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This introduction presents the argument and general parameters of the subsequent chapters. It argues that modern postural yoga as practiced in popularized contexts (such as gyms and corporate studios) is only tangentially related to premodern Indian yogic traditions. Broadly, it makes the case that the dynamics of cross-cultural translation necessitate that we examine both the original and host context of the concept or practice in question. It then outlines the main areas that must be considered in framing such an argument, specifically the difficulty of defining yoga, the historical role of Orientalism, the definition of “harmonialism,” and the issues surrounding gender, race, class, and white supremacy.

Chapter 1 establishes the origins of harmonial ideas in antiquity, focusing primarily on the Greek and later more broadly Hellenic world, and especially on thought of the Pythagorean, Platonic, Aritotelian, and Stoic traditions, ranging approximately from 500 BCE to 500 CE. It starts by exploring the evolution of cosmological ideas of harmony (harmonia) and sympathy (sympatheia) on the one hand, and spirit (pneuma) and its relationship to notions of the soul (psyche) on the other. It then proceeds to focus on the idea of a subtle body and the two spheres in which its utility has been explored: religious soteriology (or theurgy) and medical theory and practice.

Chapter 2 traces harmonial ideas from the end of antiquity through the metaphysically based religious and mind cure movements of the nineteenth century. It begins by briefly surveying developments in the early Islamic world and medieval Europe before proceeding to explore astrological medicine and theurgy in the European Renaissance, focusing primarily on the spiritus theory of Marsilio Ficino. It further argues that the legacy of astrological medicine on the one hand and theurgy on the other can be found in the eighteenth-century movements founded by Franz Anton Mesmer and Emanuel Swedenborg, respectively. It concludes by examining the reconvergence of these two strains of thought in the New Thought movement of the late nineteenth century, focusing chiefly on the work of Warren Felt Evans, which synthesizes Swedenborgian ideas with contemporary medical thought, including the importance of breath and physical culture.

Chapter 4 examines American Delsarteism as a form of harmonialism, positioning it between harmonial breath and movement practices being advocated within the broader New Thought movement and the development of modern dance. It focuses on the work of Genevieve Stebbins, whose use of esotericism closely connects her to prominent proponents of New Thought such as Warren Felt Evans, but whose influence on women such as Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis makes her something of a grandmother of modern dance. It then traces the innovations within American Delsarteism exemplified by Stebbins into Duncan’s work, which exhibits a strong esotericist influence and a harmonial subcurrent. In this context, it points out the lack of Asian content in these formulations as they culminate in Duncan’s strong Hellenic neoclassicism. Finally, it positions St. Denis as a contrast to Duncan’s Hellenism by focusing on her engagement with a resurgent and popularly explosive Orientalism.

Chapter 6 examines the effect of historical dynamics upon the development of modern yoga practice, in the United States and Europe as well as India. Indian yogis were intimately familiar not only with Western physical culture but also Western metaphysical traditions. For this reason, one finds a diffusion of Western harmonial language into the writings on Indian yogis, where such terms are used to express an entirely different school of metaphysical concepts. This is mirrored by the ways in which Sanskrit terms are being used in Euro-American sources to represent genealogically Western harmonial concepts. The chapter concludes by examining the multiple waves of synthesis affected by later teachers of this hybrid yoga, such as Indra Devi, who found themselves at pains to differentiate between the yogic teachings they brought from India and the naturalized content of the broader harmonial fitness movement.

This short epilogue returns, in broad strokes, to some of the issues explored in the preceding chapters, specifically definition, identity, origins, ideological imperialism, and colonial appropriation. It takes up the issues inherent in treating influence as a mechanical process that represents an objective, accurate, and wholesale transfer of knowledge. It also grapples with the unavoidable issues of personal identity that characterize our engagement, both as scholars and as practitioners, in dealing with culturally complex, situated, and diffuse concepts and practices. Finally, it argues that we should take practices like popular yoga seriously, even as we acknowledge and critique their problematic histories and equally problematic contemporary dynamics.

American religious history is overrun with alternate, hybrid, or personalized cosmologies or metaphysics. In these widespread imaginings of a universe populated by innumerable unseen spirits, religious visionaries have produced elaborate vocabularies and intellectual or symbolic architectures by which to theorize their place in the order of things. This chapter shows that among the more creative and intense religious visionaries of the last century have been jazz musicians, many of whom have authored metaphysical systems that serve simultaneously compositional and speculative purposes. These systems include Ornette Coleman’s Harmolodics, George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept, Anthony Braxton’s Tri-Axium system, and Wadada Leo Smith’s Ankhrasmation. Their efforts, sometimes housed in known religious traditions and elsewhere radically combinative, link up to American harmonialism and to millennia-old ruminations about the sonic nature of the universe.