Wednesday 2 June 2021

Was there an occult and magical dimension to the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany?

At one point I used to take for granted that there was a big occult element in National Socialism - that they used magic, Hitler searched for (and claimed) the Spear of Destiny etc. 

And I later discovered that the British used White Magic to counter these dark forces

But I then discovered that most of the lurid stuff came from an essentially fictional book called The Spear of Destiny, written by a trickster Englishman called Trevor Ravenscroft (whose son Raphael happened to be the tenor sax soloist on Gerry Rafferty's hit Baker Street - which started a big craze for sax solos in British pop music). 

So, was the whole 'occult Nazi' stuff just an urban folk tale? Apparently not - as this video makes clear (by one of my favourite modern historians - Mark Felton) . 


By my interpretation, this evidence amounts to a great deal more than a 'pseudo-religion' (as MF calls it); and shows a reason why National Socialism was so much more effective than Communism at generating national coherence, positive motivation, and loyalty. 

Instead of being out-and-out materialists, the Nazis made serious attempts at generating an explicit spiritual dimension to underpin their ruling elite's ideology, based on genuine belief. This was a strength when compared with communism; rather than being insanity or risible foolishness - as tends to be assumed (without argument) by mainstream post-1945 perspectives.

This spiritual dimension also explains why our ruling Globalist Leftists continue to pretend that the Nazis were the ultimate manifestation of world-historical evil - despite that the scope of their evil is dwarfed by several communist regimes (e.g. the USSR, China under Mao, Cambodia under Pol Pot...) and by the systemic value-inversion of the World Establishment, here-and-now. 

Their deranging fear of imaginary resurgences of National Socialism is therefore based on the reality that among the many 20th century Leftist regimes (i.e. the Socialist Workers Parties and Fascists) the Nazis were by far the most formidable. 

(Although they were still destined to fail within a generation or two, due to their innate Godless-materialism.) 

But to understand that obvious truth, one has to understand the nature of evil - and to understand that one has to understand (and acknowledge) the reality of God, divine creation and The Good...


8 comments:

Hoppity said...

The best expert on Nazi occultism was Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke who wrote the best book on the subject, The Occult Roots of Nazism. It is scholarly, serious, and debunks the lurid pseudo-history of Ravenscroft and the like.

Epimetheus said...

Fascinating! Did you ever read that story about how his life was saved by a mysterious voice? Hitler said that during the Great War a disembodied voice told him to get up and walk away from a campfire meal he was sharing with comrades. An artillery shell landed moments later, killing several of them.

I found that in the 1944 psychiatric evaluation of Hitler by the OSS. That document contains several other items of that kind - Hitler's spiritual experience in the hospital after he was mustard-gassed, the possibility he was descended from a Rothschild etc. Behind closed doors, the American intelligence agency took these things deadly seriously - the psychiatrist who wrote the evaluation did not scoff in the slightest at the supernatural factor. In fact, he appears to be extremely disturbed by these accounts.

I remember you writing once that secular materialism is just for upper-middle class "strivers", that people in real positions of power take this stuff deadly seriously. That's stuck with me. What a strange world we live in.

Bruce Charlton said...

@H - Thanks for the reference.

@Epi - Another video by Mark Felton covers Hitler's military service during WWI - objectively very impressive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJQQnm-WEFc

Truth to Life said...

Using occult "magick" would explain how Hitler got the general public to go along with an obviously evil agenda...similar to what is happening today.

Bruce Charlton said...

@TtL - Well, in context of the time and circumstances, including what happened before - and judged by initial performance for a *majority* of the population - I don't think it is very hard to understand the appeal of the NSDAP using ordinary political criteria. Further, they were seen as a better alternative to communism - at a time when that was a significant threat and widely supported among the global ruling class (especially in Britain). But these combined factors have never been present anywhere since, allied with so very able, vigorous and motivated a population as the Germans then were; which is why the NSDAP were an unique and unrepeatable phenomenon. In a rational and Good world, this one-off quality would have been obvious - and communism (and its evolutionary descendants) rightly regarded as By Far the more significant tool of demonic evil.

John Rockwell said...

There was also occult dimensions to the Bolshevik revolution. Russia was full of magick which helped lead to the horrors of the 20th century.
https://www.prlog.org/12077759-the-occult-in-tsarist-russia-an-exploration-of-the-occults-influence-on-pre-bolshevik-russia.html

Bruce Charlton said...

@JR - That book is apparently about Tsarist Russia, not the communists - which is a context of maybe the most Christian nation in the world at that time.

But have you read it? - it looks pretty dubious, as does the author's other work. The blurb has an error in the first line (witches weren't burned in Medieval Europe - but in the early modern era).

Anonymous said...

An excellent scholarly study is The Occult Roots of Nazism by the late Nicholas Goodrick-Clark.

David Llewellyn Dodds