The Occult Causes of the Present War. By Lewis Spence. Rider & Company, 1940. Fully abridged.





Quite a number of ostensible causes are cited by this writer or that as the true reasons for the outbreak of the Second Great War, conditions economic, racial, or merely the desire for retribution being advanced as the prime factors in its precipitation. Not one, but all of these may well rank as among its contributory causes. It was when I began to study the strange phenomenon of a religious revolution in Nazi Germany that I believed I had found the clue to the character of the real forces behind the Nazi Party, and the true cause of the War.





Nazi Germany now frankly declares herself as "heathen" and metes out the same persecution to Lutheran Protestants and Roman Catholics as she does to the Jewish Synagogue. The new pagan movement in Germany, the uncompromisingly Satanic origin of its method and intention admits of but little dispute. The replacement of the Cross by the swastika, the abrogation of the Sacrament in favour of a rite resembling that of the mysteries of Demeter, the persecution of the Christian churches and of their priests and ministers, and the replacement of the ritual, or service, and hymnology by blasphemous offices and songs, the erection of a new godhead, the instruction of the young in the myths of the past instead of in the Scriptures - all this affords the clearest proof of Germany's relapse into Satanic paganism.





The Queen of Holland, whom the Crown and people of Great Britain have gladly welcomed as an honoured guest in the hour of her country's affliction, is in no doubt of the true cause and character of the conflict which has temporarily cast the people of the Netherlands into dreadful servitude.





"This," she declared in a broadcast message to the Dutch people, given on Sunday, 28 July last, "is a war between God and conscience and the powers of darkness."





Equally striking and forceful are the terms in which Cardinal H.E. Hinsley, Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Westminster, bore witness of a similar character when, in a broadcast message to the British forces, given on 5 August last, he said: "I look upon you as champions fighting in a good cause. You are on the side of the angels in the struggle against the pride of rebellious Lucifer. This is no exaggeration when we remember the Nazi creed of all-conquering racialism. You are resisting the onslaught of brutal violence directed against the Christian values on which European civilization was founded."





Nor are the views of Dr. W.G. Whittingham, the Anglican Bishop of St. Edmundsbury and Ipswich, any less trenchant on this subject. "We are not fighting flesh and blood," he writes, "but the devil, in the persons of Hitler and his gang - a gang without humanity, without pity, without right, without good, without love."





It is well known that the hero-legends of old Germany, as viewed through the music-dramas of Richard Wagner, have made a deep impression on the mind of Adolf Hitler. Indeed, it is not too much to say that 'The Ring of the Nibelungs' has probably inspired him more than anything with the belief he so piously cherishes that the German people are descended from a semi-divine strain of supermen and superwomen such as he beholds stalking through the painted forests which compose the backgrounds of 'Rhinegold' or 'The Valkyrie'.





That Wagner's operas appear to Hitler to provide ample proof of the validitiy of his Nordic theory is accepted in Nazi circles, and that they affect him profoundly, much as 'East Lynne' was wont to affect Victorian old ladies, is notorious. In the semi-privacy of his box at the Opera, 'The Ring' has been known, again and again, to reduce him to maudlin tears, so that he is compelled at times to turn from its sterner splendours and seek relief in the strains of 'The Merry Widow', Vienna's flimsiest example of opera bouffe.





Most people have at least a general acquaintance with the plot and argument of Wagner's 'Ring'. The Rhine maidens guard a secret hoard of gold (not marks, or even Reichmarks, which showed their good sense) which the dwarf Alberich, chief of the Nibelungs (who were not Nordics), badly coveted. Alberich stole it and made a ring from it, but in time it was filched from him by the German god Wotan, who was probably the first Nazi. Wotan entrusted the bauble to the dragon Fafnir until a mortal hero should arise who should restore it to the spirits of the Rhine.





This destined hero is Siegmund, the son of Wotan by a mortal woman. His twin sister, Sieglinde, is carried off by the robber Hunding, but he slays the spoiler by the aid of the Valkyrie Brunhilde, who, because of her act, is doomed by Wotan to sleep within a circle of fire until a mortal hero shall awaken her.





