Who is the Goddess of Yoga?

Or, If there were to be a Goddess of Yoga, who could she be?

Another name for Shiva is Adi Yogi, the eternal or first Yogi. Another name for Shiva is Mahadeva, the greatest god. Shiva is the God of gods. Shiva is also the God of Yoga.

Rishi Patanjali is the Sage of Yoga.

Swami Vivekananda is the modern Guru of Yoga. Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, the Guru of B.K.S. Iyengar, taught at the Vivekananda College in Chennai. Krishnamacharya died 87 years after the passing away of Vivekananda.

Yoga is one of the six schools of the Astika (believer) schools of philosophy. Even Sankhya, considered to be the most rational school, is an Astika one.

(Image above: ’64 Yoginis Homunculus’)

Pondering upon this pantheon of Yoga one sees the inevitable movement of an inquiry: Who is the Goddess of Yoga? More Yoga practitioners and any one on social media may participate with this work. Over the next couple of weeks, this question will be examined with the help of primary research like transliterating portions of the original ancient Sanskrit texts and sample-review of modern scientific studies. Passing micro-reviews will be made of some specific Roman, Greek, and, Mayan traditions. Ultimately, a conclusion will be arrived at in the form of a conjecture. An output will be a non-scholarly article written for easy reading by all. This will be released in public domain under Creative Commons.

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More articles related to Yoga can be listed and read on this website by entering the text ‘Yoga’ in the search box.

The Finishing School of Yoga

For information on the week long finishing course ‘My Yoga Intensive: Unanswered Questions of Yogi (ni) s’ please see here.

Goethe, Shakespeare, and Kalidasa on names

In the play ‘Abhigyan-Shakuntalam’ of Kalidasa (400 C.E.), King Dushyanta forgets the name and identity of Shakuntala. The name is the identity. However, Shakespeare (1564), the Kalidasa of the West, had a different view on names in his play ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Goethe (1749) doesn’t agree with Shakespeare in his play ‘Faust’.

“Juliet:

Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,
And for that name which is no part of thee
Take all myself.

Romeo:

I take thee at thy word:
Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.”

Goethe doesn’t follow this argument of Shakespeare as seen his play ‘Faust’, the following epigram based on Kalidasa’s ‘Abhigyan-Shakuntalam’.

“Wilt thou have charms and delights,
Wilt thou have strength and support,
Wilt thou with one short word encompass the
earth and the heaven,
All is said if I name only, Shakuntla, thee.”

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