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UNHOLY ALLIANCE: A HISTORY OF NAZI INVOLVEMENT WITH THE OCCULT |
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2. Volk Magic
Return of the Teutons 1902, the Austrian novelist, poet, folk-historian, and philosopher Guido von List underwent cataract surgery. He was blind for almost a year. Like Hitler over fifteen years later -- himself blinded by mustard gas during World War I -- it was during this period of darkness that he received his greatest illumination. It was an experience that would transform his life, and that would later have an indirect effect on Hitler. Guido von List (1848-1919) had begun his career as a nature worshiper and lover of ancient German folk myths and culture, a man who believed in the reunification of his native Austria with Germany, and who came to despise both Jews and Christians as alien forces in Europe who had robbed Germans of their spiritual and territorial birthrights. He wrote a series of romantic novels about the ancient Teutons, and dreamed of reestablishing the ancient priesthood of Wotan, an organization he called the Armanenschaft either after the Teutonic warrior Arminius who defeated the Roman Legions under Varus at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest (A.D. 9), or after a qabalist bowdlerization of the name of one of the three Teutonic tribes mentioned by Tacitus in Germania, the Hermiones. In 1875, the same year that Blavatsky founded her Theosophical Society in New York, List was invoking Baldur, the Teutonic Sun God, on a hilltop outside Vienna. In Baldur's honor, he buried eight wine bottles there in the shape of a swastika and pledged himself to the worship of the Old Ones, Baldur and Wotan being prominent among them. At this time, the Armanenschaft -- the priesthood of the sun -- was but a gleam in his Aryan eye. He took up journalism when his family's fortunes went awry, and began daydreaming in print about the prehistoric Teutons, a hypothetically pure race free of the taint of spiritually retarded blood. However, during his convalescence after cataract surgery at the age of fifty-four -- dwelling in a temporary but nonetheless unnerving state of blindness -- he understood that his main preoccupations of politics and race were but two halves of a single coin. Always interested in the past more than the present (what anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, quoted above, might have interpreted as a morbid interest in death: an interest that is central to most, if not all, occultism as well as to the detective story), List had developed an intense fascination with the signs and symbols of heraldry as well as those of the proto-Aryan language he believed could be found in runes and ancient inscriptions. He was not alone in these ruminations. Like his contemporary, S. L. "MacGregor" Mathers (1854-1918) of the British secret society, the Golden Dawn, he had a desperate desire to represent himself as of noble blood (in Mathers's case, he saw himself as an heir to the old Scottish noble houses). He was joined in this obsession by his young colleague, Lanz von Liebenfels, who, like List, adopted the aristocratic "von" even though there was little evidence in either case that it was deserved. And all three of these men -- List, Liebenfels, and Mathers -- were set upon developing (or "rediscovering") a complete, internally consistent, quasi-qabalistic system of interpreting the world, each in his own way. For Mathers, the story of the Golden Dawn requires a whole separate study and as this has already been done by several scholars, it will not be repeated here except as it bears upon our story. [2] However, let's point out at once that the names List and Liebenfels soon became synonymous with the Pan-Germanic Volkisch movement that eventually gave birth to the Nazi Party: they wanted to resurrect what they perceived to be the genuine Teutonic orders of knighthood and priesthood, a mission that included many occult and pagan teachings; at the same time, Mathers -- who had military as well as aristocratic pretensions -- was desirous of restoring the House of Stuart and once claimed to have rejected "politico-military" work solely on the grounds that it would have meant severing his connections with the Golden Dawn. [3] In fact, much of his correspondence during the late 1890s from Paris is concerned with just such matters. (His first published book was entitled Practical Campaigning Instruction in Infantry Exercise, a translation from a French original.) Curiously, one of his close friends in Paris was the German author Max Dauthendey (1857-1918) who wrote occult novels, among them the provocatively entitled Die Frau von Thule (1898). [4] The author has been unable to find any more concrete link between Mathers and his German counterparts, however, although the occult underground is always a "small world" and it would be highly likely that Mathers was at least aware of List and Liebenfels (possibly through some mutual Theosophical or Masonic link, via Hartmann for example). As we shall see, List adopted the Golden Dawn system of hierarchical and initiatory degrees so it is likely that he at least knew of Mathers even if Mathers did not know of List. And just why it is that occultists yearn toward politics and titles of nobility, as well as to military campaigns and even espionage, is a problem quite beyond the scope of this book. Quite possibly, they have a perfectly understandable need to duplicate in society, i.e., in the "real world," what dignities and powers they have accumulated in the secret world of the occult Orders. After all, it's no particular satisfaction to a reasonably intelligent person if the only ones who know you are practically God are fellow cult members. In the eyes of society, you remain whatever you were when you began your spiritual Quest, or perhaps have become even less: considerably poorer, distracted in personality and appearance, abandoned by family and friends. This disparity between inner attainments and outer accomplishments can strain even the noblest of intentions. At any rate, the situation hasn't changed much in the last hundred years since Mathers strode about Paris in complete highland costume, Aleister Crowley called himself the Laird of Boleskine or dressed in the guise of a Russian nobleman or an Eastern potentate, and List and Liebenfels sported spurious heraldic emblems on their letterheads. By the spring of 1903, List's thesis on the common origins of an Aryan language, runes, heraldic emblems, epigraphic and other inscriptions as evidence of a secret store of knowledge concerning the creation of the world has been written. Vaguely theosophical in nature -- List had been quite familiar with the works of Mme. Blavatsky -- his magnum opus also expounded on the occult significance of the swastika. [5] Satan and Swastika List had been fascinated with the swastika since his early youth, recognizing it as the Ur-symbol of the Teutonic (read "Aryan") peoples; a pagan sign equivalent in power and emotional meaning to the cross for Christians or the Star of David for Jews. He first pointed this out in a series of articles published about 1905-1908, [6] and thereafter this symbol began to take on more than just a cosmological or