With
the publication of both “World War
Cthulhu” and “Achtung! Cthulhu”,
the “Call of Cthulhu” gaming range
seems to be progressing quite nicely. The milieu
for both of these publications is one that is rife with possibilities and there
is a surprising body of literature which can be used to support the telling of
Lovecraftian tales. In this post, we will examine the rise of the occult
background of Nazism and explore its roots in late Nineteenth Century weltschmerz.
Origins
At
the end of the Nineteenth Century and into the Twentieth, there was a general
malaise throughout Europe – a want of purpose and a looking-back to the past
spread throughout society. People wanted to re-connect to their history and
their culture and writers began to explore the early origins of their societies.
At the same time, the rising pre-eminence of both Theosophy and Spiritualism
gave these explorations a spiritual quality. Questions of ethnic purity were
also on people’s minds, as the spread of eugenics began to impact on the
thinking and expounding of national health policies.
After
the Great War, Germany lost much of its economic power. In China, Germans
became almost stateless, one step up from the White Russians and Russian Jews
who fled to the country after the Bolshevik Revolution. In response, the power
brokers of the German economy came together in fraternal organisations to
support each other and help move the country back on track. These societies
were riddled with esoteric thought, steeped in Rosicrucianism and hearkening
back to ancient days of Teutonic authority. Most prominent, if also most
shadowy, was the Thule Society whose goal was to return Germany to the heady
days of an ancient (and fictional) northern empire. German aristocrats flocked
to become associated with such groups and “knightly” activities such as
horse-riding and fencing came to the fore.
A
major feature of this hothoused cluster-thinking were the youth societies that
proliferated throughout Europe. In Britain, this expressed itself in various
youth hiking groups - the best known of which was the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift
- who sought physical and mental strengthening, along with a spiritual
re-connexion to the Earth, in their outdoorsy, craft-focussed activities. In
northern Europe this led to young people engaging in naturist retreats,
promoting ideas of physical and spiritual perfection. In the UK, these groups
eventually passed from favour to be replaced by such organisations as the Scouts,
Girl Guides and Venturers; in Germany, the naturists were transformed more
ominously into the Hitlerjugend and the Hitlermadchen.
With
such impressionable musing taking place, the period was ripe for various
thinkers to stand forth and begin to mould the minds behind them. In Europe
many of these authors were defined as völkisch
thinkers, writers who strove to define the connexions between people and the
land they occupied. These writers picked up the notions of Arthur de Gobineau
from his 1853-55 work An Essay on the
Inequality of the Human Races and the quasi-spiritual ramblings of Mme.
Blavatsky to arrive at a notion that the Aryan race was somehow superior to
other human beings and that, of the Aryans, the Nordics and Teutonics were the highest
expression of Aryan perfection. Many of these writers declared that the world
in some way ‘belonged’ to the Aryans, or that the race would inherit the planet
in due course. The flip-side of all this rubbish was, of course, the notion
that the other “inferior” races were evilly encroaching upon the world and that
they would relish the opportunity to be placed firmly beneath the Aryan
boot-heel where they were meant to be.
Of
course, any cursory examination of the material by a rational human being sees
through the tissue-thin web of lies which this theory represents; however, this
was another time and one primed to be influenced by corrupt thinking. As we
forge ahead, we will see a repeated pattern here: many völkisch experts tended to invent theories and then cherry-pick
facts that supported their cases, while rejecting anything that threatened to
collapse their visions with inconvenient details. It’s interesting to note that
such thinking prevails nowadays, especially in the notions of climate change
deniers.
Such
events as the Great War and the
resulting punitive economic sanctions placed upon Germany by the League of
Nations and the dissipation and ennui
of the Weimar Republic meant that many individuals were seeking more out of
life and especially something of a spiritually nourishing nature. Spiritualism
made great leaps forward at this time (as it had in America after the American Civil War) as did the fortunes
of many esoteric purveyors of snake-oil, Aleister Crowley among them. Much of
the spiritual and economic depression felt by the German peoples was felt to be
the fault of other nations, as represented by the Treaty of Versailles, and suddenly the “blood and soil” rhetoric of
the völkisch mystics with their vague
notions of a grand destiny began to play to an enthusiastic audience.
In
terms of literature, many works revealing facets of this thinking were
circulating at this time and had established a bedrock upon which the later
horrors of World War Two would be built. These ‘precursor’ authors were often
taken out of context and would have been horrified at the extra meaning which
had been read into their work. Some of these may be surprising to readers
today.
Precursors
H.P. Blavatsky: The Secret Doctrine and The Book of Dzyan
“An Archaic Manuscript – a
collection of palm leaves made impermeable to water, fire and air, by some
specific unknown process – is before the writer’s eye...”
