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.
***
The Kaiser's republic has collapsed with the defeat of Germany in the First World War, and the whole country is up for grabs. It appears as if Germany is about to fall apart into the warring city-states from which it had been assembled nearly fifty years ago. The victorious Allies are demanding enormous concessions from Germany. Kurt Eisner -- an intellectual and a Jew, a defender of the League of Nations -- takes the initiative and proclaims a Socialist Republic in Munich on the seventh of November, 1918. It looks as if there is going to be a Communist regime in Germany -- or, at least, a Socialist one in Bavaria -- after all. Hysteria grows among the nationalists, and with it despair that their nation is on the verge of realizing the dreams of Marx and Engels as codified in their famous Manifesto.
***
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.
***
Hartmann is of considerable interest to this investigation as it was he who helped create the Ordo Templi Orientis, a German occult society formed around the idea of sexual magic. Other illustrious members of the OTO will include another Theosophist, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who will go on to form the Anthroposophical Society in 1912; Gerard Encausse, who -- under the nom de plume of "Papus" -- had written the first definitive text on the Tarot as a book of concealed illuminism; and Aleister Crowley, whose A.^..A.^.., or Argentum Astrum ("Silver Star"), was founded in 1907, the same year as the Order of New Templars mentioned above....

When it came to Magick, Crowley was a genius....

Ordo Templi Orientis, or the Order of the Eastern Temple. This was the brainchild of one Karl Kellner, a wealthy German Freemason of high rank in a rather distaff branch of Freemasonry (the Rite of Memphis and Mizraim of John Yarker), who claimed that he was instructed in the techniques of sex-magic by a Hindu adept and two Arab magi during his travels in the East. He introduced this concept to his associates, Theodor Reuss, Heinrich Klein, and the ubiquitous Dr. Franz Hartmann, all of whom were also high-ranking Masons in Yarker's sect...

Theodor Reuss -- the Outer Head of the Order (OHO) of the OTO -- visited Crowley in London in 1912 ... and accused him of revealing the core secret of the Order in a publication of Crowley's called the Book of Lies... Reuss pointed out a revealing phrase having to do with a "Magick Rood" and a "Mystic Rose."...

Another personal friend of Mme. Blavatsky was Dr. William Wynn Westcott (1848-1925), another coroner and a Theosophist who founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in England in 1888, the same year as The Secret Doctrine was published. Westcott claimed that the Golden Dawn was in reality the English branch of a German occult lodge...

Whatever the reason, we have the Theosophical Society, the OTO, the Anthroposophical Society, and the Golden Dawn all intertwined in incestuous embrace....

The Golden Dawn -- that fabulously complex jewel of European occultism.....

The names List and Liebenfels soon became synonymous with the Pan-Germanic Volkisch movement that eventually gave birth to the Nazi Party....List adopted the Golden Dawn system of hierarchical and initiatory degrees....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....

"Sex-magic" is a loaded term with all sorts of connotations....It is, quite simply, a method of sublimating sexual energy to the will of the magician in a variety of rituals, for a variety of purposes, using the sexual practice appropriate to the desired end. Thus, everything from the missionary position to sodomy to masturbation has a magical analogue and refers to a different quality of occult power. The choice of partner is also a matter for some concern, and the practice of sex-magic has become so refined by later initiates of the Order that even the specific days of a woman's menstrual cycle (for instance) each has its own occult correspondence....Hitler was (probably unconsciously) putting this same knowledge to good use...Hitler had so sublimated his sexual urges that he ...had long ceased to be interested in normal sexual intercourse with women. On the other side, his speeches were so mesmerizing that even foreigners who spoke no German at all were captivated by Hitler's oratory. In other words, the magical, tantric technique worked....He transformed his sexual desire into a tool for obtaining power, and became the leader of Germany....Quite simply, we are dealing with the subordination of the sex act to the Great Work by the magician and mystic of every age.

Interestingly enough, the degree structure of the Golden Dawn was based on the famous Tree of Life symbol: a complex diagram of ten spheres connected by a total of twenty-two paths (each path representing a letter of the Hebrew alphabet) that can be consulted in any one of a variety of books on qabalism and Western occultism. This same Tree of Life diagram was used by the old Wotanist Guido von List to represent the hierarchical grace structure in his own ideal Ario-Germanic society and, like the Golden Dawn, he reserved the top three degrees as being inaccessible to the average human being. 

That List would have based his hierarchy on the patently Jewish Tree of Life and borrowed the concept from the Golden Dawn -- by way of the OTO -- would seem merely ironic to a layperson but positively frightening to an occultist, for what it implies about the relationship between the anti-Semitic List organizations and the ostensibly apolitical Golden Dawn and OTO lodges....

A great many SA men were homosexuals, which should give the nervous nellies in the Pentagon pause: for the Brownshirts -- the dreaded Storm Troopers; the brawling, two-fisted beer hall fighters; the drunken, angry mob of volunteer militiamen who defeated Communism in Germany and who propelled Hitler to power -- were the epitome of military machismo ... and Rohm, their leader and queen, was the ultimate fighting man....

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.

-- Peter Levenda, "Unholy Alliance"