Adolf und die Ubermen von der Golden Dawn
In the history of Hitlerism, or rather in certain aspects of this
history, everything happens as if the whole conception on which
it was based has baffled the ordinary historian so that, if we want
to understand, we shall have to abandon our positive way of looking
at things and try to enter a Universe where Cartesian reason and
reality are no longer valid.
We have
been concerned to describe these aspects of Hitlerism because, as
M. Marcel Ray pointed out in I939, the war that Hitler imposed on
the world was a "Manichaean war," or as the Bible says,
"a struggle between gods." It is not, of course, a question
of a struggle between Fascism and Democracy, or between a liberal
and an authoritarian conception of society. That is the exoteric
side of the conflict; but there is an esoteric side as well. This
struggle between gods, which has been going on behind visible events,
is not yet over on this planet, but the formidable progress in human
knowledge made in the last few years is about to give it another
form. Now that the gates of knowledge are beginning to open on to
the infinite, it is important to understand what this struggle is
about. If we consciously want to be men of today, that is to say,
the contemporaries of tomorrow, we must have an exact and clear
picture of the moment when the fantastic first invaded the realm
of reality. This is what we are now going to examine.
Magick Socialism
"At bottom," said Rauschning, "every German has one
foot in Atlantis, where he seeks a better Fatherland and a better
patrimony. This double nature of the Germans, this faculty they
have of splitting their personality which enables them to live in
the real world and at the same time to project themselves into an
imaginary world, is especially noticeable in Hitler and provides
the key to his magic socialism."
And Rauschning in an attempt to explain the rise to power of this
"high priest of a secret religion," tried to convince
himself that several times in history "whole nations have fallen
into a state of inexplicable agitation. They follow the flagellants'
procession, or are seized by St. Vitus's Dance.... National-Socialism
is the St. Vitus's Dance of the twentieth century."
But where
does this strange malady come from? To this question he failed to
find a satisfactory answer. "Its deepest roots are hidden in
secret places."
It is
these secret places that we feel we ought to explore. And it is
not a historian, but a poet who will be our guide.
P.J.
Toulet and Arthur Machen
"Two men who have read Paul-Jean Toulet and who meet
(probably in a bar) imagine that that means they belong to
an aristocracy." Toulet himself wrote that. It happens
sometimes that important things are suspended on a pin's head.
It is thanks to a minor but charming writer, unknown despite
the efforts of a few admirers, that I first heard the name
of Arthur Machen, practically unknown in France.
After some study, we discovered that Machen's works (there
are some thirty volumes in all) are, from a "spiritual"
point of view, more important than those of H.G. Wells.
Pursuing our researches on Machen, we discovered an English
Society of Initiates with a very distinguished membership.
This society, to which Machen was indebted for an experience
that had a decisive influence on his inner development and
which was a great source of inspiration, is unknown even to
specialists. Finally, some of Machen's writings, in particular
the text we shall be quoting, throw into clear relief an uncommon
notion of the nature of Evil, which is quite indispensable
for an understanding of those aspects of contemporary history
we are examining in this part of our book. |
Arthur Machen.
|
Before
entering into the heart of our subject we would therefore like to
say a few words about this curious man, beginning with a little
literary digression concerning a minor Parisian author, P.J. Toulet,
and ending with a vision of a great subterranean gateway behind
which lie, still smoking, the remains of the martyrs and the ruins
of the Nazi tragedy which disrupted the whole world. The paths of
"fantastic realism," as we shall see once again, do not
resemble the ordinary paths of knowledge.
A Great Neglected Genius
In November 1897 a friend, "somewhat given to the occult sciences,"
brought to the notice of Paul-Jean Toulet a novel by an unknown
thirty-four-year-old author entitled The Great God Pan. This book,
which evokes a primitive pagan world, not entirely submerged but
still cautiously surviving and occasionally releasing among us its
God of Evil and his cloven- hoofed angels, made a profound impression
on Toulet and started him on his literary career. He began translating
The Great God Pan and, borrowing from Machen his nightmarish decor
with the Great Pan lurking in the thickets of our countryside, wrote
his first novel: Monsieur du Paur, homme public.
Monsieur du Paur was published towards the end of 1898, and met
with no success. It is not an important work, and might never have
been heard of had not M. Henri Martineau, a great Stendhalian and
a friend of Toulet, taken it upon himself, twenty years later, to
republish the book at his own expense in the Editions du Divan.
