We are in the process of scanning the entire Vira Sadhana: International Journal of the Tantrik Order Vol. 5, No. 1, published by the Tantrik Order in America in 1906. There are few extant copies of this amazing journal available in the world. We happen to be lucky enough to have been given one years ago. We have been asked many times over the years where a person might obtain a copy and sadly have never had an answer, unitl now.

Click the cover image to display the first 10 pages of Vira Sadhana in PDF format.

Vira Sadhana, as decribed in The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America by Stefanie Syman.

“You can see Bernard’s debt to practical occultism most clear in volume 5, no. 1 of International Journal of the Tantrik Order: Vira Sadhana, first published in 1906. Running nearly two hundred pages, the journal was no mere prop in Bernard’s order. For more than three decades it was the T.O.’s touchstone and textbook.”

“The journal was bound in red, with the T.O symbol stamped in gold on the cover. Over time, there were several covers, including a red silk one. The frontispiece is a photograph of the moon, which according to the caption represented “the abode of the Tantrik God, Siva, (Mahadeva) with the Siddhas as the Moon.”

“Inside the editors reprinted a mangled verse of Emerson’s “Brahma.” as well as citations from various encyclopedias and the works of Rudyard Kipling, Sir Monier Monier-Williams, Max Muller, Schpenhauer and Victor Cousin, who had influenced Emerson. All of these great men concurred – Tantrism was a “divine science,” and Tantriks are masters of the Veda. The concensus was largely a fiction, the product of the editors’ quotation.”

“The journal also published selections from a host of different tantric texts, including one on Hatha Yoga, titled “Tantrik Yoga: Texts Requiring an Initiate to Unravel and Expound” a portion of the Maha Nirvana Tantra and a “Hymm to Siva.”