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Catholicism as “monstrous.”75 He held the same view of Calvinism.76
At the root of the persecution of witches was, of course, not any
teaching of Christ but the Old Testament Jewish injunction that:
“You shall not tolerate a sorceress.” (Exodus 22:17)
Himmler was also very interested in the Grail legend and tasked
certain members of the Ahnenerbe to discover its true meaning.
The Grail was original y a pagan symbol that was adopted by
Christianity, like so much of the rest of its symbolism.77 Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival and Richard Wagner’s adaptation of it inspired Otto Rahn’s researches, which came to the attention of Himmler
who offered the impoverished young scholar a commission with
the SS to continue the studies that had led to Crusade Against the Grail.78 A number of elements of Rahn’s Cathar reading of the Grail legend appealed to the Nazis. According to Rahn, the Grail was in
the possession of the Cathars of Montségur, whose eradication was
the principal motivation for the Catholic Church’s establishment of the Holy Inquisition.79
First of al , Cathar is a word of Greek origin, meaning “pure.”
The Cathars were Gnostic Dualists, probably of Persian Manichean
origin, who thought that the material world had to be transcended
altogether and that Jesus was not a corporeal being, but an emissary
of the Light, who had come to teach the elect how to purify
themselves and attain his state of being. He most certainly was not
a Jew, since the God of the Jews is the demiurge who created the
material world in order, together with his Archons, to blind and
imprison the souls of the elect.80 For example the Cathar saint,
Esclarmonde, which Rahn takes to have been “one of the noblest
women of the Middle Ages” believed that Jehovah was actual y
75 Ibid., 206.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid., 223.
78 Ibid., 209, 211, 219.
79 Ibid., 208.
80 Ibid., 204–205.
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Satan himself.81 Moreover, the Cathars were the perfect underdogs
or martyrs. They fought against the Judeo-Christian perversion of
Christ’s true teaching knowing that it was a futile battle, at least in this world, one that could only end in martyrdom.82 Ritual suicide was prominent among them, as a more noble death than falling into
the impure hands of the enemy, and it is interesting to note just how
many Thulists and Nazi leaders also committed suicide.83
According to Rahn, the Cathars were Luciferians.84 He argued
that certain Cathars escaped the destruction of Montségur with the
Grail – which came into the hands of the Templars, who then used
it to finance and build so many of the great cathedrals of Europe
in only a hundred years (1170–1270 AD).85 This Templar tradition
was bolstered by Fulcanelli in his 1925 Le Mystère des Cathédrales.86
Before founding the Thule Gesellschaft, Baron Sebottendorf was a member of a Germanenorden occult lodge that claimed to be an underground survival or revival of the Knights Templar.
In his second book, Lucifer’s Court, which was commissioned
by Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, Rahn also furthers the Nazi belief in the special significance of Latin America to the Āryan race. He recounts
the Mexican legend of how Montezuma mistook Cortez and his
conquistadors for the “White God” who had promised to return
someday with his entourage of refugees from Tul an – the homeland
of the White Gods that had been subsumed by ice, i.e. Thule or
Atlantis.87 The “feathered serpent,” or dragon, was the symbol of
these gods. This is also an ancient Germanic symbol; it appears, for
example, on the flag of the Saxons (in gold on a blue field) at the
battle of Hastings.88 Incidental y, Himmler believed that he was the
81 Ibid., 218.
82 Ibid., 206.
83 Ibid., 207.
84 Ibid., 213.
85 Ibid., 208.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid., 183, 197.
88 Ibid., 179.
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reincarnation of the Saxon king, Heinrich the Fowler. The Serpent,
which is one of the Judeo-Christian representations of the devil, is a sacred symbol of the Āryans.89 According to Rahn, these gods had
also gone to the Andes Mountains in South America, because they
stood above the floodwaters unleashed by the great cataclysm that
had rendered their homeland uninhabitable.90 Rahn heaps scorn on
Cortez and his gang as emissaries of the Church, rather than of the
Light-Bringer, Lucifer, whose return the Aztecs had been expecting.91
Rahn also discovered other traces of the way of the stars and
doctrine of the Light, for example among the Celts and the Persian
mystics, and took these to be signs of a suppressed Āryan tradition
of reverence for Lucifer, the Light-Bearer.92 Rahn concluded that the
God of love, i.e. Venus/Mehr, and the Light-Bearer Apollo/Mithras,
were the same figure as Lucifer – who is the accursed “Apol yon”
that appears in the Apocalypse of John as the Anti-Christ ruling the world in the end times.93
As late as January 1938, Rahn gave a lecture based on Lucifer’s
Court at the Dietrich Eckart House in Dortmund, Westphalia,
which a local newspaper summarized in the following terms: “The
Albigensians were exterminated. 205 leading followers of Lucifer
were burnt on a huge pyre by the Dominicans in the South of
France after a large-scale priestly Crusade in the name of Christian
clemency. With fire and sword, the Lucifer doctrine of the Light-
Bearer was persecuted along with its followers.”94
The Ahnenerbe’s most significant work was not, however, in the
realm of research into the esoteric literature and history of Āryan
survivors from Atlantis, but in the practical development and use of
paranormal abilities – especial y with a view to military application.