theosophical significance and would soon come to represent an entire body of ideas -- both occult and political -- that would eventually culminate in the formation of the Thule Gesellschaft nearly two decades later. Called hakenkreuz (or "hooked cross") in German, the swastika is an ancient design, much revered in India and the Far East. The very word swastika is Sanskrit, formed of the words su and asti meaning "it is well" or "it is fortunate." The arms seem to spin around a central axis and, depending on the direction of the spin -- clockwise or counterclockwise (deosil or widdershins) -- the swastika in question is either male or female, yang or yin, positive or negative. In many Hindu and Buddhist paintings and Tibetan tangkas -- as well as in temple architecture in China, Tibet, and India -- the swastika appears in both forms as if to emphasize the necessity of the polarization of both forces. It has been asserted by some authors that a counterclockwise-turning swastika (the type eventually adopted as the symbol of the Nazi Party) is somehow a representation of Evil, but this would be unknown to the Eastern peoples who probably gave the world the swastika in the first place. As an example, a wooden statuette in the author's possession -- purchased in 1991 at a curio shop in Shanghai -- is of a kindly Kuan Yin, Goddess of Mercy, with a counterclockwise swastika carved on her breast. Thus the swastika was not a Nazi invention, nor was its association with occultism solely a figment of Mme. Blavatsky's imagination. As early as 1869 the British astrologer "Zadkiel" (Richard James Morrison, 1795-1874) had already announced the formation of something called the Ancient Order of the Suastika; [7] the swastika symbol was also a common decoration for the covers of books by Rudyard Kipling ... ... and in 1897 the young Adolf Hitler, attending school at the Benedictine Monastery at Lambach, would pass every day beneath an archway which bears the monastery's coat of arms cast in stone. Its most prominent feature is the swastika. While an educated perspective on the swastika reveals the symbol as an ancient Eastern symbol of good fortune, words themselves have their own intrinsic power. Thus, when a German calls the swastika by the term hakenkreuz he is calling it a "hooked cross." To a German of the twentieth century (as for a German of the thirteenth century) the word cross has decidedly Christian overtones; a hooked cross therefore implies some deviation from, or modified form of, Christianity. In this way, the link between the inherently amoral swastika and questionable religious beliefs is made by way of the emotionally loaded term "hooked cross." When the various volkisch and German cultural societies began adopting the hakenkreuz as their emblem, then, they were just as conscious of its anti-Christian potential as they were of their own anti-Semitic intent. This was not paganism as a pure, Earth-Mother-worshiping cult [?] (such as the modern Wicca phenomenon) but paganism as a movement set up in opposition to Judeo-Christianity as well as to Communism, Capitalism, and Democracy, which were all creatures of the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy. In the Listian mode, therefore, the swastika as hakenkreuz identifies the volkisch Nazi movement as an ideological enemy not only of the prevailing political forces of the time but also of the majority religions of Western Europe. Whereas Communism set itself up in opposition to all religion, Nazism supported a pagan revival to replace the existing religions. It is perhaps this strategy more than any other that has allowed Nazism in various forms to survive its calamitous defeat in World War II and to continue to exert an influence over young people and old down the years into our present decade. Political systems come and go as they are useful or not; religions (in part because their immediate utility is not easily proven or disproven) can survive for centuries after their creation. After all, even Christianity itself survived hundreds of years of an underground existence before coming into its own. The List Society Although the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna did not take List's occult researches seriously and rejected his thesis (as the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna would later reject Hitler's applications), many other groups and individuals took him very seriously, indeed. A List Society was formed in 1907 to finance his work, and the roster of members and founders of this Society reads like an anti-Semitic Who's Who of early twentieth-century Austria and Germany. Clearly, the idea that there existed a "scientific" rationale for both racism and nationalism was very attractive to a certain element among the New Agers of the day, for science -- the new religion -- could thus be relied upon to provide moral support for a position that would otherwise seem either absurd or repugnant. The same motivation that prompted List, Liebenfels, and even Mathers to "prove" they had aristocratic blood also served to define the efforts of the volkisch supporters to prove that German blood in general was superior to that of the other races. And, in order to obtain an even greater degree of respectability, it was necessary to go deeply into the past in order to "discover" an aristocratic ancestor. For List personally, it was his great-grandfather who, he claimed, had been of gentle, if not noble, birth. For the volkisch movement in general, it was the mysterious race of Teutons from the mists of ancient European history who gave the German people -- the Volk -- their pedigree and excluded all other races. It is difficult to give a perfect translation of the term volkisch. To an English ear, the term sounds suspiciously like "folkish" and, in a way, that is true if we do not make the otherwise-inevitable associations with "folk music," for instance, that somehow devalue the term "folk" for certain generations of Americans. For volkisch means not only "folkish" but also "national" or "popular" in the sense of "the People," similar to the Spanish concept of "La Raza," especially in the context of the volkisch movement in Germany. This movement was nationalist in the extreme, for it extolled a perceived common heritage that was believed to go back over several (even hundreds of) millennia and which included everything from art to science, from medicine to communal living, from religion to magic. The German volkisch movement had all of these, and it was also inextricably linked to the Lebensreform (or "life reform") movement which sought to purify the German people by a whole program of "clean living" practices. (With the possible exception of nudism -- although he was seriously attracted to paintings of nudes, and the more erotic the better [8] -- Hitler incorporated all of these tenets into his own belief system. As is generally known, he was a vegetarian who did not smoke or drink; and he identified himself as the physical and spiritual incarnation of the Volk itself. As the virtually untranslatable Nazi-era slogan would tell us: Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer. Perhaps: "One People, One Empire, One Leader.") According to List, the German people -- the Volk -- could trace their spiritual