52 Biography of a Yogiwomen.^88 In 1910, “Hindu hypnotist” Sakharam G. Pandit was arrested for offer-
ing a woman a “massage treatment” as part of “Yogi religion.”^89 In 1926, Annis
Schuler, “a pretty Los Angeles matron” filed for divorce from her husband citing
his keenness for “Yogi philosophy” as the reason. According to Mrs. Schuler, “as
long as his pursuit of knowledge along Yogi philosophical lines was confined to
various and sundry attempts to exercise hypnotism on her ... it was not so bad,
but— The incident of the housetop g ymnastics in scanty attire with numerous
neighbors as spectators not only caused her much mental anguish and suffering,
... it brought her to the realization that philosophy of Yogi tendencies as prac-
ticed by her husband are incompatible with happy married life.”^90 In 1935, Yogi
Dassaunda Singh Roy was arrested and tried for distributing various herbal medi-
cines, including alleged abortifacients, to several women.^91 The American public
thus had plenty of material on the grounds of which Yogi teachers could be estab-
lished as a looming threat. Although he initially seemed innocuous compared to
his more ostentatious counterparts, the mystic was quickly becoming the most
worrisome Yogi persona of all.
Indeed, as these examples demonstrate, anyone who called himself a Yogi
posed a potential danger, regardless of whether he was Indian or not. Bernard,
though decidedly American in origin, found himself at the center of the worst
media circus to swallow up any other Yogi before him. Of course, Bernard was
not altogether innocent. He had indeed been involved in sexual relationships
with a number of his female disciples and when one of them testified that he
had approached her saying ‘I am not a real man... . I am a god, but I have con-
descended to put on the habit of a man, that I perform the duties of a yogi, and
reveal true religion to the elect of America,”^92 there may have been more than a
little truth to her story. The Washington Post article in which this claim appeared
also intimated that Bernard had “induced her [Gertrude Leo] to come East with
him by promise to give her free treatment.” Thus, while Bernard may have in fact
been a European American, this fact was either lost on the mass public or he pos-
sessed enough of an association with the Orient so that his actual ethnic identity
did not much matter.
Furthermore, while Gertrude Leo may have been exploited to a certain degree,
she did initially join Bernard’s Order of her own accord. Similarly, while there is
no way of determining exactly what had transpired between the two Sara(h)s—
Bull and Farmer— and their teachers, leading them to disinherit their families in
favor of their spiritual communities, it is likely that the two women had not in
fact been driven to insanity as their heirs claimed. There is another story to be
told here— one that deals with the dynamics of women’s participation in meta-
physical religious movements as part of the larger narrative of women’s social and
sexual liberation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While a