http://www.anti-fascism.org/
[afdoc027.txt]
The Occult and Nazism Re-Examined
Steve Mizrach
<http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/seeker1/fortpages/occult-reich.html>
n.d. downloaded 23 Jul 99
The Origins of Fascism
There have been many attempts to understand and explain fascism in purely
materialistic and economic terms, and perhaps as many analyses looking
beyond conventional socio-economic factors to more unusual origins. The
problem is that 'fascism,' like communism, has several flavors and
varieties, some of which (like Maoism and Leninism) are somewhat at odds
with each other. Clearly, some of the purported influences on German
Nazism, such as pan-Germanism and neo-paganism, had not played as much of a
role in Spanish, Italian, or Latin American fascist movements, which
emerged out of Catholic roots. Nazism has been analyzed from various
perspectives, including that of Wilhelm Reich, who saw it as a massive
'armoring' of society resulting from the sexual dysfunction of the
populace1, and Norman Cohn2, who saw parallels between the Nazis and
millenarian, anti-Semitic, and eschatological movements of the Middle Ages
such as the Lollards. Historians have a problem with getting a grasp on
fascism, because it is a label applied to such a wide panoply of political
movements (especially by putative political opponents) - some collectivist
or corporatist, others radically individualist; some rabidly puritanical,
others flouting of all morality and taste; and some imperialistic, while
others are isolationist.
Today, we ponder the applicability of the label to our own politicians. Is
Pat Buchanan a fascist? What about Lyndon LaRouche, Jacques Le Pen, Leonard
Jeffries, or David Duke, whose attacks on affirmative action closely
parallel that of the 'mainstream' Republican party? Is fascism necessarily
racist, anti-Semitic, or religiously biased? Was Barry Goldwater calling
for fascism when he said "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice?"
How about politicians who run on a "law and order" or "America First!"
plaform- some of whom are assumedly liberal Democrats? German Nazism as a
particularly unique brand of fascism must be closely examined and
understood and its historical geneaology traced. It will not do to go after
"fascism" with a wide sociological lens (which is, not suprisingly,
unfocused) and tar all right-wing thinkers with the same brush. And one of
the important roots of German Nazism is, in fact, the existence of certain
high-profile occult societies who operated in the period between the wars-
the Germanorden, the Thule Gellenschaft, Ariosophy, and the Neo-Templars3.
Blame It on Blavatsky, et al.
Sadly, most of the analyses of Nazism leave all of its various occult roots
at the doorstep of one poor old Russian woman, Helena Blavatsky. The German
occult societies appropriated some Theosophical ideas, to be sure, to the
same extent that the Nazis eagerly distorted some of the doctrines of
Nietzsche (so carefully doctored by his sister to omit the parts where he
condemns German nationalism as an "abyss of stupidity!"4 or disavows anti-
Semitism.) When Nietzsche discusses the Superman, he does not say that he
shall be a German or an Aryan, only that we will not recognize him. It
should be pointed out that Blavatsky's doctrine of the Six Root Races5 -
Astral, Hyperborean, Lemurian, Atlantean, Aryan, and the Coming Race - did
not assign much importance to the Aryan race. They would also be supplanted
in turn by the Sixth Root Race, which would arise out of all the existing
races and nations, sort of like a 'mutant' strain. Blavatsky does not
attach much importance to racial magic, which she puts in the category of
"sorcery." It should be pointed out that the Nazis closed most of the
Theosophical lodges in Germany, including Rudolf Steiner's Goetheaneum, and
banned Freemasonry and many other occult societies. There are others often
mentioned in this occult cast of villains. Jung is blamed for reviving
interest in mythology and the workings of the racial unconscious, and for
originally supporting the Nazis because of their attempts to revive
Teutonic ritual and mythic thinking. Yet, when Jung discusses that the
dreams of many patients in the 1930s reveal the archetype of a "great blond
beast," he issues it as a warning, not as a herald of good fortune6. Jung
himself described Nazism as the type of mass psychosis that afflicts a
society when its leader becomes 'possessed' by one of the archetypes of the
unconscious. Gurdjieff and Crowley are also mentioned as possible Reich
supporters, which is astounding based on the evidence that both may have
well been working clandestinely for the Resistance movements in France and
England. Many occult groups, such as the Prieure du Sion, seem to have
acted as infiltrators, aping the Nazi party line while passing on important
information to its enemies in their journal Vaincre. In places like Vichy
France, occult groups might have had no choice but to appear firmly in the
Nazi fold7.
