The Nazi's and the Occult
By D.Sklar
CHAPTER 1
By D.Sklar
CHAPTER 1
Hidden Roots
Real power begins where secrecy begins ... the only rule of which everybody in a
totalitarian state may be sure.
Hannah Arendt
Many books have been written about Hitler and the Holocaust, many
reasons suggested to account for them. It is said that Germany in the 1930's
was economically and spiritually bankrupt, that Hitler and his henchmen
were madmen or simple opportunists or petty bureaucrats—or some combination of the three. Perhaps. But one explanation tends to contradict
another, and when all are combined, they merge into a solution so general
that nothing is explained. Understandably, then, many people are still not
satisfied that the grotesque events of the Third Reich have been adequately
dealt with by the historians.
In all this complicated story, there is one question which cries out for an
answer: How is it that the theorists have missed a vital element, even when
they themselves provide important clues? That element is the occult.
Many historians have alluded to the Nazi party's origins in an occult
sect, to the occult leanings of leading Nazi officials, to the mystical rites of
the SS and the Hitler Youth, to the establishment of a bureau devoted
exclusively to the occult during World War II. It now seems puzzling that
they should not also have given as much consideration to the underlying
basis for these odd phenomena as they gave to economic and social factors.
That they did not is, of course, evidence of their own dismissal—quite reasonably—of a crankish pseudoscience. But this has led, inevitably, to
selective blindness. In order not to be accused of giving credence to
irrational beliefs, they have failed to see those beliefs in their proper
historical perspective. Since early studies always influence later ones, the
interpretation of Nazi origins has tended to remain pretty much the same for
the past two decades.
All the same, people do seem to have a subliminal awareness that the Nazis were involved in occultism. One often comes across references such as these: ...The Nazi horror reveals how Satanic the human soul can become.
...If there is anything fundamentally diabolic about Anton LaVey, it stems from the echo of nazism in his theories.
...It was predictable that Charles Manson would identify with Hitler, for they both have been motivated by a kindred demonic spirit and they are comparable personalities.
The current occult revival has placed us in a better position to examine the Nazi horror from a different perspective, and gives ample ground for believing that occult beliefs and practices, however weird, played a major part in the irrational history of the Third Reich.
Some scholars may have been thrown off the scent because Hitler went to great pains to eradicate occultism from Germany almost as soon as he came to power, and on that account, is mistakenly identified as an enemy of irrational faith.
On the contrary. As will be borne out in later chapters, the occult was purged, not because it was abhorrent, but because the Nazis took it seriously—so seriously, indeed, that it posed a potential threat. The astrologer William Wulff, who was put to work by the SS casting horoscopes of nations, groups, and movements, describes, in Zodiac and Swastika, Heinrich Himmler's confession of his own interest in and practice of occultism and his explanation of the purge:
For us politics means ... the elimination of all forces except those serving the one constructive idea.
In the Third Reich we have to forbid astrology. We cannot permit any astrologers to follow their calling except those who are working for us. In the National Socialist state astrology must remain a privilegium singulorum. It is not for the broad masses.
The Holocaust appeared in a new light when I began, some time ago, to investigate certain modern esoteric cults making claims to paranormal knowledge. These cults, from those connected with George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and Rudolf Steiner to their present reincarnations, shared certain features: an authoritarian obedience to a charismatic and Messianic leader; secrecy; loyalty to the group above all other ties; a belief in supernatural possibilities open to the members only; a belief in reincarnation; initiation into superhuman sources of power; literal acceptance of the myth of ancient "giants" or supermen who handed down an oral tradition to a chosen people and who were guiding us now; and, in uncommon cases, Satanic practices.
Glaring parallels to Nazi history. Turning back to that history and its antecedents, I saw unmistakable evidence of a direct relationship between the Nazis and occultism. In fact, it was hard not to see it. Here was the missing link in our understanding of the beasts who proclaimed themselves gods.
If it seems too fantastic to believe that one of the most civilized countries in the world should have fallen to occultism, here is a highly respected German historian, an exiled former staff member of the liberal newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung, Konrad Heiden, observing, in his introduction to The Memoirs of Dr. Felix Kersten, Heinrich Himmler's masseur, that among the Germans
the best of them found refuge from the despair of their daily life in a perverse fanaticism . . . called "the mysticism of a political movement."
Germany was the perfect place for this development. In almost no other country were so many "miracles" performed, so many ghosts conjured, so many illnesses cured by magnetism, so many horoscopes read, between the two World Wars. A veritable mania of superstition had seized the country, and all those who made a living by exploiting human stupidity thought the millennium had come. General [Erich] Ludendorff, who had commanded the German armies in World War I, tried to make gold with the assistance of a swindler boasting the appropriate name of Tausend (meaning "thousand"). There was scarcely a folly in natural or world history to which the great general did not lend credence; when the German Republic, which he hated so intensely, had the barriers of the railway crossings painted red and white for better visibility, Ludendorff declared that the Jews in the government were doing this because Moses had led the Jews through the desert under these colors.
Another high-ranking general was convinced that he possessed the secret of the death ray and that he could halt airplanes in their flight and stop tanks in their tracks. A steamship company dismissed its managing director because his handwriting had displeased a graphologist. Motorists avoided a certain road between Hamburg and Bremen because, it was rumored, from milestone number 113 there emanated certain mysterious "terrestrial rays,"which provoked one accident after another. A miracle worker, who had the faculty of making the dead Bismarck appear during his mass meetings and who healed the sick by application of white cheese, had enough followers to establish a city; another crackpot was almost elected to the Reichstag; and still a third, who also barely missed election, promised to perform the greatest miracle of all by undoing the German inflation that had depreciated the mark to the value of one trillion paper marks for one gold mark.
Among Hitler's intimates was a man on whose visiting card appeared the word "magician" to indicate his profession—and he meant it in all seriousness. Many were convinced that the course of world history was the sinister result of the ministrations of ancient secret societies—as such they considered not only the Freemasons, but also Jews and the Jesuits. . . .
Other historians have corroborated that Germany between the two world wars was particularly ripe for these states of mind. It was a time of alienation and impotence. World War I had turned everything inside out. Apart from the physical devastations, the three bugbears of taxation, inflation, and confiscation sapped the strength of the middle class. The war itself was but a symptom of growing inner turbulence in Europe. The trouble had, of course, begun much earlier. In Germany particularly, the gap between an advancing technology and an outmoded social order was great.
In the years preceding World War I, the German Jews were in an especially vulnerable position. The full emancipation of the German Jews, which had come in 1871, brought large numbers of Eastern European Jews to Germany. They settled in the cities, taking a prominent part in commercial, cultural, and political life. Likewise, the period from 1857 to 1910 saw a rise in the Jewish population of Vienna of more than 400 percent. Because of the high value the Jews placed on learning, a disproportionately large number went into the medical and legal professions, trying in that way to gain a modicum of social acceptance. Some Germans, of course, mistook these professionals for the average Jew. Slowly, a new religion evolved for those Germans who felt somehow cheated—a cult of race, based on the supremacy of the Aryans and the vilification of the Jews. It was called the volkisch—or Pan-German—movement, and it enjoyed great popular appeal. It began a virulent campaign against the »foreign element.« A racial theory of history was developed, and it heralded the coming of a new Messiah. The mystical concepts of Reich and Volk went along with an awakening interest in occultism. Secret cults sprang up, anti-Semitic and nationalistic, running like a sewer beneath Vienna and other cultural centers.
Two Austrian occultists, Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and Guido von List, presented an irrational, pseudo-anthropological package which attracted a number of wealthy backers, despite its foolishness. Lanz's Order of New Templars and List's Armanen boasted several influential members.
In 1909, young Adolf Hitler, down and out in Vienna, came across Lanz's magazine, Ostara, and made contact with the occultist. The erotic language and racist rantings of this magazine were remarkably similar to Hitler's later utterances.
Membership in occult groups was often interlocking. When, in 1912, a new secret cult, the Germanenorden, was born, disciples of both Lanz and List joined. The Germanenorden was like the other occult-racist nationalist groups, but with a difference. It called for "courageous men" to "accomplish the work" of combating the Social Democrats, who had gained ground in the elections of 1912. Courageous men did not leap forth to join the Germanenorden, but after World War I prospects were brighter.
People were in a state of shock over the German defeat, which had brought with it the collapse of Kaiser Wilhelm II's regime. Power was suddenly thrust into the hands of a provisional democratic government whose unenviable task it was to accept the consequences of a lost war, reluctantly surrender, and sign a peace treaty. Extremists of the left and right blamed everything on this government: Germany's humiliation, as well as the reparations which bore heavily, financially and psychologically, on the people. It was the end of an era. The Germans had gone into the war with such high hopes. The war was to have been a release from care, a cleansing of mounting economic and social problems, a purging and purification. When the war began, said one German, "it was as if a nightmare had vanished, as if a door had opened, and an old yearning had been satisfied." The idea of war itself had become beautiful. It was to give people back their lives. "Peace," as someone pointed out, "had become insupportable." Hitler embodied the alienated man with no family or occupation, to whom the outbreak of World War I was a godsend. He later confessed: "For me, as for every German, there now began the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly existence."
When the Germans signed the peace treaty, the army released almost a quarter of a million men to add their numbers to the growing ranks of the unemployed. Many soldiers were dazed to come home to a fatherland on the edge of anarchy, hungry, and undisciplined. The new Russian Revolution threatened to spill over into Germany. In Munich, particularly, Communists stalked the streets, threatening civil war. Conservatives and liberals alike were anxious to do anything to stave off communism.
The Germanenorden was happy to merge its destiny with a Munich group called the Thule Society, which was meeting regularly to study the supposed occult meaning of the ancient Germanic alphabet and its symbolism. It was led by an astrologer who called himself Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff. The Thule Society soon became the political arm of the Germanen Orden and quietly set about preparing for a counterrevolution against the government. It formed an umbrella for many of the racist nationalist groups and enlisted frightened or unscrupulous men against the government, which, it said, had betrayed the German people. In addition to rabid anti-Semitism, it preached the coming of a Fuhrer who would do away with hated democracy, the handmaiden of the weak. It began to collect weapons, bought a newspaper, instigated terrorist activity and stirred up race hatred against the Jews, all the while keeping up the front of being a study group for Germanic antiquity. Thule members who were to play key roles in the formation of the Nazi party were Alfred Rosenberg, Rudolf Hess, Gottfried Feder, Karl Harrer, and Dietrich Eckart. Not until they found their Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, were they able to carry out the irrational programs of Lanz, List, and Sebottendorff. But all the essential ingredients,the ideology, the rituals, the symbols, the attitudes of the coming Nazi Revolution were already present in the Germanenorden and the Thule Society, as well as the Order of the New Templars and the Armanen.
The nineteenth century was remarkable for great change. In Germany the change was more drastic than in the rest of Europe. Its people had been more completely under the sway of the past; the Middle Ages had still been dominant in agriculture and industry. The Thirty Years' War, which began in 1618, had consolidated land holdings into fewer and fewer hands, and the land reforms which followed only served to crush the people lower down on the social scale. The industrial revolution happened more rapidly in Germany than anywhere else. It went from mining 1.5 million metric tons of coal in 1850, for instance, to 30 million in 1871. From a backward, predominantly agricultural country, it grew almost overnight into a modern industrial state, much as Japan and Sweden did in the twentieth century. Mass migrations of people from country to city severed traditional ties. Scientific discovery brought a sharp decline in religious faith, and there was a search for new values with which to identify. The state, assuming more and more control, seemed bent on crushing individuality.
The European romantics, wincing at the bitter fruits of modern "progress," delighted in the exoticism's of the East. European rule in the Orient, travel, and translations of the Oriental classics helped lift the veils from the faces of the ancient Eastern civilizations. What the Europeans caught a glimpse of was a kind of serenity which had disappeared from the West and which was very much desired. So great was the Eastern influence that Victor Hugo observed in 1829: "In the age of Louis XIV, all the world was Hellenist; now it is orientalist."
Napoleon's army, entering Egypt in 1798, found the Rosetta Stone, which scholars labored to decipher. When Champollion solved the riddle, the long-lost tongue of that ancient civilization was loosened and the way opened for the great achievements of the modern science of Egyptology. German archaeologists went along with the Prussian king's expedition in 1842 and further refined the study.
The Germans also made important contributions to understanding the real nature of Islamic literature and thought. Persian love poems, called ghazals, had the greatest effect on German poets. The most brilliant of the Persian poems were Sufi. In the Sufi tradition, the poems were interpreted as allegorical and mystical revelations of the divine. German poet-scholars made use of them to such an extent that Heinrich Heine admonished: "These poor poets eat too freely of the fruit they steal from the garden groves of Shiraz, and then they vomit ghazals."
The Muslims had prejudiced the Europeans against the Hindus, whom they regarded as superstitious and degraded. But with the translation of ancient Sanskrit texts, India began to exert a fascination on the West.
The philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder read Indian philosophy with enthusiasm and managed to inspire the German romantics, who were markedly different from the romantics in Europe at large—more given to morbid bitterness. Herder cautioned them not to be frightened by supernatural elements such as gods moving among men or nature personified. These, he said, were depictions of actual experiences, for on that paradisiacal river, the Ganges, the golden age still existed. The romantics could not have been more pleased, longing as they were for just such a golden age. "It is to the East," wrote Friedrich Schlegel in 1800, "that we must look for the supreme Romanticism."
A French version of the Upanishads awakened Arthur Schopenhauer to the wisdom of the East. His pessimistic view of a demonic will, blind and insatiable, compelling all things to share in its own futile unrest, had a tremendous influence on German thought, falling in with the disappointed mood of the age. Schopenhauer's sterile negation of life was soon imitated by like minds. The cessation of activity, for the sake of eventual purification, had a definite appeal for tired, hopeless people who could now enjoy renunciation under the cloak of Orientalism. The historian Benedetto Croce observed that this often led to a "sad and bitter sensuality, of decay and death . . . tinged with Satanism and sadism."
The spiritual journey to the East, undertaken by many German scholars, philosophers, and men of letters, brought a new mythology to a politically, economically, and socially despairing country: a mystical view that all fintrude is the result of a fall from the absolute and that the effects of the Fall have to be repaired by the course of history. These writers began to glorify the Middle Ages as a period of dialogue with God, when men, art, and religion had been unified. To restore the lost innocence became their aim. [Wasn't even a fall from the 'absolute, Lucifer, Satan and the others were not created in perfection. They were created by a Perfect Being...A Paradise Creator Son, and this Creation takes place in one of the 7 super universes that are evolving around the Central Universe of Perfection. DC]
Asia's effect on the West took a terrible turn when the ancient Hindu doctrine of the race purity of the ruling class was rationalized by the Germans to demonstrate Aryan superiority over the Jews. In the mid1800's, German philologists had theorized that their noble Aryan forebears in India had the same mystical symbols and gods as the ancient Germans. A French diplomat and Orientalist, Arthur de Gobineau, made race the determining characteristic in the rise and fall of civilizations. Gobineau's theory was that the racially pure Aryans were bastardized by alien racial elements, producing, by the process of civilization, a decadent people. It was the Semites, he said, hybridized by blacks, who were responsible for the Fall. [No humans caused the fall,although a couple thousands of years later, some fell for it, because they listened to the stories,rather then the Spirit.DC]
Gobineau's work not only gave an air of pseudo-respectability to the budding anti-Semitism in Germany, it provided a convenient rationale for the economic and social fall of the nobleman—for his failure to return to paradise. Even the caste system in India, he claimed, had not been sufficiently stringent to protect the ruling elite from the defiling blood of the dark-skinned races they had subjugated. His ideas penetrated throughout Germany. The German romantics, given a shot in the arm by Gobineau, could now view themselves as a natural aristocracy replacing the older, outmoded feudal aristocracy, which no longer accorded well with the idea of progress. After all, the Teutons, whom Gobineau equated with the Aryans, were the superior race. This idea was eagerly seized on and was buttressed by the growing resentment against the Jews.
In the early nineteenth century, the Jews had begun to move toward equality and citizenship in Germany. Before then, the mass of them lived in ghettos behind walls, were taxed heavily, and were barred from any work but peddling and petty trade except for a select few, and even then under prohibitions which gave them a bare subsistence. Even the more fortunate, like the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, at the height of his fame in 1776, reported that to enter Dresden he was forced to pay "a head tax" equivalent to that set for "a Polish cow."
