Biography of a Yogi Paramahansa Yogananda and the Origins of Modern Yoga

90 Biography of a Yogi

and perhaps even more so after his death, much of the SRF’s promotional energ y
was redirected to disseminating the work.
However, long before Yogananda’s story trickled into American homes via his
favored method of dissemination— mail- order— and certainly before it was avail-
able on the shelves of most bookstores, the Yogi was already making a stir. The Los
Angeles Times declared in 1932:

From a standpoint of public interest, the most spectacular swami in Los

Angeles is Swami Yogananda, whose headquarters are at Mt. Washington

Center, Highland Park. This man, with his long, dark hair and midnight

eyes, numbers his followers by the thousands. In his little colony on the

hill are scores of men and women who seem devoted to him and his doc-

trines, and his lectures on Sunday afternoons attract hundreds of persons,

some humble and ignorant, others merely curious.^2

Yogananda’s long hair and midnight eyes had already been enchanting— as well
as perturbing— American audiences all over the nation for over a decade. It was
only a few years after arriving in Boston with hardly a foothold to rely on that he
progressed to lecturing before auditoriums and concert halls filled to brimming
capacity. His methods for capturing the rapt attention of his audiences varied
from feats of physical strength and superhuman abilities to engaging philosophi-
cal expositions on the mysteries of mind, matter, and divinity.
The berobed representative of the Maharaja of Kasimbazar of Bengal appears to
have navigated the line separating his “demonstrations” from the sideshow curiosi-
ties and parlor tricks often associated with his contemporaries in the popular imagi-
nation with impressive deftness. Yet it was exactly that touch of mysterious power
that drew many of his followers, whose personal memoirs never fail to mention at
least a few occasions on which their Master displayed an intuition so uncanny as to
be superhuman. For disciples like Roy Davis, Yogananda was the embodiment of
the mystical stories of India and the presence of the Yogi himself must surely have
compensated for the lack of more colorful displays of levitation and the like, which
were more comfortably confined to the imagined world of the holy land itself.
The story of the man who became the Yogi, which this chapter attempts
to tell, is nevertheless still a story. Unlike Yogananda’s Autobiography, which
reads something like a Dickensian novel, this story is conflicted and fragmen-
tary. In the former, Yogananda appears as something of a superhuman Oliver
Twist— a prototypically pure soul moving along the neat arc of his prescribed
progress as he offers us colorful glimpses of countless supporting characters
and the myriads of details that make up his world, all presented to the reader
to illustrate one intended lesson or another. The latter is messier, less linear, at