FIVE

Germanic Atlantology

THE GERMANIC STRAIN of Atlantology brings us to the most sensitive point of our study. If the reader does not already know it, this chapter will make it plain that the Ariosophists, an obscure group of romantic nationalists, were a breeding ground for the racial doctrines of National Socialism. Whether the individual Ariosophists would have applauded the Nazis’ policies is another question; in most cases it seems unlikely. Another question that has been raised is the responsibility of Theosophy and of Blavatsky herself, since Ariosophic racial theory arose in part from their doctrine of root races. The historian of religions James Santucci, after scrutinizing the doctrine as it appears both in Blavatsky’s work and in the Mahatma Letters (see chapter 3), concludes that their concept of race did not concern the genetic classification of living people, but stages of universal human evolution. He writes: “To place this teaching in the context of the nineteenth century, Blavatsky probably employed the label ‘race’ only because of its scientific connotations, a term that would fit well into the notion of discrete evolutionary stages of humanity.”1

Not so the Ariosophists, despite the alacrity with which they adapted Theosophical prehistory and handed it on to their readers as established truth. The rarity of Ariosophical writings outside German libraries, and even within them, makes study difficult, and I am indebted to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s groundbreaking book, The Occult Roots of Nazism, which still serves as the main portal for understanding them.2 The selection that follows shows some of the main trends.

LANZ-LIEBENFELS AND THE SODOMITE APELINGS

Jörg Lanz-Liebenfels (sometimes called “von Liebenfels,” 1874–1954) may have received the seed of his “theozoology” from Theosophy, but its grotesque flowering was all his own. His theory, first published in 1904, was that the white race was originally endowed with godlike qualities, including sense organs that gave them a form of clairvoyance. Lanz describes it thus, equating these early humans with what were later worshiped as gods: “What we laboriously and indirectly see with the scientific eye was seen by the ancients using another kind of sight. Because of this they have an amazing knowledge of pre-history. The divine electricity transferred it into them! The gods were not only living electrical receiving stations, however, they were also electrical power- and broadcasting stations.”3 As long as the divine nature was alive in them, this fortunate folk enjoyed “indescribable happiness,” dwelling, among other places, on Atlantis. This was a large body of land in the Atlantic Ocean that scientists (says Lanz) have proved to be the place of origin of the tall, white race that populated Europe and built giant stone structures.4

So far, we recognize a commonplace blend of Plato with contemporary Atlantology. It would not have needed Rudolf Steiner or Blavatsky to give Lanz the idea that the Atlanteans were clairvoyant. He knew the Greco-Roman classics and the scriptures, both biblical and apocryphal, and there was material aplenty there. Also, as we may suspect from the above quotation, he was interested in science and had his own ideas about electricity. Elsewhere in the same book he proposes a method of telegraphic transmission using “cold chemical rays”5 that to readers of the 1900s probably sounded no less impressive and incomprehensible than Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Furthermore, this ex-Cistercian monk and “New Templar” seems to have had a singularly materialistic philosophy in which everything spiritual comes down to ESP, and that comes down to electricity of one sort or another. Jesus was an “electrical entity,” but the demons that opposed him also possessed these powers.6 If asked to define divinity, Lanz writes:

I understand [by it] the living beings of the ultraviolet and ultrared forces and worlds. In former times they were embodied and moved about in complete purity. Today they live on in human beings. The gods slumber in bestialized human bodies, but the day is coming when they will rise up again. We were electric, we will be electric, to be electric and to be divine is the same thing!7

To return to Lanz’s happy ancients, we learn that other, similarly gifted creatures were coeval with them. Some of these had two legs and wings, like the fossils of flying reptiles; they are remembered in legends of angels and devils. Others were more apelike. Dwarves, too, were much more common in those days. Scientists may deny that species of the dinosaur age could have survived into human times, but Lanz explains that in places like the Near East, where the earth’s surface has remained unchanged since the Secondary and Tertiary Ages, “a gradual and gentle evolution occurred, where closely related older and younger forms crossbred with each other and the whole animal world was able to maintain its archaic structure for a long time.”8 This is ripe stuff for science fiction; the two instances just mentioned being the themes behind Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

If we recall what Genesis and the Book of Enoch have to say about the Sons of God and the Daughters of Men (see chapter 3), we can predict the next step in Lanz’s prehistory: the pure race started to interbreed with the nonhuman species. Plato bowdlerized it in the Critias as the waning of the divine element in the Atlanteans as it became mixed with the mortal element. For Lanz, as for Blavatsky, the two elements were not divine and human, but human and bestial.

Most occult Atlantologists, if they reach this point, leave it to the imagination, but for Lanz things were to get much worse. He had come to believe that these apelike creatures had persisted into biblical and classical times, when they were used as sexual partners by both men and women. In fact, they were very much in demand and fetched a high price among the decadent, leisured classes of Israel, Assyria, and Persia. Lanz then goes to work on the Bible to show how its compilers shared his obsession, and all the more so since they were living in the thick of it. All one needs to know are the code words. In the few dozen pages of Theozoology, we are warned to look out for any biblical mention of foreigners, earth, stone, wood, tower, city, house, fish, dragon, bread, water, flax, vessel, and gold. None of these words mean what they say; they are all euphemisms for the subhuman sex slaves, the “Sodomite hobgoblins,” against whom the Hebrew prophets and Jesus himself railed. Lanz interprets Jesus’s own temptations as being of intercourse with them, and his crucifixion as an attempted rape. So widespread was this practice that most people alive today are the degenerate result of this bestial copulation.

But not quite all of us. The Aryans, and especially some Germans, have more of the true human element in their genes. To Lanz, the consequence was plain. Cattle breeders know how to go about it, and we must do the same. The human race must be purified by a rigid eugenic program that will, in time, breed out the animal element, though we will still need some subhuman creatures as slaves.9 For a start, he recommends cutting the babble about Christian brotherly love and focusing our charity more selectively. “Those who should be supported are strictly the old, and those of good Germanic descent, and for Jews, those of true Israeli descent.”10 Like other prophets urging a spiritual renewal to reverse the decline of the West, Lanz issues a clarion call to his countrymen to purge themselves of their ape-nature.

Only today, now that almost the whole world has succumbed to ape-nature—right up to the Germanic countries which have not been fully spared either—does the truth begin to dawn on us, that we are lacking the divine humanity in a general flood of ape-men. But it will not be long before a new priestly race will rise up in the land of the electron and the Holy Graal, which will play new songs on new harps, and as before, on the first feast of Pentecost, when the spirit descended in tongues of radiation on the apostles (Acts 2.3), so will the electrical swans of the gods come once more to the great Pentecost of mankind. Great princes, strong warriors, God-inspired priests, singers with eloquent tongues, and bright-eyed cosmologists will rise up out of Germany’s ever-holy soil of the gods—put the Sodomite apelings in chains, establish anew the Church of the Holy Spirit, of the Holy Graal, and make the Earth into an “Island of the Blessed.”11

Lanz’s theories were first published without mentioning Theosophy, as though they were entirely his own deductions from classical and biblical sources. This makes it all the more surprising that in Die Theosophie und die assyrischen ‘Menschentiere’ (Theosophy and the Assyrian “Manbeasts,” 1907) he showed how well Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine and other Theosophical works corroborated his own theories.12 He even included one of Scott-Elliot’s maps of Lemuria and correlated the five root races, as Scott-Elliot had done, with recent scientific chronology. Of course his prize exhibit was the “sin of the mindless,” which corresponded in his system to the first miscegenation of humans with animals.

One might expect a work as eccentric as Theozoologie to garner few compliments. Quite the contrary: soon after its appearance the book and its author were highly commended by the father-figure of the Ariosophists.13

GUIDO VON LIST, FATHER OF ARIOSOPHY

Guido von List (1848–1919) was considerably older than Lanz, but he had a whole career behind him as a Viennese littérateur before entering the occult field. His main genre had been fiction of a romantic nationalist type, and one of his methods was to visit ancient sites and imagine what life was like in their glory days. His career was interrupted in 1902 by an operation for cataract that left him blind for nearly a year. The traumatic but transformational experience confirmed his belief in his own inherited gift for clairvoyance. As Goodrick-Clarke writes, “List’s vision of the prehistoric past owed little to empirical methods of historical research. His surmises depended rather upon the clairvoyant illumination that certain places induced in his mind.”14 List’s reimagination of ancient Germanic religion and culture now led to theories about an esoteric language of runes and symbols, and thence to a prisca theologia (primordial theology) that became the foundation of Ariosophy.

