Occult Nazism

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.

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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

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“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

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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.

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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:

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[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.

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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?

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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!