108 Biography of a Yogihe was forced to admit that Yogananda had not based his lectures on texts from
the Bible although he did make frequent use of quotations from it.
A local pastor, Revered R. N. Merrill, then testified that he had been called
upon to counsel a woman whose relatives insisted she was under Yogananda’s
hypnotic spell. In a similar spirit, it was speculated that Yogananda had
attempted to hypnotize Police Chief Quigg as well. One report states that
“seated across the table at the police station, the Hindu philosopher gazed
dreamily into the eyes of Chief Quigg in an effort to mesmerize him, but the
hypnotic influences were sharply interrupted when the chief ordered him
to stop.”^40 In response to these accusations, in his final rebuttal, Yogananda
insisted that he condemned hypnotism, explaining that he practiced magne-
tism, which was an “entirely different thing.” Without attributing any truth to
these accusations one way or another, one is nevertheless tempted to wonder
at the correspondence between these accusations as being par for the course
amidst a bout of sensationalized Yogi phobia and Yogananda’s actual experi-
mentations with hypnotism in his youth. It would appear that at least at one
time he too thought that such practices were well within the purview of what
it meant to be a Yogi.
Even more incendiary than the possibility of hypnotism was the overwhelm-
ingly female constitution of Yogananda’s audience. Yogananda’s organization was
repeatedly referred to as a “love cult” and presented as part of a sort of rising
epidemic, as evidenced by the fact that just a few months prior to the Miami
incident, authorities in Switzerland had “uncovered sensational activities of an
allegedly similar organization in the Alps, where east Indian teachers and their
feminine followers disported themselves in the nude.”^41 If such implicit con-
nections were not damning enough, the papers further cited accusations that
Yogananda had already been chased out of Los Angeles after having his nose bro-
ken by an insulted husband.
Although Yogananda firmly refuted this alleged altercation as a slanderous
case of mistaken identity, his connection to the incident was closer than his deni-
als implied. The man for whom Yogananda had been mistaken was none other
than Dhirananda, who during Yogananda’s absence had been placed in charge
of the Mt. Washington center and was therefore forced to shoulder the respon-
sibility when its activities came under scrutiny. Indeed, some three weeks before
Yogananda’s own unfortunate brush with an angry mob in Miami, Dhirananda
had to be escorted off a train when he returned from the East Coast to Los
Angeles so as to keep reporters at bay in light of the District Attorney’s investiga-
tion of the center.
Contrary to Yogananda’s claims that he had been in no way implicated in the
Los Angeles scandal, his own role in the matter was under just as much scrutiny