Craddock responded by taking her own life in order to die a free woman.
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Another federal trial threatened additional prison time.
In 1902, after being convicted in a New York trial for charges of obscenity, Craddock spent three tortuous months in prison.
She reconstructed the tantric mystico-erotic dimensions of hatha yoga into a system for enhancing sexual pleasures within heterosexual marriage, and she considered God to be a third partner in marital sexual union. 6 Craddock established the Church of Yoga in 1899. Craddock ( 1857–1902), an American yoga advocate who incited rage from Comstock and others. The famous efforts of the Postal Inspector Anthony Comstock ( 1844–1915) serve as a United States example.Ĭonsider the life of Ida C. 5 Many socially and politically influential people put fundamentalist standards in service of the active suppression of unorthodox ideas and practices. Whereas some mainstream denominations and new religious movements responded to such modern challenges by assimilating aspects of various worldviews, sometimes including modern scientific ones, others responded with religious fundamentalism. For example, Darwin’s theory of evolution questioned orthodox doctrines on creation and history. This was a period of religious questioning in light of modern analyses that challenged orthodox views. Nineteenth- and early 20th-century yoga advocates in Europe and the United States were also subject to serious and persistent criticisms for participation in physical yoga. 3 Mass-circulation writings on yoga reified colonialist and Orientalist stereotypes of hatha yoga as mysterious, bizarre, uncivilized, and threatening to modernity and rationality. 2 Second, the supposed siddhis or magical powers of some hatha yoga practitioners resulted in their association of hatha yoga with occult magic. First, abilities to contort the body into what were considered bizarre postures were associated with the abilities of European and North American contortionists, and so hatha yoga was reduced to an Indian form of crass entertainment. Much of that denunciation was fueled by widespread stereotypes about hatha yoga. British colonialists and Christian missionaries along with those Indian elites who sympathized with either or both causes thought of Indians engaged in hatha yoga as backward and savage. 1 More than anything else, a bifurcation between yoga’s meditative, philosophical, and ethical dimensions, associated with classical yoga or raja (“royal”) yoga, and the physical techniques associated with hatha yoga influenced the early constructions of modern yoga and the public’s view of it.įollowing the onset of British colonialism in India, elites from the United States, Europe, and India dismissed Indian systems of hatha yoga for what were considered extreme, barbaric, and anti-social practices. Though modern yoga went global by the 19th century, its early history featured controversial, elite, or countercultural systems opposed to prevailing orthodoxies and disdained or condemned by the general populace, which often treated it as a corruption of authentic yoga or as an unwelcome foreign import. Beginning in the 19th century, yoga proponents modernized yoga through creative processes of translation and accommodation in response to a sustained and unprecedented increase in capitalist production as well as colonial and industrial endeavors and the consequent globalizing processes.