Ludwig Boerne, a satirist born in 1786, writing of his boyhood memories in a Frankfurt ghetto, recalls:
There they rejoiced in the tender watchful care of the government. On Sundays they were prohibited from leaving the ghetto lane, to spare them from being beaten up by drunkards. Before the age of twenty-five they were forbidden to marry, in order that their offspring prove sound and sturdy. On public holidays they had to reenter the ghetto gate by sharp six in the evening, lest over-exposure to the sun ruin their complexions. They were forbidden to stroll in the fields beyond the city wall, so as to run no risk of being attracted to the life of a farmer. When a Jew walked the city streets and a Christian cried Mach Mores, Jud! ("Your manners, Jew!"), he needs must remove his hat; in this way the proper politeness was maintained between the two faiths. Then, too, a great many of the streets—their bumpy pavement was bad for the feet—were altogether closed to him.
After the German emancipation of the Jews, which took several decades to complete, there was a huge influx of Jews from the Eastern European countries, which were still guilty of fierce persecutions. Life in Germany was more hospitable to them. But in time, the majority of Germans, scratching out a bare living themselves, began to resent them. Boerne understood well the hostility of these Germans, who flattered themselves that no matter how low their estate, they were at least not members of an inferior race:
The poor Germans! Living in the lowest floor, oppressed by the seven floors of the upper classes, their anxiety is made lighter by speaking of people who are still lower than they are and who live in the cellar. Not being a Jew provides them with consolation at not being a state councillor.
Gobineau became the prophet for all these "poor Germans" and provided them with a philosophy which preached the nobility of the Aryan by simple virtue of his birth. From this eminent source they learned that contamination of race would lead to the certain decline of Germany.
The growing volkisch movement began an active battle against the Jews, the defilers of their blood, reinforced by a pseudo-scholarly writer who satisfied their desire for academic respectability. Rightist Pan-German groups also bolstered their ideology by citing the dubious philosophical, historical, and scientific analyses laid out by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman in love with German culture.
Though painfully dull, his two-volume Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1900, had a strange appeal. He told a mass society, at the mercy of the impersonal forces which were crushing it, that the Teutons were indomitable master builders, that in mysticism was freedom, that "every Mystic is, whether he will or not, a born Anti-Semite," and that Darwin's theory of natural selection justifies the stricture against mingling of the races. Even before Chamberlain, volkisch thinkers had tried to weave together lessons from history proving the heroism of the ancient Germanic past. Many of them were admirers of the Theosophical Society, which combined for the first time certain elements into a cohesive system considered by some people to be the beginning of modern occultism.
The Theosophical Society was organized in New York City in 1875 by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian expatriate countess known to her disciples as H. P. B. At seventeen, her family had forced her to marry an elderly Russian general, whom she promptly deserted. Headstrong, convinced that she had mediumistic powers, and versed in many languages, she wandered about Europe and the East, and decided at age forty to come to New York to investigate spiritualism, which had become an American craze. Her mission, a Society historian observed, was "to explain its phenomena, expose its frauds, to enlarge its spiritual scope, and to give it the dignity in the world of science which was its due." Depleted of financial resources, if not of energy, she delivered up an unlikely package of Hinduism, Gnosticism, and pseudoscience which had a tremendous impact on the intelligentsia of the West. She even converted the Indians themselves to the "ancient wisdom" in modern dress. Her ideas, about ancient lost races with secret knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality, the immortal soul perfecting itself through endless rebirths, and mastery of superhuman powers which could unlock the secrets of the universe, if they had been presented by traditional organized religions, would not have been credited. But people were perfectly willing to suspend disbelief of a huge Russian countess with magnetic eyes who smoked cigars and used bawdy language.
Darwin's Origin of Species, published in 1859, had widened the chasm between science and religion. H. P. B. leaped across that chasm with a spiritual concept of evolution. Men could become divine, she said, by advancing in an evolutionary process which was part of an elaborate cosmology affecting whole races.
It was possible to thwart evolution, however. Like most occultists, she believed in the old Gnostic doctrine that there were two worlds, one good and one evil.
In Gnostic thinking, spirit and matter were opposed to each other, matter being an interruption of the order of the cosmos—a fall, and therefore evil. The Gnostics posited three classes: spiritual, or pneumatic, men; animal, or psychic, men; and carnal, or physical, men. The last were said to be wholly material and could not be saved, their nature being evil; they had not a single spark of the divine in them.
Matter, according to the Gnostics, was not the creation of the supreme god but of a demiurge, an inferior divinity. A famous medieval Gnostic sect, the Cathars, came to identify the Old Testament god, Jehovah, with the demiurge, the creator of the material world, and therefore the equivalent of Satan. Within Gnosticism, then, existed the idea that the Jewish god was really the devil, responsible for all the evil in the world. [Idiots..Calling a Paradise Creator Son a demiurge...This Paradise Son had the ok of the Paradise Trinity to Create in this Neck of the Woods.Gnostic's must have cut corners and classes to get there first.DC]
Without intending to arouse hatred against the Jews, H. P. B. repeated this Gnostic thinking in her book The Secret Doctrine:
With the Semite, that stooping man meant the fall of Spirit into matter, and that fall and degradation were apotheosized by him with the result of dragging Deity down to the level of man.... The Aryan views of the symbolism were those of the whole Pagan world; the Semite interpretations emanated from and were pre-eminently those of a small tribe, thus marking its national features and the idiosyncratic defects that characterize many of the Jews to this day—gross realism, selfishness, and sensuality.
She talked of a race of giants that existed in ancient days and argued that the occasional appearance of giants in modern times proved that species tend to revert to the original type. She held that since the days of the giants, whose descendants the Aryans were, there had been an unbroken succession of semi-immortal "adepts" living in secret cities in Tibetan mountains. It was they who had appointed her as their emissary.
Because of the flamboyance of her personality, if not her prose, H. P. B. became the model for other aspiring occultist leaders. She had somehow managed to make magic, witchcraft, and alchemy respectable. With the support of educated people, her ideas spread. She brought to the last decades of the nineteenth century a universal palliative for the materialism from which it was suffering.
The volkisch writers made capital of both Theosophy and Darwinism. Darwin's book had been hailed in Germany with an acclamation in startling contrast to the storm of protest which greeted it elsewhere. In place of a dogmatic Christian theology preaching a millennium, there came a conviction that human society was moving blindly toward some ideal goal. The struggle for existence, palpable to every German, justified itself in this evolutionary scheme of nature. Origin of Species sold briskly in Germany. The Germans eagerly pressed Darwin with their own writings on the subject, lauding his work. It was said that although Darwin was English, Darwinism really came into its own in Germany. As one German scientist pointed out: "You are still discussing in England whether or not the theory of Darwin can be true. We have got a long way beyond that stage here. His theory is now our common starting point."
To a growing body of anthropological concepts was now fused the idea that the karma of the Aryans was to engage in a race struggle to the death against the Jews. Germans, the fittest to survive, were destined to become the saviors of the human race. For this, Guido von List preached, they would need a "strong man from above," who would be reincarnated from an ancient soldier. List's study of the origins of Jewish mysticism had taught him the importance of imbuing a people with a Messianic hope. When the world is changing and the old knowledge becomes suspect, it is necessary to herald the coming of a Messiah so that the traditional verities may be adapted to new conditions. List gave the Germans, in effect, an opportunity to become competitors of the Jews for the honor of "chosen people." His secular Messianic nationalism was taken seriously by many confused apostles. The German people were to take their place at the head of all nations, act as their leader, and move them toward civilization. They were the chosen people, and soon a Fuhrer would arise among them who, in turn, would lead the Messianic nation.
Just before World War I, then, side by side with an awakening interest in occultism went an interest in racist-nationalism. Germany's supremacy was "proved" by the ideas and events of the distant past, when the Teutons lived close to nature and far from modern artificiality. The call of the elemental, the breath of the woodland, the simple poetry of Wanderlust, of joyous roving, asserted themselves. The folktales and folk songs issuing from the lips of peasants became sacred. Primitive German institutions and folklore were eagerly studied. Whereas, for primitive peoples, nature often represented primordial chaos, and therefore the enemy, these neo-primitives idealized nature and anathematized the city as profane, an aberrant discovery of modern man in his wickedness. Imagination, feeling, and will attributed to Natural Man, were placed above reason, which was held responsible for the psychic disorders of civilized man. The irrational was recognized as a source of illumination. List and his Theosophical friends claimed to have a "secret science" by which they could intuit the past and divine its meaning. Through extrasensory powers, they could communicate with the ghosts which hovered around ancient soil and in the cracks of ancient buildings. Innocent and pastoral at first, this movement back to nature and simplicity gradually grew more and more patriotic, more and more "German," to the exclusion of other races, and more and more anti-Semitic.
Both the occult and the racist-nationalist movements were hostile to modernity. Both promised a millennium. If all the former were not anti-Semitic, all the latter were. They saw in the Jew the exemplar of the modern man: urban, alienated from the soil, materialistic. Both movements were essentially conservative, in that they harked back to a golden age. The groups often intertwined. Under the influence of List and Lanz, whose works they studied, volkisch youth groups pressed for the expulsion of Jews from their organizations, from university life, and from the government. Admirers and disciples of both men became agitators for a final solution to the Jewish problem. Some saw that solution only in extermination.
Both also hailed the Middle Ages with uncritical admiration. Whereas the rest of Europe tended to brand that period as an era of darkness from which it had been happy to emerge, and to hold up the Renaissance as worthy of adoration, Germans idealized the Middle Ages as the most illustrious period of their history. The hierarchic structure of medieval society appealed to their longing for political security. Their morbid worship of the twelfth-century German Crusaders, the Order of Teutonic Knights, for instance, was based on its mystical hierarchical structure, its secrecy, and its supernatural claims to world domination. Indeed, according to some people, the "thousand-year conspiracy" of conquest which the Teutonic Knights had threatened did persist into the twentieth century.
The marriage of occultism and nationalism is not as uneasy as it might appear on the surface. Each represents a nostalgia for a lost paradisiacal state, and a commitment to restoring that state in some millennial time. It is natural for people who feel uncertain about the future to look back sentimentally to a glorified past which they will try to relive. The Irish Theosophist William Sharp (who also wrote under the name Fiona MacLeod) was a nationalist-occultist who understood the connection between the patriotic longing and the longing for the occult:
I think our people have most truly loved their land, and their country, and their songs, and their ancient traditions, and that the word of bitterest savour is that sad word exile. But it is also true that in love we love vaguely another land, a rainbow-land, and that our most desired country is not the real Ireland, the real Scotland, the real Brittany, but the vague Land of Youth, the shadowy Land of Heart's Desire. And it is also true, that deep in the songs we love above all other songs is a lamentation for what is gone away from the world, rather than merely from us as a people: or a sighing of longing for what the heart desires but no mortal destiny requites.
It is not at all unusual to find such feelings of Weltschmerz in those periods when reason seems to have failed us and death and disorder wait to swallow us up. At such times, an interest in the occult gains ground steadily and tries to reintegrate the shattered cosmos.
This was the climate in Germany before World War I, and the war intensified it.
He spent much of his time studying Eastern religions, yoga, occultism, hypnotism, astrology, telepathy, graphology, phrenology, and similar subjects which often appeal to pursuers of magical powers, who usually happen to be powerless. His penchant for the occult led him to a tobacconist's shop near his lodging where he came upon a magazine, Ostara, which must have drawn him. This strange publication was produced by the mystical theorist, Lanz, who wrote under the acronym PONT (Prior of the Order of the New Templars).
Vienna, in those days one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe, was hospitable to the formation of occult groups which sprang up with religious fervor, symptomatic of the irrational atmosphere of the time. Vienna's population went up 259 percent between 1860 and 1900, and the flood of new arrivals sought relief from the frustrations of an overcrowded and expensive existence. The city was deluged by mediums, necromancers, and astrologers who claimed to be occupied with a futuristic science which the scientific establishment was as yet unable to appreciate, since experiments were still unverified. The gullible—scholars included—believed that intuition and vision enabled specially endowed natures to investigate phenomena which eluded ordinary people.[Ghost hunters DC]
Lanz, a defrocked Cistercian monk, started his group, the Order of the New Templars, in 1900. His friend, Guido von List, a somewhat different sort of pseudo-priest, started his group, the Armanen, in 1908. Membership was often interlocking, and there was continual feedback between the cults. Around 1912, a number of members of both cults finally came together under one roof in the Germanenorden, which prefigured the Nazi party.
Historians are divided on the question of whether Hitler was actually ever a member of either the Temple of the New Order or the Armanen, but it is certain that he was a reader of Ostara and met Lanz several times in that period he later alluded to as providing him with "the foundations of a knowledge" which was to become so important to him.
Writing in an oracular, pseudo-anthropological manner, Lanz took mankind from the beginning of time and divided the species into the acemen and the ape-men, the first being white, blue-eyed, blond, and responsible for everything heroic in mankind. The second group was the repository of everything vile. According to this comic-book mentality, the heroes—called variously Asings, Heldinge, or Arioheroiker—were superior by reason of breeding and blood, whereas the inferiors—Afflinge, Waninge, Schrattlinge, or Tschandale—always threatened to contaminate through interbreeding.
Ostara was one of a number of magazines which surfaced during this period. Like some of our own pulp magazines, it combined the erotic and the occult in an irrational blend which could capture the fantasies of lost souls. Its lurid stories were calculated to explain history as a struggle to the death between the pure Aryan and the hairy subhuman. This racial struggle, described in mystical, turgid prose, was the essence of human existence. To illustrate it, Lanz filled his pages with gorgeous blond women falling into the snares of satyr-like men. For all the Aryan's superiority, it was quite evident that there was one way in which he was not superior: sexual prowess. The female member of the master race was sexual enough, to be sure, but the male could not hope to compete against the enemy in having sufficient potency to satisfy the infinite needs of the blond beauty. If this sounds reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan's pronouncements against the »inferior« blacks, it is: The lower races must not pollute, through interbreeding, the rich blood of the higher races. Since, sexually, the lower races are more potent, this presents a considerable challenge to the hero.
Lanz was writing in the tradition of a volkisch revival of the conservative Germanic ideal of woman as the keeper of the hearth, in contrast with the modern suffragette who was just then demanding her rights and asserting her own sexual needs.
Race, blood, and sex combined with ancient German occultism—spells, number mysticism—to make an overrich Viennese pastry. Not many soup-kitchen derelicts, seeking an escape from their hopeless state, could resist such a package. Ostara, Brief Bücherei der blonden Mannes Rechtler ("Newsletters of the Blond Fighters for the Rights of Men") addressed these men, for example, in its March 1908 issue when it ran a full-page advertisement promoting a book to help young men choose a career. "What shall I become?" read the advertisement.
It is all too clear what one regular reader, Hitler, became, though the direct influence of Ostara upon him is not known. His obsession with the "nightmare vision of the seduction of hundreds and thousands of girls by repulsive, bandy-legged Jew bastards" is identical with Ostara's. We have Hitler's own confession that one of his favorite movies was King Kong, the plot of which might have been concocted by Lanz himself.
For such mentalities, Ostara was thoughtful enough to provide a yardstick by which the reader could measure himself as to racial worth and be assured that he was not Jewish. The Rassen Wertigkeit index allowed him to score on the basis of eye, hair, and skin color, and the size and shape of nose, hands, feet, skull, and even buttocks. Black eyes were twelve points to the bad, blue-gray eyes twelve points to the good. Being a reader of Ostara was already sufficient qualification for membership in the "mixed type," the stratum above the lower races. Hitler presumably would have rated himself in this category. With headlines like these—ARE YOU BLOND? THEN YOU ARE THE CREATOR AND PRESERVER OF CIVILIZATION. ARE YOU BLOND? THEN YOU ARE THREATENED BY PERILS. READ THE LIBRARY FOR BLONDS AND ADVOCATES OF MALE RIGHTS.—and subtitles like these—Race and Nobility; Race and Foreign Affairs; The Metaphysics of Race—Ostara, thirty-five pfennigs a copy, sometimes reached circulation figures of 100,000 in Austria and Germany.
The Order of the New Templars which this ludicrous oracle founded enrolled blond, blue-eyed members—and only if they promised to marry women with the same attributes. This was of paramount importance, even though it would not guarantee race purity, since "Through woman, sin came into the world, and it so over and over again because woman is especially susceptible to the love artifices of her animal-like inferiors." The blond Siegfried must win her away from the dark seducer, slaying dragons and giants if necessary. Our interest in this theology is enriched on learning that Lanz's New Templars were assembled as soon as he himself was expelled from a Cistercian monastery for "carnal and worldly desires."
