Count Stefan Walewski
In the early fifties of the last century, a strange book entitled A System of Caucasian Yoga appeared in the United States. The book was written by Count Stefan Colonna Walewski, a Polish diplomat who claimed to have received its contents from a mysterious neo-Zoroastrian brotherhood located in the remote Caucasus.
Soon after the manuscript was published in 1955, the members of an esoteric association – those who met them recalled their name as “Mazdaznan” – considering the disclosure of its secret practices dangerous, had the book withdrawn from the market by court order. Of the original printing only three hundred copies survived.
Stefan Colonna Walewski was born in Vilnius, Lithuania on 9 June 1897, and died in New York on 19 May 1955, shortly after the publication of this book. He claimed to be a direct descendant of the count Alexandre Florian Joseph Colonna Walewski, the illegitimate son of Napoleon Bonaparte I and his Polish mistress Maria Laczynska.