Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sat Jun 20, 2015 11:56 pm

Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult
by Dusty Sklar
© 1977 by Dusty Sklar

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Image

For my mother and father and for Dave, Steve, Lisa, and Joe

Most important, the central doctrine of nazism, that the Jew was evil and had to be exterminated, had its origin in the Gnostic position that there were two worlds, one good and one evil, one dark and one light, one materialistic and one spiritual.... The mystical teachings of Guido von List, Lanz von Liebenfels, and Rudolf von Sebottendorff were modern restatements of Gnosticism.

When the apocalyptic promise of Christ's resurrection was broken, the Gnostics sought to return men to God by another route, more Oriental than Hellenist. They devised a dualistic cosmology to set against the teachings of the early Christian Church, which, they claimed, were only common deceptions, unsuited for the wise. The truth was esoteric. Only the properly initiated could appreciate it. It belonged to a secret tradition which had come down through certain mystery schools. The truth was, God could never become man. There were two separate realms -- one spiritual, the other material. The spiritual realm, created by God, was all good; the material realm, created by the demiurge, all evil. Man needed to be saved, not from Original Sin, but from enslavement to matter. For this, he had to learn the mystical arts. Thus Gnosticism became a source for the occult tradition.

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. He was opposed to the New Testament God. The Cathars tried to eliminate the Old Testament from Church theology and condemned Judaism as a work of Satan's, whose aim was to tempt men away from the spirit. Jehovah, they said, was the god of an earth "waste and void," with darkness "upon the face of the deep." Was he not cruel and capricious? They quoted Scripture to prove it. The New Testament God, on the other hand, was light. He declared that "there is neither male nor female," for everyone was united in Christ. These two gods, obviously, had nothing in common.

The synagogue was regarded as profane by Christians. The Cathars -- themselves considered heretical by the Church -- castigated Catholics for refusing to purge themselves of Jewish sources; Church members often blamed the [Cathar] Christian heresy on Jewish mysticism, which was considered an inspiration for Gnostic sorcery.

But Gnostic cosmology, though officially branded "false," pervaded the thinking of the Church. The Jews were widely thought to be magicians. It was believed that they could cause rain, and when there was a drought, they were encouraged to do so. Despite the displeasure of the Roman Popes, Christians, when they were in straitened circumstances, practiced Jewish customs, even frequenting synagogues.

This sheds light on an otherwise incomprehensible recurring theme within Nazi literature, as, for example, "The Earth-Centered Jew Lacks a Soul," by one of the chief architects of Nazi dogma, Alfred Rosenberg, who held that whereas other people believe in a Hereafter and in immortality, the Jew affirms the world and will not allow it to perish. The Gnostic secret is that the spirit is trapped in matter, and to free it, the world must be rejected. Thus, in his total lack of world-denial, the Jew is snuffing out the inner light, and preventing the millennium:

Where the idea of the immortal dwells, the longing for the journey or the withdrawal from temporality must always emerge again; hence, a denial of the world will always reappear. And this is the meaning of the non-Jewish peoples: they are the custodians of world-negation, of the idea of the Hereafter, even if they maintain it in the poorest way. Hence, one or another of them can quietly go under, but what really matters lives on in their descendants. If, however, the Jewish people were to perish, no nation would be left which would hold world-affirmation in high esteem -- the end of all time would be here.

... the Jew, the only consistent and consequently the only viable yea-sayer to the world, must be found wherever other men bear in themselves ... a compulsion to overcome the world.... On the other hand, if the Jew were continually to stifle us, we would never be able to fulfill our mission, which is the salvation of the world, but would, to be frank, succumb to insanity, for pure world-affirmation, the unrestrained will for a vain existence, leads to no other goal. It would literally lead to a void, to the destruction not only of the illusory earthly world but also of the truly existent, the spiritual. Considered in himself the Jew represents nothing else but this blind will for destruction, the insanity of mankind. It is known that Jewish people are especially prone to mental disease. "Dominated by delusions," said Schopenhauer about the Jew.

... To strip the world of its soul, that and nothing else is what Judaism wants. This, however, would be tantamount to the world's destruction.

This remarkable statement, seemingly the rantings of a lunatic, expresses the Gnostic theme that the spirit of man, essentially divine, is imprisoned in an evil world. The way out of this world is through rejection of it. But the Jew alone stands in the way. Behind all the talk about "the earth-centered Jew" who "lacks a soul"; about the demonic Jew who will despoil the Aryan maiden; about the cabalistic work of the devil in Jewish finance; about the sinister revolutionary Jewish plot to take over the world and cause the decline of civilization, there is the shadow of ancient Gnosticism.

-- Gods & Beasts: The Nazis & the Occult, by Dusty Sklar


Adam, as the supposed great “Progenitor of the human race,” is, as Adam Kadmon, made in the image of God — a priapic image, therefore. The Hebrew words sacr and n’cabvah are, literally translated, lingham (phallus) and yoni, notwithstanding their translation in the Bible (Genesis i. v. 27.) “male and female.” As said there “God creates ‘Man in his own image’ . . . . . in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them,” the androgyne AdamKadmon. Now this Kabalistic name is not that of a living man, nor even of a human or divine Being, but of the two sexes or organs of procreation, called in Hebrew with that usual sincerity of language pre-eminently Biblical, sacr and n’cabvah; these two being, therefore, the image under which the “Lord God” appeared usually to his chosen people. That this is so, is now undeniably proven by almost all the symbologists and Hebrew scholars as well as by the Kabala. Therefore Adam is in one sense Jehovah. This makes plain another general tradition in the East mentioned in Gregorie’s “Notes and Observations upon several passages in Scripture” (1684. Vol. 1 pp. 120-21) and quoted by Hargrave Jennings in his Phallicism: “That Adam was commanded by God that his dead body should be kept above ground till committed to the middle of the earth by a priest of the most High God.” Therefore, “Noah daily prayed in the ark before the BODY OF ADAM,” or before the Phallus in the ark, or Holy of Holies, again. He who is a Kabalist and accustomed to the incessant permutation of Biblical names, once they are interpreted numerically and symbolically, will understand what is meant. Jehovah, from the two words of which his name is composed, “makes up the original idea of male-female as birth-originator, for he was the membrum virile and Houah was Eve.” So . . . “the perfect one, as originator of measures, takes also the form of birth origin, as hermaphrodite one; hence the phallic use of form.” (“Source of Measures,” 159). ...

The above affords, then, a key to the said traditions. Noah, a divine permutation, the supposed Saviour of Humanity, who carries in his ark or argha (the moon), the germs of all living things, worships before the “body of Adam,” which body is the image of, and a Creator itself. Hence Adam is called the “Prophet of the Moon,” the Argha or “Holy of Holies” of the (Yodh). This also shows the origin of the Jewish popular belief that the face of Moses is in the moon — i.e., the spots in the Moon. For Moses and Jehovah are once more permutations, as has been shown Kabalistically....

The “Holy of Holies,” both Kabalistic and Rabbinical, are thus shown as an international symbol, and common property. Neither has originated with the Hebrews; but owing to the too realistic handling of the half-initiated Levites, the symbol has with them acquired a significance which it hardly has with any other people to this day, and which it was originally never meant to have by the true Kabalist. The Lingham and Yoni of the modern average Hindu is, on the face of it, of course, no better than the Rabbinical “Holy of Holies,” — but it is no worse; and this is a point gained on the Christian traducers of the Asiatic religious philosophies. For, in such religious myths, in the hidden symbolism of a creed and philosophy, the spirit of the tenets propounded ought to decide their relative value. And who will say, that, examined either way, this so-called “Wisdom,” applied solely to the uses and benefit of one little nation, has ever developed in it anything like national ethics. The Prophets are there, to show the walk in life, before, during, and after the days of Moses, of the chosen but “stiff-necked” people. That they have had at one time the Wisdom-Religion and use of the universal language and its symbols at their disposal and in their possession, is proved by the same esotericism existing to this day in India with regard to the “Holy of Holies.” This, as said, was and still is the passage through the “golden” cow in the same stooping position as the one shown in the gallery of the pyramid, which identified man with Jehovah in Hebrew esotericism. The whole difference lies in the Spirit of Interpretation. With the Hindus as with the ancient Egyptians that spirit was and is entirely metaphysical and psychological; with the Hebrews it was realistic and physiological. It pointed to the first sexual separation of the human race (Eve giving birth to Cain-Jehovah, as shown in the “Source of Measures”); to the consummation of terrestrial physiological union and conception (as in the allegory of Cain shedding Abel’s blood — Habel, the feminine principle) and — childbearing; a process shown to have begun in the Third Race, or with Adam’s THIRD son, Seth, with whose son Henoch, men began to call themselves Jehovah or Jah-hovah, the male Jod and Havah or Eve — to wit, male and female beings. Thus the difference lies in the religious and ethical feeling, but the two symbols are identical. There is no doubt that, with the fully initiated Judaean Tanaim, the inner sense of the symbolism was as holy in its abstraction as with the ancient Aryan Dwijas. The worship of the “god in the ark” dates only from David; and for a thousand years Israel knew of no phallic Jehovah. And now the old Kabala, edited and re-edited, has become tainted with it.

With the ancient Aryans the hidden meaning was grandiose, sublime, and poetical, however much the external appearance of their symbol may now militate against the claim. The ceremony of passing through the Holy of Holies (now symbolized by the cow), in the beginning through the temple Hiranya gharba (the radiant Egg) — in itself a symbol of Universal, abstract nature — meant spiritual conception and birth, or rather the re-birth of the individual and his regeneration: the stooping man at the entrance of the Sanctum Sanctorum, ready to pass through the matrix of mother nature, or the physical creature ready to re-become the original spiritual Being, pre-natal MAN. 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. For the Aryan, the symbol represented the divorce of Spirit from matter, its merging into and return to its primal Source; for the Semite, the wedlock of spiritual man with material female nature, the physiological being taking pre-eminence over the psychological and the purely immaterial.

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. They had made a bargain, through their father Jacob, with their tribal deity, self-exalted above all others, and a covenant that his “seed shall be as the dust of the earth”; and that deity could have no better image henceforth than that of the symbol of generation, and, as representation, a number and numbers.

Carlyle has wise words for both these nations. With the Hindu Aryan — the most metaphysical and spiritual people on earth — religion has ever been, in his words, “an everlasting lode-star, that beams the brighter in the heavens the darker here on earth grows the night around him.” The religion of the Hindu detaches him from this earth; therefore, even now, the cow-symbol is one of the grandest and most philosophical among all others in its inner meaning. To the “MASTERS” and “Lords” of European potencies — the Israelites — certain words of Carlyle apply still more admirably; for them “religion is a wise prudential feeling grounded on mere calculation” — and it was so from its beginnings. Having burdened themselves with it, Christian nations feel bound to defend and poetise it, at the expense of all other religions.

But it was not so with the ancient nations. For them the passage entrance and the sarcophagus in the King’s chamber meant regeneration — not generation. It was the most solemn symbol, a Holy of Holies, indeed, wherein were created immortal Hierophants and “Sons of God” — never mortal men and Sons of lust and flesh — as now in the hidden sense of the Semite Kabalist. The reason for the difference in the views of the two races is easy to account for. The Aryan Hindu belongs to the oldest races now on earth; the Semite Hebrew to the latest. One is nearly one million years old; the other is a small sub-race some 8,000 years old and no more.


But Phallic worship has developed only with the gradual loss of the keys to the inner meaning of religious symbols; and there was a day when the Israelites had beliefs as pure as the Aryans have. But now Judaism, built solely on Phallic worship, has become one of the latest creeds in Asia, and theologically a religion of hate and malice toward everyone and everything outside themselves. Philo Judaeus shows what was the genuine Hebrew faith. The sacred Writings, he says, prescribe what we ought to do . . . commanding us to hate the heathen and their laws and institutions. They did hate Baal or Bacchus worship publicly, but left its worst features to be followed secretly; and it is with the Talmudic Jews that the grand symbols of nature were the most profaned. With them, as now shown by the discovery of the key to the correct Bible reading — Geometry, the fifth divine Science (“fifth” — because it is the fifth key in the series of the Seven Keys to the Universal esoteric language and symbology) was desecrated, and by them applied to conceal the most terrestrial and grossly sexual mysteries, wherein both Deity and religion were degraded.[/b]

We are told that it is just the same with our Brahma-prajapati, with Osiris and all other creative gods. Quite so, when their rites are judged exoterically and externally; the reverse when their inner meaning is unveiled, as we see. The Hindu Lingham is identical with “Jacob’s Pillar” — most undeniably. But the difference, as said, seems to consist in that the esoteric significance of the Lingham was too truly sacred and metaphysical to be revealed to the profane and the vulgar; hence its superficial appearance was left to the speculations of the mob. Nor would the Aryan Hierophant and Brahmin, in their proud exclusiveness and the satisfaction of their knowledge, go to the trouble of concealing its primeval nakedness under cunningly devised fables; whereas the Rabbi, having interpreted the symbol to suit his own tendencies, had to veil the crude significance; and this served a double purpose — that of keeping his secret to himself and of exalting himself in his supposed monotheism over the heathen, whom his Law commanded him to hate. A commandment now gladly accepted by the Christian too, in spite of another and later commandment — “love each other.” Both India and Egypt had and have their sacred lotuses, symbolic of the same “Holy of Holies” — the Lotus growing in the water, a double feminine symbol — the bearer of its own seed and root of all. Viraj and Horus are both male symbols, emanating from androgyne Nature, one from Brahma and his female counterpart Vach, the other, from Osiris and Isis — never from the One infinite God. In the Judaeo-Christian systems it is different. Whereas the lotus, containing Brahma, the Universe, is shown growing out of Vishnu’s navel, the Central point in the Waters of Infinite Space, and whereas Horus springs from the lotus of the Celestial Nile— all these abstract pantheistic ideas are dwarfed and made terrestrially concrete in the Bible: one is almost inclined to say that in the esoteric they are grosser and still more anthropomorphic, than in their exoteric rendering. Take as an example the same symbol, even in its Christian application; the lilies in the hand of the Archangel Gabriel (Luke i. 28). In Hinduism — the “Holy of Holies” is a universal abstraction, whose dramatis personae are Infinite Spirit and Nature; in Christian Judaism, it is a personal God, outside of that Nature, and the human Womb — Eve, Sarah, etc., etc.; hence, an anthropomorphic phallic god, and his image — man.

Thus it is maintained, that with regard to the contents of the Bible, one of two hypotheses has to be admitted. Either behind the symbolic substitute — Jehovah — there was the unknown, incognizable Diety, the Kabalistic Ain-Soph; or, the Jews have been from the beginning, no better than the dead-letter Lingham-worshippers of the India of to-day. We say it was the former; and that, therefore, the secret or esoteric worship of the Jews was the same Pantheism that the Vedantin philosophers are reproached with to-day; Jehovah was a substitute for purposes of an exoteric national faith, and had no importance or reality in the eyes of the erudite priests and philosophers — the Sadducees, the most refined as the most learned of all the Israelite sects, who stand as a living proof with their contemptuous rejection of every belief, save the LAW. For how could those who invented the stupendous scheme now known as the Bible, or their successors who knew, as all Kabalists do, that it was so invented for a popular blind — how could they, we ask, feel reverence for such a phallic symbol and a NUMBER, as Jehovah is shown most undeniably to be in the Kabalistic works? How could anyone worthy of the name of a philosopher, and knowing the real secret meaning of their “pillar of Jacob,” their Bethel, oil-anointed phalli, and their “Brazen Serpent,” worship such a gross symbol, and minister unto it, seeing in it their “Covenant” — the Lord Himself! Let the reader turn to Gemara Sanhedrin and judge. As various writers have shown, and as brutally stated in Hargrave Jennings’ Phallicism (p. 67) “We know from the Jewish records that the Ark contained a table of stone. . . . that stone was phallic, and yet identical with the sacred name Jehovah . . . which written in unpointed Hebrew with four letters, is J-E-V-E or JHVH (the H being merely an aspirate and the same as E). This process leaves us the two letters I and V (in another form U); then if we place the I in the U we have the ‘Holy of Holies’; we also have the Lingha and Yoni and Argha of the Hindus, the Isvara and ‘supreme Lord’; and here we have the whole secret of its mystic and arc-celestial import, confirmed in itself by being identical with the Linyoni (?) of the Ark of the Covenant.”

The Biblical Jews of to-day do not date from Moses but from David — even admitting the identity of the old genuine with the later and remodelled Mosaic scrolls. Before that time their nationality is lost in the mists of prehistoric darkness, the veil from which is now withdrawn as much as we have space to do so. It is only to the days of the Babylonian captivity that the Old Testament may be referred by the most lenient criticism, as the approximately correct views that were current about the days of Moses. Even such fanatical Christians and worshippers of Jehovah as the Rev. Mr. Horne, have to admit the numerous changes and alterations made by the later compilers of the “Book of God,” since it was found by Hilkiah (See “Introduction to the Old Testament,” and also Bishop Colenso’s “Elohistic and Jehovistic writers”); and that “the Pentateuch arose out of the primitive or older documents, by means of a SUPPLEMENTARY One.” The Elohistic texts were re-written 500 years after the date of Moses; the Jehovistic 800, on the authority of the Bible chronology itself. Hence, it is maintained that the deity, represented as the organ of generation in his pillar form, and as a symbol of the double-sexed organ in the numeral value of the letters of his name, or the Yodh (phallus), and He (the opening, or the Womb) according to Kabalistic authority — is of a far later date than the Elohim symbols and is borrowed from the Pagan exoteric rites; and Jehovah is thus on a par with the Lingham and Yoni found on every road-side in India.

Just as the IAO of the mysteries was distinct from Jehovah, so was the later Iao and Abraxas of some Gnostic sects identical with the god of the Hebrews, who was the same with the Egyptian Horus. This is undeniably proven on “heathen” as on the Gnostic “Christian” gems. In Matter’s collection of such gems there is a “Horus” seated on the lotus, inscribed [[ABRASAXIAO]] (Abraxas Iao) — an address exactly parallel to the so frequent [[EIS ZETS SARAPI]] (Eis zets sarapi) on the contemporary Heathen gems; and therefore only to be translated by “Abraxas is the One Jehovah” (King’s Gnostics, p. 327). But who was Abraxas? As the same author shows — “the numerical or Kabalistic value of the name Abraxas directly refer to the Persian title of the god ‘Mithra,’ Ruler of the year, worshipped from the earliest times under the appellation of Iao.” Thus, the Sun, in one aspect, the moon or the Lunar genius, in another, that generative deity whom the Gnostics saluted as “Thou that presidest over the Mysteries of the Father and the Son, who shinest in the night-time, holding the second rank, the first Lord of Death.”

