16: Ariosophy
"Hitler's character is incomprehensible to me."
-- Richard Breiting
Adolf Hitler employed Christian rhetoric for tactical reasons, however his own theological views were "Ariosophical," an eclectic brew of Theosophy, Christianity, and paganism. He and Eckart both believed that the Protestant-Catholic rift undermined German nationalism. Hitler spoke of fatuous Protestants and Catholics thumping each other with "Bible and sprinkler." (Cf. Hitler's Secret Conversations, Oct. 14, 1941, p. 83.) The "Positive Christianity" of 1930's Nazism urged patriotic Lutherans and Roman Catholics to overlook doctrinal differences for the sake of German solidarity. In 1919 Eckart thought that shared anti-Semitism would serve as a basis for rapprochement among the confessions. He agreed with the position of Ernst Graf zu Reventlow (Fanni's brother), who wrote in Reichswart Magazine that "the Protestant and Catholic hit each other over the head to the Jews' musical accompaniment." [1]
The product of a mixed marriage, Eckart approved of Luther's independent thinking, German patriotism, and anti-Semitism on the one hand, but deplored his divisiveness, which led to religious wars against Catholic Germans.
"By attacking Catholicism he inadvertently did the Jews' bidding. 'There would never have been a schism, never the war which for thirty years would shed torrents of Aryan blood, as the Jews wanted.'" [2]
Incredibly, prominent Nazis such as Walter Buch, Hans Schemm, and Ernst Reventlow found National Socialism compatible with their Christian faith. Though Eckart and Hitler modified Jesus into an Aryan hero and sometimes paid lip service to volkisch Christianity, their "religious" beliefs were closer to those of Rudolf von Sebottendorf and Guido von List than evangelical Christians like Buch and Reventlow. Neither Hitler nor Eckart attended church or paid much attention to Christian theology. In his table talk of later years Hitler regularly threatened to "settle accounts" with Christendom. To Otto Wagener he fulminated:
"The Christian churches ... denied Christ and betrayed him! For they have transformed the holy idea of Christian socialism into its opposite!. .. Their lives and deeds are a constant blow against these teachings and a defamation of God!" [3]
Since resurgent Aryandom could never usher in a new millennium without ruthless intolerance, Hitler disparaged Christian "pity ethics."
"After all these centuries of whining about the protection of the poor and lowly, it is about time we decided to protect the strong against the inferior." [4]
Artur Dinter (author of Sin Against Blood), Count Ernst Reventlow, and other spiritually-oriented Nazis wanted to create a new "Inter-Confessional German Religion." Even neo-pagans such as Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg sympathized with this movement. Realizing that a Nazi religion would offend pious Catholics and Protestants, Hitler put an end to it in 1937. He still felt it necessary to mollify the churches four years after his ascension to power.
Hitler got most of his metaphysics at second hand. He never read Madame Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine, though his friend Dietrich Eckart occasionally discussed it with him in 1920 and 1921. During his Vienna years Hitler studied the Ariosophical distortions of Guido von List and Adolf Josef Lanz, who couldn't resist indulging in fantasies that Germany would breed the coming Aryan master race.
According to H. L. Mencken, Madame Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, "swore like a second mate, and smoked incessantly." [5] A gifted psychic, she claimed to be in touch with two Indian mahatmas, Master Morya and Master Koot Hoomi. These adepts communicated spiritual knowledge to her, much of it from the Bhagawad Gita. Madame Blavatsky and Col. Henry Olcott founded the Theosophical Society in New York City on September 13, 1875. For its logo they adopted the swastika or "sun wheel," an ancient Sanskrit rune denoting vitality, creativity, fertility, and regeneration. Acting as a channel for her "Superiors," Blavatsky wrote Isis Unveiled in 1877 and The Secret Doctrine in 1888, which gave a fantastic account of the Seven Root Races. The Self-Born, a race of spirits perished when their realm sank into the ocean. The Hyperboreans who inhabited the North Pole suffered a similar fate. The Lemurians, who lived on a prehistoric continent in the Pacific Ocean had denser bodies with sex organs. They eventually fell afoul the Superiors by breeding with lower races. As Christopher Hale recounts:
"Lemuria, too, sank beneath the waves. 850,000 years ago, the Fourth Race appeared on an island continent in the Atlantic Ocean ... the fabled lost continent of Atlantis ... Over time (Atlantean giants) became immoral and misused their great size and skills. The Atlantic began to rise, submerging their kingdom. And so Atlantis joined the other lost continents on the now rather crowded ocean floor. .. ." [6]
One legendary account held that Thevetat, a low caste sorcerer, hastened Atlantis's demise through black magic. A few refugees from Atlantis made their way to the Gobi desert, where their descendants eventually generated a new elite.
