HOME   UP

FASCIST YOGA : GRIFTERS, OCCULTISTS, WHITE SUPREMATISTS AND THE NEW ORDER IN WELLNESS

By Stewart Home

Pluto Press. 212 pages. £14.99. ISBN, 978-0-7453-5112-4

Reviewed by Jim Burns

Back in the early-1970s I taught an evening class in creative writing. In the same building, and just down the corridor, there was also a yoga class. It was not unusual for us all to be arriving and leaving at the same time, and everyone, including the nice lady who ran the yoga class, seemed quite friendly and normal.  If there were any oddballs they were likely to have been among the would-be writers, especially the poets. Or so I always thought.

Reading Stewart Home, I’ve started to re-think my fifty year-old impressions. Perhaps there was more to the yoga class than met the eye? In those days I saw it as little more than a fancy name for a keep-fit group, the yoga title added to bring in a hint of supposedly Eastern mysticism and wisdom. In some ways, and at a certain level, I may not have been far wrong. I doubt that the majority of those following the moves laid down by the instructor had more in mind than working off some excess weight. But there may have been some who took it a little further and looked into the “philosophy” behind yoga. Or at least what passes for it in the West.

Home takes an in-depth look at how, since early in the twentieth century, a great many of what can only be described as con-men have latched on to yoga, tied it in with some questionable Western ideas, and sold a fake bill of goods to the public. He started going to yoga classes himself, “although it took me a bit longer to understand some of the roots of modern postural practice are to be found in white supremacy and fascist ideology”.  And there were, additionally, all the usual goings-on that seem to be almost-inevitable aspects of groups set up around ideas of ”New Thought” and the like. Home mentions Anusara, “a style of yoga invented in America by John Friend”, and relates how scandals relating to money, sex, drugs, and other matters, surfaced to cast a shadow over whatever benefits, if any, Friend’s ideas offered.

The story goes back much further than Friend and we encounter the figure of Pierre Bernard (1875-1955), a “self-styled American yogi who liked to tell tall tales about his life”.  He first gained some press attention when in 1898 “he performed a carnival trick involving slowing his breathing so that a doctor could insert surgical needles through his earlobes, cheek, upper lips and nostrils”. He moved on to “teaching hypnotism and sexual practices”, and in 1903 “founded the Tantric Order of America”, though Home wonders if it actually ever existed, and may just have been “part of a travelling medicine show popping up in towns all the way from Washington State down to California”. Bernard then moved to New York and “focused on teaching a postural practice grounded in Western physical culture”.

He was in the news again in 1910 when he was “charged with kidnapping two teenage girls, Zella Hopp and Gertrude Leo…..and impersonating a medic, allegedly so that he could persuade Hopp to have sex with him as a cure for her weak heart”. Bernard seems to have been conversant with Indian yoga to the extent that he used the chanted word “Om” which the New York newspapers misprinted when they named him “The Great Oom”. They also published stories of “sex rites, orgies and necromancy among the Tantric Order of America”. It appears that Bernard never actually stood trial, and “carried on teaching what he called ‘tantra’ and ‘yoga’, but his practices seem to bear little relationship to what these words signify on the Indian subcontinent. His yoga, for instance, seems to have drawn more from Western physical culture than Eastern meditation”. He charged high fees for his services, “with a good chunk of those fees successfully invested in real estate”. 

Home, writing about racist attitudes among Bernard’s followers, says that he endorsed their views: “yoga and tantra were claimed as Aryan – that is white – pursuits by Bernard’s circle on the basis that the Hindu caste system was created to preserve racial purity in India and those of high caste were (at the inception of the system) Aryan. They shared this position with Nazi racial theorists”. And he quotes from writings by Hamish McLaurin who believed that “the Aryans, when they arrived in India, were a highly developed race….and gained control over their dusky brethren through a superior knowledge of physical and mental phenomena”. McLaurin therefore deduced that “the old Sanskrit writings” were not the “product of a dark-skinned race” but “the legitimate heritage of the people now in the ascendancy throughout Europe and the New World”, by which he meant the white race. Perhaps I should add that McLaurin wrote those words in 1933, the year when Hitler rose to power in Germany.

