Yoga and Fetishism

Yoga and fetishism: reﬂections
on Marxist social theory

Joseph S. Alt er University of Pittsburgh
Classical social theory – including Marxist social theory – is based on a critique of the relationship
between religion and society. The philosophical underpinning of this is the question of consciousness
and the projection of consciousness onto things. Drawing on contemporary anthropological and
philosophical theories of fetishism, this article engages with Marx’s critique of religion and the
recovery of social value by way of an analysis of yoga. Two interrelated claims are made. First, yoga
represents a paradigm shift in the historical development of religious consciousness. A critical analysis
of this development extends the fetishization of social relations in things to the level of
self-consciousness in the body. Second, a critique of yoga’s fetishization of the body and
consciousness extends and expands Marx’s critique of obscured social value and enables a more
holistic ecological politics concerning the value of life.
Whether one be a god or a tiny insect, the mere fact of existing in time, or having duration, implies
pain. Unlike the gods and other living beings, man possesses the capability of passing beyond his
condition and thus abolishing suffering.
Eliade, Yoga: immortality and freedom (1990: 12)
Imagine a being which is neither an object itself nor has an object. In the first place, such a being
would be the only being; no other being would exist outside it, it would exist in a condition of solitude.
For as soon as there are objects outside me, as soon as I am not alone, I am another, a reality other than
the object outside me.
Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s dialectical and general philosophy’ (2002a: 84)
Introduction: the problem with religion

For Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, the social ontology of religion made the question of
religion’s relationship to experience foundational to the development of social theory
as well as to the politics of knowledge. And although Durkheim and Weber in particular
sought to define religion and various kinds of religious experience in different ways, the
basic structure of the argument in classical social theory – whether focused on social
facts or Verstehen – was binary, with religion being an inclusive category covering
everything from animism to asceticism and magic to mysticism.1 This left no room for
an analysis of phenomena that are – self-consciously – neither religious nor the oppo-
site of religion. Although focusing on the abstract nature of religion, rather than
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

© Royal Anthropological Institute 2006
764 Joseph S. Alter
its constituent elements, Geertz’s definition is similarly broad, open-ended, and implic-
itly binary:
(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and
motivations in men [and women] by (3) formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and
(4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations
seem uniquely realistic (1973: 90).
Definitions are always problematic, but I would like to suggest that an inclusive,
uncritical conceptualization of religion – whether orientated towards meaning or social
function – has inhibited the force of social theory in general and Marxist social theory
in particular. Yoga, as it has developed over the course of several thousand years in what
is now India, and as it has mutated into forms of practice in what is now China – as
chan – and Japan – as zen – is really very different from religion, even though many
forms of practice have been assimilated into institutionalized religion. In essence yoga
can be defined as a form of embodied practice by means of which the illusion of
self-consciousness becomes the truth of enlightenment. In this regard it is unique and
quite different from ritualized forms of practice – including asceticism – that are
meaningful and functional in the context of social life, broadly defined. Given that
yoga, in all its various permutations, is fundamentally anti-social and contrary to the
nature of direct experience, an analysis of yoga done from the vantage point of its
relationship to social formations and social value provides an interesting perspective on
social theory and the politics of knowledge associated with theory. That is the goal of
this article.
In developing this analytical perspective it is important to keep several key points in
mind. First, it is necessary to understand that the term ‘yoga’ is being used here as a
broad, general designation comparable to terms such as ‘religion’, ‘science’, and ‘medi-
cine’, even though the specific kind of yoga being discussed is medieval hatha yoga
(yoga of force; physiological yoga) and those aspects of hatha yoga that derive from
Samkhya philosophy and classical yoga philosophy as articulated in the Yoga-sutra by
Patanjali in the second century CE. This allows for the translation, and transformation,
of a philosophical topic with a long historical trajectory into the subject of anthropo-
logical – although not ethnographic – analysis. Second, up until the beginning of the
twentieth century – and in sharp contrast to what it has become over the course of the
past hundred years – hatha yoga was magical, mystical, structured with reference to
the physiology of sex, and concerned with embodied immortality. It was inherently
physiological rather than metaphysical, even in its most philosophical articulation. In
other words, up until the beginning of the twentieth century yoga was concerned with
the embodied literalization of an alternative reality. My concern is with this kind of
pre-modern hatha yoga practice as reflected in the medieval literature. Third, yoga
fetishizes the body as a whole and parts of the body in relation to one another. To
understand yoga’s self-into-Self transmutation as a fetish is to see in yoga’s literaliza-
tion the outline of a critique of human consciousness and the expression of conscious-
ness as culture. To invert yoga – as Marx sought to invert religion – is to re-orient our
consciousness away from the goal of transcendence to a clearer understanding of the
material essence of our animal nature and a political understanding of our kinship with
other animals. The position taken here is that yoga is the product of human conscious-
ness, and is linked to the truth of experience, rather than to Universal Truth. This

Joseph S. Alter 765
scepticism – directed at human self-deception rather than at any specific cultural

tradition – has political implications.
The differences between Durkheim’s and Marx’s understanding of the relationship
between religion and society are very well known. These differences are also important
and significant for many reasons. There are also problems with both Marx’s and
Durkheim’s understanding of the function of religion, among other things. But under-
lying the differences and problems is a singular idea that religion is a projection of
something more basic and true to the world – social relations. Here is an often-cited
passage from The elementary forms of religious life:
[S]ociety is by no means the illogical and alogical, inconsistent and changeable being that people all
too often like to imagine. Quite the contrary, the collective consciousness is the highest form of
psychic life, for it is a consciousness of consciousness. Being outside and above individual and local
contingencies, collective consciousness sees things only in their permanent and fundamental aspects,
which it crystallizes in ideas that can be communicated. At the same time as it sees from above, its sees
far ahead; at every moment it embraces all known reality (Durkheim 1995: 445).
And here is Marx in ‘Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right’:
Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through
to himself, or has already lost himself again. But, man is no abstract being squatting outside the world.
Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an
inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory
of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur,
its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and
justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not
acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that
world whose spiritual aroma is religion (2002b: 171).2
Religion as inverted consciousness produced by an inverted world provides a clear

indication of how Marx viewed the problem; but also how he viewed the logic of the
problem’s solution: ‘Man, who has found only the reflection of himself in the fantastic
reality of heaven, where he sought a superman, will no longer feel disposed to find the
mere appearance of himself, the non-man [Unmensch], where he seeks and must seek
his true reality’ (2002b: 171). Although here and elsewhere Marx refers to ‘Man’ as a
singular, reflexive, conscious being, it seems clear that ‘Man’ seeks – and ultimately finds
– the truth of the world in social relations in general and the social relations of labour
that are an expression of the ‘true reality’ that is masked by the reification of things as
real unto themselves. In other words true reality is epiphenomenal to individual con-
sciousness: to be realized it requires a minimum of two.
A being which is not the object of another being therefore presupposes that no objective being exists.
As soon as I have an object, that object has me as its object. But a non-objective being is an unreal,
non-sensuous, merely thought, i.e. merely conceived being, a being of abstraction (2002a: 84).
Further consideration will be given below to the equation of sensuous, material con-
sciousness and social relations, and Marx’s elision of individual embodied conscious-
ness. But the general point to be noted is that radical, revolutionary political action is
necessarily structured with reference to the kind of basic social relations that also
produce religious belief. In reading The holy family, it is apparent that the utopian ideal