So how did the "lesser races" come into being? According to Blavatsky, God delegated the task of creation to demiurges -- semi-divine beings of varying degrees of intelligence and morality. The more highly-evolved demiurges molded supermen such as the Hyperboreans and Atlanteans, while demonic spirits created "nefilim" and "untouchables." A Divine Plan called for the evolution of all races, however certain beings lacked capacity for improvement. In The Secret Doctrine Helena Blavatsky wrote:
"The Semites ... are ... degenerate in spirituality and perfected in materiality. To these belong the Jews and Arabs. The former are a tribe descended from the Chandals of India, the outcasts, many of them ex-Brahmins, who sought refuge in Chaldea, Scinde, and Iran, and were truly born from their father Abraham (no Brahmin.) [7]
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 and the Occult, by Dusty Sklar
Her disciple William Quan Judge thought all variations among humans were due to "essential character," not environmental factors such as education, wealth, or social conditioning.
"Many savages have good actual brain capacity, but are still savage. This is because the Ego in that body is still ... undeveloped." [8]
Judge concluded that a soul could not realize its destiny in one incarnation. Souls reincarnated several times -- not necessarily always to earth -- as a part of their maturation process. Holy Hierarchies wrote primitive races off as hopeless, and would not deign to assist them spiritually.
"Savagery remains because there are still egos whose experience is so limited that they are still savage; they will come up into higher races when ready .... so we find the red Indian, the Hottentot, the Easter Islanders, and others as examples of races deserted by high egos ... " [9]
19th Century Theosophical writings were not politically correct by today's standards. since they advocated "paternalism," or the rendering of guardian care to "child-like races." However, Blavatsky, Olcott, and Judge all embraced Buddha's commandment, "you shall not harm any sentient being." One might adopt a condescending attitude toward New Guinea cannibals, but it was not permissible to murder them.
Blavatsky never identified Germans as Aryans.
The difference between the Aryan Hindu and the Aryan European faiths is very small ...
But one and all, with the exception of the latest Aryans, now become Europeans and Christians ...
The Western Aryans had, every nation and tribe, like their Eastern brethren of the Fifth Race ...
Thus two peoples, the Hindus and the Europeans, placed at the two extremities of the world ...
The several branches of the Aryan Race, the Asiatic and the European, the Hindu and the Greek, did their best to conceal their true nature, if not their importance...
The Lord appears to Abraham, and while saying, "I am the Almighty God," yet adds, "I will establish my covenant to be a God unto thee" (Abraham), and unto his seed after him (Gen. xvii. 7) -- not unto Aryan Europeans....
No skeleton ever yet found is older than between 50, or 60,000 years, and man's size was reduced from 15 to 10 or 12 feet, ever since the third sub-race of the Aryan stock, which sub-race -- born and developed in Europe and Asia Minor under new climates and conditions -- had become European...
-- The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena P. Blavatsky
She taught Universal Brotherhood, not Teutonic chauvinism. Although Theosophy held that the higher root races were evolving toward divinity, it did not assert that one advanced race should enslave primordial peoples. Lower races were to be loved and helped -- not abused, or exterminated.
Human crossing may have been a general rule from the time of the separation of sexes, and yet that other law may assert itself, viz., sterility between two human races, just as between two animal species of various kinds, in those rare cases when a European, condescending to see in a female of a savage tribe a mate, happens to choose a member of such mixed tribes. Darwin notes such a case in a Tasmanian tribe, whose women were suddenly struck with sterility, en masse, some time after the arrival among them of the European colonists. The great naturalist tried to explain this fact by change of diet, food, conditions, etc., but finally gave up the solution of the mystery. For the occultist it is a very evident one. "Crossing", as it is called, of Europeans with Tasmanian women -- i.e, the representatives of a race, whose progenitors were a "soulless" and mindless monster and a real human, though still as mindless a man -- brought on sterility. This, not alone as a consequence of a physiological law, but also as a decree of Karmic evolution in the question of further survival of the abnormal race...
