Nazi Occultism: Between the SS and Esotericism

152 Pages·2023·11.494 MB·English

by  Stéphane François

NAZI OCCULTISM
Nazi Occultism provides a serious scholarly study of a topic that is often marred by
sensationalism and misinformation.
The Morning of the Magicians by Pauwels and Bergier (1960) gave rise to the idea
that a secret society with wide powers, the ‘Thule society,’ was the hidden and
ignored centre of Nazism. The influence of this very real small group is, however,
only a fantasy, a myth. The author, a historian specializing in neo-Nazism, looks
back on this speculative construction, its origins, its ideological tinkering and
the practices which have succeeded in forming a sort of radical and sulphurous
counterculture which has created a fascination with esotericism and Nazism and
the SS. To better understand it, he also paints a portrait of some of the authors
who contributed to this extremist subculture, such as the Italian esotericist Julius
Evola, the Argentine anthropologist Jacques-Marie de Mahieu, Chilean neo-Nazi
Miguel Serrano and the writer Jean-Paul Bourre.
This book will appeal to scholars, researchers and activists as well as general
readers with an interest in the history of Nazism and the occult.
Stéphane François is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Mons,
Belgium. He is also an associate member of the CNRS, France, and a researcher in
the Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités (Societies, Religions, Secularism Group).
Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right
Series editors
Nigel Copsey, Teesside University, UK and
Graham Macklin, Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX),
University of Oslo, Norway.
This book series focuses upon national, transnational and global manifestations
of fascist, far right and right-wing politics primarily within a historical context
but also drawing on insights and approaches from other disciplinary perspec-
tives. Its scope also includes anti-fascism, radical-right populism, extreme-right
violence and terrorism, cultural manifestations of the far right, and points of
convergence and exchange with the mainstream and traditional right.
Titles include:
Inside the Black Box of ‘White Backlash’
Letters of Support to Enoch Powell (1968-1969)
Olivier Esteves
Histories of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Australia
Edited by Evan Smith, Jayne Persian and Vashti Jane Fox
Foreign Fighters in Ukraine
The Brown–Red Cocktail
Kacper Rękawek
The Nazi Party and the German Communities Abroad
The Latin American Case
João Fábio Bertonha and Rafael Athaides
Nazi Occultism
Between the SS and Esotericism
Stéphane François
The Rise of the Radical Right in the Global South
Edited by Rosana Pinheiro-Machado and Tatiana Vargas-Maia
Global Identitarianism
Edited by José Pedro Zúquete and Riccardo Marchi
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Studies-in-Fascism-and-the-Far-Right/book-series/FFR
NAZI OCCULTISM
Between the SS and Esotericism
Stéphane François
Translated by Eriks Uskalis
First published in English 2023
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© CNRS Editions, Paris, 2020
The right of Stéphane François to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Translated by Eriks Uskalis
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
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or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Published in French as ‘L’occultisme nazi’ by CNRS Editions, Paris, 2020
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: François, Stéphane, author. | Uskalis, Eriks, translator.
Title: Nazi occultism : between the SS and esotericism / Stéphane
François ; translated by Eriks Uskalis Other titles: “Occultisme nazi.”
English | Between the SS and esotericism
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2023. | Series:
Routledge studies in fascism and the far right | “Published in French
as ‘L’occultisme nazi’ by CNRS Editions, Paris, 2020.” | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022042254 (print) | LCCN 2022042255 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032235455 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032234731 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003278191 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: National socialism and occultism. |
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei. Schutzstaffel. |
Germany--Politics and government--1933-1945. | Mythology,
Germanic. | Secret societies--Germany. | Occultism--Germany--
History--20th century.