ancestry by careful reading of the Edda, that compilation of Old Norse lore and legend from Iceland which became particularly sacred to Hitler. This belief was so pervasive that the Ahnenerbe-SS would later devote a whole category of its research to Icelandic studies in concert with its runic investigations, evidence of which can be found among the captured Nazi documents microfilmed in the National Archives. [9] (The enigmatic Grail scholar and SS officer Otto Rahn would even make a special pilgrimage to Iceland in search of the legendary Thule.) [10] The ancestral links to the past through Guido von List were thus kept intact until well after List's death in Berlin in 1919. The style and nature of List's writings would be familiar to anyone who had read Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine back-to-back with de Santillana's Hamlet's Mill. In fact, the latter could be said to represent (with abject and profuse apology to Professor de Santillana) Listian neo-Aryan philosophy taken to its logical conclusion: that the Edda, the runic poems and spells, the tree Yggdrasil, and all the Norse myths do represent a secret, sacred knowledge about the origins -- not only of the Teutons or mythic Aryans -- but of the entire human race, as these motifs are present everywhere and in many cultures from Africa to the Middle East to the Far East to the Western Hemisphere; except that, for Professor de Santillana, that origin lies not in a sunken hyperborean continent but in the stars. (Some American Nazis actually became converts to this point of view, at least partially. The author is reminded of William Dudley Pelley, the leader of the fascist Silver Shirts organization of the 1930s, who eventually abandoned organized Nazism and went on to help found the "I AM" movement: a cult that believes in ongoing human contact with alien space creatures, and Soulcraft, a similar movement. To Pelley, the "Aryans" are descendants of an alien Master Race.) Ultima Thule and the Secret Chiefs The ancient homeland of the Aryan race was believed to be the legendary Thule: the northernmost point on earth, an entryway into a subterranean landscape peopled by giants. A kind of Teutonic Eden, Thule or Ultima Thule was the mythic origin of all "Aryans": an equally mythic white-skinned, blue-eyed, blond-haired race of wise giants who were once the masters of the Earth but who lost their birthright due to sexual liaisons with the irresistibly seductive members of inferior, subhuman, half-animal races. It should be mentioned now that, according to science (and the dictionary), there is no such thing as an Aryan race. The term Aryan refers to a language group -- what has been called the Indo-European language group -- and not to a race of people. Obviously, speaking any of the Indo-European languages does not make one a member of the Indo-European "race." There is no such thing. Yet, this is exactly the type of reasoning that led the early "Aryan" promoters into one of the worst blunders of twentieth-century history. [11] They confused a language group with a race. They claimed that language was somehow a function of the blood. Indeed, the bulk of List's researches were based on interpretations of the ancient writing systems of the Celtic and Nordic peoples, the runes; i.e., they were etymological and linguistic studies, yet they steered him and his followers onto a disastrous course whereby the modern day residents of Germany and Austria were somehow the pure-blooded descendants of a master race of ancient Teutonic godlings, the Ur-Volk. He was not alone in this, of course. The movement to isolate the German-speaking populations of Europe from all other "races" and to unite them into one cohesive national unit -- the Pan-German movement -- had begun much earlier, and there were many anti-Semitic political parties and discussion groups abroad in the land in the 1880s, a full fifty years before Hitler came to power. Some groups formed around academic types who claimed to have proved their racial theories based on linguistic research -- such as List -- and others on physical characteristics such as skull size or eye color (factors which would later figure so prominently in the membership requirements for the Germanenorden, later in SS racial identification programs and in experiments carried out at the death camps). During the same era of the Indian wars in the American West -- which were quite reasonably understood by the Nazis as a federal (and therefore legal) program of genocide against the Native Americans in pursuit of a Yankee Lebensraum policy -- Germans and Austrians were plotting its equivalent in the extermination of the Jews and, it is said, actually taking their lead from the blatantly racist American war on the Native American tribes. [12] Unfortunately for the anti-Semites, the difficulty of forming an entire political party around the single issue of anti-Semitism made it necessary to continue the offensive by other means. Magazines, pamphlets, and books were written and widely disseminated on the subject of the heroic, blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan peoples fighting the dark-skinned Semitic, Mediterranean, and African hordes. The pornography of anti-Semitism would eventually take the form of future Nazi Gauleiter Julius Streicher's obscene broadsides against everything from miscegenation to psychoanalysis. But a constant theme of this subculture was the rape and murder of beautiful blond women by the bearded, crazed, dark-haired mongrel races. Psychoanalysts would understand it as a theme of blatant sexual insecurity and, indeed, the anti-Semitic journalists and "academics" would constantly and openly rail against the sexual prowess of the inferior peoples and of how the Semites -- through various means, but especially including the fledgling "Jewish" science of psychoanalysis -- had nearly succeeded in emasculating the Aryan male! [13] (One may jump a few generations to Los Angeles in 1969, and ponder the murder of Sharon Tate -- a beautiful, blond actress who was nine months pregnant -- by a band of "mongrels"; one may match the famous photos of the day of Charles Manson to the caricatures of the crazed, bearded Mongrel murderers of the anti-Semite's dark fantasies; one may scan the interviews and transcripts of the case, and discover that a proposed motivation for the killings was to instigate a race war between whites and blacks; one may then reasonably jump to the present day and wonder about the conversion of neo-Nazis and members of the Aryan Brotherhood to Manson's "cause," and of Manson's adoption of the swastika as his "emblem." This is a problem we will deal with in a later chapter, but for now it is important to realize that this type of thinking is by no means alien to our times or to our culture.) At one point the Aryan homeland, Thule, was actually believed to be in Iceland, for Iceland is also the repository of the most ancient Teutonic legends extant: the Edda. Nazi apologists and racial theorists pored over the Edda endlessly, looking for clues as to their own origins, the appropriate pagan rituals to perform to appease and summon the gods, and for justification for their political and racial theories. Prehistoric Nordic sites all over Scandinavia and