Princess Kate debuts new hair as she celebrates wedding anniversary in Scotland
For their overnight stay, William and Kate are staying in a self-catering cottage, where it's expected they'll celebrate their special occasion privately.
The pair actually first met in Scotland, while they were classmates at the University of St Andrew's in Fife back in 2001.
They soon began dating, and wed on April 29, 2011, in a lavish royal event watched by an estimated billion people around the world.
Meanwhile, their Scottish getaway this week marks Kate's first overnight tour since her cancer diagnosis early last year.
She stepped back from royal duties after going public with her difficult news, undergoing chemotherapy for several months before announcing she had completed treatment in September.
Earlier this year, Kate revealed she is now in remission, and is continuing her gradual return to public life.
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NZ Herald
04-08-2025
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Five immersive encounters with Vietnam's Cham community
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Otago Daily Times
01-08-2025
- Otago Daily Times
The fascist position on yoga
For more than a century, elements of the far right have been attracted by yoga's rigours, the author of a new book tells Miles Ellingham. Stewart Home just wanted to do a headstand. That said, one shouldn't always take what Home does at face value. Over the course of his career, Home (born Kevin Llewellyn Callan), a writer, artist and activist, has written a novel about dragging Diana, Princess of Wales's corpse around a Scottish stone circle, formed a series of anti-art movements and publicly announced his intention to levitate Brighton's Pavilion theatre. This time, though, he's adamant he really did just want to do a headstand. In 2009 he took up yoga, which was offered as part of his gym membership. Home threw himself into the practice, subjecting himself to more than 1000 classes between 2009 and 2019, many of them just down the road from the East London Tara Yoga Centre, the scene of an investigation into "bad guru" Gregorian Bivolaru, who allegedly tempted followers into "an international web of trafficking and sexual exploitation". But Home wouldn't have known about that back then. What he did know was that some of his classmates were acting weird. Home has a high threshold for weirdness, but this was surpassed when a fellow student sidled up to him and proclaimed herself a "starseed" — a sort of New Age angel-alien hybrid sent to Earth to cleanse humanity. Home was also thrown by the cult-like, authoritarian guru-student relationship of his classes, which concluded in a traditional namaste gesture of respect. He elected instead to hold his fist in the air and mutter: "No god, no guru." Home wanted to do a headstand. However, after some cursory research, he realised something troubling: so did the Waffen-SS. The opening chapter of his book Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order in Wellness begins with a definition of the practice it interrogates: "The term 'yoga' refers to both a physical culture system that is slightly more than a century old and a set of religious practices whose origins pre-date those of postural yoga, though they were reinvented in the late 19th century." Home's book does not claim that yoga, with its nebulous origins, is inherently fascist, nor that all yoga practitioners are primed for far-right indoctrination. Rather, after its adoption in the west, a Venn diagram emerges. In one circle, there's yoga, Tantra, occidental Buddhism and Hinduism, New Age spirituality and basic hippydom. In the other, authoritarianism, fascism, proto-fascism, white supremacy and far-right conspiracy theory. Home wanders through the gateway between these two circles, emerging into a dark, contradictory realm where death camp guards sit in a lotus position, bare-chested Italian militiamen play catch with live grenades and "Miss Jelly Fish" is flattered without reservation. More on Miss Jelly Fish later, but first we begin with "the Great Oom". Pierre Bernard should never really have been called "the Great Oom". The title was a mistake by the New York press, which didn't know how to spell the "om" mantra correctly. Nevertheless, the name stuck. Bernard was extremely influential in the spread of yogic practices in the West during the early 20th century. He started out as a carnival attraction, gaining attention by publicly inserting surgical needles into himself. Later, he began espousing hypnotism and Tantra and, in 1905, founded the Tantrik Order in America on the West Coast. He claimed to have learned his practices from a wandering guru called Sylvais Hamati, whose existence, Home points out, is not evidenced by Bernard's biographer. Soon after founding the Tantrik Order, Bernard moved to New York, where he launched yoga classes for the ultra-wealthy elite. His disciples included the Vanderbilt heiress Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd, along with the British fascist Francis Yeats-Brown and a racist journalist called Hamish McLaurin. In 1910, Bernard was charged with kidnapping two teenage girls. Modernity rolled fascism into being. But, despite modernity, fascism needed its own mythology, so fascists looked east. Two of Bernard's disciples, Yeats-Brown and McLaurin, collaborated on a book, Eastern Philosophy for