It is only in his capacity of the genius of the moon, the latter being credited in the old cosmogony with being the parent of our Earth, that Jehovah could ever be regarded as the creator of our globe and its Heaven, namely, the Firmament.

The knowledge of all this will be no proof, however, to the average bigot. Missionaries will go on with the most virulent attacks on the religions of India, and Christians read with the same benighted smile of satisfaction as ever these preposterously unjust words of Coleridge, “It is highly worthy of observation that the inspired writings received by Christians are distinguishable from all other books PRETENDING TO INSPIRATION, from the Scriptures of the Brahmins, and even from the Koran, in their strong and frequent recommendation of TRUTH (! !). . . .”

-- The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena P. Blavatsky


In 1954, Chaim Cohen, Attorney General of Israel, declaims to Judge Halevi about these same slaughtered Jews:

"For those and millions of Jews like them there came true the old curse, 'And, lo, they were meant but to be taken like sheep for slaughter, for killing, for destruction, for crushing and shame.' There was no spirit in them. The Jewish masses in Warsaw were in the same condition."


-- Perfidy, by Ben Hecht


“Now I shall tell you about myself, who and what I am! My name is surrounded with such hate and fear that no one can judge what is the truth and what is false, what is history and what myth. Some time you will write about it, remembering your trip through Mongolia and your sojourn at the yurta of the ‘bloody General.’”

He shut his eyes, smoking as he spoke, and tumbling out his sentences without finishing them as though some one would prevent him from phrasing them.

“The family of Ungern von Sternberg is an old family, a mixture of Germans with Hungarians—Huns from the time of Attila. My warlike ancestors took part in all the European struggles. They participated in the Crusades and one Ungern was killed under the walls of Jerusalem, fighting under Richard Coeur de Lion. Even the tragic Crusade of the Children was marked by the death of Ralph Ungern, eleven years old. When the boldest warriors of the country were despatched to the eastern border of the German Empire against the Slavs in the twelfth century, my ancestor Arthur was among them, Baron Halsa Ungern Sternberg. Here these border knights formed the order of Monk Knights or Teutons, which with fire and sword spread Christianity among the pagan Lithuanians, Esthonians, Latvians and Slavs. Since then the Teuton Order of Knights has always had among its members representatives of our family. When the Teuton Order perished in the Grunwald under the swords of the Polish and Lithuanian troops, two Barons Ungern von Sternberg were killed there. Our family was warlike and given to mysticism and asceticism.


“During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries several Barons von Ungern had their castles in the lands of Latvia and Esthonia. Many legends and tales lived after them. Heinrich Ungern von Sternberg, called ‘Ax,’ was a wandering knight. The tournaments of France, England, Spain and Italy knew his name and lance, which filled the hearts of his opponents with fear. He fell at Cadiz ‘neath the sword of a knight who cleft both his helmet and his skull. Baron Ralph Ungern was a brigand knight between Riga and Reval. Baron Peter Ungern had his castle on the island of Dago in the Baltic Sea, where as a privateer he ruled the merchantmen of his day.

“In the beginning of the eighteenth century there was also a well-known Baron Wilhelm Ungern, who was referred to as the ‘brother of Satan’ because he was an alchemist. My grandfather was a privateer in the Indian Ocean, taking his tribute from the English traders whose warships could not catch him for several years. At last he was captured and handed to the Russian Consul, who transported him to Russia where he was sentenced to deportation to the Transbaikal. I am also a naval officer but the Russo-Japanese War forced me to leave my regular profession to join and fight with the Zabaikal Cossacks. I have spent all my life in war or in the study and learning of Buddhism. My grandfather brought Buddhism to us from India and my father and I accepted and professed it. In Transbaikalia I tried to form the order of Military Buddhists for an uncompromising fight against the depravity of revolution.”

He fell into silence and began drinking cup after cup of tea as strong and black as coffee.

“Depravity of revolution! . . . Has anyone ever thought of it besides the French philosopher, Bergson, and the most learned Tashi Lama [Panchen Lama] in Tibet?”

The grandson of the privateer, quoting scientific theories, works, the names of scientists and writers, the Holy Bible and Buddhist books, mixing together French, German, Russian and English, continued:

“In the Buddhistic and ancient Christian books we read stern predictions about the time when the war between the good and evil spirits must begin. Then there must come the unknown ‘Curse’ which will conquer the world, blot out culture, kill morality and destroy all the people. Its weapon is revolution. During every revolution the previously experienced intellect-creator will be replaced by the new rough force of the destroyer. He will place and hold in the first rank the lower instincts and desires. Man will be farther removed from the divine and the spiritual. The Great War proved that humanity must progress upward toward higher ideals; but then appeared that Curse which was seen and felt by Christ, the Apostle John, Buddha, the first Christian martyrs, Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Goethe and Dostoyevsky. It appeared, turned back the wheel of progress and blocked our road to the Divinity. Revolution is an infectious disease and Europe making the treaty with Moscow deceived itself and the other parts of the world. The Great Spirit put at the threshold of our lives Karma, who knows neither anger nor pardon. He will reckon the account, whose total will be famine, destruction, the death of culture, of glory, of honor and of spirit, the death of states and the death of peoples. I see already this horror, this dark, mad destruction of humanity.”...

Well, there isn’t much left and this happens to be the most interesting. I was telling you that I wanted to found an order of military Buddhists in Russia. For what? For the protection of the processes of evolution of humanity and for the struggle against revolution, because I am certain that evolution leads to the Divinity and revolution to bestiality. But I worked in Russia! In Russia, where the peasants are rough, untutored, wild and constantly angry, hating everybody and everything without understanding why. They are suspicious and materialistic, having no sacred ideals. Russian intelligents live among imaginary ideals without realities. They have a strong capacity for criticising everything but they lack creative power. Also they have no will power, only the capacity for talking and talking. With the peasants, they cannot like anything or anybody. Their love and feelings are imaginary. Their thoughts and sentiments pass without trace like futile words. My companions, therefore, soon began to violate the regulations of the Order. Then I introduced the condition of celibacy, the entire negation of woman, of the comforts of life, of superfluities, according to the teachings of the Yellow Faith; and, in order that the Russian might be able to live down his physical nature, I introduced the limitless use of alcohol, hasheesh and opium. Now for alcohol I hang my officers and soldiers; then we drank to the ‘white fever,’ delirium tremens. I could not organize the Order but I gathered round me and developed three hundred men wholly bold and entirely ferocious. Afterward they were heroes in the war with Germany and later in the fight against the Bolsheviki, but now only a few remain.”...

“During the War we saw the gradual corruption of the Russian army and foresaw the treachery of Russia to the Allies as well as the approaching danger of revolution. To counteract this latter a plan was formed to join together all the Mongolian peoples which had not forgotten their ancient faiths and customs into one Asiatic State, consisting of autonomous tribal units, under the moral and legislative leadership of China, the country of loftiest and most ancient culture. Into this State must come the Chinese, Mongols, Tibetans, Afghans, the Mongol tribes of Turkestan, Tartars, Buriats, Kirghiz and Kalmucks. This State must be strong, physically and morally, and must erect a barrier against revolution and carefully preserve its own spirit, philosophy and individual policy. If humanity, mad and corrupted, continues to threaten the Divine Spirit in mankind, to spread blood and to obstruct moral development, the Asiatic State must terminate this movement decisively and establish a permanent, firm peace. This propaganda even during the War made splendid progress among the Turkomans, Kirghiz, Buriats and Mongols....”

“Russia turned traitor to France, England and America, signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and ushered in a reign of chaos. We then decided to mobilize Asia against Germany. Our envoys penetrated Mongolia, Tibet, Turkestan and China. At this time the Bolsheviki began to kill all the Russian officers and we were forced to open civil war against them, giving up our Pan-Asiatic plans; but we hope later to awake all Asia and with their help to bring peace and God back to earth. I want to feel that I have helped this idea by the liberation of Mongolia.”

He became silent and thought for a moment.

“But some of my associates in the movement do not like me because of my atrocities and severity,” he remarked in a sad voice. “They cannot understand as yet that we are not fighting a political party but a sect of murderers of all contemporary spiritual culture. Why do the Italians execute the ‘Black Hand’ gang? Why are the Americans electrocuting anarchistic bomb throwers?
and I am not allowed to rid the world of those who would kill the soul of the people? I, a Teuton, descendant of crusaders and privateers, I recognize only death for murderers!”


-- Beasts, Men and Gods, by Ferdinand Ossendowski


Gobineau's [unlike Chamberlain's] was an honest Antisemitism, it was, like Nietzsche's, an historical Antisemitism: it had nothing whatever to do with modern Antisemitism, that movement born from fear, envy, and impotence ... [i]t is an upright, a genuine, a gentlemanly Antisemitism, it is the Antisemitism of the aristocrat, who sees his very blood threatened by revolutionary religions.

-- Oscar Levy, from "Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain", by Dan Stone


Table of Contents:

Opening Pages
1. Hidden Roots
2. Giants in the Earth
3. Gods and Beasts
4. The Thule Society
5. Riffraff into Supermen
6. The Savage Messiah
7. Tibetan Wisdom Meets German Folly
8. Atlantis, the Home of the Master Race
9. The Obedient Man
10. The Black Knights
11. The Children's Crusade
12. Prophets of the Third Reich
13. Jung and the Aryan Unconscious
14. Jehovah as Satan
15. Making an Obedient Mass
16. The Dangers of Occult Thinking
Sources Quoted
Selected Bibliography
Index
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sat Jun 20, 2015 11:57 pm

Grateful acknowledgment is due to the following for permission to quote material which appears in this book:

Grosset & Dunlap, Inc., for excerpts from "Psychotherapy and Political World View" by Kurt Gauger and "The Earth-Centered Jew Lacks a Soul" by Alfred Rosenberg, in Nazi Culture by George Mosse. Copyright © 1966 by Grosset & Dunlap, Inc. Used by permission of Grosset & Dunlap, Inc.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., for excerpts from Hitler by Joachim Fest.

Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. for excerpts from The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer. Copyright 1951 by Eric Hoffer. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

Hoover Institution Press, for excerpts from Heinrich Himmler: A Nazi in the Making by Bradley F. Smith. Reprinted with the permission of the publishers, Hoover Institution Press. Copyright © 1971 by the board of trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

Houghton Mifflin Company, for excerpts from Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler, translated by Ralph Manheim, and The Young Hitler I Knew, by August Kubizek.

New American Library, for excerpts from Prophecy in Our Time, by Martin Ebon. Copyright by Martin Ebon.

The New Republic, for excerpts from" Is Hitler Youth Curable?", by Heinrich Fraenkel. Reprinted by permission of The New Republic, copyright 1944, The New Republic, Inc.

Pantheon Books, for excerpts from The Face of the Third Reich, by Joachim Fest. Copyright © 1970 by Weidenfield & Nicolson, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

Princeton University Press, for excerpts from Political Violence Under the Swastika: 581 Early Nazis, by Peter H. Merkl. Copyright © 1975 by Princeton University Press. For excerpts from C. G. Jung: Letters, I: 1906-1950, edited by Gerhard Adler, in collaboration with Aniela Jaffe, Bollingen Series XCV. Copyright © 1973 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

G. P. Putnam's Sons, for excerpts from Zodiac and Swastika, by Wilhelm Wulff and The Voice of Destruction, by Hermann Rauschning.

The University of Chicago Press, for excerpts from They Thought They Were Free, by Milton Mayer. Copyright 1955 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments

In preparing this book, I have drawn on a wide variety of sources. The bibliography should not be taken as representing the whole of my source material, but rather as a list of suggestions for further reading.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to my husband, David, and my son, Steven, for their encouragement.

Hugh Rawson, my editor, performed the weary task of scrutinizing the manuscript.

Translation assistance was given by Hans Karlsruher.

It is not possible for me to thank all of the members (enchanted and disenchanted) of esoteric groups in America and England for information given in a spirit of cooperation and with a desire to enlarge our understanding of an emotionally charged, controversial subject.

***

... being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune's greedily coveted favors, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity. The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for the mastery....

... in adversity they know not where to turn, but beg and pray for counsel from every passer-by. No plan is then too futile, too absurd, or too fatuous for their adoption....

-- Spinoza
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sat Jun 20, 2015 11:57 pm

CHAPTER I: 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 Free Masons, 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 Germanen Orden, was born, disciples of both Lanz and List joined. The Germanen Orden 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 Germanen Orden, 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 Germanen Orden 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 Germanen Orden and the Thule Society, as well as the Order of the New Templars and the Armanen.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sat Jun 20, 2015 11:59 pm

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 exoticisms 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 paradisical 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 finitude 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.

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 mid-1800'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.

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.

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 all 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. [Italics hers.]


A
As beautifully expressed by P. Christian, the learned author of “The History of Magic” and of “L’Homme Rouge des Tuileries,” the word spoken by, as well as the name of, every individual largely determine his future fate. Why? Because —

— “When our Soul (mind) creates or evokes a thought, the representative sign of that thought is self-engraved upon the astral fluid, which is the receptacle and, so to say, the mirror of all the manifestations of being.

“The sign expresses the thing: the thing is the (hidden or occult) virtue of the sign.

“To pronounce a word is to evoke a thought, and make it present: the magnetic potency of the human speech is the commencement of every manifestation in the Occult World. To utter a Name is not only to define a Being (an Entity), but to place it under and condemn it through the emission of the Word (Verbum), to the influence of one or more Occult potencies. Things are, for every one of us, that which it (the Word) makes them while naming them. The Word (Verbum) or the speech of every man is, quite unconsciously to himself, a blessing or a curse; this is why our present ignorance about the properties or attributes of the idea as well as about the attributes and properties of matter, is often fatal to us.

“Yes, names (and words) are either beneficent or maleficent; they are, in a certain sense, either venomous or health-giving, according to the hidden influences attached by Supreme Wisdom to their elements, that is to say, to the letters which compose them, and the numbers correlative to these letters.”


This is strictly true as an esoteric teaching accepted by all the Eastern Schools of Occultism. In the Sanskrit, as also in the Hebrew and all other alphabets, every letter has its occult meaning and its rationale; it is a cause and an effect of a preceding cause and a combination of these very often produces the most magical effect.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


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 paradisical 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.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sun Jun 21, 2015 12:00 am

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, [Jorg [Georg] Lanz von Liebenfels] Lanz, who wrote under the acronyn 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.

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 Germanen Orden, 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 ace-men 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, Schriittlinge, 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, Briefbucherei der blonden Mannesrechtler ("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, Hider, 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 Hider'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 Rassenwertigkeitindex 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.

He called his major work nothing less than Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-Affligen und dem Gotter-Elektron. Eine Einfuhrung in die alteste und neueste Weltanschauung und eine Rechtfertigung des Furstentumes und des Adels ("Theozoology 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's 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 be 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 Heil 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 Germanen Orden," 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 Germanen Orden 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.

The Svastica, the most sacred and mystic symbol in India, the “Jaina-Cross” as it is now called by the Masons, notwithstanding its direct connection, and even identity with the Christian Cross, has become dishonoured in the same manner. It is the “devil’s sign,” we are told by the Indian missionaries. “Does it not shine on the head of the great Serpent of Vishnu, on the thousand headed Sesha-Ananta, in the depths of Patala, the Hindu Naraka or Hell”? It does: but what is Ananta? As Sesha, it is the almost endless Manvantaric cycle of time, and becomes infinite Time itself, when called Ananta, the great seven-headed Serpent, on which rests Vishnu, the eternal Deity, during Pralayic inactivity. What has Satan to do with this highly metaphysical symbol? The Svastica is the most philosophically scientific of all symbols, as also the most comprehensible. It is the summary in a few lines of the whole work of creation, or evolution, as one should rather say, from Cosmo-theogony down to Anthropogony, from the indivisible unknown Parabrahm to the humble moneron of materialistic science, whose genesis is as unknown to that science as is that of the All-Deity itself. The Svastica is found heading the religious symbols of every old nation. It is the “Worker’s Hammer” in the Chaldean Book of Numbers, the “Hammer” just referred to in the “Book of Concealed Mystery” (Ch. I., §§ 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.), “which striketh sparks from the flint” (Space), those sparks becoming worlds. It is “Thor’s Hammer,” the magic weapon forged by the dwarfs against the Giants, or the pre-cosmic Titanic forces of Nature, which rebel and, while alive in the region of matter, will not be subdued by the Gods, the Agents of Universal Harmony, but have first to be destroyed. This is why the world is formed out of the relics of the murdered Ymir. The Svastica is the Miolnir, the “storm-hammer”; and therefore it is said that when the Ases, the holy gods, after having been purified by fire (the fire of passions and suffering in their life-incarnations), become fit to dwell in Ida in eternal peace, then Miolnir will become useless. This will be when the bonds of Hel (the goddess-queen of the region of the Dead) will bind them no longer, for the kingdom of evil will have passed away. “Surtur’s flames had not destroyed them, nor yet had the raging waters” of the several deluges. . . . . “Then came the sons of Thor. They brought Miolnir with them, no longer as a weapon of war, but as the hammer with which to consecrate the new heaven and the new Earth. . . . . ” [101]

Verily many are its meanings! In the Macrocosmic work, the “Hammer of Creation,” with its four arms bent at right angles, refers to the continual motion and revolution of the invisible Kosmos of Forces. In that of the manifested Kosmos and our Earth, it points to the rotation in the cycles of Time of the world’s axes and their equatorial belts; the two lines forming the Svastica image_il meaning Spirit and Matter, the four hooks suggesting the motion in the revolving cycles. Applied to the Microcosm, Man, it shows him to be a link between heaven and Earth: the right hand being raised at the end of a horizontal arm, the left pointing to the Earth. In the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes, the uplifted right hand is inscribed with the word “Solve,” the left with the word “Coagula.” It is at one and the same time an Alchemical, Cosmogonical, Anthropological, and Magical sign, with seven keys to its inner meaning. It is not too much to say that the compound symbolism of this universal and most suggestive of signs contains the key to the seven great mysteries of Kosmos. Born in the mystical conceptions of the early Aryans, and by them placed at the very threshold of eternity, on the head of the serpent Ananta, it found its spiritual death in the scholastic interpretations of mediaeval Anthropomorphists. It is the Alpha and the Omega of universal creative Force, evolving from pure Spirit and ending in gross Matter. It is also the key to the cycle of Science, divine and human; and he who comprehends its full meaning is for ever liberated from the toils of Mahamaya, the great Illusion and Deceiver. The light that shines from under the divine hammer, now degraded into the mallet or gavel of the Grand Masters of Masonic Lodges, is sufficient to dissipate the darkness of any human schemes or fictions.

