This book examines the history of Kundalini yoga (including how Yogi Bhajan made it a global brand)

If there is one single name that is today associated with the practice of Kundalini in the marketplace of popular spirituality, it is Yogi Bhajan (1929–2004). Born Harbhajan Singh Puri to a Punjabi Sikh family, Yogi Bhajan arrived in North America in 1968 and quickly established himself as a teacher of yoga. The myth behind the man tells of Yogi Bhajan’s tutelage, as a young boy, under a Sikh spiritual master named Sant Hazara Singh, who, through strict discipline and instruction so stern it bordered on brutal, inducted his student into the martial art of gatakā as well as the spiritual disciplines of “White Tantric Yoga” and “Kundalini Yoga.” The discipleship reached its conclusion when the young Harbhajan was only sixteen, at which point Hazara Singh confirmed him a master of Kuṇḍalinī and declared that student and teacher were not to meet again. This made Yogi Bhajan the last link in the “Golden Chain” of an esoteric lineage of Kuṇḍalinī practice, stretching back to time immemorial.

However, as Philip Deslippe has shown, the claims to lineage and antiquity made by Yogi Bhajan and canonised by his disciples are historically questionable at best. This is not a unique fault. Any guru on the landscape of...

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