The path of Enlightenment to the Darkest Age

"Some two decades ago Mona Ouzof's Festivals and the French Revolution provided impressive testimony to the centrality of myth and ritual to the dynamics of even a 'modern', 'rational' revolution purportedly carried out in the name of Enlightenment...

This paper explores the thesis that the temporal dimension of such a concept has a particular heuristic value when applied to fascist ideology and practice, despite the radical differences which clearly separate the largely spontaneous explosion of populist mythic energies unleashed by the French Revolution from those deliberately engineered in ordinary citizens by Fascist and Nazi elites, whose attitude is epitomized in Hitler's statement that 'Mass demonstrations must burn into the little man's soul the conviction that though a little worm he is part of a great dragon'...

One of the effects which Max Weber attributed to the progressive `rationalization' of all aspects of reality in the modern age was 'disenchantment' (Entzauberung), the erosion of a magic dimension of reality as the traditional binding element within society, which allows it to reemerge capriciously and spasmodically in the form of collective charismatic energies to release human beings temporarily from their iron cage of reason...

The leading figures of the occult revival and many pioneers of artistic modernism fit this pattern. Thus, figures like Madame Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, Yeats, Wagner, Stravinsky, Segantini, Kandinsky, Picasso, Van Gogh, and Rilke, and artists in such disparate movements as Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism were in their very different ways concerned both with the achievement of 'ecstasy' (states which allowed them to 'stand outside' ordinary time), and with acting as a catalyst to the diffusion of new forms of consciousness to 'save' the West from what they saw as a process of spiritual atrophy...

Nietzsche and Sorel being outstanding examples. Both thinkers looked specifically to (differently conceived) mythic energies rather than Reason...

The 9 November 1923 is interpreted within National Socialist myth as a turning-point at which the old era finished and something totally new began... Iain Boyd Whyte's reconstruction of the May Day festival held in Berlin in 1936, for example, shows how the whole event was deliberately staged through the creation of liturgical space, the choreography of the crowds, and the enactment of a ritual invented for the occasion so as to superimpose onto a spring festival of seasonal regeneration a Nazi concept of national renewal.

For this to happen the pagan custom had to be relocated onto what the art historian Hans Weigert in 1934 had called 'the deepest maternal foundations of blood and soil'."

By Professor Roger Griffin (Oxford Brookes University, UK)
An Electronic Seminars in History Presentation

"The Greek historian Pithias of Marseilles (c. 350 BCE) described agricultural communities in a place called "Ultuma Thule" (Norway?) whose inhabitants drank a beverage made from barley and honey (mead). Julius Caesar in De Bello Gallica also wrote of the use of drinking horns and the performance of rites in sacred groves. With the invasion of Britain by the Emperor Claudius (40 CE), came the first permanent Teutonic settlers to that island in the form of German auxiliaries. In his book Germania, the Roman historian Tascitus wrote of a number of tribes living in what would be Denmark and Northern Germany practicing rites in honor of a goddess called Nerthus (or "Mother Earth").

Despite the fact that the Nordic regions officially became Christian by the close of the year 1000, a large amount of material relevant to pre-Christian Heathenry was scribed down by Christian clerics and historians in Iceland from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. These include collections of myths known as the Prose and Poetic Eddas and a number of semi-historic Sagas...

The Romantic movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries fostered a renewed interest in the study of folklore, nature and "primitive" cultures... In his 1800 essay Discourse on Mythology the German philosopher Fredrich Schlegel expressed his belief that humanitys problems stemmed from a separation from nature...

German nationalism began in the late 18th century with the pre-Romantic Sturm und Drang ("Storm and Stress") movement which had expressed a common identity of all Germans as evidenced by similarities in music, art, folk customs, and literature. Following the Napoleonic wars additional "Volkish" movements developed throughout the German states...

By far the masterpiece of this nationalistic mythos were the four operas Der ring des Nibelungens (The Ring of the Nibelung) which was based upon material from the Eddas and the 12th century German epic Niebelinglied...

