A NEW HITLER CULT with extraordinary mythological force was articulated by the Chilean diplomat, explorer and poet Miguel Serrano from the late
1970s onwards. Stimulated by the “Nazi Mysteries,” Serrano’s neo-Nazi
mythology traces its roots to his wartime enthusiasm for Hitler, anti-Semitism, and initiation into a Chilean esoteric order practicing meditation, yoga
and Tantrism. His Gnostic doctrine describes the celestial origin of the
Aryans, the bearers of divine light, and a global conspiracy against them by an
evil demiurge, the regent of our planet and all base matter. The Hindu-Nordic
inspiration of Serrano is evident in his assimilation of the Aryans’ polar
home, Sanskrit terminology and yoga, together with runes and Germanic
myths. Serrano’s cult is especially indebted to the Jungian theory of archetypes, and like Savitri Devi he identifies Hitler as an avatar.
Far from being an eccentric phenomenon, Miguel Serrano’s mystical
Nazism is a major example of the Thulean mythology’s successful migration
to South America in the postwar period. When Mussolini and Franco were in
power, parties and movements in Latin America combined native populism
with fascist models, as in the regimes of Juan Perón in Argentina and Getúlio
Vargas in Brazil. But even though Chile and Argentina had sizable minorities
of German descent, prewar Nazi organizations in these countries were relatively small. Arriving in large numbers after 1945, Nazi fugitives sought a new
myth of völkisch identity relating to German settlement in Latin America. According to Serrano’s myth, the Nazis’ flight recapitulated prehistoric voyages
of discovery made by Aryan ancestors. The homeless Nazis could thus cast
themselves as heirs of an original Aryan population in Chile and Argentina.
The Nazi fugitive organizations found support among native elites, businessmen and admirers of Hitler and Mussolini. Given traditional racist attitudes
toward the Indian and mixed-race populations, Chileans and Argentinians of
European descent were also drawn to myths of Nordic origin. The mulitiracial composition of Latin America thus interacted with anti-Semitic Nazi
racism to elaborate a new Thulean myth of Aryan settlement in the Southern
Hemisphere.1
173Miguel Juaquin Diego del Carmen Serrano Fernández was born in Santiago on 10 September 1917. On the maternal side he is a descendant of the
countesses of Sierra Bella, whose extensive estates lay in the south around Las
Condes. The Serrano family itself was noted for gifted poets, political idealists and diplomats. His mother, Berta Fernández Fernández, died when he
was five; three years later he lost his father, Diego Serrano Manterola. Miguel
was brought up, together with two younger brothers and a sister, by his paternal grandmother, Fresia Manterola de Serrano, in a townhouse in Santiago
and at a romantic seventeenth-century country mansion on the foot slopes of
the Andes in the Claro Valley. From 1929 to 1934, Miguel Serrano was educated at the Internado Nacional Barros Arana. This school was noted for its
German affiliation since the influx of Prussian army instructors and educators to Chile following Bismarck’s support of Chile in the Great Pacific War
(1879–82) against Peru and Bolivia. Serrano attributes his admiration of all
things German to this education. He also traces his blue eyes and fair hair
through an Aryan bloodline to the Basque and Cro-Magnon races of northern Spain.2
At school, Serrano and his friends formed literary circles initially innocent
of politics. However, in the late 1930s, a time of political polarization in Chile,
his close friend, the budding poet Hector Barreto, joined the socialists out of
sympathy with the poor but was killed at the age of eighteen in a brawl with
uniformed right-wing Chilean Nazis (Nacistas). Serrano reacted to this
tragedy by embracing Marxist sympathies and began writing for the left-wing
journals Sobre la marcha, La Hora and Frente Popular. His diplomat-poet
uncle, Vicente Huidobro, strongly encouraged Serrano to join the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. However, Serrano soon rejected Marx and became disillusioned with the communists in Chile, owing to their shadowy
connections to Moscow and even to the American CIA.3
He was then drawn to the Nacistas (Movimento Nacional Socialista de
Chile) following their abortive coup on 5 September 1938, when sixty-two
young supporters were shot dead while they occupied the social security
building near the presidential palace La Moneda in Santiago. Originally
founded in 1932, this Chilean Nazi Party was modeled on European fascist
parties, particularly the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Led by the
mercurial German-Chilean firebrand, Jorge González von Mareés (1900–
1962), the party held a special appeal for the German-descended people of the
southern part of central Chile but also recruited members from other sectors
of the population.4
Like other fascist parties, the Nacistas organized mass marches of its uniformed stormtroopers, giving Nazi salutes, singing battle songs and bearing
174 MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISMflags and insignia. The charismatic personality of El Jefe(leader) was a potent
factor in the movement. Serrano was deeply impressed by the male comradeship, the staunch patriotism and the fascist mythos of the Chilean Nazis.
Their heroic martyrdom in the massacre of September 1938 overcame his revulsion at the murder of his best friend. In July 1939 Serrano publicly associated himself with the Nacistas (now renamed Vanguarda Popular Socialista),
began writing for the party journal Trabajo, and accompanied the leader on
speaking tours across the country.5
As Chile remained neutral at the outbreak of the Second World War, the
Nacistas were at liberty to express their solidarity with the Axis powers. However, the reformed party was losing its fire, while González von Mareés, chastened by his term of imprisonment after the failed coup, was now conciliatory
toward liberal-bourgeois politicians. Following the German invasion of the
Soviet Union, Serrano threw himself directly into pro-Nazi propaganda with
the publication of his own fortnightly political and literary review, La Nueva
Edad, from July 1941 onward.
Among the regular contributors were René Arriagada of the national daily
El Mercurio, who was interested in Oswald Spengler, General Francisco Javier
Díaz, a devoted supporter of Hitler, and Hugo Gallo, the cultural attaché at
the Italian Embassy. Articles ranged from discussions of German philosophy
and ideology to epic accounts of German military campaigns and the destruction of Soviet communism. The Third Reich was consistently glorified.
