Part One: The First American Yoga Cult Leader

I've talked about this on air before, but it is like some guys who lived in like North Carolina and just like drove to local vape shops and reviewed them.

yoga culture. Yeah, and uh and they're always selling something and you got to wear your outfits and all this stuff you don't gotta but you know, uh so I I have a bad taste in my mouth with yoga currently, and.

second episode this week. And I like it, like I don't like as a general rule, I hate exercising around other people. It's part of why, Like as soon as I got a house, like I built myself a gym.

I don't do like yoga regularly, but like I do like these days, I do particularly like a lot of hollow bodies and planks because I hurt my lower back in Iraq a couple of years back and ever since then, Like if I don't I find if I don't do a bunch of both of those things like every single week, like my back starts to fucking seize up on me. So I value like the the health benefits you can get, which I think are undeniable, that there are like significant

potential health benefits to yoga. It is probably worth noting that, like you can also seriously hurt yourself doing it if you're not like careful. But all of that is kind of beside the point, because we're not talking about like the merits of yoga is exercise. I canch again that yeah, yeah, it can be great. We're talking about yoga as a thing that khan men gravitate to, which which should not be read as like us, we're not we're not trying to cancel yoga if you like yoga.

in American culture, lends itself to conmon and cult leaders. Yeah, exactly, right, It's not different than like politics or religion, you know, it's this is just another yet another thing that lends itself to comment and cultists, and they're they're different type kinds of common and cultists. Yoga cult leaders are a special breed and and we're talking about two of them

this week. So yeah, I before when I was kind of figuring out how to put these episodes together, I kind of briefly flirted with giving like an overview of

like the entire long history of yoga. But to be honest, like there's so much debate by people who study it about like how exactly to describe the evolution of yoga as a discipline, And I am not one of those historians, So I feel like I would fuck it up if I tried to go into too much detail that about that I am going to give, you know, what I think is kind of like the briefest accurate description of like what yoga was historically. Yoga is the right approach

for sure. Yeah, yeah, because it's it is complicated well, and.

Obviously a number of the different kind of moves that you do, the different kind of stretches and stuff, are much older, and some of the concepts are much older. But like yoga as as we kind of talk about it is a fairly new thing now. Obviously, there's also a yoga that goes back much much further. The earliest yoga teachings are kind of a mix of philosophy and like different sorts of breathing styles and kind of health rules.

You can you can kind of compare some of them to sort of the you know, in the Bible, the Old Testament. You've got these rules like donate you know, cloven hoofed anim or whatever. Like it's it's kind of some stuff like that too. Alongside in one kind of branch of yoga asanas or like postures. Right, development of what became yoga probably started around like fifteen hundred BC. A lot of it is like kind of like fifteen hundred BC to five hundred BC is sort of like

the earliest period of yoga. I think generally agreed to be. Hey, everyone, Robert here, just wanted to clarify. If you look into this, A lot of people will talk about, you know, the origins of yoga dating back like five thousand years, which is obviously a bit older than fifteen hundred BC. You know,

it depends on kind of what you're talking about. The term, you know, the word yoga is much less old than that, broadly speaking, without kind of getting into or taking aside because that's certainly not my place, it's it's worth looking. You can look at kind of yoga and all of the things that sort of around it and fed into it. Well, there's not really a clean start date. Something that's brought as old in its earliest origins is like Judaism, Right, it's in that ballpark at least.

That's just like there were different sort of like branches or schools of yoga. And the school of yoga that was kind of most influential to what people in Los Angeles mean when they talk about yoga is called Hatha yoga,

which was heavily influenced by Buddhism. Several of the earliest Hatha texts, which date from around a thousand a d or so, focus on the preservation of vital force This is often embodied by semen or minstrel fluid, which was believed to like drip out of the body, so there's some like retention of like, you know, vital fluid stuff in there. Hatha yoga translates most directly to the yoga of violence or force, But the violence there does not

mean like not like beating people up or whatever. It's the forceful fusing of opposites, or at least that's how the book Hell Bent by competitive yoga guy Benjamin Lore, that's how he explains it. Quote. The violence of the violent yoga comes primarily from the method used to achieve these results, the forceful fusing of opposites. It's an ideal embodied in the sanscript named Hatha, where stands for the solar masculine energies and thaugh for the lunar feminine forces,