-‘Proem’, The
Book of Dzyan, Helena Blavatsky
Central
to Theosophy is the belief that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky encountered a group
of mystical types in the wilds of Tibet who allowed her to peruse a manuscript
of esoteric writings which she referred to as The Book of Dzyan. Her remembrance of this text and its
transliteration from “senzar” to other languages is the core of her magnum opus, a wandering and
all-but-impenetrable pile of verbiage known as The Secret Doctrine. Followed up later by another waste of paper
called Isis Unveiled, few but the
most devoted bothered to make inroads into its depths. The Book of Dzyan, however, contains the rudiments of her
hashish-blurred thesis and enumerates a theory of spiritual evolution which –
in that it mentions an “Aryan race” – grafted nicely onto the philosophy which
the Nazis were compiling.
“The
impression we get, then, is that the wording of the stanzas in the Stanzas
of Dzyan is not simply a translation of
some set text in a language called Senzar, but is rather a restatement for
modern students of such parts of the stanzas as Blavatsky herself understood,
drawing upon such sources as she had available to make the ideas more
comprehensible. That is, the Stanzas of Dzyan, as we have them, are not a fixed sacred text, but an approximation.
The version we have is less a translation than a paraphrase. That difference is
important for our understanding of what kind of language Senzar is.”
-John
Algeo, “Senzar - The Mystery of the Mystery
Language, Part 1”
HPL
heard about the Theosophists and their texts and he thought that The Book of Dzyan sounded just kooky
enough to rate a mention in one of his stories, thus forever immortalising it
as a Mythos Tome. Nevertheless, it is a real text and the cornerstone of a
faith that, while diminished in the modern world, still lingers. Lovecraft’s
take on it though, stands upon the notion that La Blavatsky saw something,
and that that book is a far more potent work than her drug-addled
mis-rememberings of it. This notion is key to incorporating the book into a “Call of Cthulhu” campaign. The original
Book of Dzyan (pronounced ‘dzhahn’)
is supposed to be a translation from the Atlantean senzar tongue into the
Tibetan idiom of a work detailing the evolution – both physical and spiritual –
of the pre-human, human and other races dwelling upon the Earth. The existence
of an anonymous English translation with no known publication details implies
that Blavatsky was probably not the only spiritual seeker to have encountered
the text; it is highly likely that there are Chinese versions, or partial
translations, in existence as well.
English; translator
unknown; mid- to late Nineteenth Century; Sanity loss: 1d3/1d6; Cthulhu Mythos
+9 percentiles; average 14 weeks to study and comprehend
Spells: “Dreams of the Mother-water” (Contact Deity: Cthulhu); “Call Forth the
Self-Born” (Summon/Bind Dark Young);
“Call Forth the Egg-Born” (Summon/Bind
Byakhee); “Call Forth the Chhaya” (Summon/Bind
Dimensional Shambler)
Tibetan (Lhasa / Ü-Tsang
dialect), written in the phonetic Devanagari script; transliterator unknown;
date unknown; Sanity loss: 1d4/1d8; Cthulhu Mythos +9 percentiles; average 40
weeks to study and comprehend
Spells: “Dreams of the Mother-water” (Contact Deity: Cthulhu); “Call Forth the
Self-Born” (Summon/Bind Dark Young);
“Call Forth the Egg-Born” (Summon/Bind
Byakhee); “Call Forth the Chhaya” (Summon/Bind
Dimensional Shambler)
Chinese; translator
unknown; date unknown; Sanity loss: 1d4/1d8; Cthulhu Mythos +9 percentiles;
average 30 weeks to study and comprehend
Spells: “Dreams of the Mother-water” (Contact Deity: Cthulhu); “Call Forth the
Self-Born” (Summon/Bind Dark Young);
“Call Forth the Egg-Born” (Summon/Bind
Byakhee); “Call Forth the Chhaya” (Summon/Bind
Dimensional Shambler)
Chinese, partial
translation; translator unknown; date unknown; Sanity loss: 1d2/1d4; Cthulhu
Mythos +1d6 percentiles; average 12 weeks to study and comprehend
Spells: “Dreams of the Mother-water” (Contact Deity: Cthulhu); plus one of the
following: “Call Forth the Self-Born” (Summon/Bind
Dark Young); “Call Forth the Egg-Born” (Summon/Bind
Byakhee); “Call Forth the Chhaya” (Summon/Bind
Dimensional Shambler)
*****
Edward Bulwer-Lytton: Zanoni and The Coming Race
The
English author Bulwer-Lytton is probably the most surprising addition to those
authors who set the stage for Nazi occultism. Neither of these two works of
fiction was intended to be anything other than an idle entertainment and
Bulwer-Lytton would probably have been mortified to learn of the impact that
his two potboilers had upon world events.
Zanoni is best described as an occult romance.
It involves the eponymous Zanoni, a Chaldean mage with the power of immortality.
