CHAPTER 14: Jehovah as Satan

Jehovah ... was a creature of darkness, hence an Evil God....
-- Louis Israel Newman, Jewish Influence on Christian Reform Movements

The Jews have figured as scapegoats many times in history. They have been hounded and massacred. This has been laid to their obstinacy in clinging to their religion and image as God's chosen people; to their rejection of Christ; to their economic superiority; and to their presumed unique psychology. But there is one peculiar motive for the extermination policy of the Nazis which has hitherto escaped attention. It suggests itself when we view the Nazis in the light of occult thinking: The mystical teachings of Guido von List, Lanz von Liebenfels, and Rudolf von Sebottendorff were modern restatements of Gnosticism.

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

A famous medieval Gnostic sect, the Cathars, came to identify the Old Testament god, Jehovah, with the demiurge, the creator of the material world and therefore the equivalent of Satan. Within Gnosticism, then, existed the idea that the Jewish god was really the devil, responsible for all the evil in the world. He was opposed to the New Testament God. The Cathars tried to eliminate the Old Testament from Church theology and condemned Judaism as a work of Satan's, whose aim was to tempt men away from the spirit. Jehovah, they said, was the god of an earth "waste and void," with darkness "upon the face of the deep." Was he not cruel and capricious? They quoted Scripture to prove it. After promising that the Tower of Babel would be built, he dispersed the builders. He rained down a deluge; ravaged Sodom and Gomorrah; circumcised his male people; encouraged animal sacrifice; insisted on strict observance of a day of rest; made two sexes, to battle each other; issued an edict to Adam which was transgressed out of ignorance or imperfection, then cursed his sinful creation.

The New Testament God, on the other hand, was light. He declared that "there is neither male nor female," for everyone was united in Christ. He blessed his creation, which was good and perfect and without sin.

These two gods, obviously, had nothing in common.

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

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

To the medieval mind, sorcery had an everyday reality, and the sorcerer was living proof of Satan's power. The Jew, with his strange customs, was suspected of practicing black magic in his most innocent rituals. Tossing a bit of earth behind oneself or rinsing the hands after a funeral; binding the head and overturning the bed during mourning; attaching a mezuzah (a scroll, inscribed with Biblical passages, placed in a small case, as a reminder of faith in God) to the doorpost -- all these were mystifying to the Christian, and filled him with dread. Jews grew so sensitive about the accusations of sorcery that they were often exempted by their rabbis from some of their customs out of fear of arousing suspicion, "for this is a matter of life and death, since they accuse us and persecute us." A Jewish group, bringing gifts to Richard I's coronation in London in 1189, touched off a conflict which lasted more than six months. It was thought that they used witchcraft on the new monarch.

Their reputation for supernatural powers -- enhanced by their Biblical reputation for interpreting dreams -- gave them a psychological edge over Christians in their practice of the healing arts. Moreover, ancient Arabic and Greek medicine was available to the Jews through their versatility in languages and their travels; and immunity from Church dogma made them look elsewhere than to miraculous relics and cures. Paradoxically, the scientific medical skill which the Jews amassed further confirmed their image as sorcerers. Thus the Christian who acknowledged the Jewish physician's superiority by seeking him out for a cure risked the consequences of a mortal sin. In this and a multitude of other ways, the Jew embodied all of the medieval ambivalence toward Satan.

Never before had Satan played the starring role than he did in that era. Under the shadow of Gothic spires, Satan skulked, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting souls. He tormented them with pestilence and portents, but also with visions of incredible beauty, because the old devil was infinitely adaptable and could appear in the guise of one's fondest dream. Terror-stricken by a Church which preached sin and sorrow, trapped in a world which wallowed in both, the Christian did not love God so much as he feared the devil. As the Italian scholar Arturo Graf puts it in The Story of the Devil:

Satan is the child of sadness ... in order that he may grow and thrive, there is need of shadows, of the mysteries of sin and of sorrow, which like a funeral shroud enfold the religion of Golgotha. Satan is the child of fear; and terror dominates the Middle Ages. Seized with an unconquerable dread, the souls of men ... fear the physical world, opposed to the world of the spirit, and its irreconcilable foe; they fear life, the perpetual incentive and tinder-box of sin; they fear death, behind which yawn the uncertainties of eternity. Dreams and visions torment men's minds. The ecstatic hermit, kneeling long hours in prayer before the doorway of his cell, sees flying through the air awe-inspiring armies and riotous hordes of apocalyptic monsters; his nights are lighted up by flaming portents; the stars are distorted and bathed in blood, sad omens of impending evil. In seasons of pestilence that mow men down like ripened stalks of grain, are seen darts, hurled by invisible hands, cleaving the air and disappearing with hissing sound; and ever and anon, across the face of terror-stricken Christendom runs, like a tremor presaging the world's end, the sinister word that Antichrist is already born and is about to open the fearful drama foretold in the Apocalypse.

