The title page of Mabel Potter Daggett’s 1911 essay, “The Heathen Invasion of America”
#HindooHistory
“Eve is eating the apple again. It is offered as a knowledge of the occult that shall solve the riddles of existence. Yoga, that eastern philosophy the emblem of which is the coiled serpent, is being widely disseminated here”
“Literally yoga means the ‘path’ that leads to wisdom. Actually it is proving the way that leads to domestic infelicity and insanity and death”
“They are priests from ‘East of Suez’ who with soft spoken proselytizing have whispered this mysticism into the ears of the American woman”
“While the churches of America are spending twenty million dollars annually in the cause of foreign missions the pagans have executed an amazing flank movement; they have sent their emissaries to us.”
Today the tinkling of temple bells ring out with a derisive, jarring note in a Christian land”
“It was the Congress of Religions at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 that with a spirit of fine religious toleration beckoned the first holy men from their fastnesses in the Himalayas”
“That benign condescension has proved fraught with far reaching consequences. The Swamis and Babas who came to America discarded in India the simplicity of their Sanyasin garb for gorgeous robes more tempered to western taste”
“They arrived silken clad and sandal shod, to prove an attraction that outshone the plain American variety of divine, the minister in a frock coat and white tie”
“These dusky-hued Orientals sat on drawing-room sofas, the center of admiring attention, while fair hands passed them cakes and served them tea in Sevres china. It was far better than squatting, clad in yellow loin cloth, at some heathen temple’s gate”
“When there was started at Green Acre, Maine in 1896, a summer school of philosophy which was the outgrowth of the World’s Fair Congress of Religions, its platform was an open forum where the Swamis found a welcome”’
“It is via this New England route from Calcutta that nearly every Eastern kharid has arrived and established his vogue in this country”
“With this introduction from Green Acre, Maine, the land of the Puritan forefathers, the turbaned teachers from the East set out across the continent...”
“The yoga class is becoming as popular as the Browning Class or the Shakespeare class. It is the direct means by which a Swami reaches the public. Through its aid, the Eastern teaching is gathering a wider clientele than it formerly numbered...”
“Placing the Hindu scriptures, the Bhagavadgita, or the Persian scriptures, the Zend Avesta, above their bibles many women who were formerly predestined Baptists and Presbyterians, Methodists saved by grace, established Episcopalians, Catholics who said their rosaries...”
“Is it not enough to tempt the feminine mind from Paradise itself? Small wonder that a Swami’s following, while it includes notably here and there college professors and men of learning... recruits its largest numbers among women”
“But yoga is a dangerous knowledge to lure any but the best balances brain. In the pursuit of it, too often the listening devotee is offering her sacrifices even at the altar of her soul”
Caption: “THE HINDOO HOLY MAN ON HIS NATIVE HEATH IN INDIA”
Caption: “Mrs. Ole Bull, widow of renowned violinist. This picture, taken some years ago when Mrs. Bull was fifty, shows her as the beautiful woman she was before the study of yoga shattered her reason”
“The imported religions of the Orient that sow the subtle seeds of destruction, are offered to the uninitiate as beautiful philosophies. On the surface they are that. But they are inevitably sprung from the soil of paganism and are tinctured with its practices”
“A greater menace than that of image worship lurks in the teachings of the Hindoo mystics. The casual observer will not discover it...And the descent from Christianity to heathenism is by such easy stages that the novice scarcely realizes she is led”
“How many are followers of the new gods it is difficult to estimate with exactness. It is known, however, that their number is in the thousands. The Vedanta society, established in America by the Swami Vivekananda...lectures to audiences of from three to five hundred people”
Caption: “Baba Bharati, the priest of the Los Angeles Radha-Krishna temple, who has many American converts, especially women”
“And your religion that is three thousand years old, what, let me ask, has it done for the women of India?”
“The Swami hesitated. He laughed disagreeably. ‘What has yours done for the old maids of New England?’”
“The missionary’s question is argument for which Orientalism in its most plausible phase has no answer. That one shrewd sentence punctures the sophistry of the East”
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.