Esoteric Nazism

:"This article describes semi-religious developments of Nazism after 1945. Semi-religious elements within pre-1945 Nazism are discussed in Nazi occultism."

The term Esoteric Nazism refers to semi-religious developments of Nazism in the post-WWII period. After 1945, esoteric elements within the Third Reich were continued and expanded into new "völkisch" (German: "ethnic") religions of white identity. Examples of post-war Nazi mystical philosophies include Esoteric Hitlerism and the Tempelhofgesellschaft. Esoteric Hitlerism includes the race-specific, pre-Christian religion (including references to Hinduism) of some Nazis.

Esoteric Hitlerism

avitri Devi

Savitri Devi was the first major post-war exponent of what has since become known as Esoteric Hitlerism. [See her "Hitlerian Esotericism and the Tradition".] According to which ideology, subsequent to the fall of the Third Reich and Hitler's suicide at the end of the war, Hitler himself could be deified. Devi connected Hitler’s Aryanist ideology to that of the pan-Hindu part of the Indian Independence movement, [See her "Hitlerism and Hindudom", originally published as "Hitlerism and the Hindu World" in "The National Socialist", no. 2 (Fall 1980): 18-20.] and activists such as Subhas Chandra Bose. For her, the swastika was an especially important symbol, as she felt it symbolized Aryan unity of Hindus and Germans.

Savitri Devi, above all, was interested in the Indian caste system, which she regarded as the archetype of racial laws intended to govern the segregation of different races and to maintain the pure blood of the fair-complexioned Aryans. She regarded the survival of the light-skinned minority of Brahmans among an enormous population of many different Indian races after sixty centuries as a living tribute to the value of the Aryan caste system (Goodrick-Clarke, "Black Sun", p. 92).

Savitri Devi integrated Nazism into a broader cyclical framework of Hindu history. She considered Hitler to be Kalki, the tenth and final avatar of Vishnu, and called him “the god-like Individual of our times; the Man against Time; the greatest European of all times” [From the dedication to her book, "The Lightning and the Sun".] , having an ideal vision of returning his Aryan people to an earlier, more perfect time, and also having the practical wherewithal to fight the destructive forces "in Time". She saw his defeatndashand the forestalling of his vision from coming to fruitionndash as a result of him being "too magnanimous, too trusting, too good", of not being merciless enough, of having in his "psychological make-up, too much 'sun' [beneficence] and not enough 'lightning.' [practical ruthlessness] ” ["The Lightning and the Sun", unabridged edition, p. 53 (http://www.savitridevi.org/lightning-03.html).] , unlike his coming incarnation:

“Kalki” "will act with unprecedented ruthlessness". Contrarily to Adolf Hitler, He will spare not a single one of the enemies of the divine Cause: not a single one of its outspoken opponents but also not a single one of the luke-warm, of the opportunists, of the ideologically heretical, of the racially bastardised, of the unhealthy, of the hesitating, of the all-too-human; not a single one of those who, in body or in character or mind, bear the stamp of the fallen Ages. ["The Lightning and the Sun", unabridged edition, p. 430 (http://www.savitridevi.org/lightning-16.html).]

Miguel Serrano

The next major figure in Esoteric Hitlerism is Miguel Serrano, a former Chilean diplomat. Author of numerous books including "The Golden Ribbon: Esoteric Hitlerism" (1978) and "Adolf Hitler, the Last Avatar" (1984), Serrano is one of a number of Nazi esotericists who regard the "Aryan blood" as originally extraterrestrial:

"Serrano finds mythological evidence for the extraterrestrial origins of man in the Nephilim [fallen angels] of the Book of Genesis....Serrano suggests that the sudden appearance of Cro-Magnon Man with his high artistic and cultural achievements in prehistoric Europe records the passage of one such "divya"-descended race alongside the abysmal inferiority of Neanderthal Man, an abomination and manifest creation of the demiurge....Of all the races on earth, the Aryans alone preserve the memory of their divine ancestors in their noble blood, which is still mingled with the light of the Black Sun. All other races are the progeny of the demiurge's beast-men, native to the planet." [Goodrick-Clarke 2003: 181.]