M. Martineau was determined to show that Monsieur du Paur was inspired
by Machen's book, but was nevertheless an original work, so that
it was through him that the attention of a few literary people was
drawn to Arthur Machen and his Great God Pan and some correspondence
between Toulet and Machen was brought to light.
[...]
For Machen,
as is apparent in all his works, "man is made of mystery and
exists for mysteries and visions." Reality is the supernatural.
The external world can teach us little, unless we look upon it as
a reservoir of symbols and hidden meanings. The only works which
have some chance of being real and serving some useful. purpose
are works of imagination produced by a mind in search of eternal
verities. As the critic Philip van Doren Stern has pointed out:
"The fantastic stories of Arthur Machen perhaps contain more
essential truths than all the graphs and statistics in the world."
It was
a strange adventure that brought Machen back to literature. It made
his name famous in a few weeks, and the shock this gave him decided
him to devote the rest of his life to writing.
He found
journalism irksome, and no longer wanted to write for his own satisfaction.
War had just broken out. There was a demand for "heroic"
literature. This was hardly his line. The Evening News, however,
asked him for a story. He wrote it straight off, but in his own
individual style, calling it The Bowmen. The newspaper published
this story on 29th September, 1914, the day after the retreat from
Mons. Machen had imagined an incident in this battle: St. George
in shining armour, at the head of his angels in the guise of the
old archers of the battle of Agincourt, comes to the rescue of the
British Army.
The next
thing that happened was that scores of soldiers wrote into the newspaper
to say that this Mr. Machen had invented nothing. They had seen
with their own eyes on the Mons front the angels of St. George mingling
in their ranks. This they could swear to on their honour. Many of
these letters were published. England, anxious for a miracle in
her hour of peril, was profoundly stirred. Machen had been hurt
when no notice was taken of him when he had tried to reveal the
secrets of reality. Now, with a cheap kind of fantasy, he had aroused
the whole country. Or could it be that hidden forces rose up, in
one form or another, summoned by his imagination that had so often
been concerned with essential truths and was now, perhaps unconsciously,
at work deep down within him? Dozens of times Machen insisted in
the Press that his story was pure invention. No one ever believed
it. Right up to his death, thirty years later, Machen, now an old
man, often reverted in conversation to this fantastic story of the
Angels of Mons.
How We Discovered an English Secret Society
About the year 1880, in France, in England and in Germany some secret
societies of Initiates and members of hermetic orders were founded
to which a number of very influential people belonged. The story
of this mystical post-romantic crisis has not yet been written.
It deserves to be, as it might throw light upon the origin of several
important trends of thought which have determined certain political
tendencies.
In two letters written by Arthur Machen to Toulet we find the following
remarkable passages. In the first, written in 1899, he says: "When
I was writing Pan and The White Powder I did not believe that such
strange things had ever happened in real life, or could ever have
happened. Since then, and quite recently, I have had certain experiences
in my own life which have entirely changed my point of view in these
matters....Henceforward I am quite convinced that nothing is impossible
on this Earth. I need scarcely add, I suppose, that none of the
experiences I have had has any connection whatever with such impostures
as spiritualism or theosophy. But I believe that we are living in
a world of the greatest mystery full of unsuspected and quite astonishing
things."
In 1900
he wrote as follows: "It may amuse you to know that I sent
a copy of my Great God Pan to an adept, an advanced 'occultist'
whom I met in secret, and this is what he wrote me: 'The book amply
proves that by thought and meditation rather than through reading,
you have attained a certain degree of initiation independently of
orders or organizations.'"
Who was
this "adept?" And what were Machen's "experiences?"
In
another letter, after Toulet had been to London, he wrote:
"Mr. Waite, who likes you very much, asks me to send you his
best regards."
We were
interested to learn the name of this friend of Machen and to discover
that he was one of the best authorities on alchemy and a Rosicrucian
specialist.
We had
reached this point in our researches into the intellectual interests
of Arthur Machen, when a friend revealed to us the existence in
England, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth
century, of a secret "initiatory" society of Rosicrucian
inspiration. [See Nos. 2 and 3 of the review La Tour Saint-Jacques,
1956: 'L'ordre hermetique de la Golden Dawn' by Pierre Victor.]
Machen and Waite together in 1936.
The Golden Dawn
This society was called the Golden Dawn, and its members included
some of the most brilliant minds in the country. Arthur Machen was
himself a member.
