The practice of yoga promises peace, self-realisation and release thanks to the power of its 'mystic' Indian origins. But what if this is just hype?
In Fascist Yoga Stewart Home sweeps away the half-truths to tell a new origin story of the world’s first modern yogi—a Californian escapologist who added some Hindu fairy dust to gym and circus exercises. Ever since, the world of yoga has been full of grifters, occultists and white supremacists, all out to exploit and recruit via the medium of exercise. From cult leaders to brainwashed followers, TV celebrities and fake gurus, the story of yoga has involved some of the strangest currents of humanity.
Today the COVID-19 pandemic has activated elements within the modern yoga movement to espouse far-right conspiracies. QAnon’s fascist political programmes mirror some of yoga’s key early proponents. In this new exposé Home shows that nothing is sacred.
Stewart Home (born London 1963) is an English writer, satirist and artist. He is best known for novels such as the non-narrative "69 Things to Do With A Dead Princess" (2002), his re-imagining of the 1960s in "Tainted Love" (2005), and more recent books such as "She's My Witch" (2020) that use pulp and avant-garde tropes to parody conventional literature.
Home's unusual approach to writing is reflected in the readings he gives from his novels: he recites from memory, utilises ventriloquism, stands on his head and declaims his work and even shreds his own books.
Home's first book "The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War" (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) is an underground art history sketching continuations of dadist and surrealist influences on post-World War II fringe radical art.
Home's first novel "Pure Mania" was published 1989 (Polygon Books), and details a violent neo-punk subculture. Unmistakenly postmodern but nfluenced by surrealism and the nouveau roman, it pushes the appropriation of pulp tropes and use of repetition found within historical avant-garde fiction to such an extreme that some critics mistook it for a piece of low-brow writing.
Home continued in much the same vein with his next four novels, starting with "Defiant Pose" (Peter Owen, 1991) and continuing with "Red London" (AK Press 1994), "Blow Job" (published in 1997 but written in 1994) and Slow Death (Serpent's Tail 1996).
All Home’s early fiction collages in large amounts of prose from a wide variety of sources – and while it is often close in spirit to the work of ‘postmodern extremists’ such as Kathy Acker, the appropriated material is much more heavily reworked than in the latter’s books.
The novels Home wrote after the mid-nineties featured less subcultural material than his earlier books and focus more obviously on issues of form and aesthetics. Home’s sixth novel "Come Before Christ And Murder Love" (Serpent's Tail 1997) featured a schizophrenic narrator whose personality changed every time he had an orgasm. This was the first novel Home wrote in the first person, and much of the fiction he wrote after this utilised the device of an unreliable first-person narrator.
"Cunt" (Do Not Press 1999) is a postmodern take on the picaresque novel. "69 Things to Do With A Dead Princess" (Canongate 2002) mixes porn with capsule reviews of dozens of obscure books as well as elaborate descriptions of stone circles, while in "Down and Out In Shoreditch & Hoxton" (Do Not Press 2004) every paragraph is exactly 100 words long. "Tainted Love" (Virgin Books) is based on the life of the author's mother, who was part of the London subcultural scene in the 1960s. "Memphis Underground" (Snow Books 2007) has a long conventional literary opening that is slowly unravelled.
Home’s 2010 novel "Blood Rites of the Bourgeois" (Book Works) is to date his only work written in the second person. The plot – as far as there is one - concerns an artist hacking the computers of London’s cultural elite to infect them with modified penis enlargement spam. Reviewing Home’s incredibly weird campus novel "Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane" (Penny-Ante Editions 2013) for The Guardian, Nicholas Lezard observes: “I think one of the great virtues of Home's work is the way it forces us to address our own complacency.”
