Two pictures. The first traces every influence feeding into the Baptiste line, with the evidence for each link drawn into the edge itself. The second lays the original sequences side by side and marks what the power flow took from each — which turns out to answer the question more cleanly than any of the biography does.
No one owns a posture. Triangle is Triangle in every room it is taught in, no more patentable than an onion. What a school actually makes is the recipe: which ingredients, in what order, at what tempo, in what heat, and how you cue it. The dish does far more than the sum of what went into it. That is why a shared pose is not evidence and an ordered run of them is. As far as I can tell nobody has compared these methods at the level of individual poses before; the published pieces stop at format.
Six roots, two generations, one method. The style of each line carries the evidence: solid where the link is documented, dashed where it is claimed but unverified, dotted where it is only inferred from the text. Two separate lines leave the Krishnamacharya node on purpose — the claim that Baron studied with Iyengar and Desikachar is unverified, but the claim that the sequence is built on Ashtanga's scaffolding is demonstrable, and those are different assertions.
The three ancestral sequences in their original order, plus Walt's own recorded curriculum. Poses highlighted in red survive into Journey Into Power. The fifth column is the power flow itself, with each pose tagged by where it came from — S Sivananda, B Bikram, A Ashtanga, — none of them.
Six poses are marked as false friends: same Sanskrit name, genuinely different shape. Bikram's Ardha Chandrasana is a standing side-bend, not the one-leg balance; his Tadasana is Tree, not Mountain; Ashtanga's Setu Bandhasana is a crown-of-head backbend, not a supine bridge. Those are not inheritances and the chart does not count them as such.
Read segment by segment, Journey Into Power stops looking like one method and starts looking like three, bolted together in a fixed order.
The two columns make different claims and it matters which is which. Composition counts poses: a pose found in only one tradition is attributed to it, and a pose found in two or more is marked unresolvable, because the sequence alone cannot say which one Baptiste took it from. Ordered run is the stronger evidence — three or more consecutive poses appearing in the same order as in a source. Locust → Bow → Camel is Bikram's floor series in Bikram's order, and that survives as an argument even though each of those poses individually appears in more than one tradition.
The opening is pure Ashtanga. Integration, Awakening and Grounding are Surya Namaskar A and B with Warrior I, then Triangle, Twisting Triangle and Prasarita — that is the Ashtanga standing sequence, in Ashtanga's order, with the vinyasa transitions intact. Nobody disputes Baptiste never studied with Pattabhi Jois. He didn't need to; by 1995 this was the shared grammar of every American flow class.
The middle is Bikram. Equanimity runs Eagle → Standing Leg Raise → Dancer → Tree, which is Bikram's Eagle → Standing Head to Knee → Standing Bow → Tree with the names changed. Igniting runs Locust → Bow → Camel, which is Bikram's floor series in Bikram's order with Cobra removed. This is the segment that carries the fingerprint of the one teacher Baron actually had.
The close is the oldest layer. Rejuvenation — Shoulderstand, Plough, Karnapidasana, and Fish just before it — is the Ashtanga finishing sequence, which is itself where Sivananda's first four postures live. Walt's 1960s LP ends on exactly these poses. Whether Baron took them from Ashtanga or from his own parents' curriculum is unresolvable from the sequence alone, because the two agree.
Strip out everything traceable and what remains is not nothing. The core work in Stability — scissor legs, the 60/30 lift, fifty abdominal twists — has no antecedent in any of the three traditions; it is calisthenics, and it comes from the same place Walt's muscle-control manual did. The hip segment in Opening — half pigeon, double pigeon, frog — is generic Western studio vinyasa with no classical source. Flip Dog, Airplane, and the crescent-lunge family are likewise modern inventions.
That is the honest finding, and it cuts both ways. The method is more derivative than its marketing admits and more original than its critics allow — and the original part is the American physical-culture part, inherited from a father who never taught a flow class in his life.