The German Occult Orders
While it is true that the various German mystical societies borrowed some
of their ideas from Hermetic/Rosicrucian groups in England and from
Theosophists on the continent, some of their principles are different. In
particular, their emphasis on the mystical powers of the Aryan race and its
resulting 'decline' and degeneration from miscegnation with lower races is
a unique idea. Their Teutonophilism - interest in the Runes, Nordic myths,
and the Swastika (along with the belief that Christianity had broken the
back of Teutonic civilization) - came out of the general climate attendant
with the new pan-Germanic nationalism. The idea that all the languages of
Europe had one Indo-European source, and that many of the world's myths
(from the Hindus to the Greeks) had a common 'Aryan' origin was gaining
ground among respectable philologists and antiquarians8. Many Russians in
1905 were already promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as evidence
that the inferior Semitic races were trying to bring about Bolshevism and
the downfall of Europe.
Guido von Liszt (founder of the Germanorden) may not have been as important
in the Nazi pantheon as Oswald Spengler and Alfred Rosenberg, who both
advanced the belief that the West was in decline from the onslaught of
"Magianism" or the "World Cavern" philosophy of the Oriental Semites, which
was in direct contrast to the Apollonian or Faustian guiding principle of
'no limits' which governed the European/Aryan races9. Both reacted in
horror to the "primitive" African, Latino, and Polynesian elements that
artists like Picasso and Gauguin were importing into Western art, a clear
sign of 'degeneration.' Not unlike some anti-rock music phillistines today,
they heard the "savage jungle beats of the tom-tom drum" in jazz and much
of modern music, and found the soaring Wagnerian operas much more to their
liking. The German mystical societies essentially saw a coming struggle
between the forces of materialism and relativism and that of true, Aryan,
spiritual civilization - a struggle that would be apocalyptic and where
there could be no quarter whatsoever afforded for the enemy. Therein lay
the roots of Nazism and the Holocaust.
New World Order?
There are various authors who propose that the Nazis were only the 'front'
organization for a more sinister, clandestine Hidden Directorate. There are
all sorts of rumours that some sort of evil-looking Oriental monk with a
green hat was often seen around Nazi party functions, suggesting perhaps
that a group of mystic lamas somewhere in Tibet might be the hidden puppet-
masters of the Nazis. By the 1840s in Germany the legend of Agharti was
already making its rounds; the legend was that there was an underground
kingdom whose ruler, the Master of the World, was already controlling many
of the kings of the earth and would soon launch an invasion for complete
control. While Napoleon may have contemplated ruling all of Europe, the
Nazis were close students of 'geopolitics' and may well have been the first
would-be conquerors to consider the ramifications of world domination.
(Hitler had blueprints in place for an invasion of America, and he assumed
Italy would control Africa and the Japanese, Asia.) Some think that there
may well have been Theosophist-like "Ascended Masters" behind their grab
for power, with some ulterior design of their own. When George Bush used
the phrase "New World Order" in 1990, conspiratorialists all over the world
went nuts. They know that as the code phrase for OWG (One-World
Government), but others also remember that it was one of Hitler's names for
his coming Thousand Year Reich. The phrase has been associated for a long
time (long before Robert Anton Wilson, anyway) with the Illuminati and
their supposed design for world control10. Certainly the Nazis themselves
believed that the Jews, International Bankers, Freemasons, and Bolsheviks
had their own plan for taking over the world - wasn't it all laid out in
the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? This is a pattern repeated throughout
history - various conspiratorial organizations are formed to combat real or
fictitious 'subversive' conspiracies. A notable example is the Holy Vehm, a
vigilante organization in the Middle Ages that wore hoods to conceal their
anonymity, and rounded up and executed what they believed to be a
conspiratorial band of witches and heretics opposed to the king. Hitler
often made reference to the Vehm in some of his writings.
The Triumph of Irrationality?