"The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones" (Test Centre 2014) is a fictional exploration of the life of one of the author's more infamous criminal relatives. "She's My Witch" (London Books 2020), is a love story exploring an unlikely relationship between a fitness instructor and a heroin addicted witch. "Art School Orgy" (New Reality Records, 2023) is a 'BDSM extravaganza'. Before this Home published his collected poems "SEND CA$H" (Morbid Books 2018) and a book about martial arts films "Re-Enter The Dragon: Genre Theory, Brucesploitation & The Sleazy Joys of Lowbrow Cinema" (Ledatape 2018).
This is not about the modern wellness movement. This is a history of maybe how the early figures laid the foundation, but even that needs a slight caveat because the historical work is rather sporadic- often using calls to the present as supporting evidence instead of historical narrative or context. Hard to have a neutral perspective because this is not at all the tone, style, approach that I expected or has been marketed. (I just deleted a longer review because I’m just going to try not talking about what I hated and just tell you whether or not this is a work for you: if you want a deep dive into the history of western yoga, this *might* be okay for you. If you’re drawn in because of the “grifter” narratives about the modern new age/wellness movements that have become popular in recent years, I really doubt this is going to be the experience you’re hoping for)
Be prepared: this is definitely a history book more than it’s a journalistic look at the current state of yoga. As someone who reads a lot of historical books, this was absolutely my jam, but I don’t think it’s quite what some people are expecting based on the cover. This book looks at the formation of Western postural yoga and the way some yogis throughout the twentieth century were intertwined with fascist movements. It’s not enough to turn me against yoga as a whole—I will probably continue my very occasional yoga practice—but it’s definitely a fascinating glimpse into the dark side of modern yoga history.
I don't really know what Home was trying to do here. I think we all know that there are right wing links in yoga especially during COVID and the crunchy to alt right pipeline antivax maha etc etc. This is less about that though (which conspirituality do better anyway and in a more informed way) and more about yoga from about 100 years ago in the west and the dodgy UK/USA mainly white men that practiced and shared it. I know that modern postural yoga is a more recent thing (that's pretty well established) but it still does link to older practices in India and still has benefits to mind and body and relaxation but I think Home is mainly about the headstands. He ends this pretty boring diatribe (which heavily relies on quotes) by saying no one should practice postural yoga.
kind of a shockingly bad book?? It’s written in this hectoring, pedantic style you get in the worst left wing writing and full of insane non sequiturs like … in fascist organisations absolute deference to the supreme leader is demanded, just like modern yoga organisations!!
The grey area between the far right, reactionary anti-rationalism and wellness, new age, the esoteric etc. is super interesting to me and something I want to know more about but this was just 150 pages of dull biographies of people involved in yoga and sometimes unsavoury right wing causes too, and it never comes to any interesting conclusions or insights.
I don’t know, I don’t care about yoga much one way of the other but it seems probably like a healthy, harmless thing to do for your body and mind. Such a weird book.
This book was not at all what I expected. The publisher’s description and the introduction stated that the premise was to expose “new age figures jumping aboard the antivax, anti-masking, [anti science], far-right bandwagon.” I expected a contemporary review of theory and practice, not obscure historical figures with questionable correlations to fascist origins of the present state of practice. Only in the introduction which included John Friend’s demise and a few times in the final 50 or so pages did the author address the current industry making false health claims of poses as treatments for medical conditions and promoting quackery like coffee enemas and bogus dietary supplements as yoga. His assertion that ridiculous claims that yoga as an elixir for all ailments was the forerunner to antivax and anti mask stances was tenuous. The author included multiple citations but he was too inflammatory in his tone to be objective (that he thinks a woman’s yoga accessories are ugly is irrelevant). His assumptions and assertions overstated the evidence he presented. He really just confirmed with confidence that physical yoga practice is a product of the west and was not imported from the Indian subcontinent but that was already well established.
I heard of this book in a review I read of it and Conspirituality. The author, a prominent British radical, argues that modern postural yoga is not an ancient Indian creation, but a product of European and American bodybuilding and physical culture from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. An early chapter is called "Did Pierre Bernard Invent Yoga in California at the Start of the Twentieth Century?" The answer, in short, is "yeah, he did." Bernard would go on to found a yoga school in Nyack, New York.