Classification: LCC DD256.5 .F713413 2023 (print) |
LCC DD256.5 (ebook) | DDC 130.943/09043--dc23/eng/20221206
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042254
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042255
ISBN: 978-1-032-23545-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-23473-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-27819-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003278191
Typeset in Bembo
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
PART 1
Studies 7
1 The esoteric origins of Mein Kampf: Myths and realities 9
2 Nazi esotericism: Between völkisch thought and fantasy 19
3 Neopaganism and Nazism 30
4 The ‘mysterious history’ and the French far-right 52
PART 2
Portraits 65
5 Evolian anthropology, the ‘race of the mind’ and Judaism 67
6 Jacques de Mahieu: Between biological racism
and ‘mysterious history’ 87
7 Miguel Serrano: A Chilean neo-Nazi between diplomacy
and racial occultism 97
vi Contents
8 Counter-culture and ‘Nazi esoterism’: The example
of Wilhelm Landig’s Thulean Cycle 109
9 Between freak thought and identitarian world view:
The writer Jean-Paul Bourre 115
10 Michael Moynihan and the Wulfing Kindred 124
Conclusion 136
Index 142
INTRODUCTION
This work consists of two unequal parts.1 The first, the shortest, includes four
studies of what purported ‘Nazi occultism’ is, in concrete terms, of its origins
and expressions, in particular in its pagan, or rather neo-pagan iterations. The
second, the longest, consists of portraits of authors who bind esoterism tightly
together with extreme political ideas (fascism and Nazism). This combination
bears on a certain world view the authors themselves had, but which was also
shared by their readers, who would not have read them had they not been inter-
ested in the ideas developed therein.
First and foremost, these two parts analyse the contents of what has been
termed ‘the mysterious history.’ It concerns a publishing trend, which came into
being in the wake of the success of Matin des magiciens, a book written by Jacques
Bergier and Louis Pauwels in 1960. Its intentions were to resolve all the myster-
ies of history: lost civilisations, unexplained events, etc. In concrete terms, it fills
in the extant ‘blanks’ and in return offers explanations, often aberrant, which
run counter to ‘official history.’ From time to time, as in the case of Jacques de
Mahieu, racist subtexts are formulated in order to deny non-European civilisa-
tions the aptitude, or the capability, to construct Cyclopean monuments (such
as the pyramids of Giza, Baalbek, the pre-Columbian cities) or to give birth to
complex civilisations.2 ‘Nazi occultism’ is one of these underpinning subtexts,
which attempts to explain the criminal policy of National Socialism through
the hypothesis of its occultist hidden agenda. Since the 1960s, this occultism-
Nazism pairing has constituted a specific publishing field, situated on the mar-
gins of esoteric and right-wing extremist circles. Whilst certain authors ‘just’
want to understand the motivations of the Nazis, others, on the other hand,
those analysed in the second part of this book, wish to spread an ideological
message. The synthesis of the theses propounded by various individuals has
given birth to ‘Nazi occultism.’ This fusion is accomplished all the more easily
DOI: 10.4324/9781003278191-1
2 Introduction
in that, in common parlance, the word ‘occult’ and its derivations allude to
that which is hidden, masked, a meaning which ‘glues’ well to Nazism, which,
to a great many, remains incomprehensible in the literal meaning of the word.
It would thus appear that for national socialism there exists a reading other
than historical, hidden, deliberately or not, by the official history. This occultist
rereading would offer the keys to understanding the irrational and extermina-
tionist policy of the Hitlerian regime.3
The militant, like every human being, thinks and reasons according to a
certain world view, following a more or less coherent framework which focuses
on the individuals, the objects and the powers supposed to populate the real,
on their attributes, their interconnections, their origins and their futures: these
are cosmologies. They offer ‘a general matrix of intelligibility of empirically
observable facts, be they of the order of practices, ideas or institutions.’4 It also
concerns ‘a world view [which] presents itself in discursive forms or in that of
structures underlying several symbolic mechanisms.’5 The theories analysed in
this work are also the expression of a form of culture which can be defined,
according to the Quebec sociologist Guy Rocher, as ‘an intricate system of more
or less formalized ways of thinking, feeling, and acting, which, being learned
and shared by a plurality of people, serve, in a way both objective and symbolic,
to constitute these people into a particular and distinct collectivity.’6 Beyond
the analysis of one of the most minority radical movements, we could talk of
the ‘underground’ of the ‘underground,’ the studies comprising this book being
inscribed above all in the framework of what Anglo-Saxon sociologists and
anthropologists call ‘rejected knowledge,’7 in other words the analysis of forms
of knowledge rejected by the official knowledges but which are none other than
constituent parts of popular culture, that is to say constituent parts of the culture
of radical right milieus. Here, indeed, the political actuality is inseparable from a
form of irrationalism, religiosity and esotericism.
