“Eve is eating the apple again,” wrote Mabel Potter Daggett as she warned her readers of the new Eastern propaganda known as yoga. Her words of caution—specially directed at American Christian men—appeared in 1911, in an ominously titled article, “The Heathen Invasion.” Daggett, an American writer and journalist, perhaps considered it her responsibility to advise her brothers-in-faith of the reappearance of the first sin in the form of yoga.
When yoga was introduced to America, by many accounts, in 1893 by Swami Vivekananda at World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, it found little acceptance in the then largely Christian American society. “As early as the nineteenth century, many Christian leaders warned that yoga was not simply about strengthening one’s own religious identity and commitments, nor was it simply about attaining physical fitness and reducing stress,” notes Andrea. R. Jain, professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University. “Rather, it was a Hindu religious movement that was antithetical to Christianity.”
The American people had two options: heeding their religious leaders’ warning that yoga was “a discipline that upsets one’s allegiance to the religion of one’s birth” or ignoring their concerns and accepting it as “a system that brings greater physical and mental health,” reads an article by Laura Douglass in the International Journal of Yoga Therapy. While these dichotomous assessments seem melodramatic today, practicing yoga at the turn of the twentieth century was not inconsequential, especially for women.
Like wildfire, yoga quickly spread across America, much to the astonishment and disappointment of Christian leaders. The vogue of yoga, or the “eastern philosophy, the emblem of which is the coiled serpent,” as Daggett described it, brainwashed citizens of educated Western society. Women’s participation was certainly a matter of great concern, as the Christian clergy worried women might be more easily misled from their religion by the false promises of eternal youth by the yoga gurus.