Everything is going swimmingly for the ancient mage until he encounters an
Italian opera singer who threatens his well-being: Zanoni’s immortality, it
turns out, is predicated upon the fact that he never fall in love with another
human being. A rival to his affections for the woman is a hesitant Englishman
who is spurred to compete with the Chaldean, who rises to the bait despite
himself. In the end the rival decides against pursuing the object of his
lukewarm affections but by then the ancient wizard has fallen in love and dies.
The
book is presented by Bulwer-Lytton as a translation of an ancient text
discovered in a Rosicrucian library which he went to in order to discover more
about the movement. He declares that the material has been updated for a more
modern audience but is accurate in its essentials. Such a trope was a mainstay
of the literature of the period, designed to lend some gravitas to the
following text, but many people thought that Bulwer-Lytton was being truthful
and so, took him at face value. It took very little effort for völkisch thinkers to join this book with
notions of Christian Rosenkreuz and come up with ‘evidence’ of an entrenched
tradition of European magical thinking.
To
have written a book entirely able to suck in the credulous once could be called
luck; to do it twice must take some kind of skill.
The Coming Race is a book by Edward Bulwer-Lytton which
fits in with the Hollow Earth tradition of novels. It tells of an explorer who,
with his friend, descends into a mineshaft after an earthquake to assess the
damage to the facility. Inevitably, there’s an aftershock, a rope breaks, and
the friend goes falling headlong to his death while our narrator is stranded,
miles beneath the surface. Thanks to the carcase of his buddy, strange beings
from within the Earth send a search party upwards and encounter our hero,
taking him home with them to nurse back to health.
The
rest is a pretty bog-standard Nineteenth Century weird novel; however, a
feature of the book is a strange energy which the subterraneans use called
“vril”. Bulwer-Lytton describes it as a “higher form of electricity”, but other
readers thought it was something else. Those readers included nascent Nazis who
had read elsewhere about Germanic druids levelling Roman enemy forces with
deadly powers drawn up from the Earth. Soon, vril had fallen into common
parlance, meaning an intangible substance which can heal and revivify the body.
Later
writers have cited the existence of so-called “Vril Societies”, gatherings of
scientific personages who dedicated their spare time to finding and codifying
whatever vril was. One group, the Berlin-based Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft
founded in 1925, released a 60-page publication entitled “Vril – Die Kosmische Urkraft” (“Vril
– the Cosmic Elementary Power”) and written pseudonymously by “Johannes
Taufer” for the group. Whether this, or any other, Vril Society ever really
existed in a serious form is debatable, however other spiritual types such as
Helena Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner and William Scott-Elliott – card-carrying
Theosophists (or its derivatives) all – believed that Bulwer-Lytton’s work was
based – in part – on some essential esoteric truth. This was enough to get
Hitler sending troops to the Poles to find entryways into the Hollow Earth and
to find a way to harness vril-power for the Third Reich.
A
tentpole of one of the Hollow Earth theories is that the world on which we live
is actually floating inside an enormous hollow sphere punctured with tiny holes
that fool us into thinking that we’re seeing stars. At one point in the War,
German researchers theorised that they could bounce radio waves off this outer
shell and use them to locate Allied shipping, or disseminate propaganda. Hitler
shut them down in annoyance.
And,
if you think that this might be the first time you’ve ever heard of vril, think
again. Back in the day, some British manufacturers of a beef extract product
wanted to name it after something which folks would associate with health and
nourishment. They conflated the word “bovine” with the word “vril” to come up
with Bovril.
*****
Houston Stewart Chamberlain:
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
This
work is a little less fanciful. Houston Stewart Chamberlain was an English
writer and Germanophile. He is best known for having married Richard Wagner’s
daughter. He was part of Hitler’s coterie of friends and the Fuhrer was known
to have been at his side when he was on his deathbed.
Chamberlain
was a full-throated adherent to de Gobineau’s theories of racial stratification
and believed that Aryan supremacy would dictate the future of the planet. He
launched his theories in 1899 with Die
Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, which was later published in
English in London by John Lane Ltd. as The
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century in 1911. The book details all of
Chamberlain’s poisonous little theories about how the Teutonic race is a power for good in Europe while the Semitic races are essentially evil. Surprisingly –
or maybe only so from our current perspective – it was greeted warmly by
academics across the planet and Chamberlain was thought of as a force with
which to be reckoned by luminaries such as Bertrand Russell, no less. Theodore
Roosevelt, on the other hand, declared that he felt Chamberlain was somewhat
unnecessarily biased in his views.