The first theory linking European witchcraft to pre-Christian witchcraft was first proposed in 1828 by Karl Ernst Jarke who was professor of criminal law at the University of Berlin. This same theory was repeated in 1839 by Franz Josef Mone...

With the uncertainties surrounding Europes rapid industrialization and the disappearance of the rural lifestyle, came a number of movements centered on reunification of humankind with nature. Naturism (or "Nudism" ) began in Germany in the late 1800s with the neo-Romantic movement known as Lebensreform ("Life-Reform). Lebensreform also advocated a "back-to-nature" lifestyle with the establishment of independent rural communes, the use of herbal medicines, and tolerance for alternative lifestyles...

The Teutonic heritage provided some valuable contributions to the evolution of modern Paganism as evidenced its mythos, ethics, glorification of the ancient past and especially in its reverence to nature."

from: Germanic Contributions to the Neo-Pagan Movement
By John C. Mayer

"Hitler not only inherited an organization founded by Aryan occultists, but he was influenced by policies that had their origin among Ariosophists... it is possible that the idea of the Final Solution was first planted in Hitler's mind by occultist who believed the Germans were the Chosen People and Jesus was an Aryan

The Nazi leader who made himself a patron of occult mysticism was the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, who retained a self-proclaimed Aryan mystic as part of his personal staff... Karl Maria Wiligut (1866-1946) began his career as an officer in the Austrian Army and saw action during World War I. After the war Wiligut began to claim that he was the last decedent of an Aryan priesthood that could trace its origins back to god-like creatures who inhabited Germany over 200,000 years... he corroborated most of List's description of ancient German history, but he also endorsed Lanz's belief in an Aryan Jesus.

In 1933 Wiligut was brought to the attention of Himmler by an SS officer who had been a member of the ONT. Himmler appointed Wiligut to the SS Race and Settlement Main Office and eventually gave him the rank of SS Brigadier.

According to Goodrick-Clark, Wiligut suggested to Himmler that the SS expropriate a castle in the German province of Westphalia. Wiligut prophesied that the castle would become a Nazi stronghold against invading barbarians from the East. Himmler put the castle to use as an SS indoctrination center, museum and temple where wedding ceremonies and solstice festivals devised by Wiligut were held."

from: William Main's review of the book:
"The Occult Roots of Nazism, Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology" by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (New York University Press, 1992, 293 pages)

The Nazi regime intended to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists

"One of Germany's highest ranking generals, Erich Lutendorf, believed that the national salvation of Germany lay with reviving the worship of the Norse god, Woden...

Many within Lutendorf's closest circle were members of an occult group known as the "Edda Society." The Edda society believed that by deciphering the ancient Icelandic script known as the "Runes" and studying the secrets found in Norse mythology contained in the "Elder Edda"...

This creed was adopted by this man, Heinrich Himmler, Reichfuhrer of the S.S. As a youth, Himmler avidly read the writings of the German occultists...

But Heinrich Himmler's vision of creating a master race went far beyond eugenics. He intended to create a religious order steeped in Aryan mysticism and the worship of the Norse gods...

With the help of German mystics and clairvoyants, Himmler made plans to create an S.S. spiritual center a worship temple for his S.S. order. The Castle of Wedelsberg on Germany's eastern border was built in the 1600s on the ruins of an old Saxon fort...

The Holocaust was preceded by vast pageants which Hitler used to promote his version of neo-Paganism."

By Eric Holmberg and Jay Rogers

National Socialist Germany saw man as an instinctive animal, a part of nature, in contrast to the notion of man distinct and apart from nature, which is one of Monotheist derivatives which Christainity inherited from Judaism.

Heinrich Heine - a Jew converted to Christianity, was able to discern the true German psyche - wrote in 1834:

...the day will come when... the old stone gods will rise and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes. And Thor, leaping forth with his giant hammer, will crush the Gothic Cathedrals!

