Why yoga is a breeding ground for fascists

Telegraph

18-07-2025

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.'
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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.