Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order In Wellness by Stewart Home

Author:Stewart Home [Home, Stewart]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fitness, Alternative & Holistic Health, Yoga, Philosophy, Health, Nonfiction, Health & Well Being, Religion & Spirituality, Published: 20 Jul 2025
ISBN: 9780745351131
Google: OOZnEQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2025-07-19T22:00:00+00:00

While Day isn’t the only writer of yoga books to explicitly claim it is possible to live to be hundreds of years old, most authors with an uncritical faith in the occult capacity of asanas and breathing exercises at least hold back from stating this in print. That said, it was clearly something a considerable cross-section of the twentieth-century yoga book readership wanted to hear.

About Yoga enjoyed sufficient success for Day’s publisher to issue a follow-up work within two years. The Study And Practice Of Yoga, published in 1953 acts as a manual for those wanting to do asanas and draws on authors such as Sivananda Saraswati, whose Yogic Home Exercises is included in the previous book’s bibliography.19 After sitting poses and breathing exercises, Day recommends starting asanas with surya namaskars, aka sun salutations.20 This makes him appear more advanced in his yoga practice than many of the other authors mentioned thus far, as sun salutations were at the time not widely known in Anglo-American yoga. Even so, it may simply be that he cobbled together his yoga programme from what he had read elsewhere rather than having a set practice himself, as Day was first and foremost a jobbing hack. This is backed up by his somewhat cynical remark in You, Too, Can Write For Money: ‘Given that little bit of extra knowledge on any subject, you can start writing a book on it. By the time your research and preparation for the book are finished, you will probably be an expert, too.’21

As already mentioned, the bibliography in About Yoga, while short, provides a useful snapshot of the various yoga and occult books that had caught Day’s eye in the preceding years and thus presumably had some degree of influence at the time. In terms of the supposed Eastern origins of the yogic traditions, aside from two works each by Francis Yeats-Brown, Alexander Cannon and William Walker Atkinson (under his Ramacharaka pen name), there are three works by Paul Brunton, two by Alexandra David-Neel, and one each by H. P. Blavatsky and Theos Bernard, as well as an anthology of Tibetan yoga texts in translation with commentaries by W. Y. Evans-Wentz. These, alongside translations of Hindu religious texts and commentaries on them, suggest that Day’s knowledge of the ‘Mystic East’ was heavily reliant on Western discourse provided by lightweight academic texts, yellow-press journalism and the writing of outright charlatans.22 In short, he was drawn to popular authors on occultism and Eastern mysticism, whose works are not generally viewed as reliable or scientific.

In terms of books about yoga more generally, About Yoga’s bibliography kicks off with Claude Bragdon’s Yoga For You, published prior to the end of the Second World War.23 Bragdon (1866–1946) was an American architect with an amateur interest in spiritualism and oriental philosophy. As he writes in the Preface to his earlier An Introduction To Yoga:24

I have never taken lessons in Yoga, much less given them. I have never been to India; nor can I lay claim

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