Here are just a few examples. The most secretive group within
89 Ibid., 180.
90 Ibid., 183, 197.
91 Ibid., 182–183.
92 Ibid., 209, 217.
93 Ibid., 217.
94 Ibid., 220.
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the Third Reich was that of twelve SS Gruppenführers selected by
Himmler to sit at the Round Table in Wewelsburg Castle.95 During
the course of an investigation of a German Army General, the
Foreign Intelligence Chief Walter Schellenberg accidental y observed
Himmler and the others at the round table sitting silently and in deep concentration. Apparently, Himmler had ordered them to exert their
psychic influence on the General, who was being interrogated in a
nearby room, so as to encourage him to tell the truth.96
The successful allied invasion of Italy had led to the ouster of
Mussolini by his own Fascist grand council. He was subsequently
arrested and was being held at an undisclosed location. Himmler
sequestered practitioners of the “occult sciences” in a Wannsee
country house, stocked with the best food, wine, cigars, and so forth, and tasked them to find Mussolini.97 This they did with pinpoint
accuracy, despite the fact that Mussolini – who was being held on
the island of Ponza – had no
apparent contact with the outside world
and all conventional intelligence methods at the disposal of the
Reich had come up empty.98 It appears that the two participants with
paranormal abilities who contributed most to finding Il Duce were
a Dr. Wilhelm Gutberlet, a “Master of the Sidereal Pendulum” and
a confidant of Adolf Hitler, and the astrologer Wilhelm Wulff.99 On
the basis of their information, Austrian-born Luftwaffe officer Otto
Skorzeny led a team of Special Forces glider commandos to swoop
down onto the roof of the building where Mussolini was being held
and successful y extract him.100
In the days before AWACS and satellites, it was very difficult
for naval forces to accurately locate enemy warships. Himmler and
his associates created a special department of the German Navy
responsible for using every manner of paranormal research to track
95 Ibid., 175.
96 Ibid., 176.
97 Ibid., 227.
98 Ibid., 228.
99 Ibid., 229, 106.
100 Ibid., 229.
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allied convoys.101 The man in charge of this top-secret department,
which was given the inscrutably vague name of “Naval Research
Institute”, was Captain Hans A. Roeder, and under his command
psychics and astrologers worked together effectively with ballistics
experts and astronomers to launch devastating U-boat attacks on
otherwise undetectable British vessels.102 The project was launched
after a test wherein the prospective paranormal adepts were shown
photographs of the two most vital German naval assets, whose
locations were the most highly classified: the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen. The British Admiralty was obsessed with destroying these ships, but could not find them. The team of occult practitioners did
do so from a room in a Berlin office building equipped with little
more than their minds, and they did it with such an exactitude that
even the staunchest skeptics in German Naval Intelligence had to
consent to opening a department devoted to developing paranormal
capabilities – if only so as not to fall behind any potential Allied
efforts to discover the coordinates of German ships by such
unorthodox means.103
In 1938, Karl Wiligut delivered a report on a lecture that Baron
Evola had presented before SS circles to Heinrich Himmler. Signed,
K. Weisthor, the report was entitled “The Restoration of the West
on the Basis of the Original Āryan Spirit.” Wiligut or Weisthor
was also known as “Himmler’s Rasputin.” Official y, he was head
of the Department for Pre- and Early History and a member of
the Central Bureau for SS Race and Settlement. He was Himmler’s
foremost advisor on esoteric matters, such as the redevelopment of
Wewelsburg Castle into the ritual headquarters of the SS. A German
translation of Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World had been published in 1935. Wiligut’s report to Himmler basical y
endorses Evola’s view that ethical degeneracy as exemplified by evils
such as materialism, relativism, and egalitarianism signaled the
West’s decline into the Dark Age or Kali Yuga.
