Yoga’s ‘Contortionist Turn,’ Pole Acrobatics and Agricultural Festivals: Re-upping Royal Power and Re-ordering the Cosmos

Abstract

High places are intrinsically pure and are therefore considered sacred. This paper extends earlier research into the ‘wrestler’s pole’ (mallakhamb), excavating through millennia and across cultures and continents to better understand the seemingly forgotten aspects of agricultural rituals involving pole climbing acrobatics. Fleeting and often vague mentions in primary texts, footnotes and etchings in caves make for tantalising morsels while exploring the metaphorical fall from grace that ritual pole acrobats have experienced. From prehistoric cave paintings and pole climbing solar rites to more recent ethnographic examples from Central, South and East Asia, the shamanistic ‘ascent to heaven’s end’ is shown to assemble the crowd to look up and marvel at the heavens above. Thus, the acrobat’s unique ritual performance has been an essential, and in many cases the most important, rite that re-orders chaos to ensure royal power, bumper harvests and prosperity for the people. Out of this complex, an argument is set out through the heuristic framing of the Contortionist Turn, which establishes a theoretical path to explain how haṭhayoga’s dynamic postures were influenced by the symbolic capital of the ancient ritual acrobat’s bodily mastery. 

Keywords: Agricultural Festivals, Bamboo, Contortionist Turn, Immortality, Pole Acrobatics, 
Shamanism, Transhumanism, Yoga