Serrano cultivated close links with the Nazi personnel at the German Embassy in Santiago which supported his periodical. From an SS man, formerly
adjutant to the director of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Serrano learned
about extensive Nazi documentation on the power of secret societies, discovered by Alfred Rosenberg in old Masonic lodges in Paris after the Occupation.
This material was also published and discussed in La Nueva Edad.
6
These early hints of conspiracy were powerfully reinforced when Serrano
was introduced to the myth of Jewish world conspiracy in the autumn of 1941.
Two Chilean artists, readers of his magazine, brought him a Spanish-language
edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This discovery marked a crucial
point in the development of Serrano’s Nazism. Prior to 1941, neither the
Chilean Nazis nor Serrano had embraced anti-Semitism as part of their radical nationalist and fascist ideology, which saw its enemy primarily in Marxist
communism. Now, at a single reading, Serrano became utterly convinced that
the Jews were behind a worldwide plot to subvert all order, tradition and national independence. On the basis of these beliefs, Serrano became a fervent
anti-Semite and began publishing material from theProtocolsin his magazine
beginning in early November 1941.7
In the later, Gnostic elaboration of his
MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISM 175Hitler cult, Serrano transmutes the Jewish world conspiracy into an evil
demiurge, the lord of darkness who rules over our fallen planet.
Besides this apocalyptic anti-Semitism, Serrano mixed his Nazi politics
with ideas from esotericism, Hinduism and kundalini yoga. In late 1941,
Hugo Gallo suggested to Serrano that the war could also be fought on other,
inner planes and introduced him to a Chilean esoteric order. Owing allegiance to a mysterious Brahmanical elite supposedly based in the Himalayas,
this order had been founded by a German immigrant,“F. K.,” to Chile around
the turn of the century. The order practiced techniques of ritual magic,
tantric and kundalini yoga for the achievement of mystical unions and visions. The master of the order emphasized the importance of the subtle or astral body, which could be awakened and activated through rituals and spiritual exercises. By means of yoga meditation, the serpent power (kundalini)
was drawn up from the base of the spine through the several energy centers
(chakras) of the subtle body to the crown of the head, in order to awaken the
superconscious ego. This ascent experience was linked with Nietzschean notions of the will to power and fascist activism. Deeply impressed by the master’s esoteric wisdom, Serrano was initiated into this mystico-martial order in
February 1942.8
The order related its esoteric spirituality directly to Hitler and Nazism.
While the remote Brahmanical leadership of the order indicated its VedicAryan origins and doctrine, cult members were united in an admiration for
Hitler as a savior of the Aryan (Indo-European) race. Astral travel and higher
states of consciousness were regarded as the ancestral heritage of the pureblooded (“twice-born”) Aryans. The master often made oracular statements
concerning Hitler and the global conflict he had unleashed in the Second
World War: Hitler was described as an initiate, a being of boundless and unprecedented willpower (shudibudishvabhaba). He had voluntarily incarnated
on earth as a highly developed being (boddhisatva) in order to overcome the
dark age, or Kali Yuga. On several occasions, the master established astral contact with Hitler: once they conversed about German colonial claims, another
time the master saw him at his Eagle’s Nest high upon the Kehlstein at Berchtesgaden. After the war had ended, the master encountered Hitler deep inside
the earth, sure evidence that he was alive and had survived the Berlin bunker.9
In the light of these revelations, Serrano regarded Adolf Hitler and the mass
cult of the Third Reich as archetypal forces whose active intervention in history promised a qualitative leap into a new era.
After the defeat of the Third Reich, Serrano continued to believe that
Hitler had escaped from the ruins of Berlin and found a refuge either in the
warm oases of Antarctica or deep below the ice cap. Already suggested by his
176 MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISMmaster, this idea was widely rumored in the Latin American press during the
summer of 1945.10 Serrano devoured the speculations of Ladislao Szabó’s
book, Hitler esta vivo (1947), that Hitler had been brought to safety by a Uboat convoy to the warm oases in Queen Maud Land originally discovered by
the Ritscher expedition of 1938. An obscure urge led him to accompany the
expedition of the Chilean Army and Navy to Antarctica in 1947–48 as a journalist. The bleak and uninhabited wastes of the polar region made a lasting
impression on him. He read books by Carl Gustav Jung on the collective unconscious and mused on the proximity of his idol. On his return he published
a short book, La Antártica y otros Mitos (1948), which repeated Szabó’s
claims.11 Hitler continued to obsess him. During his first visit to Europe in
1951, he visited the ruins of the Berlin bunker, where Hitler had vanished
from the stage of world history; he gazed long at the walls of Spandau Prison,
where Rudolf Hess and other top Nazis were immured; he lingered over the
ruins of Hitler’s Berghof in Bavaria, anticipating Savitri Devi’s pilgrimage
after its final demolition.12
But the visit to Europe also opened up new prospects. In Switzerland, Serrano met and befriended Hermann Hesse, the well-known German romantic
writer who had received the Nobel Prize in 1946. A later encounter and ensuing friendship with C. G. Jung led to an ardent exchange of ideas concerning
myths and archetypes. In 1953 Serrano, following a family tradition, had entered the Chilean diplomatic corps in order to obtain a posting to India,
which he regarded as an important source of esoteric truth. Eventually promoted to ambassador, he remained in India until 1962, all the while immersing himself in India’s rich spiritual heritage. A recurrent leitmotif of this Indian period was his search for the secret Brahmanical order of his Chilean
master. He traveled to remote Himalayan shrines and met numerous gurus.
However, as the order was supposed to be have its seat at Mount Kailas in
Tibet, it remained inaccessible to him in Chinese-administered territory.13
Through his diplomatic role he met many leading personalities and became a
personal friend of Nehru, Indira Gandhi and the Dalai Lama of Tibet. He now
published literature devoted to mythological and spiritual themes, including
The Visits of the Queen of Sheba (1960), with a preface by C. G. Jung, and The
Serpent of Paradise(1963) about his quest in India.