101 Ibid., 229–230.
102 Ibid., 230.
103 Ibid., 230–231.
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This crisis was also a moment of opportunity. It could be followed
by the dawn of a new Golden Age of Purity or Krita Yuga, but
only provided that the leaders of Fascism and Nazism recognized
the fundamental y metaphysical dimension of their revolutionary
struggle. The socio-political activity of the movement, namely
its “Āryan Imperial Idea”, was only an exoteric manifestation of a
spiritual struggle to dominate matter on the part of “the bearers of
the Āryan heritage” with their cyclical y eternal “Solar conception.”104
It is Evola who submitted his “doctrine of race” to Mussolini and
played the key role in rendering Italian Fascism racist, albeit in
a spiritual sense.105 The cosmic vision of history as a perennial
alteration between Untergang and Wiedergeburt that we see in Evola was central to Hitler’s world-view.106 So was the idea of the Āryan
origin of heavenly knowledge, which was defused around the world
by colonizers from Atlantis. Witness this passage from Mein Kampf: All the human culture, all the results of art, science, and
technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively
the creative product of the ‘Āryan’. […] He is the Prometheus
of mankind from whose bright forehead the divine spark of
genius has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew that fire
of knowledge which il umined the night of silent mysteries and
thus caused man to climb the path to mystery over the other
beings of this earth.107
Evola was a painter and the foremost practitioner and expositor
of Dadaism in Italian Futurist circles between 1920 and 1923.108 In
his autobiography, The Path of Cinnabar, whose title references the practice of Alchemy, Evola explains that it was the purgative
destructive force of Dada that attracted him: “Dadaism did not just
104 Griffin,
Modernism and Fascism, 15–16.
105 Ibid., 336.
106 Ibid., 282.
107 Ibid., 316.
108 Ibid., 336.
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want to be a new trend in avant-garde art. Rather, it asserted a general vision of life in which the impulse towards an absolute emancipation,
which threw into disarray all logical, ethical, and aesthetic categories manifested itself in paradoxical and disconcerting ways.”109 In other
words, Dada was for Evola a form of active nihilism (in Nietzschean terms) or “deconstruction” ( abbau, in Heideggerian terms) that served to clear the canvas for creating a new world beyond the filthy
ruins of modernity.
As Nietzsche put it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “And whoever
must be a creator of values in good and evil: verily, he must first be an annihilator and shatter values.”110 Moreover, although Evola dubbed
his vision of a post-modern world “Traditional” it was in fact an
extremely eclectic and innovative synergy of nearly every form of
esoteric spirituality in the world. It was, however, a syncretism that passed through the crucible of visionary gnosis in such a way that
what was forged could not be picked apart in the manner of a merely
scholastic work indefinitely open to dilution through relativistic
critique and qualification. Evola’s understanding of knowledge as
vision is key to understanding the connection between his Dadaist venture and his pro-Nazi ultra-Fascism.111
Fascism characteristical y blends “the technocratic with the
mythic, the ultramodern with the primordial.”112 The primordial past
that the Nazis were reaching back towards was a mythic projection
of a different order than that of Fascist Italy, which did bear a
quasi-historical relationship to Ancient Rome. The Nazis invented
or discovered their primordial Āryan past, as Promethean world-
colonizers from Atlantis, on the basis of a radical y futural projection of revolutionary social transformation.113 Although National
Socialism was, by definit
ion, “nationalist” it was not so in an insular sense. The leading Nazis certainly saw their ultimate mission as
109 Ibid., 40.
110 Ibid., 43.
111 Ibid., 41.
112 Ibid., 242.
113 Ibid., 257.
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the salvation of Western civilization at large from the degenerative
effects of the twin evils of liberal capitalism and communist
materialism. Yet their vision of social transformation was so radical
and drew on so many ‘Eastern ideas’ – albeit ones with origins in
Āryan India – that the civilization they were seeking could real y
be called post-Western.114 The future world that they wished to bring about was substantively different both from the present and from
any conventional y acknowledged past epoch.115
In his essay “Total Mobilization” (1930) and his book Der
Arbeiter (1932), Ernst Jünger futuristical y predicts the coming of homo technologicus – ‘The Worker’ that has evolved into a
new, post-human type. After having served on the western front continuously from December 1914 until he was seriously wounded
and hospitalized in August of 1918, Jünger wrote that since the
armistice “a new constel ation” had appeared over the horizon
“betokening a turning point in world history, just as it once did
for the kings of the East… From this point on the surrounding
stars are engulfed in a fiery blaze, idols shatter into shards of clay, and everything that has taken shape hitherto is melted down in a
thousand furnaces to be cast into new values.” Jünger believed that
“those still capable of a solution” would, in a “prosecution of the
war by other means,” alchemical y transform Man and his world in
the forge of Vulcan and bring forth a New Culture, a New Man, a
New World Order. Through technological mastery of his terrestrial
home, homo faber (the Worker who is a fusion of technocrat and solider) would become homo transcendens – a new type of being.
This is a Promethean vision of perfecting or transmuting matter in
such a way as Man is also thereby perfected.
The same thing that drew Ernst Jünger and other militaristic
modernist artists to National Socialism is what appealed, on a more
unconscious level, to many other academics working in the natural
and applied sciences: not a romantic rejection of the technological
development that had uprooted traditional society, but a vitalistic