THE UNDERGROUND
The underground can be defined as a lifestyle on the margins of the dominant
values of society, the mainstream, and which develops its own rules, both
intellectual/cultural and for everyday living. It also expresses itself through a
political and/or artistic radicalness (radical engagement or disengagement)
combined with a very high cultural level (self-taught or otherwise) and
through a wish to subvert. Last, it encapsulates an idea of the forbidden, of the
unauthorised. It involves a deviant system whose discourses and social prac-
tices run counter to dominant social norms.
See Howard S. BECKER, Outsiders. Études de sociologie de la déviance, Paris,
Métailié, 1985; Frédéric MONNEYRON et Martine XIBERRAS, Le Monde hippie.
De l’imaginaire psychédélique à la révolution informatique, Paris, Imago, 2008.
Introduction 3
In fact, there exist movements operating on the margins of neo-fascism, ‘rev-
olutionary nationalism’8 and völkisch racialism which mix esoteric traditionalism
with the doctrinal corpus of the radical right (European nationalism, antisemitism,
‘Nazi occultism,’ Nordicism, ethnocentrism, racialism, occultism, etc.),9 giving
birth to what Pierre-André Taguieff calls a ‘spiritual-religious nationalism.’10
Their political mythologies, irrationalist, are thus manufactured on the basis of
diverse heritages, borrowed from minority cultures originating from the two
extremes of the political spectrum.11
We have indeed known since Claude Lévi-Strauss that human thinking, and
primarily mythical thinking, is combinational. This involves the well-known
notion of ‘bricolage,’ which underlines the fact that myths are created through
borrowings, permutations, inversions and restructurings of pre-existing myths:
What is specific to mythical thought, as it is to bricolage on a practical
level, is its development of ensembles structured not directly, but in using
the residue and fragments of events: ‘odds and ends,’ an English person
would say, or in French snippets and scraps, fossil witnesses to an individual
or to a society.12
Syncretism thus appears not as a derivative or secondary form, but as a normal,
and in a way inevitable, form of myth. Ideologies, like mythologies, collide, mix,
exchange and interfere with each other. These points of contact, the shared
mythemes, to speak in the way Lévi- Strauss would, allow the combination of the
ideas of the radical right and ‘heterodoxographies,’ that is to say non-conventional
discourses. We thus suggest that the reader of this essay explores, wanders and
strolls through these mythemes.
Several radical right ideological tendencies or movements have been influenced
by ‘Nazi occultism’ or esotericism in general: we could, for example, point to
FASCISM, OCCULTISM AND FREEMASONRY IN ITALY
Fascism received a sympathetic welcome in Italian masonic circles due to the
movement’s open anti-clericalism. What is more, Italian freemasonry, heir to
the ideas of the Risorgimento, was quite nationalistic, which further encour-
aged this rapprochement. In fact, fascism was initially supported by an entire
movement mixing together Ghibelline tradition, freemasonry, occultism
and Italian paganism. This motley mystic-intellectual movement was char-
acterised by a virulent nationalism and anti-Christianity. It was attracted to
fascism, believing that Benito Mussolini would restore Italy’s greatness. Some
of them were even amongst the first fascists, but they were soon to be disap-
pointed by the Lateran Treaty of 1929. This tradition endured into the post-
war period in certain occultist-leaning masonic lodges.