This hero is Siegjroed, the son of Siegmund and Sieglinde, who disenchants Brunhilde and becomes her betrothed. But he is beguiled into wedding Gutrune, with fatal results. If we appeal to the original versions of this primitive story, however, we discover a state of things very different from the rather oleographic hero-tale.





Wagner drew his plot and its personnel from a rather extensive cycle of primitive legends about the Volsungs, the tribe to which his heroes belonged, and this he altered to suit the exigencies of his art and to glorify his subject. In the oldest version of the story Sieglinde vows a terrible vengeance against her abductor, murders his children, and sends her own son, Siegfried, to live in the forest with his father, Siegmund.





In order to fit themselves for the dire work of revenge, the pair of forest-dwellers become werwolves, that is, they lead the lives of wolves, leaping from the woods upon passing travellers and devouring them.





For Hitler, as for many other Germans, the sensuous and victoriously intoxicating music of Richard Wagner induces a rhapsodic condition of that kind which has been so admirably described by a French metaphysician as "Folies des splendeurs". It transports him to the Germanic Valhalla, where the gods and demigods of the ancient Teutons, his idols and the objects of his racial worship, await him, and where he may breathe an atmosphere of Germanic superiority, and revel in triumphant meditations of conquest and vengeance over the lesser breeds who have offended against the sanctities of Teutonic majesty.





For the Nazi thinkers, Christ was merely a communist whose gospel was revolution.





For twenty-one years Alfred Rosenberg has acted as the second self of the Fuehrer, prompting his fantastic policy, inciting him to the wildest frenzies of race-hatred, and, above all, urging him continually to the destruction of the Christian faith in Germany.





Who is this ill-omened and secret man, who, even in Nazi circles us variously known as "the best-hated man in Germany", "the German Antichrist" and "the devil's advocate"? How did this Baltic German from Reval, this bitter and jaundiced propagandist with the mysterious past, brimming with violent hate against the Christian faith, succeed in gaining the whole-hearted confidence of an egoist so jealous and suspicious as Adolf Hitler? Feared and detested even by Goering and Ribbentrop, he has the ear of the Fuehrer at times when even they cannot penetrate to the presence.





If the races of Europe were to be brought eventually under the beneficent rule of the just and enlightened German mind, said Rosenberg, it would first be necessary to destroy Christianity with its timid and outmoded notions of pity and kindness. After all, the Christian gospel was merely a Jewish imposition, a fraudulent conspiracy of the weak and cunning Semite to rob masculine and intellectual society of its birthright. But, so that the German race might have a spiritual background, it must be given a new faith to inspire it. The old war-like religion of Odin and Thor, the cult of her fighting ancestors, must be restored to Germany - by degrees, of course, so that the people might be gradually weaned from their effete "Nazarene" doctrines. On that, indeed, Rosenberg insisted even more than upon the racial theories which so deeply obsessed his hearer.





Before twelve months had passed Adolf Hitler had whole-heartedly accepted the views of the eloquent and mysterious refugee as completing and justifying his own more nebulous ideas. The pair were inseparable, and when, some years later, the Nazi Party became sufficiently powerful to put forward its programme and had funds at its disposal, Hitler appointed Rosenberg Director of its Foreign Press propaganda and made him editor of the 'Volkische Beobachter', the leading Nazi newspaper. When at last a Nazi Government was formed, he appointed his familiar as its Minister of Culture for the Reich and later as its Foreign Minister.





Rosenberg made full use of his position to carry out a programme bitterly hostile to the Christian faith. He urged Hitler to force upon the Churches, both Protestant and Catholic, the acceptance of a novel religious ideal which he described as "Improved" or "Positive Christianity". This innovation was of a nature so revolutionary and unorthodox that it naturally aroused widespread opposition. Hitler, now Chancellor, agreed with its provisions, but suggested caution in the application of the new proposals, as he was fearful of arousing popular indignation.





Hundreds of Lutheran pastors dissented from his wild and impious doctrines. These, by the aid of the Gestapo, he banished to concentration camps, where they were treated with particular brutality. He forbade the use of the Cross as a symbol, expunged the name of the Trinity from the Church services, and introduced a form of Communion in which the congregations were taught that the Sacrament was "the story of bread" which told them "how wheat had died to become bread, so that man might live."