A theology needs a myth of origins, and for List this lay ready to hand in the Arctic-Aryan theory, combined with the Theosophical system of root races. In his book on cosmic and human law, Die Rita der Ario-Germanen (The law of the Aryo-Germans), written in 1907,15 List writes that the Aryans came from the Northwest and spread to Europe, part of Asia, North Africa, and India. The contents of their sacred book, the Edda, dates from long before the last Ice Age, or even the next to last, and probably from before the last one or two great floods. (Elsewhere List dates their laws to the Miocene era, millions of years ago.16) Its real place of origin cannot have been Iceland or Scandinavia, whose landscape the Edda does not depict, but further north, in the land of Apollo where it was said that the sun did not set. Probably consequent on a shift in the earth’s axis, the north polar lands faced the sun and had eternal day; we know that there were tropical fauna and flora there. With a further change in the axis came the dreadful Fimbulwinter, (the dire winter of Nordic legend), then floods and changes in the disposition of land and sea. The Aryans migrated south in all directions, bringing their wisdom and their Rita or laws to their new homes. For a long time they lived in “autochthonous” isolation, and only after their population increased did they meet other Aryan waves and form a single people. They named all localities after reminiscences of their polar home.17

This much is a variant of the Arctic origins theory of Bailly and Fabre d’Olivet (see chapter 2). The following quotation has a far different pedigree. It comes in a discussion of cosmic forces and their applicability to the aeronautical problem of the early twentieth century, namely the inability of aircraft to carry heavy loads: “The air-vehicles mentioned in the well-known catastrophe of Atlantis, the erection of the amazing cyclopean constructions that baffle us with their piles of monstrous stones, which would mock at our modern lifting devices, and many other mysteries of prehistoric technology, are to be explained by laws not only known to, but put to use by the ‘ancient sages,’ like so much else that we have lost.”18 We know that List read the Theosophist G. R. S. Mead;19 this sounds as though he read Scott-Elliot as well (see chapter 4), who had already been translated into German.

A shorter work of 1909 or 1910, Die Religion der Ario-Germanen (The religion of the Aryo-Germans), is Theosophical through and through. Here List acknowledges Blavatsky in passing, but presents her notions more as his own ex cathedra statements. In short order he expounds such basic Theosophical themes as the future reconciliation of science and religion;20 a universal, impersonal hidden god as distinct from the First Logos, and an emanational cosmogony;21 the universality of consciousness, even of the atom;22 the sevenfold vibratory law governing everything;23 the creation of mankind by lunar ancestors;24 the seven root races, with the earliest ones androgynous, the fourth being the scene of the separation of the sexes before its destruction in the Flood, and the Aryan as the fifth;25 the sevenfold constitution of the human entity;26 Karma (called Garma), reincarnation, and universal progress to higher states;27 the experiences between death and rebirth (a favorite theme of Steiner’s);28 humans not evolved from animals, but some animals descended from humans through unnatural hybridization;29 the presence of the divine within the self, and consequent lack of need for priests or saviors;30 the human potential for freedom from the wheel of rebirth and for eventual divinization;31 and the Four Yugas, the Kali Yuga lasting 432,000 years.32

Whereas Blavatsky’s Aryan root race was raised in central Asia, List, obedient to the other constant in Germanic prehistory, has it coming from the land around the North Pole.33 Moreover, when he mentions the human-animal hybrids, List cites the works of Lanz discussed above, telling the reader that more details will be found in those “pioneering works.”

In his next work, a large-scale, illustrated study of symbolism, List corrected an error about when the separation of the sexes occurred, to bring it into accord with Blavatsky’s system. In Religion he had written, “The Third Race of humans was still androgynous, and . . . only with the Fourth Race were the male and female genders split.” In Die Bilderschrift der Ario-Germanen (The picture writing of the Aryo-Germans, 1910), he writes: “With the Third Race the distinction between male and female began.”34

POSTWAR RECONSTRUCTION I

After the First World War, Germany was in need of myths that would excuse its defeat and give its people hope for the future. Ariosophy lay readily to hand with its enticing myth of a Nordic-Aryan-Atlantean origin for the German folk, their rational yet spiritual worldview, and their exile compelled by natural forces beyond their control. The recent war had proved how the inferior races, with whom the Aryans unwisely interbred, had become their enemies both from within, by polluting their blood, and from without. Lanz’s proposal for eugenic purification, which in 1904 may have seemed almost parodic, now became a recipe for postwar reconstruction.

Already in 1920, Otto Hauser published an epic poem that he had been writing in Vienna during the war, called Atlantis: Der Untergang einer Welt (Atlantis: the fall of a world). The narrator, sole survivor of Atlantis, recounts Lanz-Liebenfels’s theme of blond humans mating with apes as the reason for the fall. Two years later, the Theosophist Max Duphorn published a similarly titled Atlantis: Eine untergegangene Welt (Atlantis, a fallen world). I rely on Franz Wegener for a summary of these two works. Wegener writes that Duphorn uses as sources Blavatsky, Scott-Elliot, Karl Georg Zschaetzsch, and List, then predicts, on the authority of two Harvard professors, that a great island will rise in the western Atlantic Ocean. This will reroute the Gulf Stream, changing the climate of Germany to one like the Riviera. Of course the rising of one land must be balanced by the sinking of another, so most of England, parts of northern France, Belgium, and Holland will all disappear. But this is merely the prelude: the real deluge will arrive in 1,300 years’ time. Duphorn moralizes that such changes, rooting out much that is sickly and evil, open up new paths to higher development; so the German folk should look forward with confidence to the future.35

Karl Georg Zschaetzsch, just mentioned, had already published Die Herkunft und Geschichte des arischen Stammes (The origin and history of the Aryan tribe). He uses a familiar method of picking suitable passages from South American mythologies, the Edda, and the Bible to show that the Aryans originally came from Thule, the mythic land in the far North.36 Zschaetzsch followed this in 1922 with Atlantis, die Urheimat der Arier (Atlantis, the original home of the Aryans), adding a large dose of Plato to the mix and constructing the following scenario. The original Aryans, identified from the first sentence as blond-haired and blue-eyed, flourished on the Atlantic island from at least 29,500 years ago.37 They inhabited a fertile plain in the southern part, the north being a heavily forested, volcanic zone. At an unspecified date, a close encounter with a comet caused a conflagration (Sintbrand) affecting the southern plain, in which all but three of the Aryans perished.38 The survivors were an old man, a boy, and a young woman. The world’s mythologies commemorate this trio under various guises, such as sun, Mars, and Venus, or, in the Book of Genesis, as God, Adam, and Eve.39 Zschaetzsch pictures their adventures and way of life as though things must have happened “just so.”

In time, their descendants mixed with survivors from other races, gave up their vegetarian habits (a constant of Aryan-Atlantean lore), and multiplied. Eventually they had to sail in search of other lands, bringing the gifts of civilization to the inhabitants who had lived till then in a subhuman condition. This is testified, with one accord, by the legends of Mesopotamia, East Asia, Africa, Australia, and America.40

As the centuries passed, Atlantis lost its pure Aryan population, and on the eve of the deluge, so American tradition says, was home to sixty-four million inhabitants drawn from every other race on Earth41 (a number that betrays Zschaetzsch’s reliance on Le Plongeon; see chapter 8). Zschaetzsch has no utopian illusions about their life. They lived under a theocracy, which began to crumble only after the return of the defeated Atlantean fleet. This, as Plato recounts, had been sent to conquer the Mediterranean lands and been repulsed by the Athenians. Here Zschaetzsch finds passages in the Edda and the Book of Revelation that he is sure refer to a rebellion against the priesthood, with the rebels characterized as the Fenris Wolf and the Beast. Such texts, he says, record events far separate in time that have been melded together. For example, the catastrophe called in the Edda ragnarök combines the fall of the last Aryan rule over Atlantis, around 3,500 years after the conflagration, with the wars just before the final deluge in 9600 BCE.42

For the cause of the deluge, Zschaetzsch considers the possibility of continental drift, recently proposed by Alfred Wegener but not widely accepted for a long time to come. If the American and European continents suddenly moved further apart, it would have stretched the surface of an Atlantic island so thin that the hot, fluid mass on which it rested could have burst upward.43 In any case, after the catastrophe the Aryan race survived in its purest form in northwest Europe, and continued there into historical times. Wherever its blood has been mixed with that of other races, it has been to their evolutionary advantage, but not its own. It is not in the interests of humanity for a tribe of this quality to become extinct.44 The solution is to find a region where those of pure Aryan descent can assemble and reconstitute their kind.