*****
Guido “von” List: Das Geheimnis der Runen (“The Secret of the Runes”)
Another
völkisch philosopher who was, in
fact, little more than a snake-oil salesman. The clue is in the “von” which he
added to his name, a signifier to the unaware that he descended from an
aristocratic family, when the truth was something quite different. Guido Karl
Anton List was born in Austria in 1848 and died in Berlin in 1919 after
incorrectly prophesying that Germany would win World War One. He began his
adult life as a rower, hiker and sketch artist before turning to journalism and
writing florid articles about the wholesomeness of country life for various völkisch newspapers. He proposed that
many country traditions and folk rituals were holdovers from ancient lifestyles
fallen into disuse and largely forgotten. At some point he got bitten by the
Theosophist bug and began to compile his own version of it called “Ariosophy”,
a form of Theosophy dedicated to the Aryan restoration and the worship of the
Teutonic god, Wotan.
Like
many of the völkisch prophets, List
was prone to falling into visions while out walking about the countryside; he
often saw imaginary vistas of Teutonic scenes and believed that they were
atavistic re-tellings from his past lives as a conquering Teuton. Because many
of these visions took place while he was out walking amongst ruins and notable
geographic features, he began to write about these places and compiled a
personal geography which he published as Deutsch
Mythologische Landschaftsbilder (“German
Mythological Landscapes”). In short order he became the ‘go-to’ guy for all
things völkisch, even having a
society of fellow-travellers named after him.
A
feature of List’s Ariosophy was a focus on the use of Runes and an associated
philosophy which he named Armanen. His best-known work is Das Geheimnis der Runen (“Secret
of the Runes”) which details the workings of the Armanen Futhark, or the
rune set which he compiled; his personal philosophy which he co-ordinated
between the years 1902 and 1908; and his vision for the future Germany under
his Wotanic beliefs. This book became a core text for members of the SS who
were all required to study rune lore as part of their training.
Fortunately
for List, he never saw the impact his teachings had upon Germany in World War
Two. Had he been alive he probably would have skated along like the best of
modern Republicans, not committing himself to Hitlers’ madness but not severing
ties either, pulling in personal profit until the moment came to fish or cut
bait.
*****
Friedrich Nietzsche: Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle
und Keinen (“Thus Spake Zarathustra:
a Book for Everyone and No-one”)
Interestingly,
one of the most influential writers to lend inspiration to the Third Reich was
a guy who hated autocratic government and for whom the notion of anti-Semitism
made him physically ill. Nietzsche often gets lumped in to the whole Nazi
rigmarole, but this only springs from a surface reading of his thinking and
doesn’t quite grasp the point. Unfortunately, nut-bars who adopt philosophers
for their raisons d’êtres usually
don’t make it all the way to the fine print. The error happened when völkisch notions of blonde and blue-eyed perfect physical specimens
of Teutonic manhood got confused with Nietzsche’s ideas about the “Superman”.
Hitler & Co. often liked to think of themselves as Übermensch when, for the most part, they were anything but.
Nietzsche’s
book, written between 1883 and 1885, is a novel in four parts which expounds
his philosophical ideas as presented in an earlier book entitled The Gay Science. The main ideas are the
notion of humankind as the bridge between animals and the “overman”, a
self-mastered individual who has achieved their full power; the idea that
humans are destined to repeat their life experiences over and over and should
embrace this fate, the alternative being to fall victim to fear and resentment
rather than embracing existence; and the idea of humanity as struggling to make
nature conform to their will in order to achieve a better world and their place
within it, rather than simply languishing for pleasure, happiness or
procreation. Along with these notions is a recurring criticism of Christianity
as a weakener and distracter of human beings and an obstacle on the path to
achieving the Superman.
Interestingly,
like the völkisch writers, Nietzsche
was compelled to write Also Sprach
Zarathustra after encountering a huge pyramidal rock by an alpine lake in
Switzerland which caused him to have a vision. Unlike, the other völkisch writers, his ideas were a
little more palatable. A little bit. Many German soldiers took copies of the
book into the trenches with them during World War One and took comfort in its
teachings; again, perhaps they weren’t reading it as deeply as they could have.
*****
The
Oera Linda Book
Back
to Froot-Loop territory.
The
Oera Linda Book is an unpublished
manuscript purporting to be an overview of historical, mythological and
religious themes across the period 2194 BC and 803 AD. It is written in a form
of Old Frisian and was first identified in the 1860s. A Dutch translation was
produced by Jan Gerhardus Ottema in 1872 who proclaimed the work genuine;
however, nine years and some intense academic debate later, the work was
denounced as a fraud. The author’s identity is unknown and the intent behind
writing the text is unclear – it has been cited as a deliberate hoax, a parody
of some other work, an exercise in linguistics, or a poetic fantasy.
