Interview by Christabel Stewart and Matteo PiniPortrait courtesy of Stewart Home

CS Your new book Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order In Wellness (2025), is a provocation that the modern position-based yoga movement is not a timeless Indian tradition, but a Western invention entangled from the beginning with esotericism, show business, occultism, and authoritarian spiritualism. Where did you begin?

SH I started looking for a believable historical account of yoga, other than that provided by instructors I encountered. I read Mark Singleton’s book Yoga Body (2010), which suggests that transnational Anglophone yoga, or modern postural practice, was radically different from “traditional” yoga practices from the Indian subcontinent. American conman Pierre Bernard was teaching modern postural practice a decade or two before the Indian instructors Singleton describes as mixing European gymnastics with Indian nationalist ideology. Where did Bernard learn what he taught, and to what extent did he synthesise it? Did this grifter invent modern yoga?

CS What distinguishes Fascist Yoga from recent critiques is its refusal to provide “rescue narratives”, and not offering hope to salvage a purified version of yoga, stripped of its spiritual excesses and political misuses. Is the structure as irredeemable?

SH I’d say the most prominent attempt to salvage yoga from conmen and grifters is the 2023 Conspirituality podcast and book by Derek Beres. Unlike them, I have never been sucked into an abusive cult. 

CS Has modern yoga always been a mirror for the West to project its fantasies of the East?

SH  Many historians document the discrepancies in the evolution of yoga. In Francis Yeats-Brown’s case, his guru was Pierre Bernard, and in J. F. C. Fuller’s, the English occultist Aleister Crowley. The discourse running through Crowley rhetorically strips away Orientalism in a quest to uncover universal occult truths. The mythological nature of the material is also evident from the standard miracle cure trope deployed by many 20th-century yogis. The use of specific yoga poses to cure specific ailments and diseases are even more absurd.

CS Your main critique is that contemporary yoga is a self-erasing form of historical violence. Is this true of your experience?

SH I mention “Pastel QAnon” in relation to yoga. Apart from Ashtanga, a more athletic form of yoga, the classes I attended were predominantly attended and instructed by women. I tried dozens of different styles of modern postural practice, and aside from two – a Brazilian practice and the infamously cult-like Forrest yoga – all had been put together by men. The classes were self-consciously hierarchical in terms of the relationships between students and teachers.

CS The sanitised, secular yoga class in a gentrified urban studio is not a neutral space for mind-body alignment. Does this conceal histories of cultural appropriation, racialisation and commercialisation?

SH Traditional Indian yoga is considered to be about non-dualism. The teachers I encountered were all from culturally Christian backgrounds, more under the spell of Descartes and Christianity. I don’t view modern postural practice as secular, and a lot of the occult inputs are also strongly culturally Christian.  In its present form, yoga is neither Indian nor Western. It is thoroughly transnational and transcultural, situated between cultures. Those who claim they possess the roots of true yoga do not understand that cultures are fundamentally porous. Multiculturalism is the beginning, not the end.

MP Much of fascist philosophy seems less about explicit violence and more about aestheticised power, myth and spiritual order. How do these resonate with contemporary yoga?

SH There is a gap between what is promised and what comes to pass in yoga. Frank Rudolph Young wrote extensively about yoga in the 1960s and 70s,  stating he expected to live to be 330 years old or more. But, of course, he died at the age of 91, considerably short of where he claimed occult and yogic knowledge would take him. Absurd claims about the health and longevity benefits of yoga still circulate.

MP The book’s chronology ends in the 1970s, yet the link between mindfulness and far-right politics continues unabated. How has the relationship between yoga and fascism changed?

SH Umberto Eco clarified in his essay “Ur-Fascism” (1995) that a political ideology can take many shapes. It changes, and I hope that readers will see that modern postural practice does the same thing throughout the twentieth century. Earlier on, it tended to be a series of static poses, and more recently, flow sequences have proved more popular. The lotus headstand is in many mid-century yoga manuals, but lost popularity later. Since yoga and fascism both shift, the relationship between them inevitably changes too.  A lot of what you hear now within the wellness sphere isn’t that far removed from the blood and soil rhetoric of Nazis such as Richard Walther Darré, who was Minister of Food and Agriculture under Hitler.

MP What would it mean to “reclaim” yoga from its entanglement with fascist history? Is that a meaningful or possible project?

SH Early bodybuilding figures such as Eugen Sandow also influenced yoga, and with yoga there are issues with its saturation with occult ideas. It isn’t possible to “reclaim” yoga because I don’t see how it can be untangled from absurd supernatural beliefs and related health misinformation.

MP Fascism actively thrives on politics being secretly controlled by elites, which offers a simplistic and fantastical narrative. Why do you think this paranoid feeling is so compatible with an ostensibly peaceful practice like yoga?

SH As noted in the book, yoga carries within it “a worldview grounded in essentialism and anti-empiricism. Many fascists, hippies and yogis act and speak as if there is a natural essence to everything that trumps science-based evidence. In short, what they believe to be true is – at least as far as they were concerned – not only true but irrefutable.”  .