How prophetic are the songs of the three Norse Goddesses, to whom the ravens of Odin whisper of the past and the future, as they flutter around in their abode of crystal beneath the flowing river. The songs are all written down in the “Scrolls of Wisdom,” of which many are lost but some still remain: and they repeat in poetical allegory the teachings of the archaic ages. To summarise from Dr. Wagner’s “Asgard and the Gods,” the “renewal of the world,” which is a prophecy about the seventh Race of our Round told in the past tense.

The Miolnir had done its duty in this Round, and: —

“. . . . on the field of Ida, the field of resurrection (for the Fifth Round), the sons of the highest gods assembled, and in them their fathers rose again (the Egos of all their past incarnations). They talked of the Past and the Present, and remembered the wisdom and prophecies of their ancestor which had all been fulfilled. Near them, but unseen of them, was the strong, the mighty One, who rules all things. . . . and ordains the eternal laws that govern the world. They all knew he was there, they felt his presence and his power, but were ignorant of his name. At his command the new Earth rose out of the Waters of Space. To the South above the Field of Ida, he made another heaven called Audlang, and further off, a third, Widblain. Over Gimil’s cave, a wondrous palace was erected, covered with gold and shining bright in the sun.” These are the three gradually ascending planets of our “Chain.” There the Gods were enthroned, as they used to be. . . . From Gimil’s heights (the seventh planet or globe, the highest and the purest), they looked down upon the happy descendants of lif and lifthrasir (the coming Adam and Eve of purified humanity), and signed to them to climb up higher, to rise in knowledge and wisdom, step by step, from one “heaven to another,” until they were at last fit to be united to the Gods in the house of All-Father (p. 305).

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


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 combatting 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 Germanen Orden taught the same.

Before World War I, despite countless leaflets distributed and propaganda spewed out, growth of the Germanen Orden 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-Semitical 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.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sun Jun 21, 2015 12:02 am

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 Germanen Orden 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 Germanen Orden 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 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.


The origin of the rose window may be found in the Roman oculus. An Oculus or circular window is a feature of Classical architecture since the 16th century. They are often denoted by their French name, oeil de boeuf, or "bull's-eye". Oculus is the Latin word for eye.
-- Wikipedia


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....


Secrecy is indispensable in a Mason of whatever Degree. It is the first and almost the only lesson taught to the Entered Apprentice. The obligations which we have each assumed toward every Mason that lives, requiring of us the performance of the most serious and onerous duties toward those personally unknown to us until they demand our aid, -- duties that must be performed, even at the risk of life, or our solemn oaths be broken and violated, and we be branded as false Masons and faithless men, teach us how profound a folly it would be to betray our secrets to those who, bound to us by no tie of common obligation, might, by obtaining them, call on us in their extremity, when the urgency of the occasion should allow us no time for inquiry, and the peremptory mandate of our obligation compel us to do a brother's duty to a base impostor.

-- Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, by Albert Pike


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-cum-supervisor 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 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 nonmateriality 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 Germanen Orden 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.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sun Jun 21, 2015 12:06 am

CHAPTER 5: Riffraff into Supermen

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.
-- Theodor Fritsch


After the war, the democratic regime symbolized, to the volkisch mind, Jewish control. The protest against economic, political, and social difficulties became an "anti-Jewish revolution." Shell-shocked Germans came home after the ordeal of the fighting and the defeat to find chaos and hunger in the streets. They remembered the anti-Semitic propaganda they had heard and read before the war. It was reinforced by new propaganda: The Jew was the anarchist, the Communist, the one who had caused the defeat and would bring down the world. In such an atmosphere of terror, the Thule Society prospered.

It was clear to Sebottendorff that the small room on the Zweigstrasse where the group had been meeting would no longer serve if it was to expand. Now meetings were held every Saturday -- the day of Saturn -- in the elegant Munich hotel Vier Jahreszeiten ("Four Seasons"), whose proprietor was a member of Thule. Sebottendorff rented the rooms of a naval officers' club and adorned them with the Society's arms -- a curved swastika pointing right, plus sword and wreath. The rooms could accommodate three hundred people.

"... the serpent devouring its own tail, emblem of prudence and of Saturn" — emblem of infinity, immortality, and Kronos — “Time” — not the god Saturn or the planet.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


"Here," said Sebottendorff, "objectives could be attained." The consecration of the new meeting place was attended by the chairman and committee of the Germanen Orden's Berlin chapter. They officially made Sebottendorff a representative of theirs and a Master, and accepted the name Thule as a cover for the Orden. A week later, when thirty people were consecrated to the first grade, it was decided that every third Saturday of the month was to be dedicated as a consecration lodge, and on all other Saturdays, talks were to be held. The group was kept busy with meetings, initiations, and excursions at least once a week, as well as talks on such subjects as divining rods, mysticism, and bardic ritual. Every member wore a bronze pin which was designed as a shield upon which were two spears crossing a swastika.

Sebottendorff bought the newspaper Der Munchener Beobachter because he felt that proselytizing against the enemy could not be done as effectively through the spoken word as through the press. Though Der Munchener Beobachter was a sports paper, Sebottendorff was attracted to it for several reasons. The readership was young; it was impossible to start a new paper because of the paper shortage and because the government did not allow new papers to appear; and, most important, "The Jew had no interest in sports, if it did not have any monetary advantage, so the Jew would not buy and read the paper. Therefore, a sports paper could make propaganda without being detected."

Sebottendorff was wrong, of course, but showed no awareness of this, as he went on, blithely contradicting himself: "How right these calculations were is shown by the Jewish ire against the editor. They called the paper itself 'unimportant.'"

The paper had been established in 1887. The former publisher, now deceased, had been a client of the attorney Gaubatz, the Thule member; and Sebottendorff bought the publishing rights from his widow for five thousand marks. The paper had no subscribers and was distributed on the street. Sebottendorff himself was the editor. The first edition was five thousand copies.

Early issues were given over to the exhortation to "keep your blood pure" and to propaganda about the Jew as "parasitic capitalist" and participant in the black market. According to Sebottendorff: "This was something Munich never heard of.... In addition to the big questions, we did not forget the details. We were very critical about everything."

By November 1, 1918, the Thule organization had 1,500 members in all Bavaria, 250 of them in Munich. The paid membership journeyed to Berlin to be indoctrinated in further propaganda.

The meeting on Saturday, November 9, 1918, was a crucial one. The war was ending, the monarchy collapsing. The Jew, Kurt Eisner, had taken control of the Bavarian government two days earlier. A series of revolts had just broken out which promised chaos for the whole country. Munich, in fact, was engulfed in revolution. The old order had proven itself bankrupt, not only in Germany and Austria, but in Russia. The bolshevism which had triumphed there was the big bugbear feared by the middle and upper classes in Germany and Austria. The toppled empire in Germany created a vacuum in which revolutionaries of the right and left fought for domination. Conspirators were everywhere. German radicals looked to Russia for guidance and financial support. Munich was one of the key cities for revolutionary activity, and the little anti-Semitic lodges now consolidated into something like a mass movement.

At the November 9 meeting, Sebottendorff told the members:

Yesterday we lived through the whole breakdown of what was good and holy to us. Instead of our blood-related Kaiser, there now reigns Juda. We have to fight the Jew.... He who cannot follow me, despite his oath of loyalty to me -- he should get out. I won't be angry about it. He who wants to stay with me, he should know that there is no going back, but only forward. He who wants to stay should remember his oath even until his death. I myself assure you and swear to you by the holy sign, listen to the victorious sun. I also will be loyal to you. Trust in me as you have trusted in me before. . . .

He then lapsed into mythological metaphysics, reminding them that their god was Walvater, the self-born power and spirit, whose rune was the Aarune (Aryan; fire; sun; eagle; sun-wheel; swastika) and whose Trinity was Wodan [Wotan], Wili, and We. Lest the members find this a bit obscure, he admonished: "Never would a low-class brain comprehend the unity of a Trinity. Wili is, like We, the polarization [of] Walvater, and Wodan the godly immanent law."

The Trinity originated, he said, from the first creation. It then created the world, and the first human pair. Wodan created the self or spirit of the life power. Wili gave the thought and the will, and We the feeling and emotions.

In the Norse cosmogony it is again the same. “In the beginning was a great abyss (Chaos), neither day nor night existed; the abyss was Ginnungagap, the yawning gulf, without beginning, without end. All Father, the Uncreated, the Unseen, dwelt in the depth of the ‘Abyss’ (Space) and willed, and what was willed came into being.” (See “Asgard and the Gods.”) As in the Hindu cosmogony, the evolution of the universe is divided into two acts: called in India the Prakriti and Padma Creations. Before the warm rays pouring from the “Home of Brightness” awake life in the Great Waters of Space, the Elements of the first creation come into view, and from them is formed the Giant Ymir (also Orgelmir) — primordial matter differentiated from Chaos (literally seething clay). Then comes the cow Audumla, the nourisher, from whom is born Buri (the Producer) who, by Bestla, the daughter of the “Frost-Giants” (the sons of Ymir) had three sons, Odin, Willi and We, or “Spirit,” “Will,” and “Holiness.” (Compare the Genesis of the Primordial Races, in this work.) This was when Darkness still reigned throughout Space, when the Ases, the creative Powers (Dhyan Chohans) were not yet evolved, and the Yggdrasil, the tree of the universe of Time and of Life, had not yet grown, and there was, as yet, no Walhalla, or Hall of Heroes. The Scandinavian legends of creation, of our earth and world, begin with time and human life. All that precedes it is for them “Darkness,” wherein All-Father, the cause of all, dwells.

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


SACRED THREES (Everything in Nature has a threefold aspect)

Three "Ones" from which the whole kosmos emanates: from One emanates number Two, then number Three
Three-tongued flame
Three Secret Orbs (Star Angels)
Three Fires: Spirit, Soul of the World, Body of the Earth
Three Personified Fires: Electric Fire, Solar Fire, Fire Produced by Friction
Three Degrees of Fire: Fire, Air, Sun
Three Rays of the Essence: Matter, Soul, Spirit
Three Strides of Vishnu: Fire, Lightning and Sun in the Earth, Atmosphere and Sky
Three Steps of the Dwarf: Rising Sun, Noon Sun, Setting Sun
Three Suns: Central Sun, Polar Sun, Equatorial Sun
Three Phenomena of the Personified Moon: Diana-Hecate-Luna
Three-fold character of the Moon: Mother, Child, Adult Male
Three phases of the Moon: Waxing, Full, Waning
Three Lights: Objective, Reflected, Abstract;
Three Heavens: Earth, Audlang, Widblain
Three that contain space: Chaos, Theos, Kosmos
Three Periods: Past, Present, Future
Three Periods of Rest: Individual Pralaya, Planetary Pralaya, Solar Pralaya
Three Virgins: Virgo in three different positions
Three Consciousnesses: Thought, Will, Feeling
Three Motions: Heat, Attraction, Repulsion
Three Absolutes: Motion, Abstract Space, Duration
Three Waters: Water, Ice, Steam
Three Hydrogens: Air, Water, Fire
Three Gases: Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen
Three Matters: Air, Water, Earth; Solid, Liquid, Gaseous
Three Elements of Matter: Sulphur, Mercury, Salt
Three births: Flesh, Soul, Spirit
Three Stages of Birth: Generation, Germination, Fructification
Three-fold Human Soul: Animal, Intellectual, Spiritual
Three modes of existence: Natural Men, God Men, Primordial Men
Three Holies: Inert Matter, Senseless Force, Blind Chance
Three Creations of the Archetype: Creative Worlds, Formative Worlds, Material Worlds
Three evolutionary schemes: Spiritual, Intellectual, Physical
Three Creations: Light, Sound, Number
Three Prakrita Creations: (1) Universal Soul-Infinite Intellect-Divine Mind; (2) elemental creation-first differentiation of universal indiscrete substance; (3) organic evolution
Three Cosmogonic Attributes: (1) “Root-Manu” on Globe A in the First Round; (2) “Seed of Life” on Globe D in the Fourth Round; (3) “Seed of Man” at the Beginning of Every Root-Race
Three principles to become objective: Privation, Form, Matter
Three Universes: Pre-Existing, Ever-Existing, Phenomenal
Three Kingdoms: Mineral, Vegetable, Animal
Three Kingdoms: the kingdom of darkness or fire; the kingdom of spiritual light; the kingdom of external nature
Three Higher Creations/Three Lower Creations
Three Dwellings of the Soul: Earth, Hades, Devachen; Plane of the Mortals, Superior Eden, Inferior Eden
Three Submerged Continents: Hyperborean, Lemurian, Atlantean
Three Dimensions: Length, Breadth, Thickness
Three Worlds: Form, Formless, Desire
Three Souls: Monads, Atoms, Gods
Three Vedic Gods: Agni, Vaya, Surya
Three Parabrahmans: Parabrahmam, Chit, Achit
Three Heads on One Neck: Diva Triformis, Tergemina, Triceps, like Brahma-Vishnu-Siva
Three Asuras: Varuna, Indra, Agni
Three Kwan-Shai-Yins: Mother, Wife, Daughter
Three Isises: Daughter of Osiris, Wife of Osiris, Sister of Osiris
Three Symbols of the Immortal Being: Fish, Sin, Moon
Three Sephrims: B-S’ph-r, V-S’ph-r, V-Siph-o-r
Three Sephiroths: Kether, Chochma, Binah
Three Seraphims: Sepher, Saphar, Sipur
Three Hosts: Gods (Intelligent Architects), Elementals, Atoms
Three Magi: Kaspar, Melchio, Balthazar
Three Polar Giants: Briareus, Kottos, Gyges
Three-eyed mortals: Cyclopes
Three classes of monadic hosts: most developed (Lunar Gods or Spirits); first to reach human stage; retarded
Three Rishis: (1) Rajarshis (royal kings and princes who adopt ascetic life); (2) Devarshis (sons of Dharma or Yoga); (3) Brahmarshis (descendants of Rishis who founded Brahmans)
Three primeval races: red-yellow, black, brown-white.
Three sons of the Pithecoid Noah: tailed Cynocephalus, Tailless Ape, "Arboreal" Palaeolithic Man
Three sons of Bestla (daughter of the Polar Giants): Odin, Willi, We
Three Classes of Mediums: Mechanical, Emotional, Spiritual
Three sacred animals: Ox, Eagle, Lion
Three objects of one tree: Root, Trunk, Branch
Three words: I Am He; Hoa Atah Ani
Three syllables: I Hi Wei
Three languages: Sounds, Numbers, Figures
Three baptisms: external, with water of truth, with fire of spirit
Three symbols: Water, Brazen, Serpent
Three imaginations: passive, active, creative
Three sources of imagination: Nature, Man, God
Three sources of faith: Opinion, Belief, Knowledge
Three sides to the equilateral triangle
Three steps to show a circular walk: 3, 5, 7
Three faces: 3, 3; 5, 3; 7, 3
Three numbers of days in a solar year: 3 - 6 - 5
Three aspects to a circle: Center (Father), Radius (Son), Periphery (Holy Ghost)
Three Vedantin Sects: Advaita, Dwaita, Visishtadvaitas
Three sciences: Geological, Sidereal, Scriptural
Three Hierophantic systems: Anthropological, Psychic, Astronomical
Three esoterics: Sana, Kapila, Sanat-Sujata
Three quaternaries of Alchemy: (1) X, image_il, X (2) Sulphur, Flamma, Spiritus; (3) Hydargyum, Natura, Aqua; (4) Sal, Mater, Sanguis
Three-cubit-high wheat for mummies in a state of perfection
Three days' battle of the Angels of Light against The Angels of Darkness
Three nails in the Man's extremities, making three wounds
Three aspects of seed: Form, color, substance
A three-chord consisting of three intervals
Three nations claiming descent from Lemuria: Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks
Three long ridges in the Atlantic Ocean
Three-dimensions in the world
"Three" indicated by the Law of Analogy: The ONE (deity) becomes Two (Deva or Angel) and Two becomes Three (Man); Curds (World-stuff) become Wanderers (Comets), and Wanderers become Stars (Suns and Planets)
Spirit, Mind, Body
Body, Spirit, Soul
Non Ego, Voidness, Darkness
Will, Knowledge, Power
Causation, Matter, Energy
Cognizer, Thing Cognized, Cognition
Father, Mother, Sun
Father, Son, Holy Ghost
Father, Word, Holy Ghost
Krishna, Buddha, Christ
Zeus, Minerva, Apollo
Atma, Buddhi, Manas
Wodan, Thor, Freia
Cause, Action, Effect
Jehovah, Adam, Noah
Phanes, Chaos, Chronos
Pluto, Jupiter, Neptune
Spirit, Water, Blood
Three-inch long Graeco-Latin names

-- The Secret Doctrine -- The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky


Each Rune sign must be repeated three times for three minutes each.

-- Rune-Magic, by Siegfried Adolf Kummer


What did this odd mixture of ancient Eastern philosophy and Norse mythology have to do with the revolution raging outside the Vier Jahreszeiten? It provided a rationale for the dangerous mission the members were being called on to accomplish:

My friends, as of today, the red eagle is our symbol. It should point to the fact that we may have to go through death to live.

The Jews know very well that they have to fear the Aar, as it even says in the holy scriptures, fifth book of Moses, 28:49, "and the Lord will awaken unto you a people from far away, from the end of the earth, which flies like an eagle, a people whose language you do not understand."


With this pep talk, Sebottendorff cursed any member who procrastinated or compromised, who did not join in the eight o'clock consecration the following day, the birthday of Luther and Schiller. The Master adjourned the meeting with a schmaltzy poem by Philipp Stauff.

No one, of course, dared to miss the meeting on November 10 -- no one except Sebottendorff himself, who was laid low with a fever.

The Armistice became official the next day, and the Thule Society quietly prepared for counterrevolution. Its members could not accept the surrender of the German Army nor the proclamations of the republican government.

Conditions after the war were intolerable. Food was almost impossible to get, and jobs even scarcer. It was not uncommon to see wounded war veterans begging in the streets. With production crippled and inflation rampant, the country became a vast starvation camp. In five years' time, from 1918 to 1923, the mark had sunk to one-fifth its value, which reduced the middle class to poverty. In the harsh winter, people searched everywhere for coal and kindling. One observer remarked: "If a store offered dog biscuits a long line formed outside to procure them. People ate whatever they could find. Horsemeat became a delicacy, potato a luxury."

But for the Thule Society there was a surprising upswing. Because of governmental suspicion about the possible conspiratorial nature of organizations, many Bunds were thrown out of their meeting rooms. Landlords wanted no trouble. The innocent-appearing Thule was left alone, and with its runic obsessions was able to play host to these other Bunds, who shared a similar ideology. Sebottendorff observed:

That was good, since for the first time single groups could be in proximity to each other, because it happened very often that two or three took place at one time.

In the Thule Society everything went like a pigeon coo. Here was the National Liberal Party under Hans Dahn. Here also were the All-Germans under editor [Julius] Lehmann, the German School Bund under Rohmeder, the Riding Fellows, the Hammerbund.... In short, there was not a society in Munich that somehow represented any nationalistic aim which could not be tented in the Thule Society.