In
1922, völkisch philologist Herman
Wirth took up the manuscript once more and declared it – despite evidence to
the contrary – the genuine article. In 1933, he issued a printed version of it
entitled Die Ura Linda Chronik and
championed it as the “Nordic Bible”. Such was the interest generated for the
book – Heinrich Himmler openly declared himself an admirer of the work, to the
extent that it became known as “Himmler’s Bible” – that a panel discussion was
convened in 1934 to discuss the book’s authenticity. Wirth and his supporters
were opposed by Alfred Rosenberg and his clique, with the result that the Oera Linda Book was once more consigned
to the status of fake. Someone finally noticed the Nineteenth Century watermark
on the paper.
As
a result of all the scholarly arguing, the Ahnenerbe, the Nazi agency for
researching the Teutonic history of Germany, was created and it treated all
examples of “esoteric Nordicism” such as this work, with deep suspicion.
However,
seen through a Mythos lens, as with the Book
of Dzyan, might there be something of value to the metaphysical Mythos
practitioner in this text? It’s a Mythos mainstay that information can be
transmitted across time and space to the minds of dreamers or others with a
sensitive predisposition to such material (lunatics, for example) and so, the
presence of a contemporary watermark is no barrier to useful information.
Although dismissed by the “academic” wing of the Nazi Party, there were hidden
agendas at work, seeing Herman Wirth as a threat to the philosophical
foundation of the Third Reich and wanting him ousted. Could Rosenberg have
tossed out the baby with the bathwater?
*****
Wilhelm Richard Wagner
It’s
impossible to discuss mystical Nazism without mentioning Wagner. His music is
steeped in Teutonic tradition and the theories of Rosicrucianism and the manner
of performing his works owes a lot to ritual magic. Hitler liked Wagner’s tunes
and his oeuvre was required listening
throughout the Third Reich, although many leading figures in the Nazi party
resented being forced to endure performances. Once again, the central figure of
tall, manly heroes is the feature which caught the Nazi imagination, and Hitler
declared in 1923 that Wagner’s music embodied the “heroic Teutonic nature”.
Many
commentators on ritual magic feel that the leaders of the Third Reich were
intuitive ritual magicians, capable of structuring events around them in order
to alter reality according to their will. If this is the case, then surely
Wagner is the wellspring for this type of magic theatricality. Wagner’s music
is a type of “total theatre” where even the music is often secondary to the
drama. Unusually for the production of opera, Wagner wrote both the libretti and the music for his works and
even built auditoria specifically for their performance. The most famous of
these is in Bayreuth, where the annual Bayreuth Festival holds performances of
Wagner’s works. His obsessive attention to detail even went so far as to hold
performances only at certain times of year and in particular places. Unfortunately
for him, his patronage, in the form of the Bavarian mad King Ludwig, dried up
and he spent the last years of his life dodging political enemies, scorned
lovers and creditors.
Wagner’s
efforts have been forever tainted by his association with Nazism. His
anti-Semitism and fetishistic Teutonic nationalism are hallmarks of all his
work and have cast him beyond the pale for good.
*****
Nazi völkisch
works
After
the ascension of the Nazis to power, völkisch
sentiment still managed to make itself known. Himmler, especially, was
slavishly devoted to mysticism and the occult and tried to inject it into his
notions of the Third Reich while – arguably – Hitler himself had moved beyond
such philosophical cant. After all, it’s clear that Hitler had no inclination
for reading and appears to have preferred soppy romances rather than anything of
intellectual rigour.
Wilhelm Teudt: Germanische Heiligtümer (“Ancient German Sanctuaries”)
Teudt
(1860-1942) was a German priest and an untrained völkisch archaeologist who identified a range of prehistoric and
geological structures throughout Germany, crediting their existence to an
ancient pre-Roman German civilisation. During the 1920s he discovered that he
had a paranormal ability to discover pagan Germanic locations, able to see
visions of past events at various locales around Germany. He declared that the
strange rocky outcrops of Externsteine near Detmold, were an ancient planetary
observatory along the lines of Stonehenge until destroyed by Charlemagne.
Promoted to the head of “Germanic Archaeology” during the War, he set about
“restoring” the site, tearing up miles of tram-tracks and pulling down the
hotels that served the tourist trade in the area. He even went so far as to
build a sacred grove nearby in honour of his pagan, Saxon forebears whose conversion
to Christianity he described (ironically) as cultural genocide.
Teudt’s
book on pagan sites in Germany was rejected by academics almost before it came
off the press in 1929. However, like List’s book on runes, it still has some
cachet amongst New Age circles even today.
*****
Otto Wilhelm Rahn: Kreuzzug gegen den Gral (“Crusade Towards the Grail”)
“A
man has to eat. What was I supposed to do? Turn Himmler down?”
-Otto Rahn
Rahn
(1904-1939) studied medieval history at the University of Giessen where he was
led to discover the story of the Cathars in Southern France. He became obsessed
with the Albigensian Crusade and infused his thinking about the affair with his
own long-held notions of Rosicruscian imagery (derived from Wolfram von
Eschenbach’s Parzival) and his own conversion to Ariosophy. He came to believe that the Cathar fortress of
Montsegur in the Pyrenees was the last resting place of the Holy Grail.