Carl Jung:

We cannot possibly get beyond our present level of culture unless we receive a powerful impetus fromour primitive roots. But we shall receive it only if we go back beyond our cultural level, thus giving the suppressed primitive man in ourselves a chance to develop. We need some new foundations. We must dig down to the primitive in us, for only out of the conflict between civilized man and the Germanic barbarian will there come what we need: a new experience of god.

The following is a talk presented to the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship in April 1999. It is primarily based on Richard Noll's two important historical studies of Carl Jung and the origins of the Jungian movement:

The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton University Press, 1994), abbreviated TJC;
and
The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung (Random House, 1997), abbreviated TAC.

"Paganism was deliberately revived in the German-speaking world during the late 19th and early twentieth century. It was claimed that Christianity is a repressive religion, that paganism was inherently freer and more joyous. Paganism found its way into literature and art, for example, into Wagner's operas...

the German movement said we must get in touch with suppressed pagan values to regenerate our souls. Germanic pagan cults were established to try to revive the German spirit, which had supposedly languished since forced conversion of the Germans to Christianity. Friedrich Nietzsche claimed that when Europe became Christian, European humanity became decadent. According to Nietzsche, Christianity so totally suppressed the body's vital impulses that humanity lost its creativity. Nietzsche taught what Jung was later essentially to repeat, that the irrational factor must neither be eliminated nor thoroughly tamed by order-seeking reason, but somehow integrated into our lives...

Jung believed that just as the human race all started out pagan and only later, having lost touch with its pagan roots, became rootless, "civilized" and Christian, so Germans start out, in infancy, as spontaneous pagans, but this spontaneous religion is overlaid with the artificial ideas of monotheism...

Jews had allegedly lost their pagan roots so long ago that they no longer had access to the collective unconscious. By contrast, Germanic peoples had lost their paganism at a relatively late date, roughly 500 to 1100 AD. Thus the pagan collective unconscious lay close enough to the psychological surface that it could still be dug up if only one were persistent enough. Since for Jung being in touch with the collective unconscious is a precondition for psychological health, Germanic types like himself are potentially healthier than Jews...

His views about an essentially Aryan collective unconscious put him close to the kinds of things that Hitler was saying... who also spoke incessantly of soil and blood and portrayed himself as a strong man...

The Jews, in Jung's view, had been civilized too long--uprooted from the soil."

Divine revelation in Sinai is the introduction of reason to humanity, degraded to a state of existence dominated by the dark side of lusts, bestial drives, and mere emotions. due to long years of ripped connection to G-d by idolatry. Judaism teaches the domination of the intellect over emotion. The never ending struggle between G-d's mercy and goodness and the evil inclination created by G-d as means to gain man the highest benefit by overcoming it, could from now on be achieved only by obedience to G-d's will as manifested in the Torah

"Hitlerism merely applied ideas which already existed...

The image of the "New Man," instinctive and powerful, was not invented by Nazism; he was present more that just embryonically in Nietzsche... as for the theme of blood, it too is undeniably present in Nietzsche, who in his condemnation of religion, accuses Jews of inventing the morality of slavery, and of "poisoning of the blood" (Nietzsche, 1886)...

Similar themes of animality, primitive force, cruelty, the priority of the body over the mind, blood, and instinct magnified at the expense of the mind and of reason, can also be found in Stefan George (1868- 1933)...

the particular feature of Kulturpessimismus was that it attempted to establish an overall conception of the world in which industrialization and urbanization had cut man off from his roots. It was the bourgeosie, capitalism and their supreme representative, the Jew, who were responsible for blocking the union of the People with the Nation. Here, of course, there are elements of Jean-Jacques Rousseau-revised and corrected by Herder, and channeled through the whole of the German romantic movement-with an emphasis on union with Nature and the discrediting of Reason...

