Our Elsewheres: Excerpt From Flying Yoginis, By Irwin Allan Sealy

The yogini is not a gymnosophist but an engineer of body and soul. As adepts who acquire rare skills through self‑discipline, yoginis are revered by the masses. Many wish to emulate them, but few succeed. Seekers, however, have a quality of their own: persistence. Hence the yogini temple. Such temples, distinct from shrines built to house gods, began to appear around a thousand years ago, with the yoginis often arranged in a circle so that the petitioner could make a votive circumambulation. In the north, such temples as survive are hypaethral, open to the sky, a henge of stone whose ambit a visitor would walk in quest of yogic power. Yoginis and the unorthodox rites associated with them may well go further back, to a solitary figure scratched on a cave wall or set in some village niche. Her sex, open like a door into infinity, need not be a mother goddess; she might be a respected witch whose local magic is the key to earthly power. 

Magic is lay intransigence in the face of priestcraft. A little tradition of ghosts and hobgoblins, yakshis and yakshas has always survived beside the great faiths, tugging them back into line from time to time. The appearance of the yogini has been linked with tantric practices about the middle of the first millennium, when gods were beginning to petrify in every sense. Rituals aimed at allowing the devotee to experience godhead in her own way transgressed the norms of orthodox piety. Tantrism is commonly perceived as a debased version of higher forms of worship, yet for the fifth‑century scholar Panini, tantra is the loom on which a person weaves himself or herself. A thousand years later, the poet‑saint Kabir speaks to the hearts of ordinary persons hungry for unmediated access to God. Poem after poem upends fixed notions of the Indian personality as a construct eternally embedded in family and tradition. “Take your fate in your own hands,” Kabir urges, mocking godmen of every stripe. It is an old and inward voice, another of those recusant folkways a jobbing priest would gladly expunge. The yogini and the tantric join with the poet in flouting orthodoxy, their rites conducted in obscure crannies of the sacred. But the rebel takes a risk. Many of the surviving yogini statues come to us vandalized. The lopped‑off arms and legs and heads were once attributed to invading idol‑breakers, but scholars now think the vandals may have been nearer neighbours on the rampage. In their deliberate defiance of Brahminic lore, these do‑it‑yourself amateurs invited the wrath of the powerful. The revenge of clerics is as sudden as their memory is long. 

Yet the spirit violently checked in one place can survive to evolve in another. Take the plastic form of the yogini. Late in her formal evolution, when the sex is hidden and only the breasts mark her as female, she acquires a beauty and selfhood distinctly human. Unlike apsaras—those synchronized swimmers of the ether—and unlike the identical angels of European painting, yoginis are plainly individuals. Unlike the aloof and generic gods of the Hindu pantheon, they are singular, credible women; in their individuality lies their power. A certain uniqueness always clings to the yogini and sets her apart from canonical goddesses. With goddesses, whose aspects and attributes are fixed, the sculptor’s style is cramped. With yoginis he has licence. Let her be his fiftieth yogini: a master confronting a block of granite will have a fresh image in his eye each time. Every yogini comes out a unicum, an inspired chance, unrepeatable. Often portrayed with fangs, she may equally wear a beatific smile. But the smile, when she wears one, is guarded. The yogini is never vapid; the artist has felt her power. Something of her yoga has rubbed off on him. To the diversity of womankind, yoginis add a notable commonality: hidden strength. Yet each one will manifest this in an individual way. 

A yogini is already a special case. She comes with no apron strings and has likely severed many domestic ties in her pursuit of yogic perfection. Not everyone is cut out for yoga, and of those who are, few have the devotion or the stamina to practise the art with such intensity that they acquire special powers. It takes an uncommon woman to make the grade. Of course, not the fruit of your action but the action itself counts in these matters, so the powers are incidental. Yet for those armed with patience and courage there awaits a state of being that ordinary humans can marvel at without envy but never without awe. Flying through the air is the least part of it. When a yogin told the Buddha it had taken him twelve years to learn to walk on water, the master reproached him with wasting his time. For a small coin, said the Buddha, a ferryman would have taken him across the river. Pity the yogin out to impress: concerned to persuade and to profit, he is the original zealot. Penance, not yoga, is his lot, like those self‑flagellant sages of old, stockpiling power and blazing with vengeance. A flying yogin would bomb and strafe and lay waste; better he walk on water. 

Getting there is not, as travellers pretend, the thing. Being there is. Even arriving is presumably a moment too soon; only after you have settled in are you installed. Then you may levitate or not as you please, if pleasing still preoccupies a self that has arrived there. The state is one of profound ambiguity, neither here nor there, but a little of each. Chiefly it is a third thing, which long schooling in logic has conditioned us to overlook. Neither goddesses nor ordinary women, the yoginis are emblems of that tormenting in‑betweenness that brought forth mermaids, sphinxes, griffons and every twilit chimera. Not fish, not fowl, these creatures of the interstice invite us to reconsider our supposed completeness: the sphinx is neither lion nor man but something unto itself. Yoginis signal not so much a middle ground as a new country that will make our present habitation look stilted, gross and awry. 

Excerpted with permission from Seagull Books.