and reiterated throughout all Hatha practice. But it is perhaps best appreciated by the knats, which is like kind of the guys doing hatha yoga. Principal innovation postures or bending the body into forms. Prior to the medieval rise of Hatha yoga, standing contortive postures simply did not exist. In yoga, the word asana was present. However, it was used almost

exclusively in the etymological sense as seat or throne. The asana practices described in pre Hatha Yogic literature were meditative postures, firm and stable positions, thrones from which to contemplate existence. Right. So, initially, this is the kind of asanas is referring to, like, this is how you sit while you're doing these meditations

on these kind of spiritual things. In the medieval period, when Hatha yoga, you know, becomes a branch of sort of the different sort of yogic disciplines or whatever, this expands from just sort of like a meditative posture to something closer to what we would recognize if we walk into a yoga shop.

kind of wild roving priests. They'll have these like long like often like down to their feet, dreadlocks, and beards that are like painted and these bright like orange colors, and they some of them engage in like these really

like in public and stuff. These really like physically like this is like the laying on beds of spikes kind of stuff, right, yeah, like yeah, yeah, these kind of like very demonstrative acts of like intense physical demonstrations and whatnot that are kind of showing their level of mastery and stuff that they have over their body or whatever. Like this is a constant that goes that is kind of like very common all throughout different kind of Indian

religious traditions. And the Hatha Yogi's were one of like the earlier examples of this. Uh. Their yoga included kind of what would sound to modern people like it includes kind of a peculiar variety of health acts. One of the things they would do was suck water up through their anuses to perform in a self nima. Yeah, like self animas or a thing. I mean, I don't know how to do that, Katie, but that's a thing they would do. They would like they supposedly they would teach that the UK.

or whatever. Oh yeah, it's like it's a thing.

of fringe, right, this is not the Hatha Yogis are not like the most mainstream chunk of the Yogic discipline. They're not. They're like they're they're kind of seen as weirdos at the time by a lot of people, right.

so maybe you'd go to one of these guys. Maybe most of the time you would kind of want to keep your distance because they're weird and like kind of off putting, but like you get like your kid gets sick or something, maybe you go to them hoping that they know something right, because they're seen as sort of possessing this knowledge that can be useful to people who

are who are desperate. Now, when the British take over, the new Raj has no place for anything as strange or as uncontrollable as Hatha yoga, it's practitioners became outlaws, banned under a law restricting miscellaneous and disreputable vagrants, which is also an interesting an accurate description of everyone we hire here at Cool Zone.

modern day what we call yoga in La and be like, this is yoga. It would be like walking up to a scientist with an eighth grade biology textbook and being like this book is signed, like this is all science, Like this book is what science is. Like, well, no, that's one example of it, but like there's a lot of other things involved in the jay. Yeah.

sort of like vows and stuff in order to carry on their work. Vivid Cananda traveled the country for five years before deciding it was his karma to go to the United States and spread an understanding of the Hindu faith. The best place to do that in eighteen ninety three was the World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago. Back in the day before we had TikTok and Twitter to teach us about foreigners and various kinds of grindset, people held massive fairs every few years to get an idea of what

was happening in the world. Right that was your TikTok. Because you'd show up in Chicago or New York. They'd build a bunch of like dangerous fire hazard buildings that looked pretty from a distance, and you'd look at some like Frenchman show you new cannons that were about to massacre people in Africa.

Now a bit of a legend has grown up around this guy and this this meeting at the World Parliament of Religions that says that he kind of announced to the crowd at the Parliament that he considered them sisters and brothers of America, and he was met with rivers of applause, and he used this momentum from this meeting to go on this successful lecture tour where he sold a bunch of books, and he like spread Eastern mysticism all around the United States for the first time, and

he even opened several branches of like a mission on US soil. Pieces of this are true, but painting vi Cananda's speech as an unqualified success leaves a lot out, As this write up by Philippe de Slip makes clear, the approval given to Vivid Cananda at the Parliament in

Chicago was not unique to him. However, in the account of the Parliament published by its president, John Henry Barrow's applause was also freely given to the other speakers as part of the self congratulatory spirit of the parliament, and Vivid Cananda did not just receive praise at the Parliament. Barrows also noted that very little approval was shown to some of the sentiments expressed by Vivid Cananda in his

closing address. Vivid Cananda's subsequent lecture tours drew curiosity and interest, but also some hostility. In a letter to one of his American students in eighteen ninety seven, Swami Vivid Cananda described himself as a much reviled preacher in the United States, which I don't think is surprising, right that Americans not at all would meet their first Hindu like religious leader and be racist, right like that, that's not shocking, you know, I like.

