When Yoga Sparked a Sex Panic

"Hindu mystics" with "swarthy faces and dreamy-looking eyes" once had Uncle Sam in a tizzy.

Yoga and meditation were once seen by Americans "as weird and culty," Nicole Daedone tells Reason. "Any new, profoundly healing protocol is seen as dark."

Daedone is the founder of OneTaste, an "orgasmic meditation" group that's come under fire from federal authorities. She and OneTaste's former head of sales, Rachel Cherwitz, are currently being prosecuted on a conspiracy to commit forced labor charge—a situation you can read all about here, in my new deep dive into OneTaste and the weird, weak case against it.

Daedone's comments sent me down an archival rabbit hole, seeking out past examples of people freaking out about yoga and associated philosophies. What I found is so absurd, hilarious, and relevant to modern moral panics about sex that I'm devoting today's newsletter to exploring this wild little slice of history.

"Eve is eating the apple again. It is offered as a knowledge of the occult that shall solve the riddles of existence," reads a Los Angeles Times article from October 22, 1911. "Yoga, that eastern philosophy, the emblem of which is the coiled serpent, is being widely disseminated here."

In 1912, The Washington Post warned that American women were leaving their husbands, giving away their money, or becoming "dangerously ill by…devotion" to "swamis and Hindu priests" who preached, among other things, yoga and "love for love's sake."

Today, yoga is anodyne and mainstream in American culture. But it wasn't always so.

'Federal Inquiry Into Why Women Join With Hindus'

As the 20th century revved up, America entered a full-blown moral panic over yoga and those who taught it. Instructors were accused of being cult leaders, or worse. The practice became known as something menacing, morally subversive, and sexual. Eventually, federal authorities would get involved.

The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) provides a great overview of all this in its 2006 piece called "Fear of Yoga." Yoga started gaining traction in America near the turn of the 19th century, the CJR explains. It was helped along by the Theosophical Society, a "spiritualist-reform group" that "embraced a combo platter of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs and spiced it with a few of their own." Then, the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 "launched America's first superstar swami: the charismatic Vivekananda" and "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 attacks."

At the root of all of this was—can you guess?—a hefty dose of xenophobia. Swarthy foreigners were teaching yoga to nice, white American ladies—sound the alarm! Even worse, some American women were leaving their homes and perhaps even taking up romantically with these yogis.

It made news across the country when the wife of Purdue University President Winthrop Ellsworth Stone left her husband and family "to pursue the mystery teaching of the Yoga philosophy," as The Billings Evening Journal put it on May 5, 1908.

(While Americans now use the word yoga primarily to refer to the yoga postures that people have adopted as an exercise regimen, the word was more commonly used back then to refer to broader yogic philosophy, and sometimes Hindu beliefs more generally.)

Obviously, this sort of thing became a matter of federal concern.

"Governmental inquiry has been set on foot in an effort to discover how many American women converted by the various swamis and Hindu priests have left this country for India," The Washington Post reported on the front page of its magazine section on February 18, 1912.

In March 1912, San Francisco paper The Bulletin ran the headline "Federal Inquiry Into Why Women Join With Hindus." The subhead: "Uncle Sam Worried Over Number Enticed Away by Soft-Voiced Swamis."

Yoga Drives Women Insane?

Panic about immigrants at this time coincided with "a purity panic," as the CJR noted. And together, these worries "set loose the idea that these dark-skinned foreigners and the morals-loosening effects of their 'yogi philosophy' were a menace to society. Groups of followers were from then on routinely described as 'cults.'"

There's clearly an element of sexism in all of this, too. The fact that it was apparently American women, not men, who were captivated by yoga seems to have catapulted it from a serious spiritual or philosophical belief to something viewed here as faddish, frivolous, and a tad hysterical.

"It is the promise of eternal youth that attracts woman to yoga," the Los Angeles Times claimed in 1911 before detailing how women's feeble minds simply couldn't withstand the "dangerous knowledge" that yoga gurus were offering.

"It is principally to the 'weaker sex' that the glamour and alleged mystery of the Oriental religions seems to appeal," the 1912 Post article declared.

And for women—us poor powerless dears!—this often turned out badly.

The Post piece detailed one woman who "gave her entire fortune to found at Green Acres a summer school of Hindu philosophy, and ended her little journey into mysticism by being incarcerated by her friends in a lunatic asylum." Another woman was taken from a Hindu temple "so violently insane that she had to be taken to the Illinois Insane Asylum," while a third became "so obsessed with the teachings of the Hindu mystics that she had to be restrained by law from giving away all her property to the Sun Worshipers."

Today, such mentions serve as sad reminders of women's lack of legal agency and the ways in which the state colluded to go after women whose beliefs or actions threatened those around them. Then, it was apparently a sign of the "potent" danger of the "mystic" and "unfathomable" Hindu philosophy and of Hindu teachers with their "swarthy faces and dreamy-looking eyes," per the Post's description.