Blasphemous hymns were written for the use of the new Nordic Church, pagan festivals were celebrated by the notorious Jew-baiter Streicher on the Hesselberg mountain, and "the black-coat swindle", as Rosenberg called it, was impeached in a tireless propaganda.





By blood, by race alone, says Rosenberg, can the divine nature of man be manifested, for "Nordic blood represents that Mystery which has replaced and overcome the old Sacraments."





I am dealing in this place especially with the proofs of diabolic and infidel associations to be found in Nazi paganism. We must seek not only in the writings of Dr. Rosenberg, but in those of his coadjutors.





Of these, Professor Ernst Bergmann of Leipsic is perhaps the most downright. With Professor Bergmann there is no beating around the bush. Bergmann is not a theologian, but an art critic, yet his aesthetic solicitudes have not restrained him from writing more than one book about religion, his last and most serious effort in this respect being his 'Die 25 Thesen der Deutschreligion' - a farrago of apostasy and tribal cant.





In this book Professor Bergmann sounds a war-blast on the pagan horn almost on the first page. There are none of Rosenberg's earlier subtleties in his method. "Away from Rome and Jerusalem!" he cries, "Back to our native German Faith." "Our religion," he continues, "is no more that of the international Christ-God who could not stop Versailles." Christianity is "an unhealthy and unnatural religion which arose two thousand years ago among sick, exhausted, and despairing men who had lost their belief in life."





The two thousand years of Christian regime which Europe has experienced have been two thousand years of decadence and degeneration. They have obliterated the German religion and culture which had preceded Christianity, but which has now resurgently returned. Germany needs a new religion frankly opposed to Christianity "because it is the creation of a pre-eminently Oriental mind which contradicts at almost every point the German sense of custom and morality."





Professor Bergmann revels in the name of "heathen." He is not in the slightest degree distubed by it. "In this case the word of insult 'German Heathen' takes on the aspect of a word of honour, as today there is in Germany again a persecution of the Germans."





"Like all Indo-Germanic religions, the German religion is one of knowledge rather than one of faith or of a dogmatic religion. Odin, one of the noblest God-figures, was a God of knowledge. He sacrificed an eye for knowledge."





"Back to the forest" is the slogan of "whole-hogging" Professor Bergmann. Back to the cult of the wild-wood which latterly broke down into German witchcraft and Satanism. "We are no longer the ancient Germans. That does not prevent us from entering deeply into the German forest-religion and from realizing that the Gothic dome is an imitation in stone of the Germanic holy forest-place and that Gothic in its entirety derives from the German soul."





"So long as man is regarded as 'fallen', such an experience as is to be found in the Germanic religion is not possible. Everyone who seeks a pure religion and a pure life must keep himself remote from the Bible and Christianity. For there is a Satan in this religion."





"We therefore reject the belief in immortality and release it as an offence to the Eternal Mother and as irreligious and immoral."





"If we wish to be Saviour, and this attribute is only possible for Man, we must take care that the sick are not born. This implies restraining the propagation of the inferior. The day must come when Bethel and Bethseda will be in ruins and only healthy and happy men are there. The best release we can find lies through service to people and Fatherland. So the miserable little 'I' is liberated. Pre-natal care, in the form of modern eugenics, is the one right way to liberate Man. Christianity has stood in the way of this. Mankind, indeed, requires urgently to be free from Christianity and the Saviour from beyond. We will no longer believe in Christ. We will be Christ ourselves and act as a Christ - among ourselves, our people."





Lastly the whole doctrine of German paganism must be taught in the schools. "We of the German Religion demand the introduction of religious instruction in the schools. Christian instruction can no longer be regarded as adequate or valid, since Christianity is in our sense no longer a religion."





Felix Fischer Dodeleben is also insistent that paganism be taught in the schools. The vanished world of the German past must be restored. "To this period of the German-Nordic religion belongs also a careful study of how this Germanic world of Gods was conquered by invading Christianity. What concerns us is not the conversion and baptism stories which have been handed down to us, but the resistance offered by the Germans to their compulsory Christianization. Out of this resistance we can understand many of the habits and customs of our people - the very words of our present language, which otherwise are not to be understood. These things show how high was the religious culture of the Germans before it was destroyed. Names like Easter, the days of the week and many others; the signs of runes, funeral practices, all require to be examined in this light. They should form part of the religious lessons of our schools. They must become part of the instruction in all the organizations of the Party."