Like the Indian religion is Hinduism. That's a big problem today. But like he is talking specifically about like the Hindu religion, Hindu mysticism, and his teachings on that topic have a significant impact on what you might call early American seekers. Even at that period of time, there was widespread interest in the East and alternatives to kind of the same old Judeo Christian clap trap that seem to a lot of people in this period to be kind of dreary

and lacking in avenues to pursue self fulfillment. Right. Part of what's happening in this period is that Christianity has not caught up to modernity, right, and so people are experiencing this rapid advance in science, but like they're still basically worshiping kind of in the same way they would have in teen seventeen hundreds. And folks are like, well, this kind of seems boring as shit, right, especially folks

who are like, you know, upper middle class or wealthy. Right, it's just not as exciting to those folks into like intellectuals as this guy Vivid Cananda coming in and talking about this like weird new religion they've never heard anything about. Of particular interest to these early seekers was yoga. Now, Vivi Caananda was a not a big believer in Hatha yoga, nor was he teaching asanas to like large groups of people. He's not leading like what you know again, what we

would recognize in the modern terms, like yoga sessions. But he did mention various practices that were part of yoga. Although at the time there was kind of fairly little agreement about what yoga was. Vivid Cananda spoke about it mainly as a philosophy of self improvement and often as dietary guidelines too. I'm gonna quote from Filipe again here. His published lectures in the United States are flooded with the word power, and in one of them he enjoins

his listeners to stand as a rock. You are indestructible. Not unlike in immobile Rock vivid. Cananda's approach was devoid of the flowing sequences of asanas or postures that are now commonly associated with the practice. So while he avoided talk of hatha yoga in public, he did speak more

openly about it to his close followers. He admitted to them that in eighteen ninety he'd gotten interested in it as a solution for his health, but had backed away from his studies after his master admonished him to audiences he called hatha gymnastics and queer breathing exercises. But in private, over the years he taught small groups of students a handful of different poses. Right, So this is kind of a thing that maybe he was a little bit lukewarm on.

There was some stuff he found interesting. So when he's got these more dedicated groups of practitioners, he'll walk them through some poses. He'll do probably the very first like yoga sessions like in the United States, But in public when he's doing is bigspe he doesn't really talk about this other than to kind of broadly mention like, ah ye,

and some people do this, you know. Vivid Cananda's time in the United Slime States marks, according to religious studies lecturer Suzanne Newcom, a turning point in how Indian religiosity was understood outside of India. In the decades to come, the profile of such teachings would be raised again by a wave of immigrants to the United States, many of

whom came to work dangerous jobs on railroads. The government was loathed to give them civil rights, and so many of them wound up itinerants, wandering around the country and dispensing spiritual advice, because like, what else are they going to do? Right, There's not a lot of gigs, you know.

One prominent American writer in nineteen thirty eight referred to these people as traveling salesmen, writing that every winter we can find advertisements of the appearances of yogis in the cities of the East, and during the spring and the summer they work the back places. But by the end of the nineteen thirties, a revival of hathapractices in India had brought a wider knowledge of the asanas to the

United States. Gradually, many progressive Americans started to view yoga not as some sort of foreign magic but as a physical exercise and kind of That process is pretty steady over like a twenty year period or something like that, but there are some hiccups in it. And probably the biggest hiccup in like the road to yoga being seen as respectable is the life and career of an American

named Pierre Arnold Bernard. He's probably the first man to get rich off of yoga in the United States, and of course he is a white dude, right, it makes sense that the first guy to get fucking loaded from yoga in the US is a white guy.

spirituality in the occult. You know, we've talked about this in the Helena Blovotsky episodes. Jamie talks about this in her Ghost Church podcast. The end of the eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, there's this wave of spiritism, right, these like people are doing like channeling and they're they're talking to the dead, and you know, you've got all these kind of like magicians wandering around the country doing shows. The occult is really sort of taking off in popular culture.

