Lovers of Sophia

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by Jason Reza Jorjani


  18 Ibid., 317.

  19 Ibid., 318.

  347

  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.

  349

  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

  jason reza jorjani

  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

  jason reza jorjani

  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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