Miguel Serrano subsequently held prestigious postings as Chilean ambassador to Yugoslavia (1962–64), with simultaneous accreditation in Bulgaria
and Romania, and ambassador to Austria (1964–70) as well as representative
to the International Atomic Energy Commission and the United Nations Organisation for Industrial Development (UNUDI), both based in Vienna.
However, in late 1970 Serrano was dismissed from the Chilean diplomatic
MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISM 177service by Salvador Allende, the newly elected Marxist president of Chile. He
resolved to live as an exile, renting an apartment at Casa Camuzzi, the house
in which Hermann Hesse had lived from 1919 to 1931 at Montagnola in the
Swiss Ticino. Serrano spent the next years in Europe, enjoying the life of a
writer wandering in the forests and on the mountains. In this new carefree
phase of life Serrano initially devoted himself to a poetic treatment of religious myths. His first book from this period, El/Ella: Book of Magic Love
(1973), was an allegory of man’s search for unity. Themes of Tantrism,
Catharism and the reunion of the male animus and female anima guaranteed
the work translation into many foreign languages. A second book,Nos: Book
of the Resurrection (1980), was a Jungian autobiography based on similar
themes and Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return.14
However, the abrupt and unexpected end to his public career, coupled with
the communist takeover in his country, also attracted Serrano to Nazism
again. In the early 1940s he had absorbed the myth of a secret world conspiracy involving Jews, secret societies and communists. The new revolutionary
regime in Chile now appeared to confirm these fantasies. During his time in
Switzerland, he increasingly pondered on the dualist implications of
Catharism, anti-Semitism and the Jungian idea of the projection of the
“shadow.” While his poetic work sung of unity and spiritual integration, Serrano became a hostage to the idea of opposing archetypes of light and darkness. He began work on his remarkable Hitler Trilogy, which eventually comprised El Cordón Dorado: Hitlerismo Esotérico (1978), Adolf Hitler, el Último
Avatãra (1984) and Manú: “Por el hombre que vendra” (1991). Drawing his inspiration from his earlier involvement in Chilean Nazism, the Protocols and
the esoteric Brahmanical order, Serrano now assimilated a medley of revelational, occult and “Nazi Mysteries” literature from the 1960s and 1970s to
elaborate his own political mythography of “Esoteric Hitlerism.”
The ascent experiences and visions Serrano underwent through yoga and
other rituals under the guidance of his master form the esoteric core of Serrano’s Gnostic religion. Through a magical heightening of consciousness, Serrano believes that it is possible to achieve a union with divine forces extraneous to man and nature. He claims this is not a matter of the unconscious
mind, but some form of superconsciousness, whereby the ego is “taken over”
by one or other of the gods, as imagined by the ancient Greeks. These ideas
were focused by his readings of C. G. Jung and were further developed by his
extensive conversations and correspondence with the eminent Swiss psychoanalyst between 1957 and 1961. These are of considerable interest and have
been published as C. G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships
(1965) in a number of languages.
178 MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISMJung had begun to develop his theory of the archetypes and the collective
unconscious during the First World War. In his later work, Jung would present the archetypes in scientific terms, describing them as “primordial images,”
“an instinctive trend,” or “archaic remnants” arising from the collective unconscious of mankind and rooted in its long phylogenetic evolution. However, Jung first identified the archetypes in more religious language as “the
Ruling Powers, the Gods.”15 Confronted by the rise of Nazism and the mass
enthusiasm of the German people for Hitler, Jung published in 1936 an essay
entitled “Wotan” in which he suggested that the Germans were once again
possessed by the archetype of the Germanic god of storm and frenzy. He saw
precursors of this pagan exuberance in the Dionysian, irrational philosophies
of Friedrich Nietzsche, Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages, and in the poetry
of Stefan George. The Wandervögel youth movement, völkisch nationalism,
and various attempts to “Germanize” Christianity traced a decline in the talismanic power of the Cross and the return of the furor teutonicus, a formerly
dominant archetype.16
But if the German masses had indeed been seized by the Wotan archetype,
then Hitler was the ultimate personification of Wotan. In other articles and
interviews of the interwar period, Jung focused on the phenomenon of Hitler
himself. He described how Hitler was possessed by this 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.” At a military review witnessed by the two
leaders, Hitler reminded Jung of a sort of wooden scaffolding in clothes, an
automaton with a mask, a robot or someone with the mask of a robot.“Hitler
seemed like the ‘double’ (Doppelgänger) of a real person, as if Hitler the man
might be hiding inside like an appendix, and deliberately so concealed in
order not to disturb the mechanism. . . . You know you could never talk to this
man; because there is nobody there. . . . It is not an individual; it is an entire
nation.” Jung likened Hitler to Mohammed, the messiah of Germany who
teaches the virtue of the sword. “His voice is that of at least 78 million Germans. He must shout, even in private conversation. . . . The voice he hears is
that of the collective unconscious of his race.”17
Jung’s suggestion that each race had its own collective unconscious and archetypes interested Serrano especially, for this meant that Hitler could inspire
all members of the Aryan race. However, Serrano believed that Jung was
merely “psychologizing” an ancient, sacred mystery with such concepts as archetypes and the collective unconscious.18 For Serrano, the archetypes arethe
MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISM 179gods, independent metaphysical powers that rule over their respective races
and occasionally possess their members. In his opinion, the Aryan collective
unconscious was literally the “memory of Aryan blood,” an esoteric construction of biological racism. As his master had claimed, the individual person
may travel in the astral, thereby evacuating his body for archetypal possession. Serrano claimed that this frequently occurred in Hitler’s case. The Aryan
archetype had sought out its most effective agent in order to intercede in the
world. Impressed by Hindu mythology and Savitri Devi’s The Lightning and
