The Lost Yoga of the West

From Plato to Nirvana

Fyodor Bronnikov - Pythagoreans Celebrate Sunrise (1869)

As long as I can remember, I’ve felt spiritually drawn to India. From reading The Jungle Book as a child, I progressed to the Bhagavad Gita as a starry-eyed 18 year old, and by 19, I found myself enrolled in an upper division Religious Studies course called Spiritual Traditions of India.

In college, I learned about the various schools of Indian philosophy: Yoga, Samkhya, Advaita Vedanta. These philosophies offered something I’d never before encountered: comprehensive systems of thought that attempted to explain the nature of the mind, our relation to God and the cosmos, and how to free ourselves from psychological suffering. I fell in love with these teachings, especially in their wilder, nondualistic forms, as expressed in both the Hindu and Buddhist tantric traditions.

And I learned that yoga was not just a series of physical postures, but a system aimed at spiritual awakening and union with God or ultimate reality.

At age 20, I set out for my first trip to India, spending three months backpacking around the subcontinent in search of enlightenment. I meditated in ashrams, chanted in temples, and survived a tsunami. I only came back when I did because I got sick and ran out of money.

But when I returned from that first trip to India, I felt a certain sadness. As much as I loved Indian culture and spirituality, I realized that it would never be mine—my lineage, my heritage—in the same way that Western culture was. But where was the deep spiritual lineage, the teachings that offered a path to moksha or spiritual liberation—the yoga of the West?

Had it been stamped out by Christianity—or perhaps hidden within it? Had it been lost when the Roman legions slaughtered the druids on the Isle of Anglesey, or when the emperor Theodosius finally shuttered the Eleusinian Mysteries?

Western philosophy felt like nothing but dry intellect to me. I couldn’t find anything in it that was pointing to genuine spiritual awakening or indeed, anything beyond the rational, thinking mind, the one that could uncritically believe “I think, therefore I am.”

Even neopagan teachings like Wicca seemed to lack the depth and rigor that come from thousands of years of continuous study and practice.

Little did I know that there was an authentic Western contemplative tradition, one that went all the way back to the very origins of philosophy in ancient Greece—but had been lost in the mists of time and the vagaries of history.

The Yoga of the West

In recent decades, scholars like the late Peter Kingsley have traced the origins of the earliest Greek philosophers, the Presocratics, to a kind of ancient greek shamanism.

Figures like Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Empedocles—known to most Westerners (if at all) as the fathers of fields like geometry, logic, and rhetoric—were not only philosophers but iatromanteis, “healer-seers” who journeyed in altered states of consciousness and brought back knowledge from the otherworld.

As I wrote in my essay on the cave, Plato’s philosophy has significant parallels with the Indian concepts of Māyā (the illusory nature of reality) and the Buddhist teachings on the “emptiness” of conditioned phenomena. Plato argued that the world we experience is just a shadow of a higher reality (i.e. the “forms”), with the ultimate reality being the One, the ultimate good.

Some of Plato’s followers—known to us as Neoplatonists but to themselves simply as Platonists—took this further. Like the authors of the Corpus Hermeticum, they taught a mystical ascent to the One through various levels of reality.

Plotinus, the most influential Neoplatonist, taught an inward, contemplative path to union with the One, which had five phases and in places, sounds a lot like nondual yoga:

"Phase B, called mystical self-reversion, is described by Mazur as ‘an acute, reflexive re-focusing or concentration of awareness upon itself’ […] The final phase, union with the One, then constitutes ‘an absolute unification, coalescence, or even identity of the mystical aspirant and the One.’” (Newman, 2023, p. 75)

Iamblichus, another Neoplatonist, taught a more active, embodied path of ritual magic known as theurgy (“divine action” or “God work”) that aimed at the same ultimate purpose. The scholar Gregory Shaw has even referred to Iamblichus’ teachings as a form of “Hellenic Tantra,” comparing it to the ritual yogic practices of Indian and Tibetan traditions.

Neoplatonism and theurgy were not only well-known, but influential in the ancient world. No less a figure than Julian, the last pagan Emperor of Rome, studied theurgy with one of Iamblichus’ pupils. (Like Marcus Aurelius before him, Julian was also an initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries.)

After Julian’s death, however, the victory of Christianity was virtually complete, and theurgy fell into disfavor. But Neoplatonism had a profound influence on early Christian teachings, as well as the mystical practices found within the church—such as the Eastern Orthodox tradition of hesychasm, which seeks union with God through inner quiet and meditative prayer. Meanwhile, Iamblichus’ theurgy would go on to influence later thinkers, like the Renaissance philosopher-magician Marsilio Ficino.

Why This Matters

Many of us today are turning to Eastern philosophies and meditation traditions in search of ways to reduce our stress, relieve symptoms of anxiety and depression, to find greater psychological wholeness and even spiritual awakening.

But we should also remember that Western culture has—or at least had—its own contemplative tradition, its own techniques for finding lasting inner peace and union with the One.

Unlike in Eastern traditions like Buddhism, there are no surviving teacher-student lineages going all the way back to Plato. We don’t have the exact meditation instructions taught by Plotinus or Iamblichus.

But perhaps, through our own study and contemplation—and by comparing what we do have left with other traditions—we can reconnect with the lost spirituality at the root of Western civilization, and thus help to heal the “meaning crisis” we’re currently faced with.

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Book I’m Reading

Theurgy Theory & Practice: The Mysteries of the Ascent to the Divine by P.D. Newman. This book, which I just finished reading and which is now covered in sticky tabs and margin notes, was my main source for this essay.

Podcast I’m Listening To

Iamblichus, Theurgy, and the Body: the inimitable Gordon White of the Rune Soup podcast interviews Religious Studies scholar (and former yogi) Gregory Shaw, author of two books on Iamblichus and theurgy.

Quote of the Week

“Every path leading towards spiritual realization requires of man that he strip himself of his ordinary and habitual ego in order that he may truly become ‘himself,’ a transformation which does not take place without the sacrifice of apparent riches and of vain pretensions, and thus not without humiliation.”

—Titus Burckhardt

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That’s all for this week! As always, I appreciate your feedback on Mind, Meaning, and Magic. What was your favorite thing I shared this week? What would you like to learn more about? Let me know by replying to this email or leaving a comment, below.

Thanks for reading,

Chris Cordry, LMFT

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PPS: Next week I’ll be on Kauai, officiating a friend’s wedding. In lieu of an essay like this one, I’m planning to send you a quick postcard from the island. 🏝️