Fascist Yoga - Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order In Wellness

The weird and disturbing history of the cult of yoga 

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 pandemic has activated elements within the modern yoga movement to espouse far-right conspiracies, and QAnon’s fascist political programmes mirror some of yoga’s key early proponents.

In this new exposé, Stewart Home shows that nothing is sacred.

Praise:

‘Western yoga existed in uncomfortably close proximity to various strands of extreme right-wing thought .. [Home’s] writing about yoga is intended less as an academic study than as an attempt to educate practitioners about the influence of fascism on their culture’ – New York Review of Books

 ‘With this scabrous broadside, Stewart Home exposes Hatha yoga’s political shadow. His painstaking research reveals a hidden, decidedly inauthentic history as murky as it is intriguing. Teasing a thread from a pair of dhoti pants, soon the whole garment threatens to fall apart before our eyes’ – Matthew Ingram, author of The Garden and Retreat

‘The author’s desire to stand on his head led to this book, but there is nothing upside down about his exposure of the plastic gurus and spiritual sex pests to be found in these pages. Intense, funny, always original – there is nobody quite like the brilliant Stewart Home’ – John King, author of The Football Factory and Human Punk

‘With an energy and style that only he could muster, Stewart Home eviscerates the two dominant manias of our era — individual self-optimisation and collective neo-fascism — and, reading their entrails, finds they share a common ancestor.’ – Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and The Making of Incarnation