Like Bergmann, Dodeleben scoffs at the idea of immortality. "Not only what is our spiritual abides when we are dead, but also our physical. For everything we posses in body and soul is inherited by our children from us, who thus make us immortal. There is no other immortality!"





But the Nordic Faith Movement or the New Pagan Movement, as it is known among genuine German Christians of both confessions, has of late revealed itself as an even more determined foe of the Christian faith. Founded in July 1933 by Professor Hauer, it adheres even more strictly to the doctrines of Rosenberg, while its dialectics assume a more philosophical and logical complexion. It is also a mass movement of large popular acceptance, which the "German Christian" movement never was. In describing it, Dr. Wilhelm Kusserow, its Vice-President, states emphatically that it "assumes religious responsibility for the Nordic race" and that "its activities have to do exclusively with the Nordic faith and the national, moral, and religious attitudes which emanate from it."





The Nordic Faith Movement, as regards those of its doctrines which deal with the origin and motive powers of the universe, reveals a marked materialistic tendency, although a pantheistic spirit also appears to infuse it. But it is to the ritual as well as to the writings of the Nordic Faith Movement as a whole that we must turn for the fuller evidence of that definitely pagan attitude which presently inspires large numbers of Germans. These reveal that the movement has been powerfully influenced by the last and most ironically heretical and mischievous of those destructive forces which have agitated for the establishment of a new and specifically Teutonic dispensation - that which forthrightly and fanatically demands a complete return to Germanic paganism and the abolition of Christianity, as advocated by the late General Ludendorff, and which is still maintained by members of his family and a devoted circle of his warm admirers.





Persecution of the direst character has ever been the strongest weapon of the Satanist Nordic Faith Movement. Although Herr Hitler has, on several occasions, publicly announced that no victimization of any of the Christian sects in Germany would follow in the wake of the new regime (at the very time when persecution was most rampant), it proceeds with all the frenzied hatred characteristic of the Palladist tradition. Hundreds of Lutheran pastors in Germany have been treated with the utmost ferocity because of their refusal to accept the blasphemous doctrines of the Nazi Church, whilst others have mysteriously "disappeared" from their homes. As "the German Christians" now have complete control of the funds of the Lutheran Churches, it is competent for them to withhold his stipend and wherewithal from any pastor who does not absolutely and slavishly agree with their pagan outlook. Large numbers in the Lutheran ministry have refused to adopt the novel dogmas - with results terrible to themselves and to their families. The dreaded Gestapo not only drives these unfortunates from their incumbencies to starve, or to rot in the hells of the concentration camps, but dogs their unhappy families from place to place. Truly it may be said that in the devil-ridden Germany of today the blood of a thousand martyrs cries from the earth for vengeance upon their slayers.





Adolf Hitler has loosed upon a devoted Europe a Walpurgis Night of Satanic horror, the insanity of demonic ferocity - that which is known as possession.





Nor have the brethren of the Catholic Church fared much better than those of the Lutheran. Their priests have been terrorized, their prelates assaulted by the Storm-troopers, their churches desecrated and their plate melted down. Rome placed Rosenberg's notorious book on the Index 'Expurgatorius', uttering the well-merited rebuke that it "rejected the very foundations of the Christian religion" and was designed to foster an ancient heathenism. The sermons of Cardinal Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich, on "Judaism, Christianity, and Germany" shook the country to its base. Again and again the late Pope pleaded with Nazi authority protesting that "to set up a weird, impersonal fate against the living God" was an act of profanity. His words might as well have been uttered to the frogs of the Pontine Marshes.





The despair of the Lutheran Confessional Church at the doctrines and principles which are being imposed upon it is noticeable in a circular issued privately a month before the outbreak of war by its Provisional Council. In this agonized document the true character of the pagan notions underlying Nazi "Positive Christianity" are made plain enough. In the ceremony of baptism the name of the Trinity must no longer be mentioned. At confirmations children are made to swear that they will fight against Rome and Jewry. "Both the Church authorities and the congregations know," states the circular, "that Communion is being celebrated as a festival of 'blood and soil' or 'as a symbol of the fact that bread was created by the death of wheat so that the world should be able to live.'" It is difficult to believe that this stark and crude symbolism from the ritual of the mysteries of Demeter of Eleusis should have found its reflection in a modern European state nearly eighteen centuries after it was abandoned by the ancient world.