Where could this be? Zschaetzsch favors the region that used to be German East Africa, in the highlands of Rwanda and around Lake Tanganyika. Only young people would be allowed to settle there, and measures would be taken to prevent any miscegenation with the local Negroes. As for the difference in climate from northern Europe, Zschaetzsch reminds us that the Aryans originally came from a warm land, and could in time readjust to it, especially if they began on the highlands and gradually descended as they multiplied.45

I suppose that this proposal was intended as a sop to national pride, wounded by the confiscation in 1919 of Germany’s African colony. It also sounds like a rejoinder to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which expressed the intention of giving the Jews a homeland in Palestine. Curiously, it anticipated the “Madagascar Plan” later favored by some in the Nazi party, which was to relocate the Jews of Europe to that island.

Although Zschaetzsch does not mention the Theosophists, nor ascribe any occult powers to his Aryans, I include him here to show how Ariosophy adapted to the postwar mentality. The same applies to a third book of 1922, Hermann Wieland’s Atlantis, Edda und Bibel (Atlantis, Edda and Bible). This is subtitled “Discovery of the secret of the Holy Scriptures, of the German folk’s rescue from distress and death.”46 In 1925 it was enlarged with the more alluring subtitle, “200,000 years of Germanic world-culture and the secret of the Holy Scriptures.”47 Wieland identifies the poles as the place where humans first appeared in the Secondary or Tertiary Epoch, at least a million years ago. The reason is simple: the poles were the first parts of the earth to cool, hence the first places where life appeared. The Arctic region, where a temperate vegetation flourished, was home to the Aryans, a blond, blue-eyed, brachycephalic race. They lived there until a regularly recurring alteration of the earth’s axis brought on an ice age, then were forced to migrate southward.48

Leaving their polar homeland, the Aryans settled on the island-continent of Atlantis, setting up a twelvefold nation that would later become the model for the zodiac and the divisions of time by hours and months. They were forbidden to kill animals and lived whenever possible as vegetarians, unlike the lower races who already inhabited the land and were little better than beasts themselves.49 The Edda and both Testaments of the Bible are really chronicles of the Aryans’ history. This is evident enough in the Edda, but the Bible has to be stripped of the Judeo-Christian overlay; then it will be found in perfect accord with the Edda and other ancient texts.

Wieland is not so extreme as Lanz, whose work he credits without mentioning the sexual material. He was simply convinced that racial purity and its opposite, miscegenation, were the most important factors in human history. Consequently, whenever the Bible speaks of beasts, it refers to lower races, as do all the laws of Moses and injunctions of Jesus.50 The Book of Revelation really chronicles the oppression of the Atlantean Aryans by the races that had become so much more numerous than they, forcing them, for example, to worship their depraved idols. The plagues and destruction that follow were really caused by the earth’s encounter with a comet. (In the later edition of his book, Wieland introduces the Hoerbiger theory.51) The vision of the New Jerusalem, like the Promised Land of Exodus, stands for the future reconstitution of the Aryans.

Wieland traces the German people through recorded history, presenting them as victims of incessant attempts to crush them. He devours the whole menu of conspiracy theory, blaming the Jews, the Jesuits, the Freemasons, the Illuminati of Bavaria, and popery and Catholicism in general for malice toward his folk.52 The defeat of 1918 was a recapitulation of Atlantis, and for the same reason: in both places there were great cities full of racially mixed people, strengthened by their dose of Aryan blood.53 (Wieland seems to forget that the fall of Atlantis was caused by a comet.) All this makes disagreeable reading. Yet from time to time, in all this literature, one is arrested by a passage, which deserves a better context, and remembers that Germany was also the land of Kant, Beethoven, and Goethe.

The Aryans were filled with the feeling and awareness that an eternal, unnamable power links everything that happens in the world; it is active in every creature and has a fatherly care for all. This creative energy is called “God” by Jesus Sirach (Ch. 43),54 the “All-Father” in the Aryan-Germanic version, and “Father in Heaven” in Christ’s teaching. This original monistic-pantheistic religion is in no contradiction to science, but in accord with it. It does not divide faith from knowledge, but reconciles them, following Goethe in quiet reverence for the inscrutable. It suffers no dogmas, requires no external observance, no mediator between God and man, and no priestly hierarchy. Each, like Christ, is his own priest, and responsible for his actions to God alone.55

Another admirer of the Edda was Rudolf John Gorsleben (1883–1930), who had been working for twenty years on his own universal theory of the primordial language, script, and beliefs of the Aryan race before completing Hoch-Zeit der Menschheit (Zenith of mankind, 1930) just before his death.56 This author was a member of the famous club of racist nationalists, the Thule-Gesellschaft, named for the legendary land. Gorsleben’s 700-page work is predictably polemical, opening with a clarion call to every German not just to study and admire the Greeks, but to

seek the land from which the Greeks arose in the Aryan North, in the land of Apollo, of the god Pol, of the Hyperborean near the Pole. This is his homeland, too, and the cradle of the Aryan race. Should not our schools and universities teach how to grasp and understand true Greekness on basis of our inner kinship, through studying our common Aryan-Nordic past, our old Germanic language, our ancient religion, which even today is our ancestral faith? Is not the Edda at least as good for this as Homer?57

Gorsleben is not the kind of author who troubles his readers with footnotes, bibliographies, the citation of sources, or an index. Everything comes from his undoubtedly erudite mind as fact, from the solution of theological problems downward. What is man’s role on Earth? he asks, and answers: Man is God’s consciousness and the vessel of the divine on Earth. He has not evolved from animals, but was already divine in his primordial form, with the consciousness of God within him. The Fall of Man came through miscegenation with animals; he lost his divine consciousness, and from the mixture came the lower races.58 Elsewhere Gorsleben assures us of the truth of reincarnation: all the great ancient writings, and the great men and women of the past, were convinced that we are spiritually eternal beings who make many brief descents into corporeality.59

For all his seeming authority, Gorsleben’s account of prehistory is disjointed and confusing because he tries to blend the Theosophical system of root races with current notions of Aryan origins and with Bailly’s Arctic Atlantis (see chapter 1). He assumes that all life, including human, began at the North Pole, which once had an almost tropical climate. Due to the gradual cooling of the region, the inhabitants were driven southward and created on Atlantis a post-polar Paradise.60 The Atlanteans’ chief quality was technical skill, but unlike our own purely material technology, theirs made much use of magical powers. We are not told exactly what these were, but Gorsleben evidently had a strong belief in nonphysical energies and finer states of matter. He deplores the way in which modern science dismisses all such ideas as superstitious and suggests that the runes, which are his overriding interest, may have symbolized various energy paths on which all organic growth depends.61

As for the doctrine of root races, Gorsleben says that the first and second races vanished long ago through Earth changes, and that today’s non-Aryan humanity stems from the third and fourth races. From the fourth root race of Atlantis, four cultural streams issued in the cardinal directions. The northern one came to northwest Europe, especially to an area now submerged beneath the North Sea, and thence proceeded across middle Europe to northern Asia. The eastern one began in Spain and North Africa, encircled the Mediterranean, and proceeded through south Asia to the Far East and even to Easter Island. The southern stream came from the south Atlantic island and arrived in West Africa, and the western one went to both Americas. The last island of Atlantis was destroyed around 9000 BCE.62

Gorsleben’s real interest is naturally in the fifth, Aryan root race. He writes that it was developed under divine guidance and enjoyed many thousands of years of peace, remembered in legend as the Golden Age.63 After the fall of the Aryans’ homeland (whether Arctic or Atlantic is unclear), they lived in the Celtic and Germanic lands of middle and northwestern Europe.64 From this point onward he is on his home ground and can proceed with the task of tracing all symbols and alphabets to the runes, and these to a prehistoric but literate people. Then he can imagine the “golden links of a spiritual chain” that runs from those times to his own. His list runs thus: Heliand, Widukind, the Templars, the Albigenses, Ekkehart, Walter von der Vogelweide, Luther, Wycliff, the Huguenots, Goethe, and Nietzsche.65 Lacking any historical or logical linkage, its only principle seems to be a sentimental preference for anyone opposed to the Catholic Church.

Gorsleben may have been unnerved by the appearance, just as his book neared completion, of an even more ambitious one by Herman Wirth, which we will treat in the next section. Although Gorsleben praised it, his choice of title sounds like a deliberate upstaging of Wirth’s book on the “ascent of mankind” with his own, on its “zenith.” Gorsleben assures the reader that he was entirely independent of Wirth, and that the presence of many common conclusions can only make them more plausible.66 He adds that Wirth’s explanation of the runes as derived from the course of the year ignores their secret and magical meaning, allowing that this might make Wirth more acceptable in conventionally learned circles. With that rueful thought, Gorsleben died, not even seeing his book in print.