The practice of postural yoga was taken up by a number fascists in the first half of the 20th century Britain, the USA, and Europe. Some of them created myths about postural yoga's history extending back to "Aryan" peoples who wandered around Asia and who conquered the Indian subcontinent thousands of years ago.
Home devotes chapters to many postwar promoters of yoga, some of whom were also occultists and most of whom wove baseless claims about the practice's history and potential physical and mental benefits, most of which was a confusing jumble of important-sounding words. Some of these promoters were in it for the loot: they published book after book and correspondence course after correspondence course on mental, psychic, and physical development through yoga. (Curiously, it seems that in the UK, the publisher Prentice Hall published reams of these works. It is curious because by the 1980s Prentice Hall was a major publisher of college textbooks, at least in the USA.)
Particularly interesting to me is his discussion of Richard Hittleman, a yoga huckster who in the 1960s created and hosted the television program Yoga for Health, which is where I first heard of yoga. The program featured Hittleman's voice and a woman who demonstrated the various poses Hittleman taught. For some reason, she had given up speaking, said Hittleman. At the age of 6 I accepted Hittleman's eplanation that it was part of her spiritual quest or something.
Home ends his discussion in the 1970s, because, he says, new technology increased the amount of media devoted to yoga. We do find that some prominent yoga promoters turned to anti-vaxx and anti-mask positions, as well as conspiracy theory, in the age of Covid.
The book blows the lid off the conventional story of yoga's history. The falsehood of the conventional origin story of postural yoga has, I should note, been addressed by a number of other scholars in recent years.
I would recommend the book to people who practice yoga and to anyone interested in fascism outside of Germany and/or in the intellectual bilge of the 20th century.
Fascinating concept but I think this book fell short on its execution. The book was clearly painstakingly researched, but I felt that it was hard to follow at times. I also think Home went more into detail than necessary in each of his profiles. He stated that his goal for writing this book was to dissuade people from falling into the "cult" of modern postural yoga. However, I think he spent too much time on the foundational figures in the movement and not enough time linking their problematic philosophies/actions to modern practices.
This is a pretty quick read so I encourage folks to give it a shot, if you're interested in the subject.
Very much the authors opinion using selective pieces of information to push his agenda. I don’t like what he says and would argue it is attempting to frame itself as a piece of history rather than a confused ramble. However given I hate the argument I am more likely to be critical
2.5 What did I just read?! I’d say a one-of-a-kind sociological skewering of yoga—of all things. Stewart traces the history of yoga through the many books and cultural texts that have defined it for us, and it turns out the practice may not have retained the peaceful, spiritual tradition from ancient India that we’ve always been led to believe. Instead, its evolution got far more complicated, questionable, and even insidious once it left its barn doors and went West.
The book is certainly well researched, tackling something I’d never thought to question, and that in itself is its real value. Have we been conned? What even makes someone an “accomplished yogi,” and who gets to decide? Honestly, most of the finer details flew over my head, but a bigger takeaway stuck: if yoga isn’t what we thought, what other seemingly perfect things might not be either? What’s next—cream-colored ponies? Warm woolen mittens??
Listened on audiobook-it’s short at around 5 hours, but print would probably work better as there is a lot of detail. I fear i may have missed much of its nuance.
This was hard to get through as the argument is supported by sporadic facts that the author doesn’t really connect to one another in a coherent way. Honestly, it reminded me of reading papers for intro college classes as a grad student when freshman and sophomores are still learning how to structure an argument and write a compelling case.
A short book that feels like an overlong rant—poorly written, empty of substance, and astonishingly boring for something so small that skimming it still felt like a waste of time.