Lanz, a teacher's son, was born in Vienna in 1874. He changed his birthdate and place of origin to mislead astrologers. As a child, his wish had been to become a Knight Templar and to own Templar chateaux or, at least, to reconstruct them. His strongest impression as a youth had been an opera, The Templar and the Jewess, which transported him into ecstasy. (Occultists have always argued that the Templars, a medieval religious and military order, were a Gnostic sect working to purify the world of evil.) In 1893, at the age of nineteen, he entered the Cistercian monastery Holy Cross, which had an important place in Austrian history. The following year, he issued a work about a discovery which held secret meaning for him: a monument from the period of the Crusades, of a manly figure treading barefoot on an animal-like human being. In this relief sculpture Lanz saw the triumph of the higher races over the lesser races, and it became the symbol of his ideology.
In 1900, a year after he was expelled from the monastery, he surfaced again as "Baron von Liebenfels" and started his order, usurping the name and rituals from his beloved Templars. His sign was the swastika; his slogan, "Race fight until the castration knife." This studious-looking,bespectacled young man, as much the model of a minor official as his kindred soul, Himmler, preached a fall from a race-pure paradise that came about when the "Arioheroiker" interbred with the "Dark Races," or "Demonic Slopwork." The hero, Frauja (the Gothic name for Jesus), came to save the Aryan women from the original sinner of "Sodomie" through the commandment "Love thy neighbor as thyself—if he is a member of your own race." This Lanz took to be the teaching of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. He called his theory Ariosophy.
As crazy as this may sound, Lanz quickly found people who were willing to believe—and some of the believers were wealthy men, ready to help Lanz make his wildest dreams come true. With their help, he bought the castle of Werfenstein in Lower Austria, in 1907. Other castles, in Marienkamp near Ulm and on the island of Rugen in the Baltic, were also converted into temples where the order conducted elaborate Grail ceremonies. The carefully screened initiates, awesome in white hooded robes, performed celebrations written by Lanz. Using his monastic training, he also composed his own voluminous variations of liturgical texts: a two-volumed New Templars' Breviary, The Psalms in German, and a "secret Bible for the initiated" which ran to ten volumes, as well as prayer books and the like. The race struggle was his major concern, but the order also dabbled in astrology, the Cabala, phrenology, homeopathy, and nutrition. After reconstructing somewhat the Werfenstein castle, fitting it out with Templar symbols of ritual magic, and raising up a swastika flag, never before seen in that part of the world in modern days, he made plans for world salvation. To ensure "the extirpation of the animal-man and the propagation of the higher new man," he called for a radical program: genetic selection, sterilization, deportations to the "ape jungle," and race extermination by forced labor or murder. "Offer sacrifices to Frauja, you sons of the gods!" Lanz wrote. "Up, and sacrifice to him the children of the Schrattlinge." He advocated the establishment of special breeding colonies for the production of more Aryans.[Insane person with visions of grandeur DC]
He called his major work nothing less than Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-Affligen und dem Götter-Elektron. Eine Einfuhrung in die älteste und neueste Weltanschauung und eine Rechtfertigung des Fürstentums und des Adels ("Theo-zoology or the Lore of the Sodom-Apelings and the Electron of the Gods. An Introduction into the Oldest and Newest Philosophy and a Justification of Royalty and Nobility").
He believed Aryan heroes, "Masterpieces of the gods," to be possessed of splendid electromagnetic-radiological organs and transmitters which gave them special powers. By following his eugenic measures, they would revitalize their lost faculties. Joachim Fest, one of Germany's leading journalists, comments on this in his book, Hitler:
The age's anxiety feelings, elitist leanings toward secret societies, fashionable idolization of science by dabblers in the sciences, all tied together by a considerable dose of intellectual and personal fraud, combined to shape this doctrine. . . .
[Lanz] was one of the most eloquent spokesmen of a neurotic mood of the age and contributed a specific coloration to the brooding ideological atmosphere, so rife with fantasies, of Vienna at that time.
Exactly what had Hitler to do with Lanz? In Mein Kampf the only possible reference to Ostara may be this one: "For the first time in my life I bought myself some anti-Semitic pamphlets for a few heller." His friend from childhood, August Kubizek, mentions that during this period Hitler joined an anti-Semitic lodge. But according to Lanz's biographer, Wilfried Daim, not only was Hitler a regular reader of Ostara, but, because he had missed several issues, he looked up Lanz himself in 1909, who was happy to supply him with back copies. In fact, says Daim, he saw Lanz a few times and "left an impression of youth, pallor, and modesty." Fifteen months later, through three changes of residence, the copies were still in Hitler's possession. Lanz claimed him as one of his disciples, writing to an occultist in 1932: "Hitler is one of our pupils. You will one day experience that he, and through him we, will one day be victorious and develop a movement that makes the world tremble."
Hitler attempted to bury all his earlier influences and his origins, and he spent a great deal of energy hiding them. Lanz was forbidden to publish after Germany annexed Austria in 1938. Hitler ordered the murder of Reinhold Hanisch, a friend who had shared the down-and-out days in Vienna. But the influence of Lanz's Ariosophy is evident in passages like these from Mein Kampf:
By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the handiwork of the Lord.... This Jewification of our spiritual life and mammonization of our mating instinct will sooner or later destroy our entire offspring....
Blood sin and desecration of the race and the original sin in this world and the end of a humanity which surrenders to it.
With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her own people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and it is the Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race, by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.
Here, surely, is the same paranoid, sex-obsessed imagination as the renegade monk's. Though we may never have certain knowledge as to whether or not Hitler was a member of the New Templars, there is ample reason to suppose that Lanz's nasty vapors helped to poison the Third Reich.
The other Viennese occultist who attracted Lanz's disciples, Guido von List, presented a somewhat different variation of the occultist-racist package.
List was born in 1848 to a rich Viennese merchant. At fourteen, in the catacombs of St. Stefan's Cathedral in Vienna, he vowed before a dilapidated altar that when he became adult he would build a temple to the pagan god Wotan. His life's work settled, he became first a merchant and then secretary of the Austrian Alp Society. Members used the Hell greeting, harking back to paganism. List thought of himself as the link with an ancient race of Germanic priests and wise men called the Armanen. Their holiest emblem had been the swastika. Taking the same symbol, which had been in widespread use by many ancient peoples, he started his own secret society, the Armanen, in 1908. To the Germanic peoples, the swastika was an occult symbol for the sun, which represented life. German racists believed that one of the proofs of the inequality of races was that some had a more positive attitude toward the sun than others, and sun worship became a pagan ritual among volkisch groups. List became a pioneer in reviving Teutonic folklore and mythology. This helped to prepare the climate for nationalism.
The Armanen succeeded in attracting such people as Vienna's mayor, Karl Lueger, and the well-known Theosophist Franz Hartmann. List claimed that his group was the inner circle, hence, the leaders of the Aryo Germanic race, with power to unlock the secrets of the universe.
They had the call. They were similar to God. They also happened to be radically anti-Semitic. List apparently never lacked for rich supporters to finance his undertakings. His major undertaking was his plan to lead the master race, which his presumed psychic powers led him to believe he was qualified to do, having been in communication with ancients possessing esoteric wisdom.
He looked like an ancient prophet with his long, flowing white beard. He taught his members runic occultism. Wotan was said to have invented the runes, the ancient alphabet, as part of his secret science. (The Gothic runa means "secret," "secret decision," similar to the Old Iranian run: "secret," "mystery." The early Finnish runo, taken from the Germanic, has to do with magic songs.) Edgar Polome points out in his essay "Approaches to Germanic Mythology," in Myth in Indo-European Antiquity: "What Odin [another name for Wotan] originally acquired by hanging on the tree for nine days, starving and thirsting as in a shamanic initiation rite, was a powerful secret lore, of which the runes later on became merely the tool."
The idea that the runes have occult significance was mentioned as early as A.D. 98 by Tacitus, who described the Germanic peoples as making marks on wood branches in order to practice augury and divination. Old Norse literature speaks of runes carved on wood, over which incantations or charms were spoken. List wrote a book about runes in 1908. Like other German occult groups, his was preoccupied with the magical power contained in the old alphabet.
List had other concerns too, according to Trevor Ravenscroft's book, The Spear of Destiny, largely based on the revelations of his friend Dr. Walter Stein, a Viennese scientist who was a student at Vienna University from 1909 to 1913, when Hitler was living in the city.
A deep interest in occultism, particularly the Holy Grail, led Stein to a bookshop in the old quarter of Vienna that was frequented by Hitler as well. The proprietor, Ernst Pretzsche, had a group photograph on his desk, showing himself with List, whose books on Pan-German mysticism were enjoying a great vogue. But the press had revealed black magic practices, sending Vienna into a furor. List was unmasked as the leader of a blood brotherhood which went in for sexual perversions and substituted the swastika for the cross. The Viennese were so shocked that List had to flee from Vienna. Ravenscroft reports that Dr. Stein told him how Hitler attained higher levels of consciousness by means of drugs and made a penetrating study of medieval occultism and ritual magic, discussing with him the whole span of the political, historical and philosophical reading through which he formulated what was later to become the Nazi Weltanschauung.
Pretzsche had introduced Hitler to consciousness-expanding drugs, as well as to astrological and alchemical symbolism. Hitler told Stein that Pretzsche had been present when List tried to materialize "the Incubus" in a ritual designed to create a "Moon Child."
Altering states of consciousness by means of drugs or sexual perversions are not unknown to occult groups. By daring to break taboos against acts which would disgust other people, one might gain powers of which ordinary men did not dream. Hitler's later reputation for unnatural practices (coprophilia, masochism) may well have been deserved—may, in fact, have been inspired by tutors such as Lanz and List.
The historian Reginald H. Phelps, although he does not touch on the occult practices of Lanz and List, points out in his article " 'Before Hitler Came': Thule Society and Germanenorden," in The Journal of Modern History, that they propagated their theories "with varying success among intelligentsia and aristocrats as well as among that famous foundering petty bourgeoisie that is supposed to be the chief consumer of such wares; the same names run through the same arguments and blow up the same balloons of theory, year after year, in book after book."
About 1912, disciples of Lanz and List started the Germanenorden under the leadership of a member of List's Armanen, a journalist named Philipp Stauff, and several others.
Theodor Fritsch, one of the founders, had great organizational ability. Originally a technician for windmills, he then published a trade journal for millers, the Deutscher Muller, which provided him with the funds to pursue his real passion, "scientific" anti-Semitism. Besides, windmillers represented a dying branch of the economy. From the 1880's on he had been a leader in the Pan-German movement. His books and tracts brought him a certain notoriety. In 1902, he began to publish the Hammer, a racist scandal sheet which aimed at eliminating all Jewish participation from German cultural life. He tried to spread the word to the workers as well as to the elite, calling for a racist-nationalist organization that would combine the smaller groups into one "above the parties." It was to be impeccably Aryan and was to bring "enlightenment" to the Germanic peoples.
He was joined by a sealer of weights and measures from Magdeburg, Hermann Pohl, and also by Stauff, who brought with him several other List disciples. The organization was to be a secret Bund for the purpose of combating what they believed to be the Jewish secret Bund, which was plotting world conspiracy. One could only become a member by proving German origin to the third generation. Race science was to be taught, provable in the same way for human beings as the principles of scientific breeding had been established for plants and animals. The origin of all sickness was the result of the mixing of races, they held. The principles of Pan-Germanism were to be disseminated not only among Germans but among all blood-related peoples. The fight was against all un-German thinking, which included Judaism and internationalism.
While the Germanen Orden violently opposed Freemasonry as international and Jew-ridden, it used Freemason terminology and organization. Pohl had a theory that this would guarantee secrecy. Also, Freemasonry's concept of brotherhood would help prevent dissension between members.
Their symbols were runes and swastikas, their costumes reminiscent of Wotan and paganism.
Stauff and Pohl were the only open members. Closet cultists have always enjoyed the high degree of secrecy surrounding the meetings of occult groups. Rites are rarely, if ever, committed to paper. It is as if there is a recognition that power tends to evaporate and mysteries to become cheapened with exposure. At any rate, the initiation and other rites must have been similar to those of the Freemasons and Lanz's and List's groups. As with those other groups, there were inner and outer circles, with the latter yearning to be admitted into the ranks of the former.
The mysteries were revealed through signs and symbols which only the properly initiated could interpret, and only when deemed worthy. The typical occultist saw symbolism everywhere, and hermetic significance in everything. Groups also borrowed heavily from each other, so that if one saw wisdom in the ancient rune symbols, chances were that another would adopt it. Stauff and List wrote books on runic wisdom. Meetings of the Germanenorden taught the same.
Before World War I, despite countless leaflets distributed and propaganda spewed out, growth of the Germanenorden was slow. Fritsch issued a call to action. The time for counterrevolution was at hand. For decades the Germanic peoples had been sabotaged by the Tschandale, Lanz's term for the lower races. Now the "chief criminals" must be defeated. "A few hundred courageous men can accomplish the work," said Fritsch. The Jewish liberal leaders must fall, at the very start of the revolt; not even flight abroad shall protect them. As soon as the bonds of civic order lie shattered on the ground and law is trodden underfoot, the Sacred Vehme enters on its rights; it must not fear to smite the mass-criminals with their own weapons.
The group, however, was not successful. Pohl, despite his concern with the binding cement of brotherhood, managed to quarrel with everyone.
The war put the finishing touches on its defeat. Pohl wrote to a member in November 1914, Phelps reports,
that finances were bad, nearly half the brethren were with the military; "the war came on us too early, the G.O. was not yet completely organized and crystallized, and if the war lasts long, it will go to pieces." The childish play of ritual and ceremony in the Orden wearied the members. . .. Pohl seemed to think that the banquets were the chief thing. . . .
Between 1914 and 1918 the Orden was inactive, because most of its members were at the front.
Of the known members, only Theodor Fritsch, the "grand old man" of German anti-Semitism, achieved lasting recognition. His Anti-Semitic Catechism, written in 1887, had more than twenty editions and sold almost a hundred thousand copies. His Handbook of the Jewish Question, a 1919 update of the Catechism, reached 145,000 readers. Some years ago, in a suburb of Berlin, a monument was erected to his name.
During the war, all the secret cults were dormant. Pohl was reduced to selling bronze rings inscribed with runic characters. They possessed, he claimed, protective magical qualities, certainly very much needed in those days.
It was not until after the war that the occult anti-Semitic groups produced a mass movement.
Not until 1933 did the connection between Thule and the prehistory of National Socialism come to light, when a beefy adventurer published, in Munich, a book with the intriguing title Bevor Hitler Kam ("Before Hitler Came"). It must have enjoyed a vogue, because there was a second printing in 1934. Both editions were confiscated by the Nazis, and the author vanished—murdered, his publisher claimed. Hitler had already given a rather simple, straightforward account of his political debut in an insignificant workers' party, and he apparently did not care to have another version publicized.
The author, who called himself Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff, had been Grand Master of a small lodge which called itself the Thule Society, and he stated right at the outset: "Thule people are the ones to whom Hitler first came."
Sebottendorff himself acknowledges his debt to "a man whom Juda [Jewdom] could not get rid of"—Theodor Fritsch—and to "three Austrians who started the fight against Juda": Guido von List, Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, and List's disciple, Philipp Stauff. There was one other, a Baron Wittgenberg, who, Sebottendorff claimed, "chose to kill himself" in 1920 because his wife and daughter were "caught under the influence of a Jewish banker." This unfortunate man's compendiums, published in 1914 (An Index of Jewish Titled People, An Index of Titled People and Their Connection with Jews, and Jews of Industry, Science, Authors and Artists), had been snatched up by Jews, said Sebottendorff, and there were no more copies available.
Thule and the Germanenorden joined forces right after the war. Sebottendorff prepared a brochure for the initiates coming home, and started a publication called Runen to bring in new members. The first three members of the reconstituted circle were Dr. George Gaubatz, a bald-headed Red Cross worker and member of the Audubon Society, who looked like Erich von Stroheim and wore a key chain across his waistcoat, from which dangled the swastika, emblem of the Thule Society; Wilhelm Rohmeder, an educator and member of a German education society; and Johannes Hering, who had already distinguished himself in Pan-German circles.
There were, apparently, attempts at gaining magical knowledge. Sebottendorff was an authority on astrology, alchemy, divining rods, and rune symbolism, happy to expatiate on these subjects. Johannes Hering's diary entry for August 17, 1918, shows great vexation with Sebottendorff for delivering a talk to the group on divining rods. Hering feared "such occult nonsense lost them good will."