Western Minds, which traced "Indo-Aryan texts" to an ancient encounter between "highly developed" ancient Aryan invaders of "the purest possible white stock" and "a dark-skinned people infinitely beneath them on the evolutionary scale". Yeats-Brown found fame the same decade with his memoir The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, which was adapted into a film — reportedly a favourite of Hitler's — starring Gary Cooper. Yeats-Brown was not the only British fascist yogi of his time. There was also the army officer Major-general J.F.C. Fuller, who is partially credited with inventing blitzkrieg warfare. According to the historian Kate Imy, Fuller studied "the Vedas and the Upanishads [and] took a deep interest in the yoga philosophy". Fuller was, for a while, a disciple of the occultist Aleister Crowley, although the pair fell out, Home writes, "over Crowley's indulgence in sex magic with other men". In April 1939, months before the Nazis invaded Poland, Fuller was an honoured guest at Hitler's 50th birthday, a three-hour motorised military parade in Berlin. The path to 20th-century fascism, as Home outlines, is punctuated with yoga and racist interpretations of eastern philosophy. Another example was the Italian aristocrat Gabriele D'Annunzio, often credited as the "John the Baptist of fascism" after leading the 1919 rogue annexation of the port of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia). D'Annunzio, a strange narcissist, claimed to be "the greatest Italian writer since Dante". Among his proto-fascist legionnaires was Guido Keller, a manic depressive, cocaine-fuelled aviator who posed as Neptune on photoshoots and slept in a tree with his pet eagle. During the occupation of Fiume, Keller founded the "Yoga group", whose manifestos adopted the (then-neutral) swastika as a symbol. "D'Annunzio and his followers saw in Hinduism what they saw in the mirror — bold and sensuous vitality — plus an aura of eastern holiness," Mark Thompson, a historian of early 20th-century Italy, said. "This vision gave them another licence for hedonism ... Critics of the yoga industry say it peddles the same clueless 'Orientalism' and with it, possibly, the proto-fascist ideology that celebrated warriors and master heroes for real." Not long after the annexation of Fiume, Heinrich Himmler — influenced by German Indologist Jakob Wilhelm Hauer — looked to Hinduism as an Aryan religion. According to the German historian Mathias Tietke, Himmler avidly consumed the Bhagavad Gita and later intuited its philosophy as a justification for the Holocaust. Tietke's research reportedly found that the SS death camp guards were officially recommended yoga and that Himmler even touted Wewelsburg Castle near Paderborn as a centre for "yoga exercises, meditation, Bhagavad Gita readings and yogic nutrition". According to Home, Hitler didn't appear to share the same yogic enthusiasm as Himmler. That said, one widely reproduced photograph shows his future wife, Eva Braun, in a picturesque, lakeside back bend — though whether she's explicitly practising postural yoga is "impossible to tell". Pre-1945, the fascism-yoga Venn diagram hardly resembles its traditional shape — it's just a broad circle with two slim crescents on either side. Prominent figures residing within this overlap included the Italian imperialist "super-fascist" Julius Evola (the modern far-right's treasured philosopher) and Mircea Eliade, a Romanian academic who wrote a thesis on yoga practices before throwing his weight in the 1930s behind the Iron Guard, a religious fascist movement that carried out multiple assassinations. In his essay Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco — who was not a fascist but had been forced to participate in fascism as a child — attempts to answer a difficult question: what is fascism? Eco writes that defining fascism is like defining a game: there's no single characteristic, but you know it when you see it. This, he contends, is due to an overlapping sequence of features or "family resemblances". Many of these are also applicable to new age spirituality. One is a "rejection of modernism". We see this both in the new age movement's rejection of a materialist world and in far-right traditionalists bemoaning social progress. Another is what Eco calls "the cult of action for action's sake". He describes this as the fascist belief that action is beautiful in itself, that "thinking is a form of emasculation". This almost sounds like something out of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love ("the resting place of the mind is the heart", a monk tells the book's central character). Eat, Pray, Love leads us to another of Eco's fascist identifiers: its "appeal to a frustrated middle class", which certainly applies to yoga. "If you understand being mainstream as appealing to thin white women with money to burn," Home writes, "then you can't get more mainstream in the world of modern postural practice than [the online magazine] Yoga Journal ... A 'recommended yogi reading' list on its website includes Eliade's Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. I'm still seeing this work repeatedly recommended to yoga teachers and practitioners with no warning about the fact it was written by someone active in fascist politics at the time it was composed." After reading Home's book, I met him near his old yoga studio. Home and I sat in the shade of an