Here is one of the strangest things four centuries of travelers agree on. Hindu women would come to a yogi and kiss his penis — or lay offerings on it, or stroke it — because they believed there was "a good deale of virtue in it, noe [nothing] having gone out of it," since the yogi never spilled his seed.1 The yogi who has never used his sexual organ is, precisely for that reason, the granter of fertility: barren women conceive through his boon, dried-up old men regain potency through his preparations. The celibate is the fertility god.
This is the paradox White lays bare in the village-practitioner record: the yogi's sexual power runs inverse to his sexual activity. The more rigorously he retains his seed, the more potent his blessing. Marshall, Careri, Marco Polo, Tavernier, Thévenot, and the eighteenth-century Sonnerat all circle the same belief — the holy man whose flaccid, unspent member is the proof and the source of superhuman generative power.2
This is the page where retention-as-power, a South Asian commonplace, becomes a documented village economy of fertility-blessing. The logic is condensed in the figure of Śiva himself — "the erotic ascetic of the ever-erect phallus," whose retained seed is infinite sexual energy.3 Among human ascetics, White notes, "the proof of their practice is a flaccid member," and Nirad Chaudhuri's observation holds: the naked Nāgas who parade before crowds of women at the Kumbh Melā keep their composure "due to their rigorous practice."4 The retained seed is a reservoir; the unspent organ is a battery; and the women who touch it are drawing on a charge the yogi has spent years not discharging.
But — and this is the second half of the paradox — the yogi's sexual power is "not always transmitted in latent form." The same Nāth hagiography that celebrates celibacy is "rife with accounts of barren women who, through a yogi's boon — often in the form of grains of rice or a pinch of ash which the woman is made to eat — father children who are replicas or 'incarnations' of themselves."5 Gorakhnāth himself, in Nāth legend, was born from a woman to whom Matsyendranāth had given rice. And the cynical underside is documented too: della Valle's report that yogis "marry not, but make severe profession of Chastity at least in appearance; for in secret 'tis known many of them commit as many debaucheries as they can," and the 1930s sādhu who told Edmund Demaitre's friend he was the reincarnation of Śiva's bull Nandi and could cure sterility by personal "intervention," collecting payment after.6
The mechanism only looks paradoxical from a modern frame where sex expends and abstinence withholds. Invert the frame and it resolves. In the South Asian economy of bindu (seed, drop), semen is not a fluid to be spent but a concentrated form of cosmic energy — tapas, ascetic heat, ojas, vital essence. Spending it disperses the energy; retaining it concentrates it; and concentrated energy can be directed — into longevity, into supernatural power, into the fertility of others. The yogi who never spills is not a man denying himself sex; he is a man accumulating a charge that he can then transmit by touch, by boon, by a pinch of ash. The barren woman who eats the yogi's rice is receiving the generative power he has stored by not generating. His celibacy is not the absence of his sexuality; it is its capitalization.
This is why the same figure can be both the celibate fertility-saint and, in the tantric register, the practitioner of sexual yoginī rites. White is careful here: "sexual yoginī practices were among the most powerful techniques employed by tantric practitioners for the realization of siddhis," and when a tantric practitioner succeeds in his yoginī practice, "that supernatural feminine entity grants him the powers he seeks."7 So the yogi's relation to sex spans the full range — total retention (the flaccid fertility-saint) and ritualized sexual practice (the tantric siddhi-seeker) — and both are forms of the same logic: the management of seed and feminine power as the currency of attainment.
This page supplies the village-practitioner sexual dimension that grounds the seven-queens yoginī page — della Valle's "forty immortal invisible women" whom a Gioghi can take as a spiritual wife are the yoginīs, and the report shows the cult alive at village level. It connects to White's pollution-as-power thesis (the management of sexual substances as power-substances). And it gives the alchemist page its bodily-fluid analogue: the yogi who transmutes mercury also transmutes seed.
The Demaitre report is the case study because it shows the whole paradox running as a working village business in the twentieth century. A sādhu visits a Central Provinces village periodically, "offering his favors with extraordinary zeal to the brave village women," who "seemed to lose their minds as soon as the sadhu made an appearance." He makes no secret of his aim: thanks to his "intervention" he can "not only cure sterility but also guarantee the birth of male offspring." Asked to explain his powers, he claims he is no mere ascetic but "the reincarnation of Śiva's Bull Nandi" — and so husbands, "normally so jealous in India, incited their wives to spend a few hours in the company of the reincarnated divinity, whose embodiment, having fulfilled his pleasant duty, received payment in coin."8
Read what makes this work. The sādhu is doing the opposite of retention — he is having sex with the village women — and yet the frame of holy fertility-power is so strong that jealous husbands send their wives to him and pay for it. The fertility-saint logic has become a license: because the yogi is the channel of generative divine power (Nandi, Śiva's bull, the very emblem of sexual potency), his sex with another man's wife is not adultery but blessing, and the resulting (male) child is a divine gift. The case study reveals the dark efficiency of the paradox: the belief that the yogi controls fertility can be weaponized in both directions — the retained-seed saint draws women to touch him, and the active sādhu uses the same belief to access them, and both are paid. The fertility-power frame is so robust it survives the complete inversion of the practice that supposedly grounds it.