Sebottendorff was nostalgic for the Middle Ages, when the Jews in Germany had been openly persecuted. Nowadays, he said, they exerted an influence not only on the Catholic Church, but, through Freemasonry, even on the Protestants. In fact, the Jews were always the "machers" in the Masonic lodges, and plotted an international conspiracy, under the guise of liberty, fraternity, and equality. Sebottendorff mouthed the usual attitudes of volkisch writers toward Freemasons, who have traditionally been associated with the forces of liberalism. The Pan-Germans pledged themselves to combat the "world conspiracy" being led by "Freemasons and international Jewry."
However, Sebottendorff had a love-hate relationship with the Freemasons. They were the prototype for most secret organizations. "The old Freemasonry,"he said, "had been a keeper of secrets which they had The Thule Society learned from the Aryan wisdom and from the alchemists, and which concerned itself with the building of cathedrals." Naturally, he supposed, when the cathedrals were all built, the Masonic guilds had died out, and with them, the Aryan wisdom.
Like other occultists, Sebottendorff accepted the view that the medieval master builder knew more than just the secrets of his trade. Many of the European cathedrals, four hundred years in construction, exemplified, in esoteric circles, the occult symbolism. As a modern Freemason, Delmar Duane Darrah, described it in The History and Evolution of Freemasonry:
Everywhere was the mystic number. The Trinity was proclaimed by the nave and the aisle (multiplied sometimes to the other sacred number, seven), the three richly ornamented recesses of the portal, the three towers. The rose over the west was the Unity, the whole building was a Cross. The altar with its decorations announced the real perpetual Presence. The solemn crypt below represented the underworld, the soul of man in darkness and the shadow of death, the body awaiting the resurrection.
Even the uninitiated could feel the power of the symbolism underlying the great cathedrals.
Sebottendorff recognized that for the Mason himself, the work of building cathedrals was symbolic of and important to the soul's journey, as all work was. But, he said, "after the Thirty Years' War, Juda started Freemasonry again," with a difference. An article in the July 21, 1918, edition of Runen gives Sebottendorff's views on the antithesis between modern Freemasonry and the Aryan wisdom:
We look at our world as a product of the people. The Freemason looks at it as a product of conditions.
We don't acknowledge the brotherhood of people, only blood brotherhood. We want the freedom, not of herds, but of duty. We hate the propaganda of equality. Struggle is the father of all things. Equality is death. . . .
For Sebottendorff, the modern Freemason, like the Jew, was a parasite, unbending, incapable of change—ironic, considering the reputation for liberalism of the Freemason and Jew, and the conservatism of racist nationalists. All the same, he borrowed liberally from the Freemasons, as well as from Madame Blavatsky, perhaps influenced by her boldness as much as by her Theosophy.
Sebottendorff, born with the less glamorous name of Adam Rudolf Glauer to a Silesian locomotive conductor in Hoyerswerda, on November 9, 1875, the same year that Countess Blavatsky was launching her Theosophical Society in America, became first a merchant seaman. At twenty-six, he transplanted himself to Turkey, and became a Turkish citizen. In 1909, he had the good fortune to be adopted by an Austrian baron named Heinrich von Sebottendorff, in Istanbul, according to Turkish law. Rudolf was badly wounded in the Balkan War and came back to Breslau in 1913. The adoption was contested in Germany, and in 1920 the last remaining members of the Sebottendorff family readopted him in Baden-Baden.
During his sojourn in Turkey, with his sinecure as engineer-cumsupervisor of a substantial estate, he had been able to spend time reading Oriental philosophy and Theosophical writings, as well as engaging in Sufi meditation.
He acknowledged that he had been a Knight of the Masonic Order of Constantine. Turkish Freemasonry, it seemed, had kept the ancient Aryan wisdom intact. "It must be shown," said Sebottendorff, "that Oriental Freemasonry still retains faithfully even today the ancient teachings of wisdom forgotten by modern Freemasonry, whose Constitution of 1717 was a departure from the true way."
By 1918 he had formed his own lodge, the Thule Society, and elevated himself to the rank of Grand Master.
One of his first acts was to place an advertisement in the local paper, inviting men to a meeting. Those who responded were sent a letter, predicting the imminent collapse of Germany if racial intermarriage were not halted. Each prospective member was to be on probation for one year. The initiation fee was twenty marks; the quarterly Ardensnacht, ten marks. The applicant was required to fill out a form declaring that, to the best of his knowledge, not a drop of Jewish or Negro blood flowed through his or his wife's veins. On returning this, he was sent a questionnaire and asked for a photograph. A most thorough questionnaire, inquiring into such intimacies as the amount of hair on various parts of the body and asking, if possible, for an imprint of the sole of the foot on a separate piece of paper. "We then tested for race purity," says Sebottendorff, "and started an inquiry." The one-year probationary period was only the first The Thule Society level in the member's initiation. He had to take a ritualistic vow of absolute obedience and loyalty to the Master of the lodge. "Symbolically," said Sebottendorff, "it was the return of the lost Aryan to the German Halgedom."
Sebottendorff did not need to invent anything. Inspired by Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine, he respun the age-old myth of Atlantis, calling it Thule. Like Atlantis, Thule was believed by occultists to have been the magic center of a vanished civilization. Madame Blavatsky speculated that it had been swept away in the first Deluge, 850,000 years ago. Compared with it, the much more recent Noah's Flood had been a puddle, and mythical, besides. One could get some idea of the appearance of the inhabitants of the island of Atlantis by studying the colossal statues at Easter Island. Here, Madame Blavatsky believed, were the relics of the giants of the Fourth Race; only this Atlantean being deserved to be called "MAN," for only he was completely human. After him, the Fall. Among other things, the Fall supposedly cost him his invaluable third eye, which gave him spiritual insight.
What had caused the Fall? Tucked away in The Secret Doctrine is the answer: The Atlanteans had mated with semi-human beings. Anticipating the argument that this was contrary to nature, she argued: "Esoteric science replies to this that it was in the very beginnings of physical man. Since then, Nature has changed her ways, and sterility is the only result of the crime of man's bestiality. . . ."
In the chaos and distress of Germany after World War I, with the occultist boom, the German racist groups seized upon mystical speculations of this sort and wove them into a myth of the master race. Sebottendorff transposed Blavatsky's complicated cosmology, by which she had sought to confound the evolutionists. In place of her sub-races who had extinguished the "Flames" by "long generations of bestiality," ruining it for the Aryans, he taught members of Thule that the purity of their blood had been defiled by the Jews. Thus, as his predecessors, List and Lanz, had done, Sebottendorff gave status to the lower and middle classes, who must have fantasized wistfully of having aristocratic blood—the only sure way to amount to something in that time and place. Not only did this mystical doctrine elevate them to potential Aryan supermen (the dormant occult powers would reawaken in the Aryan people in the twentieth century, with the appearance of "supermen" who would restore the German folk to their ancient glory and lead them in conquering the world), but it released them from the binding strictures of the Judeo-Christian morality, which had been, after all, inspired by the enemy, and calculated to rob the pagan heroes of their vitality.
With the old order going down to destruction, people felt threatened on all sides by the specter of "progress",the frighteningly rapid growth of alien populations in the cities and the advent of mass production and modern technology—and, above all, the feeling that an imminent revolution would come to turn everything upside-down.
Sebottendorff owed a considerable part of his success to these fears. He was an accomplished astrologer and magus. His mission, as he saw it, was to reveal certain basic esoteric secrets, to counteract a vast network of alchemists and Freemasons and Jews who had hatched a plot of monstrous dimensions to undermine the civilized world. The existing religious institutions had apparently grown too weak to make any unified effort to resist. There was only one way to avoid the chaos that would throw everything into the abyss, and that was the intervention of the spiritual chiefs in the West.
The ideology of purity of the blood was founded on the esoteric alchemical theory of the Grand Work. It was necessary for Sebottendorff to prepare suitable Aryan candidates for their proper place in a mystical hierarchy. Therefore, he taught them certain mystico-magical exercises which the French occult scholar Rene Alleau defines as
a Yoga founded on the repetition of certain syllables during periods determined by the synodic revolution of the moon and in association with signs of the hand and passes that had for a goal capturing the most subtle radiations of the original force for the purpose of integrating them into the human body and to spiritualize matter into universal energy.
This is reminiscent of the conjurations and incantations which occultists have always used in the practice of the black arts. Alleau points out:
For example, to make the sign "I" one closes the right hand and extends the index finger toward the outside of the closed palm. The sign "A" is represented by the hand held so that all the fingers are situated on one plane, while the thumb forms, with the index finger, a right angle. ...
These movements of the hand are then held at various parts of the body—neck, chest, stomach. One concentrates mentally on these gestures and the repeated syllables until, little by little, according to Alleau, an abnormal heat increases progressively and is conducted to different points in the body. At the same time, changes in the senses of taste and smell are observed, and ultimately "the disciple will see a black shadow that marks the end of the first part of the work."
When that happens, "the day is celebrated like the beginning of a new life, and the disciple receives his lodge name. ..."
The initiate perceives colors changing, which signifies his subtle transmutation from one phase to the next. "The black of the shadow changes itself to blue, to light red, and to pale green. When the tint has become a luminous green this period is finished."
Next, in conjunction with "passes" of the chest, comes a glaring white. Alleau says:
After the "ventral posture," these mystico-magical exercises end in the elaboration of a shadow of a pomegranate red. "The Oriental Mason has become the perfect master. The cubic stone is entirely shaped." The Oriental initiates . . . name these tasks of the "spiritual Work" the "Science of the Key" and name themselves the "Sons of the Key."
That there is a colored light-field around human bodies and that the colors change with changing spiritual development is an old esoteric belief. These colors, or auras, are allegedly visible to clairvoyants and sensitives. The colors, while presumably present for these people, are also symbolic, and there are varying interpretations as to the significance of each.
All of Sebottendorff's rituals had as their aim one effect, the same as that of other esoteric groups: dissolving the "small self" so that the "divine self" could become manifest. The teaching holds that there is a world beyond the senses which can be reached with proper preparation. It is not material. The occultist believes he can ascend to it in various stages, each of which has its own particular pitfalls. It is certainly not for everyone. A great effort of will is necessary. So is courage. It is not possible to get anywhere by moving haphazardly from one stage to the next. One must observe the strictest protocol and techniques. For this, of course, the services of a master are absolutely indispensable. Demons lie in wait everywhere, and the journey is most perilous. Sebottendorff taught:
Once come to the end of our training, we sense our terrestrial body becoming more and more a stranger to us. We cross beyond it. We see distinctly that it has become dust and ashes. It is the lowest point that can be attained, that where the shadows of death and their terrors involve us. It is for this reason that the ancient Oriental Freemasons received into their community nothing but courageous men because the tests reserved for the neophyte were very harsh. Courage and endurance were the two principal virtues that were necessary.
To this end, Sebottendorff exacted from his disciples the cry Sieg Heil ("Glory Hail!"), which symbolizes the kind of blind obedience the Arab formula speaks of when it exhorts the initiate: "Be between the hands of your sheikh like a cadaver in the hands of him who washes him." The master, in esoteric teaching, like the sheikh, is God's emissary. The relationship between disciple and master is particularly meaningful in the occult tradition. The neophyte must place himself completely in the teacher's hands and obey even his most eccentric commands, whether or not those commands do violence to his own individual conscience. There are at least two reasons for this: First, the master is the repository of ancient and secret wisdom which the disciple presumably cannot acquire in any other way, and second, the master seeks deliberately to create an atmosphere in which the disciple's consciousness will be changed. Toward that end, the master is prepared—in fact, it is necessary—to go beyond rational thought and behavior. For this, extremely harsh discipline may be called for.
History provides a number of examples of irrational cults by powerless people who fell under the domination of a powerful master and accomplished his will.
The Assassins, a secret politico-religious order of eleventh-century Islam, made the murder of its enemies a religious duty. An absolute ruler presided over three deputy masters. Under them were the initiated, and then the students, who were only partially acquainted with the secrets of the order. The students in time graduated into the ranks of the initiated. Below the students came the active members of the order, "the devoted ones," young men who were kept in absolute ignorance of the teaching of the sect, but from whom complete obedience was expected. They were the blind instruments in the work of secret political assassination planned by the leaders. The terrorism they spread for two centuries was disproportionately greater than their actual numbers, and the name "Assassin" became associated with dread in the Middle East. They struck down generals, statesmen, and caliphs. They were even hired by contending political factions. The secret of their power lay primarily in the peculiar manner of their training. Before they were assigned to their tasks, the disciples were stupefied by means of hashish ("Assassin" is just the English analogue of the Arabic hashshashin, one who is addicted to hashish), and, while in an ecstatic state, plunged into sensual pleasure, as a foretaste of the bliss which would be theirs in paradise if they faithfully followed the orders of their superlords. The training was so marvelously effective that the young men were indifferent to the threat of death, which gave them a considerable edge over their opponents.
The Thugs of India were comparable. A religious fraternity of Hindu origin, they were known to commit murders in honor of the goddess Kali as early as 1290, and lived chiefly on plunder. (Thug=conceal, hence a cheat in Sanskrit.) They were highly organized gangs traveling about India for more than three hundred years. They had a jargon and signs, and the character of their assassinations conformed to certain ancient religious rites, pointing back to the destructive power of nature. Through spies, they would learn of wealthy people undertaking a journey and strangle them with a cloth. Another class of Thugs murdered people in charge of children and then sold the children into slavery. They really formed a caste, hereditary for the most part, although a few recruits were admitted from outside. A number of Muhammadans joined. But no washermen, sweepers, musicians, poets, blacksmiths, carpenters, oil vendors, cripples, or lepers could become Thugs. After each murder, there would be a special ritual in honor of Kali, the feminine aspect of nature's demonic power.
In addition to all the other dangers, then, the disciple of an esoteric group runs the real danger of falling victim to a domination which may indeed leave him little more than a living cadaver.
Like all other such groups, Thule had an inner circle and an outer circle. Both were involved in raising their consciousness to an awareness of nonhuman intelligences in the universe and in trying to achieve means of communicating with these intelligences. Some writers have speculated that the inner circle were Satanists, who practiced black magic. Satanism is, of course, not unknown in esoteric circles. It is simply the crooked path to self-transcendence. There is even a philosophical rationale, Gnostic in origin: Since the world's ways are illusory and evil, the creation of Satan, all worldly behavior is equally sinful. The occultist, therefore, has two choices open to him. He can either become an ascetic and renounce the world or, since he recognizes the non-materiality of the divine nature, he may feel morally free to defy convention and indulge his passions to the full.
Whether Thule members chose the "left-hand path" or not, it is certain that, like other occult groups, they aped Freemasonry. One reason why secret societies like Thule imitated the earlier prototype, despite their enmity toward it, was that it had a history of guarding ancient secrets. In a series of pamphlets published in Germany in the early seventeenth century, at a time when the upheavals of the Renaissance and Reformation had called into question many verities, this mysterious fraternity announced that it possessed spiritual knowledge of supernatural truths which could be revealed only to specially prepared initiates. It became fashionable for wise men to belong to the Freemasons, and their rituals and techniques were widely copied by other groups.
Thule gave its members a set of symbols and a place to voice their alienation. In exchange for obedience, it promised protection. In the face of the unstable economic and social conditions, the initiate received assurance that there were forces which, through magic, he could make work for him. More important and immediately satisfying, the elaborate hierarchy in which the initiate advanced only if he did as he was told meant that one could at least control other people and assert his superiority over them. Membership in Thule set one apart from nonmembers, inferior beings. The advantage that accrued to Thule members more than made up for the totalitarian aspects: Without having to make independent decisions, they could become an elite cadre whose task was nothing less than saving the world.
To deal with that task, the Thule Society became the active political branch of the Germanenorden after the war. Without undue modesty, Sebottendorff observed of his branch: "This decision was important, for Bavaria has thereby become the cradle of the National Socialist movement."
next
Riffraff into Supermen
All the same, people do seem to have a subliminal awareness that the Nazis were involved in occultism. One often comes across references such as these: ...The Nazi horror reveals how Satanic the human soul can become.
...If there is anything fundamentally diabolic about Anton LaVey, it stems from the echo of nazism in his theories.
...It was predictable that Charles Manson would identify with Hitler, for they both have been motivated by a kindred demonic spirit and they are comparable personalities.
The current occult revival has placed us in a better position to examine the Nazi horror from a different perspective, and gives ample ground for believing that occult beliefs and practices, however weird, played a major part in the irrational history of the Third Reich.
Some scholars may have been thrown off the scent because Hitler went to great pains to eradicate occultism from Germany almost as soon as he came to power, and on that account, is mistakenly identified as an enemy of irrational faith.
