During the inter-war years, two prominent British fascists published books on yoga: Major J. F. C. Fuller (1878–1966) and Major Francis Yeats-Brown (the latter of whom is addressed in the following chapter). Both men learned the bulk of their yoga at the feet of elitist occidental occultists who they accepted as “masters.” However, rather than fessing up to the real sources of their practice, each attempted to deceive the public into believing they’d learned their smarts in India.
Article continues after advertisement
Fuller—known as “Boney” due to his admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte—had a reasonably high-flying army career until the early 1930s, but he was also a well-known military historian whose interest in armoured warfare led him to develop the idea of the “blitzkrieg,” a tactic that would later be deployed to full effect by the Nazi regime. Fuller was a top member of the British Union of Fascists and also implicated in plots to overthrow the UK government and replace it with a puppet Nazi regime.
In 1935, Boney was accorded the dubious privilege of being invited to witness Germany’s first armed manoeuvres since Hitler’s NSDAP had ascended to power. This paled in comparison, however, to being made guest of honour at the enormous three-hour motorised military parade that formed the centrepiece of the Führer’s fiftieth birthday celebrations on April 20th, 1939.
Turning to the genealogy of Fuller’s yoga system, which seems to be have been inspired by another unsavoury individual decades previously, historian Kate Imy has done much of the archival spadework:
His published works maintained that as a soldier in India he studied “the Vedas and the Upanishads” and “took a deep interest in the Yoga philosophy” after meeting “holy men, yogis, advanced radicals…and various members of the Arya Samaj”…however, Fuller’s unpublished letters and diaries suggest that his immersion in yoga came less from conversing with unnamed Indian leaders than through his connections to the British occult. While sick with enteric fever in Lucknow in 1905, he read the poetic works of occultist and magician Aleister Crowley.
Fuller soon became one of Crowley’s disciples. Perhaps the greatest expression of Boney’s love for his notorious yoga/ occult guru can be found in his book The Star in the West: A Critical Essay Upon the Works of Aleister Crowley, which reveals that the latter had already impressed his views on this particular student nearly twenty years before the chela (disciple) wrote his first and only full book on yoga:
How is this inward mystery revealed? And the answer is: In the East by Yoga, and in the West by Magic…In the East, by an entirely artificial and scientific method, in the West by a stimulation and sudden outflowing of the poetic faculty. The East, we may take it, is almost entirely static; whilst the West is wholly dynamic. Yet their methods, whatever they may be, ultimately harmonize (as everything ultimately must do), leading the aspirant through various stages of illuminism, till he stands out from the illusions of his birth, and becomes one with that higher glow of glory in exalted states of Ecstasy or Samadhi.
According to the book’s Introduction, yoga philosophy “has produced the greatest and most influential of masters—Gotama, Christ, Mahomet, whose mastery over the Unknowable has been the driving force of nations.”
Fuller and Crowley eventually fell out circa 1910, seemingly over Crowley’s indulgence in sex magic with other men, and indifference to defending his reputation when his masculinity was questioned as a result. Before this break, however, Boney spent half a decade operating as both his master’s cheerleader and his hatchet-man against rivals (including Indian yogis). An example of the latter role can be seen in the satirical sketch, “Half-Hours With Famous Mahatmas No. 1,” that Fuller wrote for Crowley’s journal The Equinox:
“Do you know Swami Vivekananda?” I asked.“Ha,” he replied, “he no good, he my disciple, I am the master!”
“And Swami Dayanand Sarasvati?” I continued.
The same answer was vouched to me, although this latter teacher had died at the age of seventy, forty years ago. Thinking it about time to change the conversation, I said: “O Thou Shower from the Highest! Tell thy grovelling disciple what then ‘is’ a ‘lie’?”
“Ha!” he replied, “it is illusion, this truth that has been diverged from its real point; an illusive spring in the primo-genial fermentation of ‘fee-no-me-non,’ in this typocosmy apparent to the sense which you call ‘deVurld’!!!”
With this, and promises of oceans of blissful reality from the highest eternality of ultimate ecstasy, he bade me sit in a chair and blow alternately through my nostrils; and, if I had faith, so he assured me, I should in six months time arrive at the supreme stage of the Highest in the infinite Ultimatum, and should burst as a chance illusively fermented bubble in the purest atmosphere of the highest reality.
This Vedanta parody nods to Crowley’s meeting with Mahatma Agamya Paramahamsa at around the time Fuller became his disciple, echoing press coverage of a 1908 court case in which the then 67-year-old Indian guru’s attempts to run a patriarchal “love cult” in West Hampstead (north London) resulted in a sentence of four months’ hard labour for assault. It also prompted a lecture from the magistrate, who suggested that this reprobate’s so-called “religious teachings” were simply a cover for “disgusting practices,” such as enticing teenage girls to his home by advertising a typing job, before proceeding to grope them.
