The Turbaned Superman 51
shoulders with them. Bull, upon her death in 1911, left nearly all of her consider-
able estate to the Vedanta Society, a decision that her daughter was— for obvious
reasons— less than elated about and chose to contest on the grounds that decades
of interactions with Yogi teachers had driven her mother insane. Testimony to
establish Bull’s insanity ranged from her bizarre eating habits (a bit of milk and six
almonds a day), to incense burning and alleged drug use, to participation in “love
rites” and “delights of the love stage of yoga,” the details of which were apparently
so salacious as to be sealed by the court.^85
The details that were revealed, however, demonstrate interesting insights into
the ideas that were coming to be associated with yoga— or “yogi,” which was reg-
ularly used to refer to both the practice and its practitioners. In addition to the
scandalous activities described above, sources describe the practice of “Raja Yogi”
as involving the awakening and ascension of the “Kundalina” (kuṇḍalinī) into the
brain via the “sussuma” (suṣumnā) canal. Nicola Roberta, a student of Bull and sub-
sequent witness in the case seeking to establish her insanity, testified that as part of
the practice “we sat in a line or in a circle and breathed deeply. We tried to breathe
entirely through the left nostril and concentrated on it until we felt the breath going
way down to kindalina [base of spine].” Roberts also specified that this was accom-
panied by “exercises in the imagination” in which the practitioners would imagine
“a locust on the top of our heads growing brighter and brighter or to imagine that
there was a locust in our hearts growing brighter and brighter.”^86 Despite the abun-
dant and variable misspellings, the testimonies accurately describe a basic form of
prāṇāyāma breathing exercise and meditative visualization, which is consistent with
other reports of the contents of Vivekananda’s teachings during his American tour.
Of course, one certainly hopes that the “locust in our hearts” was a misunderstand-
ing on the part of the Chicago Tribune reporter who recorded Roberta’s description
of the visualization rather than Roberta himself. A lotus is a traditional— and much
more pleasant— image often invoked during meditative practice.
Regardless of their objective accuracy, the strangeness of the described prac-
tices no doubt contributed to the fervent panic over the dangers posed by Yogis.
Bull’s case was one of a number of such incidents that received considerable pub-
licity during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Just before Bull, in
1910, there was Sarah Jane Farmer (1844– 1916), who established a spiritual center
in Maine following the 1893 World Parliament of Religions and hosted a large
number of foreign as well as domestic metaphysical teachers and intellectuals.
However, after she decided to join the Baha’i faith and leave much of her estate
to a corresponding community, she was declared mentally incompetent and con-
fined to an insane asylum by her heirs.^87
Many similar stories litter the popular press of the time: In 1909, Yogi William
F. Garnett, “seer and fortune teller,” was charged with defrauding multiple