The Golden Dawn, founded in 1887, was an offshoot of the English
Rosicrucian Society created twenty years earlier by Robert Wentworth
Little, and consisted largely of leading Freemasons. The latter
society had about 144 members, including Bulwer Lytton, author of
The Last Days of Pompeii.
The Golden
Dawn, with a smaller membership, was formed for the practice of
ceremonial magic and the acquisition of initiatory knowledge and
powers. Its leaders were Woodman, Mathers and Wynn Westcott (the
"occultist" mentioned by Toulet in his letter of 1900).
It
was in contact with similar German societies, some of whose
members were later associated with Rudolf Steiner's famous
anthroposophical movement and other influential sects during
the pre-Nazi period. Later on it came under the leadership
of Aleister Crowley, an altogether extraordinary man who was
certainly one of the greatest exponents of the neo-paganism
whose development in Germany we have noted.
S.L.
Mathers, after the death of Woodman and the resignation
of Westcott, was the Grand Master of the Golden Dawn, which
he directed for some time from Paris, where he had just
married Henri Bergson's daughter.
|
William
Wynn Westcott |
A
Nobel-Prize Winner in a Black Mask
Mathers was succeeded in his office by the celebrated poet W.B.
Yeats, who was later to become a Nobel Prize-winner.
Yeats took the name of "Frere Demon est Deus Inversus."
He used to preside over the meetings dressed in a kilt, wearing
a black mask and a golden dagger in his belt.
Arthur
Machen took the name of "Filus Aquarti." The Golden Dawn
had one woman member [no mention of Fraulien Sprengel...? -B:.B:.]:
Florence Farr, Director of the Abbey Theatre and an intimate friend
of Bernard Shaw. Other members included: Algernon Blackwood, Bram
Stoker (the author of Dracula), Sax Rohmer, Peck, the Astronomer
Royal of Scotland, the celebrated engineer Allan Bennett, and Sir
Gerald Kelly, President of the Royal Academy. It seems that on these
exceptional people the Golden Dawn exercised a lasting influence,
and they themselves admitted that their outlook on the world was
changed, while the activities they indulged in never failed to prove
both efficacious and uplifting.
A Hollow Earth, A Frozen World, A New Man
The Earth is hollow. We are living inside it. The stars are blocks
of ice. Several Moons have already fallen on the Earth. The whole
history of humanity is contained in the struggle between ice and
fire.
Man is not finished. He is on the brink of a formidable mutation
["alien hybridisation" -B:.B:.] which will confer on him
the powers the ancients attributed to the gods. A few specimens
of the New Man exist in the world, who have perhaps come here from
beyond the frontiers of time and space.
Alliances
could be formed with the Master of the World or the King of Fear
who reigns over a city hidden somewhere in the East. Those who conclude
a pact will change the surface of the Earth and endow the human
adventure with a new meaning for many thousands of years.
Such
are the "scientific" theories and "religious"
conceptions on which Nazism was originally based and in which Hitler
and the members of his group believed -- theories which, to a large
extent, have dominated social and political trends in recent history.
This may seem extravagant. Any explanation, even partial, of contemporary
history based on ideas and beliefs of this kind may seem repugnant.
In our view, nothing is repugnant that is in the interests of the
truth.
Against Nature and Against God
It is well known that the Nazi party was openly, and even flamboyantly
anti-intellectual; that it burnt books and relegated the theoretical
physicists among its "Judaeo-Marxist" enemies. Less is
known about the reasons which led it to reject official Western
science, and still less with regard to the basic conception of the
nature of man on which Nazism was founded -- at any rate in the
minds of some of its leaders. If we knew this it would be easier
to place the last World War within the category of great spiritual
conflicts: history animated once again by the spirit of La Legende
des Siecles.
Hitler used to say: "We are often abused for being the enemies
of the mind and spirit. Well, that is what we are, but in a far
deeper sense than bourgeois science, in its idiotic pride, could
ever imagine." This is very like what Gurdjieff said to his
disciple Ouspensky after having condemned science: "My way
is to develop the hidden potentialities of man; a way that is against
Nature and against God." This idea of the hidden potentialities
of Man is fundamental. It often leads to the rejection of science
and a disdain for ordinary human beings. On this level very few
men really exist. To be, means to be something different. The ordinary
man, "natural" man is nothing but a worm, and the Christians'
God nothing but a guardian for worms.