She has not conceived, and the village has run out of remedies, so she walks to where the yogi sits by his dhūnī. She brings what she can — a little food, a coin. He gives her a pinch of ash from the fire, or a few grains of rice, and tells her to eat it. She does. If a child comes, it will be understood as a "replica" or "incarnation" of the yogi — his stored generative power, transmitted through the ash, made flesh in her. She does not experience this as strange. The holy man who has spent decades not spending his seed is, in her world, the most concentrated source of generative power available, more potent than her husband precisely because he has never discharged. The discipline the scene teaches the reader: do not read the fertility-blessing as either superstition or fraud, but as a coherent transaction in an economy where retained seed is real power and the holy man is its bank — a transaction in which everyone involved is operating rationally inside a frame the modern reader has simply lost.
The page fails if it collapses the paradox into one pole. The prurient failure reads it all as hypocrisy — the "celibate" yogi as secret lecher, della Valle's debaucheries as the whole truth. The reverential failure reads it all as pure spiritual sublimation, embarrassed by the penis-kissing and the Nandi sādhu. Both miss that the paradox is real and stable: the same belief-system genuinely produces the retention-saint and licenses the active sādhu, and both are authentic expressions of the seed-as-power logic. The signature of the prurient failure is the word "really" (the yogi really just wanted sex); the signature of the reverential failure is averting the eyes from the body. The accurate reading keeps the paradox intact: retention and ritual sex are two settings of one dial, and the village fertility-economy ran on both.
The central tension is between the latent and active transmission of the yogi's sexual power, and White does not (and cannot) cleanly sort which yogis were which. The retention-saint (touched by women, granting fertility through a flaccid unspent organ) and the active fertility-channel (the Nandi sādhu) are described in the same sources, sometimes the same passages, and the line between sincere tantric yoginī practice, sincere retention-asceticism, and outright sexual exploitation under a holy frame is exactly what the sources blur. White's honest position: all three were real, the frame accommodated all three, and the historian cannot always tell them apart — which is itself a finding about how the fertility-power belief functioned as cover.
An open question: the gendering. The yogi's power flows to women (fertility) and from women (the yoginī who grants siddhis). Women are both the beneficiaries of the celibate's stored power and the source of the tantric practitioner's power. This double role — recipient and source — is structurally rich and White leaves it unexplored.
The convergence here is between the European travelers and the indigenous Nāth hagiography, and it is unusually warm because, again, the foreigners were fascinated rather than only contemptuous on this point — fertility and potency interest every culture. Marshall's matter-of-fact report of women kissing the yogi's "yard," Careri's bell-on-the-prepuce, and the Nāth legends of rice-boon conception all describe the same belief-economy, from outside and inside, with little of the usual hostility. Where a tension appears, it is between della Valle's two registers in the same author: he reports both the spiritual yoginī-marriage (the forty invisible immortal women, treated as genuine mysticism) and the secret debaucheries (treated as hypocrisy). Della Valle himself cannot decide whether the yogi's sexuality is sublime or sordid — and White's point is that the indecision is correct, because the tradition genuinely contained both, and the same frame that elevated the yoginī-rite to mysticism also licensed the Nandi sādhu's exploitation. The single author's internal contradiction is the most honest witness to the paradox.
Why would a page on yogi sexuality reach into psychology and into behavioral mechanics? Because retention-as-power is a psychophysiological belief-system about sublimation (psychology) and the fertility-saint frame is a legitimacy structure that licenses access (behavioral mechanics).
Psychology: Sublimation and the Libidinal Economy — The seed-as-stored-power logic is a near-exact pre-modern articulation of the sublimation hypothesis: undischarged sexual energy is not lost but converted and redirected into other forms of potency (longevity, spiritual power, even the fertility of others). Where the psychoanalytic frame keeps the conversion internal (libido sublimated into work or art within one psyche), the yogic frame makes it transmissible — the retained charge can be passed to a barren woman by a pinch of ash. The handshake reveals what neither frame alone states: the yogic system takes sublimation literally and externally, treating the "converted" energy as a physical substance that can leave one body and generate life in another, which is sublimation theory pushed past the boundary of the individual psyche into a transactable economy.
Behavioral Mechanics: Authority Frame and Licensed Access — The Nandi sādhu is a stark case of an authority-frame licensing behavior that would otherwise be forbidden: the holy-fertility-channel framing converts adultery into blessing and gets jealous husbands to facilitate and pay for their wives' access to the yogi. The behavioral frame names the mechanism the report only narrates — a sufficiently strong sacred-authority frame doesn't just permit transgression, it reverses the normal social sanction, making the transgressive act the thing the community demands. The insight neither domain alone produces: the most powerful access-licenses are the ones that invert jealousy into cooperation, and a fertility-power frame is uniquely able to do this because it promises the husband the very thing (a male heir) whose pursuit overrides his guarding instinct.
The Sharpest Implication The same belief — that the yogi controls generative power — makes the celibate yogi a fertility-saint women come to touch and makes the sexually active sādhu a divine channel husbands pay to access. Take this fully and "celibacy" stops being the opposite of sexual exploitation and becomes one of its possible covers: the frame that sanctifies the retained seed is the same frame that can license its discharge into any woman, and the community cannot tell the saint from the predator because the belief is identical for both. The fertility-power frame is not a guardrail against abuse; it is the road that abuse and sanctity both travel.
Generative Questions