Europe were investigated, and no stone was left unturned. Literally. There are pages and pages of documents and photographs of megaliths, dolmens, and standing stones from all over Europe, and their interpretation by Nazi academics, in the files of captured German documents in the archives of Germany and America. [14] Thule was a siren song to these early German occultists. It was a pagan Eden; not a Semitic, Judeo-Christian paradise in the sweltering deserts or marshes of Iraq, but a cool Nordic landscape of virgin snows and evergreen trees in the far north. A place not of warm sensuality and Mediterranean seductiveness, but of a cold, uncompromising purity. Similar to today's romantic notion that the human race somehow originated in the stars -- that the stars are our "home" -- Thule was "home" to the Pan-Germanists and to the lonely, alienated, impoverished, and disenfranchised anti-Semites and volkisch sympathizers ... and just as inaccessible. Further, just as today's romantics believe in our extraterrestrial origins and in continuing contact with beings from other planets (our forebears?), the volkisch romantics of List's day believed in continuing contact with the Supermen. It was a theme that vibrated subliminally throughout a lot of anti-Semitic literature and in more open form among their British counterparts in the Golden Dawn, who posited a race of "Secret Chiefs": superhuman beings who, they said, live secretly among us, and in the Theosophical Society, which held that Hidden Masters (the Great White Brotherhood) were guiding the world's destiny. Among the volkisch cults it was believed that -- as soon as the Germans had purified the planet of the pollution of the inferior races -- these Hidden Masters, these Supermen from Thule, would make themselves known, and the link which had been lost between Man and God would be forged anew. [15] This is not quite as absurd as it seems at first glance, since a constant theme in much Jewish and Christian eschatology is that of the coming of a Messiah who will purify the world and destroy the "not-chosen." This Messiah always seems to be a rather militaristic being, whether the armed Deliverer of the Zealots and other pious Jews who await the New Jerusalem, or the Messiah of the Book of Revelation -- the Apocalypse -- who will lay waste with fire and sword in a global, if not galactic, conflagration. The German version is not so far afield from these cherished beliefs of the Judeo-Christian fundamentalists, but is based on racial qualifications (and thus is beyond the realm of personal choice and ethical behavior) rather than on individual moral or spiritual worthiness. The tradition of Hidden Masters is not restricted to occult Aryanism, of course. Some Muslims believe in the "Hidden Imam," an Ismaili concept similar to the "Secret Chief" idea of the Golden Dawn. The Strict Observance Masonic society of eighteenth-century Germany also claimed a tradition of Secret Masters, and there is the tradition of the Nine Unknown Men of India, secret Masters of the world's various sciences who invisibly guide the fortunes of the human race. That Himmler believed in this idea is revealed by his masseur, Felix Kersten, who -- in his memoirs -- quotes the Reichsfuhrer-SS on just this point with regard to the Freemasons. [16] And then, of course, we find ourselves back on familiar ground with the ancient legend of Agartha -- or Arktogaa -- the subterranean kingdom of an alien race buried deep within the Himalayas or somewhere in the far North (at any rate, in the appropriately Nordic frozen wastes), another Aryan "Thule." Years before H. G. Wells described a similar race of beings in his novel The Time Machine, the English author and Rosicrucian Bulwer-Lytton (1802-73) was writing of a subterranean master race in his celebrated novel, Vril. All of this is mentioned only to show that these concepts of secret master race and subterranean kingdoms are not peculiar to German or even Nordic legend and myth, and certainly not to Nazi ideology, but form part of a global tradition that may have some basis in reality [?]; a basis that is now dimmed by the passage of too many millennia to place it clearly and authoritatively into a modern perspective. The volkisch theorists were merely drawing on a bank of myth and tradition familiar the world over, and sculpting from selected pieces a cosmological worldview that placed the German-speaking peoples at the top of a pyramid of power. Lanz von Liebenfels and the Templar Revival The eccentric ideas of Guido von List were carried to another extreme by his young follower, Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954), who created the Order of the New Templars as a secret society bent on reviving the chivalric brotherhood of knights, but in an aggressively Teutonic -- and anti-Semitic -- format. While List's sympathies were clearly already pagan and anti-Christian, von Liebenfels sought to restore a non-Christian, Teutonic Grail Order to its rightful place in the world. He used those of List's racial and linguistic theories he found most appealing; but it should be remembered that von Liebenfels was a Cistercian monk who abandoned his vows but who never, in his heart, abandoned the Church ... at least, not his idealized, medieval version of it. While von Liebenfels had no sympathy for the Catholic Church as such -- for its beliefs [?] -- he had unbounded admiration for its pomp and ceremony, its elaborate ritual. He managed to combine this fascination with stately ceremony with a peculiar understanding of the Templar Order. To von Liebenfels, the Templars were an Aryan brotherhood dedicated to the establishment of a greater Germany and to the purification of the race. The Grail, in his estimation, was symbolic of the pure German blood. Even modern historians of the Grail legends disagree on the meaning of the term "Grail." To a linguist, the phrase Sangraal or Saint Graal ("Holy Grail") may simply be a pun on Sang Real or "Royal Blood." Indeed, the British research team of Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln offer just such a theory in their best-selling Holy Blood, Holy Grail; [17] except that for these gentlemen the Holy Blood is not that of an Aryan super race, but the very blood of Christ himself, preserved in a dynastic lineage kept secret for two thousand years and protected by a secret society with the unfortunate name of Priory of Zion, a title which, combined with mysterious purpose, has perhaps too many resonances to those fictional Elders and their famous Protocols. The ambivalence of men like List and Liebenfels toward the Christ figure is revealing. Hitler himself would later insist that Christ couldn't possibly have been Jewish. [18] For all their hatred of Christianity and Judaism, many Nazis and anti-Semites were loath to throw the Baby out with the bathwater. That may have been simple pragmatism in the land of Luther; but it also may have been evidence of deep uncertainty over ingrained concepts like heaven and hell, retribution and salvation. As the title character in the movie version of The Man in the Glass Booth tells us, a Christian is "a nervous Jew with an insurance policy." [19] To turn one's back completely on Christ may have seemed unsettling to these Supermen. A serious