All these groups were made up, for the most part, of men who had fought in the war and returned to their country stunned to find that the prewar world had been blasted away. In these secret meetings, what they fantasized was a world better able to fulfill their longings.

It was to Thule that the civil engineer Gottfried Feder first came. He was well known in Munich for an eccentric proposal for ridding the country of all its troubles. As a crankish amateur economist, he babbled about the machinations of "Jewish high finance" which undercut "German" production. His slogan became "break the shackles of finance capital," and the way to do it was by abolishing "interest slavery." He urged Thule to try to win over the workers, who were being wooed by the left.

Anton Daumenlang, whose hobby was genealogy, worked on ancestral research. Walter Nauhaus, a sculptor, was in charge of Nordic culture. The editor Julius Lehmann argued for a coup d'etat and brought weapons to store in Thule rooms. One night at dinner, Sebottendorff was seized with a premonition that the premises were going to be searched. He ran quickly and hid the arms. No sooner had he done this when an investigator came.

In conjunction with plotting counterrevolution, Thule was busy fighting other occult groups, like Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophs. Steiner had been head of Madame Blavatsky's German branch of the Theosophical Society and had broken with it over a doctrinal dispute and started his own group. Steiner, observed Sebottendorff, "wanted to become finance minister, and propagate his system of Trinity," which, presumably, was different from Thule's. Through his system, he sought to "reform Communism" rather than destroy it. The influence of this "degenerate man, this swindler and liar," was all-encompassing. He had many disciples in Munich, but was set back, said Sebottendorff, "due to the fact that there were so many suicides and sexually abused women" among them. Before the war, he had worked with "a clairvoyant, Lisbeth Seidler, in Berlin." The pair "had connections with General [Helmuth von] Moltke and they were the ones who stopped the new recruits from going into the Marne battle when they were needed. That's how the battle was lost." Sebottendorff did not miss an opportunity to attack them in his newspaper.

Steiner was by his own account "enthusiastically active" in pan-German nationalist movements in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century. He saw world war one as part of an international "conspiracy against German spiritual life." In Steiner's preferred explanation, it wasn't imperialist rivalry among colonial powers or fanatical nationalism or unbounded militarism or the competition for markets which caused the war, but British freemasons and their striving for world domination. Steiner was a personal acquaintance of General Helmuth von Moltke, chief of staff of the German high command; after Moltke's death in 1916 Steiner claimed to be in contact with his spirit and channeled the general's views on the war from the nether world. After the war Steiner had high praise for "German militarism" (his own term), and continued to rail against France, French culture, and the French language in rhetoric which matched that of Mein Kampf. In the 1990's anthroposophists were still defending Steiner's jingoist nonsense, insisting that Germany bore no responsibility for world war one and was a victim of the "West."

-- Anthroposophy and Ecofascism, by Peter Staudenmaier


[T]he Woman Question, the Labour Question, or the Question of Peace ... all such questions are illuminated as soon as we recognise the nature of the spiritual essence which lies at the back of our blood. Who can deny that this question is closely linked to that of race, which at the present time is once more coming markedly to the front? Yet this question of race is one that we can never understand until we understand the mysteries of the blood and of the results accruing from the mingling of the blood of different races. And finally, there is yet one other question, the importance of which is becoming more and more acute as we endeavour to extricate ourselves from the hitherto aimless methods of dealing with it, and seek to approach it in its more comprehensive bearings. This problem is that of colonisation, which crops up wherever civilised races come into contact with the uncivilised: namely -- To what extent are uncivilised peoples capable of becoming civilised? How can a negro or an utterly barbaric savage become civilised? And in what way ought we to deal with them? And here we have to consider not only the feelings due to a vague morality, but we are also confronted by great, serious, and vital problems of existence itself. Those who are not aware of the conditions governing a people -- whether it be on the up- or down-grade of its evolution, and whether the one or the other is a matter conditioned by its blood -- such people as these will, indeed, be unlikely to hit on the right mode of introducing civilisation to an alien race. These are all matters which arise as soon as the Blood Question is touched upon....

Take, for example, a people that is the product of its environment, into whose blood this environment has built itself, and try to graft upon such a people a new form of civilisation. The thing is impossible. This is the reason why certain aboriginal peoples have to go under, as soon as colonists come to their particular parts of the world....

Modern science has discovered that if the blood of one animal is mixed with that of another not akin to it, the blood of the one is fatal to that of the other. This has been known to occultism for ages. If you mingle the blood of human beings with that of the lower apes, the result is destructive to the species, since the one is too far removed from the other. If, again, you mingle the blood of man with that of the higher apes, death does not ensue. Just as this mingling of the blood of different species of animals brings about actual death when the types are too remote, so, too, the ancient clairvoyance of undeveloped man was killed when his blood was mixed with the blood of others who did not belong to the same stock.. The entire intellectual life of to-day is the outcome of the mingling of blood...

Whoever, therefore, would master a man, must first master that man's blood. This must be borne in mind if any advance is to be made in practical life. For example, the individuality of a people may be destroyed if, when colonising, you demand from its blood more than it can bear, for in the blood the ego is expressed. Beauty and truth possess a man only when they possess his blood.

-- The Occult Significance of Blood, by Rudolf Steiner


The Thule itself was not without its influence. Countess Heila von Westarp was the Society's attractive young secretary. Another aristocratic member was Prince Gustav von Thurn und Taxis, a name prominent throughout Europe. Robert Payne comments, in The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, that Sebottendorff "had ingratiated himself into Munich society, large sums of money were at his disposal, and many of the most influential people in Munich were his disciples." This powerful occult circle included adepts, judges, lawyers, professors, leading industrialists, surgeons, scientists, and even former members of the royal entourage of the Wittelsbach kings. The Bavarian minister of justice, Franz Gurtner; the police president of Munich, Ernst Pohner; and the assistant police chief, Wilhelm Frick, were active.

It was not surprising, then, that Thule's hidden activities were held responsible for much of the cold-blooded terrorism in that turbulent time. In the beginning of December, Thule members planned to capture Kurt Eisner, the Jewish minister-president of Bavaria, who had led the revolt against the monarchy on November 7. To Thulists, Eisner, an ethereal looking intellectual, champion of the League of Nations, and conciliator of the Communists, represented everything odious.

Eisner's hundred-day reign was tinged with Bohemianism. Symphony concerts preceded political speeches. Poetry was recited from a roving truck which toured the streets, as if, someone observed, "a picnic and not a revolution were going on." In executive sessions, Eisner expounded on the inner nature of politics, which he thought was as much "of an art as painting pictures or composing string quartets."

Shortly after Eisner's assassination on February 21, police came to investigate Thule and search for anti-Semitic flyers. Sebottendorff threatened that if his members were not granted immunity from arrest, they would "take a Jew, drag him through the streets, and say that he stole a consecrated wafer. Then you will have a pogrom on your hands that will take you out of office at the same time... When the police assured him he was crazy, he answered: "Perhaps, but my craziness has a mouth." He meant, presumably, that he was a man of influence, one who could not be silenced, which must have been the case, since no one from Thule was arrested.

The main thrust of Thule was to consolidate the anti-Semitic organizations into militant action. Toward this end, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP -- National Socialist German Workers' Party) was established on January 18, 1919, in the rooms of the hotel, and Karl Harrer, a sportswriter for the Munchener Beobachter, was made the first chairman. A small proportion of Thule members were also members of the early NSDAP.

Karl Harrer apparently still hankered after the original secret discussion meetings, where one could cultivate feelings of exclusiveness. His days as chairman were numbered, and so were Thule's as an officially recognized society. The last consecration took place on March 21, 1919. The government now insisted that groups had to be incorporated, and the only leaders they would recognize had to be elected. "One had to abandon the Fuhrer principle," Sebottendorff wistfully noted.

Thule members did continue to meet informally. After the Eisner assassination, the new minister-president of Bavaria fled northward to the city of Bamberg with his cabinet, to avoid an imminent takeover by the Communists. He issued a proclamation that "the regime of the Bavarian Free State has not resigned. It has transferred its seat from Munich. The regime is and will remain the single possessor of power in Bavaria." The Thule Society helped to set up a military group of anti-Communists, infiltrated Communist organizations, and was in touch with the legal Bavarian government in Bamberg. On April 13, Thule members participated in a debacle known as the Palm Sunday Putsch, which was intended to restore the Bamberg government to power in Munich and prevent the Communist takeover. The leader of the Putsch, Alfred von Seyffertitz, described a comic scene after the current head of Thule, Friedrich Knauf, had presented him with the gallant offer of six hundred men. When the actual event took place, only ten or twelve Thule men came, one of them a captain "in gala uniform! Patent leather riding boots, riding whip, monocle!" reported Von Seyffertitz. The Putsch which was to have driven out the Communists had the opposite effect. It opened the way for a true dictatorship of the proletariat.

Virtual anarchy reigned in Munich. The Communists seized control on April 14 and began taking hostages in reprisal for the murder of other Communists. Twelve days later, they invaded the Thule rooms, arresting the Countess von Westarp, Prince von Thurn und Taxis, a sculptor, a painter, a baron, a railroad official, and an industrial artist. Sebottendorff laid on Knauf the charge of failing to hide the membership lists.

Sebottendorff himself had journeyed to Bamberg in the hope of enlisting the help of the Free Corps, a paramilitary band of volunteers under the leadership of former army officers, supported by rich industrialists, pledged to defend the Bamberg government-in-exile. Together with rightist politicians and army officers, the Free Corps was getting ready to overthrow the Communists. Counterrevolutionaries in Munich helped by smuggling men, arms and money to the Free Corps. The men in the Free Corps, unfit for civilian life, had a personal stake in the fight. For them, the war had never ended. They were still intoxicated with it. Some had come straight out of school into the trenches, where they had learned how to be hard and how to make sacrifices. Postwar Germany was despicable to these men, and they were with the Thulists in wanting to restore the past. They were joined by students who felt superfluous in a society that was falling apart. They had nothing better to do than to kill and plunder.

Four days after seizing the seven Thule members, the Communist leader in Munich, Rudolf Egelhofer, ordered them shot. He claimed that they were counterrevolutionaries and, after all, accountable to civil law.

Thule members had, in fact, been smuggling men and information out of the city. They had become especially gifted at forging documents, assembling caches of weapons, and recruiting men for the Free Corps, whose volunteers were laying plans to defeat the left.

While twenty thousand Free Corps men marched on the city, the hostages were taken to Luitpold High School, which the Communists were using as a barracks as well as a jail. They were lined up against the courtyard wall and executed.

After the hostage murders, the Communists posted a notice that a "band of criminals ... of the so-called upper classes" had been captured, "arch-reactionaries" who forged official documents to get confiscated goods, agents for the counterrevolution.

The executions caused an unprecedented wave of outrage among the citizenry. The anti-Semitic groups lost no opportunity to make effective propaganda, spreading rumors of fearful atrocities. The civil strife, which had begun right after the war, came to a horrifying climax over these murders.

Three Jews in the Communist government -- Eugen Levine-Nissen, Tobias Axelrod, and Max Levien -- were alleged responsible for the deaths, as an act of vengeance against their anti-Semitic enemies, a charge which was never proved. The Free Corps, inflamed by the hostage murders, stormed through Munich, setting fire to a beer hall and fighting with mortars and hand grenades. One Free Corps unit marched through the streets singing its marching song:

"Swastika on helmet,
Colors black-white-red...."


Soon, they would call themselves Storm Troopers.

During the civil war which followed, the Communists were defeated and the racist-nationalists received a great boost. It was, in every way, a rehearsal and a preparation for the brutalities to come later.

As to the Thule Society, it seems to have come to an end along with the seven hostages. Two days after their interment, there was a memorial service at the Thule rooms. The pulpit was draped with a captured Communist flag, but instead of the hammer and sickle, there was a swastika. The murder of the members had opened new possibilities.

Sebottendorff disappeared from Munich. He eventually returned to Istanbul, and then made his way to Mexico. He reappeared in Munich in 1933, hoping to revive Thule, but by that time the NSDAP he had helped to launch was doing very well without him. Some of the other Thule members were now in a position to implement what they had learned at those meetings on Saturdays at the Vier Jahreszeiten.

Eventually, the NSDAP assumed the power to come near to destroying Europe. That power, Rene Alleau observed, derived from one source:

... a fanatical autohypnosis which convinced disciples, succumbing to the totalitarian discipline in the promise of reaching a transcendent reality, that they were the new men the age was waiting for, that they were endowed with a secret energy which would enable them to take over Germany and the world. If they were properly prepared, mysteries would be revealed to them which would give them Satanic powers.


Incredible as it may seem, the members and guests of the Thule Society thought of themselves as potential masters of the earth, protected against all dangers. Their reign would last for a thousand years, until the next Deluge. Some of them became key figures in the Nazi party: Max Ammann, business manager of the party's newspaper and publishing house; Dietrich Eckart, who introduced Hitler to Munich society; Hans Frank, governor general of Poland; Anton Drexler, first chairman of the German Workers' party; Gottfried Feder, economic adviser; Karl Harrer, first chairman of the NSDAP; Rudolf Hess, Hitler's secretary and first adjutant; Adolf Hitler; Dr. Heinz Kurz, SS leader; Friedrich Krohn, dentist who designed Nazi swastika insignia; Ernst Rohm, leader of Storm Troopers; Alfred Rosenberg, commissioner for Eastern Affairs; Julius Streicher, Gauleiter (party district-leader) of Franconia.

The philosophy behind this cult, never mentioned at the Nuremberg Trials, sheds new light on the atrocities which were about to come, on the tacit sanction of them by the German people, and on the Messiah who led them.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sun Jun 21, 2015 12:09 am

CHAPTER 6: The Savage Messiah

The driving force behind black magic is hunger for power.... the black magician's ambition is to wield supreme power over the entire universe, to make himself a god.
-- Richard Cavendish, The Black Arts


Sebottendorff's Fuhrerprinzip is basic to esoteric cults. The disciple must blindly obey his master, who not only has secret knowledge, hidden from the initiate, but who must create favorable conditions in which his pupil can undergo a drastic change. This allows for actions which violate individual conscience.

Of course, the principle of blind obedience operates outside occult groups as well. The tendency is often seen in everyday institutions: military, governmental, corporate. Soldiers of every army have it drilled into them never to refuse an order. Mylai is one of the results. And this follow-the-leader syndrome certainly played a part in Watergate. Stanley Milgram's experiments in obedience to authority among university students demonstrated the alarming willingness of the average person to perpetrate harmful actions on fellow human beings when he fails to question the directives of a superior.

It is easy to see how the Fuhrerprinzip led, step by step, to the surrender of the will of the people to the will of the Fuhrer, culminating in such confessions as that of Rudolf Hess, commandant of Auschwitz, just before his execution in 1947, that he would have gassed and burned his own wife and children, and himself as well, if the Fuhrer had asked it.

A German did not need to be an occultist in order to long for a Messiah to save him. As in other difficult periods in history, after World War I the Messiah's coming was believed to be imminent. A father-figure in a chaotic age, he would surely preserve and protect and make things bloom again in the desert where men were daily losing their bearings. Still, the poet Heinrich Heine's ''man whom the German people await, the man who will bring to them the life and happiness they have so long hoped for in their dreams," was awaited with particular zeal by the members of the Thule Society. According to Trevor Ravenscroft's confidant, Dr. Stein, Thule member

Dietrich Eckart and a small inner core of Thulists had been prepared for the imminent appearance of the German Messiah in a whole series of spiritualistic seances....

... all those present were terrified....


Prince von Thurn und Taxis had prophesied the coming of a German Messiah, and Countess von Westarp had said that a false prophet would lead the Germans to defeat. Sebottendorff ran from the room in terror, but Eckart tackled him and knocked him down.

Eckart shared with Hitler a fascination with Ostara's erotic racism; had, in fact, been charged with plagiarism by Lanz von Liebenfels himself. After the Nazis were swept into power, Lanz was to write that his Order of New Templars was "the first manifestation of the Movement which now, in accordance with the law of God, is most powerful in history and unrestrainedly sweeping over the world." Eckart already belonged to the Thule Society when Hitler appeared on the scene. It was Eckart who first promoted Hitler as the long-awaited Messiah.

What do we know of Hitler's life before then? With certain important exceptions, only what he wanted us to know: that he was the son of a harsh man, a civil servant, who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps; that he adored his mother, who died a lingering death of cancer while he was struggling in Vienna; that he did not make it as an artist; that knowledge of his true vocation came to him in World War I.

But we can paint a fuller picture than this -- one that rather complicates the popular image of Hitler as a practical realist, though he most certainly was a man who knew how to seize his opportunities. He was also an occultist.

The Library of Congress in Washington contains thousands of books taken from Hitler's personal library after the Allied occupation of Germany. One of them, Nationalismus, is by the Indian mystic Rabindranath Tagore. It bears an inscription dated April 20, 1921, signed by the unfamiliar name B. Steininger: "An Adolf Hitler, meinem lieben Armanenbruder" ("To Adolf Hitler, my dear Armanen-brother").

The Armanen, Guido von List's esoteric brotherhood, invented an ancient race of Germanic priests. Their wisdom was passed on through the centuries, not only through a secret brotherhood of initiates but also through clues which List, the last of the Armanen, was able to divine through intuition and clairvoyance. Sacred meanings were hidden away in words and signs. This, of course, is perfectly understandable to the occultist. But List apparently reached a wider audience by pioneering in the revival of pagan worship.

His theories were studied by the Germanen Orden and, later, by the SS. His books, confiscated by the Allies, bear the SS mark and are stamped Ahnenerbe, the Nazi Ancestral Research branch, and apparently were used in teaching candidates for the SS.

But apart from the inscription to Hitler, the only connecting link from him to List is made by Ravenscroft, who reports that Hitler's occult adviser, the Viennese bookseller Ernst Pretzsche, was associated with List.

Hitler's library also contained one of Lanz's books, Das Buch der Psalmen Teutsch: Das Gebetbuch der Ariosophen Rassenmystiker und Antisemiten ("The Book the Psalms Teach; The Prayerbook of Ariosophic Race Mystery and Anti-Semitism").

Both List and Lanz were obsessed with blood purity, with anti-Semitism, with the secret significance of the Grail legend, with bringing about a new order. Both took the swastika for their symbol.

Membership in cults of this type are usually kept secret, so it is not surprising that we have no documentation of Hitler's membership. He may well have been a member of either the Armanen or the Order of New Templars, or both, however, for it is entirely in keeping with his character as presented by people who knew him in his younger days in Vienna.