the Sun, Serrano identified Hitler as an avatar of the gods Vishnu, Shiva or
Wotan, come to lead the heroic Aryans back to their long-lost divinity.19
But who exactly are the gods, and what do they want with men? In
order to explain the purpose of the Hitler avatar, Serrano elaborates a scifi cosmology involving a fabulous pageant of divine extraterrestrials and
their galactic contest with a universal adversary. The gods dwell at a remote place in the galaxy, perhaps even beyond, illuminated by the Black
Sun, which is beyond our golden sun and invisible from earth. Sometimes
Serrano suggests that this place is beyond time and space, in another,
non-existent universe, in the Green Ray. The gods are eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, through their possession of vril power and the Third
Eye; they reproduce asexually by means of plasmic emanations from their
ethereal bodies; the divine light of the Black Sun courses through their
veins.20 It is Serrano’s claim that these beings are the divine ancestors of
the Hyperborean, Nordic or Aryan races on earth.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, the gods’ cosmic dominion was challenged by the demiurge, an inferior godlet, who had imitated and faked a
lower form of creation in matter and begun to establish his rebellious realm
on the planet earth. Some of the gods (Serrano often uses the tantric term divyas for god-men) thus embarked upon a heroic spiritual adventure by descending to earth to combat this cosmic revolt. The divyas arrived from this
other universe in their divine form through the cosmic aperture of Venus,
clothed themselves in matter and settled on a ring-shaped polar continent
around the North Pole, which they called Hyperborea in memory of their
original homeland near the Black Sun and in the Green Ray. In this exile of
matter, the divyasfound a strange and terrible world. The fake creation of the
demiurge was subject to entropy and involution. Lacking divine inspiration,
the demiurge’s bestial creatures, variously described as “robots,”“golems” and
“slaves of Atlantis,” only degenerated while endlessly multiplying themselves
on the physical plane. Trapped in the world of the demiurge, these beast-men
were condemned to futile self-reproduction in matter, an endless repetition
in the Circle of Circles.21
180 MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISMSerrano states that the intervention of the gods, coincident with the beginning of the cycle of the ages, was intended to reverse the process of involution and decay. Now known as the Hyperboreans, the gods began to train
the colored races of the demiurge in a caste system and attempted to spiritualize the earth and all nature.22However, these efforts were frustrated and betrayed by treason among some Hyperboreans, who consorted with “the
daughters of men” (i.e., the beast-men of the demiurge). This sinful miscegenation recapitulated the cosmic emnity of the demiurge. Now bastard races
arose on earth, the divine blood was diluted, the awareness of divine origins
diminished, involution and entropy accelerated.23 Further catastrophes
struck with the fall of a moon or comet upon the earth, which caused a deluge and the inversion of the poles, and many pure-blooded Hyperboreans
sought refuge at the South Pole. The continent of Hyperborea became invisible and vanished as it receded into the interior of the hollow earth, where
other Hyperboreans reestablished their divine order in the secret underground cities of Agartha and Shamballah.24
Serrano finds mythological evidence for the extraterrestrial origins of man
in the Nephelinof the Book of Genesis, while the story of an original racial sin
comes from the Book of Enoch. A Greek myth records that Apollo returned
to Hyperborea in the Far North to rejuvenate his body and wisdom every
nineteen years. Aztec cosmology describes the descent of Quetzalcoatl from
Venus, while Irish legends identify divine ancestors in the Tuathas of Dannan.25 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.26 In particular, he cites Lokamanya Bâl Gangadhar Tilak on the Arctic
home of the Indo-Aryans, their migrations and subsequent preservation of
blood purity through the caste system.27 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.28
Serrano’s story of how mankind came about is a variety of Gnosticism.
The divyas represent the incorruptible world-soul, a fragment of which descends and is entrapped in matter. His cosmology is but a tale of the spirit’s
separation from the Supreme Deity and exile in the bondage of matter, while
the original divine inspiration becomes ever weaker in a progressively more
corrupt world as it passes through the yugas of the Hindu cycle of the ages.
But since the divyas came to do battle with the evil demiurge, this fall and entrapment in matter are not final but part of a redemptive scheme. Salvation
MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISM 181will be achieved once the Hyperborean Aryans or vîras(the tantric term for a
semi-divine hero) repurify their blood, thus restoring their memory of divine
ancestry. When the Aryan vîrasreclaim their divine inheritance and become
divyas again, they will defeat the demiurge and transform the whole earth into
a paradise.29
The origin of evil poses a fundamental problem in most religions. Serrano
prefers the idea that the demiurge originates in a fall, war or rebellion following Creation to a strictly Manichaean dualism whereby Good and Evil are coeval and equal opposites. Here 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.30 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.31 If the Hyperborean Aryans are the archetype and blood descendants 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.32
According to Serrano, the Jews have stolen the divine birthright of the Hyperboreans. Everywhere in their history he finds evidence of their imposture,
imitation and bowdlerization of an authentic racial tradition. As a primitive,
illiterate tribal group, the Jews first received spiritual instruction from the
lowly Chaldean artisans of Ur, whose myths they plagiarized as the Book of
Genesis. Neither Abraham nor Moses were Jews, and the Hebrews were a Hyperborean people whose traditions were also appropriated by the Jews. According to Serrano, the Jews are not even a biological race, but a bastard people formed by centuries of interbreeding between Canaanites, Edomites, Aramaeans, Moabites, Hittites, Amorites, Samaritans, Galileans, Phoenecians
and Philistines. Only with the return from Babylon and the construction of
the second temple did the Jews attempt to consolidate their racial identity and
exclusivity in the thousands of strict laws and regulations found in Deuteronomy. At the same time, they claimed a divine vocation over all other peoples
