Inhaling Spirit: Harmonialism, Orientalism, and the Western Roots of Modern Yoga by Anya P. Foxen (review)

In this valuable contribution to the history of yoga, Foxen uncovers and establishes a Western lineage for the psycho-physical practices that have come to be colloquially called—perhaps inappropriately, Foxen contends—"yoga" in a large part of the world, but especially Europe and America, purposely excluding those schools consciously affiliated with an Indian lineage for the sake of her argument. This history can be subdivided into four dimensions: the exoteric history of "Western" physical practices that come to be associated with modern postural yoga; the esoteric history of Western metaphysical thinking (here termed "harmonialism," following Ahlstrom) underlying such practices; the meeting of these two during the modern period with Indian yoga as physical practice; and the broader assimilation of Indian philosophical and religious ideas.¹ A comparison between Western harmonial and Indian metaphysical views is not pursued, purposefully, in an attempt to circumscribe the specifically Western roots of modern yoga, leaving the issue of deeper metaphysical continuities, substrates, and isomorphisms between Indian and harmonial ideas relatively unexplored.

With regard to the Western history of yogic physical practices—characterized by flow-like sequences of āsanas combined with breathing techniques—Foxen is inspired by Singleton's assertion that "the fitness-oriented yoga available in virtually every health club . . . may represent a direct historical succession from those regimes of New Age, quasi-mystical body conditioning and calisthenics devised exclusively for women in the first half of the twentieth century."² She takes up this idea and attempts to substantiate the claim by delving into this history. The key figures in this story are the nineteenth-century innovators of holistic gymnastics systems, chiefly Pehr Henrik Ling, whose system was influential on subsequent popularizers of female-oriented dance-like calisthenics such as Catherine Beecher and Mary Lyons; Francoise Delsarte, a French composer and musical instructor who developed a widely popular theory of spiritualized bodily aesthetics; those influential in spreading "American Delsarteism" such as Isadora Duncan and Genevieve Stebbins; and lastly, figures in early modern forms of dance like Ruth St. Denis and Marguerite Agniel, who creatively absorbed and performed "yoga" (or rather Indian culture more generally) as dance for largely modern Western audiences.

In India, such gymnastics-oriented practices, as well as other Western physical culture practices like strength training and bodybuilding, became influential on the development of modern Indian yogic systems, alongside indigenous methods of physical culture: club swinging, wrestling, and āsana—many newly innovated but also drawing on haṭha yoga traditions. This occurred in the context of rising nationalism, both in India and the West, that sought to use physical culture as a means of strengthening the body of the nation by strengthening the bodies of its citizens. By contrast, Western physical culture as it was prescribed for women in the nineteenth century emphasized neither physical strength nor endurance (traditionally masculine adaptations) but aesthetics. This took place within a context of perceived female decline in health and vitality, where women were seen as the most susceptible to nervous disorders brought on by modern life-ways. Gymnastics and calisthenic movement practices offered a means of combating this, while conflating aesthetic beauty with health.

All of these figures share not only an influential role in the genesis of the physical aspects of modern postural yoga, Foxen contends, but also a metaphysical outlook, loosely defined and connected not always by actual contact but more so by a "common logic" (154), that of "western harmonialism," which refers broadly to the history of Western esotericism originating with the Greek presocratic philosophers Pythagoras and Empedocles, elaborated by Plato and Aristotle, and continuing in the Italian Renaissance Neoplatonism of Iamblichus, Ficino, and a few centuries later, Swedenborg and Mesmer, "last of the renaissance magi" (90). She cites as its essential features; "an explicit monism . . . rendering the material continuous with the immaterial," an intermediary spiritual reality underlying and linking humanity, divinity, and...