James Webb and others have made much of the way in which irrationalistic
ideas took such strong hold under the Third Reich11. Bizarre hollow-earth
and Horbigerian world-ice cosmologies proliferated, as did extremely
strange beliefs about giants and demons and cosmic battles ripped straight
out of some Ragnarokian script. In the 1930s, there were whole journals
dedicated to the researches of Atlantis and other lost continents and the
possible Atlantean origins of the Nordic peoples. Hitler openly declared
himself an enemy of "bourgeouis reason" and extolled the virtue of
"thinking with the blood." The Lebensraum (Land-Reform) movements of the
1930s reacted violently against modern industrial, technological, and urban
tendencies, and extolled instead the icon of the simple, pure, noble
peasant living off the land. Like the hippies of the 'irrationalist'1960s,
the Lebensraumers advocated abandoning the cities for communal village
life, and were just as enamored of 'deep ecology,' folk music, "natural
living" and nudism, reviving authentic craftsmanship, alternative
(holistic) medicine, meditation, and even animal rights. Yet it might be a
mistake to see Nazism as merely a reaction against scientific materialism
and modernity. The Nazis advocated the Promethean power of science and
often promoted the Hindenburg and the V2 base at Peneemunde as signs of the
triumph of German science. They pursued researches into atomic energy and
radar as vigoruously as the allies. (They may have been hindered in their
pursuits, one might note, by exterminating or banishing the main sector of
the German intellegentsia - Jews, such as Einstein.) Eugenics, the
"science" of breeding better babies and carrying out applied Social
Darwinism, had gained considerable respectability by the 1930s, and there
were many 'respectable' medical societies promoting eugenics programs here
in America, involving such aspects as forced sterilization of the lower
classes and the handicapped, banning of marriages with southern and eastern
Europeans, and denial of immigration to 'lower' races12. The extermination
program of the Nazis was carried out with industrially and scientifically
efficient methodic precision - the Nazis kept genealogical records tracing
back seven centuries and were able to make their trains run on time.
The Nazi doctors, for example, were interested in the answers to purely
rational questions of medical science: what happens to German pilots who
are downed and must live on salt water or are trapped in frozen climes? Can
we transplant skin from one patient to another? They sought the answers by
taking Jews, Gypsies, and other groups and performing inhumane experiments
on them- experiments justified by the belief that such groups were
'subhuman' anyway. What they lacked was not reason but values, compassion,
and humanity13. In many ways, their experiments epitomized one of the prime
problems of 20th century science: its advances far outstrip man's moral and
social evolution. From Tuskeegee to Edgewood, scientists have done horrible
things to people - forget the animals who anger the anti-vivisectionists -
in the name of the science which is supposedly to benefit their lives. In
many ways, the Nazi state merely took many of the features of the modern
'Enlightenment' nation-state to their logical extremes; they could be said
represent the apotheosis, not the interruption, of modernity.
The Spear of Destiny and the Holy Grail
Of particular interest to students of the 'hidden history' of the Third
Reich is Hitler's interest in the Spear of Destiny. The so-called Spear of
Longinus kept in the imperial museum of Austria was said to be the spear
that pierced the side of Christ (and contained a nail from the Cross) and
was the spear that the Roman emperor Maximilian and the Holy Roman emperors
of Austria carried as a standard into battle14. Walter Stein insisted that
Hitler was fascinated by the spear and felt that possession of it would
mean victory for the Nazi cause of world domination and the triumph over
Christianity. How important the spear really was to Hitler - who never
really seemed to make a big deal out of it when it was seized from the
museum, at least in public - is not clear. But we know- and not just from
Indiana Jones movies- that the Nazis were fascinated with finding lost
mystical relics, particularly those associated with Christianity. That is
unusual, considering the anti-Christian bias of the Nazis, who felt that
everything wrong with the West (pacifism, belief in equality, etc.) had
been rammed down its throat by Christianity, an 'alien' religion from the
Orient.
Nonetheless, it is clear that Hitler modelled his S.S. troops on the
Templars and other Crusader orders, and the Jesuits and the Masons. There
is a famous poster from 1937 showing Hitler as a Templar Knight, in holy
armor, preparing to do battle with Satan. While Nieztsche felt nauseous
from Wagner's Parsifal (for its caving into the 'sickening' ideals of
Christian chivalry), the Nazi cadres seem to have vigorously promoted it.
Otto Rahn was searching for the Holy Grail in the south of France in 1938,
though he did not appear to think that what he was looking for was a wine
cup from the Last Supper or the blood of Jesus. Instead he claimed it was
"a power source of indescribable magnitute."15 It is not known whether the
Nazis really ever searched for the Ark of the Covenant, though there are
tantalizing hints that they may well have been laying out blueprints for a
search of northern Africa and Egypt for that Jewish relic. Why they thought
they might enlist the gods of their enemies in their destruction is not
clear.
Nazi Interest in Parapsychology and the Paranormal
There was widespread interest by the Nazis in various paranormal topics.