The desecration of the Sacraments is an age-old Luciferian policy. Poignant indeed are those passages in the circular in which the remnant of the faithful complain of "the struggle waged against the Old Testament," of "the falsifications of Biblical texts," and of "the blasphemous utterances which constantly occur in German Christian sermons."





The hymns sung at the meetings of the German Faith Movement are eloquent of the pagan spirit which is rapidly breaking through the veneer of Christian adherence:





"The time of the Cross has gone now,

The Sun-wheel shall rise,

And so, with God, we shall be free at last,

And give our people their honour back."





At the Nordic Festival of the Summer Solstice in 1938, and on the same occasion last year, the notorious Julius Streicher, "the Jew-baiter," functioned as high priest at an immense concourse on the Hesselberg, a mountain declared sacred by the Fuehrer on the slopes of which great bale-fires were lit and mysterious ritual acts performed.





Standing before one of the bon-fires, Herr Streicher said:





"We need no men in black to whom to make our confessions, that we may gain strength for the coming year. When we look into the flames of this holy fire and throw our sins into them, we can descend from this mountain with clean souls. We do not need priests and pastors. We have become our own priests. We approach nearer to God after clibing this mountain. Let people abroad criticize our worship as much as they like. The fact remains that God has always accompanied Germany on her way, even thousands of years before there were prophets or churches. The time will come when Germans will climb this sacred mountain not once a year but whenever they feel the need of worship. Be beautiful, god-like, and natural."





These bale-fires are "restorations" from the ancient German fire-festival of the Sunnewende. Herbs are cast into the flames, to symbolize that with their burning all the troubles and vexations of the German folk will similarly vanish in smoke! It is curious to note, in the passing, that the name of the mountain on which this festival is held, the Hesselberg, which has been declared sacred by Hitler, implies "the witches' height" (hexe = witch). It appears to me strange that Herr Hitler should go out of his way to select and sanctify for religious purposes a mountain formerly associated with the ancient witchcraft of Germany.





That the destruction of the Christian Churches in Germany has the fullest sanction of the Nazi government is clear enough from a speech made by Dr. Alfred Rosenberg, at Nurnberg in 1938, when he said:





"That the Catholic Church and also the Confessional Church in their present form must disappear from the life of our People is my full conviction, and I believe I am entitled to say that this is also our Fuehrer's viewpoint. Furthermore, the development of our teaching scheme in schools of all categories is of such an anti-Christian-Jewish type that the growing generation will be forewarned against the black-coat swindle."





In some districts, notably the Catholic Rhineland, the new doctrines and the interference to which they have given rise have aroused demonstrations of popular anger, the public meetings of the German Faith Movement have been broken up by the singing of hymns by mixed crowds of Protestants and Catholics, and attendances in the churches of both confessions have greatly increased. In Dresden the former Crown Prince of Saxony, now a Catholic priest, has drawn large crowds to the Hof Kirche, and his sermons on such texts as "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" have been welcomed with such a degree of acclamation as to leave no doubt that large numbers of people in Germany fully realize and condemn the pagan ideals which animate the founders of Positive Christianity (incapable of speaking the truth because of that inability which is inherent in the Father of Lies).





In the privately printed literature of the Nordic Faith Movement prepared for the instruction of the young, the ancient pantheism of Germany is lauded and rites and ceremonies are devised to take the place of Christmas and other Christian festivals. It is particularly impressed upon teachers that no hope of a life to come or any idea of salvation must be allowed to obtrude itself upon the child consciousness. "We are fighting," it is claimed in one of these publications, "as our ancestors said, for the fashioning of the world by the side of the gods - that is, the German gods, not the God of an effete and outworn Christianity. It is urgently necessary that we should all, and especially the school youth, become well acquainted with the early Faith. Not that we may become worshippers of Wotan and Donar. It is more serviceable for our people to occupy themselves with the beliefs of their own forefathers than with those of the Jewish people."





