Lovers of Sophia
Page 44
18 Ibid., 317.
19 Ibid., 318.
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lovers of sophia
in its opposition to the ‘degenerate’ ethos of Judeo-Christianity.20
It was, in a word, Neo-Pagan. It concentrated and crystallized the
eclectic New Age movement that was thriving in 1920s Weimer
Germany as an antidote to the spiritual bankruptcy of materialism
and rationalism.21 Just as in post 1968 America, this movement
drew together Western esotericism, Eastern yoga, and alternative
medicine.22
The members of the Thule Gesellschaft believed that Atlantis
– or “Thule” in the Germanic myths – was the lost homeland of
the Nordic-Atlantean master race, which had descended from
the Heavens and, during the course of Atlantean civilization, had
gradual y lost its supernatural powers on account of interbreeding
with Earth’s native hominid population who had only recently
evolved from apes.23 Initial y a society for wealthy aristocrats with
an interest in the occult, its largely secret membership included
some of the foremost Germanic scientists of the day, such as Ernst
Haeckel.24 They routinely met in luxurious rooms at the Four
Seasons Hotel in Munich. In 1919 the group sought to compete
with the increasing political influence of socialist and communist
organizations by establishing its own workers branch – the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP).25 This public political action front, which met at beer taverns rather than at the posh Hotel, later changed its name
to the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), “the National Socialist German Workers Party” or Nazi Party for short.26
Hitler, who was then a corporal in the German army, was sent to spy
on this workers party on the suspicion that it might be a socialist
20 Ibid., 332.
21 Ibid., 258.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 138, 187, 197.
24 Ibid., 336.
25 Peter Levenda, Unholy Al iance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult (New York: Continuum, 2002), 13-107.
26 Griffin,
Modernism and Fascism, 138–139.
348
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organization.27 He quickly saw through its socialistic veneer to its
martial and aristocratic occult underpinnings and joined the group
himself, rising to be its charismatic leader.
Although Hitler was still poor and hungry, a shabby
embarrassment in the milieu of high society, one of the most
prominent of the Thule occultists, the German poet Dietrich Eckart,
saw a spark of genius in him. He took Hitler under his wing and
introduced him to the elite of Munich society, connecting him to the
movers and shakers of finance and industry in Bavaria and helping
him to secure foreign backing from European and American
industrialists, such as Henry Ford.28 On his deathbed, after Hitler’s
failed Beer Hall Putsch of November 8-9, 1923 (which led to the
arrest and imprisonment during which Mein Kampf would be
written), Dietrich Eckart said: “Hitler will dance, but it is I who play the tune… Do not mourn for me, for I will have influenced history
more than any other German.”29 Eckart was steeped in the Āryan
philosophical traditions of India, and he tutored Hitler for long
hours at his occult library.30
Yet Eckart and others at the Thule Society can only be seen to
have fostered Hitler’s longstanding interest in the occult. Around
1911 (at the age of 22), when he was still living at the poor house
in Munich, Hitler befriended Josef Greiner, an unemployed
lamplighter and fellow border. Greiner recal s having often spent
hours discussing occult subjects with Hitler. He recounts Hitler’s
fascination with Yoga and the attainment of siddhis or magical powers by its practitioners, as well as the search for Shambhala in the Himalayas.31 The young Hitler voraciously read an occult magazine
called Ostara, and even paid an unannounced visit to the editor’s offices where he encountered the magazine’s founder, Jörg Lanz von
Liebenfels – a follower of Guido von List, whose esoteric writings
27 Levenda,
Unholy Al iance, 76–77.
28 Ibid., 94.
29 Ibid., 92, 78.
30 Ibid., 93.
31 Ibid., 88–89.
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lovers of sophia
had been the main inspiration for the Atlantis Society. Liebenfels
remembers Hitler looking distraught and pitiful y impoverished. He
gave the Führer-to-be free copies of Ostara and bus fare to get back home.32
Hitler’s involvement with the occult persisted throughout his
political career. In the trenches of World War I, he wrote poetry laced with runes, magic spel s, and formulas.33 When Hitler’s political
career was on the brink of col apse in 1932, and he was suicidal, he
turned to Erik Jan Hanussen, a famous astrologer and master of
several occult disciplines who, in addition to providing him with
astrological advice, taught Hitler nearly all of what would become
his characteristic gestural and body language for speaking to mass
audiences.34 Hanussen was a master hypnotist. At orgies that SA
leader Count Wolf Heinrich hosted on his estate, Hanussen would
entrance attractive young ladies in attendance to the point where
they would be brought to orgasm against their will and without any
physical stimulation.35
That Hitler was a vegetarian who did not smoke or drink was
probably connected to the practice of Yoga. His close personal
friends during his years as Chancellor contend that he was a psychic
medium who would enter into hypnotic trances and at times
appear to be possessed.36 All of them attested to his hypnotic power
over others in his immediate vicinity. Hitler’s charisma cannot be
dismissed as the effect of manipulative brainwashing; it is the totality of his faith that radiated from out of him like a magnetic field.37
He was a shaman – a term derived from the Tungus noun saman
meaning “one who is excited, moved or raised” and who “knows in
an ecstatic manner.”38 As Roger Griffin explains in Modernism and
32 Ibid., 87.
33 Ibid., 89.
34 Ibid., 102–103.
35 Ibid., 105.
36 Ibid., 82.
37 Griffin,
Modernism and Fascism, 273.