And as a kid, Perry's super into this stuff. So when he runs across this Syrian Indian yogi named Silvaus Hamadi who's a practitioner of Hatha yoga, he's really he's down with what this guy is teaching. Now, I can't tell you if Silveus Hamadi was like a legitimate for one thing, He's like, I can't, I can't like guarantee for you that this guy is in any way teaching legitimate yoga. Like it's the eighteen nineties. You know, who

knows what's going on here. But with Silvus at least his yoga includes what's described in the literature I read as magical sex rights that were acts of worship for the god shak D. So you know, Perry gets on board with this shit and kind of as a young man, he and his guru moved to San Francisco, where Perry changes his name to Pierre. He starts teaching hatha to interested seekers in charging an exorbitant price for the privilege.

One hundred dollars. That's like what it costs to get like initiated into his orders so you can like do yoga with them, which is several thousand dollars today, Like he is, Yeah, he is fucking charging like that's a lot of money today.

this is not a popular business to be in. San Francisco was not at this point a willing mecca for the weird, and Bernard was forced to flee with his few followers, who called themselves the Tantricks with ak you've heard of tantric you know yoga or like they are they spell a t A N t ri i K. In nineteen oh six, they moved from San Francisco to Seattle, which was also not yet strange enough to host them.

And so three years later, after having picked up and they're picking up people, he's picking up followers like he's running like a little cult and he's getting cult. Yeah yeah. He picks them up in Noracal, he picks them up in Washington, and then they head east to New York City. Now by this point, Bernard's followers are calling themselves the Tantric Order, and they, you know, with the kind of

limited funds they have because they're not doing great. They get by a townhouse which they decorate in mystic stylings and start to operate as a yoga school and a sanitarium. Now, the best book on Bernard is called The Great Um by Robert Love, and in that book, Love describes Bernard's early East Coast clientele as a mix of well healed interested parties, doctors, patients, the sickly, occultists, spiritual seekers, and health fad enthusiasts. So this is not a lot's changed.

I was gonna say, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, basically folks, yeah yeah yeah.

respectful curious seekers. And you know he's mixing. The Tantriks are like not again, this is not you wouldn't like if you were to like bring some yogas over from India, they would have a lot of notes on what these guys are doing. But people doing like back in eight evenings, which is like not, you know, Hindu is evidence of kind of they're they're mixing and mashing a lot of stuff, but they're using kind of the branding of yoga because it's it's Eastern and mysterious, right and it has you

have to think too here. Yoga has a connotation that's more like if you talk about like magic today again like than like it does now. Yeah, these people are not just thinking like oh, I'm going to go get like in better shape and improve my joint health. Right, that's not why people get into yoga in this period of time.

long term benefit, and she was ill enough. It's kind of unclear, like what's wrong with her. It seems like it's one of either one of those things where they

just didn't have a diagnosis. It might have been just like maybe she had some sort of allergy that at the time everything her parents were giving it like and they just didn't idea yeah exactly, like right, yeah, we don't really know, but she's ill enough that her parents are terrified that she might suffer from the worst fate a woman can experience, not being married to a dude.

went under. And you know, Pierre Bernard is not a doctor, although I should note when I say that most doctors in nineteen or nine aren't really doctors. Yeah, exactly, So this is not as alarming as it.

He's not educated, but he's an autodidact, so he reads a lot of medical texts along with a lot of spiritual texts, and he's really good at like weaving all of this together and like mixing. Some of this is like legitimate, you know, yoga. Some of this is like different aspects of like Hindu or Buddhist beliefs that he's read. Some of this is like shit he picks up from medical textbooks, and some of it's like probably Blovatsky style,

like a cult, you know whatever. And he's he's pretty good at like mixing and mashing all of this together. And he really impresses the family in his first visit or in their first visit to him, but he still charges them, Like when after he gets their consult, they're like into what he's saying, but the price he quotes them to treat her is like outrageous. It starts with a forty dollars initiation fee, which is, you know, an average American at that point gets about thirteen dollars a

week for about fifty fifty nine hours of labor. Right, So he's charging them almost three weeks of like full time labor to get it initiated, right, and then there's ongoing charges after that.

room and conducted a physical exam. He concluded that yes he could help her, Yes she could regain her vitality and even flourish under his care, but it would take extreme measures and individual attention. He sent one of his associates to find a suitable place, and in November he installed her in his new sanitary, a rented apartment at seventy West one oh ninth Street near Central Park. Zelia's father visited the place to make sure it was on the up and up before allowing his daughter to move in.

