The Liberation-Yogī vs the Sinister-Yogī
- Wallis (insider-systematic): the historical Tantric yogī is fundamentally a liberation-seeker; transgression, power, and the cremation-ground apparatus are in service of recognizing the contracted self as Śiva.
- Wallis (insider-systematic): the historical Tantric yogī is fundamentally a liberation-seeker; transgression, power, and the cremation-ground apparatus are in service of recognizing the contracted self as Śiva. Wallis explicitly charges White's Sinister Yogis / Kiss of the Yoginī with "confirmation bias." False Gurus and the Esoteric Gap - White (critical-historical skeptic): the historical yogī is substantially a power-seeker — a figure feared for supernatural attainments, sometimes a predator; the magical, fluid-based, transgressive core is primary and the gnostic-liberation reading is a later, partly sanitizing overlay. (Vault: the White trilogy in the yoga-and-tantra-history-hub.)
Same historical figure, same texts, same rites — read as a saint seeking freedom (Wallis) or as a sorcerer seeking power (White). This isn't a difference of emphasis; it's a difference about what the tradition was for. And each reader's warrant predisposes the verdict: the practitioner sees liberation because he's practicing it; the skeptic reading the power-texts sees power. Wallis's own concept — that the same transgressive act looks identical from outside whether aimed at ego-dissolution or ego-inflation (the kula-yāga, the false-guru gap) — is the hinge: the texts genuinely underdetermine the yogī's interior aim.
The liberation-yogī and the sinister-yogī are not rival historical claims to be adjudicated but two warrant-relative readings of an underdetermined record — and the tradition's own esoteric-gap doctrine (articulation ≠ realization; the act doesn't reveal the aim) predicts that the historical record cannot settle which the yogī "really" was. The disagreement is structural, not resolvable.