through Ezra’s new covenant with Jehovah.33
The Jews’ attempt to place themselves in the center of God’s plan and
world history could only succeed through their falsehood and conscious
obliteration of the truth. This is allegedly the reason for emnity between the
Aryans and the Jews: Serrano accuses the Jews of foisting their national his-
182 MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISMtory and synthetic pseudo-religion upon the rest of mankind while denying
and obscuring all knowledge of its Hyperborean and extraterrestrial origins,
in order to assuage their own terrible guilt of racial sin, which is even further
ritualized in bestiality.34 This whole project is assimilated to the demiurge’s
dark cosmic purpose:
This is the meaning of the Jewish method: not to keep the blood pure with the
intention of reviving the original Minne-memory . . . and thus to transcend
materialization in the highest realms, but only to attract to himself materials
and images appropriate to the beast-man, his hate-filled resentments and lust
for revenge. [The Jew] attributes these to a “god” who is nothing but a golem
. . . which has seized possession of a group of terrestrial beings to perpetuate
his own existence as an incubus....That is the counter-initiation which has
changed the course of things in the history of mankind.35
For Serrano, the Jew is but the concrete manifestation of the antagonist
in a cosmology structured by the battle of opposing archetypes. Serrano
traces this conspiracy of the Jews against the Hyperborean Aryans throughout all history, with a particular focus on Spain and the Americas. The
Goths who migrated from southern Sweden into eastern Europe around
800 b.c. represent “the holiest community of the Germanic Aryans.” Between the second and sixth centuries a.d., the Ostrogoths colonized Russia
and Central Europe, while the Visigoths (according to Serrano, a corruption of “white gods”) ruled Spain from a.d. 418 to 713, but their racial
stock and political influence persisted in the North long after the Arab conquest.36 Many Jews from the Levant soon followed in their wake. Serrano
traces the history of the Jews in Spain, indicating their rapid attainment of
wealth and high office in Church and state against a background of insincere conversions and recurrent expulsions. The Visigothic elite eventually
instituted the Inquisition against the Jews of Spain, and the Jews were finally expelled in 1492. Many avoided this fate by conversion while remaining “secret Jews” (Marranos). Meanwhile, the refugees and the Marranos
spread throughout the Mediterranean and northern Europe as the new
merchant elite in the early capitalist era. Serrano regards the story of the
Jews in Spain as an instructive rehearsal for the twentieth-century German
conflict with Jewry in the Third Reich.37
As a Chilean of European descent, Serrano was especially eager to claim a
Hyperborean heritage in the Americas. Just as the original Hyperboreans fled
to the South Pole, other Aryan initiates were supposed to have traveled to
America long before Columbus. Serrano suggests that Cro-Magnon Man and
MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISM 183the Trojans came to America in prehistoric times. He also describes medieval
Friesian and Viking settlements in Central and South America and their involvement with the Incas and other Indian peoples. The Knights Templar also
supposedly started colonies in America between 1272 and 1294. After the
suppression of the order in Europe in 1307, the Templar fleet disappeared
from La Rochelle, France, and sailed to Mexico.38The later Spanish colonization of South America and Chile in particular was led by warriors of Visigothic and Basque–Cro-Magnon blood, to whom Serrano proudly traces his
own ancestry, blue-blond Aryan features and “blood memory.”39 His is the
America of the White Gods.
Here Serrano’s mythology directly interacts with the new Thulean ideology of German Nazis in South America. His idea of ancient Aryan settlement
in South America extends Jacques de Mahieu’s earlier idea of a Viking empire
in pre-Columbian South America. Born in 1915 in Paris, De Mahieu emigrated after the war to Argentina, becoming director of the Institute of Anthropology in Buenos Aires. By the spurious application of ethnology, archaeology and linguistics, De Mahieu identified many sites of Viking settlement throughout Latin America. His story begins with the landing of a Viking
named Jarl Ullman from Schleswig in the Gulf of Mexico in 967. Regarded by
the Indians as the white god Quetzalcóatl, he then conquered the Toltec empire. When his army began to mix with the local population, Ullman pressed
on to Venuzuela and Columbia. A later Viking leader, Naymlap, colonized
Peru, which later served as the center of the Inca empire ruled by Nordic
elites.40Although the original Viking invaders numbered only some five hundred persons, De Mahieu calculated a population of some 80,000 by the year
1290. De Mahieu finds the heritage of these lost Vikings in the pale skin, blue
eyes and fair hair of many Indians, as well as in putative runic inscriptions
and even swastikas.41 Published originally in French, his books were translated into German by Wilfred van Oven, Goebbels’s former deputy, who fled
to Buenos Aires after the war.
Serrano claims that the Jews always followed hard on the heels of the
Aryans either to steal their wisdom or to subvert the Nordic heritage. The lost
tribes of Levi and Reuben came to America in ancient times, and pernicious
Jewish influences could be observed among some primitive Indian tribes.42
The later “discovery” of America by Columbus was a planned Jewish operation to tail the Templars and their Grail treasure: the Jews were frightened that
a Hyperborean restoration was under way in the unknown Western Hemisphere and at the South Pole. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both
Marranos and orthodox Jews from the Netherlands entered America, establishing secret societies under cover of their trading companies and Kahal Ka-
184 MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISMdosh (Holy Associations) from Brazil to New York.43 Serrano sees this Jewish
diaspora in America as a demonic crusade against the White Gods of America. Aided by the “white treason” of Christianity and Freemasonry, both
Americas have become “the seething, monstrous melting-pot of mestizos and
mulattos” of modern times. The White Gods have remained secure only in the
secret cities of the Andes, in the hollow earth and the oases of Antarctica
which the enemy can never penetrate.44 As “the black shadow of the white
gods,” the Jews act as the Gnostic adversary throughout Serrano’s improbable
account of American history. Here Serrano demonstrates the ideological
symbiosis between native Latin American racism and Nazi ideas.
