41. Keith Edward Cantú | The History of Theosophy and Yoga

In this episode we welcome back Keith Cantú for a wide ranging
conversation on the history of the Theosophical Society and in
particular its unique relationship with the modern history of
yoga. We discuss the influence of figures like Helena Blavatsky
and Henry Steel Olcott, as well as lesser-known South Asian
Theosophists and Theosophy-adjacent authors and scholars. We
discuss the impact of Theosophical publications on the global
dissemination of yoga in English-print books and journals, a
legacy still felt today in modern yoga circles. We conclude the
conversation by previewing Keith's upcoming online course, YS 126
| Theosophy and Yoga.


Speaker Bio


Dr. Keith Edward Cantú is a historian of religions whose
interdisciplinary research especially focuses on South Asian
yoga, tantra, and the interface between Sanskrit and Indic
vernacular languages like Bengali, Tamil, and Hindi, and on
modern occult movements in Europe and North America such as
Thelema and the Theosophical Society. He is currently both
Research Affiliate at the Center for the Study of World Religions
at Harvard Divinity School, where he will begin a full-time
postdoctoral fellowship in Asian Religious Traditions next June
as part of the Transcendence and Transformation Initiative, and
Visiting Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at St. Lawrence
University. He previously was a research fellow at FAU
Erlangen-Nürnberg in the “Center for Advanced Studies in the
Humanities and Social Sciences: Esoteric Practices and
Alternative Rationalities from a Global Perspective” and
Assistant Professor (postdoc) at the Jagiellonian University in
Kraków, Poland in the project “Cultures of Patronage: India
1674–1890,” and received his doctoral degree in Religious Studies
(South Asian religions) in 2021 from the University of
California, Santa Barbara. Keith’s first monograph, Like a Tree
Universally Spread: Sri Sabhapati Swami and Śivarājayoga, has
been published this year by Oxford University Press (Oxford
Studies in Western Esotericism series), and he is actively
engaged in reprinting and translating several previously unknown
or largely forgotten Tamil and Hindi works of Sri Sabhapati Swami
and of his gurus. In addition to work on the swami, he is the
author of numerous chapters and articles as varied as an
ethnography of Tantric songs and sādhana or “practice” in
Bengali, Indological research on south Indian mantra and yoga
practices at tumuli and temples and on the Sanskrit alchemical
mythology of Srisailam, modern yoga and discourses of Orientalism
and cultural authenticity, haṭhayoga as “black magic” in
Theosophy, and Islamic esotericism in the songs of the Bāuls and
Fakirs of Bengal.

A scholar-musician, Keith regularly sings and performs the Bāul
songs of the nineteenth-century Bengali humanist poet Lalon Fakir
(Lālan Phakir, d. 1890) as well as Śyāmāsaṅgīt or “music for the
dark Goddess,” which he learned directly from sadhus and sadhikas
during immersive stays in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India over
the past twelve years, and regularly co-teaches a course on
Tantric meditation and its connection with this music at the
Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California. English versions of
many of Lalon’s songs as translated by the late Carol Salomon can
be found in City of Mirrors: Songs of Lālan Sā̃i, published in
2017 with Oxford's South Asia Research series, which Keith
co-edited together with Dr. Saymon Zakaria.



Links


YS 126 | Theosophy and Yoga

https://ucsb.academia.edu/KeithCantu 

YSP Ep 28 | Esotericism, Bauls, and Sabhapati Swami