overhanging tree, meditative but not cross-legged upon a rock. I put it to him that if, say, ping-pong happened to have a number of fascist devotees, it doesn't necessarily make it fascist. "But what about if the guy who came up with the game of ping-pong had a bunch of fascist and white supremacist followers," he responds. "Also, ping-pong doesn't have the mystical trappings of a cult." Home argues that fascist yoga continued into the late 20th century, only in a slightly more veiled way. "A lot of the earlier fascist yogis are referred back to," he says of subsequent followers. "So even someone like Harvey Day, who is explicitly anti-racist in his books, can't resist mentioning the Aryan origins of yoga and will reference Francis Yeats-Brown and other people, and I think it's the credulity around the beliefs, it's what I describe as anti-essentialism and belief in one's own truth. Also, with QAnon and antivax stuff, you see this being discussed more." Home sees a telling similarity between the reverence QAnon adherents feel towards their saviour, Donald Trump, and the ardent spiritual devotion for Hitler displayed by the Nazis. "There's a very clear parallel between the two things," he says. Whether QAnon's "esoteric Hitlerism" is consciously borrowed or simply emerges from the same mythic structure, he continues, "hinges on research I haven't done". Travis View, via his QAA podcast, has been examining the QAnon movement since its origins in 2017. View points out perhaps the most obvious recent collision point between far-right QAnon conspiracy theory and new age beliefs: Jacob Chansley, AKA "the QAnon Shaman". Chansley became the mascot of the January 6 insurrection after he stormed the US Capitol in facepaint and a fur horned headdress. Having gained access to the Senate chamber, Chansley led the rioters in quasi-Christian prayer but, View explains, he was also fascinated by Native American mysticism and occultism. "I also think there's a broad overlap," View says, "between the hyper-individualism of the far right and new age wellness thinking. There's a distrust of, for example, public health measures and a belief that you have a moral obligation to take care of your own health entirely. This is why there's so much overlap in anti-vaccine belief; it's a far-right belief, but also something you'd see in crunchy yoga circles." Another similarity, View says, is that both camps prioritise esoteric knowledge. "If you're very deeply into spiritualism, there's a belief that there's esoteric knowledge that is suppressed and you can 'awaken' to it ... and then on the far right, they have the same belief, but it's that the media and the education system is controlled by Jews or whatever, and in order to escape this thinking, you have to awaken to the lies of society. Both promote a personal hero's journey you have to go through in order to reject mainstream orthodox knowledge." Fascist Yoga asserts that yogic postural practice and, to an extent, new age spirituality more broadly, is a natural home for people who crave methods of sexual coercion and control. People such as Frank Rudolph Young. The author, who died in Chicago in 2002 at the age of 91 (an impressive innings, if short of the 330 years that he had expected), wrote multiple books on seduction, mental domination and — you guessed it — yoga. In his 1969 title Yoga for Men Only, he claims the practice can enhance male "sex power" and "manly sex appeal". Young also identified 42 different personality types and details how to manipulate them. One example Home mentions is Miss Jelly Fish, who Young advised to "flatter without reservation ... despite her embarrassed smile". Miss Jelly Fish hails from a self-published mail-order book called X Ray Mind, published under the pen name Maravedi El Krishnar. She has a "soft, sweet voice" with a "bashful smile", the book suggests. She also "prefers isolation and the company of girls half as pretty as herself". Young also told readers to gaze into the mirror and imagine themselves possessing "incomparable mental power". Home's book is not only a useful tool for understanding a historical precedent, but it also gives context to a persistent problem: that people can excuse almost anything via their own enlightenment and that wellness is not always preached by well-meaning people or for well-meaning reasons. Just two months ago, for example, Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an article headed "Destroying Gaza 'with love': Israel's new YogiNazis", which featured a settler, Rivka Lafair, who Channel 4 described as "a poster girl for Israel's powerful far right". Haaretz quotes Lafair addressing "everyone who doesn't understand how it's possible to be spiritual, to teach yoga and hold retreats, while calling for the expulsion and annihilaSHon [sic] of your enemy". Her answer, the article reads, is clear: "I love my people with an undying love, and I hate my enemy with an undying hatred ... One does not contradict the other." After much consideration, Stewart Home does not recommend pursuing postural yoga. Outside his local gym, however, he triumphantly demonstrates his headstand. He prefers a tripod headstand, which is associated with gymnastics as opposed to the basket headstand recommended by yoga teachers. While he's upside down, I ask if he can feel the spirit of fascism? "No," he replies. "I've exorcised it completely by writing the book." — The Observer