In selecting Gorsleben’s passages on Atlantis, I necessarily neglect the bulk of his book and his runic ruminations, on which I am not qualified to pass judgment. I do however notice how closely his metaphysical principles accord with those of Theosophy, and perhaps even more with Anthroposophy. He acknowledges the innate divinity of the human being, its immaterial states and subtle forms of perception; he is certain that former races were aware of these and wielded powers we would call magical; he wishes for a science no longer limited to the material world—in effect, for a “spiritual science.” Yet the whole book stands under the sign of racial superiority and the need for purification of the Aryans, hence the Germans, from the pollution of lower races. It illustrates the fact that one can share someone’s metaphysics without in the least sharing their ethics (and vice versa).

After the National Socialists’ election victory of 1933, these ideas about racial origins and identities took on a new and fateful meaning.Ariosophy aside, many of the new men, from Adolf Hitler downward, belonged to a centuries-old tradition of Jew-hating Christians. Any philosophy that granted significance to racial origins was grist to their mill. This opened up career opportunities for ideologists and constructors of worldviews, but always with the risk of entanglement in party rivalries. Here we shall look at the rise and fall of one such, Herman Wirth, and more briefly at two others who introduced the now familiar mix of Theosophy and Nordic origins into the party’s ideological heart.

HERMAN WIRTH AND THE ASCENT OF MANKIND

Herman Felix Wirth Roeper Bosch (1885–1981), to give him his full name, was neither Theosophist, Anthroposophist, nor Ariosophist. He would have considered his place to be our first chapter, but was he a rationalist? The reader must judge. Wirth was born in Utrecht, Netherlands, of a German father and a Dutch mother. His approach to Atlantology was unconventional, and, as it turned out, disastrous, because it clashed with the official ideology of the Third Reich. Yet to the end of his long life he held to the serene conviction of his own rightness.67

Wirth began his professional life as a musicologist, writing a dissertation on Dutch folksong and giving concerts of early music,68 but he had many other interests and talents. His first post, in 1909, was at the University of Berlin as Reader in Netherlandish Language and Literature. During World War I he threw himself into activism on behalf of freedom for Flanders and solidarity of the “Duitch” with the “Deutsch.” This earned him a promise from the Kaiser that after Germany won the war, he would become professor of musicology at the Brussels Conservatory. As things turned out, Wirth found himself in 1919 teaching in a high school in the remote region of Friesland.

On the bleak shores of the North Sea, where Pastor Spanuth would also hatch his Atlantean theories (see chapter 1), Wirth’s antiquarian attention was drawn to the peculiar symbols carved on farmhouses that went back to the sixteenth century. The more he collected and compared these examples of folk art, the more convinced he became that the old Frisian carpenters had preserved the symbols of an incredibly ancient culture.

Gradually he assembled an unrivaled “paper museum” of early and prehistoric inscriptions and pictographs found on rock, bone, and wood throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Certain themes like the swan, the wheel, and the oared boat recurred in widely separated times and places. Wirth came to see them not as mere “pictograms” but as “ideograms,” that is, as carrying specific, symbolic meaning. In time he was able to reconstruct a theological system and an astronomically based cosmology, containing internal evidence of being at least 10,000 years old. With this came the realization that a common culture had once encircled the entire North Atlantic region, and that it was responsible for the invention of writing. Before that, Wirth concluded, there must have been an even earlier culture within the Arctic Circle itself. Without any help from Bailly, Tilak, Steiner, or the Theosophists, he had hit on the myth of Hyperborean origins and was ready to write the book of the century, Der Aufgang der Menschheit (The ascent of mankind).

Besides the evidence of the ideograms, scientific confirmation came from the recent work of Alfred Wegener and Wladimir Köppen, pioneers of the theory of continental drift or plate tectonics, in which Wirth was another early believer. The crucial points were: (1) the location of the North Pole is not stable, but has wandered as much as 30° from its present position; (2) the movement of continental plates and the wandering of the poles cause the rising and sinking of lands; (3) Europe, Greenland, and North America once formed a single landmass that broke up in the Quaternary Era.69 These are the reasons that the former Arctic continent changed climate and became uninhabitable, forcing its indigenous inhabitants to migrate south. Wirth’s Atlantis was therefore not a separate geographic entity, but part of the former Arctic continent, “of which only Greenland, Spitzbergen and Franz-Joseph Land remain as fragments . . . these are distinct from the other Atlantic islands, which were created later through volcanic outbreaks out of the wreckage of the sunken Atlantic continent.”70

Turning from geology to anthropology, Wirth favors an early date for the separation of humans from apes as part of the evolution of mammals in the Tertiary Era (here meaning the last 10 million years) and a correspondingly early differentiation of races. Based on the analysis of blood groups, which was the most advanced technology of his time, he posits two original groups. One was the light Nordic race, in its Arctic home; the other was the original black race, which originated in Gondwanaland, a now vanished continent that covered the Indian Ocean. (This had come to replace Lemuria in the schemes of geologists.) After the pole shift and the consequent ice age, the Arctic-Nordic race migrated southward, and the two original races began to mingle and produce variations. Wirth mentions the Asiatic race as a “mixovariation” containing elements of both original groups, and the Atlantic-Nordic as an “idiovariation” within the Arctic-Nordic.

As for the first evidence of Europeans, the Aurignacians seem to have been a black race, to judge from the peppercorn hair and steatopygy of their “Venus” figurines.71 Nor were the famous Cro-Magnons, appearing about 30,000 years ago, the ancestors of the white race, because it takes much longer for racial characteristics to become fixed. The Cro-Magnons descended from a mixture of Nordics with Eskimos, thanks to intrepid sailors who were navigating the northern seas at least 50,000 years before conventional prehistory allows. It was this sea-people that brought culture, writing, law, religion, agriculture, and art to all the less-developed races. They colonized northern and northwest Europe, leaving megalithic relics such as Stonehenge and the dolmens. The latter were constructed for open-air burials, hence the paucity of human remains. As for Plato’s Atlantis, Wirth allows that there was a landmass in the North Atlantic that sank around 11,000 years ago, its Stone Age structures and practices corresponding to Plato’s account, though embroidered in the telling.

This summary does scant justice to the scale or style of Wirth’s book. Here is Julius Evola, reeling from the experience of reading Der Aufgang der Menschheit shortly after its publication in 1928:

One can reject certain principles a priori, such as the very hypothesis of “sacred series” and of variations in them determined during various periods by the precession of the equinoxes. But if one does not do so, it is like finding oneself inside an enchanted castle: one can refuse to enter, but once the threshold is passed, it is difficult to get out again. One moves from signs to phonemes, from phonemes to symbols, from symbols to phonemes and signs, by way of idols, conjurations, calendrical notations, names of gods and demons, ornaments, rites and ritual objects, inscriptions, masks, prehistoric designs on rocks or in caves, funerary ornaments and finds of every sort, supplemented by specimens gathered in situ during years of research by Wirth himself—the author gives us no respite. And even if it is all reduced to a “myth,” one still has to recognize the potency and extent of the synthesis behind it. It is hard to find its equal in these fields, monopolized as they are by an arid and pedantic erudition.72

As mentioned, Wirth felt that the ideograms had given him the key to the theology and religion of the Arctic-Nordic race. They perceived the great moral law of the universe as the eternal return, the perpetual coming into being and passing away. The annual journey of the sun, especially in the Arctic region, where it rose and set only once a year, represented for them the Son of the immutable God and the revelation of that God in time and space. Everywhere, among the Native Americans as much as in the Old World, Wirth found the concept of God the Father as a sexless and impersonal being, distinct from his Son, who brings light to the land, dies, and is reborn. Third of this pagan trinity was the All-Mother Earth, to whose bosom the Son/sun goes each winter, and from whom he is reborn at the solstice.

As the Nordic race left the Arctic and mingled with foreigners, its tradition withered away. From the animistic beliefs of spiritually inferior peoples came cults of demons and ghosts, anthropomorphism, and a whole pantheon of gods. But there have been periodic efforts to retrieve and reconstitute the Atlantic-Nordic spiritual heritage. They include Zoroastrianism, Aryan-Indian Brahmanism, the Samkya school, Buddhism, Greek philosophy, the Galilean’s reform of faith, Roman Christianity, the Nordic Reformation of the sixteenth century, and the development of Western epistemology, right up to the natural philosophy of the present day.