It is a most suggestive fact -- to those concrete thinkers who demand a physical proof of Karma -- that the lowest races of men are now rapidly dying out; a phenomenon largely due to an extraordinary sterility setting in among the women, from the time that they were first approached by the Europeans. A process of decimation is taking place all over the globe, among those races, whose "time is up" -- among just those stocks, be it remarked, which esoteric philosophy regards as the senile representatives of lost archaic nations. It is inaccurate to maintain that the extinction of a lower race is invariably due to cruelties or abuses perpetrated by colonists. Change of diet, drunkenness, etc., etc., have done much; but those who rely on such data as offering an all-sufficient explanation of the crux, cannot meet the phalanx of facts now so closely arrayed. "Nothing", says even the materialist Lefevre, "can save those that have run their course .. It would be necessary to extend their destined cycle ... The peoples that have been spared ... Hawaiians or Maories, have been no less decimated than the tribes massacred or tainted by European intrusion." (“Philosophy,” p. 508.)
True; but is not the phenomenon here confirmed of the operation of CYCLIC LAW difficult to account for on materialist lines? Whence the “destined cycle” and the order here testified to? Why does this (Karmic) sterility attack and root out certain races at their “appointed hour”? The answer that it is due to a “mental disproportion” between the colonizing and aboriginal races is obviously evasive, since it does not explain the sudden “checks to fertility” which so frequently supervene. The dying out of the Hawaiians, for instance, is one of the most mysterious problems of the day. Ethnology will sooner or later have to recognize with Occultists that the true solution has to be sought for in a comprehension of the workings of Karma. As Lefevre remarks, “the time is drawing near when there will remain nothing but three great human types” (before the Sixth Root-Race dawns), the white (Aryan, Fifth Root-Race), the yellow, and the African negro — with their crossings (Atlanto-European divisions). Redskins, Eskimos, Papuans, Australians, Polynesians, etc., etc. — all are dying out. Those who realize that every Root-Race runs through a gamut of seven sub-races with seven branchlets, etc., will understand the “why.” The tide-wave of incarnating EGOS has rolled past them to harvest experience in more developed and less senile stocks; and their extinction is hence a Karmic necessity.
-- The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena P. Blavatsky
Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott opposed India's caste system.
The position was as follows: Up to the time of Buddha, the Brahmins of India had jealously reserved occult knowledge as the appanage of their own caste. Exceptions were occasionally made in favor of Tshatryas, but the rule was exclusive in a very high degree. This rule Buddha broke down, admitting all castes equally to the path of adeptship. The change may have been perfectly right in principle, but it paved the way for a great deal of trouble, and as the Brahmins conceived for the degradation of occult knowledge itself, that is to say, its transfer to unworthy hands, — not unworthy merely because of caste inferiority, but because of the moral inferiority which they conceived to be introduced into the occult fraternity, together with brothers of low birth. The Brahmin contention would not by any means be that because a man should be a Brahmin it followed that he was necessarily virtuous and trustworthy; but the argument would be: It is supremely necessary to keep out all but the virtuous and trustworthy from the secrete and powers of initiation. To that end it is necessary not only to set up all the ordeals, probations, and tests we can think of, but also to take no candidates except from the class which, on the whole, by reason of its hereditary advantages, is likely to be the best nursery of fit candidates.
Later experience is held on all hands now to have gone far towards vindicating the Brahmin apprehension...
-- Esoteric Buddhism, by A.P. Sinnett, President of the Simla Eclectic Theosophical Society
The Theosophical Society three chief objectives were:
"(1) To form the nucleus of a universal brotherhood without distinction of race, creed, sex, (or) caste.
(2) To study ancient and modern religions, philosophy, and science,
(3) To investigate unexplained laws of nature and latent psychic powers." [10]
The Theosophical Society pledged to
"aid in the institution of a brotherhood of humanity, wherein all good and pure men of every race shall receive each other as the equal effects of the Uncreated, Universal, Infinite, and Everlasting Cause." [11]
Ariosophists such as Guido von List and Adolf Josef Lanz perverted Theosophical tenets by claiming that Germans belonged to the superior Aryan race and had a divine right to rule sub-men such as Slavs, Negroes, Semites, etc. Lanz's Ostara magazine preached that Germany's master race must never intermarry with "fallen anthropoids." To do so would be to arrest Spiritual Evolution, and repeat the error of prehistoric Lemurians, whose civilization died out as a result of miscegenation.
