Writer and artist Stewart Home finds that ‘essentialism and anti-empiricism’ makes yoga a fertile ground for ‘occult delusions and fascist conspiratorialism’
Is there subjugation in your asanas? Is there domination in your downward dog? You might find that yoga classes sometimes come weighted with promises of vague abstract benefits that are to befall you if you follow that teacher’s yoga practice, from more energy to the disappearance of longrunning afflictions. Writer and artist Stewart Home also finds that such ‘essentialism and anti-empiricism’ makes yoga a fertile ground for ‘occult delusions and fascist conspiratorialism’. While recent artworks by artists like Lucy Beech and Jesse Darling have addressed some of the cultish weirdness in current ‘wellness’ trends, Home has the receipts. Fascist Yoga is a history of snake-oil salesmen and rightwing figures who have shaped what the author refers to as ‘modern postural practice’.
Yoga as known in the West, Home asserts, isn’t so much an ancient tradition from the Indian subcontinent as it is a hodgepodge of European exercises dressed up with bits of exoticising mysticism, many of them drawing on casteist ideas and fictional notions of Aryan superiority. A ‘pick-and-mix approach to world culture’, as Home refers to it, and ‘the result is unadulterated bullshit rather than ancient wisdom’. In each of these 13 short, dense chapters spanning the 1900s to 1970s, Home surveys a different character, from Pierre Bernard – a carnival trickster turn self-fashioned yogi who was one of the earliest proponents of ‘yoga’ in the West – to Frank Rudolph Young, who promised that, adhering to his ‘psychic power’ yoga regime, he would live to three-hundred-and-thirty years of age. (He died at ninety-one.) Via brief appearances by occultist Aleister Crowley, Nazi Heinrich Himmler and the more recent ‘apocalyptic folk’ band Current 93, Home traces a lineage of ideologues who learned to wrap their views of racial superiority and misogyny in the language of self-improvement and spirituality.
Home is fastidious with his sources, making sure everything is footnoted and appended – in part, no doubt, to ward off the woo-woo brigade and at least attempt to ground some of these characters’ extraordinary claims in fact. But, as a result, the book reads jarringly with incessant history-book clapbacks at authors’ biases and unreliability, more an annotated historiography of Western yoga than a smooth-reading nonfiction tale. Not all yoga is fascist, Home begrudgingly admits. But given how Home maps how today’s anti-vax, goop-selling and ‘manosphere’ influencers have taken their playbooks and reading lists directly from the creeps he’s assembled here, you might be better off gurufree and doing your headstands at home.
Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order in Wellness by Stewart Home. Pluto Press, £14.99 (softcover)
From the September 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