766 Joseph S. Alter
of the human element, in being contrasted to alienation manifest in the material,

hinges on social relations and restoration of social value. Religion is not, by any means,
the singular entelechy of these social relations. Like ‘economic categories’, however,
religious categories are the ‘theoretical expressions, the abstractions of ... social
relations’ as such, if not – to follow Marx to the letter – those of production in
particular (Marx 1963: 109). Revolutionary political action, which is orientated towards
the human ideal, does not confront the ontology of the problem of consciousness – and
the projection of consciousness – when it seeks only to recover social value, and does
not more fundamentally direct itself at a redefinition of what it means to be human in
relation to embodied consciousness. In a word, Marx conflates the human and the
social with reference to the (inadequate) problematization of religion.
As I think a subtle reading shows, this is ultimately a key problem – perhaps the most
basic philosophical problem – that concerned Marx. However, he confused religion
with the essence of human consciousness and human experience, just as Durkheim
rhetorically blurred religion, collective consciousness, and the ability of the sociological
imagination to comprehend ‘all known reality’. For both, albeit in different ways, ‘the
social’ – if not society in fact – came to define the clearest expression of human
consciousness. What is not problematized in these socio-centric formulations is the
nature of the self in relation to consciousness, even though, on some level, it is the self
– as the consciousness of a material being squatting in the world, to adapt Marx’s
rhetoric – that seeks its true reality. The problem of consciousness is the problem of
human identity, and the question of human self-consciousness relates to the political
problem of our relationship to the world at large, including, but extending well beyond,
the narrowly circumscribed conceit of our species-specific social relations. Thus one
can add substance and more grounded theoretical justification to the sentiment
expressed by Engels when he wrote of his ‘withering contempt for the idealistic exal-
tation of man over other animals’ (Marx & Engels 1975: 102).3
So if religion is society in the well-crafted, often self-deceiving guise of the divine, is
it possible that, in that which defines itself as profoundly transcendental – and thus
‘beyond religion’ – there is, in fact, a more elemental process of transformation in the
relationship between what people do and think and the reality they construct? If those
ineffable marks on the aboriginal Churinga, cryptically coded, almost erased, and
protected by taboo, are, as Durkheim famously pointed out, society writ obscurely and
ineffably large (1995: 118-23), then what does the body of the all-alone adept represent?
In particular, what does it represent when it reaches the final goal of transcendence and
no longer exists as such, but only exists as material traces of representation in the form
of words – ‘enlightenment,’ ‘samadhi’ (enstasy), ‘moksa’ (liberation), ‘kaivalya’ (alone-
ness; Ultimate Reality) – the very etching of which might be considered, if not taboo,
than at least a kind of incidental profanity.4
Redefining what it means to be radically – and revolutionarily – human in relation
to consciousness is one of the most important points made by Donna Haraway in her
widely read essay ‘A cyborg manifesto’ (1991). Here she argues that it is virtually
impossible to define the uniqueness of humans on the basis of their difference from
animals; impossible to distinguish between organism and machine; and impossible to
know what counts as nature, or tell the difference between what is physical and what is
not physical (1991: 151-3). The cyborg embodies the tension that these real impossibili-
ties reflect, and Haraway’s main point is that a new kind of politics can emerge out of
the way in which we as cyborgs – human, animal, and machine hybrids – embody a

Joseph S. Alter 767
sense of self that is not based on duality and opposition. In many respects Haraway’s
characterization of cyborg ambiguity relates directly to a theme that is perhaps more
obviously South Asian: the transformation and transmogrification of animals, humans,
plants, genders, and gods in Hindu mythology. One need only think of the most
obvious cases – the elephant-headed god Ganesh and the monkey god Hanuman – to
appreciate the point. As a number of scholars have shown – but no one so well as
Wendy Doniger (1980; 1981) – tremendous articulations of power abide in the symbol-
ism of androgyny and other ‘unnatural’ reformations of nature. In this context,
however, the cyborg provides a better point of reference simply because mythology is
purely symbolic whereas yoga is real in practice and manifest as such in the natural
world.
Haraway’s manifesto draws directly on a radical reconceptualization of the self as
straining against the kind of duality that is inherent in the structure of power in
religion:
The self is the One who is not dominated, who knows that by the service of the other, the other is the
one who holds the future, who knows that by the experience of domination, which gives the lie to the
autonomy of the self. To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to be One is to
be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse with the other. Yet to be other is to
be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial. One is too few. But two are too many
(1991: 177).
The cyborg self is, in other words, a powerfully twisted fetishized self that reflects itself
in the other, and the other in itself, but never perfectly, and never conclusively. It breaks
apart the notion of stable social formations, and opens up a new point of orientation
for being human in relation to the world at large.
Although Haraway characterizes the cyborg as radically postmodern, my argument
is that the logic inherent in cyborg politics is very old. The hybridity of self/other at the
core of cyborg ontology is linked to a distinctly pre-modern history that takes issue
with the relationship between society and religion and the human/nature dialectic that
underlies this relationship. By examining medieval hatha yoga in light of cyborg ontol-
ogy, my goal is to work towards a better understanding of the nature of this self as it
provides a means by which to think about social theory without having to ‘think
through’ the prismatic of religion. The structural similarity between a ‘person’ who has
perfected the techniques of yoga and a ‘person’ who is a cyborg can be outlined
schematically: the hybridity of personal, alchemical, and transcendent selves in yoga
compares directly with the cyborg hybridity of animal, human, and machine entities.
Where the cyborg blurs natural boundaries and confuses categories, the yogi blurs the
boundaries between biology, cosmology, and consciousness. To appreciate the signifi-
cance of this entails revisiting questions of magic and religion in relation to social facts
and embodied experience.
Fetishism embodied
In an arena where very little is definitive, one of the defining features of yoga is that it
is not religious. Certainly as Whicher (1998: 83-7) and others (Eliade 1990: 73-6) point
out, the principle of devotion is important to yoga practice. Similarly, Fort (1998: 80-3)
and Chapple (1996) make it clear that there are obvious parallels between yoga, Shan-
kara’s classical Advaita philosophy, Ramanuja’s Vashishtadvaita, and Siva Siddhantha,

768 Joseph S. Alter
among other articulations of spiritual knowledge that focus on the problem of jivan-
mukti (living liberation). But yoga transcends religion by making spirituality a means
rather than an end. Moreover, in what is a significant point around which my argument
hinges – and which relates directly to the hybridity of cyborg ontology – god and
human beings are of the same material nature. Referring to the role of god in yoga as
‘comparatively small’ – and elsewhere as a ‘perfectly useless element’ introduced by
Patanjali (Eliade 1990: 74) – Eliade points out that
Isvara [god] is a purusa [person] that has been free since all eternity, never touched by the klesas
[afflictions] [Yoga Sutra I:24] ... [He] has none of the grandeur of the omnipotent Creator-God, none
of the pathos that surrounds the dynamic and solemn God of various mystical schools. All in all,
Isvara is only an archetype of the yogin – a macroyogin (1990: 74-5).
Beyond the specific question of god, yoga is thought to be the very antithesis of
ritual. It is that which is capable of taking one out of samskara (ritual), on the one hand,
and samsara (the flow of phenomenal existence), on the other. It stands as the binary
opposite of the classical Vedic sacrifice, in the sense of being its purely self-contained,
internalized, self-referential form. It removes the practitioner from a whole panoply of
exchange relationships and transaction-orientated obligations that bind him or her to
other people, social groups, and religious institutions and to various manifestations of
god. This is true not only on the level of dharma (right action), wherein the idea of
liberation involves liberation from the illusion of right action, but also in terms of the
body’s relationship to ritual action. As Eliade puts it: ‘If, in Vedic sacrifice, the gods are
offered soma [nectar of immortality], melted butter, and sacred fire, in the practice of
asceticism they are offered an “inner sacrifice,” in which physiological functions take
the place of libations and ritual objects’ (1990: 111; see also Whicher 1998: 12-13). David
G. White makes the point this way:
Of vital importance to the yogic tradition is the fact that the sacrificial fires in question are gathered
together within one’s body. There, they serve both as cremation pyre – by which the now-obsolete
mundane, social body is shown to have truly died to the world – and, in the postcrematory existence
of the sannyasin (the ‘renouncer’), as the seat of sacrifice, which has now been internalized. It is here,
in the inner fires of tapas, which fuel the offerings of one’s vital breaths in the inner sacrifice known
as the pranagnihotra, that the practice of yoga very likely had its theoretical origins (1996: 281).
The internalization of the sacrifice transforms a paradigmatically social act into one
that is putatively asocial in its orientation of self to Self.
What yoga seems to do is establish a transcendent union between the core of
personal being and the absolute extent of existential being as such. Thereby it redefines
meaning in terms of a purely reflexive microcosmic/macrocosmic dialectic. This dia-
lectic, as manifest in practice, obviates society both in the most concrete sense of that
term as meaning social relations, and in the most abstract, philosophical sense of the
term as meaning order. For the practitioner of yoga, being alone is the structural
equivalent of being part of a social community for which the meta-referent is religion.
The yogi sits alone in the full and critically important axiomatic sense of that term as
it stands in direct opposition to all other signifiers that are inherently social – this is the
essence of kaivalya (aloneness; Ultimate Reality). But – and it is a critical but – the
all-alone adept is where he is only in relation to the world at large: that is, in relation to
everything. Otherwise his being alone would have no point of reference; no real
meaning.

