Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy

Open the book to its title page and you meet an Indian master. Yogi Ramacharaka, it says, author of Science of Breath and Hatha Yoga, with an epigraph promising that the disciple "will always find his master."

Now read a little further down the same page. The Yogi Publication Society, Masonic Temple, Chicago. London agents at Ludgate Circus. Copyright 1903.

That small print is the first clue to the book. The voice that fills the fourteen lessons is patient, grave and unmistakably Eastern. The address the lessons were mailed from was an office skyscraper in the middle of an American city.

There was no Ramacharaka. The name belonged to William Walker Atkinson, an American born in Baltimore in 1862, who worked as a lawyer before a collapse in his health sent him looking for a cure.

He found one in New Thought, the American movement that taught that the mind heals, attracts and shapes a life. Around 1900 he settled in Chicago, edited a New Thought magazine and wrote at a remarkable pace.

Ramacharaka was only one of his signatures. Atkinson published under his own name and under several others, and each voice wore a slightly different costume. The yogi simply turned out to be the most successful of them, and his books on breath and yoga are still reprinted today.

Who actually wrote Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy?

• William Walker Atkinson, an American New Thought writer in Chicago✓Correct answer
• An Indian yogi who dictated his lessons to a Chicago publisher
• A circle of Theosophists who wrote together under one shared name
• A London occult society that used Chicago only as a mailing address

Ramacharaka was a pen name of William Walker Atkinson, a former lawyer turned New Thought writer and editor in Chicago. The London address on the title page belonged to the book's sales agents, not to its author.

Why would a Chicago writer need an Indian name? Because in 1904 the East was the most exciting word in American spiritual life.

About ten years earlier Swami Vivekananda had spoken at the World's Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago itself, and left audiences hungry for yoga and Vedanta. Theosophy had been teaching Americans about masters, karma and astral planes for a generation. A lesson from a yogi carried an authority that a lesson from a former lawyer could not.

So the persona was partly a sales decision. It was also a promise about tone: a teacher who does not argue. In the East, the first lesson explains, the teacher "does not stop to 'prove' each statement" and simply delivers his message. That calm, unhurried voice is a large part of why the book still reads well.

The book did not begin as a book. According to the publisher's notice, the lessons first went out as monthly booklets, the Correspondence Class Course of 1904, and were collected into one volume only after the booklets found an eager audience.

You can still see that shape. The first lesson greets the Yogi class of 1904 and admits the class began in November 1903, two months early, so that students would reach the more exciting material by January. The back pages offer the bound edition for $1.10 postpaid, with 24 hours to examine it and your money back if you don't like it.

None of this is a scandal. It is a mail-order course in a guru's voice, written by someone who knew exactly who was waiting at the letterbox and what they hoped to find inside.

Fourteen Lessons first reached its readers as monthly booklets in a correspondence class, not as a bound book.

True✓Correct answer

True. The publisher's notice says the lessons were issued as monthly booklets for the Correspondence Class Course of 1904 and bound together afterwards, which is why the first lesson addresses its readers as a class.