exception to this would be, of course, Heinrich Himmler whose unabashed paganism we shall discuss in a later chapter. This hearkening back to a glorious German past was what united List and Liebenfels, although in many other ways their paths diverged. It was von Liebenfels's notorious magazine, Ostara, that so attracted Hitler in the latter's early days as an impoverished artist in Vienna, and we now know that Hitler -- so inflamed by the wild occult, racial, and anti-Semitic theories he found in Ostara -- actually paid an unannounced visit to the editor's offices and came face-to-face with Liebenfels himself. [20] This information comes from an interview with von Liebenfels after the war, when he was struggling with the de-nazification process and would have had no ulterior motive in describing this meeting since the revelation of a personal relationship with Hitler could conceivably only hurt him. Who was Lanz von Liebenfels, and how did he manage such an emotional impact on young Hitler? If all one had to go on were back copies of Ostara, we would have to say that he was a cross between Pat Buchanan and Henry Lee Lucas, with a little Jimmy Swaggart thrown in to provide the Biblical and sexual references. Actually, von Liebenfels was a bit more complicated than that. His Order of the New Templars was an occult lodge that met at a ruined castle high on a cliff over the Danube -- the eerie Burg Werfenstein in Upper Austria, a few miles upriver from Hitler's childhood home -- among other sites. The members wore white, surplice-style robes emblazoned with the red cross of the Templars, a cross that von Liebenfels believed was formed of two, superimposed and counter-rotating, swastikas. At the same time, another such lodge was operating in Germany: the Ordo Tempii Orientis (Order of the Eastern Temple), which had nothing to do with Liebenfels's ONT but everything to do with Aleister Crowley as we shall see in a later chapter. Von Liebenfels -- in Ostara and in other publications, such as his weirdly entitled Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-Aefflingen und dem Gotter-Elektron (1905), which we may translate as "Theozoology, or the Science of the Sodom-Apelings and the Electron of the Gods" -- prescribed sterilization and castration for inferior races and, of course, denounced miscegenation owing to its pollution of the pure-blooded German Volk. He also sounded a theme that was to occupy all other racist ideologues, including Hitler, and that was the forced submission of women to Aryan men. To the Nazis and their ideological predecessors, feminism was an evil on the same level as Freemasonry, international Jewry, and Bolshevism. In fact, the Nazis believed feminism (like Bolshevism) to be a creation of international Jewry for the express purpose of finishing off the Aryan race. The irony has come full circle, of course, for the term "feminazis" has become a staple of Rush Limbaugh-style, talk radio agit-prop. But von Liebenfels did not stop at sweeping political indictments. He included occult biology in his repertoire, with a concentration on the pineal and pituitary glands. He believed -- as did Blavatsky and as do many current mystics and theosophists -- that a space between these glands in the hypothalamus of the brain was formerly a supercharged area that gave Aryans the twin powers of telepathy and omniscience: the third Eye; but that -- because of the pollution of Aryan blood with that of members of the inferior races -- these two glands had so atrophied that the Aryan people had lost their psychic abilities. This is a somewhat liberal borrowing from the teachings of legitimate Eastern adepts who train their devotees in methods of awakening this innate potential (regardless of their racial background). According to von Liebenfels, however, the solution to the problem of the incipient physical and spiritual degeneration of the Aryan race was not hatha yoga or Transcendental Meditation but the creation of a new priesthood of the Holy Grail; a new Knights Templar of the German Blood (for that was, according to von Liebenfels, what the Grail represented). As for the inferior races? They were to be deported; or incinerated as a sacrifice to God; or simply used as slave labor. All of these proposals -- from Knights Templar to slave labor, from Holy Grail to crematoria -- were to be accepted, incorporated, and expanded upon by Adolf Hitler personally, and by the Third Reich as official policy. It was also von Liebenfels who proposed that the finest specimens of Aryan males should mate indiscriminately with the finest specimens of Aryan females in specially controlled and tightly monitored villages in order to create the super race. [21] This would, of course, be a cause taken up by Himmler's Lebensborn organization to which every SS officer was expected to belong. Lanz von Liebenfels and his mentor Guido von List can be viewed as archetypal Social Darwinists and the Third Reich as Social Darwinism carried to its logical conclusion. Similar to the rationale behind the race eugenics programs in the United States (which also influenced American immigration policies, both of which the Nazis regarded with admiration and approval), it was an ideology of the survival of the fittest, and the enslavement and destruction of the weakest, from Jews to women, from the mentally and physically handicapped to the aged, from Slavs and Gypsies to Communists. Gradually, the distinction between race and ideology became so blurred that the Soviets were viewed as race enemies as much as political enemies. This explains the ferocity with which Russian Communists were slaughtered by roving bands of Einsatzgruppen during the war, notably under such racist ideologues as Dr. Franz Six and onetime Theosophist Otto Ohlendorf. To support this program, they enlisted the aid of history, of romance, of legend, and of the occult significance of alphabets, geometry, ancient architecture, ritual magic ... and the Knights Templar.
During the early twentieth century in Europe, the romance and lure of
the Knights Templar myth was strong. The original Order of the
Knights
of the Temple had been destroyed by an agreement between the king of
France (Phillipe le Bel) and Pope Clement V in the fourteenth
century. Their leader at the time, Grandmaster Jacques de Molay, was
burned at the stake in A.D. 1314 and the Order's assets seized all over
Europe (primarily in France). One reason for all this bloodshed and
chaos was the fact that the Order had become notoriously
wealthy by loaning money to the king ... so much money that the king now
had no hope of repaying it. The official reasons given by Church and
State for the suppression of the Templars were much different, however,
and it is the mystery of this Order that has given rise to so many myths
and legends, and which has contributed to the creation of several occult
societies in the twentieth century. The works of Louis Charpentier in
France [22] and Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln in Great
Britain [23] may be consulted for a more detailed discussion of pop Templar
literature, but for now all we need to know is that the Templars were
believed to be the heirs of a mystical tradition of which Lanz von
Liebenfels considered himself the modern incarnation.