Joseph S. Alter 769
And hand in glove with the embodiment of fetishized representations of Ultimate

Reality there is also the problem of magic and the power manifest in magic which seems
to cling to the practice of yoga, almost like a drag against transcendence; a drag that
functions as a sign of much greater things to come, but which, as such, turns – to the
delight and wonder of some, and the distinct embarrassment of others – the meta-
physics of enlightenment into a kind of supernatural side-show complete with levita-
tion, clairvoyance, and other breathless, heart-stopping feats which break the laws of
physics. What is to be made of the adept’s siddhi (magic; super-natural) powers as they
are acquired almost coincidentally – and as impediments5 – in the process of coming to
see all creation as a grand illusion;6 an illusion, where, among a host of quotidian,
common-place things that constitute everyday experience – hunger, or violence, let us
say – society takes the form of god, money has value unto itself, and people are willing
to sacrifice, in the name of god and country, their own and other people’s lives to
unreal, imaginary things like the state. This is the world of maya (illusion). What
perspective does embodied magic give us on this reality that is not really real?
Reacting to an Orientalist legacy, recent scholarship has pointed out that the idea
of moksa (liberation), reflecting an enlightened realization that reality is unreal, does
not mean that the concept of maya, or its various cognates, is world-negating (see
Whicher 1995). Although the concept of maya is metaphysical and might appear to be
hyper-ideal, in fact it refers to a condition of existential materialism wherein the body
is regarded less as that which inhibits enlightenment and more as a thing whose very
flaws provide the means by which to achieve transcendence. Though itself an illusion,
the body contains within itself the potential energy of enlightenment.7 Materially
speaking, maya produces the seeds of its own destruction, and the means of its own
reproduction, as something that is natural but also something that transcends the
duality of nature. In an important way moksa is not a soteriological concept insofar
as there can be no consciousness of it in terms of desire, and the experience itself
leads not to the transformation of a person in space and time, but to the transfor-
mation of space and time. As stated in the Yoga Vāsishtha Laghu (1896), it is realiza-
tion on a plane where there is neither bondage nor liberation. Moksa derives from
maya, and therefore only the dynamic of reflection can be signified. Unto itself as a
thing-that-is-not-a-thing, moksa remains entirely obscure, at least from the vantage
point of those who have not experienced it. The point is that this unsignifiability is
a product of the body, as the body is packed full of meaning that can, in fact, be
substantiated.
It is the relationship between this fluid range of embodied meaning-that-can-be-
substantiated, on the one hand, and, on the other, the unsignifiability of yoga’s final-
goal-as-it-is produced-in-the-body that I wish to explore through the medium of the
fetish – a thing which brings magic to life and makes life magical; a concept that gives
form to illusion and makes form illusory. As Michael Taussig puts it, talking about the
word ‘fetish’ itself as an idea-thing which brings with it, from the beginning – when it
‘was god,’ so to speak – into the present, the trace residue of its etymology:
What is left, active and powerful, is the word itself – enigmatically incomplete. Just the signifier, we
could say, bereft of its erased significations gathered and dissipated through the mists of trade,
religion, witchcraft, slavery, and what has come to be called science – and this is precisely the formal
mechanism of fetishism (as we see it used by Marx and Freud), whereby the signifier depends upon
yet erases its signification (1993: 225).

770 Joseph S. Alter
The fetish is, in some sense, the lynchpin of religion. But it also figures prominently
in the history of Western thought, and is central to Freudian psychoanalysis and
Marxism, as well as to the ideologies of sexuality and capitalism with which Freud and
Marx engaged. In the social sciences more broadly, the fetish – in both general
and specific terms – lies at the very heart of Durkheimian sociology. In articulating the
enigmatic nature of Durkheim’s study of religion and society, and in extracting the
brilliance of his reasoning from the numbing empiricism of a positivist sociology –
bent on nailing down the facticity of social facts as simply things – Taussig puts it
this way:
[T]his brilliance was not the result of a step-by-step development from social fact as things to social
fact as moral web and the fetishization of Society (as deus), but instead, it was the result of a specific
epistemic tension within the very notion of the Social as both thing and godly at one and the same
time. In other words, far from being an unfortunate side-effect, it was Durkheim’s very fetishization
of ‘society’ that provided the intellectual power of his sociology. Reification-and-fetishism – res and
deus – was a powerful mode of reckoning ... and Durkheim was correct in problematizing – to the
degree of fanaticism – the invisible presence, the intangibility, the literally unspeakable but begging to
be spoken nature of ‘society’ (1993: 229).
As William Pietz has shown in his study of fetishism and materialism (1993), the idea
of the fetish has a complex genealogy rooted in colonial practice, and is, in essence the
essential product of a profound encounter with difference and the need people felt to
make links between themselves and others – economic and political, for the most part
– and yet maintain distinctions. Whereas Pietz provides a genealogy of the fetish in all
of its minute detail, Taussig has, over the past several years, both refined and compli-
cated the analytical utility of fetishism – as a concept thing – by applying it to the study
of those numerous points of intersection among magic, colonialism, capitalism and
the state.
The practical value of the fetish as an analytical term is that it is confusing – in a
transitive rather than pejoratively intransitive sense – and thereby precisely able to
engage with and help make sense of historical reality, as that reality is shot through with
ad hoc contingency, happenstance ambiguity, and outright deception, as well as
mundane illusion. In his discussion of the development of the idea of fetishism, Pietz
shows how Marx appreciated the ‘subversively materialist implications’ manifest in
Hegel’s notion of a ‘religion of sensuous desire’ rooted in the natural consciousness of
humankind (1993: 14).8 Building on this, and making it the basis of praxis,
Marx evoked the ‘savage’ subject of religious fetishism as a (potentially theoretical) viewpoint outside
capitalism capable of recognizing proletarians in their objective social identity as the economic class
owning no marketable private property other than their own embodied being and ‘its’ capacity for
concrete productive activity, and therefore as the one identity within civil society in which true human
being (that is, sensuous, embodied, living being) appears (1993: 144).
What is striking here is that what is articulated as a critique of capitalism can be

extended outward to become a profound critique of culture as such, as culture is
displaced from grounded, sensual human experience onto ideas or material things. The
‘itness’ of embodied being gives form to an identity which society constructs in the
form of reified culture. Speaking of the broad-spectrum significance of fetishism, Emily
Apter writes that

