On the basis of content...

On the basis of content, it is more than tempting to connect this treatise to the yogic text most widely known in Islamicate circles, the Amrtakunda or The Pool of Nectar , a lost hatha yoga text known from an Arabic version which was twice translated into Persian, as well as into Ottoman Turkish and Urdu.[^8] In fact, The Kamarupa Seed Syllables was circulating independently in Iran, prior to the translation of The Pool of Nectar , since it was quoted in a fourteenth-century Persian encyclopedia (the Nafa'is al-funun of Amuli).[^9] The practices described in della Valle's book, particularly divination by breath control, and the forty-odd female deities (clearly an inaccurate recollection of the sixty-four Yoginis) overlap significantly in content with chapters II and IX of The Pool of Nectar .

An examination of della Valle's Persian manuscript bears out some of these assumptions. The text in fact contains a description of sixty-four female magicians (not forty, as he recalled in his memoirs) corresponding to the cult of sixty-four yoginis; their leader is called Kamak Dev, in whom we can recognize Kamakhya (Sanskrit Kamaksa) Devi, the fierce Tantric goddess of Assam, who is mentioned by Muhammad Ghawth Gwaliyari as a source of yogic teaching in his Persian translation of The Pool of Nectar .

Other similarities include frequent reference to the water of life (8b, 18b, 19a, 20b, 23a, 28a), the rituals of oblation ( homa ) and mantra recitation ( japa ) (37b, 38a, 41b), the use of mandalas (38a, 40b), visualization of diagrams associated with the cakras, the sun and moon breaths (10b), five kinds of breath associated with the elements (11a), and the summoning of the yoginis, some of whose names are the same as those found in The Pool of Nectar .

The main difference is that The Kamarupa Seed Syllables provides at least ten times the number of examples, making it something like a large recipe-book for occultists.

An explicit link with The Pool of Nectar is suggested by a partial though untitled version of The Kamarupa Seed Syllables , found in a single manuscript.[^10] This copy contains only material on divination by breath, corresponding to chapter II of the Arabic text of The Pool of Nectar , and it closely matches a section in della Valle's manuscript (11a-14a).