Yoga in the United States has a long history, foreshadowed in the 19th century by the philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose poem "Brahma" is a statement of the Hindu philosophy behind yoga, and Henry David Thoreau, and starting in earnest with the Hindu leader Vivekananda's visit from India in 1893; he presented yoga as a spiritual path without postures (asanas), very different from modern yoga as exercise. Two other early figures, however, the women's rights advocate Ida C. Craddock and the businessman and occultist Pierre Bernard, created their own interpretations of yoga, based on tantra and oriented to physical pleasure. The practice of yoga as consisting mainly of physical postures began in 1919 when the pioneer of asana-based yoga, Yogendra, brought his system, influenced by physical culture, to the United States. From 1948, Indra Devi, a pupil of Krishnamacharya, brought yoga to public attention by teaching celebrity pupils in her Hollywood studio. A large variety of asana systems evolved, including the precise Iyengar Yoga and Pattabhi Jois's energetic Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga and its Power Yoga spinoffs. Spiritual styles also flourished, including Transcendental Meditation and Integral Yoga. Despite this, American yoga has largely detached from its religious roots, becoming part of the cosmopolitan "global popular". Early pioneers Long before yoga arrived in the United States, pioneering thinkers began to assimilate Indian thought. Among the first was the poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1857 he published a poem, "Brahma", in the first issue of literary magazine The Atlantic Monthly, which he had helped to found. The work contained the lines "I am the doubter and the doubt, I am the hymn the Brahmin sings." Emerson was expressing the Hindu philosophy of non-duality, Advaita. He had studied among other Hindu scriptures the Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna instructs Arjuna in yoga. Emerson was mercilessly mocked, and 26 parodies of the poem were published within a month of its appearance; Americans were starting to engage with Hindu philosophy. Henry David Thoreau, too, read translations of Hindu texts, quoting frequently from the Bhagavad Gita, and attempted meditation during his ascetic life – itself an indication of how strongly he was influenced by those texts – in the forest at Walden. Stefanie Syman argues that he deserved the title of Yogi. Another pioneer was Madame Blavatsky, co-founder in 1875 of The Theosophical Society in New York, her philosophy blending several Asian traditions. She repeatedly