As WE witness the renewed growth of the far right across Europe, America and the former East Bloc, The Occult Roots of Nazism helps illuminate its ideological foundations. By examining the occult ideas that played midwife to the Hitler movement, the most destructive rightwing ideology in history, we can better understand their implications today.
When the book first appeared, popular literature on the link between Hitler, Nazi ideology, occultism and Tibetan mysteries had proliferated since the 1960s and Nazi “black magic” was regarded as a topic for sensational authors in pursuit of strong sales. The very existence of this sort of literature tended to inhibit serious historical enquiry into the religious and occult aspects of German National Socialism.
Before the 1980s only a few serious writers, including Raymond Aron, Albert Camus, Romano Guardini, Denis de Rougemeont, Eric Voegelin, George Mosse, Klaus Vondung and Friedrich Heer had alluded to the religious aspects of National Socialism. This neglect was all the more surprising since commentators during the Third Reich had already noted its cultic appeal. A wdder understanding of Nazi religiosity awaited the scholarly examination of the pre-Nazi volkisch ideology.
The Occult Roots of Nazism documents the lives, doctrines and cult activities of the Ariosophists of Vienna and their successors in Germany, who combined volkisch German nationalism and Aryan racial theories with occultism. They articulated a defensive ideology of German identity and illiberalism, since they were especially concerned with the political emergence of the subject nationalities of multi-ethnic Austria-Hungary after 1900. Since their ideas in respect of ancient Aryan homelands (Hyperborea and Atlantis), suppressed pagan priesthoods, Germanic religion and runic wdsdom later filtered through to
Heinrich Himmler and his SS research departments, Ariosophy provided a model case-study in Nazi religiosity. The continuity of such beliefs through the Third Reich, with its eschatological vision of genocide, clearly demonstrated the irrelevance of a Marxist analysis based on a critique of capitalism, economic factors and class interest. Only religious beliefs and myth could explain the success of an ideology concerned with special racial and esoteric knowledge, the belief in a nefarious world-conspiracy of scheming Jews and other racial inferiors, and the apocalyptic promise of group salvation in a millenarian apotheosis of the German nation. These ideas all derived from prerational and pre-modern traditions.
The first publication of The Occult Roots of Nazism stimulated a wider scholarly appreciation of the religious and cultic aspects of National Socialism. Several German books were subsequently published on the volkisch movement, now with special reference to the Ariosophists; British and American historians gave increased attention to the importance of religious and millenarian elements in Nazi ideology.
But there is a further compelling reason why The Occult Roots of Nazism is increasingly read and noted. The widening scholarly awareness and treatment of Nazism as a political religion is in part a response to the growing role of religion in politics today. The end of the Cold War also concluded the twentieth-century “ideological wars” of fascism, liberalism and communism. Idealistic visions of political order have given way to ideologies of cultural identity, in which religion plays a major part. The rapid growth and impact of Islamic militancy, Hindu nationalism and Christian fundamentalism in the 1990s have sharply reminded us that beliefs and myths can provide a dynamic and often destructive form of political expression. The re-emergence of these forms of political religiosity makes it much easier to understand the extraordinary appeal of myth, religious imagery and political idealism that animated Nazism in its own era.
Meanwhile, the radical right itself has resurfaced in the Western democracies. From the mid-1980s onwards, Western countries witnessed the rise of the radical right, pushing for political space on the margins of liberal society. By the early 1990s, the increasing numbers and political assertion of immigrant and ethnic minorities in advanced industrial states, led the United States, Britain and other states still with predominantly white populations to embrace the idea of a multicultural society. The end of the Soviet empire and its erstwhile impermeable borders across central and eastern Europe then unleashed a further movement of economic migrants, refugees and so-called asylum-seekers across Asia. By the early 2000s Europe and North America had become the favoured destination for migrant population flows from the developing world, often placing an unsustainable burden on local housing, education and health services. Skyrocketing immigration figures, coupled with liberal demands for multi-culturalism, have recreated similar political circumstances to those which gave rise to far-right neo-Nazi parties in the United States and Britain in the 1960s, in response to civil rights legislation and non-white immigration. Once again, far right parties have re-emerged, with the British National Party winning a number of local council ward seats in urban areas of mixed ethnic settlement. Fuelled by these issues, populist parties have achieved a high profile in other European states.
However, the expression of right-wing radicalism is by no means limited to the populist parties that seek electoral success in Britain, France, Austria, Germany, Holland and Denmark. Racial nationalism escalates in numerous underground groupuscules, which communicate through small magazines available from PO box addresses or on the internet, through white power rock music groups and concerts. In this ‘cultic milieu’ one discovers the ideological heirs of the pre-Nazi volkisch movement. This milieu and its mentors are examined in my successor volume Black Sun: Aiyan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity. Such groupuscules coin esoteric symbols of white racial identity, facilitate discourses of resistance to the coloured invasion of the West, and embrace a rich plethora of conspiracy theories and occult ideas involving the mystique of the blood, Nazi-Tibetan connections and even Nazi-manned UFOs. The names of the Ariosophists, Guido von List, Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, Rudolf John Gorsleben and Karl Maria Wiligut (‘Himmler’s Rasputin’) have themselves become current in this milieu, thereby underlining the direct line of descent between Ariosophy in the 1920s and 1930s and the re-emergence of a cultic far right today.
This new edition of The Occult Roots of Nazism appears at a time when the cultic far right has increased its range and impact further by focusing resentment against big government and the growth of regulatory bureaucracy, affirmative action and the race relations industry, and massive increases in third-world immigration. It is highly significant that today’s multi-culturalism also recapitulates the special circumstances in multi-ethnic Austria-Hungary before 1914. The example of the Ariosophists, definitively documented in this volume, resonates no less strongly today in the context of globalization, mass immigration and religious nationalism.
World History