On the contrary. As will be borne out in later chapters, the occult was purged, not because it was abhorrent, but because the Nazis took it seriously—so seriously, indeed, that it posed a potential threat. The astrologer William Wulff, who was put to work by the SS casting horoscopes of nations, groups, and movements, describes, in Zodiac and Swastika, Heinrich Himmler's confession of his own interest in and practice of occultism and his explanation of the purge:
For us politics means ... the elimination of all forces except those serving the one constructive idea.
In the Third Reich we have to forbid astrology. We cannot permit any astrologers to follow their calling except those who are working for us. In the National Socialist state astrology must remain a privilegium singulorum. It is not for the broad masses.
The Holocaust appeared in a new light when I began, some time ago, to investigate certain modern esoteric cults making claims to paranormal knowledge. These cults, from those connected with George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and Rudolf Steiner to their present reincarnations, shared certain features: an authoritarian obedience to a charismatic and Messianic leader; secrecy; loyalty to the group above all other ties; a belief in supernatural possibilities open to the members only; a belief in reincarnation; initiation into superhuman sources of power; literal acceptance of the myth of ancient "giants" or supermen who handed down an oral tradition to a chosen people and who were guiding us now; and, in uncommon cases, Satanic practices.
Glaring parallels to Nazi history. Turning back to that history and its antecedents, I saw unmistakable evidence of a direct relationship between the Nazis and occultism. In fact, it was hard not to see it. Here was the missing link in our understanding of the beasts who proclaimed themselves gods.
If it seems too fantastic to believe that one of the most civilized countries in the world should have fallen to occultism, here is a highly respected German historian, an exiled former staff member of the liberal newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung, Konrad Heiden, observing, in his introduction to The Memoirs of Dr. Felix Kersten, Heinrich Himmler's masseur, that among the Germans
the best of them found refuge from the despair of their daily life in a perverse fanaticism . . . called "the mysticism of a political movement."
Germany was the perfect place for this development. In almost no other country were so many "miracles" performed, so many ghosts conjured, so many illnesses cured by magnetism, so many horoscopes read, between the two World Wars. A veritable mania of superstition had seized the country, and all those who made a living by exploiting human stupidity thought the millennium had come. General [Erich] Ludendorff, who had commanded the German armies in World War I, tried to make gold with the assistance of a swindler boasting the appropriate name of Tausend (meaning "thousand"). There was scarcely a folly in natural or world history to which the great general did not lend credence; when the German Republic, which he hated so intensely, had the barriers of the railway crossings painted red and white for better visibility, Ludendorff declared that the Jews in the government were doing this because Moses had led the Jews through the desert under these colors.
Another high-ranking general was convinced that he possessed the secret of the death ray and that he could halt airplanes in their flight and stop tanks in their tracks. A steamship company dismissed its managing director because his handwriting had displeased a graphologist. Motorists avoided a certain road between Hamburg and Bremen because, it was rumored, from milestone number 113 there emanated certain mysterious "terrestrial rays,"which provoked one accident after another. A miracle worker, who had the faculty of making the dead Bismarck appear during his mass meetings and who healed the sick by application of white cheese, had enough followers to establish a city; another crackpot was almost elected to the Reichstag; and still a third, who also barely missed election, promised to perform the greatest miracle of all by undoing the German inflation that had depreciated the mark to the value of one trillion paper marks for one gold mark.
Among Hitler's intimates was a man on whose visiting card appeared the word "magician" to indicate his profession—and he meant it in all seriousness. Many were convinced that the course of world history was the sinister result of the ministrations of ancient secret societies—as such they considered not only the Freemasons, but also Jews and the Jesuits. . . .
Other historians have corroborated that Germany between the two world wars was particularly ripe for these states of mind. It was a time of alienation and impotence. World War I had turned everything inside out. Apart from the physical devastations, the three bugbears of taxation, inflation, and confiscation sapped the strength of the middle class. The war itself was but a symptom of growing inner turbulence in Europe. The trouble had, of course, begun much earlier. In Germany particularly, the gap between an advancing technology and an outmoded social order was great.
In the years preceding World War I, the German Jews were in an especially vulnerable position. The full emancipation of the German Jews, which had come in 1871, brought large numbers of Eastern European Jews to Germany. They settled in the cities, taking a prominent part in commercial, cultural, and political life. Likewise, the period from 1857 to 1910 saw a rise in the Jewish population of Vienna of more than 400 percent. Because of the high value the Jews placed on learning, a disproportionately large number went into the medical and legal professions, trying in that way to gain a modicum of social acceptance. Some Germans, of course, mistook these professionals for the average Jew. Slowly, a new religion evolved for those Germans who felt somehow cheated—a cult of race, based on the supremacy of the Aryans and the vilification of the Jews. It was called the volkisch—or Pan-German—movement, and it enjoyed great popular appeal. It began a virulent campaign against the »foreign element.« A racial theory of history was developed, and it heralded the coming of a new Messiah. The mystical concepts of Reich and Volk went along with an awakening interest in occultism. Secret cults sprang up, anti-Semitic and nationalistic, running like a sewer beneath Vienna and other cultural centers.
Two Austrian occultists, Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels and Guido von List, presented an irrational, pseudo-anthropological package which attracted a number of wealthy backers, despite its foolishness. Lanz's Order of New Templars and List's Armanen boasted several influential members.
In 1909, young Adolf Hitler, down and out in Vienna, came across Lanz's magazine, Ostara, and made contact with the occultist. The erotic language and racist rantings of this magazine were remarkably similar to Hitler's later utterances.
Membership in occult groups was often interlocking. When, in 1912, a new secret cult, the Germanenorden, was born, disciples of both Lanz and List joined. The Germanenorden was like the other occult-racist nationalist groups, but with a difference. It called for "courageous men" to "accomplish the work" of combating the Social Democrats, who had gained ground in the elections of 1912. Courageous men did not leap forth to join the Germanenorden, but after World War I prospects were brighter.
People were in a state of shock over the German defeat, which had brought with it the collapse of Kaiser Wilhelm II's regime. Power was suddenly thrust into the hands of a provisional democratic government whose unenviable task it was to accept the consequences of a lost war, reluctantly surrender, and sign a peace treaty. Extremists of the left and right blamed everything on this government: Germany's humiliation, as well as the reparations which bore heavily, financially and psychologically, on the people. It was the end of an era. The Germans had gone into the war with such high hopes. The war was to have been a release from care, a cleansing of mounting economic and social problems, a purging and purification. When the war began, said one German, "it was as if a nightmare had vanished, as if a door had opened, and an old yearning had been satisfied." The idea of war itself had become beautiful. It was to give people back their lives. "Peace," as someone pointed out, "had become insupportable." Hitler embodied the alienated man with no family or occupation, to whom the outbreak of World War I was a godsend. He later confessed: "For me, as for every German, there now began the greatest and most unforgettable time of my earthly existence."
When the Germans signed the peace treaty, the army released almost a quarter of a million men to add their numbers to the growing ranks of the unemployed. Many soldiers were dazed to come home to a fatherland on the edge of anarchy, hungry, and undisciplined. The new Russian Revolution threatened to spill over into Germany. In Munich, particularly, Communists stalked the streets, threatening civil war. Conservatives and liberals alike were anxious to do anything to stave off communism.
The Germanenorden was happy to merge its destiny with a Munich group called the Thule Society, which was meeting regularly to study the supposed occult meaning of the ancient Germanic alphabet and its symbolism. It was led by an astrologer who called himself Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff. The Thule Society soon became the political arm of the Germanen Orden and quietly set about preparing for a counterrevolution against the government. It formed an umbrella for many of the racist nationalist groups and enlisted frightened or unscrupulous men against the government, which, it said, had betrayed the German people. In addition to rabid anti-Semitism, it preached the coming of a Fuhrer who would do away with hated democracy, the handmaiden of the weak. It began to collect weapons, bought a newspaper, instigated terrorist activity and stirred up race hatred against the Jews, all the while keeping up the front of being a study group for Germanic antiquity. Thule members who were to play key roles in the formation of the Nazi party were Alfred Rosenberg, Rudolf Hess, Gottfried Feder, Karl Harrer, and Dietrich Eckart. Not until they found their Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, were they able to carry out the irrational programs of Lanz, List, and Sebottendorff. But all the essential ingredients,the ideology, the rituals, the symbols, the attitudes of the coming Nazi Revolution were already present in the Germanenorden and the Thule Society, as well as the Order of the New Templars and the Armanen.
CHAPTER 2
Giants in the Earth
There were giants in the earth in those days. . . .
—Genesis 6:4
German occult groups did not appear out of nowhere. They had historical
antecedents. The new Aryan hero trumpeted by List and Lanz owed his birth
to the unholy marriage of early Hindu ideas of racial purity and Darwin's
concept of evolution, which was consummated in the nineteenth-century
Europe where German romantics, in particular, were fascinated with racial
theories. The nineteenth century was remarkable for great change. In Germany the change was more drastic than in the rest of Europe. Its people had been more completely under the sway of the past; the Middle Ages had still been dominant in agriculture and industry. The Thirty Years' War, which began in 1618, had consolidated land holdings into fewer and fewer hands, and the land reforms which followed only served to crush the people lower down on the social scale. The industrial revolution happened more rapidly in Germany than anywhere else. It went from mining 1.5 million metric tons of coal in 1850, for instance, to 30 million in 1871. From a backward, predominantly agricultural country, it grew almost overnight into a modern industrial state, much as Japan and Sweden did in the twentieth century. Mass migrations of people from country to city severed traditional ties. Scientific discovery brought a sharp decline in religious faith, and there was a search for new values with which to identify. The state, assuming more and more control, seemed bent on crushing individuality.
The European romantics, wincing at the bitter fruits of modern "progress," delighted in the exoticism's of the East. European rule in the Orient, travel, and translations of the Oriental classics helped lift the veils from the faces of the ancient Eastern civilizations. What the Europeans caught a glimpse of was a kind of serenity which had disappeared from the West and which was very much desired. So great was the Eastern influence that Victor Hugo observed in 1829: "In the age of Louis XIV, all the world was Hellenist; now it is orientalist."
Napoleon's army, entering Egypt in 1798, found the Rosetta Stone, which scholars labored to decipher. When Champollion solved the riddle, the long-lost tongue of that ancient civilization was loosened and the way opened for the great achievements of the modern science of Egyptology. German archaeologists went along with the Prussian king's expedition in 1842 and further refined the study.
The Germans also made important contributions to understanding the real nature of Islamic literature and thought. Persian love poems, called ghazals, had the greatest effect on German poets. The most brilliant of the Persian poems were Sufi. In the Sufi tradition, the poems were interpreted as allegorical and mystical revelations of the divine. German poet-scholars made use of them to such an extent that Heinrich Heine admonished: "These poor poets eat too freely of the fruit they steal from the garden groves of Shiraz, and then they vomit ghazals."
The Muslims had prejudiced the Europeans against the Hindus, whom they regarded as superstitious and degraded. But with the translation of ancient Sanskrit texts, India began to exert a fascination on the West.
The philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder read Indian philosophy with enthusiasm and managed to inspire the German romantics, who were markedly different from the romantics in Europe at large—more given to morbid bitterness. Herder cautioned them not to be frightened by supernatural elements such as gods moving among men or nature personified. These, he said, were depictions of actual experiences, for on that paradisiacal river, the Ganges, the golden age still existed. The romantics could not have been more pleased, longing as they were for just such a golden age. "It is to the East," wrote Friedrich Schlegel in 1800, "that we must look for the supreme Romanticism."
A French version of the Upanishads awakened Arthur Schopenhauer to the wisdom of the East. His pessimistic view of a demonic will, blind and insatiable, compelling all things to share in its own futile unrest, had a tremendous influence on German thought, falling in with the disappointed mood of the age. Schopenhauer's sterile negation of life was soon imitated by like minds. The cessation of activity, for the sake of eventual purification, had a definite appeal for tired, hopeless people who could now enjoy renunciation under the cloak of Orientalism. The historian Benedetto Croce observed that this often led to a "sad and bitter sensuality, of decay and death . . . tinged with Satanism and sadism."
The spiritual journey to the East, undertaken by many German scholars, philosophers, and men of letters, brought a new mythology to a politically, economically, and socially despairing country: a mystical view that all fintrude is the result of a fall from the absolute and that the effects of the Fall have to be repaired by the course of history. These writers began to glorify the Middle Ages as a period of dialogue with God, when men, art, and religion had been unified. To restore the lost innocence became their aim. [Wasn't even a fall from the 'absolute, Lucifer, Satan and the others were not created in perfection. They were created by a Perfect Being...A Paradise Creator Son, and this Creation takes place in one of the 7 super universes that are evolving around the Central Universe of Perfection. DC]
Asia's effect on the West took a terrible turn when the ancient Hindu doctrine of the race purity of the ruling class was rationalized by the Germans to demonstrate Aryan superiority over the Jews. In the mid1800's, German philologists had theorized that their noble Aryan forebears in India had the same mystical symbols and gods as the ancient Germans. A French diplomat and Orientalist, Arthur de Gobineau, made race the determining characteristic in the rise and fall of civilizations. Gobineau's theory was that the racially pure Aryans were bastardized by alien racial elements, producing, by the process of civilization, a decadent people. It was the Semites, he said, hybridized by blacks, who were responsible for the Fall. [No humans caused the fall,although a couple thousands of years later, some fell for it, because they listened to the stories,rather then the Spirit.DC]
Gobineau's work not only gave an air of pseudo-respectability to the budding anti-Semitism in Germany, it provided a convenient rationale for the economic and social fall of the nobleman—for his failure to return to paradise. Even the caste system in India, he claimed, had not been sufficiently stringent to protect the ruling elite from the defiling blood of the dark-skinned races they had subjugated. His ideas penetrated throughout Germany. The German romantics, given a shot in the arm by Gobineau, could now view themselves as a natural aristocracy replacing the older, outmoded feudal aristocracy, which no longer accorded well with the idea of progress. After all, the Teutons, whom Gobineau equated with the Aryans, were the superior race. This idea was eagerly seized on and was buttressed by the growing resentment against the Jews.
In the early nineteenth century, the Jews had begun to move toward equality and citizenship in Germany. Before then, the mass of them lived in ghettos behind walls, were taxed heavily, and were barred from any work but peddling and petty trade except for a select few, and even then under prohibitions which gave them a bare subsistence. Even the more fortunate, like the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, at the height of his fame in 1776, reported that to enter Dresden he was forced to pay "a head tax" equivalent to that set for "a Polish cow."
Ludwig Boerne, a satirist born in 1786, writing of his boyhood memories in a Frankfurt ghetto, recalls:
There they rejoiced in the tender watchful care of the government. On Sundays they were prohibited from leaving the ghetto lane, to spare them from being beaten up by drunkards. Before the age of twenty-five they were forbidden to marry, in order that their offspring prove sound and sturdy. On public holidays they had to reenter the ghetto gate by sharp six in the evening, lest over-exposure to the sun ruin their complexions. They were forbidden to stroll in the fields beyond the city wall, so as to run no risk of being attracted to the life of a farmer. When a Jew walked the city streets and a Christian cried Mach Mores, Jud! ("Your manners, Jew!"), he needs must remove his hat; in this way the proper politeness was maintained between the two faiths. Then, too, a great many of the streets—their bumpy pavement was bad for the feet—were altogether closed to him.
After the German emancipation of the Jews, which took several decades to complete, there was a huge influx of Jews from the Eastern European countries, which were still guilty of fierce persecutions. Life in Germany was more hospitable to them. But in time, the majority of Germans, scratching out a bare living themselves, began to resent them. Boerne understood well the hostility of these Germans, who flattered themselves that no matter how low their estate, they were at least not members of an inferior race:
The poor Germans! Living in the lowest floor, oppressed by the seven floors of the upper classes, their anxiety is made lighter by speaking of people who are still lower than they are and who live in the cellar. Not being a Jew provides them with consolation at not being a state councillor.
Gobineau became the prophet for all these "poor Germans" and provided them with a philosophy which preached the nobility of the Aryan by simple virtue of his birth. From this eminent source they learned that contamination of race would lead to the certain decline of Germany.
The growing volkisch movement began an active battle against the Jews, the defilers of their blood, reinforced by a pseudo-scholarly writer who satisfied their desire for academic respectability. Rightist Pan-German groups also bolstered their ideology by citing the dubious philosophical, historical, and scientific analyses laid out by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an Englishman in love with German culture.
