Swami Yogananda’s Autobiography and modern yogic miracle narrative

Record summary

Paramahansa Yogananda’s ‘Autobiography of a Yogi,’ first published in 1946, presented Indian gurus, Kriya Yoga, levitation stories, bilocation, healing, death and resurrection motifs, and encounters with saints to a global English-reading audience. It is an identifiable textual source for comparing hagiography, occult modernism, and transnational spiritual communication. The book’s genre is devotional autobiography, and many episodes depend on remembered testimony rather than contemporaneous records. Edition history, authorial revision, and later disciples’ expansions deserve separate treatment.