Josef Greiner, the former lamplighter, who published his reminiscences in 1947, describes Hitler as an explorer of occult mysteries and a student of telepathy -- knowledgeable about the rituals of the yogis and about fakirs who seem to control their heartbeats. He was intrigued, according to Greiner, by pseudosciences which appeal to the poorly educated.

Reinhold Hanisch, who knew both Hitler and Greiner in this period, credited Greiner with leading Hitler into the occult but it may very well have been the other way around.

Hitler had already expressed many of these ideas as a teenager to his young friend August Kubizek, in Linz. He had had visions of remodeling the whole town, and spent hours telling his plans to his patient friend. Kubizek complied with all his dreams:

We would go to St. Georgen on the Gusen to find out what relics of that famous battle in the Peasants' War still remained. When we were unsuccessful Adolf had a strange idea. He was convinced that the people who lived there would have some faint memory of that great battle. The following day he went again alone, after a vain attempt to get my father to give me the day off. He spent two days and two nights there, but I don't remember with what result.


The circle in which Hitler moved in Linz subscribed to the ideas of Georg von Schoenerer, an admirer of List. Hitler was more at home in German mythology than in his real world. Kubizek says: "From the Edda, a book that was sacred for him, he knew Iceland, the rugged island of the North, where the elements which formed the world meet now, as they did in the days of Creation...."

Kubizek and Greiner both testify that what especially intrigued Hitler was the power of the human will.

The Allies, apparently puzzled by the riddle of Adolf Hitler, a ne'er-do-well of humble origins, unprepossessing looks, and mediocre intellect, rising to such eminence, had secret psychiatric reports drawn up on him while the war was still in progress, which obviously did not help much to clear away the confusion about this complex personality. They paint a portrait of sexual deviation, of adolescent overcompensation, of an indomitable will to power. This will to power has not been given its proper due. His admirers, and even reluctant observers, have testified to his spellbinding, hypnotic effect. A romantic mystic, a visionary, a charismatic figure he is often acknowledged to be. But this early will to power betrays the interests of a potential occultist.

The occultist is concerned with transcending everyday reality. He makes use of myth, symbol, and ritual. He tries to put himself in touch with forces which he believes to be beyond the reach of sense, and to awaken higher powers in himself. The Work, the Grand Work, is to transform oneself from an ordinary mortal into a superman. For this, the will must be developed -- something the ordinary mortal neither knows nor cares about.

Hitler, from the time he was a young boy, was preoccupied with the matter of will, a concern not shared by his family or social milieu. Though he could not will himself into art school or good health, his childhood friend Kubizek was the recipient of confidences about his inner life which betray Wagnerian fantasies of another sort of strength.

After a performance of Wagner's opera Rienzi, both boys stood under the stars, and, says Kubizek:

I was struck by something strange, which I had never noticed before, even when he had talked to me in moments of the greatest excitement. It was as if another being spoke out of his body, and moved him as much as it did me. It wasn't at all a case of a speaker being carried away by his own words. On the contrary: I rather felt as though he himself listened with astonishment and emotion to what burst forth from him with elementary force. I will not attempt to interpret this phenomenon, but it was a state of complete ecstasy and rapture, in which he transferred the character of Rienzi, without even mentioning him as a model or example, with visionary power to the plane of his own ambitions. But it was more than a cheap adaptation. Indeed, the impact of the opera was rather a sheer external impulse which compelled him to speak. Like flood waters breaking their dykes, his words burst forth from him. He conjured up in grandiose, inspiring pictures his own future and that of his people.

Hitherto I had been convinced that my friend wanted to become an artist, a painter, or perhaps an architect. Now this was no longer the case. Now he aspired to something higher, which I could not yet fully grasp. It rather surprised me, as I thought that the vocation of the artist was for him the highest, most desirable goal. But now he was talking of a mandate which, one day, he would receive from the people, to lead them out of servitude to the heights of freedom.

It was an unknown youth who spoke to me in that strange hour. He spoke of a special mission which one day would be entrusted to him....


Hitler later recalled the incident, too, and solemnly said: "In that hour it began."

Typical adolescent dreams? A flight from harsh reality? Of course. But his grandiose plans for the future, unlikely as they were, did come to pass after all, and it is plausible that he should have worked on himself systematically, in obedience to occult teaching. The occult tradition, as Madame Blavatsky pointed out, holds that what moves the world is "that mysterious and divine power latent in the will of every man, and which, if not called to life, quickened and developed by Yogi-training, remains dormant in 999,999 men out of a million, and gets atrophied."

From the ancients to the most simplistic modern exponents of the magic power of thought, the doctrine is that one's attention and intense concentration can accomplish any desired end. If the end is not reached, it is simply because the mind has not sufficiently projected it.

In Vienna, Hitler's political thinking had been influenced by Mayor Karl Lueger, who, according to the Anthroposophist, Johannes Tautz, came to the Armanen. Lueger was in office from 1897 to 1910, and, in league with the Pan-German anti-Semitic groups, found favor with the lower middle class by attacking liberals and Jews. His anti-intellectualism was epitomized by one of his underlings, who said, "When I see a book I want to puke." While List wrote pseudo-erudite tracts on the esoteric meaning of words, Lueger knew that to gain power he had to win over the largest possible segment of society.

Hitler was a peculiar fellow to his World War I buddies because he would sit listlessly by himself and let nobody stir him out of his concentration. He was apt to jump up abruptly and move around agitatedly, predicting that the Germans would be defeated. Recovering in the hospital from a gassing attack which left him temporarily blinded, he had a vision which must have been comforting, considering his dim prospects for the future. Writing of this experience in Mein Kampf, he said: "I resolved that I would take up political work."

When he was discharged, he continued to work for the army, in the Munich branch, as an instructor in the Press and News Bureau of the Political Department. In the course of his duties he was sent to investigate one of the satellites of the Thule Society, the German Workers' party, and ended by joining it.

His membership number in the German Workers' party was originally 555, but for some reason it was changed to 7. The discrepancy is mentioned in a footnote to Reginald H. Phelps's monograph in the American Historical Review, July 1963:

Drexler, outraged by distorted official radio "history" of the party's origin, drafted a long, angry letter to Hitler late in January 1940.... In it he stated: "No one knows better than you yourself, my Fuhrer, that you were never the seventh member of the party, but at most the seventh member of the committee, which I asked you join as propaganda chief." In this letter -- never sent, since Drexler planned to forward it to Hitler after the war -- are also statements about the size of the party in September 1919 and about the "forging" of Hitler's party card.


It is significant that someone, at some point, saw fit to change the number. Seven, in occult terms, is a much more important number than 555. List, for instance, expatiates on seven:

The seven is developed from a triangle.... it is the secret of the beginning, the development and the change into the All in all respects ... and so closes the circle of eternity. That is why all figures in geometry can be measured by the triangle and the square. The seven is a glyphe (secret word and secret connotation) as well as a numerical value, because it can be arrived at only by symbols of the triangle and the square.


This, incidentally, is a fairly typical, if not lucid, exposition. To the occultists, numbers have curious properties which are not just utilitarian. They all borrow from Pythagoras, who first gave mathematics a specialized meaning. The occult properties of numbers form the basis for serious study which, they believe, contains the key to laws of human and cosmic life.

Whether through superstition or cognizance of cosmic laws, seven became Hitler's number. The perfect number, in short, for the membership card of the future Messiah of Germany.

But how is it that such an unexceptional fellow became the Messiah? Was he chosen by the group or by a single member -- perhaps Eckart -- or did he create the role for himself? This is still an open question.

According to Kurt Ludecke, who knew both Hitler and Eckart in those early years, Eckart "was something of a genius, and to a great degree the spiritual father of Hitler and grandfather of the Nazi movement. Also, he was well-to-do, one of Hitler's first financial blessings."

It is more likely that Eckart himself was not well-to-do but well-connected. He had contact with rich members of Munich's social circle and was an accomplished fundraiser. At any rate, it was he who afforded Hitler the entree into that circle, with the grandiloquent announcement that here, at last, was the "long-promised savior." In fact, he is reported to have said to Alfred Rosenberg, after Thule's revolutionary activities: "Let it happen as it will and must, but I believe in Hitler; above him there hovers a star."

Why Eckart believed particularly in Hitler remains something of a mystery. He apparently did have an uncanny knack for persuasive speechifying. His young friend Kubizek testified to that. His talent initially focused the attention of the group on Hitler. Its effect is admirably summed up by Joseph Goebbels, who wrote to Hitler after hearing him speak in Munich in June 1922:

Like a rising star you appeared before our wondering eyes, you performed miracles to clear our minds and, in a world of skepticism and desperation, gave us faith. You towered above the masses, full of faith and certain of the future, and possessed by the will to free those masses with your unlimited love for all those who believe in the new Reich. For the first time we saw with shining eyes a man who tore off the mask from the faces distorted by greed, the faces of mediocre parliamentary busybodies....

... You expressed more than your own pain.... You named the need of a whole generation, searching in confused longing for men and task. What you said is the catechism of the new political belief, born out of the despair of a collapsing, Godless world.... One day, Germany will thank you....


If you would know Him when He comes, then check the tendency to decry the great, and to find faults in what is noble. So many people, looking at the sun, only see the spots, and no man, they say, is a hero to his valet de chambre. But why not? Not because he is not heroic, but because the heart of the valet de chambre cannot appreciate heroism. We criticise; we find petty faults; we lay stress on petty mistakes, and we miss the soul of goodness and of greatness, perchance, in those who be against the common feeling of the time. Be not ashamed to admire. Be not ashamed to be reverent to that which is greater, nobler than yourself, for the power to admire means really the faculty to achieve. That which you recognise to the noble, by the very recognition you rise nearer to it and become liker to it. Reverence greatness wherever you see it, in outer life, in inner life, in the genius of the writer, the painter, the sculptor, in the holiness of the saint, in the compassion of the pitiful. In everyone that you meet try to see the best and not the worst. Meet everyone, be it even the criminal, as the potential saint; for by that love and respect to that which only exists in germ, the seed will burst, and presently will grow into flower and into fruit. God is in every man, and if you do not see Him it is your eyes that are blinded; and if you would see the divine in its mighty perfection in a Christ, then see the Christ in our poorest fellow-man or fellow-woman, and verily then you shall know Him when He comes.

When you are able to feel reverence, then do not put a check on the love that flows out to that which you see to be greater than yourself; but nourish the feeling of devotion which is ready to love, which is ready to give, which is able to give itself utterly to that which it knows to be greater than itself. Oh, they said of old that there were some who, when they met the Christ, left all and followed Him. And if, when He stands amongst us in our twentieth century, any of you would fain be among those who on seeing Him leave all and follow, then cultivate that feeling in your daily life while still He is not present, manifest amongst us. Thus practise the virtues that will burst into flower when you are in His presence. Try to realise what He must be, the Teacher of angels and men. Try to catch some touch of His spirit of perfect love, some gleam of His nature of perfect purity, some understanding of a power which conquers everything because it wins everything to knowledge and to answer.

If it be so amongst some of us, enough of us to influence the public opinion of our time, then when the Lord of Love comes again, it shall not be a Cross that will meet Him; then when He stands amongst us it shall not be hatred that shall be poured out against Him; not three brief years alone will He stay with us, but our love will not let Him go, for love fetters even the Lord of Love. Then we who have tried to grow into His likeness, we who have longed for the glory of His presence, we with our eyes shall behold the King in his beauty, and know the Supreme Teacher when again, ere very long He treads the roads of earth.

To these noble and eloquent words nothing can be added. It would be impossible to paint more vividly, or with more impressive effect, the lofty ideals of character and the utter desertion of all ordinary worldly standards of conduct, toward which members of the Order should even now begin to strive, if they would fit themselves to be accepted servants of the Lord when He comes.

-- The Order of the Star in the East: Its Outer and Inner Work, by by Professor E. A. Wodehouse, M.A.


Because the German Section, under the General Secretaryship of Dr. Steiner, opposed the pushing of the Order of the Star of the East ("O.S.E.") within the Theosophical Society ("T.S.") in Germany, Mrs. Besant, as President of the T.S., in March, 1913, dischartered and expelled from the T.S. the whole of that Section with all its Branches and over two thousand members, cancelling the diplomas of all these. She so successfully worked her theory, (that anyone may push within the T.S. any view he pleases,) that she has pushed out of that T.S. all these two thousand members and more at one push -- simply because they did not approve of her O.S.E. propaganda. It appears that in the course of the last few months, the two thousand have swelled to three thousand, because of resignations, in consequence of this highhanded procedure, in England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Russia, and elsewhere, also.

With a little more tact and balance, and a little less self-assertiveness and impulsive haste, with a few more of the long-sighted Counsellors whom she had 'shaken out' (in her favorite phrase) and a few less of the 'obedient' courtiers whom she had 'taken in' instead, on the General Council of the T.S., she could most easily have arranged to put the O.S.E. members of the T.S. in Germany into separate Branches and a Section of their own, and retained all the older members also intact. But as she has publicly stated, all of the members of the General Council of the T.S. now belong, with one or two exceptions perhaps, to the 'Esoteric Section,' prime condition of membership which is, the formal written pledge of absolute obedience to Mrs. Besant.

-- The Central Hindu College and Mrs. Besant, by Sri Bhagavan Das


Steiner dedicated ten years of his life to the theosophical movement, becoming one of its best-known spokespeople and honing his supernatural skills. He broke from mainstream theosophy in 1913, taking most of the German-speaking sections with him, when Besant and her colleagues declared the young Krishnamurti, a boy they "discovered" in northern India, to be the reincarnation of Christ. Steiner was unwilling to accept a brown-skinned Hindu lad as the next "spiritual master." What had separated Steiner all along from Blavatsky, Besant, and the other India-oriented theosophists was his insistence on the superiority of European esoteric traditions.

-- Anthroposophy and Ecofascism, by Peter Staudenmaier


Whatever others thought of him, Hitler himself was not so ambitious as to proclaim himself the Messiah right from the outset. At first, he was just a drummer, bringing glad tidings of the coming of the new man. The metaphor changed after the Putsch of 1923.

When the government was inactive in the face of Communist uprisings, Hitler and his Storm Troopers, on the evening of November 8, planned a coup to depose them. The government met that night in one of Munich's many beer halls, and the Nazis surrounded the building. On a signal, they entered the hall and fired a shot at the ceiling, shouting that the national revolution had come and the government was deposed. The Putsch turned out to be a fiasco, and when it was over, Hitler was imprisoned at Landsberg.

One of the major defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Hitler Youth, dated the change in Hitler's self-image from a later period, in talking to the prison psychiatrist after the war: "Before 1934 he was menschlich [human]; from 1934 to 1938 he was ubermenschlich [superhuman]; from 1938 on he was unmenschlich [inhuman] and a tyrant."

But the consensus does not seem to be that Hitler's confinement, and particularly, according to some commentators, his intimate exposure to Rudolf Hess in prison, occasioned the change. Whatever the relationship between the two men may have been, Hitler did become something of a national idol by the very fact of his imprisonment. He, of course, enjoyed the legend which began to grow up around him, and capitalized on it in every way that he could. It is not uncommon, either, for breakthroughs to come to men as they meditate quietly in prison. He certainly had lots of time to think in the nine months he was in Landsberg. It was only after this, according to his intimate acquaintance, "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, that the Fuhrer cult began in earnest. Before then, he was Herr Hitler to everyone. At Hess's instigation, this now changed, first to der Chef and then to Mein Fuhrer. Hitler seemed to enjoy the transmutation.

In prison, he had written Mein Kampf, with the help of Hess. When it was published, his absolute authority over the National Socialist German Workers' party was established. Whereas before, Kurt Ludecke observes, "people said he would be destroyed for loyalty to friends," he was now no longer one of the boys, but increasingly dictatorial and self-serving. From here on, Hitler, whatever steps he took, continued to see himself as sent by Providence to save the German people. This message communicated itself with striking power to his subalterns, to the masses, and even to his enemies.

Hermann Rauschning, who eventually defected from the Party, reports a typical conversation in which Hitler told Bernhard Forster, Nietzsche's brother-in-law, that he

would not reveal his unique mission until later. He permitted glimpses of it only to a few. When the time came, however, Hitler would bring the world a new religion.... The blessed consciousness of eternal life in union with the great universal life, and in membership of an immortal people -- that was the message he would impart to the world when the time came. Hitler would be the first to achieve what Christianity was meant to have been, a joyous message that liberated men from the things that burdened their life. We should no longer have any fear of death, and should lose the fear of a so-called bad conscience. Hitler would restore men to the self-confident divinity with which nature had endowed them. They would be able to trust their instincts, would no longer be citizens of two worlds, but would be rooted in the single, eternal life of this world.


While Rauschning took these ideas as mere reflections of irrationality, they mean something else to the student of occultism. Hitler's new religion was the same brand that Lanz and List had preached: a mixture of paganism, Gnosticism, and magic. Its true purpose could only be revealed to the initiated, and only at the proper time, because only they would really grasp its import, and only when the way had been prepared. The time, of course, had also to be auspicious in an astrological sense. And the initiated, whose consciousness presumably was sufficiently expanded, would be in a position to help usher in the new religion.

Many people have testified to Hitler's medium-like powers. Much has been made of the fact that he was born in Braunau am Inn in Austria, a town which happens to have produced a disproportionately great number of people who went on to gain reputations as mediums, the most notable being Rudi and Willy Schneider. Occultists are pleased to point out that Hitler had shared with the psychic Schneider brothers their wet nurse.

But even commentators who are not receptive to occult beliefs have drawn attention to Hitler's occasional lapses into trancelike states.

Ernst Hanfstaengl recalls "his almost medium-like performances on a speaker's platform."

Hermann Rauschning repeats what Bernhard Forster had told him about Hitler:

God, or whatever we preferred to call it, life or the universal spirit, spoke to him in solitude. He drew his great power from intercourse with the eternal divine nature.... Added Forster. ... "I hear those voices of which Hitler speaks. Then I feel strong, and know that we shall conquer and live for ever."


Stephen H. Roberts, an Australian journalist covering Germany in the thirties, described the two most popular views of him -- either "as a mere ranting stump-orator, or as a victim of demoniacal possession, driven hither and thither by some occult force that makes him a power of evil. ... the view of his believers that he is a demigod, revealing the path that Germany is to follow by some divine power of [intuitively1knowing what to do."

Hitler parodied Jesus. Lanz had preached that "love thy neighbor as thyself" really meant "love thy racially similar neighbor as thyself." Hitler said: "Whoever proclaims his allegiance to me is by this very proclamation and by the manner in which it is made, one of the chosen."