The issue of The Equinox in which Boney’s parody appeared also contained “The Temple of Solomon The King IV,” unsigned but co-authored by Crowley and Fuller, which treats yoga seriously and compares it to Western science and occultism. In many ways, it is an extension of Fuller’s writing on Crowley and yoga in The Star in the West.
The article, which contains little that would be unfamiliar to anyone conversant with some of the more influential twentieth-century texts on yoga and occultism, concludes with accounts of meditations Crowley allegedly undertook between January and April 1901. The entire piece is heavily indebted to Crowley’s former Golden Dawn master Allan Bennett, who the Great Beast had holidayed with in Ceylon in 1901. After that meeting, Bennett decided to go on to Myanmar, where he became a Buddhist monk, while Crowley went to India to study raja yoga before returning to England.
A decade-and-a-half after Boney broke with Crowley, the influence of his former master is readily evident in Yoga: A Study of the Mystical Philosophy of the Brahmins and Buddhists. In the book, Fuller cites Hindu yoga and then Buddhism as a means of reaching the highest levels of spiritual understanding, tossing them in alongside Christianity, the whole of Western occultism, the Qabalah, and any other esoteric belief he cared to throw into the mix. According to the book’s Introduction, yoga philosophy “has produced the greatest and most influential of masters—Gotama, Christ, Mahomet, whose mastery over the Unknowable has been the driving force of nations.”
Given that Fuller had only broken with Crowley the man, rather than his basic yoga teachings, this put-down should not be taken too seriously.
The final third of the book is specifically devoted to Buddhism. Given the term “noble” is understood by some as a synonym for Aryan, it comes as no surprise that Fuller wrote glowingly of “the noble [or Aryan] eightfold path.” Here, it should be noted that Aryan was originally used simply as a religious, cultural and linguistic identification. The association that Fuller makes with an entirely fictitious racial group—Indo-European for many racists both inside and outside the fascist movement, and more specifically Indo-German for some Nazis—only occurred later.
For Fuller, Buddhism is just another route to ultimate spiritual truth, all esoteric systems being much of a muchness to him. While hierarchical difference mattered for Boney on the so-called racial and social level, he doesn’t really distinguish between spiritual systems. In his book, Fuller cites leading theosophist Helena Blavatsky, only to then quote a Hindu source—the Hatha Yoga Pradipika—so as to extol its greater exactness! Regardless, it appears Blavatsky and Crowley had a greater impact on Fuller’s understanding of yoga than the likes of Vivekananda, Mahatma Agamya Paramahamsa, or any of the other Hindu gurus he quotes.
Due to his discipleship with Crowley, his work in this field remains attractive to those of an occult yoga bent, and not just those with explicitly fascist politics.
Unlike Blavatsky, Crowley isn’t explicitly named in Fuller’s book, but it doesn’t take a leap of the imagination to work out who “St. Shamefaced Sex” (a “potent but middle-class Magician”) refers to: “Even the great science of Yoga has not remained unpolluted by his breath, so that in many cases to avoid shipwreck upon Scylla the Yogi has lost his life in the eddying whirlpools of Charybdis.”
Given that Fuller had only broken with Crowley the man, rather than his basic yoga teachings, this put-down should not be taken too seriously.
Likewise, Boney’s belief in yoga’s equivalence to the Qabalah didn’t stop him going on to author an anti-Semitic rant in the Fascist Quarterly entitled “The Cancer of Europe,” which claimed Jewish people were anti-spiritual materialists who were using magic, money and psychoanalysis to destroy Christian civilisation. In the piece, Fuller deploys the Zohar and Qabalah to bolster his anti-Semitic bigotry, depicting them as part of the Jewish plot. This was despite his sympathetic use of the same material in his previous book on yoga, and the fact he even included a diagram of The Tree of Life in that work.
The hierarchical caste and spiritual structures of Hinduism—and in particular the authoritarian nature of the relationship between gurus and their students—clearly appealed to fullblown mystical fascists like Fuller. In his book, Fuller writes:
As the Shiva Sanhita says; “11. Only the knowledge imparted by a Guru is powerful and useful; otherwise it becomes fruitless, weak and very painful. 12. He who attains knowledge by readily pleasing his Guru with every attention, readily obtains success therein. 13. There is not the least doubt that Guru is father, Guru is mother, and Guru is God even: as such he should be served by all, with their thought, word and deed.”
As can be seen, the authoritarian nature of the relationship between gurus and their students—at least as Fuller sees it—mirrors the fascist ideal of the relationship between the Führer and the masses. While Fuller’s position as a high-ranking member of the British Union of Fascists and his praise of the Nazis were well known, this didn’t stop post-Second World War yogis quoting him in their own books. Fuller’s book Yoga was still being reissued decades after the military defeat of Nazism. Due to his discipleship with Crowley, his work in this field remains attractive to those of an occult yoga bent, and not just those with explicitly fascist politics.
__________________________________
From Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order In Wellness. Used with the permission of the publisher, Pluto Press. Copyright © 2025 by Stewart Home.
