Book Review: The Serpent’s Tale by Sravana Borkataky Varma and Anya Foxen
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Namrata reviews The Serpent’s Tale- Kundalini, Yoga, and the History of an Experience (Published by Columbia University Press, 2025) by Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen.
Kundalini is often spoken of as though its story were settled. The Serpent’s Tale dismantles that illusion from the first page, revealing a history far more intricate, entangled, and globally shaped than the popular narrative allows. What unfolds is a panorama that stretches across continents and centuries, tracing the serpent’s trail from early Sanskrit sources to Western esoteric laboratories, from modern yoga studios to the shifting spiritual marketplaces of the present.
Many readers come to Kundalini with a prefabricated image: a dormant serpent curled at the spine, awaiting awakening; a potent, sometimes perilous feminine force that rises through the chakras; a divine fire that can heal, destabilize, or transform. Borkataky-Varma and Foxen do not reject this tale. Instead, they open it up, showing everything it has absorbed along the way—ritual, philosophy, fear, longing, colonial projection, tantric speculation, occult experimentation, modern branding. In doing so, they reveal not a single lineage but a constellation of narratives, each carrying its own cultural weight.
