New Book Chapter: "'The Real Pure Yog': Yoga in the early Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor"

"'The Real Pure Yog': 

Yoga in the early Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor" (GoogleBooks)

from the new book 

Imagining the East: The Early Theosophical Society

I wrote this about 5 years ago while I was still working on the Thomas Moore Johnson letters. This book chapter expands on my discussion in Letters to the Sage Vol. 1 concerning the first known organized practice of yoga in the United States. In the 1870s and 1880s, as Western esotericists were forming stable organizations for the first time, they began to study yoga. At first, it was the Theosophical Society that showed the most interest, but as the group moved away from "practical occultism" in the mid-1880s, it also began dismissing non-philosophical forms of yogic practices. 

Just as this was happening, however, the TS's new competitor--the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor--was doing just the opposite: it was stressing the importance of practical occultism. Its leaders, who were all highly familiar with what was transpiring in the TS, soon reached out to its Indian contacts and were obtaining and assigning yogic practices to its neophytes. Interestingly, within a few years the HBL was claiming not to use "oriental" occultism--yet, as I demonstrate in my chapter, much of the yoga knowledge they had obtained from India was retained, but with the specific references to yoga removed.