Wirth’s solitary path thus brought him round to a version of the prisca theologia and philosophia perennis: the primordial theology and the perennial philosophy. The Theosophists had taught this all along, but with an occultist baggage that he could not abide. Traditionalists like Coomaraswamy and Guénon (see chapter 6) were teaching it in these very years. But Wirth’s spiritual genealogy, unlike theirs, excluded the religions of temple, church, and mosque, as well as all revealed scripture, all ritual, and anything redolent of a sentimental or person-to-person relationship with God. Nor had he any truck with the esoteric-exoteric division. There was only the authentic Ur-Religion based on the lived experience of a spiritually sensitive race, and then there was all the pernicious nonsense that later ages superimposed upon it.

Up to a point, Wirth’s work was in harmony with the völkisch currents of his day, the sort that inspired the Wandervogel youth movement in which he had been a leader. He conceived of the Arctic-Nordics as a spiritual and pacific race that took its direction mainly from its wise “mothers” and accorded women commensurate rights. The tragedy was that it had been driven by climatic changes from its Arctic cradle. Looking back in 1960, he wrote:

Our whole historical outlook is limited to the period of rupture that is the Eurasian migration epoch, the age of male rights and male domination. We stand today within the unmitigated collapse of this epoch, on the edge of the abyss of utter destruction of humanity, life, and earth. Yet the West is still trying, with all the “restorative means” of the Mosaic-Christian ideology, to maintain the fictions of this failed androcentric belief system. This male world of the period of rupture, the organized world of State, Church, and God, is no longer organic, ever since the “Mothers” were driven out. For that severed the organic connection between “heaven and earth,” cosmos and mankind, which is what the “world” used to be.73

While Wirth presented his findings as scholarship, there is no doubt that the Ur-Religion was his religion, and that this faith far outweighed his pretended scientific method. He was a true believer in his imaginary tradition, hence his presence here, rather than in chapter 1. Moreover, his biographer and bibliographer, Eberhard Baumann, was convinced that Wirth possessed some higher state of consciousness, such as was the universal possession of the ancient race. Baumann adds a comment about Frau Wirth’s contribution to the great project, which although it surely did not take the form of “mesmeric trance,” has something mysterious about it. He writes:

Wirth was sometimes able to observe higher consciousness “in action.” A few years ago it was important for us, on beginning our study, to read his dedication in Aufgang der Menschheit: “Margarete Wirth-Schmitt. To her, who gave me this book (my italics, E.B.), the noble seeress of our spiritual heritage . . . it is returned in deep and grateful love.” So inner perceptions poured out from the very lively consciousness of his wife, which he was then only able to acknowledge as “ancestrally remembered” (erb-erinnert). We do not know today to what extent Frau Wirth determined the contents and message of her husband’s research.74

THE FALL OF HERMAN WIRTH

For a few years, Wirth reaped the rewards of his labors. In 1933 he received a professorship in Berlin and the commission to found an open-air museum of the old German religion. In the same year he took the fateful step of publishing an edition of the Ura-Linda-Chronik. (We have already mentioned the book in the context of Wirth’s half-hearted supporter Albert Herrmann; see chapter 1.) Usually spelled Oera Linda, this was a manuscript that had first come to light in 1867, purporting to be a chronicle compiled over millennia and preserved in a Frisian family, the Over de Lindens. Wirth had already written about it ten years before;75 now he enhanced his translation with commentaries and illustrations in the spirit of his Aufgang. He found the Oera Linda Book marvelously in tune with his idea of a Nordic Atlantic culture, maintaining the traditions of the earlier Arctic one.

The first portions of the Oera Linda Book were supposedly penned by a survivor of the flood that destroyed Atland, the Frisian’s paradisal homeland, in the year 2194 BCE. Here are the relevant passages from William Sandbach’s 1876 translation:

Before the bad time came our country was the most beautiful in the world. The sun rose higher, and there was seldom frost. . . . The years were not counted, for one was as happy as another.

On one side we were bounded by Wr-alda’s Sea, on which no one but us might or could sail; on the other side we were hedged in by the broad Twiskland (Tusschenland, Duitschland), through which the Finda people dared not come on account of the thick forests and the wild beasts.

Eastward our boundary went to the extremity of the East Sea, and westward to the Mediterranean.76

Unfortunately, no map was provided to clarify this peculiar geography. Then came the catastrophe.

During the whole summer the sun had been hid behind the clouds, as if unwilling to look upon the earth. There was perpetual calm, and the damp mist hung like a wet sail over the houses and the marshes. The air was heavy and oppressive, and in men’s hearts was neither joy nor cheerfulness. In the midst of this stillness the earth began to tremble as if she was dying. The mountains opened to vomit forth fire and flames. Some sank into the bosom of the earth, and in other places mountains rose out of the plain. Aldland, called by the seafaring people, Atland, disappeared, and the wild waves rose so high over hill and dale that everything was buried in the sea. Many people were swallowed up by the earth, and others who had escaped the fire perished in the water.77

Later members of the Over de Linden family, we are assured, dutifully copied this document. They added their memoirs of the Frisians’ migrations, their encounters and battles with other tribes, and especially their customs and laws. The last contribution is dated “in the 3449th year after Atland’s sinking, that is, 1256 in the Christian reckoning.” The book was written in a unique “runic” alphabet based on the sixfold division of the circle, which Wirth immediately recognized as one of the primal solar symbols of his Arctic-Atlantic race. Since the manuscript was on nineteenth-century paper, he had to admit that the copying had continued, and that a “humanist” had had a hand in improving the original text. But still, he maintained, the core of it was authentic.

Wirth’s Ura-Linda-Chronik was beautifully produced, as Der Aufgang der Menschheit had been, by the Jena publisher Eugen Diederich. If its erudite apparatus was not clear to everyone, its message was: this was the true history of the German Volk. To judge from Baumann’s bibliography, every newspaper in the land reviewed it, and they continued to report on the controversy that exploded as soon as the academic world got hold of it. Experts in history, philology, religion, and philosophy proclaimed almost unanimously that the Oera Linda Book was a nineteenth-century forgery. In fact, Dutch historians had realized that decades ago and had paid little further attention to it. Wirth was perhaps blind to this because he had already projected ideals such as universal literacy, democratic government, women’s rights, a hatred of priestcraft, and a deistic theology back onto his Arctic folk.

Emotions were naturally strong on both sides, and to air them, a sort of academic duel was staged in the New Hall of Berlin University on May 4, 1934, with the theme “The Value of the Ura-Linda-Chronik as History and Source.” On the opposition bench was the Germanist Heinrich Hübner, who afterward issued a devastating pamphlet proving to any disinterested observer that the Oera Linda Book was written in modern times and in an entirely modern spirit. Few today would disagree with him that the book is an allegory of the principles of the Enlightenment, couched in a mixture of romantic and biblical style. Hübner even had the good luck to find a Dutch folk calendar of 1850 that dated itself “4043 years after the Flood,” thus corroborating the date given for Atland’s destruction and confirming its biblical source. He also used the occasion for some political one-upmanship.

Even worse is the book’s lack of instinct for a correct worldview. Wirth purports to reveal the ancient Germanic spirit to our folk, and presents it with a book whose liberalistic origin is simply not in doubt. One may find it tragic that Herman Wirth, who refers so enthusiastically to the inherited memory that stirs in him, should fall into such an error. But when this error is introduced to a folk that needs to be educated away from liberalism into a heroic way of life, then personal tragedy becomes public peril. If anyone accepts the Ura-Linda-Chronik as a true and credible “revelation,” as an “ancestral heritage” [Ahnenerbe], then it is preaching to them the complete opposite of what must be preached today. The Ura-Linda-Chronik is not only democratic, anti-Führer, and pacifistic in its basic attitude, it is a complete fabrication without taste or muscle, wishy-washy and sometimes tear-jerkingly sentimental.78

The debate over the Oera Linda Book degenerated into a squalid name-calling in which each side accused the other of not being Nazi enough, and Wirth gave as good as he got.79 He still had patronage in high places, and in June 1935 Heinrich Himmler appointed him president of the Ahnenerbe (“ancestral heritage”) research bureau. He led an expedition to study rock art in Scandinavia, but his career did not last long after that. Political and military realities were prevailing in the minds of Germany’s leaders over the romantic fantasies about prehistory that they may have indulged in the 1920s. It was more important to keep the churches compliant than to challenge Christianity on the grounds of some Ur-Religion. Nor did the view of material and technological progress as signifying spiritual decline suit a nation preparing for total war. Consequently Wirth was seen for what he was: an obsessive scholar, out of touch with political reality. In January 1937 he was dismissed from the Ahnenerbe and from his Berlin chair and forbidden to publish. In a way this was his salvation, for the Ahnenerbe afterward supported experiments on human subjects that earned it universal infamy, and Wirth was not implicated in these. However, after Germany’s defeat, his former connection ruled out any sympathy for him and his work. He was interned from 1945 to 1947, and after his release lived virtually as a nonperson, his work expunged from the historical and scholarly record.