Beneath the cloak of therapy, however, a powerful attraction developed between the worldly thirty three year old Bernard and the nineteen year old Zelia. Her first night in the apartment, Bernard paid her a visit. In between boasts of his knowledge of spiritual domains, he kissed her until her breath gave out. She was a lucky woman. He told her he was very powerful, very wealthy. He assured her of his commitment and his honorable intentions. She felt herself fall

completely under his power, hypnotized to obey him. Several nights later, she surrendered to the most pressing of his wishes and the couple made love. So, yeah, that's problematic. We could say, you know, he's supposed to be her doctor. She's living in a sanitarium that he runs. You know, the age GAP's a little bit problematic too, Like, there's a lot

that's problematic about this problematic. Yeah, Zea becomes a living at the tantriuc House, where the two make love on a regular basis until her family stops being able to pay for her treatments. At that point, she is kicked out of the sanitarium, but when she gets back home, she's apparently free of her heart condition, Like she feels better, So I don't maybe she just needed like you know, like yeah, yeah, like I who am I to say?

So for a while, her parents are like, well it was worth it, right, Like she's feeling better, you know. They don't know exactly what's happened, but they see that she seems to be in better health and that's mostly what they care about. So for a while, everything's fine. But Zellia's turnaround had more to do with the fact that she'd fallen in love with Pierre than the healing

power of whatever he was advertising as yoga. A modern person might have recognized that a dude who kicks you out because you can't afford the rent and his unlicensed hospital is not your soulmate, but these were more primitive times, and Lifetime Original movies hadn't yet taught that message to people. The business, the business at the Tantric House continued to evolve They developed an enrollment contract for potential students, which offered them either an upfront fee of one hundred dollars

or three monthly installments of forty dollars each. For twenty dollars, Bernard would give you a physical examination, and for just two dollars you could acquire your very own copy of their newsletter, the Journal of the Tantric Order. Yeah, which I'd love to get a copy of if anyone runs into one out there.

His best instructor then was Aura Ray named real name Gertrude, who wore quote yogi suits, skin tight colored tights covered in tantric symbols that were basically the only attractive clothing that anyone wore in a sim like this is like the early nineteen hundreds, right, Everybody's like, yeah.

on health and diet. Zelia continued to visit whenever she could, and over time she grew concerned and suspicious of about how many of his followers were attractive young women. She was as she did, Yeah, I bet she did. She was also frustrated by the fact that he kept sections of the townhouse off limits to her for obvious reasons.

talking them into having a threesome with him. So now, Katie that that sounds gross, right, like that's that's that's that's problematic, But it kind of goes in a good direction because Gertrude and Zellia, in an unlikely fashion, like become friends and they start talking without Pierre there about the way he's treating them both, and Zellia starts asking Gertrude questions like, Zellia like you would expect, you know, especially given the time, like even the day, you'd expect

Zellia to be like, fuck Gertrude, fuck this lady who's like getting in between me and this guy. But Zelly is like, has he been paying you for all the work? That you do teaching yoga classes. And Gertrude's like, well, no, he's not paying me, And Zelli is like, you know that's fucked up, right, Like you know you should be getting paid to do this job.

some things. So Gertrude's like, all right, well I'll go back with you to like deal with this because maybe it'll work out, but she promises Zellia, I'm gonna come back, like I'm not gonna stay there obviously, So Gertrude leaves. It's supposed to be just for a little while, but days go by and Zelia starts to get worried, so she writes to Gertrude's sister in Seattle, and in the letter that Zelia writes gertrude sister, she kind of insinuates

Gertrude might be being held against her will. Zellia doesn't really know what's going on, but she knows Pierre. She kind of knows the vibes, and she's like, I think something fucked up is going on. So Gertrude's sister travels east and like travels east with like fucking hell on her mind because she had not been happy when Gertrude had left Seattle with this guy, so she's kind of been like waiting for something fucked up to happen. So she travels east with the intention of like fucking shit

up for Pierre. She had Also, it's also probably worth noting she had been dumped by a member of the Tantric Order earlier, so she also has yeah, yeah, yeah, her sister adds, there's like she's not a little bit of a brud too. Yeah, this is these are this is a messy story, so chaotic you can make although again there's a there's a pretty good like Hulu plus

you know original series in this absolutely. So she and Zelle a Gertrude's sister, and Zellia go to the police lurid stories of like dark sex, magic and presumed unlawful imprisonment and a few nights and the police like take it seriously. And so a few nights later, you know, classes are going on at this at this townhouse where where Pierre runs you know, his order out of and during classes, Zella comes to the door of the townhouse

and she gives they have like a secret knock. So she gives the secret knock, and whatever guy's at the door opens the door for her and a bunch of New York detectives Russian uh, and they find you know, when they bust in what one detective describes later as quote, a young man clad in filmy garments and squatting as a sort of presiding demi god among a dozen men and women strangely garbed and tight fitting gowns of one piece, which is a very funny, like old timey description of

like people in yoga outfits.