[T]he astral prototypes of the lower beings of the animal kingdom of the Fourth Round, which preceded (the chhayas of) Men, were the consolidated, though still very ethereal sheaths of the still more ethereal forms or models produced at the close of the Third Round on Globe D. [215] “Produced from the residue of the substance matter; from dead bodies of men and (other extinct) animals of the wheel before,” or the previous Third Round — as Stanza 24 tells us. Hence, while the nondescript “animals” that preceded the astral man at the beginning of this life-cycle on our Earth were still, so to speak, the progeny of the man of the Third Round, the mammalians of this Round owe their existence, in a great measure, to man again. Moreover, the “ancestor” of the present anthropoid animal, the ape, is the direct production of the yet mindless Man, who desecrated his human dignity by putting himself physically on the level of an animal….
Ay, but that “primeval man” was man only in external form. He was mindless and soulless at the time he begot, with a female animal monster, the forefather of a series of apes….
Perchance in these specimens, Haeckelians might recognize, not the Homo primigenius, but some of the lower tribes, such as some tribes of the Australian savages. Nevertheless, even these are not descended from the anthropoid apes, but from human fathers and semi-human mothers, or, to speak more correctly, from human monsters — those “failures” mentioned in the first Commentary. The real anthropoids, Haeckel’s Catarrhini and Platyrrhini, came far later, in the closing times of Atlantis. The orang-outang, the gorilla, the chimpanzee and cynocephalus are the latest and purely physical evolutions from lower anthropoid mammalians. They have a spark of the purely human essence in them; man on the other hand, has not one drop of pithecoid blood in his veins.….
These “Men” of the Third Race — the ancestors of the Atlanteans — were just such ape-like, intellectually senseless giants as were those beings, who, during the Third Round, represented Humanity. Morally irresponsible, it was these third Race “men” who, through promiscuous connection with animal species lower than themselves, created that missing link which became ages later (in the tertiary period only) the remote ancestor of the real ape as we find it now in the pithecoid family. [150]...
A naturalist suggests another difficulty. The human is the only species which, however unequal in its races, can breed together. “There is no question of selection between human races,” say the anti-Darwinists, and no evolutionist can deny the argument — one which very triumphantly proves specific unity. How then can Occultism insist that a portion of the Fourth Race humanity begot young ones from females of another, only semi-human, if not quite an animal, race, the hybrids resulting from which union not only bred freely but produced the ancestors of the modern anthropoid apes? 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….
But this was when Africa had already been raised as a continent. We have meanwhile to follow, as closely as limited space will permit, the gradual evolution of the now truly human species. It is in the suddenly arrested evolution of certain sub-races, and their forced and violent diversion into the purely animal line by artificial cross-breeding, truly analogous to the hybridization, which we have now learned to utilize in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, that we have to look for the origin of the anthropoids. In these red-haired and hair-covered monsters, the fruit of the unnatural connection between men and animals, the “Lords of Wisdom” did not incarnate, as we see. Thus by a long series of transformations due to unnatural cross-breeding (unnatural “sexual selection”), originated in due course of time the lowest specimens of humanity; while further bestiality and the fruit of their first animal efforts of reproduction begat a species which developed into mammalian apes ages later....
For surely, it was not in or through the wickedness of the “mighty men” . . . . men of renown, among whom is placed Nimrod the “mighty hunter before the Lord,” that “god saw that the wickedness of man was great,” nor in the builders of Babel, for this was after the Deluge; but in the progeny of the giants who produced monstra quaedam de genere giganteo, monsters from whence sprang the lower races of men, now represented on earth by a few miserable dying-out tribes and the huge anthropoid apes….
The monsters bred in sin and shame by the Atlantean giants, “blurred copies” of their bestial sires, and hence of modern man (Huxley), now mislead and overwhelm with error the speculative Anthropologist of European Science…
[T]he bestiality of the primeval mindless races resulted in the production of huge man-like monsters — the offspring of human and animal parents. As time rolled on, and the still semi-astral forms consolidated into the physical, the descendants of these creatures were modified by external conditions, until the breed, dwindling in size, culminated in the lower apes of the Miocene period. With these the later Atlanteans renewed the sin of the “Mindless” — this time with full responsibility. The resultants of their crime were the species of apes now known as Anthropoid…
On the data furnished by modern science, physiology, and natural selection, and without resorting to any miraculous creation, two negro human specimens of the lowest intelligence — say idiots born dumb — might by breeding produce a dumb Pastrana species, which would start a new modified race, and thus produce in the course of geological time the regular anthropoid ape….