Created by the mystical philosopher St. Bernard of Clairvaux -- and therefore corresponding to von Liebenfels's own Cistercian background -- the Templars were originally nine Knights who abandoned all they owned and ventured off to the Holy Land to "protect pilgrims" who were on their way to the various Catholic shrines. How nine recently impoverished men were expected to accomplish this mission -- especially while there were already large, fully funded knightly organizations in Palestine doing just that -- was never explained. However, about the year A.D. 1118 they found themselves bivouacked at the site of King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem and spent their days there in relative obscurity -- nine knights in charge of the entire Temple site -- until their return to France ten years later, no pilgrims having been especially protected. The legend states that these nine men returned with something important. Something discovered in the ruins of the Temple. Whatever it was, it made the Templars unbelievably rich and powerful virtually overnight. They began building cathedrals all over France and -- according to the legend -- not a single Templar-built cathedral (and this includes the famous Chartres Cathedral) contained a crucifix anywhere as part of its original design. The author should point out to any non-Catholics that a crucifix is, strictly speaking, a representation of Christ crucified on a cross. The Templar buildings did contain crosses; they simply omitted depicting the crucified body of Christ on them. This was seen as evidence that the Templars did not believe in the crucifixion and by extension did not believe in the resurrection of Christ after death; that, in fact, the Templars had somehow ceased being Christians entirely and become heretics, or worse. What did the Templars find in Jerusalem that exerted such a profound if pernicious effect? Some say the Templars had located the Holy Grail itself. Others, that the Templars had found the Ark of the Covenant with its famous contents: the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments were inscribed, and the magical Rod of Aaron. [24] Whatever it was, it revealed a secret so shattering that a thousand years of Christian teachings lay helpless in the face of it. And whatever it was, it could not protect the Templars indefinitely. The Crusades proved to be a catastrophic series of campaigns for Church and State and eventually the Holy Land was "lost" to the Muslims. At home, the Church was worried about the wealth and influence of the Templars and suspicious about their onetime cozy relationship with the Saracens: Muslim warriors with whom the Templars might have exchanged "initiations." Then there were the rumors that the Templar initiation itself included a ceremony in which the postulant would trample upon a cross; or in which obeisance was paid to an idol called Baphomet (a suspiciously Arabic-sounding name). There were even rumors that homosexuality was being practiced on a wide scale among the knights -- a charge that would later be brought in the twentieth century against Ernst Rahm and many other SA men as an excuse for their destruction. These rumors -- including some "eyewitness" testimony -- were used as evidence in an Inquisition against the Templars; the Order was destroyed; and whatever members managed to escape the bonfires of the Church wound up in Germany, Portugal, and, it is theorized, in Scotland. Oddly enough, during the eighteenth century the Templar legend enjoyed a kind of revival during the development of speculative Freemasonry. Templar degrees were added, and a tradition grew up around them that the Freemasons had been somehow Templars in disguise, heirs to the same mystical tradition surrounding the Temple of Solomon. This is odd because the Nazis would later persecute Freemasonry and arrest many of its members even though the Nazi Party itself was heir to the Order of the New Templars created by its early theoretician and Hitler mentor, Lanz von Liebenfels, and in fact borrowed its swastika emblem. As we shall see, Liebenfels himself and other Templar organizations were also persecuted, notable among them the Ordo Templi Orientis or OTO of Theodor Reuss, Karl Germer, Franz Hartmann, and Aleister Crowley. Thule Gesellschaft Many followers of List and Liebenfels were not satisfied with the metaphysical, meditational, essentially passive and academic nature of the List Society and the Order of New Templars. While they devoured Ostara and similar publications -- and professed to read the longer, more complex books of both List and Liebenfels -- they found themselves inflamed by their wild rhetoric and the countless attacks on Jews, Freemasons, Jesuits, Bolsheviks, and Capitalists. It was no longer enough to perform pagan rituals at the summer solstice or to decode a particularly interesting series of runes found on a rock or described in a forgotten book. If the theories and proposals of List and Liebenfels were right -- if a war was, in fact, taking place between the forces of Light and Darkness and the fate of the entire human race was at stake -- then why wasn't someone doing something about it? Why wasn't there a program in place to weed out the Jews and other Minderwertigen: "beings of inferior value"? Where were the Germans of pure Aryan blood? Why weren't they taking charge in the political arena? And why weren't all German peoples united in a single great Reich? To that end, and following the lead of a wealthy if small-time industrialist by the name of Theodor Fritsch -- whose publishing hobby included an inflammatory anti-Semitic periodical, the Hammer, and one of the first German editions of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion [25] several members of the List Society and the ONT formed their own, ultra-secret and ultra-right-wing society, the Germanenorden (or "German Order") in concert with a more overt propaganda effort called the Reichshammerbund based loosely on the anti-Semitic diatribes to be found in Fritsch's Hammer magazine. The Germanenorden had an impressive series of initiatory rituals, replete with knights in shining armor, wise kings, mystical bards, and forest nymphs. The desire of the founders was to implement a Masonic-style program of secrecy, initiation, and mutual cooperation to counter the imagined conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons with their secret meetings and hidden agendas. What the Germanenorden became was, essentially, an anti-Masonry: a Masonic-style society devoted to the eradication of Freemasonry itself; an anti-Judaism: a mutual help and support network based on racial principles (one had to prove one's Aryan heritage by providing birth certificates going back several generations) that was committed to the destruction of the Jews. (As offbeat as this all sounds today, the Germanenorden would be spiritually reborn decades after the war as the Italo-Argentine P-2 Society, which we will discuss later). The Germanenorden was formally established -- along with the Reichshammerbund -- in May of 1912 at the home of Fritsch. [26] Things went along fine for a while until World War I broke out and many Germanenorden members found themselves called to the front. At that time, the Order began to weaken and split into