Namaste, fascists! The racist history of yoga

Times

10-07-2025

Judging by the front page of The New York Times, January 29, 1898 was just another day in the United States of America. Mary Both of 74th Street burnt to death after her shawl caught fire as she warmed herself by her kitchen stove. A once wealthy man who lost his money in railroad stocks was committed to hospital after he was found on Fifth Avenue proclaiming to be the king of Poland. A race war was imminent in Lonoke County, Arkansas.
Ah, yes … And Pierre Bernard of Des Moines, Iowa, put himself into a self-induced state of hypnosis in front of a crowd at the San Francisco College of Suggestive Therapeutics and submitted himself to surgical tests such as having his ear sewn to his cheek and his upper lip to his nose. He awakened — after the threads had been removed — to say he had felt no pain.
Supposedly that's what happened, anyway. Bernard — the founder of the Tantrik Order of America (which may or may not have actually existed) — had a funny way of making things up. Stewart Home's Fascist Yoga is about how the story of yoga is built on lies, and it begins with Bernard. The book is an original and entertaining analysis of the dubious origins of the western middle class's favourite postural exercise.
Home argues that there is every possibility that Bernard, dubbed 'the Great Oom' by the New York press, invented the kind of yoga that people do today. This, he argues, is drawn 'more from Western physical culture than Eastern meditation'. He started teaching it around 1905, and there isn't much record of anyone doing it before him.
Almost nothing, however, is known about who Bernard was or where he came from, other than that New York Times story. Home says his name was not even Pierre Bernard. He was born Perry Baker and sometimes went by the name of Peter Coon. Bernard told people that he had learnt yoga from a guru called Sylvais Hamati, who had apparently emigrated to America from Calcutta. Hamati was of Indian or Persian or Syrian or French or Bengali heritage, depending on who you believe. Home suspects Hamati may have never existed and the yoga we do in the West was never an Indian tradition.
Home is trenchant in his views about western yoga — 'in my experience, the overwhelming majority of yoga instructors peddle false historical accounts of what they teach, even if most of them actually appear to believe the drivel they spout'. Worse, 'the overly subjective, inward-looking mindset fostered by this form of embodied spirituality makes practitioners vulnerable to backward ideologies'.
Bernard surrounded himself with racists and white supremacists, Home says. In 1933 one of his acolytes, Hamish McLaurin, wrote a book asserting that yoga was devised in about 3,000BC by members of an Aryan race, the ancestors of modern-day Europeans and Americans who moved to India. 'Having gained control over their dusky brethren through a superior knowledge of physical and mental phenomena,' McLaurin wrote, 'it was no part of the Aryan scheme to let the people of the lower castes have access to that knowledge until such time as they had evolved to a point at which they became capable of handling it.' Yoga, you see, was a beautiful method for a white person of a certain class to absorb the ancient teachings of their forebears. There is a recurring theme in the history of yoga: western gurus invent and shed its Indian origins on a whim.
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Home pursues his promise of fascist yoga to the Free State of Fiume in 1920. After the First World War, Fiume (today the Croatian city of Rijeka) was seized by a one-eyed, cocaine-snorting sex-addict novelist and former soldier called Gabriele D'Annunzio. He established a regime with all the symbols and violence of fascism, if not the complete ideology. There were balcony addresses and Roman salutes and the troops guarding D'Annunzio used the bellicose slogan 'I don't give a damn', which was later co-opted by Benito Mussolini. Those around D'Annunzio in Fiume formed a group called YOGA, Home says. They were mystics and nudists who danced and hugged trees and believed in a spiritual hierarchy based on the Hindu caste system. The group emblazoned its shortlived weekly paper with swastikas — they believed the swastika to be a symbol of their Aryan ancestors after it was discovered scrawled on ancient artefacts. The Nazis used it for the same reason.
Like YOGA, the Nazis also twisted Hinduism. They tried to use it to justify the Holocaust. Home shows how Heinrich Himmler, the chief planner of the Final Solution, was influenced by a German Indologist called Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who was enchanted by Hinduism. Hauer founded the German Faith Movement, which sought to promote a new religion, a fusion of paganism and Nazi ideas. When writing in 1934 about the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu text, Hauer said it called on men to meet the hereditary or 'innate duty' demanded of them by their caste and fate, even if that deed is steeped in guilt. Himmler believed that his caste — the SS — were called upon by fate to exterminate Jews.
The weakness of Home's book is there is no clean link between yoga and fascism. There is no record of Mussolini or Hitler ever doing a downward dog. This mostly doesn't matter because so much of the history is strange and interesting, but sometimes Home stretches his thesis too far. A few pages are wasted trying to prove that Ezra Pound's fascism was 'very much entwined' with yoga. As evidence, Home relies on a sign that Pound once put in the window of a bookshop he owned that said something or other about marijuana and communism — it's thin and convoluted evidence.
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Fascist Yoga ends abruptly in the 1970s. Home describes the beginnings of mail-order yoga courses, the rise of the television yoga instructor Richard Hittleman, and the start of today's wellness obsession, then stops. He says that 'technological change' and the increasing popularity of modern yoga means the practice is too diffuse to track in a serious way.
Still, he draws some brief but insightful lines between yoga's past and present. Bodily purity, for example, mattered to the proto-fascists in Fiume and to the Nazis, and remains important to a strand of extreme yogis today. Those old practitioners wanted people to have clean blood for nationalistic reasons; the present ones are afraid of vaccines. Their anxieties have retreated inwards, and so have they, lurking in the backwaters of Instagram, spreading conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and the 'Covid hoax'.
Bernard called his self-hypnosis trick a 'death trance', and he did it, allegedly, to prove that patients did not need anaesthetic to undergo surgery. Yoga might not be fascist, but it is a little bit dumb.
Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists and the New Order In Wellness by Stewart Home (Pluto £14.99 pp224). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members