What is a Yogini?
A yogini is a female master of yoga and tantra. The word is the feminine form of yogin, the Sanskrit for one who practises yoga. It serves as a title of respect for women teachers in Hindu and Buddhist traditions across the Indian subcontinent, Tibet, and Southeast Asia. In Hindu tantra the same word also names a class of powerful goddesses. The human adept and the divine figure are not always kept apart, and that overlap is part of what the term carries.
Yogini vs adjacent concepts
A yogini is easy to confuse with a few nearby figures. She is not simply the female of a yogi in the modern studio sense. The historical yogini is a tantric adept or a goddess, not a person attending a posture class. She is also distinct from a ḍākinī, the sky-dancer of Tibetan Buddhist Tantra, though in later Buddhist usage the two words are often treated as the same. And she is not an apsara or a devadāsī. The apsara is a celestial nymph of Hindu and Buddhist myth, while the devadāsī was a woman dedicated to temple service. The yogini stands apart as a wielder of śakti, the sacred feminine power.
The human adept
As a human figure, the yogini is a woman who has reached mastery on the path of yoga and tantra. The title appears for women in the medieval Nāth yoga tradition, founded around the 11th century, who practised austerities and meditation alongside men. In Tantric Buddhism the scholar Miranda Shaw records named women, such as Lakṣmīṅkarā and Mekhalā, who were honoured as advanced adepts. Celibate women renunciants in India have also called themselves yoginis. The common thread is realisation through practice, not gender alone.
The goddess and the sixty-four
The other meaning is divine. From around the 10th century, yoginis appear in Hindu Tantra as groups of fierce goddesses, most often numbered sixty-four. They are aspects or attendants of the Great Goddess, born in some myths from the Mother goddesses, the mātṛkās, to drink the blood of a demon in battle. They are often shown with animal heads, carrying skulls, haunting cremation grounds, and able to fly. Between the 9th and 12th centuries, open-air circular temples were built for them, the chausaṭh yoginī shrines that still stand at Hirapur, Khajuraho, and Bhedaghat. The goal of their worship, the texts say, was the gaining of siddhis, extraordinary powers.
Where to encounter the yogini in the index
No single item in the index takes the yogini as its subject, but she stands behind several entries. She is a master of yoga and an adept of tantra, a wielder of śakti and of the awakened kundalinī. Her worship belongs to Shaktism, the strand of Hinduism centred on the Goddess. Readers drawn to her will find the wider frame in tantra and the practice context in sādhana.
What it isn't, and what scholars dispute
The yogini is not the soft, marketed figure the English word now suggests. In the medieval sources she is powerful and dangerous, and her cult involved rites that orthodox Brahminical society kept at a distance. The traditions themselves disagree on the detail. There is no single agreed list of the sixty-four names. The scholar Vidya Dehejia compared some thirty different lists and found that they rarely matched. Their origins are debated too, with David Gordon White tracing them to the sixth-century Agni Purāṇa and a synthesis of Vedic and folk goddesses. This entry sets out the tradition as it has been recorded, and does not try to settle which account is right.