schismatic factions until the arrival on the scene of Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff. Sebottendorff had an exotic past. Initiated into a Masonic society in Egypt and communicant with a variety of secret societies in the Middle East and Turkey -- for whom he fought in the Balkan War of 1912 -- Sebottendorff was another self-styled aristocrat in the tradition of List, Liebenfels, Mathers, and Crowley. Born Adam Alfred Rudolf Glauer to a locomotive driver on November 9, 1875, young Rudolf would take to sea at the age of twenty-two. After some misadventures in Australia, he fetched up in Alexandria in 1900, visited the pyramids at Giza and witnessed the rites of the Dervishes. Later in Constantinople he learned Turkish from a Muslim imam and worked for a Sufi initiate at a town near Bursa, becoming initiated into Freemasonry there in 1901. Although he returned to Germany for a short while, he would find himself back in Turkey in 1908, studying Islamic alchemy, mysticism, and the practices of a Dervish sect with Janissary lineage known as the Baktashi. It is said that he founded his own mystical lodge in Constantinople in 1910, eventually winding up back in Germany in 1913. During the war, Sebottendorff made contact with the head of the Germanenorden, Hermann Pohl, with whom he shared a fascination with Nordic runes and Eastern mysticism. Pohl enlisted his aid as a recruiter for the Order in Bavaria and Sebottendorff became a very successful promoter during 1917, even going so far as to publish his own Order magazine, called Runen (Runes) in 1918. By the end of 1917, Sebottendorff was admitted to the exalted rank of Master of the Order's Bavarian section. It should be recognized from the above that Sebottendorff's interest in the Germanenorden was obviously of a strongly occultist nature. His background was that of a mystic and Orientalist (as Arabists then were called); his contact with Pohl was made on the basis of rune symbolism and other arcane lore. Although he served in the Turkish Army, he managed to avoid conscription into the German Army because he claimed Turkish citizenship. Therefore, we do not see Sebottendorff as a fanatic German nationalist or political activist first; rather, he comes upon his politics somewhat later in the game. By 1918, the Germanenorden in Bavaria had grown to over fifteen hundred members -- an astonishing rate of growth particularly considering the number of able-bodied men who were fighting World War I at the time. In need of space, Sebottendorff would rent rooms at the upscale Four Seasons Hotel in Munich. These rooms would eventually become known as the meeting place for the Thule Gesellschaft. The Thule Society was originally conceived as a cover identity for the Germanenorden which, at this time, was becoming identified with the type of right-wing extremism and virulent anti-Semitism that the various German republican and socialist groups were seeking to weed out and destroy. In short, the Germanenorden -- another magic-oriented, occult society with its secret initiation rituals patterned after Masonic ceremony and its Theosophical-style philosophy encompassing everything from Eastern mysticism to runic lore to a rabid, pseudoscientific racism -- was considered a subversive organization and a threat to society. The Thule Society, while ostensibly a "literary-cultural group," had as its emblem the famous swastika superimposed on a dagger. The Thule Society front fooled no one, probably -- certainly not its members, who, in the beginning were all Germanenorden initiates, and which included the Justice Minister Franz Gurtner (who would retain that title in the Third Reich), Ernst Pohner, the police chief of Munich, and various titled aristocrats. [27] Sebottendorff enlisted the aid of young ex-soldier and art student Walter Nauhaus. Another occultist and a follower of Guido von List, Nauhaus joined the Germanenorden in Berlin in 1916 and in 1918 made contact with Sebottendorff (the Order's Bavarian master) after moving to Munich. The two magicians decided to divide the responsibilities of attracting new recruits to the cult by having Nauhaus devote himself to university-age prospects. Nauhaus was about twenty-six years old at the time. The membership restrictions of the Germanenorden/Thule Gesellschaft make those of the New York Athletic Club or any typical American "whites only" golfing gesellschaft pale by comparison (no pun intended). Aside from proving one's purity of Aryan blood as far back as the Thirty Years' War, there were physical examinations that had to be passed (measurement of skull, foot; color of hair, eyes; etc.). In addition, the deformed or simply unattractive were also refused admittance. Those uncertain of where they stood in relation to these draconian requirements were advised to refer to past issues of von Liebenfels's Ostara. It was directly due to this screening out of potential members that the minister-president of Bavaria's first Socialist government -- the oddly sympatico Kurt Eisner -- was assassinated, thus precipitating a national crisis. The assassin, a young count, was refused admittance to the Thule Society because he had Jewish blood. Angry at the rejection, and consumed by a desire to prove his pro-German bona fides, he shot and killed Herr Eisner while the latter was actually on his way to quit his post, letter of resignation in hand. What happened next is detailed in the pages that begin Chapter One. The young art student and occultist Walter Nauhaus was one of the seven Thulists captured, and later murdered, by the Red Army during the debacle of April 30, 1919. Munich was "liberated" from the Reds in May and Sebottendorff -- stinging from charges he had let the Order down and was indirectly responsible for the deaths of the seven Thulists by failing to conceal the membership lists -- officially resigned from the Germanenorden/Thule Society organization in June of that year and devoted the following years to a serious study of the stars. The Germanenorden continued to operate until well into the 1920s and actually carried out several political assassinations -- including that of Matthias Erzberger, [28] one of the signatories of the Armistice and hence a "November criminal" -- making the name Germanenorden synonymous with political terrorism as well as occult conspiracy. As for the Thule Society itself, there is documentary evidence in the diaries of Thule member Johannes Hering to show that it lasted at least until 1923, the year of Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch. [29] Its foremost creation, however, took place while Sebottendorff was still in charge in Munich, and that was the formation of the "workers' society" arm of the Order. Heretofore, the Germanenorden and the Thule Society were virtually the exclusive domain of the wealthy, educated, and prominent among Bavarian society. There was no room for the lower-middle-class elements who were hurting the most from the effects of war, revolution, and inflation. The enemies of the Germanenorden, the Communists and Socialists, were actively recruiting among these elements, however, poisoning them against their aristocratic leaders and promising them a heaven on earth, a "workers' paradise." The monarchists and industrialists understood the need to counter