Faculty

Dr. Keith Edward Cantú is a postdoctoral fellow in Asian Religious Traditions at the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, where he is a research associate for the Transcendence and Transformation Database. As an emerging historian of religions, his interdisciplinary research especially focuses on South Asian yoga, tantra, and the interface between Sanskrit and Indic vernacular languages, especially Bengali and Tamil, and on the connected histories of yoga in global esoteric currents like Thelema and the Theosophical Society. Prior to Harvard, he was Visiting Assistant Professor at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.

He previously was a research fellow at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg in the “Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Esoteric Practices and Alternative Rationalities from a Global Perspective (www.cas-e.de)” and Assistant Professor (postdoc) at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland in the project “Cultures of Patronage: India 1674–1890,” and received his doctoral degree in Religious Studies (South Asian religions) in 2021 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Keith’s first monograph, Like a Tree Universally Spread: Sri Sabhapati Swami and Śivarājayoga, was published in 2023 by Oxford University Press (Oxford Studies in Western Esotericism series), and he is actively engaged in reprinting and translating several previously unknown or largely forgotten Tamil and Hindi works of Sri Sabhapati Swami and of his gurus. In addition to work on the swami, he is the author of numerous chapters and articles as varied as an ethnography of Tantric songs and sādhana or “practice” in Bengali, Indological research on south Indian mantra and yoga practices at tumuli and temples and on the Sanskrit alchemical mythology of Srisailam, modern yoga and discourses of Orientalism and cultural authenticity, haṭhayoga as “black magic” in Theosophy, and Islamic esotericism in the songs of the Bāuls and Fakirs of Bengal. 

A scholar-musician, Keith regularly sings and performs the Bāul songs of the nineteenth-century Bengali humanist poet Lalon Fakir (Lālan Phakir, d. 1890) as well as Śyāmāsaṅgīt or “music for the dark Goddess,” which he learned directly from sadhus and sadhikas during immersive stays in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India over the past twelve years, and regularly co-teaches a course on Tantric meditation and its connection with this music at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California. English versions of many of Lalon’s songs as translated by the late Carol Salomon can be found in City of Mirrors: Songs of Lālan Sā̃i, published in 2017 with Oxford's South Asia Research series, which Keith co-edited together with Dr. Saymon Zakaria.

Courses taught: 

• YS 119 | Yoga and Esotericism
• YS 126 | Theosophy and Yoga
• YS 131 | The Yoga of Sabhapati Swami

Selected Publications: 

• 2023. Like a Tree Universally Spread: Sri Sabhapati Swami and Śivarājayoga. New York: Oxford University Press, Oxford’s Studies in Western Esotericism series. 
• 2023. “Haṭhayoga as Black Magic in Early Theosophy and Beyond,” in Esotericism and
  Deviance, edited by Manon Hedenborg White and Tim Rudbøg. Leiden: Brill. 
• 2023. “Songs for Siddhi: An Ethnographic Analysis of Bāul Fakiri Sādhanā.” In The Ethnography of Tantra: Textures and Contexts of Living Tantric Traditions, ed. Carola Erika Lorea and Rohit Singh. State University of New York Press.
• 2023. “Mantras for Every God and Goddess: Folk Religious Ritual in the Literature of
  Sabhapati Swami.” In Living Folk Religions, ed. Aaron Ullrey and Sravana
  Borkataky-Varma. Routledge.
• 2017. City of Mirrors: Songs of Lālan Sā̃i. Text, translations, and commentary by Carol
  Salomon, edited by Keith Cantú and Saymon Zakaria, New York: Oxford University
  Press, South Asia Research series.