'All This White Slave Business'

As you might imagine, the twin fears of foreigners and sexual licentiousness doomed yoga to get caught up in a burgeoning sex-trafficking panic. Much like our modern iteration, the Victorian scare over sex trafficking—then often referred to as "white slavery"—was wont to confuse the consensual sexual antics of (young) women with women falling victim to coercion and force.

In 1910, not long before Congress passed the White-Slave Traffic Act—now better known as the Mann Act—to prevent bringing women across state lines for immoral purposes, an American-born yogi who went by Pierre Bernard (or sometimes Oom the Omnipotent) was arrested and jailed in New York.

Bernard was accused of "abducting Gertrude Leo, age 18, and detaining her for months in [his] house of dancing and weird 'Hindoo' rites," The Cincinnati Enquirer reported on May 4, 1910.

Upon entering the house, police found 13 people "clad in the lightest of bathing suits," who "writhed, twisted, and howled in time to the leader's chant," according to the Enquirer. Bernard reportedly told authorities they were engaged in a form of physical fitness, but New York Assistant District Attorney James Bronson Reynolds "believes it was something far more serious than physical culture," the paper reported.

Leo, the woman Bernard had allegedly abducted, had followed him from Seattle and "thinks he exercised some peculiar sort of charm over her," the Enquirer added. And a neighbor noted that while Leo repeatedly told her she wished to stay at Bernard's place, the girl seemed to be "under some sort of spell" as she talked.

"All this white slave business will make it hard for me to beat this case," Bernard reportedly said from jail.

From the little I've read about Bernard, he seems like something of a grifter, but not a sex trafficker. In any event, he was never brought to trial on the New York charges and went on to open an upstate New York commune that was supported by members of the Vanderbilt family. Ultimately, he "pioneered the form that yoga would eventually take in America: A vaguely spiritual practice, primarily undertaken by the middle-class and the affluent, for the purpose of health and the cultivation of the self," writes Joseph Laycock in a 2009 paper "'Nice Little Things Like That:' Oom the Omnipotent and the Marketing of Yoga to the American Public."

There were rumors of the Nyack commune being a "love cult," and police raided the place at one point, but Bernard went on to become a member of polite society.

It would take yoga a little longer to get to that point.

"In the 1920s, when tabloids became part of the journalistic landscape, yoga became part of the tabs' new 'love cult' obsession," noted the CJR. But "in the thirties and forties, a truce settled on the land. The cult connection still hung on for headline writers, and crimes were still attributed to immoral yogis, but a softening could be felt in the media's stance."

More Recent History 

There would be subsequent panics about yoga throughout the next decades, and the practice would take on new connotations—less nefarious, perhaps, but easily mocked ("If you're not into yoga/If you have half a brain…").

And while yoga eventually and firmly joined the mainstream, its practitioners have still been subject to sporadic suspicion. In the '00s, conservative Christians objected to its presence in public schools, believing it a gateway drug to heathen religions. Since then, the yoga-in-schools controversy seems to arise periodically.

We've even had a few incredibly retro panics about yoga and sex cults in recent decades. A Buenos Aires yoga school was raided just a few years ago, accused of being a sex cult. "American authorities have cooperated in the investigation," The New York Times reported.

This followed similar persecution of the group in the 1990s.

"For the Argentinian and international media, this was the case of 'la secta del horror,' a 'cult' that had brainwashed its followers and operated an international prostitution ring for some thirty years," writes Massimo Introvigne in a 2023 paper published in The Journal of CESNUR (Center for Studies on New Religions). "For the students of the group, called Buenos Aires Yoga School (BAYS, Escuela de Yoga de Buenos Aires), this was one of the most unbelievable case of false accusations in the whole Argentinian legal history."

Introvigne's perspective on how this happened is relevant to U.S. panics and investigations around groups preaching unorthodox ideas about sex, health, and spirituality. A scholar of new religious movements, Introvigne is careful to differentiate between what he has termed "criminal religious movements"—groups that commit crimes such as "terrorism, murder, rape, sexual abuse of children, and also gross financial violations"—and those accused of what he calls "the imaginary crimes of 'being a cult' and 'brainwashing their victims.'"

Many academics have "coalesced since the 1980s around the ideas that 'cult' was not a valid category but a label used to slander unpopular minorities," he writes. Likewise around the ideas that "'brainwashing' was a pseudo-scientific theory weaponized for the same purpose, and accounts by 'apostate' ex-members—i.e., the minority among former members…who had turned into militant opponents of the religions they had left…should be handled with care, and cannot serve as the main source of information about their former movements."

We've seen authorities, again and again—from the case against Oom the Omnipotent in 1910 to the case against OneTaste now—make all of these mistakes that Introvigne lays out. The results may make for tantalizing news media headlines, but calling it justice is a stretch.

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Today's Image

On a boat at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland | 2017

ENB/Reason