Home was a bit angsty, to say the least, and I think his anger about the topic caused him to make sweeping generalizations & assumptions without sufficient evidence. Also, I’m not so sure that yoga as a practice is as entirely useless as Home believes it to be. If you take away the fabricated history of yoga, it’s really just stretching…. but whatever
entertaining but absurdly contrived and of almost zero actual historical benefit. really strains to make whatever point in any sort of substantiated way. mostly full of content with nothing to do with, or very loosely connected to fascism, while leaving unexplored barely touching in actually interesting connections between fascists and north Indian culture and histories and the origins of how yoga was brought to the west outside of the tiny sample of weird authors he chooses to look at. also doesn't explore connections between fascism and the "new order of wellness"! this book is just a humorous glance at some weirdo occultist grifters of the 20th century and might have been entertaining if it posited itself as such but it unfortunately aspires to be so much more and falls very short. it also throws the baby out with the bathwater to incredible extents, seems completely naive about actual benefits of postural exercise systems, and concludes that doing yoga is horrible and noone should ever do it just because some scammers in the 30's-70's used It as one component of the many scams they were running?
Fascist Yoga brings to light the fascinating history of the largely forgotten, first yoga creators—white men—in the US and the UK. Home’s argument that modern postural yoga originated from them, as much as from any Indian creators, is convincing—especially in correlation with Mark Singleton’s “Yoga Body”.
I am very sympathetic to Home’s work and appreciate the historical correction he has produced, but I wish he had told us a bit more about his mission: his own experience with modern-day gym yoga instructors, which I stay away from for the reasons he states; the issues with the practice itself, which I agree with; and how he came to the decision to move all his physical training at home. Putting himself into his narrative would give more powerful support to his takedown of modern posture practice.
As the book stands, the average reader may not understand why Home recommends abandoning modern postural yoga altogether.
Thoroughly researched, but poorly structured and not particularly well written. There is a compelling book to be had out of this material, but this isn’t it.
In this work, Home provides a very interesting context for some historical revisionism and cultural influences with respect to Yoga, or as he terms it, postural practice. He provides a laundry list of hucksters who have long misrepresented the origins of their interests and often obscured their profit motives.
Perhaps any of my hesitation in recommending this book to a general audience stems from me from being convinced his thesis had merit early on, and then feeling like I was just reading a bunch of names and circumstances (all seemingly providing evidentiary support but maybe not that distinguishable from each other) that I already knew as I was reading, I would ultimately not be able to remember much. That being said, I was especially impressed with how he addressed Jazz Age Yoga culture.
Maybe that is more a condemnation of my own state of mind than I agree with Home, but I wouldn't be able to discuss why at a cocktail party?
This is a fantastic read and I strongly recommend it to anyone who has an iota of interest in figuring out how the modern reactionary ludicrous trends of today's discourse originated. Genuinely hilarious bits in here with a great way of poking fun at some of the claims made by the hucksters that Home so vividly dives into and cuts apart.
I wouldn't be surprised if more than half of the people Home talks about in this book had some kind of intelligence ties (the three letter glow on Aleister Crowley, for instance, is incredibly bright), promoting yoga as a way of progressive hijacking, similar to what's being done now with Tate, Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, etc. I only say this because how could it be that every single person is a reclusive hermit that can't even provide a reliable backstory, and seemingly get rich and famous off grifting schemes?
This was very interesting and clearly a more scholarly study of the history of yoga than I have ever read. That being said, I don't really know anything about the history of yoga. Because this seemed to be attempting to overturn an uncritical consensus, I feel like I should probably read more on the subject before I decide once and for all how definitive and sufficient this historical treatment is- but in the meantime, I'm gonna provisionally assume this is the most accurate history I've heard so far. I mean, I don't doubt the historical accuracy of Home's depiction of the specific fascist yoga practioners he reviewed. I just don't feel like I have definitive knowledge about the extent to which their representations of yoga's history is strictly mythological, or the extent to which they have had lingering impact on yoga practice and/or history today.