Is Yoga Satanic?

Is yoga inspired by Satan? Apparently, to some, it is.

Recently a family member and a friend sent me separate messages expressing concern that yoga is satanic in nature. Both are committed Christians, sincere in their faith and — I have no doubt — sincere in their care for me.

The TikTok videos they shared were packed with convincing deductive logic, seen through a particular Christian lens. The conclusion in both was that the modern physical form of yoga cannot be separated from its other dimensions — meditation, pranayama, philosophical teachings, and spiritual roots. And since those roots are considered antithetical to the Bible, they are, by that reasoning, Satanic.

Neither messenger suggested directly that they believe I am inspired by satanic beliefs. But as a two-decade yoga practitioner and ten-year yoga teacher, it was hard not to sit with the question: *what do they really think about me?*

I did some searching and came across a discussion between three Christians wrestling with the same question — one of whom was a Christian yoga teacher. She spoke openly about her relationship to yoga's more metaphysical dimensions when the other two respectfully challenged her. Her response was clear and undefended: her practice of yoga grew *from* her grounding in Christ, not away from it. That rootedness, she said, protected her from being led astray.

I found that worth pondering.

One of the central Christian arguments linking yoga to Satanism concerns the worship of multiple deities. It's a compelling argument on its own terms. When Moses descended Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments, two of them stated plainly: there is only one God, and the worship of anything else is forbidden.

So in the late Bronze Age — around the 13th to 14th centuries BCE — monotheism was formalised in the West. Or was it born then? That's a question worth sitting with.

Yoga's origins predate Moses by some margin. The word first appears in the sacred Hindu texts of the Rig Veda, roughly 5,000 years ago, as the Sanskrit *yuj* — meaning "to yoke" or "to join." In the spiritual context of those scriptures, this referred to the union of the individual soul with the universal. Not separation. Not competition. Union.
And yet the ancient Hindu scriptures refer to at least 33 major categories of deity in the Vedas, hundreds more in the Puranas, and in popular modern practice, perhaps thousands. To a Christian reading, this must look like precisely the heresy Moses warned against. Poor Moses — one imagines him exhausted.

But was this really the birth of extreme polytheism?

Polytheism, as it's commonly understood, involves competing gods — independent powers in conflict. Think of the ancient Greeks, whose gods quarrelled, deceived, and warred with each other across the heavens. The Hindu pantheon, with its elephant-headed deities and many-armed goddesses, can look similarly chaotic from the outside.
But the philosophy underneath is entirely different.

Hindu thought is, at its core, a philosophy of *unity* — which is precisely what the word yoga means. What appears to be a bewildering diversity of gods is understood, within the tradition itself, as a misreading of reality. Each deity represents a unique face of a single, infinite, undivided source — what the Upanishads call *Brahman*. The many are expressions of the one. The scholar Jeaneane Fowler put it well: the relationship between the many gods and the unmanifest Brahman is like the relationship between the sun and its rays. We cannot look directly at the sun, but we can experience its light in a thousand different forms. The rays are many. The source is one.

We are like those rays — each distinct, each real, each temporarily forgetting that we all emanate from the same singular light.

The true endeavour, in Hindu understanding, is to *remember* that source. To return. This is not so different from the call at the heart of the Abrahamic traditions — to remember God, to return to God, to let the illusion of separateness dissolve. Different language, different imagery, same ancient ache.

The Bhagavad Gita even says it plainly: *"As people approach Me, so I receive them. All paths lead to Me."*
Perhaps this is also why Christianity itself has fractured into so many denominations — each one attempting, in its own way, to capture something of the universal truth that defies any single formulation. Even Jesus, whose life was a radical simplification of the Torah into love of God and love of neighbour, was interpreted so diversely that Christian traditions today look upon one another with suspicion and mistrust. And yet — aren't they all pointing toward the same singular truth?

This impulse to reach toward the infinite, to still the mind, to breathe deeply and listen — it appears across every tradition humanity has produced. The Desert Fathers of early Christianity practised breath prayer and contemplative silence. The Sufi mystics of Islam whirled into stillness. Buddhist monks counted breaths in meditation halls. Indigenous traditions drummed and danced their way into presence. The forms differ. The reaching is the same.

Which makes me wonder whether the real question isn't *"is yoga Satanic?"* but something more interesting: *what is spiritual practice actually for?* If the answer involves opening the heart, quieting the ego's noise, and cultivating greater compassion and presence — then the tradition it came wrapped in may matter less than what it actually produces in a life.

This is a big topic, and I've only turned the first stone. I'd genuinely love to hear from you — whether you come from a Christian background, a yoga background, both, or neither.
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And a sincere thank you to those concerned for me. Without your concern, this blog wouldn't exist.

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