-- The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, by Helena P. Blavatsky
The Ariosophists
German philologist Friedrich Schlegel first used the word "Aryan" in his book, The Language and Wisdom of the Indians (1808.) Aryan means "finest people" and derives from the same Sanskrit root as "aristocracy." Beginning in the 1890's Guido von List and other Ariosophists exalted Aryan-German Ubermenschen, while condemning southern and eastern Undermenschen as a menace to "Superhumanity."
In 1884 Madame Blavatsky authorized her friends Maria Gebhard and Dr. Wilhelm Hubbe-Schleiden to found the Theosophical Society's first German branch at Eberfeld. Dr. Franz Hartmann, who had lived with Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott in India for three years, soon wrested control from them. By that time Blavatsky had mixed feelings about him.
"The magnetism of that man is sickening; his lying beastly ... his intrigues unaccountable, (except) on the ground that he is either a maniac or possessed by a dugpa spirit." [12]
Her indignation arose from Hartmann's support of Henry Olcott's efforts to curb Blavatsky's perceived extravagance after the Coloumb Scandal. Despite Madame's reservations, he set the tone for German occultism from 1886 to 1912.
The Coulomb [Coloumb] Affair was a conflict between Emma and Alexis Coulomb, on one side, and Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, on the other.
Blavatsky met Emma and Alex in 1871 in Cairo. They founded the short-lived Société Spirite. In August 1879, Emma and Alex contacted Blavatsky because they had financial problems. They were stranded in Sri Lanka, and Blavatsky helped them to get to Mumbai and tried to find a job for them. As she couldn't find a job for them, she provided them with a position in the Theosophical Society, where they were doing various chores, such as cooking and gardening. In February 1884, Blavatsky and H. S. Olcott travelled to Europe. After their departure, a conflict between the Coulombs and the Theosophical Society escalated. The Coulombs tried to blackmail and threaten Blavatsky, whereupon Blavatsky dismissed them. When the theosophists inspected Blavatsky's room after the Coulombs had to leave, they found secret doors in her room. Alexis claimed that he constructed these secret doors for Blavatsky. Theosophists have said that Alexis' constructions were obviously newly built, and the secret doors could not be opened or closed silently or without strong effort.
After the Coulombs were dismissed, they went to their Christian missionary friends of the Free Church of Scotland, and gave them letters that were allegedly written by Blavatsky to Emma. These letters suggested that Blavatsky was a fraud. The chaplain George Patterson published extracts from these letters in the Madras Christian College Magazine. The incident became well known all over India and also in America and Europe. Blavatsky then immediately published a reply in several newspapers. Blavatsky and Olcott then travelled back to India in the end of 1884. Soon afterwards the Hodgson Report was published, which also severely damaged Blavatsky's reputation. The report also contained the allegations of the Coulombs.Richard Hodgson, a member of the SPR and a research worker of paranormal phenomena, was sent to India. Hodgson's task was to examine if the mode of appearance attributed to the Mahatma Letters represented genuine psychical phenomena. In December 1884 Hodgson arrived in Adyar. He eventually concluded that the evidence supported Emma Coulomb, and that various inconsistencies, misrepresentations, and provable falsehoods in sworn statements by certain Theosophical Society members destroyed their credibility. He included in his research examination of the physical spaces where phenomena had been reported, including architectural features that had been concealed or removed from their original placements. Hodgson wrote a 200-page report, in which Blavatsky was described "as one of the most accomplished, ingenious, and interesting impostors in history."
-- Hodgson Report, by Wikipedia
In 1986 and 1997, Vernon Harrison of the SPR published a study on the Hodgson Report. The Blavatsky–Coulomb letters were destroyed by Elliott Coues, an enemy of Blavatsky, so that they cannot be studied today anymore.