If God seemed absent, Satan was present everywhere, not only in curses but in prayers, and the Church, intimately acquainted, gave him full publicity. What was the Church without the devil and hell? As Graf points out: "The Church made good use of Satan, employed him as a most effective political tool, and gave him all possible credit; since what men would not do through love of God or in a spirit of obedience, they would do through fear of the Devil." Men may have hated Satan, but they also recognized him as the real ruler of the physical world. He had all the power. One couldn't help admiring him for that and wish for some of it oneself.

Though the medieval Christian persecuted the Gnostics, it is scarcely surprising that he accepted their view of the Jew as the child of Satan. Despite outward appearances, it seemed that the Jew was not really a human creature. He did not smell human. It was said that he ate Christian children; that horns even grew out of his head. In certain periods in Vienna, he was required to wear a horned hat; in France, a horn-shaped figure on his badge. Satan, in his portraits, has decidedly Semitic features. The Jew seemed to the Christian, as well as to the Gnostic, to enjoy the kingdom of this world, whatever he might expect in the next. His failure to accept Christ was, therefore, to be expected. What better proof of his partnership with Satan than his practical involvement with worldly goods? A Gnostic axiom declared: "The world's money is the corruption of the soul." Since the material world was the devil's domain, it was necessarily perverted. All matter was vile. Christians and Gnostics believed that the Jew was attracted by matter and adept at controlling it: hence, his inordinate love of ostentatious luxury and his financial genius.

The body, too, belonged to Satan. It was the prison of the soul. Physical man was a brute -- one of Satan's nicknames was God's Ape -- and it was through the passions, particularly sex, that man's greatest demonic temptations came. Here, also, the Jew was considered the exemplary demonic being, living only for his appetites, not the least the sexual appetite. The simplest way for the devil to invade souls was through possession, and the most intimate form of possession was through sexual intercourse. It was not uncommon for the devil to unite himself with human beings this way, and all the evil in the world was proof of the number of diabolical children thus begotten. Furthermore, in the Gnostic view, procreation itself was always evil. Since matter was Satan's creation, the struggle against evil could only triumph, ultimately, with the cessation of new life. This was too much to ask of weak mortals, but it was a direction toward which to tend.

Gnosticism, going by name of Hermetism in the Renaissance and Reformation, practiced magic and meditation to try to free the spirit from the body. The Age of Enlightenment was not particularly hospitable to the occult tradition, but Gnosticism found new advocates among nineteenth-century Germans. The original "fall into matter," the creation of Jehovah, which had unloosed all the evil in the world, was now given a "scientific" explanation, in light of Darwin's theories; popularizers gave the layman to understand that the inequality of races was due to a tragic flaw carried in the blood. Madame Blavatsky held, in The Secret Doctrine, that the Gnostics "were right in regarding the Jewish God as belonging to a class of lower, material and not very holy denizens of the invisible world.

" ... For the creation of those wretched races, in a spiritual and moral sense, which grace our globe, no high divinity could be made responsible, but only angels of a low hierarchy, to which class they relegated the Jewish God, Jehovah." [italics hers.]

The Jewish God, furthermore, was identical with Cain, Son of Eve by Satan, said Madame Blavatsky.

The anti-Semites embraced this with glee, and the concept of Aryanism was wedded to the forces of light. Nature, they said, decreed that the union of Aryan and Semite resulted in a hybrid monstrosity, psychically sterile. Since "bad blood drives out good," an Aryan woman mating with a Jew was sure to bear only Jewish children. Proponents of hypnotism and suggestion accounted for "Jewish" traits by the observation that a mother's thoughts were mentally transmitted to the fetus. "Nature is and remains essentially aristocratic and punishes implacably all attempts upon the purity of the blood," said Ludwig Buchner. The Jews were originally a crossbreed, argued Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and "their existence is sin, their existence is a crime against the holy laws of life; this, at any rate, is felt by the Jew himself in the moments when destiny knocks heavily at his door. Not the individual but the whole people had to be washed clean, and not of a conscious but an unconscious crime." Anti-Semitism, then, was the instinctive "wisdom" of the Aryan race, which, as the "fittest," sought to survive. To explain the Jew's survival, his "inability to disappear," one commentator fell back on his material wealth, which he hid "under the appearance of misery."

Geographers, sociologists, political scientists, and Orientalists made common cause in attributing the differences between the German and the Jew to the contrast between desert and forest. The racial soul, developed over eons, led to the softness, parasitism, sterility, and alienation from nature which was manifest in the Jew, and the strength, courage, creativity, and love of nature displayed by the German. "Biological philosophers" such as Theodor Fritsch, Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, and Guido von List preached "racial hygiene" to inflamed Aryans worrying about the contamination of their blood. Within a few decades, men of learning and propagandists succeeded in implanting in the Germans a "scientific racism" which gave them a warrant for genocide.

