Old Prose: "The Serpent's Tale" by Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen

[ecosophia]

As I noted late last month, this journal is starting to get a little thin now that both the regular forums hosted here have gone to one post a month, and I've started a sequence of book reviews -- more or less whatever I've been reading of late -- under the label "Old Prose." This one's a treat. 
 

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In recent years, competent scholarly studies of occult topics have become a little less rare than they once were. It's still a genuine pleasure to encounter one. That's what happened last month when I ducked into a bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina, more or less on the way between a speaking gig and the trip home. The Serpent's Tale: Kundalini, Yoga, and the History of an Experience is a very capable work; in fact, it may just be the best scholarly work on a specific esoteric practice I've yet read. 

 

Its strengths are threefold. First, both the authors are practitioners of kundalini-based practices as well as trained academics. It's only recently that this kind of double qualification has been permitted in academic works on occult topics, and earlier works routinely suffered from embarrassing shortcomings because their authors had no practical experience with what they were talking about; it was all rather like reading pornography written by lifelong virgins. Borkataky-Varma and Foxen, by contrast, have a solid grasp of the experiential as well as the scholarly dimensions of their topic. They don't intrude their personal experiences into the text, but the deft handling of the narratives they discuss show a practitioner's touch. 

 

The book's second strength is more subtle. Most scholarly works in any field tell a story. There's a plotline, sometimes implicit but quite often right out there in plain sight, that provides the armature around which facts are grouped. That's probably inevitable for a storytelling species like ours, and can be a great strength, but it can also lead to unhelpful oversimplifications. That's particularly common in scholarly writing about occultism. What Borkataky-Varma and Foxen do here, by contrast, is something much more difficult and interesting; they talk about how the various competing narratives about kundalini rose and interacted, without privileging any of the voices in the conversation. 

 

This is essential because of one of the core facts about kundalini: there is no one kundalini tradition, no one canonical experience. The current interpretation standard in Western societies -- seven chakras vertically aligned, sensations of fire and light rising up the spinal column, and the rest of it -- is only one of many things stuffed all anyhow into the grab-bag labeled "kundalini." There are respected Indian texts that list more or fewer than seven chakras, and put them in wildly different places. There are teachings, some of them very important in the history of Indian spirituality, that identify kundalini as an obstacle that has to be gotten out of the way in order to achieve enlightenment. There are traditional practices in which kundalini begins its ascent from the heart, or the solar plexus, or the sexual organ of a partner during lovemaking. 

 

It's perhaps the greatest contribution of The Serpent's Tale that it embraces these divergent visions and experiences without trying to impose a fake unity on them. Borkataky-Varma and Foxen treat all the competing versions, from dissident medieval Tantric texts straight through to the latest vagaries of online culture, as equally significant phenomena for the scholar. The result is a solid overview of a tradition too often flattened out into a mental monoculture, and an object lesson on how to look at the genuine diversity of occult theory and practice across times and cultures. 

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I'm curious which Asheville bookstore offered up this gem? I tend to have very sporadic luck shopping in that area.

[ecosophia]

It was at Malaprop's, at 55 Haywood Street. Most of what was there was your standard literary yuppie chow, but they had some pleasant exceptions to that rule.