Old Prose: "The Serpent's Tale" by Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen
May. 12th, 2026 01:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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." * * * * *
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.
It's a little before midnight and
I imagine that by this time all my readers have heard the yelling about a hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius. It's all very familiar stuff for those who remember a certain other virus outbreak not that many years ago: scare stories in the media, a first wave of reassurances from officials that it won't be a serious public health issue, and so on. While we wait to see just how precisely this scare tracks the Covid fiasco of 2019-2023, I'd like to raise a point relevant to some of the ongoing discussions here and on my blog. 
The first Friday this month happened to be May 1, which is a very busy time for Druids! Apologies for not getting this up then. At any rate, welcome to Frugal "First" Friday! T
As many of you will already be aware, these open posts on the Covid fiasco and its aftermath have changed from weekly to monthly; message traffic has decreased far enough at this point that weekly posts get too few comments, but there are still plenty of people who want access to a forum for discussion on that topic not dominated by either of the two heavily promoted narratives -- the medical-industry party line or the conspiracy-culture party line. My current plan is to post a new one of these on the first Tuesday of each month, and keep it open and active until the next one goes up.
It's just past midnight and
This journal is starting to look a little thin since Frugal Friday and the Covid open post both went to once a month, and so I've decided to try something a number of readers have suggested from time to time: little potted reviews of books I've read recently that might be of interest. "Old Prose" will be the label for these, if you want to search for them. 