Fear of Yoga

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Yoga arrived in the United States in a cloud of ideas both sacred and profane from what was called the Orient: the vast, exotic, unknowable out there. In 1805 William Emerson, father of Ralph Waldo Emerson, published the first Sanskrit scripture translation in the United States. His son Ralph and his Transcendentalist posse, especially Henry David Thoreau, were dazzled by the Bhagavad-Gita, which Emerson read in translation for the first time in 1843, and other Indian spiritual texts.

Thoreau kept a well-thumbed copy of the Gita in his cabin at Walden Pond and claimed wistfully that 'at rare intervals, even I am a yogi.' The Concord, Massachusetts, intellectuals were destined to remain wannabes, however. Yoga is not about texts. It is experiential, its wisdom transmitted skin to skin, teacher to student, which requires actual masters (gurus), who were in short supply for most of this nation's history. It wasn't until 1883 that the first Hindu cleric lectured in the parlor of Emerson's widow in Concord and went on a short speaking tour. Five years later, an itinerant Tantric yogi named Sylvais Hamati befriended a curious 13-year-old Iowan named Perry Baker in Lincoln, Nebraska. Baker, after more than a decade of study at Hamati's feet-and a glamorous Francophile name change-recreated himself as the first American yogi, Pierre Arnold Bernard.

Throughout those post-Civil War decades, the media's take on yoga was dictated by the Theosophical Society, an influential spiritualist-reform group founded in New York City in 1875. The Theosophists embraced a combo platter of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, and Americans first heard such terms as karma and nirvana through their efforts. The Theosophists were awed by the belief that certain yogis had demonstrated occult, Faustian powers over time and space, 'over men and natural phenomena,' as the New York Times put it in 1889. Astral projection, telekinesis, clairvoyance, speaking to the dead and hearing them talk back-it was heady stuff.

Partly through the influence of the Theosophists, a growing number of Indian holy men and yogis were here, plying the byways of turn-of-the-century America. The Chicago World's Fair of 1893 launched America's first superstar swami: the charismatic Vivekananda (which roughly translates to Blissmaster). The American press dubbed him the Cyclonic Monk for his energetic speaking style, and a lecture bureau took note and signed him up.

More swamis followed in Vivekananda's path, more Americans saw the light, and that was more or less when yoga's trouble really started. After decades of sketchy, slightly mocking coverage by newspapers and magazines, yoga came under increasingly vicious attack. What changed, you might wonder? The immigrants arrived-nearly 12 million of them between 1870 and 1900, piling up in the port cities of both coasts. The surge peaked in the decade between 1900 and 1910, when a million immigrants entered the United States each year and ran into an angry, nativist backlash.

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