This @guerinemily piece is a great example of how American prejudice and paranoia about "hindoo" influence that we see in the early 20th century (with specific regard to the increased popularity of yoga) is reproducing itself in the current day.
npr.org
npr.org
Ostensibly about yoga teachers in LA who have taken to conspiratorial thinking, the piece includes some insanely broad invective against yoga, a spiritual practice revered by hundreds of millions of people around the world for their own physical, spiritual, and mental upliftment
Here @guerinemily reports that "yoga philosophy and conspiratorial thinking have a lot in common" and that yoga encourages "relativism around truth." She also reports that Q-Anon has particular resonance for yoga practitioners
How many yoga practitioners did she speak to? Were any of them actual hindus, or did she just conduct an informal survey a few white yogis on instagram? At the very least, she surely spoke to some scholars of yoga before making these broad pronouncements on "yoga philosophy"?
Well, no. She didn't do that either. Instead she relied on the views of one @matthewremski who comes off as a total charlatan. Does he know Sanskrit? Has he studied Patanjali? What exactly is the basis of his view that "yoga philosophy" and conspiratorial thinking are linked?
Also, "relativism around truth"? Where do they get this from? I don't see any indication that @guerinemily or any of the "experts" she spoke to have any credibility to speak on yogic epistemology.
In any case, it is amusing to see the fear-mongering about "relativism." I thought notions of objective truth were a product of white supremacy?
Yoga (in the form we would recognize it today) grew in popularity among the American elite following the establishment of the Vedanta Society by Swami Vivekananda in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
The backlash was immediate. Those who recognized the therapeutic benefits sought to repackage it for American audiences, even going so far as to create "Christian Yoga" -- i.e. yoga without the "hindoo" baggage
However, for the American protestant establishment, even this was a bridge too far. Mabel Potter Daggett in her 1911 essay "The Heathen Invasion of America" argues that yoga is "proving the way that leads to domestic infelicity and insanity and deathβ
She argues that yoga and Vedanta, while ostensibly packaged "as beautiful philosophies" are "inevitably sprung from the soil of paganism and are tinctured with its practicesβ and should be avoided
Women are, according to Daggett, particularly susceptible to the wiles of the "swarthy priests" of the east because yoga promises "eternal youth"
The fear-mongering about yoga and conspiratorial thinking is a reproduction of the early 20th century paranoia that practicing yoga would lead good, Christian women into the throes of hindoo paganism.
In both cases, yoga-- along with other hindu practices-- is described as having a sinister power to cause mental perversion, to draw practitioners away from the path of Truth into darkness, purely on the basis of conjecture of course.
For more, just search the @hindoohistory feed for "yoga"-- there are plenty of clips
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