Paramahansa Yogananda
Claims of bodily incorruptibility

As reported in Time on August 4, 1952, Harry T. Rowe, Mortuary Director of the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, where Yogananda's body was received, embalmed and interred, wrote in a notarized letter

The absence of any visual signs of decay in the dead body of Paramahansa Yogananda offers the most extraordinary case in our experience... No physical disintegration was visible in his body even twenty days after death... No indication of mold was visible on his skin, and no visible drying up took place in the bodily tissues. This state of perfect preservation of a body is, so far as we know from mortuary annals, an unparalleled one... No odour of decay emanated from his body at any time...

On another note, according to Catherine Wessinger, "the body was embalmed but emulsion was not applied to the skin."

Because of two statements in Rowe's letter, some have questioned whether the term " incorruptibility " is appropriate. First, in his fourth paragraph he wrote: "For protection of the public health, embalming is desirable if a dead body is to be exposed for several days to public view. Embalming of the body of Paramahansa Yogananda took place twenty-four hours after his demise." Claims of incorruptibility require that a body not be embalmed, whereas the letter notes that Yogananda's body was embalmed soon after his death. Second, in the eleventh paragraph he wrote: "On the late morning of March 26th, we observed a very slight, a barely noticeable, change – the appearance on the tip of the nose of a brown spot, about one-fourth inch in diameter. This small faint spot indicated that the process of desiccation (drying up) might finally be starting. No visible mold appeared however."

Rowe continued in paragraphs fourteen and fifteen: "The physical appearance of Paramahansa Yogananda on March 27th just before the bronze cover for the casket was put into position, was the same as it was on March 7th. He looked on March 27th as fresh and unravaged by decay as he had looked on the night of his death. On March 27th there was no reason to say that his body had suffered any physical disintegration at all. For these reason we state again that the case of Paramahansa Yogananda is unique in our experience. On May 11, 1952, during a telephone conversation between an officer of Forest Lawn and an officer of Self-Realization Fellowship, the amazing story was brought out for the first time."

Self-Realization Fellowship published Rowe's four-page notarized letter in its entirety in the May–June 1952 issue of its magazine Self-Realization. From 1958 to the present it has been included in that organization's booklet Paramahansa Yogananda: In Memoriam.

The location of Yogananda's crypt is in the Great Mausoleum, Sanctuary of Golden Slumber, Mausoleum Crypt 13857, Forest Lawn Memorial Park.
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