This is a recording of an event that took place on Monday, 10th March 2025 at SOAS University of London.
Every day, tens of millions of people use mantras—sacred utterances, formulas, and powerful syllables—in ritual, meditation, yoga, and healing. Articulated in Sanskrit and other Asian languages, mantras originated in the religious traditions of early India and then spread via practitioners, inscriptions, manuscripts, and iconography throughout Asia and around the world. While speech and sound are central to mantra practices, mantras take a range of material forms: they may be chanted aloud, contemplated in silence, inscribed on surfaces, written in manuscripts, printed on posters, visually encoded in diagrams, or worn as amulets and textiles; mantras also circulate widely online and in digital media.
Funded by a Synergy Grant from the European Research Council, “Mantras in Religion, Media, and Society in Global Southern Asia” (MANTRAMS) is a pioneering, large-scale research project entirely dedicated to mantras, past and present. Radically interdisciplinary and comparative, the project will produce a history and anthropology of mantras, including extensive sonic, textual, and visual archives. The team will investigate mantras across millennia and around the world, examining the roots of mantra in the religions of the Indian subcontinent, their circulation across South and Southeast Asia, and their transcultural significance in global spiritualities today.
In this talk, the three principal investigators, Carola Lorea, Finnian Gerety, and Borayin Larios, will introduce the project and present concrete examples of mantra practices studied within their respective research. These include the sound efficacy of mantras, ancient Sanskrit conceptualizations of mantra power, their material presence in inscriptions and amulets, and their evolving role in digital spaces, yoga communities, and diasporic religious practices.
By integrating diverse methodologies and creating sonic, visual, and digital archives, the MANTRAMS project advances a new understanding of mantras as multisensory, transregional phenomena. Join us to explore how mantras shape religious and cultural landscapes from ancient times to the present.
Carola Lorea holds the Junior Professorship “Rethinking Global Religion” at the University of Tübingen. She works on sound, oral traditions and popular religious movements in South Asia, particularly eastern India, Bangladesh and the Andaman Islands. Her research foregrounds the gendered body sensorium for the study of folklore, esoteric movements, Dalit religions and Tantric traditions. Within MANTRAMS, she leads Task Force 2 on sonic efficacy to explore the intersection of sound, religion, and media, examining how mantras’ sonic dimensions are embedded in their social and cultural contexts.
Dr. Lorea co-created a network to research living Tantric traditions through ethnographic methods (see Lorea and Singh 2023). She implements a ‘sonic turn’ in the study of religions (see Religious Sounds Beyond the Global North). She has led research on the impact of COVID-19 on Asian religions through the CoronAsur project, and worked on digital archives, including the Songs of the Old Madmen, funded by the Endangered Archives Programme. Her monograph Folklore, Religion and the Songs of a Bengali Madman: a Journey Between Performance and the Politics of Cultural Representation (2016) is based on extensive ethnography with Baul performers in West Bengal. Her forthcoming book, Communities of Sound is focused on the soundscapes of caste, Matua religion, and displacement across the Bay of Bengal.
Dr. Lorea’s research has been supported by the University of Rome La Sapienza and by research fellowships at the Asia Research Institute (National University of Singapore), International Institute for Asian Studies, Gonda Foundation (Leiden) and Südasien Institut (Heidelberg).
Finn Moore Gerety is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Asian Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford and Research Fellow at Harris-Manchester College. He leads MANTRAMS Task Force 1, "Roots and Branches: Emergence and Circulation of Mantras," which investigates the historical and textual foundations of mantras, focusing on their evolution and transmission within South Asian religious traditions. His research spans the history of South Asian religions, Vedic texts and rituals, contemporary Hinduism in South India, mantra studies, yoga studies, and sound studies. Dr. Gerety’s work examines how mantras navigate between historical contexts and contemporary practices, contributing to the project's exploration of mantras' material, sonic, and relational dimensions.
Dr. Gerety holds a Ph.D. in South Asian Studies from Harvard University (2015). He has previously served as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Brown University (2018-2024) and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Sacred Music, Yale University (2017-2018). His recent publications include All This is OM: Mantra, Yoga, and the History of the Sacred Syllable in Early India (forthcoming, Oxford University Press) and contributions to Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies.
Ass-Prof. Borayin Larios is a Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Vienna. He leads Task Force 3 on the materiality of mantras, focusing on their visual, embodied, and digital forms across South Asia. His team's research examines mantra-inscribed objects, their commodification, and their role in digital spaces. Drawing on fieldwork in Mumbai and Pune and digital ethnography, Dr. Larios explores the intersection of mantras, media, and their broader roles in religion and society. As part of his involvement in the task force, he oversees the project’s exhibition, which will share key findings and offer an insightful exploration of the material culture of mantras, showcasing their tangible expressions and significance.
Dr. Larios holds an M.A. from the University of Fribourg and a Ph.D. from Heidelberg University. His expertise spans Vedic traditions, material religion, and the anthropology of mantras. He has previously held positions at the French Institute of Pondicherry and the EFEO. He is also a member of the Centre for Yoga Studies at SOAS, University of London, and a core member of the Yoga in Latin America Project (YoLA). He co-edits Latināsana: The Avatars of Yoga in Latin America (forthcoming) and is the author of Embodying the Vedas: Traditional Vedic Schools of Contemporary Maharashtra (2017).
Suzanne Newcombe studies religion with the tools of a sociologist and social historian. She is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University (UK) and the director of Inform which is based in Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London. Much of her work has focused on investigating the popularization of yoga in the modern period, e.g. Yoga in Britain: Stretching Spirituality and Educating Yogis (Equinox 2019) and the Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies (2020) also co-edited with Karen O’Brien-Kop. From 2015-2020 she was a post-doctoral researcher on the European Research Project AYURYOG Entangled Histories of Yoga, Ayurveda and Alchemy in South Asia. Since 2001, she has also explored different aspects of new and minority religions through her work with Inform.
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