Richard Wagner, for example, considered that everything was denatured by industry, money, capitalism and the Jew and that their existence was imcompatible with art and ideals. He wrote of ancient Greece, where there was a communion between the artist and the people, and where the Greeks formed a true "community" (see Wagner, 1849, 1850)...

In effect, then, Nazism invented nothing but merely applied ideas which had been expressed with increasing clarity since the mid-nineteenth century. I have tried to show in earlier contributions that once the body and blood become a part of an ideology, that ideology is bound to utimately lead to collective murder."

"Nazism is the manifestation of the pagan, romantic forces at a time of deep, specifically German, national humiliation...

Hitler and the Nazis wanted nothing less than the "re-barbarization" of the German people. The esteemed German historian Hajo Holborn wrote that "Anti-Semitism was the major instrument in this policy of barbarization...

Hitler... wanted, in effect, to set back up the pagan holy tree of the Saxons which St. Boniface had felled twelve hundred years before. The source for his thinking, according to Alan Bullock, was a "crude Darwinism," in which struggle was the key aspect of existence...

The Nazi state was an abomination almost unimaginable to those who have not endured its tortures, both subtle and overt. Like Stalinist Russia, which Hitler consciously emulated, National Socialist Germany repudiated the civilized tradition of government which had developed out of the medieval period. Hitler and his acolytes ruthlessly and maliciously employed the liberal themes of nationalism, anti-Christian secularism, and devotion to the state."

from: IN HITLER'S SHADAOW
The Myth of Nazism's Conservative Roots

By Elbridge Colby
Deputy Editor,The Harvard Salient

Anton van Harskam

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

"...either Auschwitz is the consequential culmination of modern deicide, the modern killing of God (already partly seen and partly prophesied by Nietzsche; and made completely manifest in World Wat I; a war which so to say demonstrated that when humanity in a industrial and technological world wishes to take over the old functions of divine power and providence, self destruction will be the consequence); or the nazi-genocide itself is the last (?) effort to get rid of God, by killing the people that represents the humanly intolerable Presence of His Absence.

Auschwitz has become the completely inversed image of the loving God, the most horrible proof what's happening whenever human beings have been cut loose from every 'transcendent control', striving to occupy the empty place of God by technical means."

Christianity was a sect that broke off the main body of Judaism and introduced the values of the Sinai revelation to the pagan world of Europe. In doing so, it amalgamated existing paganism with Jewish Monotheism. Since its establishment as the ruling religion of prior pagan society, its adherents are in a constant state of struggle between yielding to Divine goodness or to bestial lusts and evil

by David P. Goldman

"Writing his last book in London after his 1938 escape from Nazi-occupied Vienna, the atheist Freud reported:

We must not forget that all the peoples who now excel in the practice of antisemitism became Christians only in relatively recent times, sometimes forced to it by bloody compulsion. One might say they are all badly christened; under the thin veneer of Christianity they have remained what their ancestors were, barbarically polytheistic. They have not yet overcome their grudge against the new religion which was forced on them, and they have projected it on to the source from which Christianity came to them.

Christianity placated the heathen by transmuting Judaisms God into an earthly being with whom heathens might identify, but at the cost of failing to covert the inner pagan inside each Christian."

WW2 saw the great surrender of Europe to resurgent paganism over Jewish Monotheism. Nevertheless, Christians are reluctant to admit their big failure, also in face of the horrors of Nazi Germany and their European collaborators against the Jews, whose only "crime" was to be the carriers of G-d's word.

The following statement by the Vatican, although some progress, fails nevertheless to be a proper recognition in the immense contribution og Judaism to the benefit of the world, and of course totally fails to admit the Christian fault during WW2:

Issued today by the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews

At the level of theological reflection we cannot ignore the fact that not a few in the Nazi party not only showed aversion to the idea of divine Providence at work in human affairs, but gave proof of a definite hatred directed at God himself

The Shoah was the work of a thoroughly modern neo-pagan regime

Yes, we are barbarians. It is an honorable title to us... the Jews have inflicted two wounds on mankind - circumcision on its body and conscience on its soul. They are Jewish inventions... I am freeing humanity from the shackles of the soul, from the degrading suffering caused by the false vision called conscience and ethics...