ALFRED ROSENBERG’S MYTH OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

One who might have rejoiced at Wirth’s discomfiture was Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), except that it presaged his own. Among the heavyweights of the Nazi Party, Rosenberg cuts a rather feeble figure. He aspired to be the party’s philosopher, and to prove it by writing Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts (The myth of the twentieth century), perhaps the dullest book that ever sold a million copies. If people read any of it, though, it would have been the first chapter, which puts the Arctic-Atlantis theory in a nutshell and shows how deeply the theory had penetrated the German mythological imagination. Like Wirth, Rosenberg calls on recent scientific research to show that there was once dry land between Greenland and Iceland; that sea levels were formerly more than a hundred meters lower than today; and that the North Pole has wandered, so that the Arctic may have had a much warmer climate. Hedging his bets, Rosenberg writes:

All this makes the ancient legend of Atlantis appear today in a new light. It seems we cannot exclude the possibility that where the waves of the Atlantic Ocean crash and gigantic icebergs loom, a flourishing land once rose above the deep, on which a creative race raised a great, wide-ranging culture and sent its children out into the world as seafarers and warriors; but even if this Atlantis hypothesis should prove untenable, a northern prehistoric culture center must be accepted.80

He goes on to mention some salient points of the Arctic-Atlantic theory: the cosmic experience of the sun, which divided the year into two halves; the southward migrations and the coming of the swan and dragon boats to the Mediterranean; the memories of the Artic homeland preserved in Persian and Indian mythology; the mixing with the indigenous races of the South, and the incongruous presence even today of blond-haired, blue-eyed North Africans. Once the Nordic race reaches India, the whole nineteenth-century Aryan myth of racial and religious diffusion is at Rosenberg’s disposal.

Wirth’s work had served its purpose as a dramatic curtain-raiser, and while Rosenberg did acknowledge its impact on prehistory, neither he nor any other committed Nazi could go along with its subversive feminism. The tough, mystical, freedom-loving Aryans of the Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts, as Rosenberg pictured them, inevitably collided with Wirth’s “chthonic, matriarchally inclined racial groups,” and at that point the author inserts an unfriendly footnote:

It is completely misleading when Herman Wirth, in Aufgang der Menschheit, attempts to present mother-right as the original Nordic-Atlantic way of life, while also recognizing the solar myth as a Nordic possession. Matriarchy is always connected with chthonic religious beliefs, Patriarchy always with the solar myth. The high valuation of women among the Nordic people is directly based on the masculine structure of being. The feminine in the pre-Christian Near East always went along with prostitution and sexual collectivity. The evidence that Wirth adduces is thus worse than scanty.81

Rosenberg had always been one of the Nazi party’s main ideologues. Not only virulently anti-Jewish, he was also anti-Christian, and he hoped that the Reich would eventually sever its connections with the churches and adopt some sort of mystic paganism. (This is what Lewis Spence interpreted as Satanism—see chapter 8.) In 1934 he received the high-sounding title of Delegate of the Führer for the Supervision of the Entire Spiritual and Ideological Teaching and Education of the NSDAP,82 which was probably one of the reasons that his enemy Himmler hastened to form his own and better funded Ahnenerbe. As Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories (1941), Rosenberg’s authority was again sidelined. This did not spare him from conviction and execution at Nuremberg because of the war crimes perpetrated in the territories under his jurisdiction.

KARL MARIA WILIGUT’S ANCESTRAL TRADITIONS

Himmler did not rely on the Ahnenerbe alone to feed his appetite for mythic history. In 1933 a curious character had come to his notice: Colonel Karl Maria Wiligut (1866–1946).83 Wiligut was an Austrian, a decorated war hero, and an associate of Lanz-Liebenfels’s New Templar Order. His career might be thought to have finished in 1924, when his wife had him committed to a mental hospital. However, on his release in 1927 he reentered völkisch and New Templar circles and started teaching them his stock of runic lore. In 1933 he met Himmler, who connived to suppress Wiligut’s embarrassing past, making him an SS brigadier and head of the Department for Pre- and Early History in the Race and Settlement Office.84 In spring 1935, just a month or two before putting Herman Wirth in charge of the Ahnenerbe, Himmler installed Wiligut in a Berlin villa as a member of his personal staff. There are rumors that he acted as a “medium” for Himmler, but this is improbable in the sense of someone entranced or possessed. Wiligut was more likely a medium for the ancient German tradition, which he claimed had been handed down from father to son in the Wiligut family from time immemorial. On the strength of this authority, which evidently made a great impression on Himmler, Wiligut wrote gnomic texts about the runes, astrology, and ancient Germanic theology and designed many of the symbolic trappings of the Schutzstaffel. These included rituals, especially ones to do with the selective breeding program (marriage, naming of infants, and so forth), and objects inscribed with runes, like the SS death’s head ring. He also helped plan the transformation of the seventeenth-century castle at Wewelsburg into a ceremonial and initiatic center for the SS elite. The renovation used forced labor from a nearby concentration camp, and postwar adaptation as a youth hostel has not exorcised all the evil memories of the place.85 Tourists still wonder at the two great circular halls, one of them with the twelve-fold runic symbol of the zodiac inlaid in the marble floor.86

Stephen E. Flowers, an acknowledged authority on runic traditions, rightly observes that besides influences on Wiligut from Guido von List and Lanz-Liebenfels, “the esoteric history provided by Blavatsky’s Theosophy gave him the broad outlines of his own Germano-centric version of the prehistory of man. As early as 1908, in his ‘Nine Commandments of Gôt,’ he mentions the ‘seven epochs of human history,’ which echo the seven ‘root races’ of Theosophy.”87 These commandments, which survive in a later typescript signed by Wiligut and marked as read by Heinrich Himmler, are said to stem from oral tradition and to have been written down for the first time since the year 1200.88 Much later, Wiligut wrote a fuller exposition for his patron, entitled “Description of the Evolution of Humanity from the Secret Tradition of our Asa-Uana-Clan of Uiligotis.”89

The reputed source of this mythological document that Wiligut called the “Irminsaga” was seven oaken tablets in ancient Aryan linear script supplemented by images, preserved in the Wiligut family. In 1848 they were destroyed in a fire caused by Hungarian rebels, and their content had to be reconstructed through oral tradition. The saga describes four former epochs of humanity and the current fifth one, the description of the latter taken down almost verbatim from “the retired military officer K. Wiligut who died in his 89th year (1883).” Here are some of the characteristics and events attributed to the five epochs:

First epoch: “Aithar-beings,” propagating through concentration of the will, are in constant struggle with water-beings.

Second epoch: Air- and water-beings solidify themselves into bisexual beings who live on earth and water, and can also fly.

Third epoch: The remnants of the second epoch struggle and mate with beings from “heaven” and complete the transition to sexual division. They have a third eye in the forehead. Some mate with animals and generate satyrs, fauns, centaurs, and bull-men, who are in constant struggle with humans.

Fourth epoch: Three races, red, black, and albino, all fight against the beast-men. The third eye disappears. They foresee the coming catastrophe and build giant caves as refuges.

Fifth epoch: To the few survivors of the fourth race come human beings from the moon and mate with them, having no women of their own. The wise organize clans. Asgard is established, but because the earth shifts, the Asa-Uanas have to migrate to “Attallant.” The sixth and seventh humanities are yet to come.

This is so obviously a garbled version of Blavatsky’s first five root races that one wonders how Wiligut could pass it off as his own family’s secret tradition. It does have two conspicuous differences, though. First, there is no overall evolutionary plan under divine guidance, but an endless return of interracial strife and new beginnings. Secondly, the catastrophe that ends each epoch is caused by a moon or other cosmic body slamming into the earth, starting an ice age and forcing human development to start virtually from scratch. Equally obviously, the crashing moons came out of Hans Hoerbiger’s Welteislehre, of which Himmler was a devotee (see chapter 1).