Serrano supports this idea from various myths which assign divine ancestry to 'Aryan' peoples, and even the Aztec myth of Quetzalcoatl (one of the 'White Gods' of the ancient Americas) descending from Venus. He also cites the entirely respectable (but not widely accepted) scientific hypothesis of Bal Gangadhar Tilak on the Arctic homeland of the Indo-Aryans, as his authority for identifying the earthly centre of the Aryan migrations with the 'lost' Arctic continent of Hyperborea. Thus, Serrano's extraterrestrial gods are also identified as Hyperboreans. [Serrano finds supporting evidence in, for example, the Irish legends (recorded in the Book of Invasions) which tell of divine ancestors, Tuatha Dé Danann, arriving from the northern islands; and the Greek tradition according to which Apollo returned every 19 years to Hyperborea in the far north in order to rejuvenate his body and wisdom (Goodrick-Clarke, "ibid.").]

In attempting to raise the spiritual development of the earthbound races, the Hyperborean "divyas" (a Sanskrit term for god-men) suffered a tragic setback. Expanding on a story from the "Book of Enoch", Serrano laments that a renegade group among the gods committed miscegenation with the terrestrial races, thus diluting the light-bearing blood of their benefactors and diminishing the level of divine awareness on the planet. [Goodrick-Clarke, "ibid."]

The concept of Hyperborea has a simultaneously racial and mystical meaning for Serrano. [Jeffrey, Jason. "Hyperborea & the Quest for Mystical Enlightenment", published in New Dawn No. 58 (January-February 2000). Online: [http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/Articles/hyperborea.html] ] He believes that Hitler was in Shambhala, an underground centre in Antarctica (formerly at the North Pole and Tibet), where he was in contact with the Hyperborean gods and from whence he would someday emerge with a fleet of UFOs to lead the forces of light (the Hyperboreans, sometimes associated with Vril) over the forces of darkness (inevitably including, for Serrano, the Jews who follow Jehovah) in a last battle and thus inaugurating a Fourth Reich.

According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, [Goodrick-Clarke 2003: 182.] "Serrano follows the Gnostic tradition of the Cathars (fl. 1025-1244) by identifying the evil demiurge as Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament. As medieval dualists, these eleventh-century heretics had repudiated Jehovah as a false god and mere artificer opposed to the real God far beyond our earthly realm. This Gnostic doctrine clearly carried dangerous implications for the Jews. As Jehovah was the tribal deity of the Jews, it followed that they were devil worshipers. By casting the Jews in the role of the children of Satan, the Cathar heresy can elevate anti-Semitism to the status of a theological doctrine backed by a vast cosmology. If the Hyperborean Aryans are the archetype and blood descendents of Serrano's "divyas" from the Black Sun, then the archetype of the Lord of Darkness needed a counter-race. The demiurge sought and found the most fitting agent for its archetype in the Jews".

As religious scholars Frederick C. Grant and Hyam Maccoby emphasize, in the view of the dualist Gnostics, "Jews were regarded as the special people of the Demiurge and as having the special historical role of obstructing the redemptive work of the High God's emissaries". [Collier's Encyclopedia Vol. 11, 1997: 166.] Serrano thus considered Hitler as one of the greatest emissaries of this High God, rejected and crucified by the tyranny of the Judaicized rabble like previous revolutionary light-bringers. Serrano had a special place in his ideology for the SS, who, in their quest to recreate the ancient race of Aryan god-men, he thought were above morality and therefore justified, after the example of the anti-humanitarian "detached violence" taught in the Aryo-Hindu Bhagavad Gita.

The collective Aryan unconscious

In the book Black Sun, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke reports how C.G. Jung described "Hitler as possessed by the archetype of the collective Aryan unconscious and could not help obeying the commands of an inner voice." In a series of interviews between 1936 and 1939, Jung characterized Hitler as an archetype, often manifesting itself to the complete exclusion of his own personality. 'Hitler is a spiritual vessel, a demi-divinity; even better, a myth. Mussolini is a man' ... the messiah of Germany who teaches the virtue of the sword. 'The voice he hears is that of the collective unconscious of his race'". [ Goodrick-Clarke 2002: 178] Richard Noll has controversially argued that the early Jung was influenced by Theosophy, solar mysticism and völkisch nationalism in developing the ideas on the collective unconscious and the archetypes. [Goodrick-Clarke 2002: 335 (Note 18 to Chapter 9)] Jung's suggestion that Hitler personified the collective Aryan unconscious deeply interested and influenced Miguel Serrano, who later concluded that Jung was merely psychologizing the ancient, sacred mystery of archetypal possession by the gods, independent metaphysical powers that rule over their respective races and occasionally possess their members. [ Goodrick-Clarke 2002: 179] A similar esoteric thesis is also put forward by Michael Moynihan in his book Lords of Chaos.