You're sore because you're jealous of Gertrude. One of the tantric women focused a menacing glare on Gertrude and began chanting on ominously, zimzimzim zz z. Gertrude, who had been around these other women for some time, was obviously spooked. She is putting a curse on me, she screamed. In the midst of all this, someone doused the lights, but it was clear even in the confusion and darkness that the young man in the filmy garments was the person

the police were looking for. You're under arrest, said Callahan, the detective to Bernard. Detective Joseph Lennard, the wise guy of the two partners, pointed at the symbols on Bernard's robe. What are those things on your chest? He demanded. When Bernard filled him in, the cop replied, so that's the bar. After his initial indignation, Bernard stood calmly before the police. He confirmed his identity and that of the quivering girl

in tights, Gertrude Leo. Then the detectives rousted the entire party and moved them down the steps of the Brownstone and into the spring night. The officers, the irate witnesses, the young women in bathing suits, the others hissing curses, and finally Bernard, wearing the elaborate ceremonial robe of a seventh degree tantric priest bearing the ancient symbols of birth, death, and regeneration. Together they set out from the Brownstone, and a comical looking pert parade headed for the West sixty

eighth Street police station. It's yeah again, great Hulu series.

he's not a doctor. He's a Hindu teacher. He claims to cure people by controlling spirits. Now, Bernard did not look very much like a yogi. He is a balding like Irish American dude in his thirties. He could have passed for a banker in the right place.

So again that's like the kind of and that gives you an idea too of like who they're they're going after, because like Pierre has these young women who are like basically working as instructors, and then these old men who are presumably wealthier, who are basically paying to like hang out with a bunch of attractive young women wearing tight clothes and stretching. Right like that that is what he's offering, you know. Also again, and it's New York City, yeah,

it's New York City. It is interesting to me that a crystal ball was involved. I've done a number of yoga classes, none of which involved a crystal ball.

uncommonly honest. He told the journalist, I never lived in India. The whole scheme is physical culture, that's all. Only some of those nasty tongued women got busy. You know, if you pay more attention to one than you do to another, she gets jealous. This whole white slave business was too much. Wonder they didn't hold me for murder?

is called physical culture. So Pierre is as he's being interviewed by this guy he's trying to you know, normally, when he's like trying to con people into giving him money, he wants to portray himself as like this Eastern mystic who has access to like magical powers. When he's in trouble, He's like, no, I'm just like this guy who's like popular and rich and famous, right, Like this is just another kind of physical culture, you know, it's like lifting weights.

He attempts to do that only when he's in trouble, but that I think that is interesting.

black women that we don't anymore. Jenny Miller, Gertrude's sister, saw kind of tying in what he had done to this like white slaver panic as a savvy way to get revenge on Pierre. So she told the press that the tantric order was engaging in an even quote higher order of the of the white slave traffic, adding wealthy women, women whose fortunes run high into the millions, are prime movers in this traffic.

Some of them sat down with anyone from the West Coast who would claim to have been a former member of the Tantrik Order, and a lot of these people

were just like lying, right for whatever reason. But others journalists started digging through various Hindu texts, often like bad translations of Hindu texts that they only partly understood, looking for anything that they could like tie into this broader thing, right, that they could like, Ah, here's another you know, it's it's journalism hasn't changed either, you know, Centurion or so, I.

and young girls. Since the Vira Sadhana was a compendium of abridged mystical tracks and translated Hindu writings that were long on metaphor and symbol, UM's enemies found everything they wanted. They picked from a combination platter of yoga's alleged supernatural powers, sex rituals, phallic worship, and yes, even a mention of

medieval Hindu rights that used dead bodies. When apprized by a reporter that some of the texts he published were sealacious in nature, Bernard answered wistfully, that's the trouble with people. They so readily misunderstood and a true conception of the system.

