http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_Hitlerism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Circle_(esoteric)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vril_Society#Vril_society
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Circle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Burros
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nexus_(journal)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Keith_Thompson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Parker_Yockey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occult-fascism
The Landig Group was an occultist and neo-völkisch group formed in 1950, that first gathered for discussions at the studio of the designer Wilhelm Landig in Vienna's 4th district of Wieden, in Austria. The circle's most prominent and influential members were Wilhelm Landig (1909–1997), Erich Halik (Claude Schweikhart) and Rudolf J. Mund (1920–1985). The circle has also been referred to as the Landig Circle, Vienna Group and Vienna Lodge.The Vienna Circle (in German: der Wiener Kreis) was an association of philosophers gathered around the University of Vienna in 1922, chaired by Moritz Schlick, also known as the Ernst Mach Society (Verein Ernst Mach) in honour of Ernst Mach. Among its members were Gustav Bergmann, Rudolf Carnap, Philipp Frank, Hans Hahn, Tscha Hung, Victor Kraft, Karl Menger, Richard von Mises, Marcel Natkin, Otto Neurath, Olga Hahn-Neurath, Theodor Radakovic, Rose Rand and Friedrich Waismann.The pre-history of the Vienna Circle began with meetings on the philosophy of science and epistemology from 1908[2] on, promoted by Philipp Frank, Hans Hahn and Otto Neurath.
Hans Hahn, the oldest of the three (1879–1934), was a mathematician. He received his degree in mathematics in 1902. Afterwards he studied under the direction of Ludwig Boltzmann in Vienna and David Hilbert, Felix Klein and Hermann Minkowski in Göttingen. In 1905 he received the Habilitation in mathematics. He taught at Innsbruck (1905–1906) and Vienna (from 1909).
Otto Neurath (1882–1945) studied sociology, economics and philosophy in Vienna and Berlin. From 1907 to 1914 he taught in Vienna at the Neuen Wiener Handelsakademie (Viennese Commercial Academy). Neurath married Olga, Hahn's sister, in 1911.
Philipp Frank, the youngest of the group (1884–1966), studied physics at Göttingen and Vienna with Ludwig Boltzmann, David Hilbert and Felix Klein. From 1912, he held the chair of theoretical physics in the German University in Prague.
Their meetings were held in Viennese coffeehouses from 1907 onward. Frank remembered:
After 1910 there began in Vienna a movement which regarded Mach's positivist philosophy of science as having great importance for general intellectual life [...] An attempt was made by a group of young men to retain the most essential points of Mach's positivism, especially his stand against the misuse of metaphysics in science. [...] To this group belonged the mathematician H. Hahn, the political economist Otto Neurath, and the author of this book [i.e. Frank], at the time an instructor in theoretical physics in Vienna. [...] We tried to supplement Mach's ideas by those of the French philosophy of science of Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem, and also to connect them with the investigations in logic of such authors as Couturat, Schröder, Hilbert, etc.
— Uebel, Thomas, 2003, p.70.
Presumably the meetings stopped in 1912, when Frank went to Prague, to hold the chair of theoretical physics left vacant by Albert Einstein. Hahn left Vienna during World War I and returned in 1921. The following year Hahn, with the collaboration of Frank, arranged to bring into the group Moritz Schlick, who held the chair of philosophy of the inductive sciences at the University of Vienna. Schlick had already published his two main works Raum und Zeit in die gegenwärtigen Physik (Space and Time in contemporary Physics) in 1917 and Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (General Theory of Knowledge) in 1918. A central work for the newly founded discussion group was the Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), published by Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1921 (in 1922 in German-English version).
Under the direction of Schlick, a new regular series of meetings began. In 1926 Schlick and Hahn arranged to bring in Rudolf Carnap at the University of Vienna. In 1928 the Verein Ernst Mach (Ernst Mach Society) was founded, with Schlick as chairman. In 1929 the Vienna Circle manifesto Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis (The Scientific Conception of the World. The Vienna Circle) was published. The pamphlet is dedicated to Schlick, and its preface was signed by Hahn, Neurath and Carnap. In the appendix is a list of the members of the Vienna Circle.
The Vienna Circle was dispersed when the Nazi party came to power in Germany; many of its members emigrated to USA, where they taught in several universities. Schlick remained in Austria, but in 1936 he was killed by a Nazi sympathizer student in the University of Vienna.
The Kraft Circle, a successor to the Vienna Circle, arose in 1949 under the leadership of Viktor Kraft. Its philosophical programme was continued long after its demise (1952/3) by Paul Feyerabend.
It states the scientific world-conception of the Vienna Circle, which is characterized "essentially by two features. First it is empiricist and positivist: there is knowledge only from experience [...] Second, the scientific world-conception is marked by the application of a certain method, namely logical analysis."[3]
Logical analysis is the method of clarification of philosophical problems; it makes an extensive use of symbolic logic and distinguishes the Vienna Circle empiricism from earlier versions. The task of philosophy lies in the clarification—through the method of logical analysis—of problems and assertions.
Logical analysis shows that there are two different kinds of statements; one kind includes statements reducible to simpler statements about the empirically given; the other kind includes statements which cannot be reduced to statements about experience and thus they are devoid of meaning. Metaphysical statements belong to this second kind and therefore they are meaningless. Hence many philosophical problems are rejected as pseudo-problems which arise from logical mistakes, while others are re-interpreted as empirical statements and thus become the subject of scientific inquiries.
One source of the logical mistakes that are at the origins of metaphysics is the ambiguity of natural language. "Ordinary language for instance uses the same part of speech, the substantive, for things ('apple') as well as for qualities ('hardness'), relations ('friendship'), and processes ('sleep'); therefore it misleads one into a thing-like conception of functional concepts".[4] Another source of mistakes is "the notion that thinking can either lead to knowledge out of its own resources without using any empirical material, or at least arrive at new contents by an inference from given states of affair".[5] Synthetic knowledge a priori is rejected by the Vienna Circle. Mathematics, which at a first sight seems an example of necessarily valid synthetic knowledge derived from pure reason alone, has instead a tautological character, that is its statements are analytical statements, thus very different from Kantian synthetic statements. The only two kinds of statements accepted by the Vienna Circle are synthetic statements a posteriori (i.e. scientific statements) and analytic statements a priori (i.e. logical and mathematical statements).
However, the persistence of metaphysics is connected not only with logical mistakes but also with "social and economical struggles".[6] Metaphysics and theology are allied to traditional social forms, while the group of people who "faces modern times, rejects these views and takes its stand on the ground of empirical sciences".[7] Thus the struggle between metaphysics and scientific world-conception is not only a struggle between different kinds of philosophies, but it is also—and perhaps primarily—a struggle between different political, social and economical attitudes. Of course, as the manifesto itself acknowledged, "not every adherent of the scientific world-conception will be a fighter".[8] Many historians of the Vienna Circle see in the latter sentence an implicit reference to a contrast between the so called 'left wing' of the Vienna Circle, mainly represented by Neurath and Carnap, and Moritz Schlick. The aim of the left wing was to facilitate the penetration of the scientific world-conception in "the forms of personal and public life, in education, upbringing, architecture, and the shaping of economic and social life".[9] In contrast, Schlick was primarily interested in the theoretical study of science and philosophy. Perhaps the sentence "Some, glad of solitude, will lead a withdrawn existence on the icy slopes of logic"[10] is an ironic reference to Schlick.
The manifesto lists Walter Dubislav, Josef Frank, Kurt Grelling, Hasso Härlen, Eino Kaila, Heinrich Loewy, F. P. Ramsey, Hans Reichenbach, Kurt Reidemeister, and Edgar Zilsel as "Those sympathetic to the Vienna Circle" and Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein as "Leading representatives of the scientific world-conception".
The final goal pursued by the Vienna Circle was unified science, that is the construction of a "constitutive system" in which every legitimate statement is reduced to the concepts of lower level which refer directly to the given experience. "The endeavour is to link and harmonise the achievements of individual investigators in their various fields of science".[11] From this aim follows the search for clarity, neatness, and for a symbolic language that eliminates the problems arising from the ambiguity of natural language. The Vienna Circle published a collection, called Einheitswissenschaft (Unified science), edited by Rudolf Carnap, Philipp Frank, Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, Joergen Joergensen (after Hahn's death) and Charles W. Morris (from 1938), whose aim was to present an unified vision of science. After the publication in Europe of seven monographs from 1933 to 1939, the collection was dismissed, because of the problems arising from the World War II. In 1938 a new series of publications started in USA. It was the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, an ambitious project never completed devoted to unified science. Only the first section Foundations of the Unity of Sciences was published; it contains two volumes for a total of twenty monographs published from 1938 to 1969. As remembered by Rudolf Carnap and Charles Morris in the Preface to the 1969 edition of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science:
The Encyclopedia was in origin the idea of Otto Neurath. It was meant as a manifestation of the unity of science movement [...] Original plans for the Encyclopedia were ambitious. In addition to the two introductory volumes, there was to be a section on the methodology of the sciences, one on the existing state of the unification of sciences, and possibly a section on the application of the sciences. It was planned that the work in its entirety would comprise about twenty-six volumes (260 monographs)
— Foundations of the Unity of Sciences, vol. 1, The University of Chicago Press, 1969, p. vii.
Thomas Kuhn's well known work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, was published in this Encyclopedia in 1962, as the number two in the second volume.
The attitude of Vienna Circle towards metaphysics is well expressed by Carnap in the article 'Überwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache' in Erkenntnis, vol. 2, 1932 (English translation 'The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language' in Sarkar, Sahotra, ed., Logical empiricism at its peak: Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath, New York : Garland Pub., 1996, pp. 10–31). A language—says Carnap—consists of a vocabulary, i.e. a set of meaningful words, and a syntax, i.e. a set of rules governing the formation of sentences from the words of the vocabulary. Pseudo-statements, i.e. sequences of words that at first sight resemble statements but in reality have no meaning, are formed in two ways: either meaningless words occur in them, or they are formed in an invalid syntactical way. According to Carnap, pseudo-statements of both kinds occur in metaphysics.
A word W has a meaning if two conditions are satisfied. First, the mode of the occurrence of W in its elementary sentence form (i.e. the simplest sentence form in which W is capable of occurring) must be fixed. Secondly, if W occurs in an elementary sentence S, it is necessary to give an answer to the following questions (that are—according to Carnap—equivalent formulation of the same question):
What sentences is S deducible from, and what sentences are deducible from S?
Under what conditions is S supposed to be true, and under what conditions false?
How is S verified?
What is the meaning of S?
(Carnap, 'The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language' in Sarkar, Sahotra, cit., pp. 12)
An example offered by Carnap concerns the word 'arthropod'. The sentence form "the thing x is an arthropod" is an elementary sentence form that is derivable from "x is an animal", "x has a segmented body" and "x has jointed legs". Conversely, these sentences are derivable from "the thing x is an arthropod". Thus the meaning of the word 'arthropod' is determined.
According to Carnap, many words of metaphysics do not fulfill these requirements and thus they are meaningless. As an example, Carnap considers the word 'principle'. This word has a definite meaning, if the sentence "x is the principle of y" is supposed to be equivalent to the sentence "y exists by virtue of x" or "y arises out of x". The latter sentence is perfectly clear: y arises out of x when x is invariably followed by y, and the invariable association between x and y is empirically verifiable. But—says Carnap—metaphysicians are not satisfied with this interpretation of the meaning of 'principle'. They assert that no empirical relation between x and y can completely explain the meaning of "x is the principle of y", because there is something that cannot be grasped by means of the experience, something for which no empirical criterion can be specified. It is the lacking of any empirical criterion—says Carnap—that deprives of meaning the word 'principle' when it occurs in metaphysics. Therefore, metaphysical pseudo-statements such as "water is the principle of the world" or "the spirit is the principle of the world" are void of meaning because a meaningless word occurs in them.
However, there are pseudo-statements in which occur only meaningful words; these pseudo-statements are formed in a counter-syntactical way. An example is the word sequence "Caesar is a prime number"; every word has a definite meaning, but the sequence has no meaning. The problem is that "prime number" is a predicate of numbers, not a predicate of human beings. In the example the nonsense is evident; however, in natural language the rules of grammar do not prohibit the formation of analogous meaningless word sequences that are not so easily detectable. In the grammar of natural languages, every sequence of the kind "x is y", where x is a noun and y is a predicate, is acceptable. In fact, in the grammar there is no distinction between predicate which can be affirmed of human beings and predicate which can be affirmed of numbers. So "Caesar is a general" and "Caesar is a prime number" are both well-formed, in contrast for example with "Caesar is and", which is ill-formed. In a logically constructed language—says Carnap—a distinction between the various kinds of predicate is specified, and pseudo-statements as "Caesar is a prime number" are ill-formed. Now, and this is the main point of Carnap's argument, metaphysical statements in which meaningless words do not occur, are indeed meaningless because they are formed in a way which is admissible in natural languages, but not in logically constructed languages. Carnap attempts to indicate the most frequent sources of errors from which metaphysical pseudo-statements can arise. One source of mistakes is the ambiguity of the verb 'to be', which is sometimes used as a copula ("I am hungry") and sometimes to designate existence ("I am"). The latter statement incorrectly suggests a predicative form, and thus it suggests that existence is a predicate. Only modern logic, with the introduction of an explicit sign to designate existence (the sign ), which occurs only in statements such as , never as a predicate, has shown that existence is not a predicate, and thus has revealed the logical error from which pseudo-statements such as "cogito, ergo sum" has arisen.
Another source of mistakes is type confusions, in which a predicate of a kind is used as a predicate of another kind. For example the pseudo-statements "we know the Nothing" is analogous to "we know the rain", but while the latter is well-formed, the former is ill-formed, at least in a logically constructed language, because 'Nothing' is incorrectly used as a noun. In a formal language, 'Nothing' only means , such as "there is nothing which is outside", i.e. , and thus 'Nothing' never occurs as a noun or as a predicate.
What is the role of metaphysics? According to Carnap, although metaphysics has no theoretical content, it has content indeed: metaphysical pseudo-statements express the attitude of a person towards life. Metaphysics is an art like lyrical poetry. The metaphysician, instead of using the medium of art, works with the medium of the theoretical; he confuses art with science, attitude towards life with knowledge, and thus produces an unsatisfactory and inadequate work. "Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability".[12]
Herbert Feigl and Kurt Gödel were two eminent students at the University of Vienna at this time. They were allowed to participate in the meetings, but were not members of the Vienna Circle. Members of the Vienna Circle had a common attitude towards philosophy, consisting of an applied logical positivism drawn from Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus formed the basis for the group's philosophy[1] (although Wittgenstein himself insisted that logical positivism was a gross misreading of his thinking, and took to reading poetry during meetings of the Vienna Circle). The Vienna Circle's influence on 20th century philosophy was immense, and much later work, such as that of Willard Van Orman Quine, was in response to the Circle's thought.Landig was the founder of the group, that has since inspired decades of völkisch mysticism. He and his group revived the ariosophical, Ario-Germanic mythology of Thule, the supposed polar homeland of the ancient Aryans.
Landig "coined the term Black Sun, a substitute Swastika [and/or Fylfot ] and mystical source of energy capable of regenerating the Aryan race."[1] Landig, through his circle, popularized esoteric ideas current among the pre-Nazi völkisch movement and the SS relating to Atlantis, the World Ice Theory, pre-historic floods and secret racial doctrines from Tibet.
Landig and other occult-fascist propagandists have circulated wild stories about German Nazi colonies that live and work in secret installations beneath the polar ice caps, where they developed flying saucers [see Nazi UFOs] and miracle weapons (Die Glocke) after the demise of the Third Reich.[2] Including the theory that flying saucers were Nazi secret weapons launched from an underground base in Antarctica, from which the Nazis hoped to conquer the world.
The focus of the group’s discussions was a secret center in the Arctic known as the Blue Island, which could serve as a source point for a renaissance of traditional life. This idea was taken from Julius Evola, whose Revolt Against the Modern World became the bible of the Landig group.[1]
More so, or at least equally as important to the group as Evola's book, the Vienna Group hungrily devoured the ideas and books of Herman Wirth.[1]
Landig was a former SS (of Himmler) man whom revived ariosophical mythology of Thule. He coined the idea of the Black Sun, a substitute swastika and mythical source of energy. He was born on 20 December 1909.[1] He wrote Götzen gegen Thule, Rebellen für Thule. Das Erbe von Atlantis and Wolfszeit um Thule.
It has been shown that a younger generation continued the development of the circle's ideas from the 1980s on. This younger generation consisted of members of the German/Austrian Tempelhofgesellschaft. Their publications demonstrate an exchange of ideas with the older generation, mainly revolving around the Black Sun concept. After the Tempelhofgesellschaft had been dissolved, it was succeeded by the Causa Nostra, a Freundeskreis (circle of friends) that remains active.[3]
Vril society
[edit]Willy Ley
Willy Ley (right) in a discussion with Heinz Haber and Wernher v. Braun, 1954
Willy Ley was a German rocket engineer who had emigrated to the United States in 1937. In 1947, he published an article entitled "Pseudoscience in Naziland" in the science fiction magazine Astounding Science Fiction.[7] He wrote that the high popularity of irrational convictions in Germany at that time explained how National Socialism could have fallen on such fertile ground. Among other pseudo-scientific groups he mentions one that looked for the Vril: "The next group was literally founded upon a novel. That group which I think called itself Wahrheitsgesellschaft—Society for Truth—and which was more or less localized in Berlin, devoted its spare time looking for Vril."
[edit]Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels
The existence of a Vril-Society was alleged in 1960 by Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels.[8] In their book The Morning of the Magicians, they claimed that the Vril-Society was a secret community of occultists in pre-Nazi Berlin that was a sort of inner circle of the Thule Society. They also thought that it was in close contact with the English group known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Vril information takes up about a tenth of the volume, the remainder of which details other esoteric speculations, but the authors fail to clearly explain whether this section is fact or fiction.
In his book Monsieur Gurdjieff, Louis Pauwels[9] claimed that a Vril Society had been founded by General Karl Haushofer, a student of Russian magician and metaphysician Georges Gurdjieff.
[edit]Publications on the Vril Society in German
The book of Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels was published in German with the title: Aufbruch ins dritte Jahrtausend: von der Zukunft der phantastischen Vernunft (literally Departure into the Third Millennium: The Future of the Fantastic Reason) in 1969.
In his book Black Sun, Professor Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke refers to the research of the German author Peter Bahn. Bahn writes in his 1996 essay, "Das Geheimnis der Vril-Energie" ("The Secret of Vril Energy"),[10] of his discovery of an obscure esoteric group calling itself the "Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft", which revealed itself in a rare 1930 publication Vril. Die Kosmische Urkraft (Vril, the cosmic elementary power) written by a member of this Berlin-based group, under the pseudonym "Johannes Täufer" (German: "John [the] Baptist"). Published by the influential astrological publisher, Wilhelm Becker (whom Bahn believes was "Täufer"), the 60 page pamphlet says little of the group other than that it was founded in 1925 to study the uses of Vril energy.[11]
[edit]See also
Aether (classical element)
Aether theories
Animal magnetism
Bovril (aliment)
Energy (esotericism)
Etheric body (spirituality)
Etheric plane (spirituality)
Jules Verne
Kerry Bolton, author of The Nexus
Mysticism
Nazi mysticism
Nazi UFOs
Odic fluid
Orgone
Prana
Qi
Thule
UFOs
Vrillon (TV hoax)
The Thule Society (pron.: /ˈθjuːliː/; German: Thule-Gesellschaft), originally the Studiengruppe für germanisches Altertum ("Study Group for Germanic Antiquity"), was a German occultist and völkisch group in Munich, named after a mythical northern country from Greek legend. The Society is notable chiefly as the organization that sponsored the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP), which was later reorganized by Adolf Hitler into the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP or Nazi Party). According to Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw, the organization's "membership list...reads like a Who's Who of early Nazi sympathizers and leading figures in Munich", including Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Julius Lehmann, Gottfried Feder, Dietrich Eckart and Karl Harrer.[1] However, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, an expert on the Thule Society, finds that while Hans Frank and Rudolf Hess had been Thule members, other leading Nazis had only been guests of the Thule or entirely unconnected with it.[2][3] There is no evidence that Hitler ever attended the Thule Society.[4]The Thule Society was originally a "German study group" headed by Walter Nauhaus,[5] a wounded World War I veteran turned art student from Berlin who had become a keeper of pedigrees for the Germanenorden (or "Order of Teutons"), a secret society founded in 1911 and formally named in the following year.[6] In 1917 Nauhaus moved to Munich; his Thule-Gesellschaft was to be a cover-name for the Munich branch of the Germanenorden,[7] but events developed differently as a result of a schism in the Order. In 1918, Nauhaus was contacted in Munich by Rudolf von Sebottendorf (or von Sebottendorff), an occultist and newly elected head of the Bavarian province of the schismatic offshoot, known as the Germanenorden Walvater of the Holy Grail.[8] The two men became associates in a recruitment campaign, and Sebottendorff adopted Nauhaus's Thule Society as a cover-name for his Munich lodge of the Germanenorden Walvater at its formal dedication on 18 August 1918.[9]
A primary focus of Thule-Gesellschaft was a claim concerning the origins of the Aryan race. In 1917 people who wanted to join the "Germanic Order", out of which the Thule Society developed in 1918, had to sign a special "blood declaration of faith" concerning the lineage:
"The signer hereby swears to the best of his knowledge and belief that no Jewish or coloured blood flows in either his or in his wife's veins, and that among their ancestors are no members of the coloured races."[10]
"Thule" ((Greek): Θούλη) was a land located by Greco-Roman geographers in the furthest north (often displayed as Iceland).[11] The term "Ultima Thule" ((Latin): most distant Thule) is also mentioned by the Roman poet Virgil in his pastoral poems called the Georgics.[12] Although originally Thule was probably the name for Scandinavia, Virgil simply uses it as a proverbial expression for the edge of the known world, and his mention should not be taken as a substantial reference to Scandinavia.[13]
They identified Ultima Thule, said by Nazi mystics to be the capital of ancient Hyperborea, as a lost ancient landmass in the extreme north: near Greenland or Iceland. These ideas derived from earlier speculation by Ignatius L. Donnelly that a lost landmass had once existed in the Atlantic, and that it was the home of the Aryan race, a theory he supported by reference to the distribution of swastika motifs. He identified this with Plato's Atlantis, a theory further developed by Helena Blavatsky, an occultist during the second part of the 19th century.
The Thule Society attracted about 250 followers in Munich and about 1,500 in greater Bavaria.[14] Its meetings were often held in the luxury Hotel Vierjahreszeiten ((German): Four Seasons Hotel) in Munich.[9]
The followers of the Thule Society were, by Sebottendorff's own admission, little interested in occultist theories, instead they were interested in racism and combating Jews and Communists. Nevertheless, Sebottendorff planned and failed to kidnap the Bavarian socialist prime minister, Kurt Eisner, in December 1918.[5][15] During the Bavarian revolution of April 1919, Thulists were accused of trying to infiltrate its government and of attempting a coup. On 26 April the Communist government in Munich raided the Society's premises and took seven of its members into custody, executing them on 30 April. Amongst them were Walter Nauhaus and four well-known aristocrats including Countess Heila von Westarp, who functioned as the group's secretary, and Prince Gustav of Thurn and Taxis who was related to several European royal families.[16][17] In response, the Thule organised a citizens' uprising as White troops entered the city on 1 May.[18] In 1918, the Thule Society bought a local weekly newspaper, the Münchener Beobachter (Munich Observer), and changed its name to Münchener Beobachter und Sportblatt (Munich Observer and Sports Paper) in an attempt to improve its circulation. The Münchener Beobachter later became the Völkischer Beobachter ((German): People's Observer), the main Nazi newspaper. It was edited by Karl Harrer.
On 5 January 1919 Anton Drexler, who had developed links between the Thule Society and various extreme right workers' organizations in Munich, together with the Thule Society's Karl Harrer, established the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP), or German Workers' Party. Adolf Hitler joined this party later in the same year. By the end of February 1920, the DAP had been reconstituted as the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), or National Socialist German Workers' Party, generally known as the "Nazi Party".[19]
Sebottendorff had by then left the Thule Society, and never joined the DAP or the Nazi Party. Dietrich Bronder (Bevor Hitler kam, 1964) alleged that other members of the Thule Society were later prominent in Nazi Germany: the list includes Dietrich Eckart (who, along with Erik Jan Hanussen, coached Hitler on his public speaking skills and had Mein Kampf dedicated to him) as well as Gottfried Feder, Hans Frank, Hermann Göring, Karl Haushofer, Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg.[20] Historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke has described this membership roll and other, similar claims as "spurious" and "fanciful", noting that Feder, Eckart and Rosenberg were never more than guests to whom the Thule Society extended hospitality during the Bavarian revolution of 1918,[21] although he has more recently acknowledged that Hess and Frank were members of the Society before they came to prominence in the Nazi Party.[22] It has also been claimed that Adolf Hitler himself was a member.[23] Evidence on the contrary shows that he never attended a meeting, as attested to by Johannes Hering's diary of Society meetings.[4] It is quite clear that Hitler himself had little interest in, and made little time for, "esoteric" matters.[24] (See also Hitler's Nuremberg speech of 6 September 1938 on his disapproval of occultism.)
Wilhelm Laforce and Max Sesselmann (staff on the Münchener Beobachter) were Thule members who later joined the NSDAP.
Early in 1920 Karl Harrer was forced out of the DAP as Hitler moved to sever the party's link with the Thule Society, which subsequently fell into decline and was dissolved about five years later,[20] well before Hitler came to power.
Rudolf von Sebottendorff had withdrawn from the Thule Society in 1919, but in 1933 he returned to Germany in the hope of reviving it. In that year he published a book entitled Bevor Hitler kam ((German): Before Hitler Came), in which he claimed that the Thule Society had paved the way for the Führer: "Thulers were the ones to whom Hitler first came, and Thulers were the first to unite themselves with Hitler." This claim was not favourably received by the Nazi authorities: after 1933, esoteric organisations (including völkisch occultists) were suppressed, many closed down by anti-Masonic legislation in 1935. Sebottendorff's book was prohibited and he himself was arrested and imprisoned for a short period in 1934, afterwards departing into exile in Turkey.
Nonetheless, it has been argued that some Thule members and their ideas were incorporated into the Third Reich.[23] Some of the Thule Society's teachings were expressed in the books of Alfred Rosenberg.[25] Many occult ideas found favour with Heinrich Himmler who, unlike Hitler, had a great interest in mysticism, but the Schutzstaffel (SS) under Himmler emulated the structure of Ignatius Loyola's Jesuit order[26] rather than the Thule Society.
Savitri Devi
Greek writer Savitri Devi was the first major post-war exponent of what has since become known as Esoteric Hitlerism.[2] According to that 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'sAryanist ideology to that of the pan-Hindu part of the Indian Independence movement,[3] 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 finalAvatar of Vishnu, and called him "the god-like Individual of our times; the Man against Time; the greatest European of all times",[4]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 defeat—and the forestalling of his vision from coming to fruition—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]",[5] 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 theopportunists, 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.[6]
Robert Charroux
Unlike most ancient astronaut writers, Robert Charroux took a large interest in racialism. According to Charroux Hyperborea was situated between Iceland and Greenland and was the home of a Nordic White race with blonde hair and blue eyes. Charroux claimed that this race was extraterrestrial in origin and had originally come from a cold planet situated far from the sun.[7] Charroux also claimed that the White race of the Hyperboreans and their ancestors the Celts had dominated the whole world in the ancient past. Some of these claims of Charroux have influenced the beliefs of Esoteric Nazism such as the work of Miguel Serrano.[8][9]
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 theBlack Sun. All other races are the progeny of the demiurge's beast-men, native to the planet.[10]
Serrano supports this idea from various myths which assign divine ancestry to 'Aryan' peoples, and even the Aztec myth of Quetzalcoatldescending 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.[11]
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 committedmiscegenation with the terrestrial races, thus diluting the light-bearing blood of their benefactors and diminishing the level of divine awareness on the planet.[12]
The concept of Hyperborea has a simultaneously racial and mystical meaning for Serrano.[13] 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 aFourth Reich.
According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke:[14]
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".[15] 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.
Collective Aryan unconscious
In the book Black Sun, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke reports how Carl Gustav 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. Benito 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'".[16]
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.[17] A similar esoteric thesis is also put forward by Michael Moynihan in his book Lords of Chaos.
Tempelhofgesellschaft
The older Tempelhofgesellschaft (THG) was built in the 1980s by a few members of the nazi "Erbengemeinschaft der Tempelritter". The leader of this group was the former police man Hans-Günter Fröhlich who resided in Germany/Homburg. The group had close links to the German-speaking far-right network. Its first publication was Einblick in die magische Weltsicht und die magischen Prozesse(1987).[1]
The younger Tempelhofgesellschaft was founded in Vienna in the early 1990s by Norbert Jurgen-Ratthofer and Ralft Ettl to teach adualist form of Christian religion called Marcionism. This one was a part of the main THG/Homburg. The group identifies an "evil creator of this world," the Demiurge with Jehovah, the God of Judaism. Jesus Christ was an Aryan, not Jewish. They distribute pamphlets claiming that the Aryan race originally came to Atlantis from the star Aldebaran (this information is supposedly based on "ancientSumerian 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. It is believed by adherents of this religion that an enormous space fleet is on its way to Earth from Aldebaran which, when it arrives, will join forces with the Nazi Flying Saucers from Antarctica to establish the Western Imperium.[1][18] Its major publication is called Das Vril-Projekt (1992).
After the THG had been dissolved, Ralf Ettl founded the Freundeskreis (circle of friends) Causa Nostra. It remains active and maintains relations to far-right publishers like the Swiss Unitall-Verlag.[1]
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 shadowynew world orders.[citation needed] 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 Poliphilischolar 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 and the SS's supposed survival in underground Antarctic oases in New Swabia or in alliance with Hyperboreans from the subterranean world.[19]
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).
Neo-völkisch movements
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.[20] 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.[21]
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