Tempelhofgesellschaft

The Tempelhofgesellschaft was founded in Vienna in the early 1990s by Norbert Jurgen-Ratthofer and Ralft Ettl to teach a form of Gnostic religion called Marcionism. The group identifies an "evil creator of this world," the Demiurge with Jehovah, the God of Judaism. They distribute pamphlets claiming that the Aryan race originally came to Atlantis from the star Aldebaran (this information is supposedly based on "ancient Sumerian manuscripts"). They maintain that the Aryans from Aldebaran derive their power from the vril energy of the Black Sun. They teach that since the Aryan race is of extraterrestrial origin, it has a divine mission to dominate all the other races.

Conspiracy theories and pseudoscience

The writings of Miguel Serrano, Savitri Devi and other proponents of Esoteric Nazism have spawned numerous later works connecting Aryan master race beliefs and Nazi escape scenarios with enduring conspiracy theories about hollow earth civilizations and shadowy new world orders.Fact|date=February 2007 Since 1945, neo-Nazi writers have also proposed Shambhala and the star Aldebaran as the original homeland of the Aryans. The book "Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival", by Hypnerotomachia Poliphili scholar Joscelyn Godwin, discusses pseudoscientific theories about surviving Nazi elements in Antarctica. "Arktos" is noted for its scholarly approach and examination of many sources currently unavailable elsewhere in English-language translations. Godwin and other authors such as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke have discussed the connections between Esoteric Nazism and Vril energy, the hidden Shambhala and Agartha civilizations, and underground UFO bases, as well as Hitler’s supposed survival in Antarctic oases or in alliance with Hyperboreans from the subterranean world. [Godwin 1996, chh. 5-6, 10; Goodrick-Clarke 2002, especially chh. 6-9.]

Influences within neopaganism

Organisations such as the Armanen-Orden represent significant developments of neo-pagan esotericism and 'Ariosophy' after World War II, but they do not all constitute forms of Nazi esotericism. Some northern European neopagan groups, such as Theods, Ásatrúarfélagið and Viðartrúar, have explicitly stated that neo-Nazism is not common among their members. On the other hand, there are neopagan organisations with close ties to neo-Nazism, such as the "Artgemeinschaft" or the Heathen Front, and the attraction of many neo-Nazis to Germanic paganism remains an issue particularly in Germany (see Nornirs Ætt).

Nazi satanism and National Socialist "black metal"

There is a contemporary loose network of small musical groups that combine neo-fascism and satanism. These groups can be found in Britain, France, and New Zealand, under names such as "Black Order" or "Infernal Alliance", and draw their inspiration from the Esoteric Hitlerism of Miguel Serrano. [Goodrick-Clarke 2002: 106, 213-231.] These groups advocate the anti-modern neo-tribalism and "Traditionalism" found in the "pagan" mysticist ideals of Alain de Benoist's "Nouvelle Droite" inspired by Julius Evola.

Esoteric themes, including references to artifacts such as the Spear of Longinus, are also often alluded to in neo-Nazi music (e.g. Rock Against Communism) and above all in National Socialist black metal. [ [http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/hate_music_in_the_21st_century.htm?Multi_page_sections=sHeading_4 Neo-Nazi Hate Music: A Guide] ]

Notes

Bibliography

*Joscelyn Godwin. 1996. "Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival". Kempton, Ill.: Adventures Unlimited Press. ISBN 0-932813-35-6
*Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. 2002. "Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity". New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-3124-4. (Paperback, 2003. ISBN 0-8147-3155-4)
*———. 1998. "Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth and Neo-Nazism", ISBN 0-8147-3110-4

ee also

*Adolf Hitler's religious beliefs
*Cosmotheism
*National Socialist black metal
*Nazi UFOs
*Nazism and religion
*Neofascism and religion
*The Nexus (journal)
*Universal Order
*Vienna Circle (esoteric)