And a lot of this is like, you know, you can find like texts in pieces in the Bible, pieces in like literally every religious text that like most practitions will they are like, well, that's a metaphor that's not meant to be literal like and also it is like I don't know the quality of the translations he's getting, but people are finding stuff from like these medieval texts that like are fucked up sounding to modern ears, and he's kind of just like printed out in order to

have something to sell, and they're accusing him of like stuff he's not doing.

this mode of worship. It constitutes the basis of all that is sacred, wholly, and beautiful. The whole world is embodied in the woman. Now, yeah, that's heteronormative, but to most people in twenty twenty three, it's not what you'd call like a particularly offensive statement, even if it is a bit reductive and you know, horny. That said, as the arraignment went on, the allegations continued to pour out. Some were likely true and some were you know, exaggerated

or just false. Zelia, who was never a full initiate, told lurid stories of blood oaths that either you know, were exaggerated. You know, she's in kind of a heightened state when she encounters this, But you know, I don't think anyone was like doing any serious like blood magic or whatever. But she also told like stories of like orgies in sort of like sexual like being pressured into having group sex and stuff that definitely did happen, right

ay for sure. Yeah, things got really dark when Gertrude took the stand. Though she alleged that on September seventeenth, nineteen oh nine, Pierre had threatened to drug her with morphine when she became what he called hysterical, She said

that he kept her prisoner with his hypnotic powers. Now, obviously I'm not like a particular believer in hypnotic powers, but I certainly believe that a mix of drugs, the mind altering impact of cult dynamics, and good old fashioned gas lighting canna have the effect of keeping someone a prisoner without having them chained to a wall.

I both feared and loved him. He made me believe that he could communicate with priests of the Order all over the world who would sit in counsel at his command and take a awigh my mind if I did not obey him. And one of the heartbreaking dimentions about this is that in order to lay out the abuse that both women absolutely experienced, Zelia and Gertrude had to admit to having premarital sex. In Gertrude's case, this involved sex with a number of men as part of sexual rights.

Some of this does sound very satanic, panicky, but part of why I tend to like why I believe like what they're saying is that Gertrude and Zelia they suffered massive personal consequences for doing this. Going up in front of like a court and saying that you had sex outside of marriage in this period of time closes off opportunities for you as a woman.

His followers dissolved, and the townhouse lay vacant while he languished in jail waiting for his trial, but as the weeks ticked by his lawyers found what they called evidence against Gertrude's previously chased character. They alleged that she had lied about her age and that she had slept with someone outside of marriage previously. Pierre's lawyer offered to produce these claims and witnesses to them in court, so the

DA dropped Gertrude as a witness and a complainant. Right he dropped the charge is based on Pierre's abuse of Gertrude because this lawyer was like, I found evidence that she had sex outside of marriage once, Like that's the time wherein he reduced bail on Pierre. But the case did go forward at this point, though, Zelia decided that she too wanted off the case. Her family said that she had moved out of state. She wanted the charges.

She just wanted it to end. Like the way her family described it is that the case had nearly driven her insane. I think it was just too much for her, and once Gertrude kind of was out, it was like, I can't, I can't go through this, like.

replay of the Bernard proceedings. Meanwhile, back in New York City, esoteric psychologist doctor William Latson, who taught Hindu dancing as a way of freeing his female patients from their liberal restraints, committed suicide in his office. Combined with Bernard's notoriety and seized conviction, the lats and scandal turned public sentiment against yoga and mysticism. Newspapers began publishing feature length expose as

blaming yoga for domestic infelicity, insanity, and death. The federal government opened official investigations against various swamis and Hindu priests. America was fascinated, horrified, and obsessed with what the Washington Post called the soul destroying poison of the East, the tragic flood of broken homes and hearts, disgrace and suicide. Yoga had become public enemy number one.

the Northeast. And he worked with a number of the wealthiest people in the country at the time, including the Vanderbilt daughters. Yes, he's extremely successful. If you want to learn about this guy's whole life story, I really recommend Robert Loves the Great Um. It's an interesting, well written book about this fella. Yoga itself languished until the late nineteen fifties, when enough distance from the moral panic years allowed a new generation to see it as simply a

secular exercise remedy. It was still transmitted to people largely by white Americans like Richard Hitelman, and Lilias Folan. Television was key to this spread. It made it easy to show people different poses in a manner that seemed straightforward and absent the trappings of mysticism that had made Pierre

Bernard seem so shady. Then the nineteen sixties hit, the h bees all started doing yoga and the New Age movement took off, and in the middle of that process, a young Indian immigrant would introduce the continent to a new version of yoga. His name was Bickram. And we're gonna talk about all that in part two.