-- Coulomb Affair, by Wikipedia
Hartmann was born in Donauworth, Germany in 1838. After serving two years in the Bavarian Artillery as a medic, he traveled to Paris c. 1864. A year later he got hired as a ship's doctor, even though he had no medical degree. Hartmann sailed to America some time in 1865. He became a U.S. citizen and spent the next eighteen years there. The 29 year old Bavarian studied medicine in St. Louis, Missouri circa 1867. From there he moved to New Orleans and worked as a fortune-teller. At some point in the 1870's he married, then abandoned, a woman in Texas. Claiming once again to be a physician, he established a medical practice in the mining town of Georgetown, Colorado -- then talked himself into the job of coroner. While out west Hartmann visited Indian villages, where he witnessed ceremonies involving spirit possession. He also attended numerous seances with a Denver medium who eventually went insane. In response to sensational articles about Madame Blavatsky in The Theosophist magazine, Hartmann grabbed his suitcase on September 21, 1883 and headed for San Francisco. He passed up the opportunity to marry a dark-eyed beauty there, booking passage to Madras, India where he met Helena P. Blavatsky and Colonel Henry S. Olcott on December 5, 1883.
While at the Theosophists' compound in Adyar, India, Hartmann received ten "precipitated" letters from Blavatsky's Mahatmas between December, 1883 and July, 1884. On Christmas Day, 1883, Master Morya urged him to
" ... take part in the work of the Theosophical Society. Make known without reservations the principles of philosophy which speak loudest in your own heart. Help others, so that you may be helped ..." [13]
On February 5, 1884 Hartmann solicited Madame Blavatsky's advice about a certain matter. She instructed him to ask Master Morya the same question mentally. He did so. A few moments later H.P.B. told him that in the astral light she saw Master Morya writing. Then a woman in the household interrupted them, asking for scissors. Although resenting this intrusion, Hartmann nonetheless went downstairs to his room to retrieve a pair of scissors. He found in his drawer an envelope addressed to him with a seal bearing the initials of Master Morya in Tibetan letters.
"Never offer yourself as a chela (disciple,) but wait until (discipleship) descends by itself upon you. Above all, try to find yourself, and the path of knowledge will open before you ... " [14]
After Madame Blavatsky left for Europe in late February, 1884, Hartmann continued to receive epistles from the Masters -- on March 22nd, April 1st, and April 28th. These lessons from beyond made a deep impression on him. Henceforth, the keystone of his philosophy became a Quaker-like reverence for the Inward Teacher. In Magic, White & Black, he wrote:
"The beginning of all knowledge is the knowledge of self; the knowledge of the soul, and not the vagaries of the brain ... Do not believe that there is anything higher in the universe than your own divine self and know that you are exactly what you permit yourself to become... The knowledge of God and the knowledge of man are ultimately identical, and he who knows himself knows God ... " [15]
A person must learn to trust his or her Divine inner self, for it is
"a guiding signal from an interior compass deep within -- beacon giving direction, which points to a path or lifestyle that gives better probability of Becoming ... [16]
Hartmann witnessed the Coulomb Scandal at first hand. While Helena Blavatsky traveled in Europe during the spring of 1884, disgruntled housekeeper Emma Cutting Coloumb decided to betray her mistress for money. With the collusion of her husband Alex, she forged interpolations onto some of Blavatsky's letters which related how to fool the gullible with bogus spiritual phenomena. Coulomb first offered these incriminating letters to the Theosophical Society for 10,000 rupees, then sold them to the anti-Theosophical Christian Messenger Magazine in Bombay.
Franz Hartmann described Emma Coulomb as "a small elderly person with hawk nose and small, stinging eyes." [17] He and board members St. George Lane Fox and Dadomar Mavalankar fired the Coulombs on May 13, 1884. They declined to pay them hush money. Hartmann, William Q. Judge, and St. George Lane Fox destroyed a trick cabinet in Madame Blavatsky's shrine room and had the unauthorized carpentry work performed by Alex Coulomb removed. H.P.B. had used the cabinet with false panel as a curio -- and "mailbox" for precipitated letters -- but claimed never to have used it to dupe seance attenders. On March 31, 1885 Hartmann accompanied Madame Blavatsky on her voyage from Madras to Naples. She never again returned to India.
Although H.P.B. had misgivings about Franz Hartmann, she wrote on his behalf a letter of introduction to the Theosophical Society in Vienna. There he became the "man who came to dinner," imposing upon paper manufacturer Frederick Eckstein's hospitality for a year. During that time Hartmann frequently entertained friends at his wealthy host's expense. Over the next ten years he shuttled between Vienna, Salzburg, Eberfeld, Munich, Locarno, Ascona, and Berlin, establishing relationships with fellow Theosophists such as Karl Kellner, Guido von List, Theodore Reuss, Alfred Schuler, and novelist Gustav Meyerinck [Meyrink]. With the assistance of Karl Kellner, he charged high fees for "ligno sulphite inhalation therapy," a supposed "Paracelsian" cure for tuberculosis.
