Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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The Largest Claim in the Posture Chapter

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The Largest Claim in the Posture Chapter

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika describes mayurasana as the palms placed on the ground, the elbows planted against the sides of the navel, and the whole body raised horizontal and straight like a staff, carried on the arms alone. The Gheranda Samhita carries it too, so it belongs to the shared stock behind both manuals.

Svatmarama then makes the strongest claim in his posture chapter. He says the posture destroys disorders of the spleen and the stomach, overcomes disease arising from imbalance of the humours, and digests even food that is deadly. The atlas records those as the text's statements. They are not repeated here as effects, and nothing in this entry should be read as a health claim; the atlas describes what a fifteenth century Sanskrit manual asserts about a posture, which is a fact about the manual.

The claim is worth noticing precisely because it is extreme. Assertions of this kind are a feature of the genre, and they sit alongside the corpus's wider promises about the perfected body, freedom from ageing and freedom from death. Reading them as pharmacological statements misunderstands what the compilers were doing, and reading them as mere hyperbole misses that the tradition meant them. The historian's job here is to report the claim accurately and to say who is making it, which is what this entry does.

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