A correspondence school in Chicago
In 1903 a reader could enrol in a Chicago correspondence course taught under the name Yogi Ramacharaka. The Yogi Publication Society issued the lessons in sequence. Their printed timetable shows how a pupil studying alone could still expect to be working on the same material as other subscribers. Once gathered into a book as Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism, the course outlived its original calendar.
William Walker Atkinson, a lawyer and New Thought writer working in Chicago, is closely associated with the series. Some catalogues assign him the books outright. The surviving publication record establishes the involvement of the society and the repeated use of the Ramacharaka byline more securely than it establishes who composed every lesson. The books themselves offer a much fuller history of the teaching enterprise than of an individual Indian teacher.
The yoga courses
The society developed different courses for readers interested in bodily practice, concentration or spiritual philosophy. The Science of Breath and Hatha Yoga address breathing and the care of the body. Raja Yoga turns to attention and mental discipline. Gnani Yoga takes up questions about knowledge and the self. Advertisements bound into the volumes helped readers move from one part of the programme to the next.
These books reached an English-speaking public already accustomed to the language of mind training and lessons by post. What they called yoga came through that American publishing setting, where Indian religious terms appeared alongside concepts familiar from New Thought. Following the byline across the series reveals how an early commercial publisher introduced yoga to readers who had no direct contact with a teacher.
