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the chauvinistic leanings of old societies. The most radical difference centered on the lifestyles of the men.
    Yogis were often vagabonds who engaged in ritual sex or showmen who contorted their bodies to win alms—even while dedicating their lives to high spirituality. The Punjab yogi was no exception. Chroniclers report that he always did his burial feats “for good compensation,” as one put it. After surviving his forty-day interment, he was presented with a pearl necklace, gold bracelets, pieces of silk, and shawls of a kind “usually conferred by the Princes of India on persons of distinction.”
    Yogis were as much gypsies as circus performers. They read palms, interpreted dreams, and sold charms. The more pious often sat naked—their beards uncut and hair matted—and smeared themselves with ashes from funeral pyres to emphasize the body’s temporality.
    The Kanphata yogis, a large sect, had reputations as child snatchers. To obtain new members, they would adopt orphans and, when the opportunity arose, buy or steal children. Understandably, good families dreaded their presence. At times, bands of yogis would prey on trade caravans and descend onmerchants to extort food and money. When hired as guards, violent orders formed what we would now call protection rackets.
    Some yogis smoked ganja and ate opium. Some carried begging bowls. A few were surely saints. But British officialdom as well as educated Indians came to resent the holy men as not only potentially dangerous but as economic drains on society. A British census summed up the condescension tartly by putting yogis under the heading “miscellaneous and disreputable vagrants.”
    No small part of the disrepute centered on sex. Spiritually, the objective of the yogi was to achieve a blissful state of consciousness in which the male and female aspects of the universe merged into a realization of oneness. That union (the word “yoga” means union) resulted in enlightenment. But a main path was sexual ecstasy—a veiled part of the agenda that modern research has recently uncovered. David Gordon White, one of the field’s preeminent scholars, who teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, noted in a 2006 book that the ancient yogis sought a divine state of consciousness “homologous to the bliss experienced in sexual orgasm.”
    The path to the ecstatic union was known as Tantra. Hugely popular, it rejected the caste system, pulled in converts by the cartload, and gave rise to religious authorities who wrote thousands of texts and commentaries. It reveled in magic, sorcery, divination, ritual worship (especially of goddesses), cultic rites of passage, and sacred sexuality.
    In the West, Tantra is best known as an originator of sexual rites. And rites there were—enough to raise protests from the Hindu and Buddhist orthodoxy of the day. The main charge was that Tantrics indulged in sexual debauchery under the pretext of spirituality.
    So too the Punjab yogi, a good Tantric. As his reputation rose, his behavior became so bad that the maharajah considered throwing him out of the kingdom. But the yogi left of his own accord. He did so with spirits high, eloping to the mountains with a young married woman.
    Over the centuries, Tantra underwent various degradations that reached their nadir with the Aghori—a cannibal sect that ate the flesh of human corpses, drank urine and liquor from human skulls, lived in cremation grounds and dunghills, and reviled all social convention, supposedly to court public disapproval as tests of humility. The primal ascetics also practiced ritual crueltyand seasonal orgies. Scholars of religion tend to avoid the gory details but do mention such things as an Aghori predilection for incest. In any event, the worst behaviors associated with Tantra were so extreme that the overall practice came to be condemned as a threat to society.
    Another way that old yoga differed from our own was its formulation of Hatha—or