Joseph S. Alter 771
the etymological origins and philosophical history of the word itself point to the artifice (facticius)
present in virtually all forms of cultural representation ... [F]etishism as a discourse weds its own
negative history as a synonym for sorcery and witchcraft (feticaria) to an outlaw strategy of dereifi-
cation ... Fetishism, in spite of itself, unfixes representations even as it enables them to become
monolithic ‘signs’ of culture (1993: 3).
Along these lines it is remarkable to read – through Pietz’s reading of Livingston and
Benton’s reading of Marx as informed by Meister’s reading of Hegel – the way in which
materialism, sensuality, and phenomenology informed Marx’s understanding of the
human subject. Sounding both like and unlike a Buddhist, as well as anticipating Freud,
Marx writes, about political economy, rather than, as it might seem, about sexuality,
To be sensuous, i.e. to be real, is to be an object of sense, a sensuous object, and thus to have sensuous
objects outside oneself, objects of one’s sense perception. To be sensuous is to suffer (to be subjected
to the actions of another). Man as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering being, and
because he feels his suffering, he is a passionate being. Passion is man’s essential power vigorously
striving to attain its object (Pietz 1993: 144).
Focusing clearly on the transitive, action-orientated form of being as praxis, Pietz

fleshes this critical point out as follows: ‘Marx conceived human being as an essentially
active, material being, one whose objects are sensuous objects and whose bodily life and
personal self are “produced” in a single process: labor as praxis’ (1993: 144). The
communist ideal is, thus, not an ideal at all – at least in the sense of idealism, utopian
or otherwise – but an embodied, sensuous state of being in the world. For Marx the
significant thing was to see how this embodied state enabled one to see value as a social
substance as manifest in the fetishization of material things, and replace human con-
sciousness with the being of social reality.
But what if social reality, as the product of passionate suffering, is understood as an
illusion par excellence? And what if those sensuous objects are not outside one’s self,
and therefore not set in place to define the building blocks of revolutionary conscious-
ness and the praxis of struggle? What if, to adapt Apter’s terminology, an embodied
state of being human ‘unfixes’ the monolithic sign of social value itself? What if, in other
words, the body – and all of its various parts – is an object unto itself where the ‘signifier
depends upon yet erases its signification’, and both are the same thing? Addressing these
questions show how, in yoga, the material body is implicated in enlightenment, and
how the fetish power of enlightenment, as something one step beyond magic and
religion, reflects a critical – and potentially revolutionary – state of being human in
the world.
The argument here is that social life, as the product of objective consciousness, does
not constitute the base-line of reality, and that the self as an object unto itself can be
understood as a fetish that derives from consciousness, and the desire to transcend
consciousness. When this happens, the fetishized world that is a reflection of self-
consciousness – culture, let us say – implodes and the body becomes a highly reified,
extremely fetishized ideathing that gives form to a desire for transcendence, and stands
in relation to enlightenment much in the same way as disembodied fetishes – the
Churinga, for example – stand in relation to society and social facts. But the body is not
a stable form so much as a thing of action, and so in yoga the body and all it represents
must be understood as a process – a thing in transformation. As such, what seems to
happen is that, as the adept becomes more and more isolated, more and more alone,

772 Joseph S. Alter
and closer and closer to the final goal of self-realization, the body becomes, ironically,
more and more reified, and increasingly more monolithic until it loses all significance
and becomes meaningless. What this means is that, from the vantage point of the
‘deluded masses’, yoga looks more and more absurd as the signified paramatma (Uni-
versal Self) – which is really unsignifiable – appears to take shape in the atmic (egoic)
body of the signifier, which appears to be real unto itself and the world it inhabits.
Unlike the god of religion, yogic enlightenment, regardless of how it is valued, is
inherently antisocial and therefore meaningless from the standpoint of society. As
Eliade puts it, ‘All of the yogic techniques invite to one and the same gesture – to
do exactly the opposite of what human nature forces one to do’ (1990: 96). The
de-reification of anti-human enlightenment points not to a thing as such – community
– but to the idea of a thing that is always just out of sight and just beyond reach: pure
self-awareness. This de-reification points at once to the hopelessness of pure subjec-
tivity – a human apart from society – and a hoped-for subjectivity that can emerge
from under the fetish of society and culture as ideathings unto themselves. Thus it is
possible to extend the critique beyond religion and to something more fundamental
than social value. To adapt Marx, once the Self is truly recognized as a reflection of the
self, the self itself will no longer be ‘where [Man] seeks and must seek his true reality’.
But for this to happen, key secrets about the nature of the self must be spoken about,
but never at the same time.
Asceticism, yoga, and the body

David White’s monumental study of alchemy in medieval India (1996), following
directly in line with Eliade’s classic analysis (1990), shows that hatha yoga developed in
tandem with Siddha alchemy and is intimately linked to the physiological principles of
tantra (see also Briggs 1938; Lorenzen 1972). Before looking at the way in which the
practice of hatha yoga entails the embodied union of self with Self – and the way in
which, even when revealed, this must be kept absolutely secret – it is necessary to trace
the historical disarticulation of asceticism and yogic self-discipline.9
According to most sources, hatha yoga was developed as a mode of comprehensive
self-discipline first by Matsyendra in the tenth century and was then formalized in the
early eleventh century by his disciple Gorakshnath (Feuerstein 2001: 386). Gorakshnath
is also credited with founding the Kanphata order, a ‘sect’ of yogis whose name signifies
the way in which their ear lobes are split. Although often referred to as an order or sect
within the broader Shaivite tradition, it is important to compare and contrast what
yogis were doing in relation to what ascetics were doing at about the same time: the
point being that although hatha yoga clearly emerges out of ascetic practice, it repre-
sents a radical shift away from the structural relationship of asceticism to religion and
ritual. In essence the development of hatha yoga out of ritualized asceticism should be
understood as a paradigm shift that defined a new way to articulate human experience
– and the relationship between humans and the world – that is neither secular nor
spiritual. Realizing that it cannot succumb to the fate of even the most radically
agnostic ‘religion’, hatha yoga defines the internalized means to the end that Gautama
was ultimately not able to achieve in the early fifth century BCE through his original,
uncompromising, abnegation and self-mortification.
Beginning around the 2nd century CE, a number of very self-consciously extreme
and esoteric ascetic orders came into being in what is now South Asia. Most likely
they came into being in response to what were perceived to be the limitations of