I’ve spent a little time on Pierre Bernard because of his importance in the spread of a Westernised yoga, but also because his legacy was carried on by his nephew, Theos. Before leaving the subject of Pierre, it’s relevant to mention “Yogi” Ramacharaka and Aleister Crowley, “both key figures in the development of modern occult yoga, and both owe a huge debt to Helena Blavatsky and her theosophy movement”.  Ramacharaka was, in fact, William Walker Atkinson, “an American who used his Indian-sounding pseudonym to write extensively about Hinduism and yoga in the early twentieth century”. Home describes him as a “New Thought booster”.  As for the “notorious British occultist”, Aleister Crowley, he used his supposed occult powers to bamboozle more than a few supposedly intelligent people by combining what he knew of yoga with “the ceremonial magic he learned as a member of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn”. From what I’ve read about him elsewhere, he could be dangerous to associate with. The British novelist Mary Butts experienced some of Crowley’s activities at his Abbey of Thelema in Sicily, and was reportedly badly affected by them.

It’s possible to carry on writing about some of the curious people who crop up in Fascist Yoga, though I’ll restrict myself to just a few of them. Major J.F.C. Fuller was a British Army officer who had served in India where he had “studied the Vedas and the Upanishads” and taken an interest in yoga philosophy. He was also a military historian and had developed “the idea of ‘blitzkrieg’, a tactic that would later be deployed to full effect by the Nazi regime”. Fuller was a member of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, and the guest of honour at the massive military parade held to celebrate Hitler’s fiftieth birthday in 1939. He had also been friendly with Aleister Crowley, but they fell out, “seemingly over Crowley’s indulgence in sex magic with other men”. Fuller’s book, A Study of the Mystical Philosophy of the Brahmins and Buddhism, “cites yoga and then Buddhism as a means of reaching the highest levels of spiritual understanding, tossing them in alongside Christianity, the whole of Western occultism, the Qabalah, and any other esoteric belief he cared to throw into the mix”.

Francis Yeats-Brown was another “British Army officer and Nazi sympathiser”, said by Home to be a “disciple of Pierre Bernard”. He was the author of an “unreliable yogic memoir, Bengal Lancer, published in 1930”. A film, starring Gary Cooper, was made from the book, though Home says it “bore about as much resemblance to Yeats-Brown’s memoir as the book did to the author’s actual life”. Hitler is said to have told Yeats-Brown that it was his favourite film and was “compulsory viewing for members of his elite SS”. Home remarks, “Like his yoga guru Pierre Bernard, Francis Yeats-Brown was an incorrigible liar”.

It does seem that the idea of yoga often appealed to the well-to-do. Indra Devi “taught a gentle yoga practice” to Hollywood icons such as Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, and Eve Gabor, and her “reflected celebrity as a personal trainer to the stars provided her with a platform from which to spread dubious claims about yoga”. Indra Devi was “born Eugenie Peterson in Riga, Latvia, to a Russian mother and Swedish father”. She read Yogi Ramacharaka’s book, Fourteen Lessons in Yogi philosophy and Oriental Occultism, and when she got to India became a student of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, “a man with an impressively and demonstrably fake guru lineage”. Home devotes a chapter to Devi, and says that “the apparent contempt for the masses that seeps through her writing echoes the rhetoric of those on the far right who vilify great swathes of the population while looking to ‘superior’ figures to act as the driving force of nations”.

