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Telegraph
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Why yoga is a breeding ground for fascists
What do you think about when you think about yoga? For most people, the word conjures pleasant images of people doing 'downward-facing dog' or 'warrior pose', with a vague air of Indian mysticism. But Stewart Home is not most people. To the man who may be Britain's most avant-garde writer and artist, yoga is a swindle that dupes the well-meaning middle classes. It's also a breeding ground for fascists. It isn't even particularly good for you. His new book, Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists and the New Order in Wellness, is a serious treatise on a zeitgeisty topic. This is unusual, as the 63-year-old Londoner, described on the jacket as 'a legend of counterculture', is best known for his controversial fiction. Among the highlights, if that's the right word, are 69 Things to do With a Dead Princess (2002) – which features a conspiracy theory that the dead body of Diana, Princess of Wales was driven around Grampian stone circles until it decomposed – and a parody of the London literati called C--t Lickers Anonymous (1996). Others in the Home backlist include Blow Job (1997), a pulpy tale of skinheads and anarchists, and C--t (1999), in which an author writes about tracking down the first 1,000 women he bedded and having sex with them again. Home has never troubled bestseller lists, and is still published by tiny independent houses, but he has become one of our best-known and most influential cult novelists. The Times Literary Supplement once said that 'Home's deliberately bad writing does for the novel form what Viz does for the comic strip'. Jenny Turner, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, wrote in 2002: 'I really don't think anyone who is at all interested in the study of literature has any business not knowing the work of Stewart Home.' In particular, he's obsessed with slaughtering sacred cows. Take Art School Orgy (2023), which imagined a young David Hockney in all manner of depraved scenarios. 'I had [major] publishers interested,' he says. 'But they asked if I could change the names of the characters. It wouldn't have been very funny if I had.' (He claims that Hockney was amused.) 'People just freak out. 'You can't do that, [Hockney] is a national treasure!' But it was fine. You decide where you want to make compromises, and I'm less inclined to make them than some people.' I suggest to Home that this unwillingness to compromise with some of polite society's mores might be why he isn't more famous on the British literary scene, and with British readers, than somebody with his abilities and work-rate should be. He laughs. 'Probably. But it's just what happens. It'd be nice to have a bit more money coming in.' Anyway, the cultural mainstream is not for Home. I ask, for instance, how he feels about contemporary literary A-listers such as Sally Rooney and Jonathan Coe. 'I don't read any of that stuff. I've looked at the odd page of it, but it's just not my interest. I often read the first page of a book and then know 'Not for me, too literary – conventionally literary.' Right now, I'm reading the new Chris Kraus novel.' One former A-lister he has read, and intensely disliked, was Will Self. In the early 1990s, after Self criticised Home for giving his work a bad review in a newspaper column, Home handed out badges during a street protest that said 'Will Self is Stupid'. (The Self piece was apparently a case of mistaken identity: the offending review, in the NME, was written by the late Steven Wells.) Does Home still think Self is stupid? 'I don't think about him, to be honest. He married a good friend of mine, Deborah Orr, although I didn't see her when they got married. [She is] sadly dead.' Home's new book was conceived when he got into yoga – which he did for a startling reason. 'I wanted to read my books standing on my head,' he says earnestly. 'I would do a half-hour lecture standing on my head… I think it's reasonably safe, but as I got older I cut down on the amount of time I spent doing it. You can allow yourself to sink into your neck, which isn't very good.' (Home also paints standing on his head, with the brush put between his toes, and explains at length that it's best to do so in an attic room with a sloped roof.) So he joined classes at a municipal gym near his central London council flat. But he soon bristled at what he found to be a 'worldview grounded in essentialism and anti-empiricism'; he hated the 'occult-saturated health misinformation' that his instructors 'spewed forth'. They went on about how ancient the practice was, how important chakras were, and the remarkable benefits of doing these simple moves. 'I found some of what the yoga teacher said incredible,' he says. 'When you go back to the older sources for that stuff, they'll claim that a shoulder stand, or whatever, will cure leprosy. It's quite absurd.' View this post on Instagram A post shared by Stewart Home (@stewarthome1) Home also came to fear that something altogether more sinister was lurking beneath yoga's surface. He read about Eric Atwood, a far-Right provocateur who in 2016 was photographed in a newspaper in a half-lotus pose, his hands in prayer position with a neo-fascist Celtic-cross flag behind him and a 'Make America Great Again' cap resting on his right knee. So it was that Home, with literary élan, decided to investigate the origins of yoga and why it was seemingly so popular with such people. According to Home, the key character in the early development of yoga as we know it is Pierre Bernard, a self-styled American yogi dubbed 'The Great Oom', who operated at the beginning of the 20th century. Bernard was, Home says, in truth a Californian escapologist who