Joseph S. Alter 773
institutionalized Vedic religious practice.10 One of the first of these was the Pashupatas,
thought to have been founded by Lakulin, a Shivite ascetic. In iconography Lakulin is
often depicted seated in a padamasana (lotus posture) holding a club in one hand and
a citron in the other. His penis is often erect. According to one source this symbolizes
‘mastery of the sexual drive and the conversion of semen into mysterious ojas, or subtle
vitality, that is an important part of the alchemical processes occurring in the body of
the Yoga adept’ (Feuerstein 2001: 260).
Aside from how this defines Pashupatas as proto-yogis, what is particularly note-
worthy is the way in which the followers of Lakulin did not just renounce the world, but
very self-consciously went about flaunting social conventions – talking nonsense,
making rude gestures – and acting like animals – babbling, snorting, and walking in
strange ways. Although these practices may well have been intended as a means to the
end of achieving greater humility (Feuerstein 2001: 260) and, ultimately, experiencing
the end of all suffering through the grace of Lord Shiva, it is important to realize the
extent to which ‘the end of all suffering’ was achieved by perverting social facts. In some
respects it is possible to see how the Pashupatas were intent on taking issue with their
status as human beings defined in terms of social and cultural conventions. This is
coded directly into their name: pashu means animal or beast. Among the animals the
Pashupatas counted all creatures locked in the cycle of karmic births, including human
beings. If what might be called mimetic animalism was at one end of the spectrum, at
the opposite end was a kind of radical theism. Lord Shiva – Pashupati, Lord of the
Animals – was conceptualized as an all-powerful god completely separate from the
created world. As such his power was independent of karmic law and his will was not
structured by distinctions such as those between good and evil. The structural rela-
tionship between radical theism and radical, anti-social behaviour is an important one.
It leads directly to the formalization of hatha yoga as such.
If anything, the Kapalikas, who came into being around the fifth century CE, and
whose name means skull-bearers, were even more extreme than the Pashupatas.11 As
Feuerstein puts it:
The purpose of all the Kapalika rites12 was to achieve communion with god through which the
practitioner acquired both super-human power (siddhi) and liberation. They offered human flesh in
their ceremonies and have been accused – probably rightly – of occasionally performing human
sacrifice (2001: 262).
Clearly human sacrifice and flesh-eating are highly ritualized forms of counter-
cultural practice that may well be regarded as ‘a terrible regression from the high
moral sensibility achieved in Buddhist and Jain communities’ (Feuerstein 2001: 262).
But instead of seeing them as evil incarnate, and even instead of seeing them as
rituals with social significance, it is useful to think about them with reference to a
kind of idealism that was – perhaps desperately and fanatically, but also logically –
seeking to give itself literalized, material form. It was, in a non-pejorative rather than
pejorative sense (see Feuerstein 2001: 262), a return to Upanashadic, and perhaps
shamanic, literalism.
There is, I think, a logical progression from animalistic behaviour and the definition
of human beings as animals, in which meat consumption may be seen as a kind of
proxy cannibalism wherein pashu eats pashu, to literal, species-specific cannibalism.
Whatever the moral judgement assigned to the activity – and it was, most certainly,

774 Joseph S. Alter
meant to pervert social value in a very direct and unambiguous way – human sacrifice
was an advancement in the progression of religious ritual to its absolute and ultimate
extent. In Durkheimian terms it may be understood as the zenith of religious thought
made manifest, insofar as it brings reification and fetishization into the same concep-
tual space – a social being sacrificed to a god that is, in essence, the principle of that
social being: the process of erasure is made manifest as it is erased.
The Aghori order of ascetics emerged out of the Kapalika sect. Although there is no
need to continue ranking on a scale of relative extremism, Feuerstein characterizes their
beliefs and practice as follows: ‘The Aghoris ... aspire to obliterate all human-made
institutions in their way of life. Thus, they live on cremation grounds or on dunghills,
drink liquor and urine as readily as water, and break all social conventions by eating
meat and the flesh of human corpses’ (2001: 203).
The broader pattern in the development of these institutions of ascetic renunciation
is quite clear, and has been analysed by a number of scholars. For example, Jonathan
Parry (1982; 1994) provides one of the most persuasive and rich interpretations,
showing how various aspects of practice – including the ingestion of flesh – can be
interpreted as a form of gift exchange, by means of the removal of pollution, in the
context of the structural relationship between householders and world-renouncers.
This follows in line with arguments about this relationship that have been made by
Dumont (1970), Heesterman (1985; 1993), and others (Das 1983).
What I think needs to be emphasized, however, is the way in which the develop-
ment of hatha yoga by Gorakshnath and other Kanphatas during and immediately
following the rise and fall of the Kapalika sect must be understood with regard to the
problematic relationship between asceticism, religious ritual, and the formal and
informal institutions of social life and culture during the time between the Gupta and
Chola dynasties.13 A direct engagement with the ‘problem of society’, and with social
relations as the putative base-line of human experience, leads to a conceptualization
of god as ever more terrible, horrific, and so increasingly all-powerful as to transcend
normal human comprehension. As humans become anti-social, god is conceptualized
as so powerful that he becomes Reality apart from religious belief and ritualized
practice.
Extreme asceticism in the middle of the first millennium defined, in some ways, the
limit of religious understanding: Ultimate Reality and Absolute Truth conceived of in
terms of an incomprehensibly divine principle. Although many scholars have noted
that it developed out of the beliefs and practices of Kapalikas and Siddha alchemists,
few have made note of the way in which hatha yoga, as an embodied form of practice,
is a radical shift in orientation and priorities. According to Eliade, hatha yoga is the
enstatic, internalized embodiment of ecstasy. As the etymology of the word itself
indicates, ecstasy is fundamentally an out-of-body spiritual experience orientated
towards divine power. But enstasy does not depend on the grace of god. It is inherent
in the monistic link between self and Self, and the mechanism of this link is ontologi-
cally both human and supra-human. As will become clear in a moment, it is also an
experience that is grounded in the nature of plants and animals.
In all probability, god died in northeast India sometime in the middle of the tenth
century, not, as Nietzsche famously proclaimed, in Germany at the end of the nine-
teenth. And the death of god in northern Bengal – if that is where Matsyendra was from
– gave birth to hatha yoga, even if various aspects of asana (seat; physical posture) and
pranayama (breathing exercise) were manifest in earlier forms of ascetic practice.

Joseph S. Alter 775
Extreme asceticism and ritualism were internalized in the body of the adept. Yoga both
destroys and perfects the body and both rejects and incarnates a basic principle of being
– the perfected self. With the death of god – at least in Bengal if not Germany – came
the radical problematization – and fetishization – of the embodied relationship
between self and Ultimate Reality.
The proto-social self: the gross physiology of subtle mimeses

All of the extant works on hatha yoga were composed by Natha Siddhas. David G.
White goes so far as to say that ‘hatha yoga is often nothing more than a projection of
alchemical discourse onto the human body. The human body is an alchemical body’
(1996: 57). More than anything else what this indicates is the intimate link between
magic and yoga, and – ambiguous artefactual seals from the Indus Civilization not-
withstanding14 – the relatively recent development of asana (postures) and pranayama
(breathing techniques). Keeping in mind the problem of imposing more recent icons
on earlier forms, it should be pointed out that the earliest reference to ‘yogic positions’
is roughly a thousand years after the date of the iconic terracotta seal from the Indus
Civilization – well after the first mention of Lord Shiva. As White points out: ‘Sometime
in the fourteenth century, we witness the gradual disappearance of tantric alchemy and
the appropriation of its techniques and goals of transmutation and transubstantiation
by other Indian systems of thought and practice, both old and new’ (1996: 55).
In the Siddha tradition, which is where hatha yoga was most systematically devel-
oped, mercurial preparations were consumed in tandem with yogic exercises so as to
achieve immortality. The idea was to systematically isolate, seal off, and ultimately stop
the flow of all embodied substances. Given the solidly grounded and rigorous methods
of tantric alchemy, which was richly empirical in the sense of dealing with botany,
chemistry, and mineralogy (White 1996: 54), it is not surprising that hatha yoga was
conceived of in terms of a kind of fluid biology. Central to this biology, as White makes
very clear, is the idea that semen and mercury are one and the same thing in essence.
Thus hatha yoga or ‘the method of violent exertion’ boils down to the forceful internal
ejaculation of semen into the cranial vault, from where it drips down – after being
transmuted into an elixir – onto the tongue of the adept, who thereby achieves ever-
lasting life.
Although one can trace the symbolism of this concern with immortality further
back in time as it compares with the structure of sacrifice in Vedic literature and with
mythic cosmology, it is significant that what the Natha Siddhas were doing was devising
physical exercises. Thus, in an important sense, the materialism inherent in alchemy
provided a framework for thinking about the bio-chemistry of embodied transubstan-
tiation and the real possibility of magic: the phenomenal realization of what is thought
to be epiphenomenal; the experience of what is paranormal as normal. Given the
vernacular form of all of their works, White characterizes the Natha Siddhas as dis-
tinctly non-elite and clearly out of the mainstream of religious and philosophical
orthodoxy. In sharp contrast to developments in brahmanical ritual practice, as ‘tech-
nicians of the concrete’, Natha Siddhas were concerned with worldly power (White
1996: 7). ‘Theirs has always been a path to mastery and raw, unadulterated power –
mastery over the forces of nature ...’ (White 1996: 7-8).
This concern with supernatural power as it is thought to derive from ancient and
occult tantric practices has meant that, over the years, Natha Siddhas have suffered a
degree of prejudicial ridicule. As White puts it, ‘their “Yoga” is more closely identified,

