Makarasana

Makarasana is described in the second lesson of the Gheranda Samhita: the body lies prone with the chest against the ground, the legs stretched out behind, and the head held in the crossed arms. The text claims that it increases the heat of the body. That is the text's statement and the atlas records it as such.

The animal is less straightforward than the usual English rendering suggests. Makara is regularly translated as crocodile, and a crocodile is close enough to what a prone body with its head raised on its forelegs resembles. But in Indian art and iconography the makara is a composite water creature, part crocodile and part fish and often given an elephant's trunk, that serves as the mount of the river goddess Ganga and of the sea god Varuna. Carved makaras flank temple thresholds and arch over doorways in the ornament known as the makara torana, so the creature is one of the most frequently represented figures in the built religious landscape of South Asia.

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika does not carry the posture. It belongs with the crocodile, the locust, the camel and the serpent to the group of prone forms that the later manual adds, and those four together are the strongest sign that the Gheranda Samhita is working from a wider range of bodily arrangements than its predecessor recorded.

In contemporary practice makarasana is generally used as a place to lie still between more demanding work, much as the corpse posture is. The Gheranda Samhita does not describe it that way. The text presents it as heating, which is closer to the opposite of rest, and the only posture either surviving manual explicitly assigns to recovery is shavasana, whose stated purpose in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika is the removal of fatigue.

That difference is a small example of a general pattern. The classical corpus says remarkably little about recovery, sequencing or the management of effort across a session, because the manuals are not describing a session. They are describing a repertoire of seats and shapes, most of them intended to be held, alongside chapters on breath restraint, locks, seals and the states those practices are said to produce. The idea of a class with a shape to it, warming up and winding down, belongs to the twentieth century reorganisation of the practice that Mark Singleton documents in Yoga Body.

The atlas records the classical description and notes the modern use as a separate fact rather than reading one into the other. Where a posture's function has changed, that change is itself part of what the entry has to report, and flattening the two accounts into one would lose the most interesting thing about the entry.