The Posture and the Serpent Goddess

Bhujangasana appears in the second lesson of the Gheranda Samhita and not in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, which is a useful marker of how the classical posture repertoire grew. The Pradipika's fifteen seats are almost entirely cross legged; the Gheranda Samhita's thirty two add a group of prone forms, and the serpent is one of them.

What sets it apart from its neighbours in that group is the claim the text makes for it. The Gheranda Samhita says the posture raises the bodily heat, destroys disease, and awakens the serpent goddess who sleeps at the base of the spine. Those are the text's statements and the atlas reports them as such. The third is the interesting one, because it is a direct link between a bodily shape and the kundalini doctrine that the hatha literature otherwise reserves for breath restraint, the locks and the seals. Most postures in the corpus are described as seats or as remedies; very few are described as doing the work that the tradition normally assigns to the pranayama chapters.

The naming logic is transparent. Bhujanga is the serpent, and the raised head and chest over a body still lying on the ground is a snake rearing. The serpent is not a neutral choice of animal in this literature: it is the form the tradition gives to the coiled energy at the base of the spine, and the posture that mimics a snake lifting is the one the text says wakes her.