38 Ibid., 274.
350
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Fascism, in traditional cultures such an “inspired figure is always one who stands apart, completely focused on his inner vision. This
sets him on a level above ordinary humanity. He is seen to be in
the liminoid state, halfway between Heaven and Earth. It means that
he speaks with the conviction of higher authority, which puts his
followers in awe of him.”39 Hitler’s shamanic drumbeat put Germany
into a collective trance that could never have been achieved through
shrewd propaganda alone.40 His listeners felt personal y addressed
by him and could sense his conviction that he was tasked with a
mission that transcended the political.41
Although he almost never finished his speeches early, Hitler
survived a bombing attempt by Georg Elser on November 8, 1939
when – acting on intuition – he c
ut his speech at a beer cel ar short
by a few minutes and walked off just before the explosion of a bomb
planted in a pil ar right beside where he was speaking.42 This attack
was predicted by the Swiss astrologer Karl Ernst Krafft, but Kraft’s
warning had gotten lost in the Reich’s bureaucracy.43 Krafft, who
made the mistake of drawing the Nazis’ attention to his accurate
prediction after the fact, was rounded up and met his demise in
transit between two concentration camps in January of 1945.44
Hanussen, who knew too much about how Hitler had acquired his
art, also ended his days in a concentration camp.
Hitler’s library at his “Eagle’s Nest” mountain retreat
Berchtesgaden, which he had remodeled from an alpine lodge into a Chateau as an architectural pet project, was found to contain
many volumes on occultism.45 In one of these books, entitled Magic: History, Theory, and Practice, the Führer had emphatical y marked the margin beside the line: “He who does not carry demonic seeds
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 278.
41 Ibid., 283.
42 Ibid., 236.
43 Ibid., 236–237.
44 Ibid., 239.
45 Levenda,
Unholy Al iance, 80.
351
lovers of sophia
within him will never give birth to a new world.”46 We are reminded
of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, when Hitler remarks that art is the source of “the eternal, magic strength… to master
confusion and restore a new order out of chaos.”47 In a speech he
gave at the ceremonial opening of the House of German Art, Hitler
explicitly linked the New Age movement with the aestheticism of
the Nazi regime: “The new age of today is at work on a new human
type.”48 It is through this occult understanding of the power of art
or craft that we should interpret another of the Führer’s tremendous
statements: “Anyone who interprets National Socialism merely as a
political movement knows almost nothing about it. It is more than
religion; it is the determination to create a new man.”49
Hitler believed that the base matter of mundane reality could be
melted down and willful y forged into a work of art based on a total
Weltanshauung.50 The Nazi Revolution was not just political – it was anthropological in its aim of using, not only state power, but Technik
[Technology or Craft] to reshape minds, bodies, and machines into
a Gesamtkunstwerke [Total Work of Art].51 The term is often taken to be a Wagnerian one. The operas of Richard Wagner epitomize
that brand of modernism that the Nazis forwarded with its mythic
reimagining of the past as a basis for a projection of the future.
Even when recanting his youthful praise of Wagner as the rebirth
of Dionysian art that allows for the “spirit’s return to itself through the purifying power of myth,” in The Case of Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche writes: “Wagner sums up modernity. There is no way out,
one must first become a Wagnerian.”52 What is so quintessential y
modernist about Wagner is his aspiration to synthesize all of the arts into a single Master Craft that expresses the mythic world-view of
46 Griffin,
Modernism and Fascism, 261.