After
writing his book - quickly followed by another on the same topic, Luzifers Hofgesind or Lucifer’s Court - he was contacted by
Himmler and inducted into the SS as an Obersturmführer in order to conduct
further archaeological research in the Pyrenees. His research led him to many
other places around the world, including Italy and Iceland, and his journeys
annoyed Himmler who felt he was not focussing his efforts to their best
advantage. It is said that the character of Indiana Jones was loosely based
upon the adventures of Otto Rahn.
Having
fallen from favour, Rahn was assigned to guard duty at Dachau where, as an
openly gay man, he became involved in a sexual misadventure while drunk and was
punished. Consequently, he resigned his commission and left the SS. Thereafter,
he was pursued by the Gestapo who – when they caught up with him – suggested
that he commit suicide and save everybody a lot of trouble. Thereafter he
disappeared, and his body was found frozen on the side of a Tyrolean mountain
in Austria.
*****
Dr. H.H. Kritzinger: Mysteries of the Sun and the Soul
Written
in 1922, Kritzinger’s book is a wide-ranging overview of many occult phenomena
including spiritualism, hypnosis, dowsing, telekinesis, strange
materialisations and hermeticism. However, it is a section on the topic of
prophecy that brought the work fame in the Third Reich.
The
book deals with the writings of Nostradamaus and highlights a quatrain that
seems to indicate a great trouble falling upon Britain in 1939 in tandem with
matters in Poland. Goebbels’s wife was reading the book in bed shortly after the
War began and immediately woke her husband to show him the relevant passage. It
was clear that the verse could be interpreted as prophesying the British
declaration of war on Germany after the annexing of Poland. Shortly thereafter,
Goebbels was sent three copies of the book by other readers with the same section underlined.
Goebbels
was not inclined to believe that Nostradamus had predicted anything, but he saw
that his writings could be twisted to refer to almost any event and so
contacted Kritzinger to re-draft the existing prophecies, even inventing new
ones, to shatter the morale of British troops. The endeavour proved quite
lucrative; however, the Brits had also plundered Nostradamus for their own
propaganda purposes and the exercise kind of levelled out.
*****
Alfred Rosenberg: Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (“The Myth of the Twentieth Century”)
“…The
myth of blood which, under the sign of the swastika, unchains the racial
world-revolution. It is the awakening of the race soul which, after long sleep,
ends the race chaos.”
-Alfred Rosenberg
Since
Hitler wasn’t really up to the rigours of creating an ideology for the Third
Reich, he devolved responsibility for this to Alfred Rosenberg, who took to it
like a duck to water. Having penned this book in 1930 as an ideological sequel
to Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Rosenberg was soon
editing the Nazi newspaper the Völkischer
Beobachter and adjudicating the operations of the Ahnenerbe.
Rosenberg’s
book discusses the creation of the human races as a cascading hierarchy of
virtuous nobility with the Aryan peoples on top. He rejects absolutely the
notion that humanity is homogeneous species and claims that each race has its
own soul of which each is but a poor reflection of the Aryan ideal. Although
Hitler awarded Rosenberg the first State Prize for Art and Science for the work
- stating that he had “laid the firm foundation for an understanding of the
ideological bases of National Socialism” – in private he said “I must insist
that Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century
is not to be taken as an expression of the official doctrine of the party.” It
remains, along with Mein Kampf, as “one
of the two great unread bestsellers of the Third Reich”.
*****
Otto Sigfrid Reuter: Das Rätsel der Edda und der Arische Urglaube (“Riddle of the Edda and the Ancient Religion of the Aryans”)
Otto
Reuter was one of the two founders of Nazi Archaeology, the other being
Dutchman Herman Wirth, later replaced by Karl Maria Willigut and Wilhelm Teudt. He was a firm
believer in Ariosophy and helped found two different Aryan-Christian orders in
his lifetime – the Deutschglaubige
Gemeinschaft (in 1911) and the Germanische
Glaubensgemeinschaft (1912) - both of which restricted membership to “true
Aryans" and which tried to purge Christian dogma of its "Jewish influences", thus
making it more palatable for Germans. To this end he published his bestselling Sigfrid oder Christus? Ein Kampfruf (“Sigfrid or Christ? A Battle Cry”)
outlining his methods.
In
1934, he published a völkisch work
entitled Germanische Himmelskunde (“German Sky Lore”) focussing upon
supposed early astrological practises of the ancient Germans; but his
reputation rested on his 1921 work Das
Ratsel der Edda. In it he expounds the notion that the Eddas – the Nordic
mythology – were entirely real and reflected the ‘soul’ of the Aryan peoples in
a way that the Christian faith could not. The work was re-published many times.