The struggle for world domination will be fought entirely between us, between the Germans and the Jews. All else is facade and illusion

Hitler's speech to the Reichstag in 1939:

If the international finance-Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations into a world war yet again, then the outcome will not be the victory of Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!

Delivered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 6, 1942

Destruction of the material and spiritual centers of civilization-this has been and still is the purpose of Hitler and his Italian and Japanese chessmen.

They know that victory for us means victory for religion.

And they could not tolerate that. The world is too small to provide adequate "living room" for both Hitler and God.

In proof of that, the Nazis have now announced their plan for enforcing their new German, pagan religion throughout the world-the plan by which the Holy Bible and the Cross of Mercy would be displaced by MEIN KAMPF and the swastika and the naked sword.

We are fighting on the same side with the British people.

We are fighting on the same side with the Russian people.

We are fighting on the same side as the brave people of China.

We are fighting on the same side as the indomitable Dutch.

We are fighting on the same side as all the other governments in exile.

We are inspired by a faith which goes back all the years to the first chapter of the Book of Genesis:

"God created man in His own image."

We on our side are striving to be true to that divine heritage

Hitler's address at the opening of the winter relief campaign
Berlin, September 30, 1942

On the first of September, 1939, we made two pronouncement in the Reichstag session of that date: First, that now that the, have forced this war upon us no amount of military force and no length of time will ever be able to conquer us; and second, that if Jewry is starting an international world war to eliminate the Aryan nations of Europe, then it won't be the Aryan nation which will be wiped out but Jewry.

They have drawn nation after nation into this war. The men who pull the strings of this demented man in the White House have managed actually to draw one nation after the other into this war. But to just the same degree a wave of anti-Semitism has swept over nation after nation. And it will move on farther. State after state that enters this war will one day become anti-Semitic.

In Germany too the Jews once laughed at my prophecies. I don't know whether they are still laughing, or whether they have already lost the inclination to laugh, but I can assure you that everywhere they will stop laughing. With these prophecies I shall prove to be right.

Current Western civilization, in its hedonistic gallop to degraded forms of behavior in total indulgence in the momentary pleasure of the body, is actually on the same track of paganism as contrasted to the Divine

"Hitler sought... to annihilate the monotheistic theology which shaped Western Civilization and holds mankind accountable to a righteous Holy Other, a Divine Lawgiver whose standards stand forever.

David Hirsh declares, in The Deconstruction of Literature:
Criticism after Auschwitz: "'Much as it may pain philosophers to admit it, Hitler and Heidegger shared a world outlook. Both sought to return German culture to pagan roots"

Heidegger lost his position as rector not because he came to oppose Hitler but because he was aligned with the Rohm faction of radical Nazis which was purged in 1934. Thereafter, however, he opened his classes with the Nazi salute and enjoyed the support of Hitler's regime.

Today's popular culture, pulsating to the beat of MTV and rock concerts, may seem some distance from Auschwitz, but inwardly there's a tie inasmuch as it appeals to our emotions rather than our reason. Popular culture, Veith says, amply illustrates "the fascists' artistic ideals: pleasure from violence; the thrill of moral rebellion; the cult of the Aryan body. The grisly blood-letting of a slasher movie; the body-builder who takes the law into his own hands by machine-gunning his enemies; the masses of teenagers slam-dancing as Metallica sings, 'Scream, as I'm killing you!"--such art is the quintessence of the fascist aesthetic"

from an evaluation of: "Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview" (St Louis: Concordia Publishing House, c.1993).
by Gene Edward Veith, Jr., Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Assistant Professor of English at Concordia University-Wisconsin