Images of yoga survive in drawings, paintings, carvings, and sculptures, and entire art gallery and museum exhibitions have been devoted to the history and style of these yogic depictions—although precious little attention to date has been given to their presence as numbered diagrams in early modern printed publications.

This site remedies this lack of attention by cataloging (and translating where applicable) dozens of visual diagrams of yoga that were published by the so-called “Madras Yogi” Sri Sabhapati Swami (ca. 1828-1923/4) and his students between 1880 and 1913.

A handful of Sabhapati’s diagrams were important to an emerging discourse on the “astral” body in theosophical and other esoteric milieus and were reprinted in English and German, but until now the dozens of diagrams from his Indic language works in Tamil, Sanskrit, Hindi, Telugu, and Bengali have been hidden in academic libraries or private archives and have not been widely available for over a century.

All of Sabhapati Swami’s known extant diagrams are here translated, provided with number keys where applicable, and presented freely on this website to the public for the first time.