Thursday25 Jan 04:26 PM
The History Of Yoga In America As Refracted By The Press
The Columbia Journalism Review has recently archived an excellent article by Robert Love, Fear of Yoga —possibly the best cursory overview of the history of yoga in America published to date (at least until Stefanie Syman's eagerly anticipated book hits the streets.)
For better or worse, Love follows more than a century's worth of news media headlines. It's not merely his narrative device and cultural barometer, it's the stage for the emergence of yoga in today's world.
As a cultural historian, he remains steadfast in the phenomenon more than the practice itself. He follows yoga through several overplayed (but entertaining!) scandals where yogis are synonymous with thugs. He links the emergence of gossip columnists and their chatter about Hollywood's intrigue with yoga to a changing public attitude. He then follows the full-on fitness movement erupt into the whitewashed physical culture that popular yoga in America has become.
Here's a taste of his technique—
In the 1920s, when tabloids became part of the journalistic landscape, yoga became part of the tabs’ new “love cult” obsession... Hearst’s New York Journal gave the tabs a run for their money with double-truck takeouts like this: "Latest Black Magic Revelations About Nefarious American Love Cults," which included [Pierre ] Bernard, who had combined yoga with baseball, vaudeville, and circuses in Nyack, in the process convincing members of the Vanderbilt family to bankroll his efforts.
By then, America’s second most famous swami, a young Calcutta mystic who went by the name Yogananda, had arrived in the U.S. (His Autobiography of a Yogi, published in 1946, is still in print.) Yogananda quickly built an American following for his “Yogoda” brand of meditation-based yoga through relentless touring and speaking. “You Americans exercise your bodies and brains too much and your will power too little,” he admonished, throwing himself from lotus position to a handstand in one motion. His followers purchased a hilltop retreat for his ashram outside Los Angeles that later became the Self-Realization Fellowship. Yogananda bought himself a new Packard to tool around in and posed proudly next to it for a photo the Los Angeles Times captioned with a wink: "Swami Buys Swanky Automobile."
Robert Love in Fear of Yoga
My personal favorite nugget?
In 1966, Rudolf Hess, the lone surviving Nazi in Spandau Prison, who was serving a life sentence for crimes against humanity, told a reporter that “his chief occupation now is practicing yoga on his cell floor.”
Robert Love in Fear of Yoga
It just goes to show you that Germany was way ahead of the USA in its popular fascination with the Indo-Tibetan religious diaspora.
Yet while this is all well and good, it doesn't even touch the deeper issues surrounding the personal encounter of the yogic mindset with the individual in the west. What was it that attracted us despite all the bad press? What is it about these practices that are simultaneously so appealing, helpful, and potentially volatile?
Lots of celebrity names are dropped: Cole Porter, Greta Garbo, Mae West, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Woodrow Wilson, Marilyn Monroe, Mia Farrow, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithful, Donovan.
In the end, as he zooms into our current era, who gets the lead quote?
"Mata Ezraty" [sic].
Link.
Image credits: (1) THE OMNIPOTENT OOM | Tantra and Its Impact on Modern Western Esotericism by Hugh B. Urban, Ohio State University. (2) Greta Garbo.
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Thu 25 Jan 2007 at 06:31PM
Mary Stuart
interesting and informative post. thanks, spiros.
Thu 25 Jan 2007 at 07:21PM
This is one the best pieces on Yoga in America. Funny for the old stories and headlines reagarding Yoga. You can make this stuff up.
Thu 25 Jan 2007 at 07:38PM
Yep. The history of yoga in America is quite colorful and robust!
Thu 25 Jan 2007 at 09:40PM
I don't know about Hess in particular, but the Nazis were very big on Indian culture--obviously the swastika was part of that, but there was much more: over the 100 years leading up to WWII, German philosophers and ethnographers built a complex and bizarre myth that linked the Indian Aryans who invaded the subcontinent in days of old, and the blond, Nordic types of Scandinavia, which is how "Aryan race" came to mean blond and blue eyed. According to this theory the Aryans brought culture to India, Greece, Rome, Egypt, and finally Northern Europe, all the while combating the de-civilizing influence of the Semitic tribes. Total hogwash of course, but it makes perfect sense that a group of German mystics in thrall of this theory would idolize some parts of Indian culture...
Thu 25 Jan 2007 at 10:11PM
Spiros Antonopoulos
The Indo-Tibetan diaspora had a huge affect on the culture, not just the crazy philosophers either...
But as far as the troubling but fascinating, check out:
It appears that she's at least partially responsible for Hindu fundamentalism back in India as well..
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