The greatest obstacle in the way of extermination, religious sentiment, was swept aside by divorcing Jesus from his origin as a Jew and making him the ancestor of the Germanic tribes, a sort of Siegfried-Christ. German racists took the Gnostic view that Christianity must separate itself from the Old Testament, and they printed "a mass of 'revelations' of every kind (such as the 'unveiling of the secrets' of Holy Writ or of Runic lore or of Paradise itself)," as Leon Poliakov points out in The Aryan Myth.

Of course, a great deal of this religious questing was associated with speculations and experiments in occult phenomena or in theosophy and spiritualism.... But it was only in Germany that they took such an aggressively pagan as well as patriotic and nationalistic turn. The inevitable spongers who climbed on to the band-wagon earned a living by ... forging documents to prove the Aryanism of Jesus.

The Jew, "the devil incarnate of human decadence," as Richard Wagner called him, had made a "Judaeo-barbaric jumble of the world," and only a blood purification rite would keep civilization going.

Wagner transposed esoteric themes into music and turned on generations of Germans to the real meaning of the struggle between the Jew and the Aryan. One of his operatic themes was the quest for the Holy Grail, a mystery in the ancient Gnostic tradition that had been revealed in the songs of the Cathar troubadours and was understandable only to those who had ears to hear.

Hitler was one. He worshipped Wagner, and expounding on the opera Parsifal, confided to Hermann Rauschning:

Behind the absurd externals of the story, with its Christian embroidery and its Good Friday mystification, something altogether different is revealed as the true content.... pure, noble blood, in the protection and glorification of whose purity the brotherhood of the initiated have come together. The king is suffering from the incurable ailment of corrupted blood. The uninitiated but pure man is tempted to abandon himself in Klingsor's magic garden to the lusts and excesses of corrupt civilization, instead of joining the elite of knights who guard the secret of life, pure blood.

Only the "truly pure and noble" would partake of the "eternal life granted by the grail," Gnostic symbol for hidden knowledge of immortality.

Rauschning observed that to Hitler the Jew represented "the very principle of evil," and that in his "esoteric doctrine" the "mythical prototype of humanity," the Jew, must be "the irreconcilable enemy of the new, the German, Chosen People. One god excludes the other." There was an "actual war of the gods." Rauschning, ignorant of esoteric doctrine, assumed that Hitler meant this symbolically, but Hitler assured him:

No! It's the sheer simple undiluted truth. Two worlds face one another -- the men of God and the men of Satan! The Jew is the anti-man, the creature of another god. He must have come from another root of the human race. I stood the Aryan and the Jew over against each other, and if I call one of them a human being I must call the other something else. The two are as widely separated as man and beast. Not that I would call the Jew a beast. He is much further from the beasts than we Aryans. He is a creature outside nature and alien to nature.

We can understand more fully the Nazis' intense identification with the Middle Ages in the light of their Gnostic attachment. A reporter in Munich in 1936 observed colored pictures of Hitler in the silver garb of the knights of the Holy Grail. The pictures were withdrawn by the Nazis after a short while. SS training classes presented material on the Grail, on knighthood, on alchemy, and on Gnostic history. Nazi antipathy to the Church confused Christians, who failed to recognize in the reference to a paganized Christ the ancient Gnostic heresy. As Hitler told Goebbels in Rauschning's presence:

The peasant will be told what the Church has destroyed for him: the whole of the secret knowledge of nature, of the divine, the shapeless, the daemonic.... We shall wash off the Christian veneer and bring out a religion peculiar to our race. And this is where we must begin. Not in the great cities.... There we shall only lose ourselves in the stupid godless propaganda of the Marxists: free sex in nature and that sort of bad taste. The urban masses are empty. Where all is extinguished, nothing can be aroused. But our peasantry still lives in heathen beliefs and values....

Most important, the central doctrine of nazism, that the Jew was evil and had to be exterminated, had its origin in the Gnostic position that there were two worlds, one good and one evil, one dark and one light, one materialistic and one spiritual.

This sheds light on an otherwise incomprehensible recurring theme within Nazi literature, as, for example, "The Earth-Centered Jew Lacks a Soul," [Found in George Mosse's book "Nazi Culture"] 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. The medieval concept of the Jew as sorcerer was apparent in Hess's announcement, after his capture by the British, that the Jews were in possession of a secret power to hypnotize people and make them act against their will.

And like the medieval inquisitors, the Nazis felt no qualms of conscience about burning the Satanic Jews. Only, they substituted crematoria for fagots and stakes.

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