Symbols of his Messiahship appeared everywhere. One of the fashionable art shops in Berlin displayed an impressive portrait of Hitler in a prominent window space, flanked with duplicates of a painting of Christ. At one of the Nuremberg rallies a giant photo of Hitler was captioned with a phrase which opens the Gospel of John -- believed, by Biblical scholars, to be a Gnostic text -- and which occultists are fond of quoting: "In the beginning was the Word." Sermons were preached in churches which must have caused some people, at least, a good deal of dis-ease, as, for example, this one: "Adolf Hitler is the voice of Jesus Christ, who desired to become flesh and blood of the German people and did become flesh and blood."

A message bearing the title "What the Christian Does Not Know About Christianity" made this astonishing point:

If Jehovah has lost all meaning for us Germans, the same must be said of Jesus Christ, his son. He does not possess those moral qualities which the Church claims for him. He certainly lacks those characteristics which he would require to be a true German. Indeed, he is as disappointing, if we read the record carefully, as is his father.

In day nurseries, children were taught to pray:

"Fuhrer, my Fuhrer, by God given to me,
Defend and protect me as long as may be.
Thou'st Germany rescued from her deepest need;
I render thee thanks who dost daily me feed.
Stay by me forever, or desperate my plight.
Fuhrer, my Fuhrer, my faith, my light,
Hail, my Fuhrer!"


All of which lent support to Hitler's epigram in one of his more lucid moments: "What luck for the rulers that men do not think."

The Christ image was not the only one which Hitler adopted. He also had a particular fondness for Grail symbols. He put the question to Rauschning: "Should we create an elite of initiates? An order? A religious brotherhood of Templars to guard the Holy Grail, the august vessel containing the pure blood?" The quest for the Holy Grail is another of those talismans for the occultists, and Lanz and List, of course, had helped to kindle an interest in the real meaning of the Grail legend. The Grail, to the occultist, is a symbol for hidden knowledge. According to Ravenscroft, Hitler told Dr. Stein that he visualized the Grail "as a path leading from unthinking dullness, through doubt, to spiritual awakening," and that there were "ascending grades on the way to the achievement of higher levels of consciousness, disclosing the meaning of the heraldry and armorial insignia of the Knights, which he interpreted as representing the various stages they had attained in the quest for the Grail."

He went through an elaborate explanation of the various creatures which symbolized the different degrees, the highest being the eagle, emblem of the initiate who had attained the highest powers and faculties of which man was capable, and was at last in a position to "assume a world-historic destiny." Hitler went on to say: "The real virtues of the Grail were common to all the best Aryan peoples. Christianity only added the seeds of decadence such as forgiveness, self-abnegation, weakness, false humility, and the very denial of the evolutionary laws of survival of the fittest, the most courageous and talented."

No one could accuse Hitler of false humility. Stephen H. Roberts, the Australian journalist, describes colored pictures which he saw displayed in Munich for a short time in the autumn of 1936: "of Hitler in the actual silver garments of the Knight of the Grail." Roberts believes they were withdrawn from circulation because "they gave the show away ... were too near the truth of Hitler's mentality."

By then, Hitler's view of the Jew as the enemy of the light had bedazzled the whole country. It was the Jew who had to be cleared out of the way before the new man could arise. Lanz had proposed extermination as the most expedient way to do it. Sebottendorff, in the March 10, 1920, issue of the Beobachter, had been more ambiguous. He proposed, as an Endziel ("final goal"): MACHT GANZE ARBEIT MIT DEM JUDEN! ("CLEAN OUT THE JEWS ONCE AND FOR ALL!") by resorting to the "most ruthless measures, among them concentration camps" (Sammellager) and "sweeping out the Jewish vermin with an iron broom."

Like his teachers, Hitler saw the Jew as the embodiment of all evil, but among the qualities he considered evil were virtues such as intellect, conscience, intelligence, and pursuit of absolute truth. As he told Rauschning:

We are now at the end of the Age of Reason. The intellect has grown autocratic, and has become a disease of life. . . .

Conscience is a Jewish invention. It is a blemish, like circumcision.

A new age of Magic interpretation of the world is coming, of interpretation in terms of the Will and not the intelligence.

There is no such thing as truth, either in the moral or in the scientific sense. The new man would be the antithesis of the Jew.


The new man, Hitler told Rauschning, would be a mutation, a different biological species altogether from homo sapiens as we know him. This, Hitler believed, was the real seductive power of nazism. So fierce and terrible would the new men be that ordinary humans would hardly be able to look them in the face; they would be the true aristocracy, and all others would be subjects. With the coming of the new man, the inequality that exists in human life would be heightened. This was Hitler's antidote to democracy: the restoration of insurmountable barriers between two breeds of people, as he presumed to have existed in ancient great civilizations. Only Germans would have rights. Hitler had come to free them from "the dirty and degrading chimera called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and personal independence which only a very few can bear." They would be beyond good and evil. He would liberate them from "the burden of free will." He opposed "with icy clarity" the significance "of the individual soul and of personal responsibility. " Judging from Hitler's popularity, the suffering masses apparently found relief in this message.

Here, again, the voice of the occultist may be heard. Since Darwin, esoteric groups have talked in terms of a mutation, though generally none but Satanists have perceived the new man as amoral.

To betray the Fuhrer, then, was also to betray the new civilization which he was ushering in, and he managed to convince the people of this. Over and over again, in mass rallies so carefully staged that they left no one immune, he pummeled home, with the force of a master magician such as has not been seen before or since, the startling doctrine that he and the people were one. Through torchlit night parades, striking military bands, cathedral-like arcs of light, and the patterns and colors of swastika flags, a religious fervor was created among audiences wearied with waiting for hours until he came before them, suddenly, late at night, thundered his oration, and left just as suddenly. So skilled a psychologist was he that he knew that if he invited alienated mass man to "step out of his workshop," his smallness would disappear in the midst of a body of hordes "with a like conviction."

It worked. For a time, the Aryan Germans were rid of anxiety, and Hitler's mutations dared to commit unimaginable crimes against humanity, in the name of a greater humanity.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sun Jun 21, 2015 12:13 am

CHAPTER 7: Tibetan Wisdom Meets German Folly

Our meeting had hardly begun when my Storm Troopers -- as they became from that day forth -- attacked. Like wolves they flung themselves upon the enemy in packs of eight and ten. How many of these men I never really knew until that day. And at their head was gallant Rudolf, my personal secretary, Hess.

-- Hitler, Mein Kampf


Rudolf Hess has been painted by historians as weak and indecisive, characterless, passive, putty in the hands of a stronger man, eager to be rid of his personal identity, to give up his freedom to think and feel for himself to a totalitarian cause -- in short, the perfect disciple loyal and obedient to the death. As Hitler's deputy, he must have enjoyed his dependency on the Fuhrer.

Like Hitler, Hess had a penchant for occultism, having been steeped in it from his birth in Egypt. Born on April 26, 1896, to a prosperous Bavarian wholesaler and exporter who had transplanted himself to Alexandria, Rudolf lived with his family until his fourteenth year and then was sent to school in Germany.

As soon as World War I started, he volunteered, and was placed in the 1st Company of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, named the List Regiment, after its original commander. He was an officer in the same regiment as Hitler, who was a dispatch runner, but they never met then.

The List Regiment was in the thick of the fighting at the front. According to a letter which Hitler wrote to his old Munich landlord, they lost 2,900 men in four days. Hess was wounded twice.

When the war ended, Hess was twenty-two. He went back to Munich and joined the Thule Society. He was one of the hundreds of veterans smuggled out of Munich by Sebottendorff, along with money and arms, to join the Free Corps. Despite his hangdog look, he had a reputation for being a scrappy street fighter. He participated wholeheartedly with the Free Corps in ridding Munich of the leftist revolutionaries.

Hess was in the audience when Hitler came to German Workers' party meetings to deliver his grandiose plans for the future of the movement, predicting that the day would come "when the banner of our movement will fly over the Reichstag, over the Castle in Berlin, yes, over every German house."

Seeing the small audience and the pale, gesticulating speaker, Hess wondered, as he later reported, Was this thundering orator foolish or was he the Messiah? Soon, his mind was made up.

As a student at the University of Munich, he was eligible to apply for a prize which a wealthy South American had endowed. Competitors were to write a theme that posed the question "How Must the Man Be Constituted Who Will Lead Germany Back to Her Old Heights?"

Delirious with the Messianic hope of the time, Hess won. Drawing a word portrait of Hitler, he wrote:

Profound knowledge in all areas of political life and history, the capacity to draw the right lessons from this knowledge, belief in the purity of his own cause and in ultimate victory, and enormous power of will give him the power of thrilling oratory which evokes joyful enthusiasm from the masses. Where the salvation of the nation is in question, he does not disdain utilizing the weapons of the adversary, demagogy, slogans, processions, etc. Where all authority has vanished, only a man of the people can establish authority. This was shown in the case of Mussolini. The deeper the dictator was originally rooted in the broad masses, the better he understands how to treat them psychologically, the less the workers will distrust him, the more supporters he will win among these most energetic ranks of the people. He himself has nothing in common with the masses; he is all personality, like every great man.

If necessity commands it, he does not shrink from shedding blood. Great questions are always decided by blood and iron. And the question at stake is: Shall we rise or be destroyed?

Parliament may go babbling, or not -- the man acts. It transpires that despite his many speeches, he knows how to keep silent. Perhaps his own supporters are the most keenly disappointed.... In order to reach his goal, he is prepared to trample on his closest friends.... For the sake of the great ultimate goal, he must even be willing temporarily to appear a traitor against the nation in the eyes of the majority. The lawgiver proceeds with terrible hardness.... He knows the people and their influential individuals. As the need arises, he can trample them with the boots of a grenadier, or with cautious and sensitive fingers spin threads reaching as far as the Pacific Ocean. . . . In either case, the treaties of enslavement will fall. One day we shall have our new, Greater Germany, embracing all those who are of German blood. . . .

Thus we have the portrait of the dictator: keen of mind, clear and true, passionate and then again controlled, cold and bold, scrupulous in decision, fearless in rapid execution of his acts, ruthless toward himself and others, mercilessly hard and then again soft in his love for his people, tireless in work, with a steel fist in a velvet glove, capable ultimately of overcoming even himself.

We still do not know when he will intervene to save us -- this "man." But millions feel that he is coming.


By November 8, 1923, "this man" had made his presence known to all Germany. Hitler had already seized control of the Nazi party and now planned to seize control of the Bavarian government as well. Hess, intoxicated with his newly discovered Messiah, marched along with Hitler in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Despite its dramatic effect, the Putsch was a fiasco. When police opened fire on the marching Storm Troopers, Hitler was the first to flee. He did not mention this in Mein Kampf, but said of the meeting: "my Storm Troopers -- as they became from that day forth -- attacked. Like wolves they flung themselves upon the enemy in packs of eight and ten. How many of these men I never really knew until that day. And at their head was gallant Rudolf, my personal secretary, Hess."

Hess escaped across the border into Austria over a mountain pass. Hitler was imprisoned at Landsberg, a town just west of Munich. The punishment was very mild, lasting less than nine months, and Hitler spoke of it afterward as a much-needed vacation.

Hess proved his devotion to Hitler by coming back from Austria, giving himself up, and joining Hitler in prison, in room No. 7. So steadfast was that devotion, in fact, that Ernst Hanfstaengl hints at an unnatural relationship: "It is probably not true to say there was a physical homosexual relationship between the two, but in a passive way the attraction was there. I certainly did not trust the manhood of either...."

Shared prison life served to bind the two men together until a later fiasco severed the bond. Hess became Hitler's secretary and helped him with Mein Kampf. Hess did more than take dictation and type the manuscript. As the best educated of Hitler's disciples, he was able to provide Hitler with useful information, particularly on a new study which was called geopolitics. He introduced Hitler to the professor (and ex-general) from whom he had learned about geopolitics, and, in fact, the professor was a frequent visitor to Landsberg prison. Some people, indeed, believe that the professor, Karl Haushofer, was Hitler's guiding brain.

Writing in Current History and Forum in June 1941, Frederic Sondern, Jr., who had personal knowledge of the subject, reported:

Dr. Haushofer and his men dominate Hitler's thinking. That domination began 17 years ago when the World War general flattered the ex-corporal by paying him visits in prison. Haushofer saw possibilities in the hysterical agitator who had launched an unsuccessful beer- hall revolution. The prison visits became frequent; the distinguished soldier-scientist fascinated Hitler, then finally made him a disciple. The ascendancy has grown as Dr. Haushofer again and again has proved the accuracy of his knowledge and the wisdom of his advice....

It was Haushofer who taught the hysterical, planless agitator in a Munich jail to think in terms of continents and empires. Haushofer virtually dictated the famous Chapter XVI of Mein Kampf which outlined the foreign policy Hitler has since followed to the letter.


Haushofer's Lebensraum ("living space") theory sought to justify Germany's world conquest by claiming that it was necessary to insure the German people room to preserve and expand their racial community. He developed an intelligence-gathering organization which became the envy and model for all others. He was called everything from "Hitler's idea man" to "the man who will in the end take the Fuhrer's place," yet he seems to have kept a very low profile. But there is apparently much more to Haushofer than the geopolitician.

A love affair with the Orient began in 1908, when, as a field artillery officer in the Bavarian army, he was sent to Tokyo to study the Japanese army and to advise it as an artillery instructor. The assignment changed the course of his life. He traveled extensively in the Far East, and added the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean languages to his repertoire of English, French, and Russian. He could not be accused -- as other leading Nazis were -- of having a provincial background.

His four-year sojourn in the Far East also changed the course of German history. Haushofer was able to make the acquaintance of influential Japanese and to develop a rapport for the culture which helped account later for the German-Japanese alliance. When he returned to Germany in 1912, he had no reason at all to know that the Chinese proverb of which he was so fond, "He who rides a tiger cannot get off," would one day have particular relevance for him.

Haushofer was introduced to Oriental teachings during his stay in the Far East. He had been a devout student of Schopenhauer, and now he could drink directly from the source. He became sufficiently conversant in Sanskrit to translate several Hindu and Buddhist texts, and according to Ravenscroft, he was "an authority on Oriental mysticism ... concealing the other side of his nature and activities as a leader of a secret community of Initiates, and an authority on every aspect of the 'Secret Doctrine. ' [He was] in the esoteric stream of satanism through which he sought to raise Germany to the pinnacle of world power."

(The king of Satanists in America today is Anton LaVey, a former circus lion-tamer who greatly admires the Nazis. LaVey's book, The Satanic Bible, published in 1969, is dedicated to a puzzling mixture of people, with one entry reading: "To Karl Haushofer, a teacher without a classroom.")

A number of unsupported theories about Haushofer's occult connections are all rejected by his son Heinz. Haushofer is known to have had a reputation for precognition, and a belief in astrology. Johannes Tautz adds to these the belief that he belonged to George Gurdjieff's esoteric circle, which was as well versed in the difficult exercises of the Order of Bektashi Dervishes as Sebottendorff was, and that he was also a secret member of the Thule Society. List's publishing house made a German translation of Gurdjieff's biography. Gurdjieff traveled extensively through Asia, and may have met Haushofer there. A former disciple of Gurdjieff, Louis Pauwels, believes that Haushofer was a member of "one of the most important secret Buddhist societies" and was on a mission to restore the Indo-Germanic race, which he believed had originated in Central Asia, to its former greatness. If he failed in the mission, he would commit suicide in the traditional Japanese manner.

According to Jan van Helsing (Geheimgesellschaften und ihre Macht ... [“Secret Societies and their Power”], 1993), Tibetan monks worked together with Templar Knights who were organized in the highest lodge of the “black sun” on the establishment of the Third Reich. The secret order had (and still has) an important base underground in the Himalayas. The ruler of the underground kingdom is said to be “Rigden Iyepo”, the king of the world, with his representative on the surface, the Dalai Lama. In Die schwarze Sonne von Tashi Lhunpo [The Black Sun of Tashi Lhunpo] (1996), McCloud reports on the survival of the national socialist Thule group in Tibet. They are the followers of a “sun oracle” there. For Wilhelm Landig (Götzen gegen Thule ... [Idols against Thule], n.d.), Tibet is also “the realm of the black sun!

-- "Fascist Occultism and Its Close Relationship to Buddhist Tantrism," from "The Shadow of the Dalai Lama," by Victor and Victoria Trimondi


George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff was born in 1872 in the Caucasus region of Russia, of Russian, Greek, and Armenian ancestry. Like Madame Blavatsky, he claimed to have met members of a Hidden Brotherhood while traveling in Asia, and they imparted to him the occult tradition. He started a school, first in Moscow and then in France, where disciples could open up higher levels of consciousness.

An enigmatic figure, he may have been sent to Tibet as a Russian secret agent. He is believed by some people to have been known there as Dorjieff, the name of the man who taught the Dalai Lama. I have been told that there is a striking similarity in early photographs of both men. J. H. Brennan, a writer on occultism, believes that it was in Tibet that Haushofer made Gurdjieff's acquaintance. In any case, whether Haushofer knew him or not, it is clear that Gurdjieff was never a Nazi sympathizer. He and a group of disciples were in Berlin during the height of Nazi power and watched a street parade, which he proceeded to satirize. He was about to be hauled off to prison, but was dismissed as a madman.

All the same, Haushofer may very well have been imbued with the spirit of Gurdjieff's teaching, which held that men are asleep and that great effort is needed for some of them to awaken and become, in effect, supermen. Gurdjieff believed in the legend of Masters of Wisdom, superhuman intelligences who keep a careful watch over the destiny of mankind and intervene whenever human affairs get out of hand. Though this legend is common in Central Asia and the Near East, it is likely that Gurdjieff derived it from the Order of Bektashi Dervishes. As we will see, it recurred in Nazi mythology.

Gurdjieff also believed that he himself was a source of higher energy from which his disciples could draw. He hinted that he was in direct communication with a higher source, through which "the work for which he was responsible would be able to spread and gain strength in the world," and that "an organization of a higher order was being established in the world which would be able to accept only those who had reached such a stage of spiritual development that they were able to generate higher energies." He believed that his work was evolutionary, because it was "against the stream of life," that is to say, "against nature and against God."

Gurdjieff was far from being a Satanist or a racist, but neither was he bound by traditional ideas of morality. There was an air of the trickster about him and he could often play the cruel despot, which would appeal to the totalitarian mentality.

Pauwels, Brennan, and Tautz have linked Haushofer's name with another esoteric group, the Vril Society, or Luminous Lodge, a secret community of occultists in pre-Nazi Berlin. "Vril" derives from the novel The Coming Race, which has prophetic overtones. It was written by an English occultist who is better known as the author of The Last Days of Pompeii: Baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Written in the nineteenth century, The Coming Race details a superhuman subterranean race of beings living in huge caves in the bowels of the earth, who have developed a kind of psychic energy -- vril -- with which they are made the equals of the gods. They plan, one day, to take control of the earth and bring about a mutation among the existing human elite, subjugating, of course, the rest of slavish humanity.

