In the bay, the remains of the fleet commanded by Admiral Pascual Cervera still show the fierceness of the recently ended war. From El Morro the sentinels see the battleships and other vessels arriving from the United States, with military and civilians on board. Among the passengers, a mature woman with a stern face comes down to the dock. It can be seen that she is used to giving orders.
It is Katherine Tingley. She comes with two missions: to help in the organization of the health service and to expand the teaching institutions that she directs, based on a millenary practice, originally from India.
It is said that Mackinley, the U.S. president, facilitated her trip.
He has led an intense life, unusual for women of that time.
Born in Newbury, Massachusetts, on July 6, 1847, she worked as a nurse in 1861 during the Civil War and her interest in the arts motivated her to join a traveling theater group in Europe. When she headed the Ladies Society of Mercy in the late 1880s in New York, she became involved with the Manhattan Masonic group. There she met the Irishman William Quan Judge, a mystical man, esoteric and occultist, one of the founders of the Theosophical Society, an organization which Katherine joined on October 13, 1894. Two years later, when Judge died, she was left as leader.
She actively participated, through talks, lectures and the formation of groups, in a World Theosophical Crusade that took her to several countries and she founded in Point Loma, California, the School for the Revival of the Lost Mysteries of Antiquity. She also created the International Brotherhood League and Children’s Summer Home, in Spring Valley, New Jersey.
Exploring the terrain
On November 19, 1898, Katherine led a charity event on a stage in New York City to raise funds for victims of the war in Cuba. She chose the Greek tragedy “The Eumenides” by Aeschylus. She understood that the Caribbean island, under the military rule of the United States, due to the high rates of illiteracy, in the midst of the material crisis caused by the armed conflict and the spiritual consequences that war always causes, was fertile ground for the expansion of her educational ideas.
To achieve this, she would create the Raja Yoga Academy in Santiago de Cuba, a branch of the one she founded in Point Loma. She found a powerful ally in the patriot and businessman Emilio Bacardí Moreau, mayor of Santiago de Cuba, grand master mason, an intellectual who founded several cultural institutions. She met with him in February 1899 and explained her purposes.
Katherine Tingley based her pedagogical work on Raja Yoga, native to ancient India, from the 3rd century BC when the wise Patanjali systematized in a philosophical text, the Yoga Sutra, doctrines that until that date were dispersed. “It implies that the mind is king above the rest of our body organs.”
The eight comprehensive practices are summarized in:
Yamas. Codes of conduct focused on self-control.
Niyama. Observances and commitments to practice.
Asana. Integration of mind and body through physical yoga postures.
Pranayama. Regulation of breathing leading to the integration of mind and body.
Pratyahara. The withdrawal of the senses from external distractions to develop insight.
Dharana. Concentration, unidirectionality of the mind.
Dhyana. Meditation (leading to samadhi)
Samadhi. The state of peace and full consciousness/supraconsciousness where duality does not exist.
Katherine returned to the United States optimistic. On August 18, 1900, the team that would materialize the initial phase of her plan landed in Santiago de Cuba: Dr. Gertrude Van Pelt, L. Wood, B. Knocke and Antonio Castillo, members of the Theosophical League of Universal Brotherhood, according to what researcher and journalist Igor Guilarte Fong, student of the life and work of Emilio Bacardí, told us.
This advance group was housed at the Cuabitas property, owned by Bacardí, where they would establish a venue for the Raja Yoga Academy.
Katherine returned in 1903, according to the magazine El Fígaro: “founding a school in the city of Santiago, which was attended by about 200 students. Two months later she founded another one with the name of Raja Yoga Academy, which inaugurated her work with children of both sexes belonging to the most distinguished families of the town. This institution occupied one of the most spacious buildings in the eastern city, and not being sufficient for the plans harbored by Mrs. Tingley, it later moved to the nearby town of Cuabitas, to the picturesque property owned at that point by Mr. Bacardí, who put it at the service of the Institution.”
