34 Biography of a Yogiextraordinary feats. The performance culminated in a basic version of the then-
novel rope trick in which the fakir threw a ball of twine into the air that subse-
quently disappeared from sight, a boy climbed the twine and disappeared roughly
forty feet from the ground, and the twine itself disappeared a moment later.
Ellmore and Lessing were both prepared for and skeptical of such wonders and so,
while Lessing sketched the progression of the act, Ellmore took photographs of
the same. The photographs, in contrast to the sketches, revealed no twine, no boy,
but only the fakir sitting on the ground. As the article glibly explained, “Mr Fakir
has simply hypnotized the entire crowd, but he couldn’t hypnotize the camera.”^32
As Lamont reveals, the entire story was a hoax penned by one John Elbert Wilkie,
and a retraction was printed in the Chicago Tribune four months later— but by
then the story had been reprinted multiple times and translated into nearly every
European language.^33 Not only was the retraction generally ignored by the public,
but the hypnotism- based debunking offered by the fictional authors also gradu-
ally fell by the wayside. The performance of the Indian rope trick became a holy
grail for those seeking to discover the wonders of India.
Ultimately we can take away two very important points from the story of the
Indian rope trick. One is the enormous cultural power of tropes and narratives to
influence and even shape reality. The other point concerns the underlying origins
of the Yogi’s superpowers. Those who wanted to believe were much more able
to do so if they were able to ascribe the Yogi’s seemingly magical abilities to the
powers of the mind, and more specifically to the powers of hypnotism, whether
the Yogi was thought to apply such powers to himself or to others. Even the most
ardent skeptics could often be found attempting to explain the otherwise unex-
plainable claiming that the Yogi used hypnotism, in the case of seemingly super-
natural occurrences, or that he had relied on the sheer force of his personal charm,
in cases of the remarkable sway that he seemed to have over the finances of the
social elite.
Yogi MysticsIt is important to emphasize that when Vivekananda stepped onto the stage of
the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, he did so neither as a ragged ascetic
nor as a bejeweled magician. Of course, whether he was at the time presenting
himself as a Yogi per se is also up for debate. Nevertheless, Vivekananda, at that
moment or during the American tour that followed would hardly have been com-
prehensible to his audiences had they not already been exposed to a very different
kind of Yogi.
Although most histories of Hinduism— what to say of yoga— in America
will begin flourishingly with Vivekananda, some do include a brief preamble