Baron Lytton himself presumably believed that he was a storer of vril. [?] He practiced ceremonial magic and was claimed by Madame Blavatsky to be a Theosophist. Although he had examined mesmerism, he denied that vril had anything to do with animal magnetism. It was electricity whose properties were the same as "the one great fluid" with which all of life was pervaded. His "Vril people" accumulated it through mental and physical exercises resembling yoga.

These subterranean philosophers assert that by one operation of vril, which Faraday would perhaps call "atmospheric magnetism", they can influence the variations of temperature -- in plain words, the weather; that by operations, akin to those ascribed to mesmerism, electro-biology, odic force, etc., but applied scientifically, through vril conductors, they can exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics. To all such agencies they give the common name of vril.'

***

The more I think of a people calmly developing, in regions excluded from our sight and deemed uninhabitable by our sages, powers surpassing our most disciplined modes of force, and virtues to which our life, social and political, becomes antagonistic in proportion as our civilisation advances -- the more devoutly I pray that ages may yet elapse before there emerge into sunlight our inevitable destroyers. Being, however, frankly told by my physician that I am afflicted by a complaint that, though it gives little pain and no perceptible notice of its encroachments, may at any moment be fatal, I have thought it my duty to my fellow men to place on record these forewarnings of The Coming Race.

-- The Coming Race, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton


The English Rosicrucian society, founded in 1867 by Robert Wentworth Little, claimed Bulwer-Lytton as their 'Grand Patron', but he wrote to the society complaining that he was 'extremely surprised' by their use of the title, as he had 'never sanctioned such'. Nevertheless, a number of esoteric groups have continued to claim Bulwer-Lytton as their own, chiefly because some of his writings—such as the 1842 book Zanoni—have included Rosicrucian and other esoteric notions.

-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton, by Wikipedia


The Vril Society in Berlin apparently sought connection with the supernatural beings in the center of the world, and practiced the techniques which would eventually strengthen their mastery of the divine energy, so that they would have power over others and over events. They believed that this attempt at mastery was the only thing which gave purpose to existence. Any other activity was meaningless. One day, when the world was transformed, the beings in the center of the earth would emerge and form an alliance with those initiates who had succeeded in adequately preparing themselves.

The Berlin Vril Society was in close contact with an English group known as the Golden Dawn Society, which was, for a time, headed by the Satanist Aleister Crowley, and counted among its members such illustrious people as the poet William Butler Yeats.

The Golden Dawn Society created an even more exclusive inner group than its competitors, the Theosophists, with admission by invitation only, rule by secret chiefs who were discarnate spirits existing only in the astral plane, the practice of ritual magic, and the use of meeting rooms unknown to outer-order members. Such elitism made it the prototype of other magical groups throughout the continent.

The swastika was a key symbol to Golden Dawn, as it had been to Madame Blavatsky. She had incorporated it into a mystical brooch which she wore. Aleister Crowley had written about it in a tract published in 1910, and he later claimed that the Nazis had stolen the sacred swastika from him.

Haushofer returned to his native country in 1912, and advanced to the rank of general in World War I. He developed a reputation for clairvoyance, predicting, according to Pauwels, "the hour when the enemy would attack, the places where shells would fall, storms and political changes in countries about which he knew nothing."

Rudolf Hess was made his aide-de-camp. It was to remain a lasting relationship. Hess often referred to his old commander as a Secret Chief.

Haushofer the geopolitician is a much more familiar and comprehensible figure than Haushofer the Secret Chief. With his Roman nose and patrician bearing, he made an imposing professor at war's end. He had already distinguished himself in formulating ideas which were well received by the nationalists and Pan-Germans. At the University of Munich, he taught that "war is the father of all things" and that Japan and Germany had a common destiny: to appropriate more "living space" from other nations. He moved quite easily from military affairs to geopolitical statecraft, making good use of his Far Eastern travels. Munich, the center of revolutionary conspiracies, was the perfect intellectual climate for the father of geopolitics. His disciples and pupils slavishly followed his theories and style, and evolved a strategy of German world conquest which presently had a unique opportunity of fulfillment.

His most famous disciple was Rudolf Hess. He followed Haushofer to the University of Munich and sat at his feet, ardently drinking in the pseudoscientific political theories. He was a frequent visitor to the Haushofer home. Mrs. Haushofer was kind enough to give him English lessons. But the professor described his pupil with merciless accuracy:

He was one student among others, not particularly gifted, of slow intellectual grasp and dull in his work. He was very dependent on emotions and passionately liked to pursue fantastic ideas. He was only influenced by arguments of no importance at the very limits of human knowledge and superstition; he also believed in the influence of the stars on his personal and political life.... I was always disconcerted by the expression of his clear eyes, which had something somnambulistic about it....


Presumably, the professor was able to effect a change in his student, because he later claimed that it was only Hess who really understood his theories.

On Haushofer's visits to Landsberg, his geopolitical theories were eagerly discussed by all three men, and incorporated into Mein Kampf. Hess always remained loyal to both masters.

As for Hitler, he was released first, and wailed to Hanfstaengl about Hess, "Ach, mein Rudi, mein Hesserl, isn't it appalling to think he's still there?"

The common experience at Landsberg may have sealed a mystical brotherhood between the two men. Both Hitler and Hess were practiced in occult exercises. In the relatively isolated conditions of their prison room, they could have surrendered to the Grand Work of calling forth untapped powers in themselves. Hanfstaengl believed that Hitler's mind had become "impregnated with the limited doctrines of the Hess-Haushofer coterie" and that Hess had contributed to his "gradual divorce from reality with the inception of the Fuhrer cult." Before the Putsch, Heil was just an old Austrian custom which the Nazis had appropriated as a way of saying "Good day." After the Putsch, party people "Heil Hitlered" as a sort of password.

Hess kept his job as secretary on his return from prison, only now it was secretary of the Nazi party. After 1932, when the Nazis came to power, he was made deputy leader, second in command under Hitler. He controlled the central political organization of the Party, supervised and coordinated policy throughout Germany, and was in charge of at least nineteen departments of the government. He was not popular with the other party people. Kurt Ludecke refers to him as a "notorious" homosexual, and claims he was known as "Fraulein Anna."

He had married at Hitler's suggestion, and according to Goebbels' wife, for years Frau Hess announced that they were about to have a child, because some prophet had foreseen it. They consulted cartomancers, astrologers, and other magicians, who urged on them combinations of drinks and potions, until in the end a son was born. To commemorate the occasion, all the district leaders were urged to make an offering of a sack of earth from their respective districts. The earth was poured under the baby's cradle, as a symbol of his beginnings on German soil. As district leader of Berlin, Goebbels speculated on whether he ought not to have sent a Berlin paving-stone.

Hess was a man hungry for faith and ready to place it in pseudosciences like astrology, homeopathy, and every manner of divination. His fate was ruled entirely by the stars, by the pronouncements of soothsayers, by animal magnetism, the swings of pendulums, and terrestrial radiations. Demons had a terrible reality for him. Hanfstaengl says that Hess was considered

highly peculiar and went in for vegetarianism, nature cures and other weird beliefs. It got to the point where he would not go to bed without testing with a divining-rod whether there were any subterranean watercourses which conflicted with the direction of his couch. His wife used to complain: "I have as much experience out of our marriage as a candidate for confirmation."


Himmler's Finnish physiotherapist, Dr. Felix Kersten, recalls finding Hess in bed under a huge magnet swinging over him from the ceiling. There were twelve other magnets under his bed, to draw harmful substances out of his body and restore his strength.

Still, Hess was a valuable man to the Party, probably for the reason stated in a character study published in Vas Reich; "Hess can be silent and keep secrets."

Meanwhile, Hess's original master, Haushofer the geopolitician, was soon transformed into elder statesman. He was made president of the German Academy and of the People's Organization for Germans Living Abroad, and became an important member of the Academy of German Law, which originated the legislation binding on conquered countries. Most impressive of all was his job as director of the Institut fur Geopolitik of the University of Munich. After Hitler came to power, he saw to it that Haushofer received unlimited funds for the expansion of his Institut. His was the head which conceived of the plan by which Germany was to conquer the world.

He had long believed that Germany would give birth to a leader who would rule the earth; and astrological predictions had convinced him that this leader would accomplish his mission in an alliance with Japan. He often had premonitions, upon which he acted. He convinced Hitler that the Institut must find out everything about its enemies: strengths, weaknesses, impending famine, religious sensibilities, the personalities and tastes of officials, the morals and corruptibility of even minor bureaucrats, the views of opinion makers. To collate, sift through, and interpret all this material on every country in the world, Haushofer enlisted a staff of more than a thousand students, historians, economists, statisticians, military strategists, psychologists, meteorologists, physicists, geographers, and other specialists, working in Germany and abroad.

The researches apparently paid off. When, in 1938, the General Staff was worried that France would mobilize if Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, Haushofer assured them that it neither could nor would. He turned out to be right. He argued that Poland could be conquered in eighteen days. The military disagreed. They feared their armored trucks would bog down in the Polish mud. Haushofer said it was not likely to rain. It did not. The General Staff didn't believe Germany should invade Norway. Haushofer prophesied that it would be easy. The military wanted to invade France when war first started. Haushofer urged that they wait until German propaganda had made its full impact on the people. He also dictated when the campaigns in Africa and the Balkans would begin. It was his idea that the Nazis make temporary friends with Russia, despite widespread anxiety about collaborating with the Communists. He wooed Latin America for its usefulness against America.

The Nazis tried to keep foreign investigators from finding out how elaborate their new geopolitical machine was. They deliberately led outsiders to believe that they were not themselves taking it seriously, and the deception worked. Deprecatory remarks were made about Haushofer's use of such phrases as the "demoniac beauty of geopolitics," the "Nordic Japanese," "the almost telepathic sensitivity of oceanic nations to foreign dangers. " Time called his theory "one of history's greatest hoaxes -- a vast nonesuch of propaganda for luring Germans to the idea of world domination.... Mysticisms, race theories, phony 'cultural' conceptions...." But some observers believed that Haushofer's thinking dominated Hitler's. Even American thought was influenced. Said Hans W. Weigert in Foreign Affairs, July 1942: " ... the highest eulogy a political writer could earn was to be called 'the American Haushofer' ... colleges all over the country hurried to organize 'Institutes of Geopolitics.'"

He became the geopolitical adviser to Japan, as well, and his house was the meeting-place for Japanese diplomats to come and talk over their alliance with German diplomats.

His eldest son, Albrecht, was also a geopolitician, and occupied the Chair of Political Geography at the University of Berlin. He worked closely with the Foreign Office, and was made Joachim von Ribbentrop's assistant.

Father and son kept up close contact with British members of the upper class-Golden Dawn people, according to Jean-Michel Angebert, a French writer on occultism. Once war broke out, though, there was no longer any way to communicate. The elder Haushofer used his influence with Hess to try to convince Hitler to make peace with England. The same mystical thinking which advised the German army to enlarge the living space of the Third Reich "by moving out from a powerful territorial hub and by accomplishing this conquest progressively, step by step, following the accelerating movement of a spiraling dextrogyre [clockwise rotation]" urged Hess, in the spring of 1941, to embark on an adventure which was to make him the most ridiculous figure in the Third Reich.

The Haushofers had planned for some time a personal meeting between Hess and the Duke of Hamilton, a good friend of Albrecht's. The duke had the ear of Prime Minister Winston Churchill and King George VI. If he could be instrumental in passing on a German peace proposal, it would be worth risking a secret rendezvous. The elder Haushofer told Hess that he had two dreams on two separate occasions. In one, Hess flew a plane to an important destination. In another, Hess walked along the tartan-tapestried halls of a splendid castle (the Duke of Hamilton happened to be Scottish). Twenty-four years earlier, Haushofer's premonitions had been celebrated for their accuracy. Hess was now ready to fly whenever the stars were propitious.

He took off for Scotland alone on May 10, 1941, in a Messerschmitt that had been especially designed for him, with just a few possessions, including visiting cards from each of the Haushofers, an assortment of homeopathic pills, a small hypodermic syringe, and a letter addressed to the duke. Whether or not Hitler knew his plans, if not the specific date of his departure, is still a matter of hot debate.

Hess landed in Scotland, but that was the only part of the trip which went as he and the Haushofers would have expected. The British government did not leap at his peace offer. The German government had to denounce him as mentally deranged, which caused it quite a bit of embarrassment, since Hess had been in a position of authority, with no one questioning his sanity. Hess remained an uncomfortable subject in both countries. British cabinet ministers sealed their lips so tightly that one Londoner quipped: "Never has so much been kept from so many by so few."

The British would not allow Hess to go home, warning that he would be done in by his compatriots if he did. Hess sent Professor Haushofer a birthday greeting:

Do not worry over me. You, less than anyone, need do this. That my present situation is not exactly agreeable goes without saying. But, in time of war, we have to put up with many things that are not agreeable.

Let the waves like thunder break,
Be your very life at stake;
May you crash or may you land
E'er as your own pilot stand!


That I crashed is not to be denied, and it is equally certain that I was my own pilot! In this matter I have nothing with which to reproach myself. It was I who took the controls. You know as well as I do that the compass which guides our affairs is influenced by forces that are infallible -- even when we know them not. May those forces be favorable to you in the years to come!


In the event, the "forces" proved no more favorable to Professor Haushofer than to Hess himself.

Not only were hospitals and streets named "Hess" ostentatiously changed after his unsuccessful attempt to end the war, but there was a wholesale routing of astrologers, seers, mediums, and nature therapists.

Hess, meanwhile, grew increasingly paranoid. He was being hypnotized by the Jews, he complained. Furthermore, so were Churchill, Secretary of State Anthony Eden, and the king of Italy.

Karl and Albrecht Haushofer fell from grace. A letter from Martin Bormann to Alfred Rosenberg dated June 17, 1942, suggests that the National Socialist Monthly gave the professor too much publicity, and that this should not happen in the future.

Albrecht Haushofer participated in a coup d'etat against Hitler on July 20, 1944. The Fuhrer escaped death. Karl Haushofer was sent to Dachau, Albrecht to Moabite prison. Before his execution, Albrecht composed eighty sonnets, entitled Sonnets from Moabite, some of which have become renowned. The collection was in his hands when he was shot on a street in Prussia. Sonnet 39 is called "Guilt":

I should have seen my duty sooner and should have dared with louder voice to name as evil the thing my judgment knew as evil but held too long unspoken.... I deceived my own conscience. I lied to myself and others. I early understood the whole sequence of the misery to come.


Sonnet 38 is called "The Father":

In Father's life, the die is cast.
Once it was in the power of his will
To push the demon back into his cell.
My father held the seal and broke it.
He did not sense the breath of evil
And out into the world he let the devil.


After the war, an American was sent to interrogate Karl Haushofer for the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, and he confessed that Hess had been his favorite pupil. But Karl Haushofer never testified, for he committed suicide in the traditional Japanese manner.

Hess did testify at Nuremberg. The other leading Nazis believed his presence at the trial was a disgrace. He barely seemed to listen, and often dozed. It was as if he were operating on another level of reality.

From 1947, he has been Prisoner No.7 at Spandau in Berlin. He practices yoga regularly, and though he writes to his wife and son, he says he does not want to see them because it would make the rest of his life sentence too unbearable.

His wife keeps a room for him in a mountain chalet which she manages. "My husband's mouth is closed," she says. "He cannot utter the final word about his deed."

Though she has not seen him since the day he left for England, they are never apart. Says Mrs. Hess:

Telepathy, astrology and his letters keep us together. ... My husband and I are in constant telepathic contact. People frequently turn up here that I have not seen for years, and inevitably in Rudolf's next letter there are questions about these very visitors. My husband and I receive and send to each other in this way.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Gods & Beasts: The Nazis and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

Postby admin » Sun Jun 21, 2015 12:17 am

CHAPTER 8: Atlantis, the Home of the Master Race

Some say the world will end in ice....
-- Robert Frost


Science hasn't yet been able to give us a completely satisfactory answer to the question of how the universe came to be. The occultists are much bolder. From time to time, they have advanced different theories -- always colorful -- about the origin of the world and of human beings. The Nazis favored the occult cosmology of an Austrian named Hans Hoerbiger.

Born in 1860 to a poor family in Carinthia, Hoerbiger became a blacksmith's apprentice as a youth, and when he scraped together enough money, studied mechanics in Vienna. Eventually, he became a mechanical engineer and inventor. As a boy, he was fond of lying out of doors at night and gazing up at the sky, and the intuition came to him that the moon was an ocean of ice. He extended the vision as a young engineer, in the instant when he saw molten steel poured onto snow and the ground explode violently. He took this as a microcosm for the kind of cataclysm that might have given birth to the universe. In the next two decades, he explored the tension between cosmic ice and fire, which culminated in the publication of a 772-page book, Glazial-kosmogonie, in 1913.

The "world-ice theory" (Welteislehre) is that the universe came into existence when a gigantic chunk of cosmic ice collided with the sun, causing an explosion whose continuing aftermath explains the Great Deluge, the Ice Age, and the differentiation of races. This glacial cosmology went so far as to offer an entirely new theory about the origin of the moon -- one which bears a striking similarity to Gurdjieff's. The moon, said Hoerbiger, was originally an independent planet, circling the sun in an independent orbit. It eventually trespassed on the earth's orbit, becoming earth's satellite. The present moon, Hoerbiger continued, was not the first to be captured by the earth; primary, secondary, and tertiary moons had already collided with our planet, and the present moon, captured about thirteen thousand years ago, will eventually crash into the earth too, billions of years hence.

Hoerbiger's ideas were happily pounced upon by occultists, with good reason. He believed that on the three previous occasions when the moon had collided with the earth, the catastrophes which resulted were recorded in the legends about the Flood, about the lost continent of Atlantis, and about the Twilight of the Gods.

Atlantis has always been the favorite place of all occultists. According to ancient tradition, it was a large island in the Atlantic Ocean. Plato, in Timaeus, described it as larger than Libya and Asia Minor combined. In Critias, he spoke of it glowingly as a powerful nation which later was completely engulfed by the sea.

Whether the continent of Atlantis ever really existed or was the product of human imagination, it has provided ample occasion for speculation. To occultists, it became associated with man's search for hidden wisdom. The supposed Atlanteans, like the Vril people, presumably developed supernormal powers. They were the models upon which esoteric groups patterned themselves, usually according to a blueprint envisioned by their masters in a trancelike state. Atlantis provided these groups with many hours of lectures and workshops, and thousands of books have been written about it -- amazing, when you consider that the only original references to it occur in the two works of Plato, Timaeus and Critias. In neither of these works, moreover, does Plato claim to have firsthand information. One of his characters merely quotes the Athenian jurist Solon. We are never sure whether this is an accurate account of Solon's belief or merely a literary convention.