this threat, or else their population base -- a given for a thousand years of royal rule over the peasant populations of Europe -- would wither and die. The arcane occult theories and snarled academic prose that characterized the meetings and publications of the Germanenorden, the Thule, the List Society, and the Order of New Templars was not likely to be easily understood -- or warmly embraced -- by the largely Christian masses. The Thule, it was recognized, was an elite society, attractive only to those who had done the reading; to those who could afford the initiations and the leisure time to devote to occult studies; and to those who had already abandoned their traditional Christian faith or who were on the verge of doing so. Thus, in order completely to unify the German population in opposition to the threat of Bolshevism and international Jewry, Sebottendorff formed a workers' circle with a few handpicked men, among them Anton Drexler. This group did not meet at the fancy Four Seasons Hotel but at a tavern, and was called the German Workers' Party, the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or DAP, a consciously Socialist-sounding title. It was this group that Hitler was sent to spy on in September, 1919, and which, five months later, became the National Socialist German Workers' Party, the NSDAP or Nazi Party. As we shall see in more detail in Chapter Five, Rudolf von Sebottendorff would eventually return to Germany in the 1930s with a mission to revitalize his old Order, calling upon his former colleagues and even reissuing his old magazine, Runen. He wrote a book -- Before Hitler Came -- describing the early history of the Thule Gesellschaft and the Nazi Party, showing how the occultists had virtually created both the Party and Hitler. This book -- consulted with appropriate caution -- has become invaluable to researchers tracing the lineage of many of the principal actors and organizations in this drama and in providing a time line against which the history of the Nazi Party can be established. However, his revelations aroused the ire of the Party -- and particularly of Hitler, who would take steps to ensure that no one who knew of his early days would be around to talk about them. Sebottendorff was thrown into a camp for a while, and then released to make his way to Turkey, where he worked for German Intelligence as a perfectly useless agent until the war ended. (The degree of his ineptitude as a spy may be judged by the fact that Schellenberg, chief of SS Foreign Intelligence, never mentions the illustrious Sebottendorff in his memoirs even though he wrote at some length about his visit to the Nazi intelligence apparatus in Turkey. [?]) The new Thule Gesellschaft never got off the ground, and died aborning, divided by petty squabbles among its members (including an acrimonious attack on Franz Dannehl) and increasingly under pressure from the Nazis to disband. But the damage had already been done, many years before. It should be pointed out that there is a great deal of controversy over the early days and connections of the DAP with the Thule Society. Some historians insist that there was no direct connection between them -- although many DAP members were also Thulists, such as Franz Dannehl, Karl Harrer, and Friedrich Krohn (who designed the swastika flag for Hitler), and although the adoption of the swastika as Party symbol is a virtual admission of the link between the List, Liebenfels, and Sebottendorff groups and the DAP and NSDAP. Indeed, during the "troubles" of 1918 when the German revolution was in full swing with the collapse of the Second Reich, Pan-German groups were shut down all over Germany with the exception of the Thule Society (which was, we remember, purely a "literary-cultural" society); and its premises at the Four Seasons Hotel were used as a meeting place -- and sometime hiding place -- for such notables as Rudolf Hess and Alfred Rosenberg, not to mention the poet Dietrich Eckart who was the Doctor Frankenstein to Hitler's Monster. (It was only Eckart's fast talking and fancy footwork that kept him and Rosenberg alive when the Red Army began arresting -- and shooting -- Thulists.) So, while we cannot show a document stating that the DAP and NSDAP were subsidiaries of the Thule Gesellschaft or the Germanenorden, the author believes it is safe to say that the DAP (and, by extension, the Nazi Party) was originally a creature of both the Thule Society and Sebottendorff (as claimed by Sebottendorff and as admitted by Toland), [30] and, certainly, the wildest, most extreme aims of the Thule Society would all eventually become official policy of the Third Reich, while its purely metaphysical and occult characteristics were adopted wholeheartedly by the SS. Between them, Guido von List -- an elderly man in flowing beard and quasi-Renaissance attire -- and Lanz von Liebenfels (a younger, clean-shaven, somewhat more imposing sort photographed in the ritual vestments of his Order) created the atmosphere of "rational" anti-Semitism in Vienna that was based on suspect scholarship in a number of fields, from etymology and linguistics to anthropology, astronomy and astrology, archaeology, and the occult. Sebottendorff, with his initiations into Eastern cults and his background in Middle Eastern mysticism and Freemasonry, personified the Aryan Mystic. As an aristocrat, a proven man of action who fought with Turkish forces in the Balkan War, and with his political connections and his activism at the time of the 1919 Putsch, he showed what a serious occultist could accomplish with a few hundred men and a stockpile of weapons. Sebottendorff was an ideal figure, a perfect combination of mystic and militarist, an echo of the times when kings were initiates, and when priests raised armies. Although he was held responsible by the Thule for the murder of the seven hostages held by the Red Army by allowing the Thule membership lists to fall into enemy hands, it was Sebottendorff who had tirelessly organized -- first for the Germanenorden, of which he was a Master, and then for the Thule Gesellschaft, which he founded -- and who had created an armed cult and sophisticated intelligence apparatus in the midst of pre-Weimar Munich. His Society had received such distinguished guests as Alfred Rosenberg, Dietrich Eckart, and Rudolf Hess. His Society had created the German Workers' Party, from which the Nazi Party would be born. And his Society bestowed the single most important symbol of the Third Reich upon the fledgling Nazis: the occult sign of the swastika, inherited from Liebenfels, Hitler's early mentor. Sebottendorff and the Thule Society were both ultimately and directly responsible for the collapse of the Soviet regime in Bavaria, both from force of arms and from force of ideas.
And it was an amazing time, no matter who was responsible; for an occult
organization -- a secret society based on Theosophical, runic, and magical
concepts (a kind of redneck Golden Dawn with guns) -- had
fought an armed conflict in the streets of Munich against the purely
political forces of a Soviet state ... and won. Today, this would be
considered the stuff of science fiction or, at worst, sword and sorcery
fantasy. But in Munich, in 1919, it was reality.
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