sprinkled some 'orientalist fairy dust' on his circus moves and packaged it as a profound and ancient 'Aryan' practice. That tradition was picked up by the 20th century's fascists and neo-fascists, such as the Italian thinker Julius Evola – a favourite of the likes of Steve Bannon – who wrote guides to yoga and Hindu spirituality. All of this, according to Home, has trickled down into the attitudes of the 'crunchy moms' of West Coast America, who are sceptical of vaccines and love Robert F Kennedy Jr. In other words, being the sort of person that buys into yoga woo-woo is also the sort of person who might buy into conspiracy theories and extreme beliefs. It's exactly the sort of provocation out of which Home has made a career: something to make those who are immersed in a cultural mainstream that he regards as effete and onanistic clutch their pearls in horror. It can be difficult to know how sincerely any of Home's output is meant to be read. But Fascist Yoga approaches its subject with a seriousness that's palpably absent in Home's previous books. He admits that it has 'a bit more of a straighter edge… it just felt the right way to treat the material.' Home is fit, with the physique of a man a couple of decades his junior, as he demonstrates when, for our photographer, he holds the lotus pose for a long time in the hot London sun. 'I do tai chi, for my sins, which I enjoy – but I tend to stay away from teachers who start telling you how it's a 5,000-year-old tradition, because it isn't,' he says. 'I don't really understand why saying something is old makes it good. Someone had to invent it at some point and whether that was two weeks ago or 5,000 years ago doesn't make that much of a difference.' His upbringing may go some way to explaining the zaniness of his career. He was adopted as a baby and grew up in Merton, south-west London; by the age of about 12, he had developed 'a critical interest in the occult' and was reading books on the topic. His mother was a bohemian drug addict, and had worked at Murray's Cabaret Club at the same time as Christine Keeler. Home was briefly the bassist in a ska band, and by the end of the 1970s had begun writing fanzines and experimental texts. He has been a sui generis writer and artist ever since. As a non-mainstream Leftist – of that camp, but not a fan of the Labour Party – he has often been lumped in with anarchists, to his chagrin. In 1994, he wrote a column about them, at a time when the British tabloids were frantic that they might become violent insurrectionists. 'I was saying they couldn't organise a p--s-up in a brewery, which seemed to go down a lot worse with anarchists than saying they were a violent threat to society.' The piece led to people following him around London, and to the suspicious appearance of claims that he was an undercover police officer or a child trafficker. Home has since been more circumspect about revealing anything of his personal life. As we talk, we walk around Bunhill Fields, a burial ground on the fringe of the City of London, and the final resting place of Daniel Defoe and William Blake. The original plan had been to talk at his nearby flat, but Home didn't want to be photographed there, whether inside or outside it. And, given his writing has been full of bilious invective, he's surprisingly softly-spoken. So much of his work has been about sex. Dead Princess is highly pornographic; in some scenes, a ventriloquist's dummy gets involved. Doesn't he believe that some things in literature can be beyond the pale? 'I think some things are in bad taste. Racist jokes are in bad taste. Lots of things are in bad taste. But I don't necessarily believe the same things as other people. 'There's a lot of sexual repression now. I think we've been moving backwards, in that [literature about sex] is either divided into porn, or quite sanitised, in a lot of mainstream culture. And if I read my old books with younger audiences, and you just use words like 'C--t'…' He mock-gasps. C--t, he points out, 'is just a book, and it didn't get the same reaction at the time. As long as it's not used in a kind of misogynistic discourse, I don't have a huge problem with Anglo-Saxon. I think it depends on context as well. I think it would be quite hard to get a lot of the early books published now. It was very hard to get Art School Orgy published.' Home has often been accused of writing things that seem to make factual claims, yet are palpably untrue. Does objective reality matter? 'What I particularly enjoy doing is telling people things that are true and have them not believe me,' he replies. Is that because you have told so many untruths, I ask. 'Maybe. I'm not sure. I also enjoy people thinking something shouldn't exist.' Take the Necrocard, a joke organ-donor card for supporters of 'sexual liberation' for necrophiliacs; he devised that one after a friend needed a kidney transplant. An error by the printer meant that Home had about 50,000 of them, which he handed out to people in Soho. 'The local Aids hospice was desperate for as many as they could have,' he says with not a little relish. But when it comes to yoga, it's different. 'If people want to do yoga, I can't stop them, and I wouldn't want to stop them,' he says. 'But I think they should be informed about what it is, where it comes from and what the potential risks are of some moves.' For once, Stewart Home appears to be serious.
Times
10-07-2025
- General
- Times
Namaste, fascists! The racist history of yoga
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. • 6 ways to boost your flexibility without hitting the yoga studio 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. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List 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 Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