Though painfully dull, his two-volume Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, published in 1900, had a strange appeal. He told a mass society, at the mercy of the impersonal forces which were crushing it, that the Teutons were indomitable master builders, that in mysticism was freedom, that "every Mystic is, whether he will or not, a born Anti-Semite," and that Darwin's theory of natural selection justifies the stricture against mingling of the races. Even before Chamberlain, volkisch thinkers had tried to weave together lessons from history proving the heroism of the ancient Germanic past. Many of them were admirers of the Theosophical Society, which combined for the first time certain elements into a cohesive system considered by some people to be the beginning of modern occultism.
The Theosophical Society was organized in New York City in 1875 by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian expatriate countess known to her disciples as H. P. B. At seventeen, her family had forced her to marry an elderly Russian general, whom she promptly deserted. Headstrong, convinced that she had mediumistic powers, and versed in many languages, she wandered about Europe and the East, and decided at age forty to come to New York to investigate spiritualism, which had become an American craze. Her mission, a Society historian observed, was "to explain its phenomena, expose its frauds, to enlarge its spiritual scope, and to give it the dignity in the world of science which was its due." Depleted of financial resources, if not of energy, she delivered up an unlikely package of Hinduism, Gnosticism, and pseudoscience which had a tremendous impact on the intelligentsia of the West. She even converted the Indians themselves to the "ancient wisdom" in modern dress. Her ideas, about ancient lost races with secret knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality, the immortal soul perfecting itself through endless rebirths, and mastery of superhuman powers which could unlock the secrets of the universe, if they had been presented by traditional organized religions, would not have been credited. But people were perfectly willing to suspend disbelief of a huge Russian countess with magnetic eyes who smoked cigars and used bawdy language.
Darwin's Origin of Species, published in 1859, had widened the chasm between science and religion. H. P. B. leaped across that chasm with a spiritual concept of evolution. Men could become divine, she said, by advancing in an evolutionary process which was part of an elaborate cosmology affecting whole races.
It was possible to thwart evolution, however. Like most occultists, she believed in the old Gnostic doctrine that there were two worlds, one good and one evil.
In Gnostic thinking, spirit and matter were opposed to each other, matter being an interruption of the order of the cosmos—a fall, and therefore evil. The Gnostics posited three classes: spiritual, or pneumatic, men; animal, or psychic, men; and carnal, or physical, men. The last were said to be wholly material and could not be saved, their nature being evil; they had not a single spark of the divine in them.
Matter, according to the Gnostics, was not the creation of the supreme god but of a demiurge, an inferior divinity. A famous medieval Gnostic sect, the Cathars, came to identify the Old Testament god, Jehovah, with the demiurge, the creator of the material world, and therefore the equivalent of Satan. Within Gnosticism, then, existed the idea that the Jewish god was really the devil, responsible for all the evil in the world. [Idiots..Calling a Paradise Creator Son a demiurge...This Paradise Son had the ok of the Paradise Trinity to Create in this Neck of the Woods.Gnostic's must have cut corners and classes to get there first.DC]
Without intending to arouse hatred against the Jews, H. P. B. repeated this Gnostic thinking in her book The Secret Doctrine:
With the Semite, that stooping man meant the fall of Spirit into matter, and that fall and degradation were apotheosized by him with the result of dragging Deity down to the level of man.... The Aryan views of the symbolism were those of the whole Pagan world; the Semite interpretations emanated from and were pre-eminently those of a small tribe, thus marking its national features and the idiosyncratic defects that characterize many of the Jews to this day—gross realism, selfishness, and sensuality.
She talked of a race of giants that existed in ancient days and argued that the occasional appearance of giants in modern times proved that species tend to revert to the original type. She held that since the days of the giants, whose descendants the Aryans were, there had been an unbroken succession of semi-immortal "adepts" living in secret cities in Tibetan mountains. It was they who had appointed her as their emissary.
Because of the flamboyance of her personality, if not her prose, H. P. B. became the model for other aspiring occultist leaders. She had somehow managed to make magic, witchcraft, and alchemy respectable. With the support of educated people, her ideas spread. She brought to the last decades of the nineteenth century a universal palliative for the materialism from which it was suffering.
The volkisch writers made capital of both Theosophy and Darwinism. Darwin's book had been hailed in Germany with an acclamation in startling contrast to the storm of protest which greeted it elsewhere. In place of a dogmatic Christian theology preaching a millennium, there came a conviction that human society was moving blindly toward some ideal goal. The struggle for existence, palpable to every German, justified itself in this evolutionary scheme of nature. Origin of Species sold briskly in Germany. The Germans eagerly pressed Darwin with their own writings on the subject, lauding his work. It was said that although Darwin was English, Darwinism really came into its own in Germany. As one German scientist pointed out: "You are still discussing in England whether or not the theory of Darwin can be true. We have got a long way beyond that stage here. His theory is now our common starting point."
To a growing body of anthropological concepts was now fused the idea that the karma of the Aryans was to engage in a race struggle to the death against the Jews. Germans, the fittest to survive, were destined to become the saviors of the human race. For this, Guido von List preached, they would need a "strong man from above," who would be reincarnated from an ancient soldier. List's study of the origins of Jewish mysticism had taught him the importance of imbuing a people with a Messianic hope. When the world is changing and the old knowledge becomes suspect, it is necessary to herald the coming of a Messiah so that the traditional verities may be adapted to new conditions. List gave the Germans, in effect, an opportunity to become competitors of the Jews for the honor of "chosen people." His secular Messianic nationalism was taken seriously by many confused apostles. The German people were to take their place at the head of all nations, act as their leader, and move them toward civilization. They were the chosen people, and soon a Fuhrer would arise among them who, in turn, would lead the Messianic nation.
Just before World War I, then, side by side with an awakening interest in occultism went an interest in racist-nationalism. Germany's supremacy was "proved" by the ideas and events of the distant past, when the Teutons lived close to nature and far from modern artificiality. The call of the elemental, the breath of the woodland, the simple poetry of Wanderlust, of joyous roving, asserted themselves. The folktales and folk songs issuing from the lips of peasants became sacred. Primitive German institutions and folklore were eagerly studied. Whereas, for primitive peoples, nature often represented primordial chaos, and therefore the enemy, these neo-primitives idealized nature and anathematized the city as profane, an aberrant discovery of modern man in his wickedness. Imagination, feeling, and will attributed to Natural Man, were placed above reason, which was held responsible for the psychic disorders of civilized man. The irrational was recognized as a source of illumination. List and his Theosophical friends claimed to have a "secret science" by which they could intuit the past and divine its meaning. Through extrasensory powers, they could communicate with the ghosts which hovered around ancient soil and in the cracks of ancient buildings. Innocent and pastoral at first, this movement back to nature and simplicity gradually grew more and more patriotic, more and more "German," to the exclusion of other races, and more and more anti-Semitic.
Both the occult and the racist-nationalist movements were hostile to modernity. Both promised a millennium. If all the former were not anti-Semitic, all the latter were. They saw in the Jew the exemplar of the modern man: urban, alienated from the soil, materialistic. Both movements were essentially conservative, in that they harked back to a golden age. The groups often intertwined. Under the influence of List and Lanz, whose works they studied, volkisch youth groups pressed for the expulsion of Jews from their organizations, from university life, and from the government. Admirers and disciples of both men became agitators for a final solution to the Jewish problem. Some saw that solution only in extermination.
Both also hailed the Middle Ages with uncritical admiration. Whereas the rest of Europe tended to brand that period as an era of darkness from which it had been happy to emerge, and to hold up the Renaissance as worthy of adoration, Germans idealized the Middle Ages as the most illustrious period of their history. The hierarchic structure of medieval society appealed to their longing for political security. Their morbid worship of the twelfth-century German Crusaders, the Order of Teutonic Knights, for instance, was based on its mystical hierarchical structure, its secrecy, and its supernatural claims to world domination. Indeed, according to some people, the "thousand-year conspiracy" of conquest which the Teutonic Knights had threatened did persist into the twentieth century.
The marriage of occultism and nationalism is not as uneasy as it might appear on the surface. Each represents a nostalgia for a lost paradisiacal state, and a commitment to restoring that state in some millennial time. It is natural for people who feel uncertain about the future to look back sentimentally to a glorified past which they will try to relive. The Irish Theosophist William Sharp (who also wrote under the name Fiona MacLeod) was a nationalist-occultist who understood the connection between the patriotic longing and the longing for the occult:
I think our people have most truly loved their land, and their country, and their songs, and their ancient traditions, and that the word of bitterest savour is that sad word exile. But it is also true that in love we love vaguely another land, a rainbow-land, and that our most desired country is not the real Ireland, the real Scotland, the real Brittany, but the vague Land of Youth, the shadowy Land of Heart's Desire. And it is also true, that deep in the songs we love above all other songs is a lamentation for what is gone away from the world, rather than merely from us as a people: or a sighing of longing for what the heart desires but no mortal destiny requites.
It is not at all unusual to find such feelings of Weltschmerz in those periods when reason seems to have failed us and death and disorder wait to swallow us up. At such times, an interest in the occult gains ground steadily and tries to reintegrate the shattered cosmos.
This was the climate in Germany before World War I, and the war intensified it.
CHAPTER 3
Gods and Beasts
Gods and beasts, that is what our world is made of.
—Hitler, quoted in The
Voice of Destruction
by Hermann
Rauschning
In the years preceding World War I, German anti-Semitism was fed by an
underground stream of secret cults running like a sewer beneath Vienna and
other cultural centers. Hitler dipped into this stream. He lived in a
flophouse in the city's slum area, and his life had all the elements of a
scenario for a Charlie Chaplin movie about the Little Tramp. He was
twenty when he came to Vienna in 1909, rejected for admission to the
Academy of Fine Arts, and according to eyewitness accounts, lonely, shy
with women, moody, given to violent outbursts—in short, even in those
squalid quarters where the struggle for existence must have brought out the
brutal side of human nature, exceedingly odd. He later wrote in Mein
Kampf of this period that it gave him "the foundations of a knowledge" which sustained him for the rest of his life: "In this period there took shape
within me a world picture and a philosophy which became the granite
foundation of all my acts. In addition to what I then created, I have had to
learn little; and I have had to alter nothing." He spent much of his time studying Eastern religions, yoga, occultism, hypnotism, astrology, telepathy, graphology, phrenology, and similar subjects which often appeal to pursuers of magical powers, who usually happen to be powerless. His penchant for the occult led him to a tobacconist's shop near his lodging where he came upon a magazine, Ostara, which must have drawn him. This strange publication was produced by the mystical theorist, Lanz, who wrote under the acronym PONT (Prior of the Order of the New Templars).
Vienna, in those days one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe, was hospitable to the formation of occult groups which sprang up with religious fervor, symptomatic of the irrational atmosphere of the time. Vienna's population went up 259 percent between 1860 and 1900, and the flood of new arrivals sought relief from the frustrations of an overcrowded and expensive existence. The city was deluged by mediums, necromancers, and astrologers who claimed to be occupied with a futuristic science which the scientific establishment was as yet unable to appreciate, since experiments were still unverified. The gullible—scholars included—believed that intuition and vision enabled specially endowed natures to investigate phenomena which eluded ordinary people.[Ghost hunters DC]
Lanz, a defrocked Cistercian monk, started his group, the Order of the New Templars, in 1900. His friend, Guido von List, a somewhat different sort of pseudo-priest, started his group, the Armanen, in 1908. Membership was often interlocking, and there was continual feedback between the cults. Around 1912, a number of members of both cults finally came together under one roof in the Germanenorden, which prefigured the Nazi party.
Historians are divided on the question of whether Hitler was actually ever a member of either the Temple of the New Order or the Armanen, but it is certain that he was a reader of Ostara and met Lanz several times in that period he later alluded to as providing him with "the foundations of a knowledge" which was to become so important to him.
Writing in an oracular, pseudo-anthropological manner, Lanz took mankind from the beginning of time and divided the species into the acemen and the ape-men, the first being white, blue-eyed, blond, and responsible for everything heroic in mankind. The second group was the repository of everything vile. According to this comic-book mentality, the heroes—called variously Asings, Heldinge, or Arioheroiker—were superior by reason of breeding and blood, whereas the inferiors—Afflinge, Waninge, Schrattlinge, or Tschandale—always threatened to contaminate through interbreeding.
Ostara was one of a number of magazines which surfaced during this period. Like some of our own pulp magazines, it combined the erotic and the occult in an irrational blend which could capture the fantasies of lost souls. Its lurid stories were calculated to explain history as a struggle to the death between the pure Aryan and the hairy subhuman. This racial struggle, described in mystical, turgid prose, was the essence of human existence. To illustrate it, Lanz filled his pages with gorgeous blond women falling into the snares of satyr-like men. For all the Aryan's superiority, it was quite evident that there was one way in which he was not superior: sexual prowess. The female member of the master race was sexual enough, to be sure, but the male could not hope to compete against the enemy in having sufficient potency to satisfy the infinite needs of the blond beauty. If this sounds reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan's pronouncements against the »inferior« blacks, it is: The lower races must not pollute, through interbreeding, the rich blood of the higher races. Since, sexually, the lower races are more potent, this presents a considerable challenge to the hero.
Lanz was writing in the tradition of a volkisch revival of the conservative Germanic ideal of woman as the keeper of the hearth, in contrast with the modern suffragette who was just then demanding her rights and asserting her own sexual needs.
Race, blood, and sex combined with ancient German occultism—spells, number mysticism—to make an overrich Viennese pastry. Not many soup-kitchen derelicts, seeking an escape from their hopeless state, could resist such a package. Ostara, Brief Bücherei der blonden Mannes Rechtler ("Newsletters of the Blond Fighters for the Rights of Men") addressed these men, for example, in its March 1908 issue when it ran a full-page advertisement promoting a book to help young men choose a career. "What shall I become?" read the advertisement.
It is all too clear what one regular reader, Hitler, became, though the direct influence of Ostara upon him is not known. His obsession with the "nightmare vision of the seduction of hundreds and thousands of girls by repulsive, bandy-legged Jew bastards" is identical with Ostara's. We have Hitler's own confession that one of his favorite movies was King Kong, the plot of which might have been concocted by Lanz himself.
For such mentalities, Ostara was thoughtful enough to provide a yardstick by which the reader could measure himself as to racial worth and be assured that he was not Jewish. The Rassen Wertigkeit index allowed him to score on the basis of eye, hair, and skin color, and the size and shape of nose, hands, feet, skull, and even buttocks. Black eyes were twelve points to the bad, blue-gray eyes twelve points to the good. Being a reader of Ostara was already sufficient qualification for membership in the "mixed type," the stratum above the lower races. Hitler presumably would have rated himself in this category. With headlines like these—ARE YOU BLOND? THEN YOU ARE THE CREATOR AND PRESERVER OF CIVILIZATION. ARE YOU BLOND? THEN YOU ARE THREATENED BY PERILS. READ THE LIBRARY FOR BLONDS AND ADVOCATES OF MALE RIGHTS.—and subtitles like these—Race and Nobility; Race and Foreign Affairs; The Metaphysics of Race—Ostara, thirty-five pfennigs a copy, sometimes reached circulation figures of 100,000 in Austria and Germany.
The Order of the New Templars which this ludicrous oracle founded enrolled blond, blue-eyed members—and only if they promised to marry women with the same attributes. This was of paramount importance, even though it would not guarantee race purity, since "Through woman, sin came into the world, and it so over and over again because woman is especially susceptible to the love artifices of her animal-like inferiors." The blond Siegfried must win her away from the dark seducer, slaying dragons and giants if necessary. Our interest in this theology is enriched on learning that Lanz's New Templars were assembled as soon as he himself was expelled from a Cistercian monastery for "carnal and worldly desires."
Lanz, a teacher's son, was born in Vienna in 1874. He changed his birthdate and place of origin to mislead astrologers. As a child, his wish had been to become a Knight Templar and to own Templar chateaux or, at least, to reconstruct them. His strongest impression as a youth had been an opera, The Templar and the Jewess, which transported him into ecstasy. (Occultists have always argued that the Templars, a medieval religious and military order, were a Gnostic sect working to purify the world of evil.) In 1893, at the age of nineteen, he entered the Cistercian monastery Holy Cross, which had an important place in Austrian history. The following year, he issued a work about a discovery which held secret meaning for him: a monument from the period of the Crusades, of a manly figure treading barefoot on an animal-like human being. In this relief sculpture Lanz saw the triumph of the higher races over the lesser races, and it became the symbol of his ideology.
