"being Careful With the Goddess: Yoginis in Persian and Arabic Texts”

Notes

[^1] The Travels of Pietro della Valle in India, from the Old English Translation of 1664 by G. Havers, ed. Edward Grey (London:  Hakluyt Society, 1892), I, 106-[^8]:

[^2] C. Micocci, "Della Valle, Pietro," Dizionario Biografico degli Itiliani (Rome:  Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1989), vol. 39, pp. 764-[^68]:

[^3] Ignazio Ciampi, Della vita e delle opere de Pietro Della Valle il pellegrino (Rome:  Tipografia Berbèra, 1880), p. 181, no. [^52]:

[^4] Ettore Rosse, Elenco dei manoscritti persiani della biblioteca Vaticana, Studi e Testi, 136 (Vatican City:  Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1948), pp. 47-[^49]:

[^5] The title Damerdbigiaska given in the passage above is elsewhere transliterated as Kamardinjaska.  The Italian edition of della Valle gives an alternate reading of the title as Kamerdbigiaska, "for thus the Persian copy has it, not being accurate in consonants or vowels" (ibid., I, 108, n. 2).  The valiant effort of Lach and van Kley to see in della Valle's text a Jain treatise (Damerdbigiaska as a corruption of Digambara) is not convincing, though I am indebted to them for this reference to della Valle; see Donald F. Lach and Edwin J. van Kley, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. III, A Century of Advance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. [^658]:

[^6] Kamak Dev, Kamar deni maka [sic], MS 1957-1060/18-1, National Museum, Islamabad, containing six chapters, so cited by Munzawi, IV, 2178, title no. 3944, MS no. [^11777]:  I owe the reconstruction of the term bijaksa to David White of the University of California at Santa Barbara.  The similarity of the letters K, D, and U in a hastily scribbled Persian script helps to explain the confusion, along with the typical metathesis of S and K (bijaska in place of bijaksa) in the representation of Hindi words in Persian script.

[^7] See Rossi, pp. 33-38, 44, 67-68, for della Valle's Persian texts on astronomy and religious disputation.  These include (pp. 35-36) della Valle's own Persian translation of a Latin work on the astronomical theories of Tycho Brahe, composed by him in Goa in [^1624]:

[^8] See my articles "The Islamization of Yoga in the Amrtakunda Translations," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, 13:2 (2003), pp. 199-226; and “Situating Sufism and Yoga,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, 15:1 (2005), pp. 15-[^43]:

[^9] References are provided in Ernst, "Islamization."

[^10] India Office, Ashburner 258, fols. 7a-10b. See E. Denison Ross and Edward G. Browne, Catalogue of Two Collections of Persian and Arabic Manuscripts Preserved in the India Office Library (London:  Eyre and Spottiswode), 1902), p. [^157]:

[^11] In one place (26a) the translator says, "Know that thirty-two verses in the Indian language have been transmitted from the sayings of Kamak.  Now Kamak chose a certain kind from those, and added something else to it, and this poem is called Kamak baray tajanka (?)."  Elsewhere he adds, "This is all a commentary on the thirty-two verses, which someone has written in the Indian language, in which many practices are mentioned, and in which are strange and wonderful sciences which all the practitioners of imagination (wahm) and magicians are agreed upon and pleased with" (29a).  Once (15b) he says, "Now they put this book into 85 verses, and versified it in the Indian language."

[^12] Prior to the 12th century, the terms yogin and yogini primarily designated sorcerers, according to David Gordon White, Kiss of the Yogini: "Tantric Sex" in Its South Asian Contexts (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003) and, p. [^221]:

[^13] In actuality, the shrine of Kamakhya in Assam is characterized by a red arsenic flow that is identified in tantric thought with the menstrual blood of the goddess; see David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Chicago: The University Of Chicago Press, 1996) pp. 195-[^6]:

[^14] White, Kiss, p. [^8]:

[^15] Vidya Dehejia, Yogini Cult and Temples:  A Tantric Tradition (New Delhi:  National Museum, 1986).

[^16] White, Kiss, p. [^60]:

[^17] Dehejia, pp. 30, 36; White, Kiss, p. [^22]:

[^18] Dehejia, pp. 74-[^75]:

[^19] It should be emphasized that there was no universal standard system of numbered cakras; see White, Kiss, p. [^222]:

[^20] See Eliade, Yoga, p. 88, n.

[^21] The Persian scholar Mulla Zayn al-Din of Lar, from whom Pietro della Valle obtained his manuscript of The Kamarupa Seed Syllables in 1622, belonged to a sect "which attributed intelligences to the sun, moon and stars, and venerated them as angels of a superior order who would intercede with God and seek his protection" (J. D. Gurney, "Pietro della Valle: The Limits of Perception," BSOAS XLIX [1986], p. 113).

[^22] al-Ulughkhani, Zafar ul Walih, trans. Lokhandwala, I:333 (Arabic text, p. 417), and I:377 (Arabic text, p. 470), where a Deccani Muslim named Hasan, a specialist in these arts, is called in.

[^23] See my article, "“Accounts of Yogis in Arabic and Persian Historical and Travel Texts,” forthcoming in Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, vol. 32, Yohanon Friedmann Festschrift Volume (2007).

[^24] Simon Digby, "Illustrated Muslim books of omens from Gujarat or Rajasthan," in Indian Art and Connoisseurship:  Essays in Honour of Douglas Barrett, ed. John Guy (Middleton NJ:  Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd., 1995), pp. 342-[^60]: