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 anti-vax 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 6 January 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.”
