a French acting teacher who inspired an international vogue for spiritualized gymnastics.)

  Yet, as the 1930s progressed, hatha yoga’s reputation began to change rapidly. Thanks to a few brilliant innovators, it was being transformed from a lurid, threatening relic into a wholesome indigenous science of health and longevity. And Eugenia, on a quest to free herself from her heart-palpitating nervous attacks, would find herself right at the center of the hatha yoga renaissance.

  Yoga as a system of physical fitness is, contrary to conventional wisdom, a fairly modern phenomenon. If few people realize that, it’s partly because the word yoga is so labile, creating a false sense of continuity among many distinct practices. As the great scholar of religion Mircea Eliade writes, “The word yoga serves, in general, to designate any ascetic technique and any method of meditation.” When people say “yoga,” they can be talking about many different things.

  It is true that Indians have been doing yoga for millennia, but their practices didn’t necessarily have anything in common with yoga as currently understood by the West, as a series of poses and breathing exercises designed to strengthen the body and calm the mind. Much like Theosophy, modern yoga is a hybrid of ancient and contemporary ideas, an East-West fusion.

  The most well-known text of classical yoga is The Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali, which scholars generally date to somewhere between 200 BC and AD 250, though the techniques it presents are thought to be far older. References to the philosopher Patanjali are common in contemporary Western yoga classes, which might give students the idea that their practice is rooted in his writing. It isn’t. The Yoga-Sutra is a short text, comprising 196 aphorisms. The sum total of its teaching about yoga poses is this, in scholar Georg Feuerstein’s translation: “The posture [should be] steady and comfortable. [It is accompanied] by the relaxation of tension and the coinciding with the infinite [consciousness-space].”

  Patanjali’s yoga is neither an exercise regimen nor a medical modality. It is a practical philosophy—and arguably a quite pessimistic one. Starting from the assumption that human life is full of intolerable suffering and that suffering derives from mental activity, it offers a schema for escaping the pain of worldly existence through the dissolution of the ego and the cessation of thought. As the second stanza of the Yoga-Sutra puts it, Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah, which Feuerstein translates as “Yoga is the restriction of the fluctuations of consciousness.”

  In their diagnosis of the human predicament, Patanjali and other classical yoga philosophers had some of the same insights that would later spawn existentialism and psychoanalysis. They understood the way our perceptions shape our reality, and they were profoundly concerned with the anguish of being trapped by one’s thoughts. They elaborated practical techniques, particularly breathing and concentration exercises, to aid adepts in observing the workings of their own minds, a sort of self-psychoanalysis or even self-hypnosis.

  Mystics from every religious tradition report rapturous experiences of union with the divine and direct perception of numinous truths that transcend language and logic. Yoga elaborates a rational path for inducing such suprarational states. That’s why so many who developed a taste for altered states of consciousness in the 1960s found yoga congenial. It can be, as Feuerstein subtitles one of his books, “The Technology of Ecstasy.”

  It’s clear why so many iconoclastic Western thinkers have been electrified by yogic wisdom. “Depend upon it, rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully…to some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in an 1849 letter. Many psychoanalysts, particularly Carl Jung, saw the parallels between their own disciplines and yoga philosophy; Jung called yoga “one of the greatest things the human mind has ever created.”

  Nevertheless, classical yoga clashes with the deepest values of modern individualism. The point of Patanjali’s philosophy is to reject and transcend this world, not to function more easily within it. His yoga is a tool of self-obliteration more than self-actualization. Feuerstein, a great admirer of Patanjali, is adamant about this. Patanjali’s idea of the conquest of the ego “presupposes that we turn our back on all things of the world, on life itself,” Feuerstein writes. “Patanjali’s is not a way of living in the world free from fear of death
or loss of any kind, but of acquiring an other-worldly dimension of existence where properly speaking it no longer makes any sense to talk of fear or its removal. The transformation of human nature as envisaged in Classical Yoga is entirely a process of negation of everything that is ordinarily considered as typically human.” The archetypical yogi, after all, was a half-naked hermit.

  The fact that yoga is now seen as a route toward individual development and a more efficacious life in the world is thus a historical irony. Eugenia would play an important role in this conceptual transformation.

  While classical yoga has little to say about asana practice, in medieval times a clear yogic focus on the body, and on techniques for preserving it, emerged. Hatha yoga, as the physical side of yoga is called, was originally the name of a discipline practiced by an order of twelfth-century ascetics known as the Kanphata yogis. As Eliade explains, however, “the term soon came to be the collective designation for the traditional formulas and disciplines that made it possible to attain [the] perfect mastery of the body.”

  It is in the hatha yoga texts—The Gheranda Samhita, The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, and Shiva Samhita—that asanas first play a major role. The first of these books describes thirty-two poses; the second, fifteen; and the third mentions eighty-four, though only four, the seated poses Siddhasana, Padmasana, Paschimottananasana, and Sukhasana, are elaborated upon. Most of the asanas described in these texts are either seated or supine; there’s no mention of now-familiar standing sequences such as surya namaskar, or sun salutations, in any ancient work.

  Hatha yoga combined elements of Patanjali’s yoga with tantra, a transgressive, occult tendency within Hinduism that turns upside down traditional concerns with purity. Tantra is itself a complex, multilayered tradition, but Wendy Doniger, one of the leading Western scholars of Hinduism, writes that tantric texts and rituals typically include “worship of the goddess, initiation, group worship, secrecy, and antinomian behavior, particularly sexual rituals and the ingesting of bodily fluids.” Inversion and reversal are hugely important within tantra. Substances that classical Hinduism regards as polluting are transubstantiated and become sacred; one variant of tantra prescribes ritual ingestion of the “Five Jewels”: semen, urine, feces, menstrual blood, and phlegm.