Hartmann wrote extensively. In addition to editing J.B. Kerny's books on Freemasonry, he wrote The Life and Doctrines of Paracelsus (1887,) An Adventure Among the Rosicrucians (1887,) Secret Symbols of Rosicrucians (1888,) Magic, White and Black (1888,) The Principles of Astrological Geomancy (1889,) The Talking Image of Urur (I 890,) The Life and Doctrines of Jakob Boehme (1891,) Occult Science in Medicine (1893,) Among the Gnomes (1895,) and the Life of Jehoshua (Jesus,) 1901. The Nazis later banned most of these books for advocating "oriental passivity."
To Helena P. Blavatsky's dismay, Hartmann replaced Wilhelm Hubbe-Schleiden as President of the German Theosophical Society, and promoted some of his own pet theories in place of Theosophical precepts. In partnership with Theodore Reuss and Joshua Klein, Hartmann purchased the Grand Lodge of Mizraim and Memphis's charter from English Freemason John Yarker in 1903. With this document they formed a "hermetic brotherhood of the light," called The Order of the Templars of the Orient (O.T.O.) in Berlin, the first "Masonic" lodge to admit women as members. Orthodox Freemasons immediately proscribed this errant offshoot, which eventually morphed into an independent occult society. English black magician Aleister Crowley later became a member of the O.T.O.
Franz Hartmann joined the List Society in 1905. Five years later he praised Guido von List's book, Picture Writing of the Ario-Germans for discovering the lost link between Germanic and Indian cultures.
Guido von List
Guido von List (1848-1919), from the "holy city" of Vienna, concocted a racist version of Theosophy. He declared that Teutons, not Jews, were God's chosen people. List rejected Theosophy's ideal of universal brotherhood and contorted Helen P. Blavatsky's account of prehistoric root races into an apology for Nordic supremacy. His List Society borrowed the swastika, seal of the Theosophical Society, as a symbol of Aryan resurgence. The Nazi party subsequently adopted this logo, as well as the Society's oath:
"I swear to God Almighty, to the invisible Araharl and to my (Fuhrer) as the visible Araharl according to the Armanian Reich laws of fellowship and my duty to my Aryo-Germanic people, unconditional German loyalty, to cover and protect him with my shield, my own life and limb, goods, and blood." [18]
List received bad press in the 1890's amid charges of black magic and sexual perversion, yet he still managed to attract luminaries such as Austrian General Blasius von Schemua, Theosophist Franz Hartmann, and Vienna mayors Karl Lueger and Josef Neumayer to his cause. An academic outsider, List yearned for a professional respectability as an expert on runes, the Norse Eddas, and German folklore. Years of disappointment enkindled the spurned dilettante's resentment of official opinion. Feeling superior to "pettifogging specialists," he held scientists, physicians, and professors in contempt because they preferred narrow-minded orthodoxy to his revelations. In 1902 List claimed to have temporarily lost his vision during a mystical epiphany -- similar to St. Paul's on the road to Damascus. Lords of the Germanic Race vouchsafed prophecies to him about the Coming Third Reich.
After that transfusion of enlightenment, List championed a militant form of pantheism in his book, The Religion of the Ario-Germans, Esoteric and Exoteric. He believed "the closer to nature, the closer to truth." Solitary treks into the woods facilitated his communion with spirits. He once wrote: "if you want to lift the veil of mystery you must fly into the loneliness of nature." [19] An immanent Teutonic god manifested in Nature, but only pure-blooded Germans were equipped with souls capable of apprehending this ever-flowing "God-Knowledge." List himself claimed to communicate with "the old ones" (Germanic masters) via the Akashic Record. He and his disciples wished to restore the Armanen's authority. These "Old Ones" were a race of handsome, long-headed giants with "electric organs" and superpowers who died out eons ago since their corrupt descendants intermarried with racial inferiors. In order to establish psychic communication with the Armanen, List learned "Kala," their lost language.
In 1911 List formed the High Armanenorden consisting of a few initiates (including Philipp Stauff.) He brought this select group on a tour of holy sites: castles at Kahlenberg, Klosterneuberg, and Leopoldberg, and the catacombs of Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral, where he first encountered his spiritual guide "Wotan." In February, 1913 List, Stauff, and others participated in a series of seances during which they attempted to communicate with Germany's ancient priest-kings.