47 Ibid., 289.
48 Ibid., 308.
49 Ibid., 327.
50 Ibid., 289.
51 Ibid., 308–309.
52 Ibid., 298.
352
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his society in a more total and all-encompassing way than had ever
been possible in pre-modern times.53
As in the case of his artistic aspirations, Hitler was not alone in
his occultism. Numerous members of Hitler’s inner circle were avid
practitioners of the black arts, most notably: Heinrich Himmler,
Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, and Wilhelm Gutberlet.54 Among
these, Heinrich Himmler’s esotericism far surpassed even that of
Hitler. Himmler was the head of the SS – the most feared institution
in Nazi Germany. Even the Geheime Staatspolizei or Gestapo came under the jurisdiction of the SS.55 Together with Hermann Wirth
and Walter Darré, Himmler founded the SS Ahnenerbe, whose full name in German translates as “Research Society for the Primordial
History of the Spirit.”56 The organization’s two-fold purpose was: 1)
to launch archeological and ethnographic expeditions in search of
the Atlantean origin and worldwide influence of the Āryan race; 2)
scientific research into the paranormal with a view to weaponization
of psychic abilities. The SS was the most elite military-industrial
institution in Nazi Germany, and the Ahnenerbe was its highest-
level think tank. Many of the German intellectuals who belonged
to the Ahnenerbe were inspired by the adventure writings of
the famous Swedish explorer, Sven Hedin.57 Hedin maintained
continuous contact with his friends in the Ahnenerbe, even though
by 1942 it had begun scientific experiments at the camps on account
of which its director, Wolfram Sievers, received the death penalty
at Nuremberg.58 As late as July 27, 1942, Hedin was maintaining a
correspondence with Schäfer where he forwards greetings from
his sister to Schäfer’s wife, as well as to Dr. Wüst, and signs “Your
faithful and sincerely devoted…”59
53 Ibid., 299.
54 Levenda,
Unholy Al iance, 107.
55 Ibid., 169.
56 Griffin,
Modernism and Fascism, 256.
57 Levenda,
Unholy Al iance, 173, 199.
58 Ibid., 174.
59 Ibid., 192.
353
lovers of sophia
Dr. Ernst Schäfer of the Ahnenerbe led the SS-Tibet Expedition,
which was extensively chronicled in German newspapers.60 The
Ahnenerbe is the actual Nazi group of world-traveling adventurers
seeking occult power that was fictionalized in Steven Spielberg’s
Indiana Jones films. These SS officers visited the Dalai Lama in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa as well as the Panchen Lama in Tibet’s
second largest city of Shigatse. They made a pilgrimage to prominent
monasteries and they used nine animal loads to bring back a
complete 108-volume edition of the Kangschur, the sacred scriptures of Tibetan Buddhism.61 The whereabouts of this particular Nazi
acquisition after the conclusion of the Second World War remains
unknown.62 One very practical strategic aim of the Tibet Expedition
was to organize a joint Tibetan-North Indian strike force tasked with
expelling the British from India.63 Geophysical and earth-magnetic
research was also conducted at the behest of Heinrich Himmler
himself.64
Although he realized that many Germans were devout Christians
and that he would have to play politics with the Church for the
time being, the ultimate dream of the head of the SS, the second
most powerful man in the Reich after Hitler, was to replace Judeo-
Christianity with a New Age revival of the Āryan Ur-religion of
India, Iran, and Europe.65 Members of the SS were pressed to formal y
renounce Christianity and a whole set of alternative holidays and
ceremonies were devised for them to replace Christian ones.66 Even
the word “Christmas” was prohibited on SS documents after 1939,
&nbs
p; which made reference to the Solstice instead.67 Himmler’s dealings
with the Vatican were as cynical as his dealings with the Capitalists
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid., 195.
62 Ibid., 196.
63 Ibid., 192–193.
64 Ibid., 195.
65 Ibid., 215.
66 Ibid., 176–177.
67 Ibid.
354
jason reza jorjani
were pragmatic.68 The National Socialists were in principle against
Capitalism on account of its materialism, which they associated
with the Judaism of its foremost financiers, and they only placated
capitalistic industrialists as a means to seize power.69 They opposed
Communism, in part, because it retained the materialist delusion
at the core of Capitalism. Himmler spoke often of India and Indian
philosophy.70 Thus it is perhaps unsurprising that the Humanities
chairman at the Ahnenerbe was one Walther Wüst, an expert on
Sanskrit – the closest language to the Āryan root tongue. He was
also acting president of the Deutsche Akademie and Rector of the University of Munich.71 Since the Ahnenerbe was official y part of
the SS, Wüst held the rank of Oberführer or Brigadier.72
A book that Wüst co-authored with R. Schrötter, and which bore
a foreword written by Heinrich Himmler himself, gives us some
insight into what the Ahnenerbe considered the canon of Āryan
civilization. Published in Berlin in 1938, Death and Immortality
in the Indo-Germanic Thinker’s Worldview treats these Indian,
Greek, Italian, German, and Persian thinkers as Āryan forefathers
whose knowledge ought to be preserved: the nameless authors of
the Eddas and of the Vedas, the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad-
Gita, Homer, Socrates, Plato, Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius,
Empedocles, Meister Eckhardt, Jacob Böhme, Angelus Silesius,
Giordano Bruno, Omar Khayyam, and Rumi.73 The Judeo-Christian
Bible is conspicuously absent. Himmler identified with the medieval
witches who were burned at the stake by the Holy Inquisition of the
Church for upholding their pagan practices.74 He had researched the
witchcraft trials to the point that he considered himself an expert
on the subject and this, among other things, had led him to view
68 Ibid., 215.
69 Ibid., 206.
70 Ibid., 205.
71 Ibid., 174.
72 Ibid., 175.
73 Ibid., 181.
74 Ibid., 180.
355
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