Dr. Willy
Ley, one of the world's greatest rocket experts, fled from Germany
in 1933. It was from him that we learned of the existence in Berlin
shortly before the Nazis came to power, of a little spiritual community
that is of great interest to us.
Haushofer
and the Vril
This secret community was founded, literally, on Bulwer Lytton's
novel The Coming Race. The book describes a race of men psychically
far in advance of ours. They have acquired powers over themselves
and over things that make them almost godlike. For the moment
they are in hiding. They live in caves in the centre of the
Earth. Soon they will emerge to reign over us.
This
appears to be as much as Dr. Ley could tell us. He added
with a smile that the disciples believed they had secret
knowledge that would enable them to change their race and
become the equals of the men hidden in the bowels of the
Earth.
|
Karl Haushofer |
Methods of concentration,
a whole system of internal gymnastics by which they would be transformed.
They began their exercises by staring fixedly at an apple cut in
half.... We continued our researches.
This
Berlin group called itself The Luminous Lodge, or The Vril Society.
The vril [the notion of the 'vril' is mentioned for the first time
in the works of the French writer Jacolliot, French Consul in Calcutta
under the Second Empire. ] is the enormous energy of which we only
use a minute proportion in our daily life, the nerve-centre of our
potential divinity. Whoever becomes master of the vril will be the
master of himself, of others round him and of the world. [Reich's
"orgone"...? -B:.B:.]
This
should be the only object of our desires, and all our efforts should
be directed to that end. All the rest belongs to official psychology,
morality, and religions and is worthless.
The world
will change: the Lords will emerge from the centre of the Earth.
Unless we have made an alliance with them and become Lords ourselves,
we shall find ourselves among the slaves, on the dung-heap that
will nourish the roots of the New Cities that will arise. [shades
of Crowley's Liber AL? -B:.B:.]
The Luminous
Lodge [Silver Star, Argon Astron, L.V.X. and latter-day "Lightworkers"
woven together in this Luciferian tapestry? -B:.B:.] had associations
with the theosophical and Rosicrucian groups. According to Jack
Fishman, author of a curious book entitled The Seven Men of Spandau,
Karl Haushofer was a member of this lodge. We shall have more to
say about him later, when it will be seen that his association with
this Vril Society helps to explain certain things.
The Idea of the Mutation of Man
The reader will recall that the writer, Arthur Machen, we discovered
was connected with an English society of Initiates, the Golden Dawn.
This neo-pagan society, which had a distinguished membership, was
an offshoot of the English Rosicrucian Society, founded by Wentworth
Little in 1867. Little was in contact with the German Rosicrucians.
He recruited his followers, to the number of 144, from the ranks
of the higher-ranking Freemasons. One of his disciples was Bulwer
Lytton.
Bulwer Lytton, a learned man of genius, celebrated throughout the
world for his novel The Last Days of Pompeii, little thought that
one of his books, in some ten years' time, would inspire a mystical
pre-Nazi group in Germany. Yet in works like The Coming Race or
Zanoni, he set out to emphasize the realities of the spiritual world,
and more especially, the infernal world. He considered himself an
Initiate. Through his romantic works of fiction he expressed the
conviction that there are beings endowed with superhuman powers.
These beings will supplant us and bring about a formidable mutation
in the elect of the human race.
We must
beware of this notion of a mutation. It crops up again with Hitler,
and is not yet extinct today.
Hitler's
aim was neither the founding of a race of supermen, nor the conquest
of the world; these were only means towards the realization of the
great work he dreamed of. His real aim was to perform an act of
creation, a divine operation, the goal of a biological mutation
which would result in an unprecedented exaltation of the human race
and the "apparition of a new race of heroes and demigods and
god-men." (Dr. Achille Delmas.) [perhaps these same neo-Nephilim
Nazi "ubermen" are today clothed in the time and culture-appropriate
sci-fi regalia of "alien"/human "hybrids" a
la Whit Strieber, Harvard's Dr. John Mack, and a veritable cornucopia
of other associated -- often Rockefeller-financed -- socio-cultural
metaprogrammers. -B:.B:.]