776 Joseph S. Alter
in the jaundiced eyes of their critics, with black magic, sorcery, sexual perversion, and
the subversion of alimentary prohibitions, rather than with the practice of Yoga in the
conventional sense of the term’ (1996: 8).15 Leaving aside the question of what yoga is in
any conventional sense, what I would like to explore is the way in which the Natha
Siddhas – however counter-cultural and perhaps even revolutionary they might have
been – were confronted with the following vexing problem: whatever its relationship to
the Self, the self stands in a material relationship with the world at large, and the
embodiment of immortality instantiates that fact just as it transcends it. In other words
they were confronted with the problem of the ontological materialism of idealism.
Given their concern with worldly power, and their explicit, conscious rejection of
society, the Natha Siddhas did not so much problematize renunciation as directly
engage with the problem – enstatically embodied – of their physiological relationship
to the world at large.
The Hathayogapradipika, one of the three key texts emerging out of a medieval
tradition of practice, engages directly with magic. In this context the body – that thing
saturated with sensuality and thereby intimately engaged with suffering, as Marx put it
– provides the basis for a revolutionary struggle to recover human consciousness from
within the illusory, artefactually distorted institutions of social life. Karmic cyclical
revolutions notwithstanding – and having been transcended in any case – the body is,
in some sense, the basis of revolutionary praxis since it is basic to life itself. In Marx’s
formulation – which derives as much from Descartes as from Feuerbach in this regard,
although not consciously (see Foster 2000: 68-71) – the body is the basis of praxis as a
consequence of ‘the ultimate objects of sensuous desire’ being outside, and categorically
separate from, one’s own embodied self. One senses the natural world as different
from oneself, while understanding that world in terms of the natural truth of sense
perception.
It is precisely for this reason that it is important to understand embodiment as an act
with profound political and ethical significance. But the locus of politics shifts with the
locus of objectification and subjective reification. As reflected in the Natha Siddhas’
concern with semen, the objects of passionate suffering are inside the body, as the body
is imbricated in consciousness. Thus, in terms of sensual phenomenology, the embod-
ied self is increasingly dislocated from the world as it moves towards transcendent
consciousness. To understand transcendent consciousness as a fetish relocates the body
in the world, and this relocation has political and ethical consequences similar to those
that attend to the recovery of social value.
Conclusion: yoga and the (re)union of humans with other forms of life
Recent scholarship has drawn attention to an incipient environmentalism or ecological
politics in Marx’s writing (Burkett 1999; Foster 2000). This emerges from his under-
standing of the relationship between the body and nature.
Nature is man’s inorganic body, that is to say nature in so far as it is not the human body. Man lives
from nature, i.e. nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to
die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked
to itself, for man is part of nature (Marx 2002c: 122).
For Marx, the relationship was direct, but mediated by consciousness. This is what
distinguished the species-being life activity of humans from that of the animal, which

Joseph S. Alter 777
‘is immediately one with its life activity’ (2002c: 123). What are the politics of this
immediacy and the alienation of our species-being from it?
Many aspects of yoga have not been critically analysed, but one in particular is the
relationship between humans and other forms of life. There is an important and
growing body of scholarship on Hinduism and ecology, which has a direct bearing on
this question (Chapple & Tucker 2000; Nelson 1998); however, my concern is not in
identifying the basis for an ecological politics within the framework of yoga – as yoga
relates to Hindu beliefs and practices – but in reading it against the grain of its own
logic. Beyond the fairly obvious deployment of ‘sacredness and purity’ in activist
ecological politics, I do not think it is particularly useful to identify the way in which
claims can be made on behalf of Hinduism – or any other system of religious beliefs
– to effect ecological transformation, or even to define the problem of ecology
as such.
Yoga philosophy recognizes important differences between various forms of life,
and these differences make it possible for humans alone to achieve liberation. But the
logic of liberation also defines the logic of radical holism, since the cycle of births
and deaths – from which one is liberated – defines the seamless continuity of life.
From the vantage point of yoga, the continuity of life is understood in terms of
prakritic materialism manifest in the form of triguna (three psycho-somatic strands):
sattva (purity and radiance), rajas (action), and tamas (dullness). All life is consti-
tuted by the ongoing modification of these strands relative to one another through
time. Difference emerges as a consequence of the way in which direct experience of
‘the ultimate state of matter’ (Jacobsen 2002: 242) is mediated through sense percep-
tion. Senses distort reality, and the distortion takes numerous different forms
depending on the form of life in question. This is part of the multi-dimensional
illusion of maya.
Reality, as humans perceive it, is a modification of triguna as it appears to our species and is dependent
on the power of our sense capacities. We perceive according to the competence of the organs ... To
define reality as that which appears for humans is to identify the experience of one species with the
whole of reality. Insects, plants, and [non-human] animals, have different experiences according to the
capacities of their sense organs ... Human experience is not therefore the ‘true experience’ of reality as
compared to the experience of trees, cats or divinities. The concept of maya, therefore, challenges the
anthropocentric view of the world, which privileges human interests (Jacobsen 2002: 242).
To achieve liberation entails separation and isolation from the inherent interdepen-
dency that characterizes the relationship between all life forms. In yoga the basic
mechanism for achieving isolation is ahimsa (non-violence) since non-violence breaks
the ‘food chain’ that makes one form of life dependent on another. Ahimsa, in this
sense, derives from pure self-interest rather than from an ethics of altruism; the end of
pain and suffering is achieved not by means of gentle kindness but by means of a radical
withdrawal of the senses and dissociation from matter. If the world of maya is, in fact,
real – or, more properly, an inverted reflection of reality, in the way Marx saw the
relationship between religion and the world – then the challenge it poses to anthropo-
centrism in the domain of grand illusion can be understood as the basis for a real
politics of consciousness and conscience.
As in Marx’s interpretation of religion – where the fetish is played off against itself
so as to reorientate the truth of the world – an interpretation of yoga shows how the
embodiment of enlightenment reflects a real challenge to anthropocentrism.

