Yama' ; Boletin Informativo de la R. Escuela de Yamines de la Ciudad de Mexico

[Ciudad de Mexico]: Direccion de R. Escuela de Yamines de la Ciudad de Mexico, Julio, 1984. Octavo in orange and white photo-illus stiff paper stapled wraps; 48p. Exterior rubbed and soiled; intetrnally sound and clean. Paperback.

Scarc. Information bulletin of the “R[espetable?] Escuela de Yamines” of Mexico City, issue for July 1984. The school was a branch of the Gran Fraternidad Universal (GFU, Universal Great Brotherhood), the initiatic and yoga movement founded by the French esotericist Serge Raynaud de la Ferrière (1916–1962). After leaving Europe he took it to the Americas, where his first and most important disciples were José Manuel Estrada, Juan Víctor Mejías, and Gil Colmenares, known as the “Elder Brothers.” The GFU promoted a system of yoga and spiritual discipline that de la Ferrière called “Yoghism,” and spread through Latin America from the 1950s on. In the movement’s hierarchy Yamín is an early initiatic degree, so a Escuela de Yamines is a school for members at that level. The masthead probably also plays on the yamas, the ethical restraints that open the classical eight-limbed path of yoga. The cover photograph shows a white-robed, white-bearded master wearing a pectoral cross. It is very likely Estrada, the senior lineage-holder in Mexico in these years. Printed in orange and black with a rayed-sun motif in the masthead letters, this is an ephemeral, internal publication of a once-substantial Mexican esoteric movement. Such bulletins rarely survive and are scarcely represented in libraries.