Conclusions

Abstract

Western occultists’ approach to India and her spirituality is rooted in the long tradition of analogical thinking that, together with the practice of concordance, forms the basis on which they build their interpretations, and in particular their claim of the mutual correspondence and similarity between Yoga, Tantra, and the occult. And while this claim, like any other, is open to criticism, what needs emphasizing is that its nature is primarily religious and that methodological conventions and epistemological convictions differ between scientific and religious truth-claims. The contingent nature of human knowledge about reality makes any absolute claim of veracity and objectivity to at least some degree suspicious. There is thus, by that very fact, a place for a Western occultist imagining of India besides other imagined constructs of the same place and its culture. To the degree that there is selection among the data, that there exist personal preferences and agendas, social and cultural influences, sexual and gender conditionings, political motivations, and a host of other factors involved at each and every form of human cognition and expression, what has been conceived of and expressed will be to that degree colored by those factors and in that sense subjectively constructed. There is no India, there are many Indias: the India of a male Brahmin differs and is differently understood, experienced, and imagined than that of an untouchable woman; a Hindu India is not the same as the Muslim India; scholarly India is different from the occult India.