SOCRATES: I should like, before proceeding further, to tell you how I feel about the State which we have described. I might compare myself to a person who, on beholding beautiful animals either created by the painter's art, or, better still, alive but at rest, is seized with a desire of seeing them in motion or engaged in some struggle or conflict to which their forms appear suited; this is my feeling about the State which we have been describing. There are conflicts which all cities undergo, and I should like to hear some one tell of our own city carrying on a struggle against her neighbours, and how she went out to war in a becoming manner, and when at war showed by the greatness of her actions and the magnanimity of her words in dealing with other cities a result worthy of her training and education....

CRITIAS: Then listen, Socrates, to a tale which, though strange, is certainly true, having been attested by Solon, who was the wisest of the seven sages. He was a relative and a dear friend of my great-grandfather, Dropides, as he himself says in many passages of his poems; and he told the story to Critias, my grandfather, who remembered and repeated it to us. There were of old, he said, great and marvellous actions of the Athenian city, which have passed into oblivion through lapse of time and the destruction of mankind, and one in particular, greater than all the rest. This we will now rehearse. It will be a fitting monument of our gratitude to you, and a hymn of praise true and worthy of the goddess, on this her day of festival....

In the Egyptian Delta, at the head of which the river Nile divides, there is a certain district which is called the district of Sais, and the great city of the district is also called Sais, and is the city from which King Amasis came. The citizens have a deity for their foundress; she is called in the Egyptian tongue Neith, and is asserted by them to be the same whom the Hellenes call Athene; they are great lovers of the Athenians, and say that they are in some way related to them. To this city came Solon, and was received there with great honour; he asked the priests who were most skilful in such matters, about antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old. On one occasion, wishing to draw them on to speak of antiquity, he began to tell about the most ancient things in our part of the world—about Phoroneus, who is called 'the first man,' and about Niobe; and after the Deluge, of the survival of Deucalion and Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their descendants, and reckoning up the dates, tried to compute how many years ago the events of which he was speaking happened. Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said:...

As for those genealogies of yours which you just now recounted to us, Solon, they are no better than the tales of children. In the first place you remember a single deluge only, but there were many previous ones; in the next place, you do not know that there formerly dwelt in your land the fairest and noblest race of men which ever lived, and that you and your whole city are descended from a small seed or remnant of them which survived. And this was unknown to you, because, for many generations, the survivors of that destruction died, leaving no written word. For there was a time, Solon, before the great deluge of all, when the city which now is Athens was first in war and in every way the best governed of all cities, is said to have performed the noblest deeds and to have had the fairest constitution of any of which tradition tells, under the face of heaven. Solon marvelled at his words, and earnestly requested the priests to inform him exactly and in order about these former citizens. You are welcome to hear about them, Solon, said the priest, both for your own sake and for that of your city, and above all, for the sake of the goddess who is the common patron and parent and educator of both our cities. She founded your city a thousand years before ours (Observe that Plato gives the same date (9000 years ago) for the foundation of Athens and for the repulse of the invasion from Atlantis (Crit.).), receiving from the Earth and Hephaestus the seed of your race, and afterwards she founded ours, of which the constitution is recorded in our sacred registers to be 8000 years old. As touching your citizens of 9000 years ago, I will briefly inform you of their laws and of their most famous action; the exact particulars of the whole we will hereafter go through at our leisure in the sacred registers themselves. If you compare these very laws with ours you will find that many of ours are the counterpart of yours as they were in the olden time. In the first place, there is the caste of priests, which is separated from all the others; next, there are the artificers, who ply their several crafts by themselves and do not intermix; and also there is the class of shepherds and of hunters, as well as that of husbandmen; and you will observe, too, that the warriors in Egypt are distinct from all the other classes, and are commanded by the law to devote themselves solely to military pursuits; moreover, the weapons which they carry are shields and spears, a style of equipment which the goddess taught of Asiatics first to us, as in your part of the world first to you. Then as to wisdom, do you observe how our law from the very first made a study of the whole order of things, extending even to prophecy and medicine which gives health, out of these divine elements deriving what was needful for human life, and adding every sort of knowledge which was akin to them. All this order and arrangement the goddess first imparted to you when establishing your city; and she chose the spot of earth in which you were born, because she saw that the happy temperament of the seasons in that land would produce the wisest of men. Wherefore the goddess, who was a lover both of war and of wisdom, selected and first of all settled that spot which was the most likely to produce men likest herself. And there you dwelt, having such laws as these and still better ones, and excelled all mankind in all virtue, as became the children and disciples of the gods.

Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.

I have told you briefly, Socrates, what the aged Critias heard from Solon and related to us. And when you were speaking yesterday about your city and citizens, the tale which I have just been repeating to you came into my mind, and I remarked with astonishment how, by some mysterious coincidence, you agreed in almost every particular with the narrative of Solon; but I did not like to speak at the moment. For a long time had elapsed, and I had forgotten too much; I thought that I must first of all run over the narrative in my own mind, and then I would speak. And so I readily assented to your request yesterday, considering that in all such cases the chief difficulty is to find a tale suitable to our purpose, and that with such a tale we should be fairly well provided.

-- Timaeus, by Plato


The latest theory, of course -- and this, too, has been disputed -- holds that Plato's Atlantis may have been confused with the real Aegean island of Thera, devastated by a tremendous volcanic explosion in about 1500 B.C.

Enthusiasts have sought Atlantis in all sorts of unlikely places. The German volkisch occult groups placed it in Thule, the northernmost part of the earth, and made it the original home of the Aryan master race. They were delighted to have Hoerbiger explain why that home had disappeared.

The glaciers caused by the last falling moon, when they melted, engulfed the whole Atlantean civilization in a deluge, memories of which exist in the legends of all people. This was the fall of man; from this period he degenerated. The occult tradition teaches that some wise and powerful members of the highly developed race went underground and saved themselves from the Great Flood.

Disciples of Hoerbiger also were pleased to point out that the age of giants, set forth in myth and legend, was fully explained by his theory. When a satellite approaches nearer to the earth, the gravitational pull of the earth becomes greater, tides become stronger, and, as Peter Kolisimo explains in Timeless Earth,

as a second consequence, human beings and creatures in general will become taller.... this is the only possible explanation of the huge species of plants and animals that have existed on earth, and of a race of men sixteen feet tall. The increase of men's stature, and likewise of their intelligence, is also due, according to this theory, to an increase in the intensity of cosmic rays.


Dinosaurs, which are especially to be taken into account here, are conspicuous for their apparently quite useless armor plates and spines. Obviously they served as electrical induction antennae and surfaces -- another purpose cannot be found and nature creates nothing without a purpose.

-- Theozoology, or the Science of the Sodomite Apelings and the Divine Electron, by Dr. Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels


Hoerbiger believed that cosmic events recur. The Ice Age, which seemed to him to recur in cycles of six thousand years, was about to come again. Only this time, supermen who had learned to control cosmic fire and ice would have the option to stop the cycle and make their civilization immortal.

But Hoerbiger was not all cosmic ice and fire. Indeed, his metaphysics also took in the view that there was a world apart from this one, where the laws of cosmic ice were not operable.

The Judea-Christian notion of primitive man slowly inching his way up to civilization did not accord well with the volkisch Hoerbigerians. To them, it was precisely the other way round: Moons ago, Aryan men had created a marvelous civilization which had been destroyed by the Ice Age; we had yet to approach their splendor. Traces of the lost paradise existed, for those who had eyes to see, in ancient giant monuments, statues, and complex mathematical and engineering constructions.

Hoerbiger was one of many in the scientific community who aligned themselves with the Nazis. After World War I, Jewish scientists and scholars were more readily accepted into the universities, since the republic no longer allowed them to be arbitrarily excluded. The increase in Jewish participation in major universities, along with the anti-Semitic propaganda, accounted for the push among German scholars and scientists to "purge" the Jews and thus advance their own careers. Some, of course, were not just opportunistic, but really believed the volkisch arguments.

Hans Hoerbiger was at the height of his fame in 1925 when he issued a declaration to Austrian and German scientists:

You must choose, and right now, whether you want to be with us, or against us. While Hitler cleans up politics, Hans Hoerbiger will take care of the false sciences. The doctrine of the eternal ice will herald the regeneration of the German people. Watch out! Come over to our side before it is too late!


At sixty-five, Hoerbiger had pitted himself against orthodox astronomy. His appeal, obviously, was to emotion rather than reason. With his white flowing beard, very much like that of his fellow Viennese, Guido von List, Hoerbiger, too, played the role of mystical prophet, warning that "objective science is a pernicious invention, a totem of decadence." He sought to replace it with an inspired piercing of the mysteries. Illumination would come intuitively with the development of "higher" consciousness.

In the post-World War I period, Albert Einstein was the most famous scientist in Germany. Hostility toward him increased in direct proportion to his growing fame. German scientists were made acutely aware that he was a Jew, a pacifist, and a radical. His theories posed a threat to some experimental physicists, who saw in them the eventual ascendancy of theoretical physics. His theories were labeled "meaningless" or "unverifiable abstractions," or else he was accused of not being original. Men who championed the National Socialist cause concentrated on him as their chief scapegoat. Hoerbiger was one of these men.

His success as an engineer had set him up well financially, and he started what amounted to a political campaign, trumpeting his visionary theories like a revolutionary agitator. He wanted to wean people away from the "uselessness" of mathematics and to replace it with an enlightened "knowing." His propaganda spread through mass media, tracts, posters, meetings, and lectures. A monthly periodical, The Key to World Events, went to German and Austrian Hoerbigerians. His organization published many books, articles, and pamphlets.

Hoerbiger was greatly helped in disseminating his propaganda by Nazi Storm Troopers. Dietrich Eckart introduced Hitler to Hoerbiger's ideas, and it was a meeting of like minds. Both men knew the importance of mythology in the lives of the masses.

The Storm Troopers among Hoerbiger's followers used the same tactics as Hitler in disseminating their fantasies. Other astronomers' meetings were invaded with cries of "Down with the orthodox scientists!" Rivals were proselytized in the streets, handed leaflets which threatened: "When we have won, you and your like will be begging in the gutter." Hoerbiger admonished industrialists: "Either you will learn to believe in me, or you will be treated as an enemy." They were told to have prospective employees sign a statement reading: "I swear that I believe in the theory of eternal ice."

Other scientists, at first, stood their ground and attacked Hoerbiger's theories. Gradually, as Hitler's strongmen helped to swell his pseudoscience into a popular movement, they were silenced. The system meshed well with the temper of the times and was perfectly tailored to Nazi mythology.

Hoerbiger died in 1931, before he could see some of the consequences of his dogma. Hitler Youth were recruited to spread the word. In 1935, Heinrich Himmler, an admirer, established the Ahnenerbe ("Ancestral Research") branch of the SS for the purpose of subsidizing researches into occult theories of ancestral origins of Aryanism. He sent the German playwright Edmund Kiss to Abyssinia, to look for supporting evidence for Hoerbiger's theories, and made another Hoerbiger disciple, Dr. Hans Robert Scultetus, head of the Ahnenerbe branch which was to concentrate on weather forecasts resting on the world-ice cosmology. Literature about this cosmology was handed out freely to high-ranking Nazis. A German expedition to Tibet tried to find fossilized remains of giants. Anyone who attacked Hoerbiger was promptly suppressed by the Ahnenerbe.

In 1936, despite rumors that he was a Freemason and a Roman Catholic, Hoerbiger's son, Hans Robert Hoerbiger, was appointed cosmic-ice Fuhrer by Himmler, who insisted that if the theory were shorn of its fantastic elements, which might hurt his flawless reputation, it would be "scientific" enough to constitute a "really Aryan intellectual treasure." A Nazi pamphlet announced that cosmic ice stood in the same relation to Einstein's theory of relativity as the Edda did to the Talmud.

No one was in a position to do more for Hoerbiger's cosmology than Hitler. He promised that when he built his ideal city in Linz, he would dedicate an observatory to Hoerbiger. After Hitler came to power, a number of celebrated engineers and scientists succumbed to the cosmic-ice theory.

One tract drew attention to the natural affinity between the two self-made Austrians:

Our Nordic ancestors grew strong amidst the ice and snow, and this is why a belief in a world of ice is the natural heritage of Nordic men. It was an Austrian, Hitler, who drove out the Jewish politicians, and another Austrian, Hoerbiger, will drive out the Jewish scientists. By his own example Hitler has shown that an amateur is better than a professional; it was left to another amateur to give us a thorough understanding of the Universe.


The few times that these two Messianic leaders met, Hoerbiger actually outtalked Hitler in his harangue against modern science, which not only did not understand the why of anything but had managed to separate man from the spirit. Jews like Einstein and Freud distinguished themselves in their fields and at the same time helped to destroy the belief in magic. They were pacifists in the bargain. Einstein had called World War I "a fateful misunderstanding ... an incomprehensible deception," and Freud went so far as to claim that all war was a mass regression to a primitive state, writing: "Never has any event been destructive of so much that is valuable in the commonwealth of humanity, nor so debasing to the highest that we know."

With Hoerbiger, on the other hand, Hitler was comfortably in the realm of Wagner and Nietzsche. The magic of myth would be reestablished in Germany, with its giants and dwarfs, masters and slaves, transgressions, sacrifices, and punishments.

Hitler took great pride in being the enemy of "Jewish, liberal" science. He confessed to Rauschning:

I thank my destiny for saving me from the State-granted privilege of acquiring blinkers in the form of a so-called scientific education. I have been able to steer clear of many naive assumptions. Now I am reaping the benefit. I approach everything with a vast, ice-cold freedom from prejudice.


He often expounded on cosmic catastrophe at the dinner table, holding that "we shall never raise the veil between our present world and that which preceded us" unless intuition teaches exact science the path to follow. Hoerbiger, said Hitler, ranked with Ptolemy and Copernicus. His theory that water "is in reality melted ice (instead of ice's being frozen water) ... amounted to a revolution, and everybody rebelled against" him, proving once again that science grappled "with the spirit of routine."

Hoerbiger was not accepted by the scientific establishment because "the fact is," said Hitler, "men do not wish to know."

Hitler based some important decisions on Hoerbigerian premises. For example, cosmic ice experts caused delays, because they were concerned about the delicate balance between fire and ice. They feared a rocket in space might cause a global disaster. (The military head of the first German rocket tests, Walter Dornberger, also relates that the work was delayed for months at a time because Hitler dreamed that no V-2 rocket would reach England. As an occultist, Hitler took his dreams quite literally.)

Hoerbiger's was not the only occult cosmological theory in which the Nazis believed. There was also the theory of the hollow earth, which received support in Germany after World War I. A leading proponent, Karl Neupert, held that the earth was a spherical bubble, with humanity on the inside, not, as commonly supposed, on the outside. In World War II, certain German naval circles tried to apply the hollow-earth theory. According to an article in Popular Astronomy in June 1946, entitled "German Astronomy During the War":

They considered it helpful to locate the British fleet, because the curvature of the earth would not obstruct observation. Visual rays were not suitable because of refraction; but infrared rays had less refraction. Accordingly a party of about ten men under the scientific leadership of Dr. Heinz Fischer, an infrared expert, was sent out from Berlin to the isle of Rugen to photograph the British fleet with infrared equipment at an upward angle of some forty-five degrees.


The experiment did not work.

Nor did an earlier one, called the Magdeburg Project, in which an engineer who was connected with the municipal government of that city devised a way of testing the hollow-earth theory by sending up a rocket. As Willy Ley writes in Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space, "it began like a story by Jules Verne. A mentally decrepit 'philosopher' had written a badly printed pamphlet about the true shape of the universe, in which he insisted that the earth is the universe, that we live inside a hollow globe of the dimensions of the earth, that there is nothing outside that globe, and that the universe of the astronomers is only an optical illusion." If the rocket crashed at the opposite end of the earth, that would prove people lived inside a hollow globe. The rocket cost 25,000 marks, and another 15,000 were spent on a city holiday. Several tests ended in disaster. Either the rocket did not get off the ground, or it smashed, or it flew away, never to be seen again.

After the war, Dr. Fischer protested that the Nazis had forced him "to do crazy things," which had taken him away from more fruitful research, such as he was able to engage in later when he helped America to develop the H-bomb.

Teutonic mythology speaks of the end of all things, the twilight of gods and men, when the world will be consumed in flames because the age of evil has come. Winter will follow winter, in a world chained in ice, and then a new age will come, with a regenerating race.

The apocalyptic vision within the occult tradition is similar. The Fall, and the accompanying Flood, are punishments for man's transgressions, and will purge him of sin. After the Deluge, a Second Coming. Hoerbiger and Hitler believed in this mystique. Modern man, in the twentieth century, had a chance to redeem the species. Hoerbiger and Hitler would point the way.

By spring 1944, the Nazis grew desperate. Hitler must have had grave doubts about man's redemption. The turning point had come for them in the Russian campaign of 1941. Advised by Hoerbigerians to expect a mild winter, Hitler did not even provide his troops with adequate warm clothing. The icy winds did not blow away his mystical faith that he could win. The Russian winter was Germany's most serious military crisis, and Hitler would never admit that he had been wrong. The Russian campaign mystified everyone else.

Hitler had promised, in his early days, that Germany would never surrender again. If she could not conquer her enemies, she would drag them down to destruction with her. Once Hitler was convinced that Germany could not be saved, he made good his promise. When the American and Russian troops were outside of Berlin, Hitler ordered all food and clothing stores, all bridges and dams, all military, industrial, transportation, and communication facilities in the whole country destroyed. Any Germans who stood in the way were to be killed.

Albert Speer, nonmystical, one of the few Nazi leaders who could still communicate with Hitler, was horrified at the order. He tried to argue Hitler out of it by appealing to a concern for the future. After all, many of those bridges, highways, and buildings were Speer's own creations, as the chief architect of the Third Reich:

We must do everything to maintain, even if only in a primitive manner, a basis for the existence of the nation.... We have no right to carry out demolitions which might affect the life of the people....

Hitler's response was in keeping with the superman myth:

If the war is to be lost, the nation also will perish. This fate is inevitable. There is no need to consider the basis of even a most primitive existence any longer. On the contrary, it is better to destroy even that, and to destroy it ourselves. The nation has proved itself weak, and the future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation. Besides, those who remain after the battle are of little value; for the good have fallen.


The Germans had proved themselves not to be ready yet to become the master race. Hitler's leadership had been wasted on them. They deserved to perish.

Hitler himself committed suicide on April 30, 1945, a deliberately chosen day, according to J. H. Brennan:

The Dark Initiate had remained true to his black creed to the very last, had arranged his affairs so that even his suicide should be a sacrificial tribute to the Powers of Darkness. April 30 is the ancient Feast of Beltane, the day which blends into Walpurgis Night. It is perhaps the most important date in the whole calendar of Satanism.
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Next

Return to Political Science

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests

cron