The second half of the twentieth century saw a rise in interest in modern postural practice, and Home names several leading lights whose “yogic texts were consumed by the bucket load”, including James Lee Richardson, Richard Hittleman, and “the ‘Einstein of the Occult’, Frank Rudolph Young. Home is of the opinion that “he can be seen as the epitome of those peddling a more pseudo-scientific, occult vision of modern yoga”, while Hittleman “represents the ‘faith based’ version of postural practice”. I haven’t the space to quote it in full, but Home extracts a passage from Young’s Yoga Secrets for Health and Long Life dealing with the subject of pubic hair in which he claims that “shaving off pubic hairs permits the sex organ to enlarge more during sexual intercourse”, and “Yogis who rejoined the material world have maintained erections for eight hours of rather continuous copulation”. This is little more than a sex sales pitch, despite the reference to yoga and the fake advice about pubic hair. Home rightly describes it as “absurdity”.

With James Lee Richardson we are truly in the commercial world of mail-order goods like the publication, Yoga Made Easy, “especially suited to the American way of life”, a magazine called Prediction, and the Institute of Personal Analysis and Development, the head of which was a lady who had a regular astrology column in the News of the World. Richard Hittleman was a “yoga televangelist” and “an accomplished cod-spiritual salesman”. According to Home, “Hittleman became a minor television personality in the 1960s and 1970s by hosting both US and UK yoga instruction shows, and also put together publications and records along similar lines, some of which he sold directly to the public” .When writing about Hittleman’s supposedly well-informed advice, Home says, “In reality, the wisdom he dispensed is on a par with that you might expect from a mediocre motivational coach, and is just as applicable to making money as it is to achieving ‘enlightenment’ “. 

It's only fair to say that some people, reading about Richardson and Hittleman, might ask why they’re seen as Fascists and not just ordinary con-men. I think there may be an explanation available when Home discusses the antics of the Italian fascist Gabriele D’Annunzio and his “monstrous narcissism. This fascistic, self-regarding inward turn – also observable in more-recent right-wing figures like Donald Trump – can perhaps be seen as reflecting the yogic obsession with personal transformation at the expense of genuine social change”. Weren’t Richardson, Hittleman, and others like them, catering to that desire for “personal transformation” and so distracting attention from the problems of the wider world?

Home tells us that “Several leading Nazis shared Yeats-Brown’s obsession with yoga, and in particular his absurd belief that the practice could be traced back to the Aryan invaders of the Indus Valley”. He gives some space to Heinrich Himmler (a believer in “Hinduism as an Aryan religion”), head of the SS, and involved in the murder of millions of Jews and others. Himmler “was strongly influenced by the views of German Indologist and religious studies writer, Jakob Wilhelm Hauer. Hauer founded the German Faith Movement, which sought to promote a new religion based on Germanic paganism and Nazi ideas” : “Hauer’s 1934 publication on the Bhagavad Gita lays out systematically the justification for doing the deed that a man is called to do by fate even if the deed is steeped in guilt”. Home comments : “Hauer’s interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita is, of course. driven by a violent, reactionary political ideology. Nevertheless, it continues to resonate with the way in which yoga, as a form of ‘embodied spirituality’, is currently taught by a number of yoga organisations in the overdeveloped world”.

Home’s “historical account of modern postural practice” goes as far as the 1970s, after which, he says, “technological change and the growth in numbers of those practising modern yoga”, altered the methods by which it is made available : “With the spread of home video equipment and the proliferation of cable television in the 1980s, the ways in which home workouts were marketed shied away from books and mail-order courses”. He adds. “it was with the internet that modern yoga, along with its evil twin the alt-right, rose to their current prominence”.

Fascist Yoga is a fascinating and provocative book and one I can imagine could arouse some strong opposition to its questioning of modern yoga and its proponents. A friend I told about the book and its arguments wondered why it was necessary to doubt the motives of people who went to a yoga class simply to improve their physical health and, hopefully, their frame of mind. Were they all being subtly brainwashed by hidden messages in the instructor’s advice about headstanding? Home himself recalls : “Most of those I encountered through yoga classes had only the vaguest notions, if any at all, of the actual – as opposed to the mythological – history of what they practised”.

There are numerous notes to back up Home’s assertions, and an extensive bibliography.