778 Joseph S. Alter
It is important to understand that the figure of ‘Man’ that Marx was writing with
reference to is clearly the product of the Enlightenment and understood within the
broad parameters of humanism, and the relationship between humanism and religion.
And although there are very important ways in which Indian thought and European
philosophy intersected – particularly with reference to Schelling, Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, and Hegel in particular (Halbfass 1988) – yoga did not emerge in this
environment and did not take shape with reference to the same figure of Man. Nor is
yoga itself revolutionary; rather, it stands in a refracted relationship to the world as it is
and as it should be.
A key point of reference for this refraction is a concept of the person, if not Man as
such, since yoga manipulates both the essence and categories that constitute a person.
Here the work of McKim Marriott (1990) is most directly relevant. As Marriott has
pointed out, and as a number of his students have elaborated, an important – if not
necessarily pervasive – concept of the post-Samkhyan person in South Asia is struc-
tured with reference to the fluidity of dividual elements, and the interplay of substances
that bind people together to various degrees. Regardless of the extent to which it is
possible to generalize this formulation across time, space, and context, a matrix of
extreme transitivity, on the one hand, and radical self-contained monism, on the other,
most certainly defines the figure of the person against which the project of yoga may be
read. The way in which yoga seeks to immobilize semen, breath, and consciousness to
produce embodied immortality invokes a whole world – and a social world at that – of
time-bound, fluid, transitive movement against which isolated, self-contained immo-
bility makes sense. On a more specific level the logic behind dividual transubstantiation
and the question of the relative degree to which a person can or cannot change her- or
himself is a logic that can be extended beyond the boundary of a species-specific
person.
There are many different points of entry into this, but the most logical is with
regard to asana postures and pranayama since they reflect the most direct relation-
ship between the domains of subtle and gross physiology. As Eliade points out,
asana and pranayama, the primary techniques of hatha yoga, are designed to be
contrary to the nature of normal human action and experience. Asana and
pranayama purposefully abolish the ‘modalities of human existence’ (1990: 54-5). Sig-
nificantly, this happens through and in the body, as the body becomes increasingly
concentrated.
While the exercise continues, the yogin’s sensation of his body is wholly different from that of the
noninitiate. Bodily stability, retardation of the respiratory rhythm, narrowing of the field of con-
sciousness until it coincides with a point, together with the resultant vibration set up within him by
the pulsation of the inward life – all this apparently assimilates the yogin to a plant ... [T]he
vegetable modality is not an impoverishment, but, quite the contrary, an enrichment of life
(1990: 66).
Although in this formulation the iconic padmasana – lotus posture – is literalized, as

the body in fact becomes the lotus that symbolizes the matrix of creation, it is inter-
esting to note that there is a close correlation between asana and a range of different life
forms, but animals in particular. According to the Gherandasamhita (1996), the number
of possible postures is exactly equal to the number of different classes of living things
– 840,000. However, only thirty-two of these are ‘useful for mankind in the world’ (2.2).

Joseph S. Alter 779
Of these fifteen are postures that reflect the form of animals. It seems quite clear that
hatha yoga engages with the problem of transcending the world by embodying the
diversity of life forms that constitute the illusion of maya. Underlying diversity is the
fact that all forms of life are of the same material essence, which makes the dynamic of
mimesis more intimate and more literal.
On one level the transparent literalism of asana performance is obvious. While
doing a svanasana, one looks like a dog stretching; while doing a salabhasana, one looks
like a locust; while doing a kukkutasana, one looks like a rooster, and so forth. On this
level the body transforms the scope of illusion into a series of singular representations.
It is a kind of literalism that reflects the nature of the illusion. Based on a contrived
mimicry of form, it is a real illusion of the illusion that appears to be real. On another,
closely related level, however, the transparent, material literalism of yoga is completely
obscured. On this level everything is a secret, but only paradoxically so – for the secret
is kept and told at the same time.
The logic of secrecy has been studied in some detail by scholars of South Asian
religion given the fact that it is a central feature of initiation rites and the transmission
of sacred knowledge, particularly with reference to tantra (see, e.g., Bledsoe 2000;
Feuerstein 1998; Muller-Ortega 1990; Urban 2003). Secrecy is a tremendously powerful
mechanism in the representation of truth (Taussig 1999), and it is the only mechanism
for the representation of the inherently obscure and unsignifiable truth about Ultimate
Reality. In yoga, secrecy mediates the relationship between the body, magical power,
and transcendent consciousness. It is what prevents the whole thing from devolving
into the domain of physiological literalism. Thus the Hathyogapradipika (1997) points
out that yoga is powerful if kept secret, but rendered impotent if revealed (1.11). The text
then proceeds to reveal – but obviously not really reveal – how to practise asana and
pranayama, among other things. Many of the procedures are said to produce super-
natural power, cure some or all diseases, and/or produce enlightenment. Consider the
cobra pose, bhujangasana:
From the navel downwards to the toes, let the body touch the ground. Place the palms on the ground
and rise up the upper portion of the body like a serpent. This is called the serpent-posture. It increases
bodily heat, destroys all diseases, and awakens the kundalini [serpent power] (2.42-3).
The power of secrecy lies in the fact that if one does not experience these results, then
one does not understand, or as yet cannot understand, the secret. And this directly
relates to the first principle of yoga: the flow of existence is perceived to be real as a
consequence of avidya (ignorance). Just as ignorance is universalized and reflects
powerlessness, secrecy – not the secret itself, but secrecy – is the totalized, reductive,
omnipotent source of power in the world. It is endlessly compelling. Speaking about
the body, it is the very language of transcendence. It disconnects the body from nature.
Once it is recognized that there is no secret, one is not just left with the literalism of
yoga – which would be rather banal – but with the question of what confusion led to
the fantastic mis-conceptualization of life as suffering and pain; of the grounded
experience of reality as a grand illusion? Ultimately this confusion is a cultural confu-
sion, and so a critique of enlightenment turns into a critique of culture, in the com-
prehensive sense of culture being that which makes us human and thereby putatively
superior to other forms of life. The revelation of the secret that does justice to the power
of its enchantment – to apply Taussig’s (1999) reading of Benjamin – is that maya is in

780 Joseph S. Alter
fact the truth of the world. Being a more profound critique of unreality than it is a
critique of religion, and being more directly concerned with what is sensuously per-
ceptible in the relationship of ‘Man’ to the essential being of nature, a critique of yoga
points in the direction of a revolutionary goal for human development – one that
includes many more sentient things than humans.
Atheism, as a denial of this inessentiality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of
God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer
stands in any need of such a mediation. It proceeds from the practically and theoretically sensuous
consciousness of man and of nature as the essence. Socialism is man’s positive self-consciousness, no
longer mediated through the annulment of religion, just as real life is man’s positive reality, no
longer mediated through the annulment of private property, through communism. Communism is
the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next
stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and recovery. Communism
is the necessary pattern and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism is not
as such the goal of human development – the structure of human society (Marx 1961: 114, original
emphasis).
In trying to interpret this rather inconclusive conclusion, it is useful – as I have tried to

do here – to think about a logic of consciousness that is more basic to experience than
religion, and a critique of that consciousness that is not rooted in social value, com-
munism notwithstanding.
It is significant that Marx’s critique of religion that initiates a ‘struggle against that
world whose spiritual aroma is religion’ (2002b: 170) develops as a consequence of a
reflection becoming visible as a reflection. Religion provides Marx with a critical means
by which to understand reification and the transposition of value from social relations
to things. Fetishism, broadly understood, allows for an analytical reversal of this logic
and the political recovery of social value. Directed at the reification of self-into-Self
transcendental consciousness, a critical analysis of yoga’s fetishization reveals the
outline of a more encompassing politics. The next step is to flesh it out.
NOTES
1
Clearly it is possible to make arguments for a clear distinction between magic and religion, and to
formulate definitions that are substantive, formal, meaning-orientated, or functional in orientation.
However, even the least strict delineation and most parsimonious definition fail to make the difference clear
and unambiguous.
2
It is interesting to note that Marx’s often quoted – and mis-quoted – reference to religion as the opiate
of the masses has a long and curiously relevant genealogy. Hegel’s reference derives from Le Gobien and Bayle
via Diderot, who used the opium metaphor to characterize the illusory and delusional religious practices of
Brahmins (Halbfass 1988: 59-60).
3
Foster quotes this passage, but claims that ‘[t]here is no trace in Marx and Engels of the Cartesian
reduction of animals to mere machines’ (2000: 166). I think this assessment is too definitive and that Marx
and Engels did not conclusively theorize the human/animal distinction.
4
Here Durkheim’s discussion of asceticism and the ‘negative’ cults is relevant. To at least some degree it is
important to note that in sociological terms yoga’s rejection of life as we know it through our senses involves
the logic of asceticism, even though, in terms of institutionalized practice, asceticism and yoga should not be
confused (1995: 314-21).
5
As Whicher points out, ‘the siddhis, misunderstood as an end in themselves, are a form of possessive or
obsessive power in that the attachment to their pursuit only furthers egoic states’ (1998: 113).
6
My use of the word ‘illusion’ needs to be qualified. Although it evokes an idealist view of the world as
really unreal in relation to Ultimate Reality, it is important to keep in mind that illusion is active rather than
passive. Illusions are created, and this sense of the term is referenced in the pre-Vedantic yoga literature,
where the meaning of maya is very much linked to the prakrtic (elementally natural) domain of devolved