Serrano’s occult history of the New World finds a natural ally in the myth
of Masonic or Jewish world conspiracy embraced from the French Revolution
onward by anxious monarchists, aristocrats, clerics and many other social
groups beset by the rapid changes and dislocations of modernity.The Protocols of the Elders of Zion detailed horrific Jewish plots to overthrow all existing
thrones and religions, to manipulate and enslave the entire gentile world
through international banking, wars, artificial slumps, anarchy and revolution. If democracy, liberalism and socialism was supposed to serve the Jews as
a means to erode traditional authority, their ultimate plan was to destroy all
states and create a world empire ruled by a monarch from the house of David,
who would be the anti-Christ.45Describing the power of the Jews in the modern period, Serrano quotes whole protocols verbatim: the Jews expect to rule
the earth; they will reduce the gentile nations to subservience by means of
speculation, ruinous borrowing, and the artificial stimulation of economic
crises; the international network of Masonic lodges advances their aims; if
any nation ever tries to escape their clutches, the Jews will destroy such opposition by inciting war with its neighbors.46
Like most anti-Semitic readers of the Protocols, Serrano believes that these
plans for Jewish world domination were first leaked at the Zionist Congress
held in August 1897 at Basel and subsequently passed via Paris to Russia,
where they were edited by Sergei Nilus in 1905. He has published a commemorative group portrait of the congress delegates and menacing photographs of
their venue at the Dreyfus Brodsky mansion.47 Serrano identifies Achad
Ha’am, alias Asher Ginzberg (1856–1927), as the editor of the Protocols at
Odessa in the 1880s, a speculation that may be traced to Lesley Fry (Mrs.
Shishmarev), a Russian American woman writing in the 1920s.48 Ginzberg
was a mystical Zionist, who saw Jerusalem as the future cultural focus of Jewry
and opposed Theodore Herzl’s more secular brand of nationalism. This makes
him even more sinister to Serrano: such secret and symbolic Zionism strove to
create a“terrestrialchakra”for the unification of Israel and the conquest of the
MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISM 185universe through the counter-avatar of the Lord of Darkness.49 Needless to
say, Serrano discounts Ginzberg as an elder; members of this secret group always remain wholly secret and anonymous; nowadays they wait concealed
beneath the earth, safe from the atomic holocaust they may at any time unleash upon mankind.
Serrano is also deeply impressed by the novel Biarritz (1868) by Sir
John Retcliffe, a pen name for Hermann Goedsche, who served on the editorial staff of the conservative Kreuzzeitung in Berlin. One of its chapters,
entitled “At the Jewish Cemetery in Prague,” describes a secret nocturnal
meeting of the twelve representatives of the Jewish tribes who gather every
hundred years at this “Cabbalistic Sanhedrin” to report on their progress
toward world domination. The eerie background, midnight gloom and satanic allusions of this fictional narrative lend an uncanny aura to these
conspiratorial revelations. The delegates each speak in turn about the
massive concentrations of Jewish capital in each of the European capitals.
Plans for the future include the acquisition of land and urban property,
the degradation of craftsmen and promotion of mass manufactures, the
achievement of full civic equality and intermarriage with the Goyim
(non-Jews) to infiltrate the aristocracy and influential families, and the
control of the law, medicine and the press. “We will prescribe to the world,
what it is to think and to believe, to praise or to condemn. . . . We will destroy our enemies’ belief in everything they hold dear.”50
The date and content of this book almost certainly reflect conservative apprehension about the growing freedom and acceptance of Jews in German society after the revolution of 1848, culminating in their full emancipation in
the years from 1867 to 1871. Desirous of these benefits, the Jews had associated themselves with the forces of political liberalism and soon played a
highly prominent role in business, banking, the professions, academe and
journalism in proportions excessive to their numbers in German and Austrian society. This rapid advance owed much to the long exclusion of Jewish
talent from civil society, which suddenly found free rein in public careers and
the expanding commercial opportunities of both empires.51 The fantasy of a
Jewish plot was thus able to make a career in the ensuing reaction to liberalism. Goedsche’s thriller soon turned into a forged document known as The
Rabbi’s Speech, which was frequently published in Russia, Austria-Hungary
and Germany between 1872 and the early 1900s. It may well have served the
czarist secret police in their forgery of the Protocols in the late 1890s; in any
case, it was often printed together with them and cited as proof of their authenticity.52 The telling chapter of Biarritzlent further support to Nazi antiSemitism: Johannes von Leers published a booklet edition in 1933 and three
186 MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISMother editions appeared during the Third Reich, one of which served Serrano
as a source.
Serrano is aware of the charges of forgery against the Protocols, based on
their plagiarism from the political pamphlet by Maurice Joly, Dialogue aux
Enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel (1864), which presented the case for
liberalism against the despotism of Napoleon III. Nevertheless, Serrano’s
utter conviction in the existence of a universal Jewish plot of demiurgic inspiration precludes any doubts. He wonders where Goedsche could have obtained his information and finds it suggestive that neither Joly nor the Protocols use key material in Goedsche or The Rabbi’s Speech. He decides that the
latter is the common source for all the accounts with a date prior to 1864. As
the documents exist, it follows for him that their obscure but authentic prototype must also have existed. This, he claims, had long circulated among
Russian rabbis at Simferopol and was kept in their court archives at Odessa.
Serrano regards the Protocols as the only known legacy of an obscure tradition
whose traces have almost been obliterated.53 The Jewish world conspiracy is
the cornerstone of his Gnostic cosmology and thus resistant to all proofs of
forgery, plagiarism, historical motive and purpose.
Besides these crude, paranoiac fantasies of conspiracy, Serrano has also
assimilated the metaphysical anti-Semitism of Otto Weininger and Julius
Evola. Quoting Claudio Mutti’s introduction to the Protocols, Serrano sees
Weininger’s “Platonic idea” of Jewry as the “intellectual tendency” or “psychic
constitution” of modernity as an archetype in fundamental opposition to the
Hyperborean hero. Serrano agrees with Evola’s characterization of the Jewish
spirit as abstraction, calculation and mechanistic thinking. Taking his cue
from Evola’s Tre aspetti del problema Ebraico (1936), Serrano sees Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity as an atomistic Jewish cosmology, “dissolving and
exploding the integrated Aryan universe into a thousand reflecting mirrors.”