His belief in Nordic Mysticism was so fundamental that he became increasingly
marginalised by elements of the National Socialist movement, renouncing his
membership to many Nazi organisations which did not adequately reflect his own
views.
*****
Adolf Josef Lanz: Theozoölogie oder die Kunde von den
Sodoms-Äfflingen und dem Götter-Elektron (“Theo-Zoology or the Lore of the
Sodom Apelings and the Electron of the Gods”)
“One
shall remember that the swastika and fascist movements are basically offspring
of Ostara”
-Adolf Josef Lanz
For
some, sex isn’t satisfying unless it partakes of some sort of transgressive
quality; unless it breaks a few taboos along the way. This is the only logical reason
that Adolf Josef Lanz would have wanted to become a Catholic monk. After his
assumption of Holy Orders, he lasted a handful of years before being ejected
for “carnal sins”, after which, in a fit of pique he decided to create his own
religious order based on his understanding of the Knights Templar, the Ordo Novi Templi.
He
changed his name to Jörg Lanz temporarily and then altered it again to Lanz
“von” Liebefels (that “von” in there again, to give him some aristo cred).
Under this guise he began life as an occultist and racial theorist, aligning
himself with the Ariosophists and publishing many poisonous racist and völkisch pieces, mainly in the magazine
he founded, Ostara:
Briefbücherei
der Blonden und Mannesrechtler. Even
the title of this rag is distinctly off-putting…
1905
saw the publication of his manifesto - Theozoölogie
- a mish-mash of eugenics and Ariosophical nitwittery which advocated, among
other things, the sterilization of the sick and the “lower races” and the
corralling of Aryan women into brothels for the use of Aryan males, in order
that their womanly weakness wouldn’t allow them to stray into the clutches of
the unworthy races. Lanz, as it turns out, had issues with women, as well. Many people read and
endorsed the book, including Swedish poet August Strindberg who called Lanz a
“prophet”.
It’s
known that Hitler was a great reader of Ostara
in his day and many have detected a link between Lanz’s theories and the
practises of the SS. However, Hitler denounced the magazine after the annexation
of Austria, and refused to acknowledge that the theories within its pages were influencing his regime. Of course, Lanz couldn’t help crowing about how
much the Nazis were borrowing from his ideas – maybe if he’d kept his stupid
mouth shut he might have been more warmly embraced by the party. As it is,
Hitler allowed no-one to steal this thunder. There is an apocryphal tale that Hitler came to see Lanz in his offices in order to pick up three missing issues of his Ostara collection; the only source to this tale is Lanz himself, and so it must be regarded with a jaundiced eye.
After
the War, Lanz claimed that Hitler’s failure was due to his “racial inferiority”
and accused him of having stolen and ‘corrupted’ his racial theories. Lanz died
– thank God! – in 1954.
*****
Journals
“Ostara: Briefbücherei
der Blonden und Mannesrechtler”
A
monthly magazine devoted to the teachings of Guido "von" List, Helena Blavatsky
and their interpretations by Austrian occultist and Ariosophist, Adolf Josef
Lanz (“von” Liebenfels), the editor and creator of the journal. Begun in 1905,
the magazine ran in three series up until 1930 after which it was banned by
Adolf Hitler, himself an avid collector of the material before his rise to
power. Depending upon sources, there were either 89, 110, or 121 issues in
total.
Ostara deals with Lanz’s theories of racial
purity and his model for a new Aryan society. Many of his theories (which he
called "Theozoology") are based upon Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, wrapped up in the new "science" of Eugenics
and "von" List’s visionary call for a return to a Teutonic German past (spiced
with more than a whiff of homoeroticism). Many of Lanz’s plans for a return to "genetic purity" were implemented by the SS and, despite the ban placed on the
organ by Hitler, SS officers and other enthusiastic Nazis still carried copies
of the journal with them.
German; Adolf Josef Lanz (ed.);
1905–1930; No Sanity loss; Occult +2 percentiles/issue
Spells:
None
*****
“Zenit/Der
Zenit”
Karl
Ernst Krafft was a Swiss astrologer who was hired by Goebbels to cast
horoscopes for the Third Reich. Initially, he was tasked with preparing the
natal charts of the Allied leaders in order to anticipate their reactions to
various military stratagems undertaken by the Nazis; but later he was told to
prepare fake horoscopes which would predict favourable outcomes for the Axis forces
and negative ones for the Allies. As we have already seen, Goebbels was not the
sort of individual to put his faith in the occult; rather, he well understood
its use as part of his global propaganda assault.