Joseph S. Alter 781
existence, but is understood as ‘creative power’ that is manifest in the gunic (stranded) elements (see
Feuerstein 1990: 218). As Eliade puts it:
Vedanta ... seeking to avoid the difficulty of the relations between the soul and the universe, denies the
reality of the universe and regards it as maya, illusion. Samkhya and Yoga have been unwilling to deny
ontological reality either to Spirit or Substance. Hence Samkhya has been attacked, principally because
of this doctrine, by both Vedanta and Buddhism (1990: 32).
7
In this sense maya is very much the same as parinama (transformation) insofar as the latter defines the
structure of change and transformation that is characteristic of prakrti (elemental nature) in contrast to the
immutability and changelessness of purusa (transcendental Self) (see Feuerstein 1990: 253-4; Whicher 1998:
63-4, 154-72).
8
Space does not allow for what would be the logical tack to take at this juncture – a full and critical
re-evaluation of Hegel’s analysis of Indian philosophy. Nevertheless some key points should be noted. For
Hegel, Indian philosophy was inherently religious, and both religion and philosophy were intimately con-
cerned with substance; Indian philosophy’s orientation towards the singular Universal was not reconciled
with ‘the concrete particularity of the world’; and the ‘negative attitude’ that is fundamental to yoga negates
‘the dialectical interplay of subject and object, and the creative self-explication of man in history’ (Halbfass
1988: 84-99). It would also be interesting to read Hegel’s The phenomenology of mind in light of the Yoga-sutra,
and commentaries on the Yoga-sutra, specifically as concerns Hegel’s notion of self-consciousness, Spirit and
Absolute Knowledge (Hegel 1967: 455-679, 789-808).
9
It is important to keep in mind how Buddhist teaching also defines an important framework for under-
standing the development of asceticism and yoga philosophy. However, at issue here is the embodied self, and
this is most clearly linked, directly, to the development of extreme asceticism in the middle of the first
millennium. Ultimately, although Buddhism anticipates the discipline of the embodied self, it remains
fundamentally a structured – and by definition non-extreme – form of ascetic idealism focused much more
clearly on meditation than on embodiment.
10
Broadly speaking, the ferment of ideas associated with these sects may be referred to as tantric. As Hugh
Urban has shown, however, tantra is an ambiguous term: ‘[O]ne is hard pressed to find any clear definition
of tantra in these [Hindu] texts, much less any notion of larger movement or tradition conceived as
“Tantrism” ’ (2003: 31). Tantrism has come to mean something very specific in the context of Indian
modernity, but with reference to what was going on in the first millennium it is more appropriate to talk in
terms of specific groups doing specific ritualized things. If there is a single term that encompasses the
movement as a whole it is kaula, and it is important to underscore the way in which kaula derives from
religion, but is conceived of as a superior, more powerful route to experiencing Reality.
11
The most comprehensive account of the Kapalikas is David Lorenzen’s The Kapalikas and Kalamukhas
(1972). See Hugh Urban’s discussion of Kapalikas and Pashupatas – among other sects – in the context of
so-called ‘tantrism’, particularly his analysis of the representation of the activities of members of these groups
from the vantage point of those who conceived of themselves as being normal, civilized, and well socialized
(2003: 36-7, 106-33).
12
Including the notorious five Ms of tantrism: maithuna (‘intercourse’), matsya (fish), mansa (‘flesh’),
mudra (‘parched grain’), and mada (‘wine’).
13
David G. White provides a succinct account of the probable historical relationship between these early
sects and the emergence of the Natha Siddha tradition, emphasizing the way in which it should be under-
stood as the convergence of Shaivite asceticism and Siddha alchemy (1996: 97-101).
14
Romila Thapar writes:
Much speculation focuses on whether a seated figure on a seal represents a proto-Shiva. The identi-
fication of the figure is uncertain and the evidence for the link with Shiva is tenuous. It would perhaps
be more apposite to regard these representations as contributing to the evolution of a later religious
mythology and iconography, rather than insisting that a later icon be imposed on an earlier period ...
The figure could equally well be identified as depicting a yogic position (2002: 86).
15
This, of course, is a specific instance of the broader discourse against so-called ‘tantrism’ that was
generated by Orientalists and reformers in colonial India (Urban 2003).
REFERENCES
Apter, E.S. 1993. Introduction. In Fetishism as cultural discourse (eds) E.S. Apter & W. Pietz, 1-9. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.

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Bledsoe, B. 2000. An advertised secret: the goddess Taleju and the King of Kathmandu. In Tantra in practice
(ed.) D.G. White, 195-205. Princeton: University Press.
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Yoga et fétichisme : réﬂexions sur la théorie sociale marxiste
Résumé
La théorie sociale classique, y compris marxiste, est basée sur une critique de la relation entre religion et
société. La toile de fond philosophique qui sous-tend cette problématique est celle de la conscience et de
sa projection dans les choses. À partir des théories anthropologiques et philosophiques actuelles du
fétichisme, l’auteur aborde la critique de la religion par Marx et la récupération de la valeur sociale par une
analyse du yoga. Il formule deux hypothèses interdépendantes : d’une part, le yoga représenterait un
changement paradigmatique dans le développement historique de la conscience religieuse. Une analyse
critique de cette évolution étend la fétichisation des relations sociales dans les objets au niveau de
conscience de soi dans le corps. D’autre part, une critique de la fétichisation du corps et de la conscience
dans le yoga étend et élargit la critique par Marx de la valeur sociale obscurcie et rend possible une
politique écologique plus holistique concernant la valeur de la vie.
Joseph S. Alter is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. Among his publications are Asian
medicine and globalization (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), Yoga in modern India: the body between
philosophy and science (Princeton University Press, 2004), and Gandhi’s body: sex, diet and the politics of
nationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).
Department of Anthropology, 3302 Wesley W. Posvar Hall, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA 15260, USA.
jsalter+@pitt.edu


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Yoga and fetishism: reﬂections

on Marxist social theory

Introduction: the problem with religion

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

scepticism – directed at human self-deception rather than at any specific cultural

And here is Marx in ‘Critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right’:

Religion as inverted consciousness produced by an inverted world provides a clear

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

of the human element, in being contrasted to alienation manifest in the material,

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

And hand in glove with the embodiment of fetishized representations of Ultimate

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

What is striking here is that what is articulated as a critique of capitalism can be

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

Focusing clearly on the transitive, action-orientated form of being as praxis, Pietz

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

Asceticism, yoga, and the body

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

The proto-social self: the gross physiology of subtle mimeses

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

Although in this formulation the iconic padmasana – lotus posture – is literalized, as

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

In trying to interpret this rather inconclusive conclusion, it is useful – as I have tried to

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

Yoga et fétichisme : réﬂexions sur la théorie sociale marxiste

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12, 763-783

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