Serrano also quotes Evola’s list of Jewish mathematicians and physicists—
Tullio Livi-Civita, Hermann Weyl and Max Born—who developed the quantum theory. Their reduction of all existence to subatomic particles in mathematical and algebraic formulas empties the world of all sense and spirit.54
Here Serrano co-opts “Jewish” modernity as a demonic principle that disinherits the Aryan heroes from their spiritual birthright in a higher cosmos.
With regard to the present, Serrano is a profound cultural pessimist. Enthralled by the demiurge and its Jewish agents, the modern world is in an advanced state of degeneration corresponding to the Kali Yuga. Serrano rejects
Christianity, the Enlightenment and rationalism. Art and tradition are dead;
the human population proliferates in living silos and cement ant heaps. The
zoological promiscuity of the lower races, the racial chaos of South America,
MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISM 187the rule of the masses and markets, materialism and industry, the overriding
concern with quantity, the atomistic futility of contemporary civilization are
objects of his savage scorn. Money, electronics and numbers substitute for
value and hierarchy on all sides.“The Fourth Estate will be the rule of the collective, machine-slaves, automatons, a planetary bureaucracy, robots and antmen.”55 Serrano links redemption with a tangled mythology involving the
Gnostics, the Druids, the Cathars and the Knights Templars and the Grail, all
of which he regards as the secret agents of the Hyperborean gnosis through a
benighted age.
Conspiracy and war are the two recurring motifs of Esoteric Hitlerism.
Only a Great Cosmic War of the Worlds can account for the original fall of
Hyperborea and the end of the golden age.56 But wars also possess redemptive force. The great wars of the Koravas and the Pandavas in the Mahabharata, the wars of the Vanir and Aesir in Norse mythology, above all the
Great War of 1939–45 are but punitive campaigns against those who have interbred and defiled their divine blood.57 Following Savitri Devi, Serrano regards Adolf Hitler as an avatar, a divine intermediary between the Hyperborean gods and men (the Aryan race alone). He also describes Hitler as a
bodhisattva ortulku, namely, a divine being in Mahayana Buddhism worthy
of nirvana who has chosen to return to the human plane to help men to salvation. The Aryan-Hyperborean archetype incarnated in Hitler, in order to
defeat the demiurge, breaks the Circle of Circles and redeems the white race.
Following his victories in the West and Scandinavia and the dashing of his
hopes for a settlement with Britain after the failure of Rudolf Hess’s flight,
Hitler attacked the communist Soviet Union and declared war on the United
States, both supposed bastions of Jewish power in the modern world. His aim
was an all-out avataric battle against the demonic hosts of the Kali Yuga in
order to turn the cycle from the dark age into a new golden age.58
As a Latin American with no direct memory of Nazi atrocity, Serrano sees
the Third Reich in millennial terms. With Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933,
Germany suddenly entered “the Esoteric Reich of the Vîras” through a “click”
into another dimension. Serrano sees Hitler as the center of an archetypal
field of energy, not as a despot atop a hierarchical pyramid, and dismisses
Evola’s critique of the plebeian nature of National Socialism. He especially
reveres the SS as an esoteric order of initiates seeking the the Holy Grail of
Hyperborean blood. He dwells at length on the symbolic architecture of the
Wewelsburg, where Himmler evoked the memory of Parsifal and the knights
of the Grail. Here the SS supposedly practiced yoga and secret rites to restore
their memory of the magical Aryan blood and thus achieve their alchemical
“Great Transmutation” into god-men. For Serrano, the murderous activities
188 MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISMof the SS take place on the symbolic level of a cosmic war in heaven. For him,
the figure of six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust is only significant because the figure 6 is an archetype of the Jewish collective unconscious. He denies the Holocaust, stating that the six million figure is no human invention
but rooted in the “cabalistic” planetary conspiracy of Jehovah.59
In Serrano’s view, the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945 is only a temporary
loss in the outer world. The Nazis had already prepared a secret refuge beneath the ice cap of Antarctica, possibly in alliance with the Hyperboreans
who had long ago colonized the interior of the hollow earth. Their advanced
technology, based on implosion and antigravity, accounts for the countless
postwar UFO sightings and also anticipates a new civilization that will ennoble rather than despoil the earth. Hitler remained for some time in the warm
Antarctic oases, but he has probably long since traveled by UFO through the
“window” of Venus back to the archetypal home of the Black Sun and the
Green Ray beyond the galaxy.60 Elsewhere, Serrano mentions “parallel universes” and “astral wormholes” to justify his belief in the survival of Hitler in
another dimension and the imminent transfiguration of our world.
