The Origins of a Famous Yogic/Tantric Image (part 2)

In a post in February this year I talked about the origin and spread of the famous "lines of energy" image.  I asserted that this image was created by or for Yogini Sunita.

I had a memory of having seen the image reproduced in Mircea Eliade's book, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, or in one of Daniélou's books.  I looked at the issues of Eliade's books available to me, and at Daniélou's
Yoga: Mastering the Secrets of Matter and the Universe, that is on my bookshelf, but the image wasn't there.

Now, I can report that I've solved both these puzzles in a stroke.  In the Vienna Indology library last week, I came across an Eliade book that I'd forgotten, Patanjali et le Yoga (Paris, 1962).  And look at the cover!

Eliade reproduces the image inside the book:

Eliade captions the image "La matière, la vie, l'esprit."  As an aside, I have argued and taught in the past that anyone who says "body, mind and spirit" is reproducing a meme from Western New Age thought, and not anything specifically Indian.  The threefold division of Man in the original Sanskrit sources is normally "body, mind and speech."

In the acknowledgements at the back of the book, Eliade attributes this image to Alain Daniélou's "Yoga: Méthode de réintégration (Éditions de l'Arche), pp. 171, 179 et couverture."  Eliade doesn't give a date for the Daniélou edition he copied from, but the edition will turn up sooner or later.  It was first published in 1951.

From http://www.pranayama-yoga.co.uk/

So, this image was used by Daniélou, as early as 1951, and following him, by Eliade in 1962.

The earliest edition of Yogini Sunita's book that I can find is 1965, and she only arrived in England in 1960, and started her first yoga classes that year, as reported in this newspaper clip.

So perhaps the whole story of this image has a prehistory before Yogini Sunita.  Perhaps she reproduced the image from Daniélou, or even Eliade.

Update April 2019

Here's the image in a 1949 English translation of Daniélou's book.  The caption says "with permission from 'Kalyan' Corakhour".  Kalyan was a well-known Sanskrit and Hindi journal published by the Geeta Press in Gorakhpur since 1926.  So the trail now leads to an issue of Kalyan from before 1949.  Some issues have been scanned and are at Archive.org.

Update January 2022

Found it!  After an afternoon of scanning back issues of Kalyan, I located the image in the 1935 issue: 

Unfortunately, the image available in the scan is folded over, so the whole image is not visible.  But the visible parts are definitely identifiable as the bottom half of the famous Danielou-Eliade-Sunita image. It's nice to see that it is in negative, which explains why it was negative in the early reproductions.  This is a bold idea by the Kalyan illustrator.  Later printers have preferred to reverse the image to positive.  In the volume, the illustration is on page 560 and illustrates an article by Svāmī Śrīkṛṣṇacalled "प्राणायामविषयको मेरा अनुभव"(My experience in the area of Prāṇāyāma") (pp. 554-561). 

This issue of Kalyan was dedicated to the theme of Yoga, which is no doubt why it came to Danielou's attention, over ten years later.  It contains other interesting illustrations, including pictures on pp. 389-392 copied without attribution from Haṃsasvarūpa's Ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇa (Muzaffarpur, Bihar: Trikutivilas Press, 1903?).  See Wujastyk 2009: 201-204 for further background on this work 

In the same issue of Kalyan, there is an unexpected article on mesmerism and hypnotism by Dr Durgāśaṅkarajī Nāgara, "मेस्मेरिज्म् और् हिप्नाटिज्म्" (pp. 538-544) that gives a history of the techniques, its use at St Thomas's hospital in London, illustrations of magnets and practitioners, and a discussion of electrical flow, the scientific basis, methods of magnetic pass, deep breathing, etc.