PERYT SHOU, THE OUTSIDER

We have to make a chronological leap backward to do justice to an esotericist whose career spans both world wars.90 He was born in Pomerania as Albert Christian Georg Schultz (1873–1953), but he wrote under the name of a previous incarnation as a priest in ancient Egypt: Peryt Shou. After a scientific training and a period of creative work, Schultz gravitated to Theosophical and Ariosophical circles. He began to publish around 1909 on such topics as Indian fakirs, sexual mysteries in religion, and “psychic breathing.” Unlike many esotericists, he actually gave practical instruction. Here is a summary of his teaching by Manfred Lenz, one of the very few researchers to have concerned themselves with him:

Peryt Shou taught that man is in resonance with certain cosmic fields of consciousness and vibration, or can become so through certain “Logos-practices,” so as to experience an “etherization” of his body and thereby an elevation of soul and spirit. In his writings, Peryt Shou gives many instructions and explanations for the “unfolding” of man into a corresponding “antenna-cross,” which serves as receiver for cosmic rays and vibrations. Once one is tuned in, the “captured waves” generally lead quickly to a peculiar “current” whose surge is usually felt as a pleasant shudder.91

Peryt Shou wrote two short books on Atlantis, one before and one after the First World War. They take for granted the existence of a high civilization, which fell through its own fault, but are less concerned with history than with the Atlanteans’ states of consciousness. Peryt Shou reads Plato’s account as pregnant with esoteric symbolism and, alone among Atlantologists, fastens on the list of Atlantean kings. He analyzes these ten names into their phonetic contents and tabulates their correspondences with star names, the Egyptian decans (30° sections of the zodiac), the Sephiroth of the Kabbalah, the antediluvian patriarchs named in Genesis, and the multiples and divisions of the “mother number” 432.92 This was not just an intellectual game, but part of Peryt Shou’s practical teaching. He enjoins meditation on the “word essences” of the names to develop a subtle sense for their “energetic core.” His purpose, in short, is to revive in modern humans the spiritual capacities that were lost with the fall of Atlantis.93 Here is his summary of the situation:

The two pillars [of Hercules, in the Atlantis myth] are the “electrical” secret of man, the twin poles of a fundamental energy. Where it arises and unfolds within him, as if with a lightning flash it illuminates new worlds. In the natural man it slumbers; it develops as he climbs to the spiritual zones of the World Soul. The secret of this double energy was not hidden to the Ancients, but they misused it. Thus it became their fate. And here we behold the moral catastrophe of the Atlanteans. They were in possession of higher knowledge, of a science through which they wielded great power over the natural forces. But this science served for their fall, for it served lower, blind, egotistical purposes. And thus they were destroyed through that which they most treasured.94

Apart from a few priestly castes, the vast majority of those who emerged after the Atlantean catastrophe lacked the clairvoyant faculty. Consequently we cannot put ourselves in the position of the Atlanteans when they looked up at the stars and entered into telepathic communication with higher beings.95 But we still have the potential for it, because mankind is “the echo of a world-order established from eternity” (original emphasis). Man himself is the “consciousness of the universe, for into him there stream, from a great source (in Orion) of rhythmically gradated vibrations of the astral light, intelligible values, i.e., ‘noumena,’ concepts.”96

Although it does not have to do directly with Atlantis, what follows anticipates today’s interest in cosmogenesis and the constellation of Orion:

Modern astronomy, too, sees at this location [the constellation of the Salamander] the forking of the Milky Way, near the Swan, the center of our cosmic system. Out of it go clouds of a dark, ultraviolet light-matter, which accumulates most densely around the center of Orion, which corresponds to it. And here we see a remarkable cosmic drama. A dark, deep black primordial material floods into the so-called “Lion’s Mouth” of the great Orion nebula in a white luminous cloud of cosmic dust. Two polar forms of primordial matter mingle and copulate in elemental energy development.97

After the First World War, Peryt Shou joined in the search for esoteric meaning in Nordic and Germanic mythology and wrote on “The Edda as Key to the Coming Age.” He also seems to have accepted Lanz’s concept of a degraded human type brought into being by some ancient misdeed.98 On a completely different front, he took notice of the American “New Thought” movement and adapted its ideas for self-improvement to his own more subtle program. During the 1920s he visited the ancient sites of Rome and Egypt, both of which contributed to his broad spiritual synthesis. If he is rightly numbered among the Ariosophists, he was by far the most benign of them. His sympathy for ancient German religion did not make him hostile to Christianity, nor did he have any belief in racial superiority. In his view, all human races needed to be brought to their full spiritual development.99

In 1930, Peryt Shou’s second book on Atlantis appeared, with even more correspondence tables, magic words, and dense passages on comparative philology. It frequently cites Herman Wirth’s Aufgang der Menschheit, which helped Peryt Shou to focus his concept of an archaic religion based on direct spiritual experience. He also mentions the coming Age of Aquarius. There is little on Atlantis except as the implied home of the Ur-Religion, but the physical cause of its destruction, now, “can hardly be otherwise explained than through the fall of the Tertiary Moon”100—the Hoerbiger theory. Aleister Crowley, whom Schultz had met in Berlin,101 makes a cameo appearance as “the English philosopher ‘Therion’.” Peryt Shou calls Crowley’s Law of Thelema the “great law of destiny of the Atlanteans, which in fact is returning today.”102 By this time he was preoccupied with Communist Russia and its karmic destiny, but his basic message remained the same. We should remember it when we come to the New Age (see chapter 10), for there is indeed nothing new there.

The primordial religion taught that man himself creates his destiny, for man was divine from the beginning.

It lies in the essence of divine being that man forms himself, creates himself, for he possesses the divine guardian, the angel in his breast, who watches lest he thereby violate the divine law. If he violates it, he himself must atone for it. In the course of his development, man grew ever further from this primordial religion. He believed that the Godhead was there to care for him, and so he should entrust everything to it.

But this God really dwelt in him, as God dwells in everything. God gave man his higher self, which is divine in nature, self-created and self-determining.

Through the Fall, man lost the right to free self-determination. He had to lean on God for everything and thereby forgot that God burned with its holiest rays in his own breast. Today, in greatest agony, the free man again gives birth to his free primordial faith.103

The apolitical Schultz seems to have evaded the Nazis’ persecution of occultists, perhaps through knowing people like Wiligut, by keeping a low profile, and virtually ceasing to publish. The diary leaves of one of his New Templar friends gives us a rare snapshot of his attitude as the Second World War neared its close.

Dresden, 22.4.1944. We spoke about . . . the Jewish question. Peryt Shou: That damages our karma, to which he attributes the fate of Berlin. My description of the Eastern situation in a dream . . . let him believe in a coming age in which gods come to earth again. That it already happened, and is not fairytales or legends, as generally assumed—he believes that—Creatures who came here from other planets.104

The jottings are prophetic of the direction that Atlantology would take over the next decade, with UFOs, space gods, contactees, and the alien intervention theory of human evolution. But these were phenomena of the New World, enjoying the freedom and moral complacency of the victors. Things were, and are, very different in the German-speaking world.

POSTWAR RECONSTRUCTION II

The postwar revelations of Nazi atrocities beggared rational explanation, and as Europe struggled back onto its feet, the Goddess Reason was the deity of choice. The Germans, so it was explained, had been possessed by “the Irrational,” and to avoid a repetition it was necessary to purge the human mind of this virus. Never were esotericism, occultism, and Theosophy in lower esteem than in the period from 1945 until the sixties, and the excesses of that decade did little to endear them to the intelligentsia. To this day, it is easy to gain a hearing in academia or the media by associating such “irrational” movements with political extremism.

One example is the recent study of German Atlantology by Franz Wegener, to which I willingly admit my debt. In a part-Freudian, part-structuralist peroration Wegener demonstrates that the Atlantis myth is a “parasitical, semiological system with the meaning of Death.”105 So anyone who accepts it is suspect. The Berlin writer and filmmaker Rüdiger Sünner takes a more measured approach in his study of Nazi and post-Nazi mythology, Schwarze Sonne (Black sun). After quoting a passage from one of Lanz’s associates on the sacred places of ancient Germany, Sünner comments:

In England, Ireland, Scandinavia or Brittany it would be entirely normal to speculate in this [lofty and enthusiastic] tone on the religion of one’s ancestors. But for the German public this terrain lies under a taboo, thanks to the Nazis’ overblown rhetoric and its connection with racist ideology. Only scholars and dubious cultists concern themselves with it, in more or less closed circles. One symptom of this is that travel guides maintain an almost embarrassed silence about our often impressive megalithic sites, so that it takes a detective’s nose to discover many of them.106

I know nothing of these closed circles. However, every Whitsunday weekend since 1967 a group has been meeting quite openly at Horn, near Detmold in northwestern Germany. Horn’s claim to fame is its proximity to the Externsteine, an awe-inspiring cluster of natural rock towers in a clearing of the Teutoburg Forest. Once a pagan place of worship, then Christianized, they were rediscovered by the völkisch movement and made much of by the Nazis. They are now on the way to becoming a normal attraction for tourists, prehistory buffs, and New Agers: a sort of German Stonehenge. Like that monument, they inspire scholars, amateurs, and cranks.