Albert Speer was clearly very interested in geomancy and the ley lines and
sacred spots of Germany, and some of his architecture betrays knowledge of
principles of mystical geometry and numerology. The Vril Society in Germany
promoted the idea that there might be a mystical energy within the earth
that could be tapped by the German people, although Bulwer-Lytton had
maintained it was the property of a race living inside the earth. It is
well known that Hitler consulted astrologers for propitious dates for his
military campaigns and employed dowsers on the battlefield to search for
water and for minefields. There was also some interest by the Nazi cadres
in parapsychology as an espionage device - research that appears to be
carried along by the intelligence apparati of the two victorious Allied
powers (our CIA and the Soviet KGB.) Further, the Nazis were interested in
antigravity and 'free energy' devices. Viktor Shauberger, a Nazi scientist,
worked on a saucer design for one of his 'antigravity' ships16. For a long
time, it was believed that the 'foo fighters' and 'ghost rockets' of the
1940s were a secret Nazi weapon, and there was a small minority that
thought the Nazis may have created the 'flying saucers,' though the ETH-UFO
hypothesis caught on soon after, by 1949.
But what captivated Hitler's interest most of all was his interest in
hypnosis or the occult powers of 'fascination.' Witnesses of the Nuremberg
rallies claim that people there were in a trancelike state, glassy-eyed and
open mouthed with awe. Hitler claimed to have studied the mystical
charismatic powers of earlier leaders, and read a great deal about the
Jesuits' psychological techniques of focused concentration and devotion. It
is certain that Hitler's minister Goebbels did employ carefully crafted
techniques of social control - lighting, the tenor of the voice, and crowd
psychology - for maximum propaganda value. But Trevor Rayvenscroft and
others are of the opinion that the Nazis may have been more than just
master propagandists; they may have been true sorcerous mesmerists,
possessing the minds of thousands of people. Some people maintain the CIA's
MKUltra mind-control experiments may have been derived from Nazi
researchers smuggled into this country through Project Paperclip17.
Occultism = Nazism? NOT!
There are those of a so-called 'skeptical' bent that have been promoting a
rather sloppy thesis of late. That thesis is based on a few deceptively
simple assertions. The Nazis were devotees of the irrational, the occult,
and the paranormal. The Nazis did horrible things. Ergo, if we do not stamp
out belief in the occult and paranormal, another Nazi regime may come to
power. This silly syllogism is employed to maximum effect by the purported
rationalists of CSICOP: when irrationalism (ergo, Forteanism, et al., which
they consider to be an irrational pursuit) is on the rise, democracy and
freedom are threatened. The idiocy of this position should be fairly clear.
There were many occultists who resisted the Nazi regime, such as the
Coventry witches who placed an 'occult circle of power' around the British
Isles to protect them from the Germans (well-intentioned, if ineffective
against the V2s.) And there were many attempts by the Nazis to stamp out
occult societies who did not agree with their party line, such as Steiner's
Anthroposophists. (One of the first acts of the Nazis was to ban
fortunetelling and Tarot card reading, as well as other forms of
divination, since they associated them with the 'despicable' Gypsies.) Not
everyone interested in the paranormal, mythical, metaphysical, or occult is
a Nazi; the Nazis clearly distorted and twisted many occult philosophies
and systems to fit their own purposes and goals. The Surrealists (Andre
Breton, etc.) also wanted to get 'in touch' with man's unconscious or
'nonrational' side, and most of them fled Germany early on, when the Nazi
canon of naturalist realism in art took hold. Heidegger, Thomas Mann, and
other metaphysical philosophers may have been initially flirtatious with
Nazi ideas, but they eventually came to repudiate them as well. The
relationship between occultism and 'irrationalism,' however vaguely
defined, and other attempts at resistance to the unwanted tendencies within
the urban-industrial nation-state, are not as clearcut as some might have
us think, and the relationship of all these ideologies to Nazism is highly
complex. It is simply unfair and simplistic to see the Nazis only as a
revolt against science, reason, technology, the Enlightenment, and Western
Judeo-Christianity, and by extension accuse other social movements that are
against the notion of 'progress' (e.g. environmentalists, postmodernists,
or punk rockers) of being Nazis. For the record, it should be noted that a
little-known journal of irrationality, Doubt , never carried one pro-Nazi
editorial, despite all its anti-Roosevelt diatribes.
* * * * *
See one of Reich's greatest rants, Listen, Little Man!
See Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium.
Michael Howard, The Occult Conspiracy.
Stated quite clearly in Nietzsche's Gay Science.
See closely Blavatksy's Secret Doctrine, if you can deal with its
impenetrable text. Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh. The Messianic Legacy.
Marija Gimbutas, The Religions of Old Europe.
Read Spengler's Decline of the West or Rosenberg's Myth of the 20th
Century. Nesta Webster, None Dare Call it Conspiracy.
Webb, The Occult Underground and The Occult Establishment.
Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature.
See Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors.
See Trevor Rayvenscroft, The Spear of Destiny.
Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh. Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
David Hatcher Childress, Anti-Gravity and the World Grid.
Elizabeth Holtzmann, Secret Agenda: Project Paperclip
* * * * *
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