The schools located within the urban center were in no.16 Santo Tomás, and in no.7 San Félix. Bacardi proudly displayed the academic institutions to visitors. In April 1906, for example, he took the 300 delegates participating in the National Charity Conference to Cuabita, and there he offered them lunch.
Fear of the resurrection of the fakirs
It was to be expected that Katherine Tingley would find opponents, due to the strong influence of the Catholic Church in society and the existing lack of knowledge about the practices she proposed. A Raja Yoga School was also created in the city of Pinar del Río. Indalecio Sobrado, former Governor of the province, and lawyer Ricardo R. Lancís, in 1908 asked the U.S. authorities for authorization to use 4,000 pesos of the budget in the educational center. The request caused discomfort in various sectors that were against the introduction of those academies on the island. The Diario de la Marina, edition of May 26, noted:
“Is theosophy characteristic of the Cuban State? Is orientalism with its old principles and its old dogmas part of the official Curriculum? Do they know what is instilled about spiritualism in young consciousnesses in the Raja Yoga Schools? Their introducers should have started, and have not done so, by disclosing, in a clear and precise manner, their mission, practices and purpose. Not all of us can search libraries, review history and dismantle the annals of old India, to know specifically if fakirs and dervishes are being resurrected, and if after the Raja Yoga classrooms, the pagodas will be reborn and the sciences and rites of the days of Brahminic splendor will return.”
Along with confronting the extensive media campaign of discredit that lasted for years, Katherine had to overcome the destruction of the property occupied in Cuabitas by the Theosophical League of Universal Brotherhood and its attached Raja Yoga academy, due to a fire that occurred on June 27, 1907.
As part of her educational plans, she took dozens of Cuban children to study at the Academy established in Point Loma, including two of Bacardí’s daughters. This project also received criticism, in which the Diario de la Marina and La Defensa, published in Santiago de Cuba, stood out. They reported that physical abuse was committed on the students within the schools and the health of the pupils was affected with prolonged fasting.
La Defensa apparently went too far in the accusations about what happened in Point Loma, facts that warrant future investigations: “most of these young people have returned home suffering from tuberculosis, atrophied, fatuous, mutilated.…”
General Calixto García Velez, Cuban ambassador to the United States, asked Washington to investigate the situation of student Alicia Gil Gogorza, a victim of abuse, according to the Santiago newspaper. The girl and her sister, fatherless, had traveled with the authorization of their mother, Caridad Gogorza. Katherine ordered that an investigation be carried on the issue and announced it through a letter distributed on the Caribbean island. The Brotherhood paid the fare for the disciple, who returned to her hometown, without the veracity of the case being clear.
Meanwhile, in Santiago de Cuba, Sidney Turner, director of Raja Yoga, sued the director of La Defensa for insults, in May 1909. And the Diario de la Marina continued its criticisms by saying that they practiced witchcraft and that they considered the doctrines promulgated “dangerous, false and a little ridiculous.” On June 24, Ángel Morales Carvajal, the executive of the Santiago newspaper, was arrested and had to pay a 1,300-peso bails. Then the Court sentenced him to pay a fine of 308 pesos.
The reconciliation
The influential Diario de la Marina ended the campaign on February 25, 1910, through an article titled “Clarifications,” “in order to prevent public opinion from confusing the Raja Yoga Schools and the International Brotherhood League Institution, of which the former depend, with one or another of the religious sects that are so abundant today.”
The academies survived, we do not know if until 1959, since in the press, there are news of the participation of their students in political and cultural events during the republican period. The healthy physical and spiritual exercise ultimately overcame prejudices and ignorance.
Katherine Tingley died July 11, 1929; her imprint remained as a precursor of the practice of yoga in Cuba. If one day you walk through the city of Santiago de Cuba and arrive at the Rajayoga neighborhood, perhaps you will remember the story that I have told you.
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Sources
Igor Guilarte Fong: “Cronología de Emilio Bacardí Moreu,” unpublished work.
Diario de la Marina
El Fígaro
https://xuanlanyoga.com/raja-yoga/
Author
José Antonio Quintana García