Pending the intervention of the Hitler avatar in renewed cosmic conflict,
Serrano believes that Gnostic redemption can be achieved on the inner planes
of consciousness. This inner battle against the demiurge involves methods of
magical ritual and tantric yoga for the transmutation of the individual Aryan
vîra. Serrano assimilates the chakras, mudras and mantras of yoga and the
Nordic runes into a physiology of the astral body. Personal salvation can be
achieved by yoga and meditation. The resultant repurification of the blood to
its former quality of divine light activates and “tunes” the chakras, transforming the Aryan hero into a god-man. In a series of complex illustrations, Serrano interprets the Hitler salute with an outstretched right hand as a yogic
mudra for drawing cosmic energy into the chakras, depicted as mystical centers of swastika-spinning energy.61 This bodily redemption is complemented
by a transformation of nature into a paradise. Serrano implies that this
process takes place in a parallel world or another dimension, which is opened
up as the spell of the demiurge is broken. Long entrapped in the illusion of
matter, the Aryans will once again be able to see the Hyperborean divyas, the
Black Sun and the Green Ray “on the other side of their senses,” through a
“click” in the time-space continuum, which may be experienced at any time.62
Serrano has long practiced yoga and meditation as a means of raising his
consciousness beyond the grasp of the demiurge and for making contact
with the higher Aryan intelligences. On at least one occasion Serrano and his
friends have visited the Wewelsburg castle in Westphalia to perform Nazi religious rituals. Here in the crypt of the great northern tower of the castle,
MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISM 189Serrano and his companions assumed the positions of runes and intoned
“Nordic” mantras. Serrano’s account of these rituals describes how their deep
vibrations filled the acoustic space, designed on the principles of “Aryan
mathematics,” to suspend mundane reality and enable them to reach another
universe. Serrano himself spoke the mantras of greeting, summoning the
brahmans of his old order to unite once again as in the war with the SS leaders and support Hitler in his struggle against the forces of darkness, against
the Lord of the Shadows and his supporters on the planet. Serrano even related this campaign to the esoteric symbolism of the architectural plans for
the completed north tower, the center of this SS vatican and the omphalos of
the Germanic world. In a bizarre parody of St. Peter’s in Rome, a small throne
room with the seat number 13 was to have occupied the lantern upon the tall
cupola. Here, the “Führer-Parsifal” would give the order for the final assault
on the demiurge and his planetary legions.63
Given the highly personal and eclectic nature of Serrano’s Nazi mythology,
one must ask how he is regarded within the movement and how influential
are his ideas. Already during his years as Chilean ambassador to Austria
(1964–70) and subsequently in Switzerland, Serrano cultivated strong ties of
friendship with renowned surviving Nazis, including Léon Degrelle, Otto
Skorzeny, Hans-Ulrich Rudel and Hanna Reitsch, the famous aviatrix. He visited Julius Evola in Rome and Herman Wirth, the aged ex-director of Himmler’s SS Ahnenerbe, in West Germany and Wilhelm Landig in Vienna. He paid
court to the American poet and fascist sympathizer Ezra Pound in Venice. He
was friendly with the French former Waffen-SS man, Saint-Loup, whose stories of Otto Rahn, Montségur and Skorzeny’s mission to find the Grail gave
him inspiration. He quarried books on extraterrestrial gods by Robert Charroux, a leading French fantasy writer who had served as a minister in the
Vichy government of wartime France. Serrano appears to have been especially
close to Léon Degrelle, whom he eulogized in a fascist magazine interview
that printed a photo of the two men together in Spain.64
Returning to Chile after the military coup of September 1973, Serrano
found little sympathy for his ideas among the Pinochet regime. Henceforth,
Serrano cast himself in the role of intellectual gadfly to the Nazi die-hard
faithful in Chile and abroad. In May 1984 he conspicuously gave the Hitler
salute at the Santiago funeral of SS Colonel Walter Rauff, who had long
eluded West German justice in Chile.65 During the war, Rauff had served in
the SS Reich Main Security Office, where he masterminded the mobile killing
operations using gas vans in the early stages of the Holocaust. Held responsible for the deaths of 97,000 Jews, he successfully contested extradition with
the financial and legal aid of Das Reich network. Serrano also regularly or-
190 MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISMganizes anniversary celebrations of Hitler’s birthday at a country retreat in
Chile on 20 April each year. In 1986 he published his political manifesto for
National Socialism in the Southern Cone of Latin America.66 A familiar figure in his black leather coat, he convened a major Nazi rally in Santiago with
swastika flags and marches on 5 September 1993. This event was staged in
honor of Rudolf Hess and in memory of the Chilean Nazi martyrs of 1938.
He maintains a lively correspondence with neo-Nazi leaders overseas and is
on calling terms with Matt Koehl of the New Order, the successor organization to Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party. It is likely that old Nazis welcome Serrano’s Nazi enthusiasm and unswerving loyalty to their hero, Adolf
Hitler, even if many find his mythology fantastic.
The picture is somewhat different when one considers Serrano’s image
among a younger generation of neo-Nazis. Here Nazism is already detached
from the historic context of the Third Reich and re-presented as a global,
racist ideology of white supremacism. A coloring of pop mythology, Hinduism, and extraterrestrial Aryan gods adds sensational appeal to the powerful myths of elitism, planetary destiny and the cosmic conspiracy of the Jews.
A German translation of El Cordón Doradowas published in 1987 by Richard
Schepmann’s Teut-Verlag in Wetter, Western Germany, which specializes in
reprints from the Nordland-Verlag of the Ahnenerbe and dossiers on Nazi
UFOs. An English translation has now been published by the 14 Word Press
of Wotansvolk in the United States (see chapter 13). Serrano was the subject
of a long, in-depth illustrated interview in the Greek far-right magazine TO
ANTI6OTO and has more recently been featured in the underground literature
of the Black Order, a small international neo-Nazi organization with lodges in
Britain, the United States, Italy, Sweden,Australia and New Zealand. The Black
Order combines Hitlerite mythology with a variety of Nazi satanism in a
Nordic pagan denial of the Christian roots of Western civilization.67
In these interviews, Serrano seeks to engage a younger audience by juxtaposing his magical and millennial vision of National Socialism with a corrupt, saturated image of modern liberalism. Using heroic and epic metaphors, describing himself as a “warrior-troubadour” (a reference to
Catharism), and his work as “extra-stellar poetry,” Serrano opposes an Aryan
mystique of ancient Germanic gods, lost lands, polar mysticism and extraterrestrial deities to the Jewish “black magic” of money, economic exploitation, nuclear power and ecological degradation. His anti-Semitism assumes
a cosmic function, identifying the Jews as the root cause of all alienation and
inhumanity in the world. Abstraction, the reign of quantity, computerization
of all aspects of life, the assault on nature—trends that disturb many in an
increasingly automated, regulated society—are attributed to the demonic
MIGUEL SERRANO AND ESOTERIC HITLERISM 191Jewish spirit.68 For him, all sin, suffering and disorder are the work of the
Jews, intent on enslaving and ultimately destroying the earth and its creatures.
In this way, Serrano offers a mystical Nazism that glosses over the facts of
tyranny, torture and repression in the Third Reich with a medley of myths
about SS heroes, fabulous cities and a magical Aryan millennium. In their
New Age costume, these myths of Gnostic world rejection and the projection
of all fault and sin onto a hated adversary act on young minds as a powerful
distillate of Nazism.
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου