Speculation about Nazism and occultism has become part of popular culture since at least 1959. Aside from several popular documentaries, there are numerous books on the topic, most notably The Morning of the Magicians (1960) and The Spear of Destiny (1972).
Historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke analyzed the topic in The Occult Roots of Nazism. He argued cautiously for some real links between some ideals of Ariosophy and Nazi ideology, but also analyzed the problems of the numerous popular "occult historiography" books written on the topic. He separated empiricism and sociology from the "Modern Mythology of Nazi Occultism" books which "have represented the Nazi phenomenon as the product of arcane and demonic influence". He considered most of these to be "sensational and under-researched"
James Hartung Madole (July 7, 1927-May 6, 1979) was the leader of the National Renaissance Party in the United States. He is now recognized as a pivotal figure in the development of post-war occult-fascism.Madole influenced by Aryanism and Hinduism wrote that the Aryan race was of great antiquity and had been worshipped worldwide by lower races as "White Gods". Madole also wrote that the Aryans originated in the Garden of Eden located in North America.He also believed that America was the "new Atlantis" and "the cradle of a new God like race".
- After the Third Age: Eschatological Elements of Postwar International Fascism
- THE NEO-NAZI FACE OF THE EXTREME RIGHT, chapter 6 of The Other Radicalism
- Preliminary Report on Neo-Fascist and Other Hate Groups; U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities, Dec. 17, 1954
Examples of post-war Nazi mystical philosophies include Esoteric Hitlerism and the Tempelhofgesellschaft. Esoteric Hitlerism includes the race-specific, pre-Christian religion (including references to Hinduism) of some Nazis.
FOR MORE THAN thirty years, James H. Madole (1927–1979) regularly
harangued passers-by on the crowded streets of New York City with his urgent
call for a fascist revolution in the United States. His appearances owed
much to the customs of an open-air revival meeting and evangelical preaching.
Flanked by his own stormtroopers clad in uniform black caps, gray shirts
with lightning-bolt armbands and black trousers, Madole always wore a
close-fitting suit jacket with all three buttons fastened and a ludicrous motorcycle
crash helmet above his thick horn-rimmed glasses. The plump,middle-
aged Madole stood upon a pulpitlike rostrum decorated with the lightning
bolt symbol of his National Renaissance Party and emphasized his
speeches with staring eyes, wild grimaces, and striking melodramatic poses.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the National Renaissance Party frequently
hit the headlines by provoking violent protests and riots in districts of New
York heavily populated by Jews and blacks, where Madole carried his missionary
message of white supremacy and Aryan renaissance.
Madole was obviously a fanatic and could easily be dismissed as a wild eccentric
pursuing a quixotic political campaign on the margins of postwar
American society. However, his campaign strategies, his organization and,
above all, his philosophy and doctrines of Aryan renewal identify him as an
early and important figure in the development of esoteric fascism. His ideas
were saturated with the fabulous mythology of science fiction and occult notions
derived from Theosophy.He attacked Christianity and upheld the hierarchical
caste society of Vedic India as the model for his “New Atlantis,” the
future fascist state of America. Ultimate authority would rest with philosopher-
kings selected and schooled for rulership from childhood. His streetfighting
stormtroopers, known as the Security Echelon, were supposed to be
the living example of a new military caste of Aryan warriors.Madole also anticipated
later fascist “Third Way”movements with his rejection of both capitalism
and communism. In his opposition to the plutocracy and imperialism
of the United States, Madole even sought alliances with Arab and black nationalists
and encouraged them to hold joint meetings with the National Re-
naissance Party. By the mid-1990s,Madole was being celebrated by fascist and
neo-Nazi groups as the “father of post-war occult-fascism.”
James Hartung Madole was born on 7 July 1927 in New York City. Two
years after his birth, his parents separated and young James was brought up
in Beacon, New York, by his mother, who held strongly anti-Semitic views.
While in high school, the lonely youngster developed a passionate interest in
science. He built his own laboratory at home and carried out experiments in
chemistry and astronomy. As a youth, Madole envisioned the scientist in
Faustian terms, a semi-divine sage seeking mastery of the earth and the whole
universe. He considered that science was the only valid basis of culture and
that society should be governed by scientist rulers. This naive belief in the
omnipotence and certainty of science was heightened by Madole’s enthusiasm
for science fiction, a literary genre that had gained a remarkable hold
over the popular American mind through mass-circulation magazines and
pulp fiction in the 1930s and 1940s.2 Science fiction frequently emphasized
the elitist pretensions of the heaven-storming scientist, while its fantasy genre
often described magical lands and authoritarian utopias on alien planets.
The elitism of science and science fiction (SF) drew Madole to fascism as a
political philosophy. During his late teens, Madole sought out SF fans with
fascist leanings and thus came to know Charles B. Hudson, an SF writer and
veteran prewar American fascist, who was a leading defendant in the famous
Sedition Act trials of 1941–43.3 Hudson was a short, fanatic, plump man with
a bald pate who had cultivated a Midwest fascist following during the 1930s
with his bulletin, America in Danger. He worked in close collaboration with
Weltdienst, the Nazi German press agency run by Lieutenant-Colonel Ulrich
Fleischhauer in Erfurt under the auspices of Alfred Rosenberg. The agency
sought to drum up overseas support for the Hitler regime by fostering an
anti-Semitic international with a global ideology of resentment.
Hudson was an obsessive conspiracy theorist and peppered his bulletin
with references to the “hidden hand” and ascribed to the Jews every
calamity in American history from the assassination of Lincoln to the
Johnstown flood. His pet phrase, “Judeo-Socialistic-Communistic Nu-
Deal Organized-Jewry-Finance World-War I” encapsulated all the dangers
he perceived in modern liberal society and was later abbreviated to the
“synagogue of Satan.” By 1940 Hudson’s bulletin and Omaha base acted as
major outposts in the Midwest for defeatist and appeasement propaganda
in favor of the Third Reich.
He promoted the pro-Nazi views of John B.
Snow, James True, Colonel Eugene Sanctuary, Congressmen Jacob
Thorkelson and Clare E. Hoffman; the charismatic radio priest, Father
Charles E. Coughlin; Mrs. Leslie Fry, a Russian-born promoter of the
anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion; and Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling, the
communist-obsessed agitator and lecturer.
By the time Madole met Charles B.Hudson at the end ofWorld War II, the
latter had achieved notoriety for his indictment on sedition charges after
Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of war against Japan and Germany. While
many of his contacts were tried, convicted and imprisoned, Hudson had remained
at liberty and continued to peddle anti-Semitic and anti-communist
literature. In 1945 Madole formed the Animist Party as a right-wing political
movement with its base among SF fans. Thanks to Hudson’s influence,
Madole enjoyed the support of several “America First” and patriotic groups
surviving from the prewar period. He soon caught the attention of another
patriot, Kurt Mertig, who had led the Citizens Protective League before the
war. Mertig was a fat-jowled, heavily accented, German American shipping
executive with the Hamburg-American Line. Together with Louis Zahne, a
brusque Prussian and former member of the Friends of the New Germany (a
precursor of the German-American Bund), Mertig held weekly mass meetings
for Americans and Germans at the Turnhalle in Yorkville,New York, during
the early 1940s. His anti-Semitic, anti-war and pro-German speeches left
no doubt that the League was a Nazi front and in 1943 he was ordered removed
300 miles inland by the Army Exclusion Board as a security measure.
In 1949 the elderly Kurt Mertig had founded the neo-Nazi National Renaissance
Party with its headquarters in Yorkville. The party took its name
from Hitler’s Political Testament, where the Führer proclaimed that, from the
sacrifice of his death, there would spring up “the seed of a radiant renaissance
of the National Socialist Movement.”Mertig was on the lookout for a successor
and was impressed with Madole, who, though barely twenty-two years
old, had already demonstrated dynamic powers of oratory in the Animist
Party and the Nationalist Action League. Shortly after joining Mertig,Madole
assumed leadership of the National Renaissance Party (NRP) and retained
this position until his death thirty years later.6 This party thus had its roots in
the prewar German-American Nazi fronts of Yorkville, with its predominantly
German population. Between 1937 and 1941, these streets had regularly
witnessed the parades of Fritz Kuhn’s “Bund Boys” under their ominous
swastika standards. The NRP was to become Madole’s lifelong career and the
vehicle for his radical ideas of Aryan renaissance and occult fascism.
Madole began as a Nazi enthusiast, initially using the swastika as the party
flag, although this was later superseded by the fascist symbol of a lightning
bolt within a circle. He announced in his party bulletin that “what Hitler did
in Europe, the National Renaissance Party intends to do in America.” The
NRP proposed to abolish Congress in favor of elite rule; it would protect the
Aryan race against racial contamination by deporting the colored races, and
it would destroy communism by eliminating the Jews. However, during the
1950s Madole steered the NRP along novel lines of fascist development, involving
a “Third Way” position rejecting both capitalism and communism.
Instead of its former conventional radical right-wing position of anti-Semitism
and anti-communism, the NRP later modified its view of the Soviet
Union. Here, Madole was influenced by the American fascist intellectuals
Francis Parker Yockey and Frederick Charles Weiss, both of whom favored a
pro-Soviet position against the United States and world Jewry.
Francis Parker Yockey (September 18, 1917 – June 16, 1960) was an American political thinker and polemicist best known for his neo-Spenglerian book Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics, published under the pen name Ulick Varange[1] in 1948. This 600-page book argues for a culture-based, totalitarian path for the preservation of Western culture.Yockey was one of a handful of neo-Nazi esoteric writers during the post-World War II era.Without notes, Yockey wrote his first book, Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics, in Brittas Bay, Ireland over the winter and early spring of 1948. It is a Spenglerian critique of 19th century materialism and rationalism. It was endorsed by far-Right thinkers around the world including former German General Otto Remer; Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois, Revilo P. Oliver; and Italian esotericist Julius Evola. Yockey became embittered with Sir Oswald Mosley after the latter refused to publish or review Imperium upon its completion, after having promised to do so. Guy Chesham, one of the leaders of Mosley's movement, actually resigned from it, in part because of Mosley's treatment of Yockey. Imperium subscribes to Spengler's suggestion that Germany had been destined to fulfil the 'Roman' role in Western Civilization by uniting all its constituent states into one large empire.Maurice Bardèche, a French writer of fascist sympathies, wrote about his meeting with Yockey in his semi-autobiographical novel Suzanne et le taudis. Yockey, called "Ulrich Clarence" in the book, was described by Bardèche as a "lunatic." Most of Yockey's other acquaintances, however, always regarded him as a brilliant and dedicated fighter for the cause in which he believed.He had a much greater impact in Europe, where intellectuals of the Right, especially the current of thought sometimes called the European New Right, including the Belgian Jean Thiriart, the Russian Aleksandr Dugin, and French writers Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye, adopted many of Yockey's views.
Nouvelle Droite arguments can be found in the rhetoric of many major radical right and far-right parties in Europe such as the National Front in France, the Freedom Party in Austria and Vlaams Belang in Flanders (Belgium). This, despite the fact that Alain de Benoist and certain other ideologues of the Nouvelle Droite, since the late 80s, had issued statements against some populist far-right movements.
Although mostly known in France, according to Minkenberg, the Nouvelle Droite borders to other European "New Right" movements, such as Neue Rechte in Germany, New Right in the United Kingdom, Nieuw Rechts in the Netherlands and Flanders, Forza Nuova in Italy, Imperium Europa in Malta, Nova Hrvatska Desnica in Croatia, Noua Dreapta in Romania and the New Right of Paul Weyrich and the Free Congress Foundation in the United States.
This claim is disputed by most other scholars, who argue that the European New Right has some superficial similarities to certain sectors of the New Right in the United States, but not the entire New Right coalition. The European New Right is similar to the Cultural Conservatism movement led by Paul Weyrich and the Free Congress Foundation, and to the related traditionalism of paleoconservatives such as Pat Buchanan and the Chronicles (magazine) of the Rockford Institute (Diamond, Himmelstein, Berlet and Lyons). However these subgroups of the New Right coalition in the United States are closely tied to Christianity, which the Nouvelle Droite rejects, describing itself as a pagan movement.Both Jonathan Marcus, Martin Lee and Alain de Benoist himself have highlighted these important differences with the US New Right coalition
As Martin Lee explains,
“ By rejecting Christianity as an alien ideology that was forced upon the Indo-European peoples two millennia ago, French New Rightists distinguished themselves from the so-called New Right that emerged in the United States during the 1970s. Ideologically, [the European new Right group] GRECE had little in common with the American New Right, which [the European new Right ideologue] de Benoist dismissed as a puritanical, moralistic crusade that clung pathetically to Christianity as the be-all and end-all of Western civilization.
Francis Parker Yockey (1917–1960) had acted as a legal assistant to the Allied
prosecution at the Wiesbaden “second string” war crimes trials in
1946–47, only to resign in disgust at what he considered Allied hypocrisy.
While in Ireland he wrote Imperium (1948), a voluminous account of Western
heritage and destiny from a Spenglerian point of view. After making contact
with the national bolshevist (pro-Soviet) neo-Nazi circle under Alfred
Franke-Grieksch inGermany,Yockey went to London to influence the English
Mosleyites of the Union Movement in this neutralist, anti-American direction.
Here, Yockey founded the anti-Semitic European Liberation Front in
1949 and published The Proclamation of London as its manifesto.After falling
out withMosley,Yockey traveled in Europe. From the early 1950s until his suicide
in FBI custody in 1960, Yockey was an active neo-fascist agent throughout
Europe and the United States. He cultivated close links with a number of
far-right groups and maintained the pro-Soviet bias in pursuit of his anti-
American and anti-Zionist convictions. Yockey’s analysis of Russia in Imperium
was more favorable than that of America; he also wrote approvingly of
Stalin’s anti-Zionist campaign in Czechoslovakia for the NRP press in 1952
and was suspected of visiting East Germany, the SovietUnion and even Cuba.8
Born on 18 September 1917 in Chicago to a wealthy upper-middle-class
family of Irish and German descent, Yockey was raised in Ludington,Michigan,
and attended the Foreign Service School at Georgetown University and
Northwestern University. He graduated with a law degree from Notre Dame
University in 1941. Profoundly attracted by European traditions (his parents
had lived in Paris before the First World War), Yockey felt repelled by the
mediocrity of American culture and democracy.At an early stage he fell under
the spell of Oswald Spengler,whose widely translated magnum opus, The Decline
of the West (1918–22), explained the growth and decay of civilizations
according to organic principles.During the late 1930s, Yockey joined several
domestic pro-German and fascist groups.He spoke at a gathering of William
Dudley Pelley’s Silvershirts in 1939 and was tipped by Mrs. De LaFayette
Washburn to lead the National Liberty Party.While serving in the U.S.Army
in 1942–43, Yockey maintained his Silvershirt contacts and was suspected of
Nazi sympathies. Going AWOL from a Georgia camp in November 1942, he
undertook a Nazi intelligence mission in Texas and Mexico City. He subsequently
obtained a medical discharge by feigning mental illness.Following
legal appointments in Detroit in 1944–45, heworked for eleven months on the
War Crimes tribunal in Germany.After five months in the States, he settled at
an inn in Brittas Bay, Ireland, to write his six hundred–page political opus.
Imperium scorns democracy, equality and the ideas of 1789. Its main
theme is a metahistorical anti-Semitism, suggested by Spengler’s The Decline
of the West. In his monumental book on the periodicity of history, Spengler
had contrasted the Western Faustian soul, whose prime symbol is dynamic
energy in limitless space,with the Magian soul of Babylonian-Semitic culture,
typified by algebra, mosaics and arabesques, the sacraments and scriptures of
the Jewish and Christian religions. Spengler described the Jews as a residual
fossil of the earlier Magian civilization, stranded in urban ghettos among the
settlements of medieval Europe. Landless, cynical and mercantile, the Jews
represented the completed stage of an earlier civilization quite alien to the
young Faustian culture of the West. It was not until Europe itself became intellectual
and cosmopolitan in the eighteenth century that Jewry felt itself at
home. Henceforth, the Jews contributed massively through commerce, art
and philosophy to the acceleration of modernity but in a way that was critical
and destructive of the native Western spirit.
Yockey adopted these Spenglerian ideas for his analysis in Imperium. Just
when the West should have been progressing toward the final stage of an empire,
Jewry represented a fateful form of “cultural distortion.”Mindful of their
past oppression, the Jews vengefully exploited the new cultural forms of
money thinking, rationalism, materialism, capitalism and democracy to destroy
the traditions of the West and the authority of its old elites.The Jews
henceforth remade the modern world in their own image and interest.Yockey
recounts the massive Jewish invasion of the United States from 1880 onward,
bringing some 5 to 7 million immigrants from Eastern Europe. “The American
Revolution of 1933”—the Democratic victory under Franklin D. Roosevelt—
marked the Jewish seizure of political power in America. By contrast,
German National Socialism represented “the European Revolution of 1933,”
which set the West back on course toward its proper fulfillment in a strong
empire. However, the defeat of the Axis by extra-European forces—America
and Russia—unleashed a new terror with war-crimes show trials. Yockey
gives an early version of Holocaust denial by claiming that the gas chambers
were faked to discredit the Nazis.15 Imperium is dedicated to “the hero of the
Second World War” (Adolf Hitler).
It is impossible to overestimate Yockey’s importance in early postwar Nazi
networks. In 1949 Yockey’s Mosleyite circle included Guy Chesham, Peter
Huxley-Blythe and Baroness von Pflugl, who financed the publication of Imperium.
In 1949 Yockey published The Proclamation of London as the manifesto
of his European Liberation Front, which opposed Washington and Tel
Aviv with a pan-European fascist order. By fusing anti-Semitism with anti-
Americanism, Yockey clearly identified the United States, rather than Russia,
as Europe’s main enemy. Thus, Yockey wanted to organize partisans against
the Allied occupying powers in Germany and take direct action against American
bases in England. Already in the late 1940s, Yockey had organized the
legal defense network of Rudolf Aschenauer, a leading figure in the German
neo-Nazi Socialist Reich Party and legal counsel for the Malmedy war criminals.
In October 1951 Yockey attended a fascist international conference in
Naples; the following month he and the Italian neo-fascist Egido Boschi visited
the Canadian fascist leader Adrien Arcand in Montreal.Yockey spent part
of 1953 writing anti-Semitic propaganda in Cairo, having links to Otto Skorzeny,
Hitler’s top commando leader, now a military adviser to the Egyptian
government. By the time of his death in June 1960 in San Francisco, Yockey’s
name was a byword in international Nazi intrigue.
Otto Skorzeny (12 June 1908 – 5 July 1975) was an SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) in the German Waffen-SS during World War II. After fighting on the Eastern Front, he was chosen as the field commander to carry out the rescue mission that freed the deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from captivity. Skorzeny was also the leader of Operation Greif, in which German soldiers were to infiltrate through enemy lines, using their opponents' language, uniforms, and customs. At the end of the war, Skorzeny was involved with the Werwolf guerrilla movement and the ODESSA network where he would serve as Spanish coordinator.
Although he was charged with breaching the 1907 Hague Convention in relation with Operation Greif, the Dachau Military Tribunal acquitted Skorzeny after the war. Skorzeny fled from his holding prison in 1948, first to France, and then to Spain.
A close ally of Yockey in New York was Frederick Charles Weiss, who was
also involved in the NRP. Born in Pforzheim, Germany, in 1886, Weiss had
graduated from the University of Heidelberg and the Sorbonne. He first visited
the United States in 1910 but returned to Germany,where he served as an
artillery captain in the First World War. The son of a wealthy German industrialist
whose fortune was lost by 1918,Weiss emigrated to America between
the wars and settled in New York. After the Second World War he was deeply
involved in Nazi and fascist intrigues on an international scale. According to
the West German authorities,Weiss was another important contact man for
renegade Nazis in Germany and overseas. He was said to correspond with
prominent Nazi leaders, including Dr. Werner Naumann and Dr. Ernst
Achenbach; General Heinz Guderian, Hitler’s famous Panzer tactician; Dr.
August Haussleiter, a prominent neo-Nazi politician in Bavaria; and Hans-
Ulrich Rudel, the famous Stuka pilot hero who shuttled between Germany
and Argentina, where he advised President Juan Perón. Weiss was closely
linked to the postwar Socialist Reich Party (SRP) in Germany, while his aide
H. Keith Thompson was instrumental in an American action committee to
defend SS General Otto Remer of the SRP after the party had been officially
banned. Thompson was also involved with several neo-Nazi presses in South
America, which printed literature for clandestine circulation in occupied
Germany.
Just as Yockey had earlier attempted to solicit a pro-Soviet, anti-American
line among the Mosleyites in London,Weiss also saw a Nazi future in an Eastern
alliance. Through the National Renaissance Party press and his own publishing
house, Le Blanc Publications, Weiss authored a stream of articles in
praise of Russia from 1955 onward, which bore the unmistakable stamp of
Yockey’s influence. Here he argued that the “deep, instinctive religious antipathy
of the Russian people toward Western economic forms” was a sign of
their national health. The Russian aversion to the rule of money and the triumph
of mercantile elites recalled the medieval European reaction to usury
and Jewish banking practices. The Russian Revolution was viewed by Weiss as
a violent reversal of Peter the Great’s attempted Westernization of the country.
Its only disadvantage was a Jewish leadership,which targeted the peasants,
craftsmen and believers, in his view the true representatives of the Russian
soul. However, the Revolution ultimately fanned the flames of Russian nationalism,
and under Stalin’s leadership nationalism fused with revolutionary
communism.
Madole accepted the views of Weiss and Yockey that the Soviet Union
had by 1939 liquidated the original “Jewish Bolshevik” leadership of the
Revolution in favor of Stalinism, which represented a strongly nationalist
form of socialism. The NRP thus regarded Stalinism as a nationalist form
of totalitarian rule and a valuable ally against the international Jewish
menace and plutocracy, headquartered in the United States. The pro-Soviet
stance of Yockey, Weiss and Madole was quite at variance with the
traditional American far-right endorsement of the Cold War and the fight
against world communism. In the same way, Madole admired various
Third World dictators, typically vilified on the right as communists, for
their staunch anti-imperialist hostility toward American capitalism and
Zionism. He supported Nasser’s “progressive nationalism” in Egypt and
was contemptuous of the old Arab ruling families, whom he regarded as
lackeys of U.S. imperialism. These sympathies gained the NRP support
and financial backing from Arab nationalists, including diplomats in the
United States. Abdul Mawgoud Hassan, press attaché of the Egyptian
United Nations delegation, spoke at an NRP meeting.20
A further ideological alliance of the NRP indicative of its “Third Way”
position involved the Greenshirts, a pro-Islamic nationalist movement.
Founded in the early 1960s by John Hassan, a Euro-American convert to
Islam, the Greenshirts were the action troops of the Ikhwan al-Kifah al-Islamiyya
(IKI), the Fighting Muslim Brotherhood. The Greenshirts wore a
uniform consisting of a forest green military shirt with dark red swallowtail
collar insignia, a dark-red short fez with chin strap, black trousers, boots and
belt. They met at Masjid Rabbil-Alamin, a Polish-Lithuanian mosque in
Brooklyn, where a large portrait of their blond-haired, blue-eyed Imam was
displayed. The inspiration of the Greenshirts was the Bosnian Muslim SS
which was incorporated in the Waffen-SS during World War II and endorsed
by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who resided in exile in Berlin. The Greenshirt
insignia was the upraised scintian used by the 13th Waffen-SS Gebirgsdivision.
John Hassan wrote a paper vindicating the Muslim SS formations
for their part in Hitler’s war machine. He believed that a new global Islamic
movement was an essential weapon to expose and confront Zionism in the
postwar world. Due to the overlap in their beliefs and international policy, the
Greenshirts and the NRP collaborated in the 1960s.
But it was in the field of doctrine that the NRP went beyond any ideology
encountered on the postwar far-right scene. Madole’s fascist philosophy was
an extraordinary mixture of notions involving a considerable debt to the
“Aryan” teachings of Hinduism and Theosophy. Madole probably first encountered
the teachings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), the
founder of modern Theosophy, through the world of science fiction and fantasy
literature. Originally founded at New York in 1875, the Theosophical Society
had survived charismatic Madame Blavatsky’s death and established
vigorous national societies in India, the United States, Britain and continental
Europe during the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the
twentieth. The success of the movement was largely due to the appeal of rediscovered
ancient wisdom based on Egyptian and Hindu traditions, attractive
to those individuals in the Anglo-American world who felt disturbed by
the growth of agnosticism and the challenges of modern science.
The key text of Blavatsky’s mature formulation of Theosophical doctrine
was written after the removal of the Theosophical Society to India in 1879
and her encounter with Hinduism and Buddhism. The Secret Doctrine (1888)
was presented as a commentary on a secret text called the “Stanzas of Dzyan,”
which she claimed to have seen in a subterranean Himalayan monastery.Her
weighty tome described the activities of God from the beginning of one period
of universal creation until its end, a cyclical process that continues indefinitely
over and over again. The first volume (Cosmogenesis) outlined the
scheme according to which the primal unity of an unmanifest divine being
differentiates itself into a multiformity of consciously evolving beings that
gradually fill the universe. All subsequent creation passed through seven
“rounds,” or evolutionary cycles. In the first round, the universe was characterized
by the predominance of fire, in the second by air, in the third by water,
in the fourth by earth, and in the others by ether. This sequence reflected the
cyclical fall of the universe from divine grace over the first four rounds and its
following redemption over the next three, before everything contracted once
again to the point of divine unity for the start of a major new cycle.
The second volume (Anthropogenesis) attempted to relate mankind to this
grandiose vision of the cosmos.Not only was humanity assigned an age of far
greater antiquity than that given by science, but it was also integrated into a
scheme of cosmic, physical and spiritual evolution. These theories were partly
derived from late-nineteenth-century scholarship concerning paleontology,
inasmuch as Blavatsky adopted a racial theory of human evolution. She extended
her cyclical doctrine of cosmic evolution with the assertion that each
round witnessed the rise and fall of seven consecutive root-races, which descended
on the scale of spiritual development from the first to the fourth race,
becoming increasingly enmeshed in the material world.Here the Gnostic notion
of a Fall from Light into Darkness was quite explicit. Evolution then ascended
through progressively superior root-races fromthe fifth to the seventh.
According to Blavatsky, the modern white race constituted the fifth rootrace
upon a planet that was passing through the fourth cosmic round, so that
an upward process of spiritual advance lay before mankind. She called this
fifth root-race the Aryan race and claimed that it had been preceded by the
fourth root-race of Atlanteans, which had largely perished in a flood that submerged
their mid-Atlantic continent. The three earlier races of the present
planetary round were proto-human, consisting of the first Astral root-race,
which arose in an invisible, imperishable and sacred land, and the second
Hyperborean root-race, which had dwelled on a vanished polar continent.
The third Lemurian root-race had flourished on the continent of Lemuria
that once lay in the Indian Ocean. It was probably due to this race’s position
at or near the nadir of the evolutionary racial cycle that Blavatsky charged the
Lemurians with racial mixing entailing a kind of Fall and the breeding of
monsters and inferior races.
It was Blavatsky’s mystical racism that appealed to Madole’s taste for the
fabulous landscapes of science fiction. Above all, Theosophical doctrine offered
him a ready-made account of Aryan superiority against the debris of
lower, unnatural half-breeds originating in racial defilement.Madole was also
drawn to Blavatsky’s account of her revelation. Throughout her account of
prehistory she frequently invoked the sacred authority of elite priesthoods
among the root-races of the past. She claimed she received her own initiation
into the secret doctrine from two exalted mahatmas, or masters, in Tibet who
had decided to impart their wisdom to Aryan mankind. After the Lemurians
had fallen into racial sin and iniquity, only a hierarchy of the elect remained
pure in spirit. This remnant became the Lemuro-Atlantean dynasty of priestkings
who dwelled on the fabulous island of Shamballah in the Gobi Desert.
These leaders were linked with Blavatsky’s own masters, who were the instructors
of the fifth Aryan root-race.This elitism and sacred authority
strongly attracted Madole, whose fascism was ultimately driven by religious
fanaticism.
Madole elaborated an NRP program combining the metaphysics and philosophy
of the Eastern Aryan tradition (Hinduism and Theosophy) with the
science and technology of the Western Aryan tradition (the white European
races) in order to create favorable circumstances for the emergence of the
“God Man”. From 1974 onward,Madole published his major occult-
political treatise, “The New Atlantis: A blueprint for an Aryan Garden of
Eden in North America,” as a series of articles in the National Renaissance
Bulletin. Drawing his inspiration from Theosophy, Madole claimed that the
Aryan race was of great antiquity and had everywhere been worshipped by
lower races as “White Gods.” The proposed system of NRP government was
based on the Hindu Laws of Manu, which sanctioned a caste system based on
racial divisions and a pyramidal social structure ruled over by the priestly
caste of brahmins. Below these stood the kshatriyas, a governing elite; then
came the vaisyas, the merchant class; and finally the sudras, or workers.
Madole regarded Vedic India as the archetypal model for Aryan statecraft.He
believed that it had derived from Atlantis and continued in Brahmanic India,
Pharaonic Egypt, Druidic Celtic Europe and Imperial Rome. He saw its revival
in the “modern, streamlined, superbly efficient totalitarian states as
manifested in National Socialist Germany, Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union.”
He regarded such hierarchy and racial segregation as a reflection of “Cosmic
Law” and a guarantee of the harmony between the Macrocosm (the universe)
and the microcosm (the body of man).
Madole regarded all valuable esoteric teachings as Aryan in origin. Plato
was credited with bringing the “Aryan Secret Doctrine” from Pharaonic Egypt
back to Greece. His anti-democratic teachings underpinned the imperial
achievements of Alexander the Great and ancient Rome. Madole quoted
Blavatsky to the effect that the Jewish Cabala derived from Aryan sources in
Central Asia. He further offered lengthy quotes from P. D. Ouspensky, Gurdjieff
’s successor in the teaching of the Fourth Way, and Eliphas Levi, the nineteenth-
century French occultist, to support the aristocratic principle and the
incompatibility of a society grounded in metaphysical wisdom with modern
notions of equality and democracy in the age of the masses.He also quoted a
diatribe of Aleister Crowley, the notorious English magician and occultist,
along Social Darwinist lines: “We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit.
. . . Nature’s way is to weed out the weak. . . .At present all the strong are being
damaged, and their progress hindered by the dead weight of the weak. . . . The
cant of democracy condemned. It is useless to pretend that men are equal.”
Madole’s slogan for the NRP state was even taken from the English Rosicrucian
novelist, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton: “No happiness without order, no
order without authority, no authority without unity.”
Madole maintained that only a combination of fascist institutions and esoteric
initiation could foster the development of the “God Man,” an advanced
Aryan man representing “a forward step in the evolution of the incarnated
egos now embodied within the human race.” This “New Adam” could come
only from the Aryan race, subject to a program of “selective breeding, cosmic
thinking, specialized training and Occult Initiation.” The ancient Vedic system
of philosopher-kings would govern the New Atlantis, and the inferior
racial elements of the masses would be eliminated by means of euthanasia
and eugenics.Madole stressed the anti-Semitic aspect of his beliefs by asserting
that “cosmic thinking” would replace “man-made Judaeo-Christian concepts
of Reality.” Cosmic Law, a combination of Hindu and Theosophical
tenets, was favorably contrasted with Semitic religious beliefs that “have
stressed the absurd argument that man’s role is to overcome and enslave Nature.”
With a withering glance at the shortcomings of modern liberal society,
Madole claimed that “chaotic democracy and anarchy reflect the Judaeo-
Christian rebellion against Nature.”
Madole’s hostility to the Judeo-Christian tradition involved a rejection of
Christianity itself.Whereas most right-wing American groups, from conservatives
to Nazis, identified with Christianity, Madole saw Christianity as a
Jewish cultural product. He denounced “the national heritage of religious
twaddle handed down from the Pilgrims and the Puritans” and claimed that
“the Semitic heresies of Judaism and Christianity [existed] as alien and disruptive
factors within the body of Aryan Europe.” He condemned Christian
humanism together with liberal democracy, egalitarianism and “the nonsensical
belief in anthropomorphic deities” as products of the Jewish mind
“foisted upon Aryan humanity at the point of Roman swords under the accursed
Christian Emperor Constantine.”Madole fulminated against “the ignorant
fanatics of the Christian clergy”who had destroyed the ancient Aryan
esoteric and scientific knowledge and thus ushered in the medieval Dark
Ages. The text was illustrated with Christians being thrown to the lions in the
Roman circus, over the caption: “The grim justice of Imperial Rome—death
to the Judaeo-Christian subverters of Aryan values, the foul criminals whose
later victory plunged Aryan Europe into the Dark Ages.”
Such open hostility toward Christianity led Madole and some of his NRP
followers to plumb the occult paths of paganism and satanism. Alongside
books on Theosophy, the NRP literature list included
Gerald Gardner’s The Meaning of Witchcraft,
Lewis Spence’s The History and Origins of Druidism,
Paul Carus’s History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil
and a number of books on runes.
In his quest for the pre-Christian, pagan sources of Aryan religion,
Madole made contact with satanist groups, and there was even some overlap
in membership between these and the NRP.
James Wagner, a former Security Echelon (SE) commander, recalls that relations between the NRP and the Church of Satan, founded in 1966 by Anton Szandor LaVey, were cordial.
Madole and LaVey frequently met at the NRP office and in the Warlock Bookshop
in New York. Madole is said to have erected a large satanic altar in his
apartment, and Wagner has confirmed that an image of Baphomet, the sabbatic
goat, hung there, and that Madole played LaVey’s recording of the Satanic
Mass at several NRP meetings. One NRP bulletin shows a picture of
Madole and an SE trooper with the high priest of the Temple of Baal and
some female acolytes at their temple. Seth Klippoth, the NRP Michigan State
organizer, formed the satanic Order of the Black Ram with some other NRP
members “to celebrate the ancient religious rites of the Aryan race.”29 These
contacts between Madole’s occult fascism and satanism anticipated the pagan
alliances of neo-Nazis and satanists in the 1990s.
Another leading member of the NRP, Eustace Clarence Mullins (b. 1923),
provides a further indication of the occult ideas current within the party.
Mullins had beome a devotee of Ezra Pound while the latter was interned in
an American mental hospital for his pro-Axis stance during the war. Besides
writing a book on Pound, Mullins authored an anti-Semitic history of the
Jews and an exposé of the Federal Reserve system, a favored topic among
right-wing conspiracy theorists. From his Chicago base, Mullins was associated
with two organizations in the 1950s concerned with the mystique of
Aryan eugenics: the Real Political Institute and the Institute for Bio-Politics.
It is possible that these research groups also reflected Yockey’s eccentric biological
political theories. Papers found at the time of his arrest included his
own essays on the principle of polarity in the psyche, a book on palmistry and
politics, and a bibliography of books on the “second body,” on reincarnation
and on cosmic rays.Although these esoteric topics relate to Yockey’s own interests,
they also give a hint of the mystical fascist concerns within the NRP.
But Madole did not simply indulge sectarian religious ideas as a fantasy of
a golden age in the distant past. Madole was an occult fascist. He wanted to
translate mankind and the world into the authoritarian utopia of a revived
Vedic hierarchy, employing violent and draconian means if necessary. The
sectarian religion of Theosophy, borrowings from Hinduism, paganism and
satanism, and mystical biological and eugenic ideas all served to explain and
justify his militant attack on the democratic and liberal institutions of the
modern world. Inspired by the Hindu stratification of society into castes,
Madole modeled his stormtroopers on the kshatriyas, the warriors forming
the second of the four main Hindu castes, subordinate only to the brahmin
priests.He regarded his activists as “cosmic warriors” who were to uphold the
order of the cosmos and ensure that the laws of race and eugenic selection became
the basis of the New Atlantis. These men were imbued with a fighting
spirit and were indoctrinated with classes, lectures and reading lists on fascism,
Theosophy and Vedic India.Wagner relates that stormtrooper instruction
included “unique mind training” and the discussion of Theosophical and
Indo-Aryan metaphysics.
These stormtroopers were initially known as the “Elite Guard,” acting as
street orderlies from 1954 onward to protect Madole’s regular street meetings.
In 1963 Madole renamed his warrior elite the Security Echelon and organized
a number of battalions.
ECHELON is a name used in global media and in popular culture to describe a signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection and analysis network operated on behalf of the five signatory states to the UKUSA Security Agreement
Given the high Jewish proportion of the population
in New York, Madole’s NRP rallies represented a unique provocation with
their strident Aryan zealotry and vicious anti-Semitism. As one of the first
postwar fascist parties, the NRP was targeted for counterdemonstrations by
communist and Jewish organizations in the city. There was a strange courage
in Madole’s tireless witness to his doctrines, with racial diatribes against the
Jews and blacks in the heart of a multiracial and Jewish metropolis. Running
street battles inevitably ensued between the SE units and the large masses of
protesters. This emnity and tension served to heighten the self-regard of
Madole’s tough squad as an elite of cosmic warriors fighting the inferiors of a
degraded world.
One of the first and most notorious of the SE/NRP actions occurred on 25
May 1963, when the party held a rally in Yorkville,New York, a town that had
seen vigorous prewar fascist activity on the part of the German-American
Bund, the Christian Front and Kurt Mertig’s Citizens Protective League. The
rally drew a crowd of four thousand, including a counterdemonstration of a
thousand Jews organized by the Jewish War Veterans. A massive riot began in
the afternoon and continued into the evening after police lines failed to contain
the Jewish protest and the SE men went into action. Madole used to
counter-demonstrate with force whenever the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE) organized pickets at racially exclusive restaurants and other institutions
during the civil rights campaign of the early 1960s. Another favored location
for SE picket action was Astoria,New York, where the NRP formations
frequently engaged the Maoists of the Progressive Labor Party in the years between
1973 and 1975. In 1974, the NRP ran a picket of the Israeli El Al Airlines
office on Rockefeller Plaza in downtown Manhattan, which brought the
expected news coverage. Madole won continuous publicity for the NRP as a
result of the many court cases brought against the party for affray, illegal solicitation
of donations and the contested use of public halls.
This strategy of militant confrontation was extended by Madole’s adroit
manipulation of the media. Madole and his top officers successfully sought
radio and TV slots, such as the Pennsylvania cable broadcast “Interview with
a Fascist,” where Madole appeared on the screen flanked by uniformed SE
troopers. In 1975 the NRP applied to hold a meeting at the Bicentennial Auditorium
in Virginia. The prospect of a fascist party dignifying its program
and views by association with a prestigious venue at a time of national celebrations
swiftly mobilized a reaction among black, Jewish and liberal interest
groups. The local Anti-Defamation League and the Black Urban League
threatened violence. Black members of the Bicentennial Commission and
Virginia State Senator Leroy solemnly promised to resign if permission were
granted to the NRP. The ensuing furor only served to create further publicity
for the party which was, after all, allowed to hold its meeting in the auditorium.
Madole seldom appeared without a show of strength from the Security
Echelon. The stormtroopers wore black caps, gray shirts with lightning-bolt
armbands and black trousers; black jackets with epaulettes, collar insignia,
medals and badges of rank were worn by senior officers. These strong, wellbuilt
uniformed men with short haircuts and of neat appearance created an
uncanny impression and a threatening martial presence. As Madole ran
through his racial invective against the Jews, blacks and other supposed inferiors,
the Security Echelon exuded a sinister, brooding aura, a glimpse of the
fearful fascist regime that awaited onlookers if ever the New Atlantis, with its
neo-Vedic hierarchy of racial castes, were to be established on the ruins of a
multiracial America.
Madole died of cancer at the age of fifty-one on 6 May 1979, and the NRP
barely survived its leader. His mother, Grace, attempted to keep the movement
alive by encouraging other leaders. Andrej Lisanik, a tough SE commander
who had earlier served as an officer in the wartime Czech Army, assumed
the leadership, but he was killed by a mugger. As he was carrying the
bulk of the NRP records with him in his car at the time, these were scattered
and lost. By 1980 the NRP was defunct.
The NRP provides an early postwar example of a fascist organization that
used sectarian religious ideas to elaborate a political theology of Aryan renaissance.
Its adaptation of Theosophy for a fascist ideology was by no means
original or unique. Even before the First World War, occult-racist völkisch
sects in Austria and Germany had quarried the ideas of Theosophy for the
Aryo-Germanic cult of Ariosophy.Notions of elite priesthoods, secret gnosis,
a prehistoric golden age, the conspiracy of demonic racial inferiors and millennial
prophecies of Aryan salvation all occur in the writings of Guido von
List (1848–1919) and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874–1954) and their followers.
Their ideas and symbols filtered through to several anti-Semitic and
nationalist groups in late Wilhelmian Germany, from which the early Nazi
Party emerged in Munich after the war. At least two Ariosophists were closely
involved with Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler in the 1930s, contributing to
his projects in Germanic prehistory, SS order ceremonial and his visionary
plans for the Greater Germanic Reich in the third millennium.38
The attraction of Theosophy for Madole and the Ariosophists right up to
the present lies in its eclecticism with respect to exotic religion, mythology
and esoteric lore. The sources of Aryan and Germanic belief, customs and
identity, so germane to nationalist thought, are thus placed within a universal
and non-Christian perspective upon the cosmos, the origins of mankind and
the races. Given the neopagan revivalism and frequent antipathy toward
Christianity among fascists, Theosophy can offer such individuals a scheme
of religious belief that ignores Christianity in favor of a mixture of mythical
traditions and new scientific ideas from contemporary scholarship in anthropology,
etymology, ancient history and comparative religion.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Theosophy itself tended to
be associated with liberal and emancipatory causes by its leaders in Britain
and India.Here one recalls Helena Blavatsky’s support of Garibaldi’s struggle
in Italy and Annie Besant’s champiomship of the Indian National Congress.
However, the very structure of Theosophical beliefs can lend themselves to illiberal
adoption. The implicit authority of the hidden mahatmas from a
Lemuro-Atlantean dynasty with superhuman wisdom is easily transmogrified
by racist enthusiasts into a new hierarchical social order based on the
mystique of the blood.
And the notion of an occult gnosis in Blavatskyan
Theosophy, together with the charge that alien (Christian) beliefs have obscured
this spiritual heritage, also fits the need to ascribe a prehistoric pedigree
to modern racial nationalism.
A recent example of the neo-fascist potential in Theosophy is provided by the Nouvelle Acropole movement of Jorge Angel Livraga (b. 1930), the charismatic Argentinian Theosophist who by the
1980s had built up an ardent youth following in more than thirty countries.The structure, organization and symbolism of the Nouvelle Acropole is clearly indebted to fascist models.
The Theosophical inspiration of James Madole and the National Renaissance
Party ably demonstrates the cultic and pseudoreligious underpinnings
of a marginal postwar fascist movement. For a minute sect to uphold disgraced
and abhorrent notions of anti-Semitism and Aryan supremacy in the
wake of the recent defeat of the Axis powers was both extremist and radical;
to persist in holding rallies and street protests at the heart of cosmopolitan
New York in support of their discredited ideas required a racism that was religious
in inspiration. The medley of Theosophy, popularized Vedic Hinduism,
hostility toward Christianity and the neopagan posturing of satanism
provided a composite doctrine of racial superiority. Thus armed, believers
could vilify the Jews, blacks and other colored races while comforting themselves
that they were in the militant vanguard of a powerful force for racial
revolution and the coming victory of the Aryans in a fascist utopia.
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