Hitler unfolded his private opinions on the subject to Hermann Rauschning: "Fascism, if it likes, may come to terms with the Church." he said, "Why not? That will not prevent me from tearing up Christianity root and branch and annihilating it in Germany. For our people, it is decisive whether they acknowledge the Jewish Christ creed with its effeminate pity-ethics, or a strong heroic belief in God in nature, God in our own people, in our destiny, in our blood." Later he said: "It's all the same old Jewish swindle. A German Church, a German Christianity, is distortion. One is either a German or a Christian. You cannot be both."





That Hitler's mentality is under the influence of Satanism is evident. As regards Alfred Rosenberg, his Mephistopheles, he is, as Heiden puts it, "a German by descent, but a Russian in mentality." He appears to have been educated first in Riga, then in Moscow. For a time he was an instructor in draughtsmanship in Russia. Then, as one writer remarks, "a period of mystery followed." Concerning his history no man knows anything definite.





My own impression is that this man is assuredly a Satanist emissary of high standing, as were Clootz and Mikhail Bakunin, closely in touch with the Luciferian nucleus, and cognisant of its actual directors; that he was dispatched to Munich in 1919 for the express purpose of stirring up unrest in that distracted centre, that he saw in Hitler a tool wonderfully well adapted to his purpose, and that, by means familiar to Luciferian adepthood, he succeeded in placing Hitler under the control of those dark influences which dominate the Satanist caucus.





The links of an exact genealogy and record of Satanic effort in Germany since the commencement of the Christian era at least are unbroken. Beginning with the Satanist Bogomiles, a Manichaean sect, this descends through witchcraft to the Tugenbund and the Pan-Germanic societies, to the Nazi regime. The literature of Pan-Germanism, as expressed in the writings of Paul Lagarde and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, had advocated some such departure as an intellectualistic rather than a practical desideratum.





Diabolism had, indeed, been the uncompromising foe of the official religion of imperial Rome. Rome was compelled to exile all practicioners of black magic, passing sentence of death upon the most notorious. The Manichaean heresy, a sect which had its rise in Asia Minor under a half-legendary Mani, combined the remnants of Gnosticism and Zoroastrianism with some of the principles of Christianity.





Wave after wave of Manichaeism rolled across Europe. In A.D. 556 a number of its immigrant apostles were executed at Ravenna. But about the year 1000, Manichaeism received a considerable accession to its numbers, and a new era of popularity began for it. By the year 1200 it had spread across southern Europe and had reached Germany. Later, it split up into a bewildering number of minor sects, such as the Bogomiles, the Aldonistae, the Cathari, and a host of other minor bodies. The Bogomiles openly worshipped Satan and rejected all the Christian sacraments. Under the name of Cathari they spread into southern France, Italy, and Germany.





The ideas underlying the Bogomile cult are important as indicating a very definite link with later Satanism. The Bogomiles came to be known as "Luciferians" according to their belief that Lucifer would one day be restored as the Lord of Heaven. In the latter part of the twelfth century Luciferianism, or the later phase of the Bogomile doctrine, had spread from the Balkan Peninsula, its earliest European home, to the Tyrol, Bohemia, and Germany, and a couple centuries afterwards had established itself in France and Italy.





The spread of these doctrines was greatly assisted by the accession of beliefs and superstitions from the ancient diablerie of Europe, the detritus of the broken-down religions which had been thrust into outer darkness by the official acceptance of Christianity, but thousands of whose devotees still clung to them, carrying on a species of subterranean warfare against the Christian faith. Even kings, on occasion, gave countenance to these heresies. Philip of France, who reigned for forty-eight years, from 1060 to 1108, appears to have done his utmost to quash sentences passed against heretics in the ecclesiastical courts and to have banished and persecuted the bishops who had sat in judgement upon them.





In conclusion, I believe the present war to have been brought about by the influences of the Luciferian power upon the Nazi regime and especially through that of its servant Alfred Rosenberg, upon Adolf Hitler. I could readily have extended the proof fourfold, but present exigencies make such a course impossible. I think I have afforded a sufficiency of evidence to prove my case.