In 1900, a year after he was expelled from the monastery, he surfaced again as "Baron von Liebenfels" and started his order, usurping the name and rituals from his beloved Templars. His sign was the swastika; his slogan, "Race fight until the castration knife." This studious-looking,bespectacled young man, as much the model of a minor official as his kindred soul, Himmler, preached a fall from a race-pure paradise that came about when the "Arioheroiker" interbred with the "Dark Races," or "Demonic Slopwork." The hero, Frauja (the Gothic name for Jesus), came to save the Aryan women from the original sinner of "Sodomie" through the commandment "Love thy neighbor as thyself—if he is a member of your own race." This Lanz took to be the teaching of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. He called his theory Ariosophy.
As crazy as this may sound, Lanz quickly found people who were willing to believe—and some of the believers were wealthy men, ready to help Lanz make his wildest dreams come true. With their help, he bought the castle of Werfenstein in Lower Austria, in 1907. Other castles, in Marienkamp near Ulm and on the island of Rugen in the Baltic, were also converted into temples where the order conducted elaborate Grail ceremonies. The carefully screened initiates, awesome in white hooded robes, performed celebrations written by Lanz. Using his monastic training, he also composed his own voluminous variations of liturgical texts: a two-volumed New Templars' Breviary, The Psalms in German, and a "secret Bible for the initiated" which ran to ten volumes, as well as prayer books and the like. The race struggle was his major concern, but the order also dabbled in astrology, the Cabala, phrenology, homeopathy, and nutrition. After reconstructing somewhat the Werfenstein castle, fitting it out with Templar symbols of ritual magic, and raising up a swastika flag, never before seen in that part of the world in modern days, he made plans for world salvation. To ensure "the extirpation of the animal-man and the propagation of the higher new man," he called for a radical program: genetic selection, sterilization, deportations to the "ape jungle," and race extermination by forced labor or murder. "Offer sacrifices to Frauja, you sons of the gods!" Lanz wrote. "Up, and sacrifice to him the children of the Schrattlinge." He advocated the establishment of special breeding colonies for the production of more Aryans.[Insane person with visions of grandeur DC]
He called his major work nothing less than Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-Affligen und dem Götter-Elektron. Eine Einfuhrung in die älteste und neueste Weltanschauung und eine Rechtfertigung des Fürstentums und des Adels ("Theo-zoology or the Lore of the Sodom-Apelings and the Electron of the Gods. An Introduction into the Oldest and Newest Philosophy and a Justification of Royalty and Nobility").
He believed Aryan heroes, "Masterpieces of the gods," to be possessed of splendid electromagnetic-radiological organs and transmitters which gave them special powers. By following his eugenic measures, they would revitalize their lost faculties. Joachim Fest, one of Germany's leading journalists, comments on this in his book, Hitler:
The age's anxiety feelings, elitist leanings toward secret societies, fashionable idolization of science by dabblers in the sciences, all tied together by a considerable dose of intellectual and personal fraud, combined to shape this doctrine. . . .
[Lanz] was one of the most eloquent spokesmen of a neurotic mood of the age and contributed a specific coloration to the brooding ideological atmosphere, so rife with fantasies, of Vienna at that time.
Exactly what had Hitler to do with Lanz? In Mein Kampf the only possible reference to Ostara may be this one: "For the first time in my life I bought myself some anti-Semitic pamphlets for a few heller." His friend from childhood, August Kubizek, mentions that during this period Hitler joined an anti-Semitic lodge. But according to Lanz's biographer, Wilfried Daim, not only was Hitler a regular reader of Ostara, but, because he had missed several issues, he looked up Lanz himself in 1909, who was happy to supply him with back copies. In fact, says Daim, he saw Lanz a few times and "left an impression of youth, pallor, and modesty." Fifteen months later, through three changes of residence, the copies were still in Hitler's possession. Lanz claimed him as one of his disciples, writing to an occultist in 1932: "Hitler is one of our pupils. You will one day experience that he, and through him we, will one day be victorious and develop a movement that makes the world tremble."
Hitler attempted to bury all his earlier influences and his origins, and he spent a great deal of energy hiding them. Lanz was forbidden to publish after Germany annexed Austria in 1938. Hitler ordered the murder of Reinhold Hanisch, a friend who had shared the down-and-out days in Vienna. But the influence of Lanz's Ariosophy is evident in passages like these from Mein Kampf:
By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the handiwork of the Lord.... This Jewification of our spiritual life and mammonization of our mating instinct will sooner or later destroy our entire offspring....
Blood sin and desecration of the race and the original sin in this world and the end of a humanity which surrenders to it.
With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her own people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate. Just as he himself systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and it is the Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race, by the necessarily resulting bastardization, throwing it down from its cultural and political height, and himself rising to be its master.
Here, surely, is the same paranoid, sex-obsessed imagination as the renegade monk's. Though we may never have certain knowledge as to whether or not Hitler was a member of the New Templars, there is ample reason to suppose that Lanz's nasty vapors helped to poison the Third Reich.
The other Viennese occultist who attracted Lanz's disciples, Guido von List, presented a somewhat different variation of the occultist-racist package.
List was born in 1848 to a rich Viennese merchant. At fourteen, in the catacombs of St. Stefan's Cathedral in Vienna, he vowed before a dilapidated altar that when he became adult he would build a temple to the pagan god Wotan. His life's work settled, he became first a merchant and then secretary of the Austrian Alp Society. Members used the Hell greeting, harking back to paganism. List thought of himself as the link with an ancient race of Germanic priests and wise men called the Armanen. Their holiest emblem had been the swastika. Taking the same symbol, which had been in widespread use by many ancient peoples, he started his own secret society, the Armanen, in 1908. To the Germanic peoples, the swastika was an occult symbol for the sun, which represented life. German racists believed that one of the proofs of the inequality of races was that some had a more positive attitude toward the sun than others, and sun worship became a pagan ritual among volkisch groups. List became a pioneer in reviving Teutonic folklore and mythology. This helped to prepare the climate for nationalism.
The Armanen succeeded in attracting such people as Vienna's mayor, Karl Lueger, and the well-known Theosophist Franz Hartmann. List claimed that his group was the inner circle, hence, the leaders of the Aryo Germanic race, with power to unlock the secrets of the universe.
They had the call. They were similar to God. They also happened to be radically anti-Semitic. List apparently never lacked for rich supporters to finance his undertakings. His major undertaking was his plan to lead the master race, which his presumed psychic powers led him to believe he was qualified to do, having been in communication with ancients possessing esoteric wisdom.
He looked like an ancient prophet with his long, flowing white beard. He taught his members runic occultism. Wotan was said to have invented the runes, the ancient alphabet, as part of his secret science. (The Gothic runa means "secret," "secret decision," similar to the Old Iranian run: "secret," "mystery." The early Finnish runo, taken from the Germanic, has to do with magic songs.) Edgar Polome points out in his essay "Approaches to Germanic Mythology," in Myth in Indo-European Antiquity: "What Odin [another name for Wotan] originally acquired by hanging on the tree for nine days, starving and thirsting as in a shamanic initiation rite, was a powerful secret lore, of which the runes later on became merely the tool."
The idea that the runes have occult significance was mentioned as early as A.D. 98 by Tacitus, who described the Germanic peoples as making marks on wood branches in order to practice augury and divination. Old Norse literature speaks of runes carved on wood, over which incantations or charms were spoken. List wrote a book about runes in 1908. Like other German occult groups, his was preoccupied with the magical power contained in the old alphabet.
List had other concerns too, according to Trevor Ravenscroft's book, The Spear of Destiny, largely based on the revelations of his friend Dr. Walter Stein, a Viennese scientist who was a student at Vienna University from 1909 to 1913, when Hitler was living in the city.
A deep interest in occultism, particularly the Holy Grail, led Stein to a bookshop in the old quarter of Vienna that was frequented by Hitler as well. The proprietor, Ernst Pretzsche, had a group photograph on his desk, showing himself with List, whose books on Pan-German mysticism were enjoying a great vogue. But the press had revealed black magic practices, sending Vienna into a furor. List was unmasked as the leader of a blood brotherhood which went in for sexual perversions and substituted the swastika for the cross. The Viennese were so shocked that List had to flee from Vienna. Ravenscroft reports that Dr. Stein told him how Hitler attained higher levels of consciousness by means of drugs and made a penetrating study of medieval occultism and ritual magic, discussing with him the whole span of the political, historical and philosophical reading through which he formulated what was later to become the Nazi Weltanschauung.
Pretzsche had introduced Hitler to consciousness-expanding drugs, as well as to astrological and alchemical symbolism. Hitler told Stein that Pretzsche had been present when List tried to materialize "the Incubus" in a ritual designed to create a "Moon Child."
Altering states of consciousness by means of drugs or sexual perversions are not unknown to occult groups. By daring to break taboos against acts which would disgust other people, one might gain powers of which ordinary men did not dream. Hitler's later reputation for unnatural practices (coprophilia, masochism) may well have been deserved—may, in fact, have been inspired by tutors such as Lanz and List.
The historian Reginald H. Phelps, although he does not touch on the occult practices of Lanz and List, points out in his article " 'Before Hitler Came': Thule Society and Germanenorden," in The Journal of Modern History, that they propagated their theories "with varying success among intelligentsia and aristocrats as well as among that famous foundering petty bourgeoisie that is supposed to be the chief consumer of such wares; the same names run through the same arguments and blow up the same balloons of theory, year after year, in book after book."
About 1912, disciples of Lanz and List started the Germanenorden under the leadership of a member of List's Armanen, a journalist named Philipp Stauff, and several others.
Theodor Fritsch, one of the founders, had great organizational ability. Originally a technician for windmills, he then published a trade journal for millers, the Deutscher Muller, which provided him with the funds to pursue his real passion, "scientific" anti-Semitism. Besides, windmillers represented a dying branch of the economy. From the 1880's on he had been a leader in the Pan-German movement. His books and tracts brought him a certain notoriety. In 1902, he began to publish the Hammer, a racist scandal sheet which aimed at eliminating all Jewish participation from German cultural life. He tried to spread the word to the workers as well as to the elite, calling for a racist-nationalist organization that would combine the smaller groups into one "above the parties." It was to be impeccably Aryan and was to bring "enlightenment" to the Germanic peoples.
He was joined by a sealer of weights and measures from Magdeburg, Hermann Pohl, and also by Stauff, who brought with him several other List disciples. The organization was to be a secret Bund for the purpose of combating what they believed to be the Jewish secret Bund, which was plotting world conspiracy. One could only become a member by proving German origin to the third generation. Race science was to be taught, provable in the same way for human beings as the principles of scientific breeding had been established for plants and animals. The origin of all sickness was the result of the mixing of races, they held. The principles of Pan-Germanism were to be disseminated not only among Germans but among all blood-related peoples. The fight was against all un-German thinking, which included Judaism and internationalism.
While the Germanen Orden violently opposed Freemasonry as international and Jew-ridden, it used Freemason terminology and organization. Pohl had a theory that this would guarantee secrecy. Also, Freemasonry's concept of brotherhood would help prevent dissension between members.
Their symbols were runes and swastikas, their costumes reminiscent of Wotan and paganism.
Stauff and Pohl were the only open members. Closet cultists have always enjoyed the high degree of secrecy surrounding the meetings of occult groups. Rites are rarely, if ever, committed to paper. It is as if there is a recognition that power tends to evaporate and mysteries to become cheapened with exposure. At any rate, the initiation and other rites must have been similar to those of the Freemasons and Lanz's and List's groups. As with those other groups, there were inner and outer circles, with the latter yearning to be admitted into the ranks of the former.
The mysteries were revealed through signs and symbols which only the properly initiated could interpret, and only when deemed worthy. The typical occultist saw symbolism everywhere, and hermetic significance in everything. Groups also borrowed heavily from each other, so that if one saw wisdom in the ancient rune symbols, chances were that another would adopt it. Stauff and List wrote books on runic wisdom. Meetings of the Germanenorden taught the same.
Before World War I, despite countless leaflets distributed and propaganda spewed out, growth of the Germanenorden was slow. Fritsch issued a call to action. The time for counterrevolution was at hand. For decades the Germanic peoples had been sabotaged by the Tschandale, Lanz's term for the lower races. Now the "chief criminals" must be defeated. "A few hundred courageous men can accomplish the work," said Fritsch. The Jewish liberal leaders must fall, at the very start of the revolt; not even flight abroad shall protect them. As soon as the bonds of civic order lie shattered on the ground and law is trodden underfoot, the Sacred Vehme enters on its rights; it must not fear to smite the mass-criminals with their own weapons.
The group, however, was not successful. Pohl, despite his concern with the binding cement of brotherhood, managed to quarrel with everyone.
The war put the finishing touches on its defeat. Pohl wrote to a member in November 1914, Phelps reports,
that finances were bad, nearly half the brethren were with the military; "the war came on us too early, the G.O. was not yet completely organized and crystallized, and if the war lasts long, it will go to pieces." The childish play of ritual and ceremony in the Orden wearied the members. . .. Pohl seemed to think that the banquets were the chief thing. . . .
Between 1914 and 1918 the Orden was inactive, because most of its members were at the front.
Of the known members, only Theodor Fritsch, the "grand old man" of German anti-Semitism, achieved lasting recognition. His Anti-Semitic Catechism, written in 1887, had more than twenty editions and sold almost a hundred thousand copies. His Handbook of the Jewish Question, a 1919 update of the Catechism, reached 145,000 readers. Some years ago, in a suburb of Berlin, a monument was erected to his name.
During the war, all the secret cults were dormant. Pohl was reduced to selling bronze rings inscribed with runic characters. They possessed, he claimed, protective magical qualities, certainly very much needed in those days.
It was not until after the war that the occult anti-Semitic groups produced a mass movement.
CHAPTER 4
The Thule Society
In the depths of his subconscious every German has one foot in "Atlantis" where he
seeks a better Fatherland and a better patrimony.
—Hermann Rauschning, Hitler Speaks
After the war, it was not uncommon to find occult secret societies
coupling with politics of the conservative, racist sort and growing quite
militant. The Germanenorden was reactivated, and Hermann Pohl's
Bavarian branch took the cover name of Thule. Not until 1933 did the connection between Thule and the prehistory of National Socialism come to light, when a beefy adventurer published, in Munich, a book with the intriguing title Bevor Hitler Kam ("Before Hitler Came"). It must have enjoyed a vogue, because there was a second printing in 1934. Both editions were confiscated by the Nazis, and the author vanished—murdered, his publisher claimed. Hitler had already given a rather simple, straightforward account of his political debut in an insignificant workers' party, and he apparently did not care to have another version publicized.
The author, who called himself Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff, had been Grand Master of a small lodge which called itself the Thule Society, and he stated right at the outset: "Thule people are the ones to whom Hitler first came."
Sebottendorff himself acknowledges his debt to "a man whom Juda [Jewdom] could not get rid of"—Theodor Fritsch—and to "three Austrians who started the fight against Juda": Guido von List, Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, and List's disciple, Philipp Stauff. There was one other, a Baron Wittgenberg, who, Sebottendorff claimed, "chose to kill himself" in 1920 because his wife and daughter were "caught under the influence of a Jewish banker." This unfortunate man's compendiums, published in 1914 (An Index of Jewish Titled People, An Index of Titled People and Their Connection with Jews, and Jews of Industry, Science, Authors and Artists), had been snatched up by Jews, said Sebottendorff, and there were no more copies available.
Thule and the Germanenorden joined forces right after the war. Sebottendorff prepared a brochure for the initiates coming home, and started a publication called Runen to bring in new members. The first three members of the reconstituted circle were Dr. George Gaubatz, a bald-headed Red Cross worker and member of the Audubon Society, who looked like Erich von Stroheim and wore a key chain across his waistcoat, from which dangled the swastika, emblem of the Thule Society; Wilhelm Rohmeder, an educator and member of a German education society; and Johannes Hering, who had already distinguished himself in Pan-German circles.
There were, apparently, attempts at gaining magical knowledge. Sebottendorff was an authority on astrology, alchemy, divining rods, and rune symbolism, happy to expatiate on these subjects. Johannes Hering's diary entry for August 17, 1918, shows great vexation with Sebottendorff for delivering a talk to the group on divining rods. Hering feared "such occult nonsense lost them good will."