Krafft
came to light due to the fact that he successfully predicted the November plot
on Hitler’s life by means of a time-bomb. He told a minister close to the
Fuhrer before the event, but that individual declined to raise the alarm for fear it might not come to pass; later,
the same person refused to inform the leadership of Krafft’s warning in case he
would be punished for not speaking up in the first place. Not to be silenced, Krafft resorted to
sending a telegram to Rudolf Hess bragging about what he’d accomplished. In
short order, the Gestapo arrested Krafft as a conspirator in the assassination
plot and he only escaped execution by fast-talking his way out of the mess. During
this process, Goebbels was impressed by the youth’s knowledge of his art and
employed him in his propaganda schemes.
Krafft’s
main organ of dissemination was an astrology magazine called “Zenit”. Over time, the Nazi leadership
came to evaluate Krafft’s efforts in damaging Allied morale as having only a
marginal effect and he was sent to a concentration camp in 1942, where he died
in 1945. Interestingly, the force of Krafft’s attack was blunted by the fact
that the Allies soon worked out what was going on and created a fake “Zenit” which was air-dropped over Axis
forces and which cancelled-out the Nazi propaganda effort. The Allied magazine
was engineered by a Hungarian astrologer, Louis de Wohl, who had fled to England before the War
and who had clashed with Krafft in the past.
The
fake magazine is easily identified because it was titled incorrectly as “Der Zenit”; still, by the simple
expedient of printing ‘predictions’ of things that had already happened beneath
post-dated banners, it seriously undermined Axis morale.
German; Karl Ernst Krafft (Louis
de Wohl); No Sanity loss; Occult +1
percentiles/issue
Spells:
None
*****
A Note on Periodicals:
Some
occult magazines listed herein give bonuses per issue to a reader’s Occult score; some players may see this
as a means of ‘maxing-out’ their Occult
stats in a short space of time: this is not the case.
Firstly,
each issue of a magazine takes awhile to read and understand – at least a day
or more where such esoteric philosophising is concerned. Secondly, the bonus is
not automatic: after each issue is read, the player must roll above their
current Occult score before adding
the bonus, just as if they were rolling for experience. This reflects the
period of study required and the fact that most periodicals have political or
ideological agendas which must be sifted through, along with distracting
material which is rather beside the point (such as advertising). In any case,
no-one can raise their Occult score
above 50% in this fashion since periodicals are, by their very nature,
reiterative.
*****
Treasure
So
much for the literary background to Nazi Occultism. What sort of things could
this mass of information lead to as the focus of a “World War Cthulhu” or “Achtung!
Cthulhu” campaign? The following are some possibilities:
*****
[Necronomicon],
Gothic language version; discovered 1944 AD – translator unknown
The
Nazis discovered a Gothic language version of the Necronomicon and the work was despatched to the Ahnenerbe to be
quickly translated. The translation into German was completed shortly before
the Allies occupied Berlin and forced the German capitulation; both the
original text and the translation vanished from sight.
Fifty
years later in 1994, a Gothic version of the Necronomicon was said to have been discovered during an inspection
of the former KGB Headquarters: before it could be identified as the missing
edition discovered by the Nazi occultists, it was stolen by a neo-Nazi
organisation and its whereabouts are currently unknown.
*****
The
Spear of Destiny
Believed
to be the head of the spear with which the Roman centurion Longinus pierced the
side of Christ as he hung upon the cross, in order to ascertain - or ensure - that he was
dead, this relic has attracted much interest and not a little history. Without
its long shaft of wood, it makes a handy sword-like object and has been used as
such – according to the legend – throughout history. Frederick Barbarossa is
said to have carried the weapon on his way to the Third Crusade, but dropped it
by accident in a river, thus dooming himself to failure; Charlemagne is
supposed to have used it to ensure a string of victories before dropping it
when his horse reared beneath him. It is said that to grasp the Spear is to
ensure victory, but to lose it, or have it taken away, seals the wielder’s doom.
At
the time of the annexation of Austria, the Spear was in the Hofburg Museum in
Vienna as part of the royal treasure of the Hapsburg Dynasty. Hitler had
studied its history while he was a struggling student there and knew all about
its mythical powers. Two Storm-troopers were despatched instantly to guard it
while Hitler journeyed to the Austrian capital after that country's annexation.
Did
Hitler pick it up? Or was he too wary of its power to take the chance? During the
Second World War it went missing and, according to the (dubious) history of the
weapon by Trevor Ravenscroft, was captured by US forces at the War’s end. But
is this really the case?
*****
The
Holy Grail
We’ve
all seen “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”
so we all pretty much know the drill. But is this really the state of play? As we’ve
seen, Otto Rahn spent a lot of time (and Reichsgelt)
trying to pin down the whereabouts of this artefact and there are those who
think that he died while trying to find the thing in his final days in the
Tyrol. Then there are Rosicrucian and Anthroposophist theories (the latter
posited by Rudolf Steiner) that the Grail is merely a symbol of holy grace and
the state of being free of sin. And then there are those old notions that the ‘Grail’
is actually the bloodline of Christ.
There
are a multitude of options!