The group in question is called “Forschungskreis Externsteine” (Externsteine research circle).107 It was founded by Walther Machalett (1901–1982), a village schoolmaster with a passion for mythology, history, and the landscape. As a youth he loved to visit old castles, and one morning, camping by the ruined Henneburg near his native Gotha, he had an experience worthy of Novalis or Blake.

Every tree, every twig, every bit of wall, every stone block in the courtyard, every one of my friends looked strange! All the outlines of the things around me were quivering and radiating! And the same was true of myself: my fingertips, my hands, my arms and legs were clothed in a bright light, like a solar flare. . . . Birds flying overhead had this sheath floating around them. Every dry blade of grass had it, every telegraph post . . . every church spire, house roof, chimney, every car, whether stationary or moving, every horse and cow in the meadow, every chicken, every person we met!108

Machalett’s biographer Heino Gehrts remarks, “Such experiences are often much more significant indications of a person’s path and destiny than teachers and textbooks.” By all accounts, Machalett himself was an inspiring teacher, and a comfort to his comrades, too, during the three postwar years he spent interned in Buchenwald. In the long evenings, lacking artificial light, he would entertain them with endless sagas, fairytales, and stories from German history. Toward the end of his life, he returned to the experience of his youth with a book of photographs called Sichtbare Strahlen (Visible rays),109 in which he had succeeded in capturing on film the light-forms emanating from highly charged or sacred spots.

The men and women who came to speak at Machalett’s annual conferences were the German equivalent of the British Avalonians, whom we will meet in chapter 7, but with the task of exorcising the perverse use to which Germanic mythology had been bent by the Ariosophists and Nazis. Few of them were academics, but many followed the honorable German tradition of independent scholarship by lawyers, high school teachers, and retired businessmen. A number of them had been Anthroposophists until Steiner’s movement was banned, but they seem to have preferred the Machalett circle as less doctrinaire and Christocentric. Although occultism as such was not on the agenda, those who shared Machalett’s psychic sensitivity felt free to speak of it before this sympathetic company. Their contributions ranged widely. Besides the core study of local history, both before and after Christianization, they touched on the subtle forces of nature; the interface of modern science with ancient knowledge; archaeoastronomy; pendulums and dowsing; ley lines and alignments in the prehistoric landscape; the pivotal Battle of the Teutoburg Forest (9 CE), in which three Roman legions were slaughtered; Stone Age technology; and, as a particular specialty, the theory of Groß-Skulpturen: rock formations turned into sculptures on a gigantic scale.110

Long before the founding of the Externsteine circle, Machalett had been working on his magnum opus: Die Externsteine. Das Zentrum des Abendlandes. Die Geschichte der weißen Rasse (The Externsteine. The center of the West. The history of the white race). The six volumes of about 400 pages each are entitled: I, Atlantis; II, Externsteine; III, Cheopspyramide; IV, Salvage; V, Lichtenstein; VI, Annalen.111

The writing of a “history of the white race” had different implications for Machalett’s generation from those it carries in today’s multiracial culture. While he says that equally thorough histories of the other races should be undertaken,112 the most urgent need was the healing of the European family that had been at war, to a greater or lesser degree, from 1914 until 1945. He writes:

Let the Western peoples today call themselves what they will—Germans, French, Italians, Russians, Poles, Greeks, Norwegians—they are and will remain members of a single people, just members of the White race.

With this way of thinking we will save ourselves from the recurrent surge of national hatred, which for so long has brought in its wake blood and misery, terror and destruction, the annihilation of cultural values and of human beings.113

In pursuit of this ideal, Machalett set himself four interlinked objectives, which I understand as follows: (1) to expound his own theory of Atlantis as a high civilization and the original home of the white race; (2) to gather in translation all the ancient histories, annals, and myths concerning the Flood and the prehistoric period; (3) to catalog all prehistoric sites, megaliths, alignments, caves, and sacred places that derived from Atlantean civilization; (4) to develop his theory of prehistoric Earth measurement and surveying.

This ambitious program rested on twin dogmas: that Plato’s account was true, and that Hoerbiger was right, at least about the moon.114 Putting these together, Machalett deduced that it was the capture of the Quaternary Moon that sucked the oceans to the equator and brought Atlantis to a watery end. In the fourth volume, Salvage, he provides a thumbnail sketch of what the Atlanteans did when that moon appeared in the sky:

Realization of the cosmic danger.

Remembrance of former and similar catastrophes [i.e., the capture and fall of the three prior moons].

Building of moon observatories.

Preparation of safe areas.

Occupation of areas needed for refuge.

Exodus of the privileged and selected ones.

Confinement of those remaining in safe areas.

General flight at the height of the catastrophe.

Submergence of the Atlantean continent.

Tentative feelers put out by the survivors from the underground shelters, after the subsidence of the flood.

Beginning of rebuilding of the sunken cultures and cults.

Mixing of the survivors with one another, forming new peoples and tribes.

Attempts to return to the original home . . .

Creation and building of a new culture worldwide . . .115

The reader may wonder what the Externsteine had to do with this, and why they should be called the “center of the West.” Machalett’s theory can best be expressed as a series of coincidences:

 The coordinates of the Externsteine are latitude 51°52' North, longitude 8°55' East. (The longitude is based simply on the human convention of the Greenwich Meridian, but the latitude is a fact of nature.)

 The angle of elevation of the sides of the Great Pyramid is 51°51'. This is mathematically determined by the builders’ desire to express the value π in the ratio of perimeter to height.

 The Great Pyramid’s coordinates are 29°58' North, 31°9' East.

 A line drawn on the earth’s surface from the Great Pyramid northwest to the Externsteine makes an angle of 51°51' with the 30° line of latitude.

 An isosceles triangle with its base as the 30° line of latitude and two of its points at the Great Pyramid and the Externsteine produces a third point at the island of Salvage (Portuguese: Selvagens), at latitude 30°5' North, 15°55' West.

 Thus a triangle drawn between the three points Externsteine, Great Pyramid, Salvage reproduces the geometry of the Great Pyramid, placing its summit at the latitude corresponding to the angle of elevation.

 A circle with center at the Externsteine and circumference passing through the Great Pyramid and Salvage encloses North Africa, the Mediterranean, Asia Minor, and all of Europe as far as the Urals, and touches Greenland. This is the historical ambit of the white race, its legends, and its prehistoric remains.

Are these just coincidences, or do they mean something? The reader must decide. To Machalett, they were proof of Atlantean geodesy and astronomical observation on a continental scale, all of it motivated by the need to calculate the course of the approaching moon. Hoerbiger’s theory serves him as key to every prehistoric mystery, such as the purpose of stone circles, dolmens, and other megalithic constructs: they were all observatories. It accounts for the migrations from the once-inhabited far north, whose climate became insupportable as the air was drawn equatorward. Religion changed, too, from the Atlantean solar cult to a dismal lunar cult, aimed at pacifying the moon god through sacrifice. Even the Atlanteans’ invasion of the Mediterranean, chronicled by Plato, falls into place: it was to secure safe areas on higher ground than their low-lying island.116

John Michell, whose interests accord with Machalett’s at many points, has shown in his study of geographic and cultic centers that every people imagines itself to be at the hub of the universe.117 Early civilizations fixed their centers by surveying the limits of their land, whether on a large scale like the British Isles, or on as small a scale as the Isle of Man. The center became the sacred omphalos, the seat of spiritual authority, and the point of reference for the political divisions of the land, which, as Michell also shows, was generally into twelve sectors.118 From a mythic point of view, one can see Machalett’s grand project as the re-creation of such a center.

The annual meetings of the Externsteine circle are to all appearances a conference, but there is a ritual aspect to them. They begin on Ascension Day (Thursday evening) with an elevating musical performance and end on Whitsunday with a tour of some interesting local sites. In the Christian tradition, Whitsunday (Pentecost) commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the twelve apostles: an event that non-Christians can interpret, too, in their way. The Externsteine circle celebrates the genius loci—the “spirit of place” honored by all traditional peoples. It meets in the shadow of one of nature’s wonders and honors it with a free exchange of ideas between men and women, experts and amateurs, engineers and “spiritual scientists.” As an effort at postwar reconstruction and the healing of the German psyche, it is as different as can be from the grim program of the Aryan supremacists. The rightness or wrongness of Walther Machalett’s own theories seems a small matter in comparison to that.