Sebottendorff was nostalgic for the Middle Ages, when the Jews in Germany had been openly persecuted. Nowadays, he said, they exerted an influence not only on the Catholic Church, but, through Freemasonry, even on the Protestants. In fact, the Jews were always the "machers" in the Masonic lodges, and plotted an international conspiracy, under the guise of liberty, fraternity, and equality. Sebottendorff mouthed the usual attitudes of volkisch writers toward Freemasons, who have traditionally been associated with the forces of liberalism. The Pan-Germans pledged themselves to combat the "world conspiracy" being led by "Freemasons and international Jewry."
However, Sebottendorff had a love-hate relationship with the Freemasons. They were the prototype for most secret organizations. "The old Freemasonry,"he said, "had been a keeper of secrets which they had The Thule Society learned from the Aryan wisdom and from the alchemists, and which concerned itself with the building of cathedrals." Naturally, he supposed, when the cathedrals were all built, the Masonic guilds had died out, and with them, the Aryan wisdom.
Like other occultists, Sebottendorff accepted the view that the medieval master builder knew more than just the secrets of his trade. Many of the European cathedrals, four hundred years in construction, exemplified, in esoteric circles, the occult symbolism. As a modern Freemason, Delmar Duane Darrah, described it in The History and Evolution of Freemasonry:
Everywhere was the mystic number. The Trinity was proclaimed by the nave and the aisle (multiplied sometimes to the other sacred number, seven), the three richly ornamented recesses of the portal, the three towers. The rose over the west was the Unity, the whole building was a Cross. The altar with its decorations announced the real perpetual Presence. The solemn crypt below represented the underworld, the soul of man in darkness and the shadow of death, the body awaiting the resurrection.
Even the uninitiated could feel the power of the symbolism underlying the great cathedrals.
Sebottendorff recognized that for the Mason himself, the work of building cathedrals was symbolic of and important to the soul's journey, as all work was. But, he said, "after the Thirty Years' War, Juda started Freemasonry again," with a difference. An article in the July 21, 1918, edition of Runen gives Sebottendorff's views on the antithesis between modern Freemasonry and the Aryan wisdom:
We look at our world as a product of the people. The Freemason looks at it as a product of conditions.
We don't acknowledge the brotherhood of people, only blood brotherhood. We want the freedom, not of herds, but of duty. We hate the propaganda of equality. Struggle is the father of all things. Equality is death. . . .
For Sebottendorff, the modern Freemason, like the Jew, was a parasite, unbending, incapable of change—ironic, considering the reputation for liberalism of the Freemason and Jew, and the conservatism of racist nationalists. All the same, he borrowed liberally from the Freemasons, as well as from Madame Blavatsky, perhaps influenced by her boldness as much as by her Theosophy.
Sebottendorff, born with the less glamorous name of Adam Rudolf Glauer to a Silesian locomotive conductor in Hoyerswerda, on November 9, 1875, the same year that Countess Blavatsky was launching her Theosophical Society in America, became first a merchant seaman. At twenty-six, he transplanted himself to Turkey, and became a Turkish citizen. In 1909, he had the good fortune to be adopted by an Austrian baron named Heinrich von Sebottendorff, in Istanbul, according to Turkish law. Rudolf was badly wounded in the Balkan War and came back to Breslau in 1913. The adoption was contested in Germany, and in 1920 the last remaining members of the Sebottendorff family readopted him in Baden-Baden.
During his sojourn in Turkey, with his sinecure as engineer-cumsupervisor of a substantial estate, he had been able to spend time reading Oriental philosophy and Theosophical writings, as well as engaging in Sufi meditation.
He acknowledged that he had been a Knight of the Masonic Order of Constantine. Turkish Freemasonry, it seemed, had kept the ancient Aryan wisdom intact. "It must be shown," said Sebottendorff, "that Oriental Freemasonry still retains faithfully even today the ancient teachings of wisdom forgotten by modern Freemasonry, whose Constitution of 1717 was a departure from the true way."
By 1918 he had formed his own lodge, the Thule Society, and elevated himself to the rank of Grand Master.
One of his first acts was to place an advertisement in the local paper, inviting men to a meeting. Those who responded were sent a letter, predicting the imminent collapse of Germany if racial intermarriage were not halted. Each prospective member was to be on probation for one year. The initiation fee was twenty marks; the quarterly Ardensnacht, ten marks. The applicant was required to fill out a form declaring that, to the best of his knowledge, not a drop of Jewish or Negro blood flowed through his or his wife's veins. On returning this, he was sent a questionnaire and asked for a photograph. A most thorough questionnaire, inquiring into such intimacies as the amount of hair on various parts of the body and asking, if possible, for an imprint of the sole of the foot on a separate piece of paper. "We then tested for race purity," says Sebottendorff, "and started an inquiry." The one-year probationary period was only the first The Thule Society level in the member's initiation. He had to take a ritualistic vow of absolute obedience and loyalty to the Master of the lodge. "Symbolically," said Sebottendorff, "it was the return of the lost Aryan to the German Halgedom."
Sebottendorff did not need to invent anything. Inspired by Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine, he respun the age-old myth of Atlantis, calling it Thule. Like Atlantis, Thule was believed by occultists to have been the magic center of a vanished civilization. Madame Blavatsky speculated that it had been swept away in the first Deluge, 850,000 years ago. Compared with it, the much more recent Noah's Flood had been a puddle, and mythical, besides. One could get some idea of the appearance of the inhabitants of the island of Atlantis by studying the colossal statues at Easter Island. Here, Madame Blavatsky believed, were the relics of the giants of the Fourth Race; only this Atlantean being deserved to be called "MAN," for only he was completely human. After him, the Fall. Among other things, the Fall supposedly cost him his invaluable third eye, which gave him spiritual insight.
What had caused the Fall? Tucked away in The Secret Doctrine is the answer: The Atlanteans had mated with semi-human beings. Anticipating the argument that this was contrary to nature, she argued: "Esoteric science replies to this that it was in the very beginnings of physical man. Since then, Nature has changed her ways, and sterility is the only result of the crime of man's bestiality. . . ."
In the chaos and distress of Germany after World War I, with the occultist boom, the German racist groups seized upon mystical speculations of this sort and wove them into a myth of the master race. Sebottendorff transposed Blavatsky's complicated cosmology, by which she had sought to confound the evolutionists. In place of her sub-races who had extinguished the "Flames" by "long generations of bestiality," ruining it for the Aryans, he taught members of Thule that the purity of their blood had been defiled by the Jews. Thus, as his predecessors, List and Lanz, had done, Sebottendorff gave status to the lower and middle classes, who must have fantasized wistfully of having aristocratic blood—the only sure way to amount to something in that time and place. Not only did this mystical doctrine elevate them to potential Aryan supermen (the dormant occult powers would reawaken in the Aryan people in the twentieth century, with the appearance of "supermen" who would restore the German folk to their ancient glory and lead them in conquering the world), but it released them from the binding strictures of the Judeo-Christian morality, which had been, after all, inspired by the enemy, and calculated to rob the pagan heroes of their vitality.
With the old order going down to destruction, people felt threatened on all sides by the specter of "progress",the frighteningly rapid growth of alien populations in the cities and the advent of mass production and modern technology—and, above all, the feeling that an imminent revolution would come to turn everything upside-down.
Sebottendorff owed a considerable part of his success to these fears. He was an accomplished astrologer and magus. His mission, as he saw it, was to reveal certain basic esoteric secrets, to counteract a vast network of alchemists and Freemasons and Jews who had hatched a plot of monstrous dimensions to undermine the civilized world. The existing religious institutions had apparently grown too weak to make any unified effort to resist. There was only one way to avoid the chaos that would throw everything into the abyss, and that was the intervention of the spiritual chiefs in the West.
The ideology of purity of the blood was founded on the esoteric alchemical theory of the Grand Work. It was necessary for Sebottendorff to prepare suitable Aryan candidates for their proper place in a mystical hierarchy. Therefore, he taught them certain mystico-magical exercises which the French occult scholar Rene Alleau defines as
a Yoga founded on the repetition of certain syllables during periods determined by the synodic revolution of the moon and in association with signs of the hand and passes that had for a goal capturing the most subtle radiations of the original force for the purpose of integrating them into the human body and to spiritualize matter into universal energy.
This is reminiscent of the conjurations and incantations which occultists have always used in the practice of the black arts. Alleau points out:
For example, to make the sign "I" one closes the right hand and extends the index finger toward the outside of the closed palm. The sign "A" is represented by the hand held so that all the fingers are situated on one plane, while the thumb forms, with the index finger, a right angle. ...
These movements of the hand are then held at various parts of the body—neck, chest, stomach. One concentrates mentally on these gestures and the repeated syllables until, little by little, according to Alleau, an abnormal heat increases progressively and is conducted to different points in the body. At the same time, changes in the senses of taste and smell are observed, and ultimately "the disciple will see a black shadow that marks the end of the first part of the work."
When that happens, "the day is celebrated like the beginning of a new life, and the disciple receives his lodge name. ..."
The initiate perceives colors changing, which signifies his subtle transmutation from one phase to the next. "The black of the shadow changes itself to blue, to light red, and to pale green. When the tint has become a luminous green this period is finished."
Next, in conjunction with "passes" of the chest, comes a glaring white. Alleau says:
After the "ventral posture," these mystico-magical exercises end in the elaboration of a shadow of a pomegranate red. "The Oriental Mason has become the perfect master. The cubic stone is entirely shaped." The Oriental initiates . . . name these tasks of the "spiritual Work" the "Science of the Key" and name themselves the "Sons of the Key."
That there is a colored light-field around human bodies and that the colors change with changing spiritual development is an old esoteric belief. These colors, or auras, are allegedly visible to clairvoyants and sensitives. The colors, while presumably present for these people, are also symbolic, and there are varying interpretations as to the significance of each.
All of Sebottendorff's rituals had as their aim one effect, the same as that of other esoteric groups: dissolving the "small self" so that the "divine self" could become manifest. The teaching holds that there is a world beyond the senses which can be reached with proper preparation. It is not material. The occultist believes he can ascend to it in various stages, each of which has its own particular pitfalls. It is certainly not for everyone. A great effort of will is necessary. So is courage. It is not possible to get anywhere by moving haphazardly from one stage to the next. One must observe the strictest protocol and techniques. For this, of course, the services of a master are absolutely indispensable. Demons lie in wait everywhere, and the journey is most perilous. Sebottendorff taught:
Once come to the end of our training, we sense our terrestrial body becoming more and more a stranger to us. We cross beyond it. We see distinctly that it has become dust and ashes. It is the lowest point that can be attained, that where the shadows of death and their terrors involve us. It is for this reason that the ancient Oriental Freemasons received into their community nothing but courageous men because the tests reserved for the neophyte were very harsh. Courage and endurance were the two principal virtues that were necessary.
To this end, Sebottendorff exacted from his disciples the cry Sieg Heil ("Glory Hail!"), which symbolizes the kind of blind obedience the Arab formula speaks of when it exhorts the initiate: "Be between the hands of your sheikh like a cadaver in the hands of him who washes him." The master, in esoteric teaching, like the sheikh, is God's emissary. The relationship between disciple and master is particularly meaningful in the occult tradition. The neophyte must place himself completely in the teacher's hands and obey even his most eccentric commands, whether or not those commands do violence to his own individual conscience. There are at least two reasons for this: First, the master is the repository of ancient and secret wisdom which the disciple presumably cannot acquire in any other way, and second, the master seeks deliberately to create an atmosphere in which the disciple's consciousness will be changed. Toward that end, the master is prepared—in fact, it is necessary—to go beyond rational thought and behavior. For this, extremely harsh discipline may be called for.
History provides a number of examples of irrational cults by powerless people who fell under the domination of a powerful master and accomplished his will.
The Assassins, a secret politico-religious order of eleventh-century Islam, made the murder of its enemies a religious duty. An absolute ruler presided over three deputy masters. Under them were the initiated, and then the students, who were only partially acquainted with the secrets of the order. The students in time graduated into the ranks of the initiated. Below the students came the active members of the order, "the devoted ones," young men who were kept in absolute ignorance of the teaching of the sect, but from whom complete obedience was expected. They were the blind instruments in the work of secret political assassination planned by the leaders. The terrorism they spread for two centuries was disproportionately greater than their actual numbers, and the name "Assassin" became associated with dread in the Middle East. They struck down generals, statesmen, and caliphs. They were even hired by contending political factions. The secret of their power lay primarily in the peculiar manner of their training. Before they were assigned to their tasks, the disciples were stupefied by means of hashish ("Assassin" is just the English analogue of the Arabic hashshashin, one who is addicted to hashish), and, while in an ecstatic state, plunged into sensual pleasure, as a foretaste of the bliss which would be theirs in paradise if they faithfully followed the orders of their superlords. The training was so marvelously effective that the young men were indifferent to the threat of death, which gave them a considerable edge over their opponents.
The Thugs of India were comparable. A religious fraternity of Hindu origin, they were known to commit murders in honor of the goddess Kali as early as 1290, and lived chiefly on plunder. (Thug=conceal, hence a cheat in Sanskrit.) They were highly organized gangs traveling about India for more than three hundred years. They had a jargon and signs, and the character of their assassinations conformed to certain ancient religious rites, pointing back to the destructive power of nature. Through spies, they would learn of wealthy people undertaking a journey and strangle them with a cloth. Another class of Thugs murdered people in charge of children and then sold the children into slavery. They really formed a caste, hereditary for the most part, although a few recruits were admitted from outside. A number of Muhammadans joined. But no washermen, sweepers, musicians, poets, blacksmiths, carpenters, oil vendors, cripples, or lepers could become Thugs. After each murder, there would be a special ritual in honor of Kali, the feminine aspect of nature's demonic power.
In addition to all the other dangers, then, the disciple of an esoteric group runs the real danger of falling victim to a domination which may indeed leave him little more than a living cadaver.
Like all other such groups, Thule had an inner circle and an outer circle. Both were involved in raising their consciousness to an awareness of nonhuman intelligences in the universe and in trying to achieve means of communicating with these intelligences. Some writers have speculated that the inner circle were Satanists, who practiced black magic. Satanism is, of course, not unknown in esoteric circles. It is simply the crooked path to self-transcendence. There is even a philosophical rationale, Gnostic in origin: Since the world's ways are illusory and evil, the creation of Satan, all worldly behavior is equally sinful. The occultist, therefore, has two choices open to him. He can either become an ascetic and renounce the world or, since he recognizes the non-materiality of the divine nature, he may feel morally free to defy convention and indulge his passions to the full.
Whether Thule members chose the "left-hand path" or not, it is certain that, like other occult groups, they aped Freemasonry. One reason why secret societies like Thule imitated the earlier prototype, despite their enmity toward it, was that it had a history of guarding ancient secrets. In a series of pamphlets published in Germany in the early seventeenth century, at a time when the upheavals of the Renaissance and Reformation had called into question many verities, this mysterious fraternity announced that it possessed spiritual knowledge of supernatural truths which could be revealed only to specially prepared initiates. It became fashionable for wise men to belong to the Freemasons, and their rituals and techniques were widely copied by other groups.
Thule gave its members a set of symbols and a place to voice their alienation. In exchange for obedience, it promised protection. In the face of the unstable economic and social conditions, the initiate received assurance that there were forces which, through magic, he could make work for him. More important and immediately satisfying, the elaborate hierarchy in which the initiate advanced only if he did as he was told meant that one could at least control other people and assert his superiority over them. Membership in Thule set one apart from nonmembers, inferior beings. The advantage that accrued to Thule members more than made up for the totalitarian aspects: Without having to make independent decisions, they could become an elite cadre whose task was nothing less than saving the world.
To deal with that task, the Thule Society became the active political branch of the Germanenorden after the war. Without undue modesty, Sebottendorff observed of his branch: "This decision was important, for Bavaria has thereby become the cradle of the National Socialist movement."
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1 comment:
I call this horse shit. Germany was THE only prosperous nation while the rest of the world suffered under a fabricated "great depression". So the same scum bags who collapsed the worlds economy, instituted their fiat currency and confiscated everyone's gold without compensation are the same scum bags that wrote the history you believe in. Lets not forget that the jews were removed from over 100 other countries prior to Hitler doing the same. The prescribed holocaust is fictitious made for people like this author to accept false narratives and accept the Palestinian suffering because the jews are gods chosen people and deserve their biblical land. The jews are notoriously lazy, corrupt, demonic and basically socially unacceptable. Its been this way for thousands of years. Currently, they have enough wealth to buy acceptance while they manipulate the world.
Secondly, giants are a part of history and did exist. There is evidence even here in America of their existence. To use Giants as some sort of evidence for a belief in an occult is ludicrous. Go research written history of the Spanish Conquistadors who visited this land. Research the archeological excavations of the mounds in America.
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