We must
also beware of the notion of the "Unknown Supermen." It
is found in all the "black" mystical writings both in
the West and in the East. Whether they live under the Earth or came
from other planets, whether in the form of giants like those which
are said to lie encased in cloth of gold in the crypts of Thibetan
monasteries, or of shapeless and terrifying beings such as Lovecraft
describes, do these "Unknown Supermen," evoked in pagan
and Satanic rites, actually exist? When Machen speaks of the World
of Evil, "full of caverns and crepuscular beings dwelling therein,"
he is referring, as an adept of the Golden Dawn, to that other world
in which man comes into contact with the "Unknown Supermen."
It seems certain that Hitler shared this belief, and even claimed
to have been in touch with these "Supermen."
G.'.
D.'. Mathers Meets the "Great Terrorists"
We have already mentioned the Golden Dawn and the German Vril
Society. We shall have something to say later about the Thule
Group. We are not so foolish as to try to explain history
in the light of secret societies. What we shall see, curiously
enough, is that it all "ties up," and that with
the coming of Nazism it was the "other world" which
ruled over us for a number of years.
That world has been defeated, but it is not dead, either on
the Rhine or elsewhere. And there is nothing alarming about
it: only our ignorance is alarming. [Indeed, those who forget
history, etc. -B:.B:.] |
|
Mathers
claimed to be in communication with these "Unknown Supermen"
and to have established contact with them in the company of his
wife, the sister of Henri Bergson. Here follows a page of the manifesto
addressed to "Members of the Second Order" in 1896:
We leave
it to the reader to compare the statement of Mathers, head of a
small neo-pagan society at the end of the nineteenth century, and
the utterances of a man who, at the time Rauschning recorded them,
was preparing to launch the world into an adventure which caused
the death of twenty million men. We beg him not to ignore this comparison
and the lesson to be drawn from it on the grounds that the Golden
Dawn and Nazism, in the eyes of a "reasonable" historian,
have nothing in common. The historian may be reasonable, but history
is not. These two men shared the same beliefs: their fundamental
experiences were the same, and they were guided by the same force.
They belong to the same trend of thought and to the same religion.
This religion has never up to now been seriously studied. Neither
the Church nor the Rationalists -- that other Church -- have ever
allowed it. We are now entering an epoch in the history of knowledge
when such studies will become possible because now that reality
is revealing its fantastic side, ideas and techniques which seem
abnormal, contemptible or repellent will be found useful in so far
as they enable us to understand a "reality" that becomes
more and more disquieting.
We are
not suggesting that the reader should study an affiliation Rosy
Cross-Bulwer Lytton-Little-Mathers-Crowley- Hitler, or any similar
association which would include also Mme Blavatsky and Gurdjieff.
Looking for affiliations is a game, like looking for "influences"
in literature; when the game is over, the problem is still there.
In literature it's a question of genius; in history, of power.
The Golden
Dawn is not enough to explain the Thule Group, or the Luminous Lodge,
the Ahnenherbe. Naturally there are cross- currents and secret or
apparent links between the various groups, which we shall not fail
to point out. Like all "little" history, that is an absorbing
pastime. But our concern is with "big" history.
We believe
that these societies, great or small, related or unrelated, with
or without ramifications, are manifestations, more or less apparent
and more or less important, of a world other than the one in which
we live. Let us call it the world of Evil, in Machen's sense of
the word. The truth is, we know just as little about the world of
Good. We are living between two worlds, and pretending that this
"no-man's-land" is identical with our whole planet. The
rise of Nazism was one of those rare moments in the history of our
civilization, when a door was noisily and ostentatiously opened
on to something " Other." What is strange is that people
pretend not to have seen or heard anything apart from the sights
and sounds inseparable from war and political strife.
All these
movements: the modern Rosy-Cross, Golden Dawn, the German Vril Society
(which will bring us to the Thule Group where we shall find Haushofer,
Hess and Hitler) were more or less closely associated with the powerful
and well organized Theosophical Society. Theosophy added to neo-pagan
magic an oriental setting and a Hindu terminology. Or, rather, it
provided a link between a certain oriental Satanism and the West.
Theosophy
was the name finally given to the whole vast renaissance in the
world of magic that affected many thinkers so profoundly at the
beginning of the century.
In his
study Le Thiosophisme, histoire d'une pseudo-religion, published
in 1921, the philosopher Rene Guenon foresaw what was likely to
occur. He realized the dangers lurking behind theosophy and the
neo-pagan Initiatory groups that were more or less connected with
Mme Blavatsky and her sect.
This
is what he wrote:
