On Edward Bulwer-Lytton: Agharta, Shambhala, Vril and the Occult Roots of Nazi Power

© 2004 Joseph George Caldwell. All rights reserved. Posted at Internet web site http://www.foundationwebsite.org . May be copied or reposted for non-commercial use, with attribution. (31 December 2004)

Contents

Introduction and Summary. 1

Selections from The King of the World, by René Guénon. 7

Western Ideas about Agarttha. 7

Selections from Shambhala, by Victoria LePage. 8

The Shambhalic Tradition in the West 8

The Earth’s Chakric System.. 9

Gaia: The Earth as a Living Organism.. 10

Shambhala’s Hierarchy. 11

The Sign of Shambhala: Unidentified Flying Objects. 12

Selections from The Occult Roots of Nazism, by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke 14

The Modern German Occult Revival, 1880-1910. 14

The Modern Mythology of Nazi Occultism.. 22

Selections from Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival, by Joscelyn Godwin. 25

The Occult Roots of Nazism.. 25

Chapter Seven: Agartha and the Polaires. 26

Saint-Yves d'Alveydre. 29

The Polar Fraternity. 33

A Brahmatma in Charenton. 36

Chapter Eight: Sbambhala. 38

Shambhala in the Gobi 40

The Roerich Family. 41

The Shaver Mystery. 44

Additional Reading on Access to Agharta / Shambhala / Vril 45

Hypnotic Regression. 45

Astral Projection. 47

Vril 47

Some time ago I began reading the novel, Zanoni, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Near the very beginning of the novel, I read the following passage: “Plato here expresses four kinds of mania, by which I desire to understand enthusiasm and the inspiration of the gods: Firstly, the musical, secondly, the telestic or mystic; thirdly, the prophetic; and fourthly, that which belongs to love.” Well, I did not recall anything about “Plato’s four manias,” and so I did a quick search of the Internet, and came up with the following paragraph, from the article, “Atumpan Drummers and Marsyas’ Flute: Exploring Parallels Between African and Greek Conceptions of State” (1995):

“In the Phaedrus we read the following ironic words from the Western world’s first great rational philosopher: "Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness [mania] which indeed is a divine gift" (Phaedrus, 244a). It is here that we also learn of four kinds of mania for which the telestic variety denotes ritualistic madness (attributable to Dionysus). The remaining three kinds of mania include the poetic, the erotic and the prophetic (mantic). Later, in the Laws, we learn that the telestic rites that Plato had in mind were characterized by rites of initiation, sacrifices, dance and music (Laws, 791a). While it is difficult at times to discern Plato’s true opinion on specific matters, even from the most scholarly reading of his dialogues, the fact that Plato perceived of a general and useful social end through mania, poetry and music should become clear from the Phaedrus and other dialogues that support this contention. It is clear from a continued reading of the Phaedrus (244d-e) that the telestic kind of mania, which we shall take to be essentially a form of trance-possession, consists of both good and bad kinds. The crisis kind of mania is associated with human disease, attributed to a "weakness of the soul," for which Plato saw the need to purge from his state by various means. By Plato’s account, the diseased individual can be delivered from their ordeal by those accomplished in achieving divinatory trances (here he is speaking of the mantic variety consisting essentially of a kind of prophetic diagnosis) followed by a recovery through purifications and rites (i.e., the act of telestic mania). In brief, the diviner determines the nature of the disease by divining the diety responsible so that appropriate rituals may be performed to appease the deity. The critical matter for Plato was to ascertain the manner in which one becomes "correctly entranced and possessed." [emphasis added]. The answer that he came to adopt was that the good aspect of trance is the kind brought on by ritual that has been passed down through the generations.”

The reason why I was reading Zanoni was that I had once seen a reference to it, in Rudolf Steiner’s discussion of the Guardian of the Threshold in his book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (available on the Internet at http://www.elib.com/Steiner/Books/ ). On an idle day not too long ago I recalled the Zanoni reference. I searched for Zanoni on the Internet, and found a copy at The Gutenberg Project’s website, http://www.gutenberg.org .

(In case you don’t know about The Gutenberg Project, I will say a few words about it. It is a truly wonderful activity that has been going on for a couple of decades. The Gutenberg Project, directed by Michael S. Hart at Carnegie-Mellon University (my alma mater), places works of literature on the Internet. Here is a statement describing the Project, taken from the Project’s website: “Project Gutenberg is the oldest producer of free electronic books (eBooks or etexts) on the Internet. Our collection of more than 13.000 eBooks was produced by hundreds of volunteers. Most of the Project Gutenberg eBooks are older literary works that are in the public domain in the United States. All may be freely downloaded and read, and redistributed for non-commercial use….” The works are mainly those for which the copyright has expired, and so they are mainly older works. The books are typed into computer-readable text files by volunteers. The original goal of the project is to give away one trillion e-text files by December 31, 2001. It is still going strong. If you are interested in downloading a copy of a book that you read as a child, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars, you can almost certainly find it at the Project Gutenberg website (http://www.gutenberg.org ).)

Over the course of the past year or so, I have seen an increasing number of references to Bulwer-Lytton (variously referred to in bibliographies and references as Bulwer, Lytton, Bulwer Lytton, Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, First Baron Lytton, or Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton), and so I decided to “look him up” on the Internet. Bulwer-Lytton was an English novelist, playwright and politician who lived 1803-1873. He was one of the most prolific novelists of his day. He is now remembered mainly for his work, The Last Days of Pompeii, which was published in 1834. Wikipedia (online encyclopedia) observes the following about his current-day reputation: A prolific novelist in his day, he is now almost forgotten, his name living on in the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which contestants have to supply the openings of terrible (imaginary) novels. This was inspired by his novel Paul Clifford, which opens with the famous words,

"It was a dark and stormy night"

or to give the sentence in its full glory:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

The opening phrase was popularized by the Peanuts comic strip: Snoopy would often begin with it at the typewriter. Winners in the contest capture the rapid changes in point of view, the florid language, and the atmosphere of the full sentence.

A second contest, the Lyttle Lytton contest ( http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html ), also asks for opening sentences of terrible novels, but limits entries to 25 words maximum. The contest has run from 1 January to 15 April in 2001 through 2004.

There is actually a rather long sequence of events leading to my coming across, and taking more than casual notice of, Bulwer-Lytton’s work. First, as a boy, I read many of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels – not so much the Tarzan series, but mainly the Martian series and a few of his others. One of these was Pellucidar, which describes a “journey to the center of the earth.” Over the years since then, I have had a tendency to notice books about subterranean civilizations. It turns out that there are quite a few of them. Here is a quote from Arktos, by Joscelyn Godwin: “The literature of the Romantic era, needless to say, is rich in fantasies of polar mysteries and lands within the earth. The best known works are probably George Sand’s Laura ou le voyage dans le crystal (Laura, or the voyage on the Crystal); Edgar Allen Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Alexandre Dumas’ Isaac Laquédem; Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race; Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre (Voyage to the Center of the Earth) and Le Sphinx des glaces (The Sphinx of the Ice). Novels by later and less distinguished authors include William Bradshaw’s The Goddess of Atvatabar (1892), Robert Ames Bennet’s Thyra, A Romance of the Polar Pit (1901), Willis George Emerson’s The Smoky God (1908) and the Pellucidarian stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan.” Godwin might also have mentioned H. G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine.

All of the novels mentioned above are simply novels, represented as such (adventure stories of the science-fiction / fantasy genre). In addition to these works, however, there is a large body of literature dealing with subterranean themes that is of a quite different nature – an occult, or esoteric nature, as opposed to an “adventure-story” nature. This is the collection of works dealing with the legends / myths of Shambhala (or Shamballah or other similar spellings) and Agharta (or Agartha, or Agarttha, or Asgartha, or other phonetically-similar spellings). The terms Shambhala and Agharta refer to a mythical kingdom inhabited by spirits that monitor and control the world. Some sources consider them to be the same thing, while others consider them to be distinct kingdoms that oppose each other. Yet other sources describe Shambhala as the capital city of the kingdom of Agharta. Shambhala (the Shangri-la of James Hilton’s The Lost Horizon (1933)) is sometimes considered to be above ground, and Agharta subterranean (although some sources state just the reverse)). One is referred to as the “left-hand” way, and the other is the “right-hand” way. One represents the forces of light and the other the forces of darkness. The legend of Agharta was popularized by Joseph Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre in his book, Mission de l’Inde (Mission of India in Europe, 1886). The legend of Shambhala is recounted in the book, Beasts, Men and Gods by Ferdinand Ossendowski (1923). Other sources of information include the books by Nicholas Roerich (Altai-Himalaya(1929), The Heart of Asia (1929) and Shambhala (1930), The Way to Shambhala by Edwin Bernbaum.

Shambhala and Agartha are mythical in the same sense as the continents of Lemuria (Mu) and Atlantis – they exist in a different “dimension” (or “level of materiality”; or “density,” or “vibration,” to use current New-Age terminology) from that of today’s physical reality / world, and are reached by means such as meditation, hypnotic regression and astral projection. Edwin Bernbaum’s book, The Way to Shambhala, contains the following passage:

“An old Tibetan story tells of a young man who set off on the quest for Shambhala. After crossing many mountains, he came to the cave of an old hermit, who asked him, “Where are you going across these wastes of snow?”

“To find Shambhala,” the youth replied.

“Ah, well then, you need not travel far,” the hermit said. “The kingdom of Shambhala is in your own heart.”

The French mystic René Guénon discusses the kingdom of Agharta (spelled Agarttha) in his 1927 book, Le Roi du Monde (The King of the World). It is the reputed seat of the “Ascended Masters” (the Hierarchy, the Enlightened Masters, Hidden Masters, Spiritual Masters, Adepts, Initiates, Watchers, Immortals, Ancient Ones, etc.), and the “Great White Brotherhood” (Great White Lodge, Universal Brotherhood, etc.). Shambhala is the reputed seat of the Illuminati (Black Lodge, etc.) (but, depending on the source, the roles of Agharta and Shambhala with respect to “goodness” and “light” (and “above ground” and “underground”) are frequently reversed).

The location of Shambhala / Agartha is specified either interior to the Earth or on its surface, in the latter case usually in or near the Himalaya Mountains, or in the far north. The apparent reason for the conflicting views on the exact nature of either is the fact that observation of either is evidently restricted to telepathic / telestic means (e.g., Akasha Chronicle / Akashic records, hypnotic regression, astral projection), which are notoriously unreliable and inconsistent. References to subterranean places includes not just cities and kingdoms, but vast networks of underground tunnels. As is the case for Shambhala / Agharta, and for Hyperborea / Lemuria / Atlantis, these tunnels are never identified or located by physically objective or repeatable means.

There is a strong link between mythical cities and Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). On his trip to search for Shambhala, Nicholas Roerich relates the following experience (Altai-Himalaya, (1929) pp. 361-362):

“On August fifth [1927] – something remarkable! We were in our camp in the Kukunor district not far from the Humboldt Chain. In the morning about half-past nine some of our caravaneers noticed a remarkably big black eagle flying above us. Seven of us began to watch this remarkable bird. At this same moment another of our caravaneers remarked, “There is something far above the bird.” And he shouted in his astonishment. We all saw, in a direction from north to south, something big and shiny reflecting the sun, like a huge oval moving at great speed. Crossing our camp this thing changed in its direction from south to southwest. We even had time to take our field glasses and saw quite distinctly an oval form with shiny surface, one side of which as brilliant from the sun.”

The belief that UFOs are terrestrial in origin (but come from a different “dimension” or “density” or “parallel universe”) is strongly held today. (See, e.g., Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens by John E. Mack; Secret Life: Firsthand, Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions by David M. Jacobs; Sight Unseen: Science, UFO Invisibility and Transgenic Beings by Budd Hopkins; The Adventure of Self-Discovery by Stansilav Grof; The High Strangeness of Dimensions, Densities and the Process of Alien Abduction by Laura Knight-Jadczyk; and several of David Icke’s books, including The Robot’s Rebellion, …and the truth shall set you free, The Biggest Secret, and Children of the Matrix.) Alternatively, many sources suggest an “Extraterrestrial Hypothesis” (ETH), in which UFOs come from faraway places (e.g., Orion, Sirius, Cassiopeia) (whether from our own dimension or not) (see, e.g., The Mammoth Book of UFOs by Lynn Picknett or The World’s Greatest UFO & Alien Encounters (anonymous, 2002, Chancellor Press / Octopus Publishing Group, London).

It is in the occult category of subterranean or Shambhala-Agartha literature in which Bulwer-Lytton’s name frequently arises. Bulwer-Lytton had a profound effect on events of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He had a passion for occult studies, and used his knowledge of the occult as the basis for several of his novels, including Zanoni (1842), A Strange Story (1862) and The Coming Race (1871) (all available, by the way, from the Gutenberg Project). His work strongly influenced Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophy spiritualist movement in the late nineteenth century, and the Nazi movement of the early twentieth century. I shall present a number of quotes from the following four sources, describing this influence: The King of the World by Réné Guénon; Shambhala by Victoria LePage; The Occult Roots of Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke; and Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival by Joscelyn Godwin.

(Other sources of information on subterranean or hollow worlds include: The Lost World of Agharti: The Mystery of Vril Power by Alec Maclellan (lots of detailed history); Lost Continents and the Hollow Earth by David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver (esp. the article, “The Underground World of Central Asia” by Childress); Subterranean Worlds inside Earth by Timothy Green Beckley; The Hollow Earth Enigma by Alec Maclellan; Hollow Planets: A Feasibility Study of Possible Hollow Worlds by Jan Lamprecht (very large bibliography); and Our Mysterious Spaceship Moon by Don Wilson. In the matter of mythic or nonphysical worlds, there is a vast literature, including, for example, The History of Atlantis by Louis Spence; Edgar Cayce on Atlantis by Edgar Evans Cayce; The Legend of Atlantis by Eliah; The Story of Atlantis and Lost Lemuria by W. Scott-Elliot; Cosmic Memory: Prehistory of Earth and Man by Rudolf Steiner (available on the Internet from http://www.elib.com/Steiner/Books/ (detailed description of nonphysical aspects of Lemuria / Atlantis); The Complete Ascension Manual by Joshua David Stone (brief history of Lemuria / Atlantis); and Telos by Dianne Robbins (“New-Age” orientation, limited list of references).)

Madame Blavatsky was influenced not only by Bulwer-Lytton, but by a French writer, Louis Jacolliot, who appears to have been the first Western writer to refer to the mystical kingdom of Agartha (which he spelled Asgartha). He authored twenty-one books in his lifetime, including La Bible dans l’Inde (The Bible in India) (1868); Le Fils de Dieu (The Son of God) (1873); Le Spiritisme dans le Monde (Spiritualism in the World) (1875); Histoire des Vierges (History of the Virgins) (1879); and Occult Sciences in India (1884).

Why is it of interest to comment on Bulwer-Lytton’s writings? Because, almost solely because of his writings the Theosophy movement began, and Nazism was inspired to attempt to take over the world. The pen is, in fact, mightier than the sword – since it influences and controls it. Today, largely because of the work and inspiration of early writers like Bulwer-Lytton, the New Age movement is growing incredibly fast, from almost nothing a few decades ago other than a few people interested in Edgar Cayce and yoga. As the industrial world runs out of petroleum, massive change will occur. What happens at this time will be controlled, as it always has been, by those of the strongest spiritual belief and commitment. Bulwer-Lytton’s writings led, rather directly, to the assumption of power by Adolf Hitler, and the Second World War. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

Many people discount things unseen, and pay little attention to occult or esoteric explanations, either of strange happenings or of uncontested events (such as Hitler’s incredible rise to power). Those who do, however, do so at their peril. While they may reject spiritual explanations or aspects of world events, there are many world leaders who take these matters very seriously.

It does not matter who wrote these myths or whether they exist in a spiritual realm or in the physical world. To criticize these myths as of diminished utility or value because of the source or their spiritual/physical nature is analogous to the use of an ad hominem attack against an argument. The Bible and the Koran include content that is of value, independent of the source. Is the moral lesson of Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son of diminished value because it is merely a story? Is the utility of Synarchy as a form of planetary government dependent on reality of Agharta as spiritual or physical? The Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion (Sion) are attacked by those who dispute its authorship, or claim that its authorship has been deliberately misrepresented. But does it matter whether it was Shakespeare or Bacon who wrote “Shakespeare’s” plays? Does a rose by any other name smell as sweet? The Protocols are now referred to by some as the Illuminati Protocols, in an attempt to avoid the criticism of disputed authorship (see, e.g., David Icke’s books The Robot’s Rebellion and …and the truth shall set you free). The author and the source do not matter; what matters are the utility / truth / value of the content. With respect to the Protocols, the issue is whether a group of people is attempting to take over the world – not who the author is. Similarly, for the legend of Agharta, the issue is the utility / value of Synarchy as a basis / model for world government – not whether Agharta or Shambhala existed or exist as physically real manifestations.

More and more of today’s writers, such as Neale Donald Walsch (Conversations with God), Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (Left Behind), James Redfield (The Celestine Prophecy) and Barbara Marx Hubbard (Conscious Evolution) are convinced that a spiritual revolution is about to take place, with concomitant massive changes in Earth and in human society. The one thing that you can count on in this world / universe is change. And it may be change for the better or change for the worse. As global petroleum supplies, the world will soon plunge into chaos and the economic forces of global industrialization will lose their stranglehold grip on the planet. There will soon be a tremendous opportunity for planetary change. That change will be for the better only if the spiritual forces for good prevail over those of evil.

By the way, the “vril” (kundalini, prana, chi) life force mentioned below was the inspiration for the “vril” suffix in Bovril (“ Bo vine vril ”), the breakfast spread so popular in England (along with its vegetable counterpart, Marmite).

Since my time available for writing at the present is short, I will quote passages from several of the works mentioned above, with no further comment. All of the works quoted are currently in print, available from http://www.amazon.com . If you are interested in this material, I strongly urge your purchase of the books – they are in paperback, and reasonably priced. The sections quoted below contain text only, and many of the books are replete with footnotes, endnotes, graphics, and references. The works from which I extract material are those of an analytical, comparative, critical and summary nature. For detailed description of the history of history of discovery of material on Agharta, Shambhala, subterranean worlds and related topics (since the time of Jacolliot and Bulwer-Lytton), see The Lost World of Agharti: The Mystery of Vril Power by Alec Maclellan and the article, “The Underground World of Central Asia” by David Hatcher Childress in Lost Continents & the Hollow Earth, by David Hatcher Childress and Richard S. Shaver. For detailed descriptions of individual quests to find Shambhala, consult either Ferdinand Ossendowski’s or Nicholas Roerich’s diaries. [I will add more descriptive material, if sufficient requests are made.]

Selections from The King of the World, by Ren é Guénon

Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s posthumous work Mission de l’Inde, first published in 1910, contains a description of a mysterious initiatic center called Agarttha, and many readers have no doubt assumed that this was just an imaginary tale, a sort of fiction, with no basis in reality. If taken literally, it does in fact contain some improbable accounts that could justify such an appraisal, at least for those accustomed to seeing only external appearances, and Saint-Yves doubtless had good reasons for not publishing the book, which was written long ago but never brought to completion. Moreover, until the appearance of this book there had hardly been any mention in Europe of Agarttha and its leader the Bhahmātmā, except by the rather superficial writer Louis Jacolliot [1837-1890], whose authority one cannot possibly invoke. In our opinion Jacolliot had actually heard of these things while in India, but created his own fantasy about them, as he did with everything else. However, in 1924 a book entitled Beasts, Men and Gods appeared unexpectedly on the scene, in which the author, Ferdinand Ossendowski, relates the incidents of a most eventful journey he made across Central Asia in the years 1920 and 1921, including, especially in its latter part, accounts almost identical with those given by Saint-Yves; and we believe that the sensation aroused by this book at last furnishes a favorable opportunity to break the silence on the question of Agarttha.

Naturally, hostile and sceptical critics did not fail to accuse Ossendowski of simply plagiarizing Saint-Yves, supporting their allegation by pointing out all the concordant passages in the two books; and in fact there are a good number that show a rather astonishing similarity, even to points of detail. First of all, in one of his most improbable passages, Saint-Yves asserts the existence of a subterranean world with branches everywhere – under continents and even under the oceans – by means of which communications are invisibly established between all the regions of the earth; moreover, Ossendowski does not affirm this on his own authority, even declaring that he does not know what to think of it, but attributes it rather to reports received from people he met in the course of his journey. On a more particular point, there is also a passage in which the 'King of the World' is depicted in front of his predecessor's tomb and where the question is raised concerning the origin of the gypsies, who, among others, are said to have lived originally in Agarttha. Saint-Yves writes that there are moments during the subterranean celebration of the 'cosmic mysteries' when travelers upon the desert stop motionless and even the animals are silent; and Ossendowski has assured us that he himself was present at such a moment of universal contemplation. But most important of all, by a strange coincidence both writers tell the story of an island now vanished where extraordinary men and beasts once lived; at this point Saint-Yves cites the summary by Diodorus of Sicily of the journey of Iambulus, whereas Ossendowski describes the journey of an ancient Buddhist from Nepal; but their accounts hardly differ, so that if two versions from such widely divergent sources really do exist it would be interesting to acquire them and compare them carefully.

Although we have pointed to these similarities, it should be emphasized that we are in no way convinced that there was indeed plagiarism; and we do not in any case intend to enter into a discussion of only limited interest. We know through other sources, independent of the evidence offered by Ossendowski himself, that stories of this kind are current in Mongolia and throughout Central Asia, and we can immediately add that there is something similar in the traditions of nearly all peoples. Furthermore, if Ossendowski did in part copy from the Mission de l’Inde, it is difficult to see why he should have omitted certain passages or changed the form of certain words, writing Agharti in place of Agarttha, for example, which on the contrary is easily explained if he received from a Mongolian source the information that Saint-Yves obtained from a Hindu source (the latter being known to have been in contact with at least two Hindus); nor is it easy to understand why he would have used the title 'King of the World' to designate the head of the initiatic hierarchy, a title that appears nowhere in Saint-Yves's work. Even if a certain amount of borrowing were admitted, the fact remains that Ossendowski sometimes says things that have no equivalent in Mission de l’Inde and that he certainly would not have been able to invent in their entirety, all the more so as he was far more preoccupied with politics than with the pursuit of ideas or doctrines, and was so ignorant of anything touching on esoterism that he was manifestly incapable of grasping the true import of such things. For example, he tells the story of the 'black stone' that had originally been sent by the 'King of the World' to the Dalai Lama, and subsequently transported to Urga in Mongolia, where it disappeared approximately one hundred years ago; now, in many traditions 'black stones' play an important role, from that played by the symbol of Cybele to that of the stone enshrined in the Kaaba at Mecca. Here is another example: the Bogdo-Khan or 'Living Buddha,’ who resides at Urga, preserves, among other precious items, the ring of Genghis Khan, on which is engraved a swastika, and a copper plaque bearing the seal of the 'King of the World'; it seems that Ossendowski managed to see only the first of these two objects, but, if this is so, would it not then have been extremely difficult for him to conjure the other from his imagination, and would it not have been more natural for him to describe a plaque of gold?

These preliminary observations must suffice, for we wish to remain apart from any polemics or questions of personalities; we have only cited Ossendowski and Saint-Yves as a point of departure for considerations that have nothing to do with what one might think of either of them, and whose importance exceeds their individualities, as well as our own, which in this domain should no longer count. Nor do we propose a more or less vain 'textual criticism,’ but rather a presentation of some information that, to our knowledge, has been unavailable until now, and that might help in some measure to elucidate what Ossendowski calls the 'mystery of mysteries.’

[LePage is discussing Andrew Tomas, author of the book Shambhala: Oasis of Light (1976).]

Tomas's conviction of the reality of Shambhala, fed by his meeting with Roerich in 1935, was shared by a growing metaphysical school in Europe in the first half of the century. Another strand to the story – one considerably more mystical and less accessible to the rational understanding – was provided by René Guénon. Guénon was one of the foremost Sufi scholars of the twentieth century and a skilled student of the Cabala, the ancient Jewish mystical system. In 1927, he published Le Roi du Monde, in which he gave unprecedented esoteric information about Shambhala – information that had apparently been hitherto part of the secret knowledge which the brotherhood jealously guarded from the uninitiated. Guénon accomplished this "leak” by veiling his information in a characteristically overcondensed and cryptic style that takes patience to unravel, and to which a large part of this book will be devoted to decoding.

According to Guénon, Shambhala is a center of high evolutionary energies in Central Asia. It is the source of all our religions and the home of Yoga Tantra, having a vital relationship to the kundalini science on which all our systems of self-transformation are based. Reflecting the changes in the aeonic cycles of the earth and the unfoldment of humanity's soul, it is the prototypic Holy Land of which all other Holy Lands such as Jerusalem, Delphi and Benares are or have been secondary reflections. "In the contemporary period of our terrestrial cycle," he stated, " – that is to say, during the Kali Yuga – this Holy Land, which is defended by guardians who keep it hidden from profane view while ensuring nevertheless a certain exterior communication, is to all intents and purposes inaccessible and invisible to all except those possessing the necessary qualifications for entry." Once it was open and more or less accessible to all, and will be again with the closing of the Kali Yuga, but presently exists in a veiled state and is understood, if acknowledged at all, only in metaphorical and symbolic terms.

Guénon indicated that Shambhala exists both above and below ground. He enlarged on the vast underground network of caverns and tunnels running under the sacred center for hundreds of kilometers, attributing to these catacombs, as had Saint-Yves d'Alveydre before him in 1910, the function of an even more secret and advanced center of initiation called Agarttha. Agarttha, he said, was the true center of world government. It was the impregnable storehouse of the world's wisdom, surviving the ebb and flow of civilizations and the catastrophes of the earth, and would shortly send forth its energies to create a new planetary culture.

In the same prophetic spirit, other occult writers saw Shambhala as the venue of the imminently returning Christ. The neo-Theosophist Alice Bailey, who was of the same era as Guénon, had nothing to say about Agarttha, but described Shambhala as "the vital centre in the planetary consciousness" and the home of the great spiritual hierarchy of which the Christ was the head. She related it to the Second Coming, and through the writings of her disciple Vera Stanley Alder gave out many apocalyptic prophecies scheduled to be fulfilled in the latter part of the century. Other esotericists likened the mystical center to Campanella’s City of the Sun and to Dante's Terrestrial Paradise. Like Tomas, they saw in it a significant likeness to the Rosicrucians' Invisible Academy of initiates so widely publicized in seventeenth-century Europe. That fraternity likewise was never found, but claimed to safeguard through the ages the highest spiritual and social ideals and promised the imminent coming of the New Jerusalem.

[LePage is here discussing John Michell’s book, Earth Spirit]

…The nature of the spirit that animates the earth, "subtle, omnipresent, yet ever indefinable in terms of the dimensions apparent to our senses,” says Michell,

…forms the ultimate problem for modern physicists as it did for their predecessors, the magicians.... Yet we can be certain that this force, formerly identified with the holy spirit, provided the power and inspiration by which the ancient civilization was sustained.... It was held to be what some now call the life-essence, the pervading flow with which at death the spirit becomes merged, and from which arises the vital spark that stimulates new growth. Its names are legion. It is the prana or mana of eastern metaphysics, the "vril," the universal plastic medium of occultists, the anima mundi of alchemy.

Wilhelm Reich called it the orgone force, the Chinese call it qi or chi and understand its causal relation to all other forces.

"Chinese philosophy," says Paul Dong, an American-Chinese author writing on paranormal phenomena in mainland China, "holds that qi is the primal matrix of creation from which springs the yin and yang forces that give rise to substance and material forms ... and thus a master of ql is one who controls the very forces of life. Such a person can perform feats that are truly paranormal.”

In Guénon's view, the vast network of terrestrial magnetic and electrical currents which the Chinese call respectively blue dragon and white tiger lines is analogous to the Indian system of nadis in the human body and is similarly fed by the main artery of terrestrial kundalini that runs like a great unifying spine through the planet. There are power centers other than Meru scattered about the globe: Mount Athos, Mount Shasta, Mount Kailas, Arunachala and others; but these Guénon regards as auxiliaries of the main power center in Shambhala, even as the large nerve centers in various limbic parts of the human body are auxiliaries of the central nervous system.

The idea of an energetic correspondence between the human and planetary systems has also been voiced by Lyall Watson, a naturalist, anthropologist and archaeologist, who discusses the harmony between the two systems in terms that suggest their synchronization of activity. "Earth’s magnetic field," he writes, "fluctuates between eight and sixteen times per second. The predominant rhythm of our brains lies in the same area." Learning that at sunrise in many parts of the world there is a unique electromagnetic transmission, he notes: "We find that frequency associated with physiology... Our systems, both planetary and personal, are governed by the same timekeeper.”

According to the ancient cosmology, that synchronization was rendered possible because one universal energy gave rise to the multiplicity of all known energies, all known phenomena, whether organic or inorganic, meaningfully relating every part of the universe to every other part. Guénon's worldview rests on the same unitive principle. He sees the universal energy as synergistic, as outside the entropic processes of the cosmos and knowable only indirectly by reference to its reflected properties in spacetime. Whether we call it Kundalini, Divine Light, Holy Spirit, Shekinah or Great Life-Force – and he uses all these names in turn from the roll call of religions – it is conceived of as superordinal to all else, a power inhering at the center of all phenomena in a zone of absolute reality, absolute being and transcendental radiance that lies beyond them, yet informs them all. That power, Guénon believes, not only radiates out from the center of Shambhala, inspiring and sustaining its communities, but also plays an unsuspected central role in the life of the planet as a whole, which cannot be understood without it.

Guénon's conception is a grand one that dignifies the earth with life, consciousness and soul. In every essential it accords with James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, although it goes much further. As is well known, Lovelock, a British biologist, has graced the earth with the beautiful name of Gaia after the ancient Greek earth-goddess, on the grounds that she is intelligent and purposive, "a super-organism, a living being of planetary proportions” who, like all organisms, is self-organizing and capable of maintaining her own life and well-being.

In The Ages of Gaia, published in 1988, he conceived of the planet as an integrated whole, a mothering web of life in which the organism and the environment interact and evolve symbiotically so as to form a single living entity, each part cooperating with every other part to promote a continuation and evolution of more life. All the planet's self-regulating mechanisms, he believed, point to this conclusion. The stability of the atmosphere over millions of years despite its unstable and reactive gases, the maintenance of an even temperature despite the sun’s growing heat, and the earth’s apparent ability to select, out of others equally possible, just the right climatic conditions and chemical constituents for the continuing health of its life-forms, points to the inherently living and purposive nature of our globe.

Lovelock has come under a lot of criticism for his unorthodox views in scientific circles, and he has now modified his position. In 1990 his fellow biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, referred to him as the leading proponent of the hypothesis that the Earth is a self-regulating living organism; but in a more recent essay (1996) by Don Michael in Jim Swan's Dialogues With the Living Earth, a footnote states that Lovelock now says Gaia acts like a living organism, not is one. Noting that the earth "has a tendency to produce stability, and to survive," he explains, "I needed to show that the stability emerges from the properties of the system, not from some purposeful guiding hand.”

No doubt there are many who regret Lovelock's reformulation, which seems to deny Mother Earth anything more than a robotic nature – if such a thing can be conceived without a guiding intelligence to motivate it. However, he has already done his work in sowing valuable seeds that can be further cultivated by others. Scientists, like Sheldrake, continue to search for a viable formula by which to express their vision of Gaia as a living, goal-directed organism. Especially since the physicists' formulation of the Unified Field Theory, the pressure to redefine the earth in holistic terms, as an animate and organismic biosphere, has steadily increased.

But as has been said, Guénon, faithful to the ancient Cabalistic-Hermetic tradition, goes further. The earth, he contends, is not only alive; it is a spiritual being, as man is. On the subtle plane it too has an inner body of light, a vajra body. It too is highly evolved, with something like the equivalent of our phylogenetic structure, the equivalent of a spinal cord, of a sympathetic nervous system and of a cortical governing center even as the human central nervous system has; and therefore Mother Earth operates under the same self-governing and self-maintaining evolutionary principles as are evident in human beings.

In his book Mission de l’Inde, the French esotericist Saint-Yves d'Alveydre describes this Hierarchy in Solar terms. "The highest circle, nearest to the mysterious center, is composed of twelve members who represent the supreme initiation and correspond, amongst other things, with the Zodiacal Zone. This zone is the section of the heavens marked out by the circular motion of the celestial pole over 25,920 years. The twelve members are called the twelve Suns or the twelve rays of the Sun. Manu Vaiveswata, the Hindu Lawgiver commonly known as the Son of the Sun, and Moses, who received the Hebraic tablets of the Law from the summit of Mount Sinai, are, according to this occult tradition, both legendary members of this special band, at whose head Guénon places the Christ, linking him with the missionary Sons of the Sun from Central Asia.

For Guénon, the Christ with his twelve apostles represents the Lord of the World for this age who, during it, is the supreme Lawgiver for our earth. According to Guénon:

The title "Lord of the World" belongs properly to "Manu," the primordial and universal legislator. This is the name that in various forms is found amongst many ancient peoples: Mina or Menes of the Egyptians, the Celtic Menw, and Greek Minos. In reality the name describes not a figure that is more or less historical or legendary, but a principle, a cosmic Intelligence that reflects pure spiritual light and formulates the Law (Dharma) appropriate to the conditions of our world and of our cycle of existence. At the same time, it is the archetype of man in his uniqueness, that is to say, of man as a thinking being (in Sanskrit manava).

Those on the human level of the Hierarchy who directly serve this principle mirror it from below and become themselves Lawgivers. They govern the ebb and flow of the culture tides emanating from Shambhala, according to which the spiritual brotherhoods move to and fro across the earth, obeying the obscure rhythms of history and civilization. These are the migrations that are rarely observed and never recorded in our history books, yet are the very mainspring of humanity’s cultural evolution. The movements of the underground organizations that keep the religious spirit alive in society are monitored by Masters who inhabit Shambhala’s inner zone.

Alice Bailey calls them Ascended Masters, ldries Shah calls them Guardians of the Tradition, John Bennett psychoteleios or "perfected ones," and they are also known as the Ancient Ones, the Watchers, the Immortals, the Monitors, the Hidden Directorate, the Children of Seth. All follow what is known as the Ancient Path. According to esoteric tradition, in remote times before the advent of the Mystery schools they lived in more open communication with us, but as the age advanced were compelled to withdraw into their present obscurity, so that now they are accessible to only the most highly purified souls and with rare exceptions are known to the rest of us only through the grace of mystical vision.

Those who live in Shambhala's transcendental inner zone are its engine, its powerhouse; their consciousness turns the wheel. They are the supreme authority for this planet, forming the governing core of Shambhala and, through the ashrams and monasteries of the outer region, of the world. The inner region no doubt has its hidden settlements and cultivated environs like the outer zone, and probably an even higher technology, but the inner Masters are no longer reliant on the physical state. Sometimes incarnate, but often discarnate, they are beyond religious and ethnic categories and work at energy levels that are entirely outside the frequencies with which ordinary humanity is familiar, in ways we are not yet able to comprehend.

Shambhala-Agarttha, says Guénon [actually, in The King of the World, Guénon refers only to Agarttha, and never to Shambhala], is related to the zodiacal sign of Libra, which means "balance" or "scales," and is the quintessential point of balance for the planet; and in precisely the same sense the Directorate is a stabilizing and balancing force in the life of the race. No matter how eccentrically we deviate from the path of wisdom, no matter what descending cycle of destruction, what frightful chimeras we pursue in the course of our evolution, the Directorate negotiates a balance. It is the countervailing and normative influence in our midst, secretly conserving what we have lost, holding in our best interests what we carelessly throw away and safeguarding a future in whose reality we never really believe and are not capable of serving. In an age of superstition it promotes the sciences; when materialism prevails, it reforms religions. It waits when we rush forward, acts when we sleep, believes in life eternal when we do not, and the more we value the exoteric phantasms of the material world the more it withdraws into the invisible realms of soul, counterbalancing our periods of intense physical exploration with equally long periods of withdrawal.

So far we have considered only meditational techniques; but what technology produced the shining spheroid oval Roerich and his party saw speeding high across the cloudless Inner Asian skies, suddenly changing direction, in 1927? Of all the strange manifestations attributed to Shambhala this is the most mysterious, the most inexplicable. Even allowing for an hallucinatory factor, eminently possible in anything connected with Shambhala, the purely material aeronautical basis of the phenomenon, witnessed through three pairs of binoculars and familiar to the lamas present, is undeniable. It is only in the twentieth century that we can fully appreciate how mysterious this is, and can ask ourselves whether the same Shambhalic technology is responsible for the flying saucers that have been seen by millions of people in every part of the world. If so, how and where was it developed, and how long ago? What are its principles? And how has it escaped detection? We can answer none of these questions.

The lamas told Roerich that the flying object he saw was the signature of Shambhala and the sign of its blessing. When it flies overhead one may know that august powers are at hand to succor struggling humanity and to help in enterprises of humanitarian value. As to the energy that empowers its flight, it is the primal energy, "this fine imponderable matter which is scattered everywhere and which is within our use at any moment" – the same energy that Tomas has called "the intelligent force in the core of the atom.” Whether the sign of Shambhala is psychophysical rather than purely physical in the sense that we normally understand the term is something we do not yet know. But not only are stories of strange aircraft traditionally associated with Shambhala, more than one sighting of UFOs have been reliably reported in the region. In 1933 the British mountaineer Frank Smythe, on reaching an altitude of 26,000 feet on Mount Everest, saw to his amazement two aircraft hovering far above him. One had squat wings, the other a kind of beak, and both were surrounded by a radiant pulsating aura.

Up until recently the unidentified flying object was generally the mass target of either credulous cultist fascination or disbelief and scorn. But the number of hardened skeptics in the population is rapidly waning as trained enquiry by scientists and academics, plus the sheer overwhelming weight of reliable observers, is tending to support the authenticity of the phenomenon – although its interpretation is another matter. It has been almost universally assumed that the UFO, if given any credence at all, must be a spacecraft manned by extraterrestrial beings, especially since their craft appears to be capable of moving in and out of visibility, passing through material barriers and executing maneuvers that defy gravity and mass and are impossible for the human frame to withstand. But as more facts become known and their study has moved onto a more sophisticated level of research, different options are being considered.

Dr. Kenneth Ring, professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut, has conducted an exhaustive survey of the subject. In his book The Omega Project, Ring, like other academics, has come to the conclusion that the UFO seems to be a psychophysical event that somehow has its origin in humanity itself, coming from an unknown terrestrial source; and that it may be the outward manifestation of a major evolutionary advance in human consciousness. While some researchers do not go as far as that, and a few believe that flying saucers are simply a natural phenomenon – such as "earth-lights,” the electromagnetic effects of tectonic stress in the earth which are known to cause peculiar psychic and hallucinatory effects in some susceptible people – in in all cases the world of science fiction is being abandoned.

Dr. Jacques Vallée, a computer expert trained in astrophysics, is one of the most prominent investigators of UFO phenomena. According to Vallée:

It is curious to observe that even scientifically trained researchers who accept the idea of multiple universes, or the few ufologists who understand the idea that space-time could be folded to allow almost instantaneous travel from one point of our universe to another, still cling emotionally to the notion that any nonhuman form of consciousness is necessarily from outer space.

In the light of thousands of personal accounts of close encounters and abductions involving UFOs, and the extraordinary consistency and sincerity of these accounts, strong arguments are now being marshaled against this assumption of extraterrestrial visitation in favor of an unknown earth-agency that is manipulating the popular mind in such a way as to create a global metamorphosis of consciousness. Like the near-death experience, which is equally ubiquitous, the UFO experience with its strong psychic and paranormal overtones has features that are increasingly being interpreted as a form of spiritual awakening or initiation, although with puzzlingly physical elements.

It has been observed by modern researchers that, although these unknown aerial objects are physical enough to be tracked by radar and witnessed by hundreds of people at the same time, in many cases of close encounter a psychic dimension is present, indicative of trance, altered states of consciousness, time loss, hazy reportage, etc., which throws the objectivity of the experience into doubt. Many witnesses report leaving normal reality behind and moving as though within a lucid dream – as though ordinary space-time physics no longer applies – until they are returned to the normal world with the sense of a break in time. But in fact this is an accurate description of any out-of-the-body experience in which the physical body is left behind in an entranced sleep while the inner body, carrying the egoic consciousness with it, moves elsewhere for a time, often unaware that the physical body is not involved in its adventures.

An unusually clear example of such an experience has been recounted by a woman in Wollongong, Australia. She says she woke up in the middle of the night to see through the roof a round aircraft, silent and without lights, hovering directly over her house. A chain, which was dangling from it over her bed, was made of some kind of energy in the form of links, and was making a horrible screeching noise. She decided to go up it out of curiosity, but on arriving in the cabin of the aircraft, now lighted, was so nauseated by the nerve-wracking noise of the energy chain that she returned to her bed and went back to sleep. She says that just at the last she was aware that, although awake and with her eyes open throughout, her physical body had somehow never left her bed.

On the other hand, some people seem to be well aware of the psychophysical nature of their encounter and state frankly that it has been a deeply personal initiatory experience resulting in physical hearings, psychic gifts or a radical change in spiritual direction….

Occultism has its basis in a religious way of thinking, the roots of which stretch back into antiquity and which may be described as the Western esoteric tradition. Its principal ingredients have been identified as Gnosticism, the Hermetic treatises on alchemy and magic, NeoPlatonism, and the Cabbala all originating in the eastern Mediterranean area during the first few centuries AD. Gnosticism properly refers to the beliefs of certain heretical sects among the early Christians that claimed to possess gnosis, or special esoteric knowledge of spiritual matters. Although their various doctrines differed in many respects, two common Gnostic themes exist: first, an oriental (Persian) dualism, according to which the two realms of Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, order and chaos are viewed as independent battling principles; and second, the conviction that this material world is utterly evil, so that man can be saved only by attaining the gnosis of the higher realm. The Gnostic sects disappeared in the fourth century, but their ideas inspired the dualistic Manichaean religion of the second century and also the Hermetica. These Greek texts were composed in Egypt between the third and fifth centuries and developed a synthesis of Gnostic ideas, Neoplatonism and cabbalistic theosophy. Since these mystical doctrines arose against a background of cultural and social change, a correlation has been noted between the proliferation of the sects and the breakdown of the stable agricultural order of the late Roman Empire.

When the basic assumptions of the medieval world were shaken by new modes of enquiry and geographical discoveries in the fifteenth century, Gnostic and Hermetic ideas enjoyed a brief revival. Prominent humanists and scholar magicians edited the old classical texts during the Renaissance and thus created a modern corpus of occult speculation. But after the triumph of empiricism in the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, such ideas became the preserve of only a few antiquarians and mystics. By the eighteenth century these unorthodox religious and philosophical concerns were well defined as 'occult,’ inasmuch as they lay on the outermost fringe of accepted forms of knowledge and discourse. However, a reaction to the rationalist Enlightenment, taking the form of a quickening romantic temper, an interest in the Middle Ages and a desire for mystery, encouraged a revival of occultism in Europe from about 1770.

Germany boasted several renowned scholar magicians in the Renaissance, and a number of secret societies devoted to Rosicrucianism, theosophy, and alchemy also flourished there from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. However, the impetus for the necromantic occult revival of the nineteenth century did not arise in Germany. It is attributable rather to the reaction against the reign of materialist, rationalist and positivist ideas in the utilitarian and industrial cultures of America and England. The modern German occult revival owes its inception to the popularity of theosophy in the Anglo-Saxon world during the 1880s. Here theosophy refers to the international sectarian movement deriving from the activities and writings of the Russian adventuress and occultist, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-91). Her colourful life and travels in the 1850s and 1860s, her clairvoyant powers and penchant for supernatural phenomena, her interest in American spiritualism during the 1870s, followed by her foundation of the Theosophical Society at New York in 1875 and the subsequent removal of its operations to India between 1879 and 1885, have all been fully documented in several biographies. Here the essentials of theosophy as a doctrine will be summarized before tracing its penetration of Central Europe.

Madame Blavatsky's first book, Isis Unveiled (1877), was less an outline of her new religion than a rambling tirade against the rationalist and materialistic culture of modern Western civilization. Her use of traditional esoteric sources to discredit present-day beliefs showed clearly how much she hankered after ancient religious truths in defiance of contemporary agnosticism and modern science. In this enterprise she drew upon a range of secondary sources treating of pagan mythology and mystery religions, Gnosticism, the Hermetica, and the arcane lore of the Renaissance scholars, the Rosicrucians and other secret fraternities. W. E. Coleman has shown that her work comprises a sustained and frequent plagiarism of about one hundred contemporary texts, chiefly relating to ancient and exotic religions, demonology, Freemasonry and the case for spiritualism. Behind these diverse traditions, Madame Blavatsky discerned the unique source of their inspiration: the occult lore of ancient Egypt. Her fascination with Egypt as the fount of all wisdom arose from her enthusiastic reading of the English author Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. His novel The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) had been conceived of as a narrative of the impact of the Isis cult in Rome during the first century AD. His later works, Zanoni (1842), A Strange Story (1862), and The Coming Race (1871), also dwelt on esoteric initiation and secret fraternities dedicated to occult knowledge in a way which exercised an extraordinary fascination on the romantic mind of the nineteenth century. It is ironical that early theosophy should have been principally inspired by English occult fiction, a fact made abundantly clear by Liljegren's comparative textual studies.

Only after Madame Blavatsky and her followers moved to India in 1879 did theosophy receive a more systematic formulation. At the new headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Madras she wrote The Secret Doctrine (1888). This work betrayed her plagiarism again but now her sources were mainly contemporary works on Hinduism and modern science. Her new book was presented as a commentary on a secret text called the 'Stanzas of Dzyan,' which she claimed to have seen in a subterranean Himalayan monastery. This new interest in Indian lore may reflect her sensitivity to changes in the direction of scholarship: witness the contemporary importance of Sanskrit as a basis for the comparative study of so-called Aryan languages under Franz Bopp and Max Müller. Now the East rather than Egypt was seen as the source of ancient wisdom. Later theosophical doctrine consequently displays a marked similarity to the religious tenets of Hinduism.

The Secret Doctrine claimed to describe the activities of God from the beginning of one period of universal creation until its end, a cyclical process which continues indefinitely over and over again. The story related how the present universe was born, whence it emanated, what powers fashion it, whither it is progressing, and what it all means. The first volume (Cosmogenesis) outlined the scheme according to which the primal unity of an unmanifest divine being differentiates itself into a multiformity of consciously evolving beings that gradually fill the universe. The divine being manifested itself initially through an emanation and three subsequent Logoi: these cosmic phases created time, space, and matter, and were symbolized by a series of sacred Hindu sigils [circle, circle plus (superimposed) dot, circle plus vertical bar, circle plus horizontal bar, circle plus plus sign]. All subsequent creation occurred in conformity with the divine plan, passing through seven 'rounds' or evolutionary cycles. In the first round the universe was characterized by the predominance of fire, in the second by air, in the third by water, in the fourth by earth, and in the others by ether. This sequence reflected the cyclical fall of the universe from divine grace over the first four rounds and its following redemption over the next three, before everything contracted once more to the point of primal unity for the start of a new major cycle. Madame Blavatsky illustrated the stages of the cosmic cycle with a variety of esoteric symbols, including triangles, triskelions, and swastikas. So extensive was her use of this latter Eastern sign of fortune and fertility that she included it in her design for the seal of the Theosophical Society. The executive agent of the entire cosmic enterprise was called Fohat, a ‘universal agent employed by the Sons of God to create and uphold our world.' The manifestations of this force were, according to Blavatsky, electricity and solar energy, and 'the objectivised thought of the gods.' This electro-spiritual force was in tune with contemporary vitalist and scientific thought.

The second volume (Anthropogenesis) attempted to relate man to this grandiose vision of the cosmos. Not only was humanity assigned an age of far greater antiquity than that conceded by science, but it was also integrated into a scheme of cosmic, physical, and spiritual evolution. These theories were partly derived from late nineteenth century scholarship concerning palaeontology, inasmuch as Blavatsky adopted a racial theory of human evolution. She extended her cyclical doctrine with the assertion that each round witnessed the rise and fall of seven consecutive root-races, which descended on the scale of spiritual development from the first to the fourth, becoming increasingly enmeshed in the material world (the Gnostic notion of a Fall from Light into Darkness was quite explicit), before ascending through progressively superior root-races from the fifth to the seventh. According to Blavatsky, present humanity constituted the fifth root-race upon a planet that was passing through the fourth cosmic round, so that a process of spiritual advance lay before the species. The fifth root-race was called the Aryan race and had been preceded by the fourth root-race of the Atlanteans, which had largely perished in a flood that submerged their mid-Atlantic continent. The Atlanteans had wielded psychic forces with which our race was not familiar, their gigantism enabled them to build cyclopean structures, and they possessed a superior technology based upon the successful exploitation of Fohat. The three earlier races of the present planetary round were proto-human, consisting of the first Astral root-race which arose in an invisible, imperishable and sacred land and the second Hyperborean root-race which had dwelt on a vanished Polar continent. The third Lemurian root-race flourished on a continent which had lain in the Indian Ocean. It was probably due to this race's position at or near the spiritual nadir of the evolutionary racial cycle that Blavatsky charged the Lemurians with racial miscegenation entailing a kind of Fall and the breeding of monsters.

A further unimportant theosophical tenet was the belief in reincarnation and karma, also taken from Hinduism. The individual human ego was regarded as a tiny fragment of the divine being. Through reincarnation each ego pursued a cosmic iourney through the rounds and the root-races which led it towards eventual reunion with the divine being whence it had originally issued. This path of countless rebirths also recorded a story of cyclical redemption: the initial debasement of the ego was followed by its gradual sublimation to the point of identity with God. The process of reincarnation was fulfilled according to the principle of karma, whereby good acts earned their performer a superior reincarnation and bad acts an inferior reincarnation. This belief not only provided for everyone's participation in the fantastic worlds of remote prehistory in the root-race scheme, but also enabled one to conceive of salvation through reincarnation in the ultimate root-races which represented the supreme state of spiritual evolution: ‘we men shall in the future take our places in the skies as Lords of the planets, Regents of galaxies and wielders of fire-mist [Fohat].’ This chiliastic vision supplemented the psychological appeal of belonging to a vast cosmic order.

Besides its racial emphasis, theosophy also stressed the principle of élitism and the value of hierarchy. Blavatsky claimed she received her initiation into the doctrines from two exalted mahatmas or masters called Morya and Koot Hoomi, who dwelt in a remote and secret Himalayan fastness. These adepts were not gods but rather advanced members of our own evolutionary group, who had decided to impart their wisdom to the rest of the Aryan mankind through their chosen representative, Madame Blavatsky. Like her masters, she also claimed an exclusive authority on the basis of her occult knowledge or gnosis. Her account of prehistory frequently invoked the sacred authority of elite priesthoods among the root-races of the past. When the Lemurians had fallen into iniquity and sin, only a hierarchy of the elect remained pure in spirit. This remnant became the Lemuro-Atlantean dynasty of priest-kings who took up their abode on the fabulous island of Shamballah in the Gobi Desert. These leaders were linked with Blavatsky’s own masters, who were the instructors of the fifth Aryan root-race.

Despite its tortuous argument and the frequent contradictions which arose from the plethora of pseudo-scholarly references throughout the work, The Secret Doctrine may be summarized in terms of three basic principles. Firstly, the fact of a God, who is omnipresent, eternal, boundless and immutable. The instrument of this deity is Fohat, an electro-spiritual force which impresses the divine scheme upon the cosmic substance as the 'laws of nature.' Secondly, the rule of periodicity, whereby all creation is subject to an endless cycle of destruction and rebirth. These rounds always terminate at a level spiritually superior to their starting-point. Thirdly, there exists a fundamental unity between all individual souls and the deity, between the microcosm and the macrocosm. But it was hardly this plain theology that guaranteed theosophy its converts. Only the hazy promise of occult initiation shimmering through its countless quotations from ancient beliefs, lost apocryphal writings, and the traditional Gnostic and Hermetic sources of esoteric wisdom can account for the success of her doctrine and the size of her following amongst the educated classes of several countries.

How can one explain the enthusiastic reception of Blavatsky's ideas by significant numbers of Europeans and Americans from the 1880s onwards? Theosophy offered an appealing mixture of ancient religious ideas and new concepts borrowed from the Darwinian theory of evolution and modern science. This syncretic faith thus possessed the power to comfort certain individuals whose traditional outlook had been upset by the discrediting of orthodox religion, by the very rationalizing and de-mystiying progress of science and by the culturally dislocative impact of rapid social and economic change in the late nineteenth century. George L. Mosse has noted that theosophy typified the wave of anti-positivism sweeping Europe at the end of the century and observed that its outré notions made a deeper impression in Germany than in other European countries.

Although a foreign hybrid combining romantic Egyptian revivalism, American spiritualism and Hindu beliefs, theosophy enjoyed a considerable vogue in Germany and Austria. Its advent is best understood within a wider necromantic protest movement in Wilhelmian Germany known as Lebensreform (life reform). This movement represented a middle-class attempt to palliate the ills of modern life, deriving from the growth of the cities and industry. A variety of alternative life-styles – including herbal and natural medicine, vegetarianism, nudism and self-sufficient rural communes – were embraced by small groups of individuals who hoped to restore themselves to a natural existence. The political atmosphere of the movement was apparently liberal and left-wing with its interest in land reform, but there were many overlaps with the völkisch movement. Marxian critics have even interpreted it as mere bourgeois escapism from the consequences of capitalism. Theosophy was appropriate to the mood of Lebensreform and provided a philosophical rationale for some of its groups.

In July 1884 the first German Theosophical Society was established under the presidency of Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden (1846-1916) at Elberfeld, where Blavatsky and her chief collaborator, Henry Steel Olcott, were staying with their theosophical friends, the Gebhards. At this time Hübbe-Schleiden was employed as a senior civil servant at the Colonial Office in Hamburg. He had travelled widely, once managing an estate in West Africa and was a prominent figure in the political lobby for an expanded German overseas empire. Olcott and Hübbe-Schleiden travelled to Munich and Dresden to make contact with scattered theosophists and so lay the basis for a German organization. It has been suggested that this hasty attempt to found a German movement sprang from Blavatsky's desire for a new centre after a scandal involving charges of charlatanism against the theosophists at Madras early in 1884. Blavatsky's methods of producing occult phenomena and messages from her masters had aroused suspicion in her entourage and led eventually to an enquiry and an unfavourable report upon her activities by the London Society for Psychical Research. Unfortunately for Hübbe-Schleiden, his presidency lapsed when the formal German organization dissolved, once the scandal became more widely publicized following the exodus of the theosophists from India in April 1885. Henceforth Blavatsky lived in London and found eager new pupils amongst the upper classes of Victorian England.

In 1886 Hübbe-Schleiden stimulated a more serious awareness of occultism in Germany through the publication of-a scholarly monthly periodical, Die Sphinx, which was concerned with a discussion of spiritualism, psychical research, and paranormal phenomena from a scientific point of view. Its principal contributors were eminent psychologists, philosophers and historians. Here Max Dessoir expounded hypnotism, while Eduard von Hartmann developed a philosophy of 'individualism,' according to which the ego survived death as a discarnate entity, against a background of Kantian thought, Christian theology, and spiritualist speculations. Carl du Prel, the psychical researcher, and his colleague Lazar von Hellenbach, who had held seances with the famous American medium Henry Slade in Vienna, both contributed essays in a similar vein. Another important member of the Sphinx circle was Karl Kiesewetter, whose studies in the history of the post-Renaissance esoteric tradition brought knowledge of the scholar magicians, the early modern alchemists and contemporary occultism to a wider audience. While not itself theosophical, Hübbe-Schleiden's periodical was a powerful element in the German occult revival until it ceased publication in 1895.

Besides this scientific current of occultism, there arose in the 1890s a broader German theosophical movement, which derived mainly from the popularizing efforts of Franz Hartmann (1838-1912). Hartmann had been born in Donauwörth and brought up in Kempten, where his father held office as a court doctor. After military service with a Bavarian artillery regiment in 1859, Hartmann began his medical studies at Munich University. While on vacation in France during 1865, he took a post as ship's doctor on a vessel bound for the United States, where he spent the next eighteen years of his life. After completing his training at St Louis he opened an eye clinic and practised there until 1870. He then travelled round Mexico, settled briefly at New Orleans before continuing to Texas in 1873, and in 1878 went to Georgetown in Colorado, where he became coroner in 1882. Besides his medical practice he claimed to have a speculative interest in gold- and silver-mining. By the beginning of the 1870s he had also become interested in American spiritualism, attending the seances of the movement's leading figures such as Mrs. Rice Holmes and Kate Wentworth, while immersing himself in the writings of Judge Edmonds and Andrew Jackson Davis. However, following his discovery of Isis Unveiled, theosophy replaced spiritualism as his principal diversion. He resolved to visit the theosophists at Madras, travelling there by way of California, Japan and South-East Asia in late 1883. While Blavatsky and Olcott visited Europe in early 1884, Hartmann was appointed acting president of the Society during their absence. He remained at the Society headquarters until the theosophists finally left India in April 1885.

Hartmann's works were firstly devoted to Rosicrucian initiates, Paracelsus, Jakob Boehme and other topics in the Western esoteric tradition, and were published in America and England between 1884 and 1891. However, once he had established himself as a director of a Lebensreform sanatorium at Hallein near Salzburg upon his return to Europe in 1885, Hartmann began to disseminate the new wisdom of the East to his own countrymen. In 1889 he founded, together with Alfredo Pioda and Countess Constance Wachtmeister, the close friend of Blavatsky, a theosophical lay-monastery at Ascona, a place noted for its many anarchist experiments. From 1892 translations of Indian sacred texts and Blavatsky's writings were printed in his periodical, Lotusblüthen [Lotus Blossoms] (1892-1900), which was the first German publication to sport the theosophical swastika upon its cover. In the second half of this decade the first peak in German theosophical publishing occurred. Wilhelm Friedrich of Leipzig, the publishers of Hartmann's magazine, issued a twelve-volume book series, Bibliothek esoterischer Schriften [Library of Esoteric Writings] (1898-1900), while Hugo Göring, a theosophist in Weimar, edited a thirty-volume book series, Theosophische Schriften [Theosophical Writings] (1894-96). Both series consisted of German translations from Blavatsky's successors in England, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, together with original studies by Hartmann and Hübbe-Schleiden. The chief concern of these small books lay with abstruse cosmology, karma, spiritualism and the actuality of the hidden mahatmas. In addition to this output must be mentioned Hartmann's translations of the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao-Te-King and the Tattwa Bodha, together with his own monographs on Buddhism, Christian mysticism and Paracelsus.

Once Hartmann's example had provided the initial impetus, another important periodical sprang up. In 1896 Paul Zillmann founded the Metaphysische Rundschau [Metaphysical Review], a monthly periodical which dealt with many aspects of the esoteric tradition, while also embracing new parapsychological research as a successor to Die Sphinx. Zillmann, who lived at Gross-Lichterfelde near Berlin, was an executive committee member of a new German Theosophical Society founded under Hartmann's presidency at Berlin in August 1896, when the American theosophists Katherine Tingley, E. T. Hargrove and C. F. Wright were travelling through Europe to drum up overseas support for their movement. Zillmann's own studies and the articles in his periodical betrayed a marked eclecticism: contributions on yoga, phrenology, astrology, animal magnetism and hypnotism jostled with reprints of the medieval German mystics, a late eighteenth-century rosicrucian-alchemical treatise, and the works of the modern French occultist Gérard Encausse (Papus). Hartmann supplied a fictional story about his discovery of a secret Rosicrucian monastery in the Bavarian Alps, which fed the minds of readers with romantic notions of adepts in the middle of modern Europe. Zillmann was so inspired by the early nineteenth-century mystic Eckhartshausen and his ideas for a secret school of illuminates that he founded an occult lodge in early 1897. This Wald-Loge (Forest Lodge) was organized into three quasi-masonic grades of initiation. In Zilimann's entourage there worked the occultist Ferdinand Maack, devoted to the study of newlv discovered rays in the context of his own 'dynamosophic' science and an edition of the traditional Rosicrucian texts, the astrologer Albert Kniepf, Indian theosophists and writers on the American movements of Christian Science and New Thought. In his capacity of publisher, Paul Zilimann was an important link between the German occult subculture and the Ariosophists of Vienna, whose works he issued under his own imprint between 1906 and 1908.

The German Theosophical Society had been established in August 1896 as a national branch of the International Theosophical Brotherhood, founded by the American theosophists around Willian Quan judge and Katherine Tingley. Theosophy remained a sectarian phenomenon in Germany, typified by small and often antagonistic local groups. In late 1900 the editor of the Neue Metaphysische Rundschau received annual reports from branch societies in Berlin, Cottbus, Dresden, Essen, Graz, and Leipzig and bemoaned their evident lack of mutual fraternity." However, by 1902, the movement displayed more cohesion with two principal centres at Berlin and Leipzig, supported bv a further ten local theosophical societies and about thirty small circles throughout Germany and Austria. Paul Raatz, editor of the periodical Theosophisches Leben [Theosophical Life, est. April 1898], opened a theosophical centre in the capital, while at Leipzig there existed another centre associated with Arthur Weber, Hermann Rudolf, and Edwin Böhme. Weber had edited his own periodical Der theosophische Wegweiser [The Theosophical Signpost, est. 1898], while from the newly-founded Theosophical Central Bookshop he issued a book series, Geheimwissenschaftliche Vortrdge [Occult Lectures] (1902-7), for which Rudolph and Böhme contributed many titles.

While these activities remained largely under the sway of Franz Hartmann and Paul Zillmann, mention must be made of another theosophical tendency in Germany. In 1902 Rudolf Steiner, a young scholar who had studied in Vienna before writing at Weimar a study of Goethe's scientific writings, was made general secretary of the German Theosophical Society at Berlin, founded by London theosophists. Steiner published a periodical, Luzifer, at Berlin from 1903 to 1908. However, his mystical Christian interests increasingly estranged him from the theosophists under Annie Besant’s strongly Hindu persuasion, so that he finally broke away to found his own Anthroposophical Society in 1912. It may have been a desire to counter Steiner's influence in the occult subculture which led Hartmann to encourage the publication of several new periodicals. In 1906 a Theosophical Publishing House was established at Leipzig by his young protégé Hugo Vollrath. Under this imprint a wave of occult magazines appeared, including Der Wanderer (1906-8), edited by Arthur Weber; Prana (1909-19), edited initially by the astrologer Karl Brandler-Pracht and later by Johannes Balzli, secretary of the Leipzig Theosophical Society; and Theosophie (est. 1910), edited by Hugo Vollrath. Astrological periodicals and a related book-series, the Astrologische Rundschau [Astrological Review] and the Astrologische Bibliothek [Astrological Library], were also issued here from 1910. Hartmann's earlier periodical was revived in 1908 under the title Neue Lotusblüten at the Jaeger press, which simultaneously started the Osiris-Biicher, a long book-series which introduced many new occultists to the German public.

Meanwhile, other publishers had been entering the field. Karl Rohm, who had visited the English theosophists in London in the late 1890s, started a firm at Lorch in Württemberg after the turn of the century. His publications included reprints of Boehme, Hamann, Jung-Stilling, and Alfred Martin Oppel (A.M.O.), translations of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's romances and the works of contemporary occultists. Johannes Baum's New Thought publishing house was founded in 1912 and moved to Pfullingen in 1919. Although initially concerned with translations of American material, this firm was to play a vital role in German esoteric publishing during the 1920s.

In competition with the theosophists at Leipzig was the firm of Max Altmann, which had commenced occult publishing in 1905. In July 1907 Altmann began to issue the popular Zentralblatt für Okkultismus, edited by D. Georgiewitz-Weitzer, who wrote his own works on modern Rosicrucians, alchemy and occult medicine under the pseudonym G. W. Surya. The Leipzig bookseller Heinrich Tränker issued an occult book-series between 1910 and 1912, which included the works of Karl Helmuth and Karl Heise. From 1913 Antonius von der Linden began an ambitious book-series, Geheime Wissenschaften [Secret Sciences] (1913-20), which consisted of reprints of esoteric texts from the Renaissance scholar Agrippa von Nettesheim, the Rosicrucians and eighteenth-century alchemists, together with commentaries and original texts by modern occultists. From this brief survey it can be deduced that German occult publishing activity reached its second peak between the years 1906 and 1912.

If the German occult subculture was well developed before the First World War, Vienna could also look back on a ripe tradition of occult interest. The story of this tradition is closely linked with Friedrich Eckstein (1861-1939). The personal secretary of the composer Anton Bruckner, this brilliant polymath cultivated a wide circle of acquaintance amonest the leading thinkers, writers and musicians of Vienna. His penchant for occultism first became evident as a member of a Lebensreform group who had practised vegetarianism and discussed the doctrines of Pythagoras and the Neo-Platonists in Vienna at the end of the 1870s. His esoteric interests later extended to German and Spanish mysticism, the legends surrounding the Templars, and the Freemasons, Wagnerian mythology, and oriental religions. In 1880 he befriended the Viennese mathematician Oskar Simony, who was impressed by the metaphysical theories of Professor Friedrich Zöllner of Leipzig. Zöllner had hypothesized that spiritualistic phenomena confirmed the existence of a fourth dimension. Eckstein and Simony were also associated with the Austrian Psychical researcher, Lazar von Hellenbach, who performed scientific experiments with mediums in a state of trance and contributed to Die Sphinx. Following his cordial meeting with Blavatsky in 1886, Eckstein gathered a group of theosophists in Vienna. During the late 1880s both Franz Hartmann and the young Rudolf Steiner were habitués of this circle. Eckstein was also acquainted with the mystical group around the illiterate Christian pietist, Alois Mailänder (1844-1905), who was lionized at Kempten and later at Darmstadt by many theosophists, including Hartmann and Hübbe-Schleiden. Eckstein corresponded with Gustav Meyrink, founder of the Blue Star theosophical lodge at Prague in 1891, who later achieved renown as an occult novelist before the First World War. In 1887 a Vienna Theosophical Society was founded with Eckstein as president and Count Karl zu Leiningen-Billigheim as secretary.

New groups devoted to occultism arose in Vienna after the turn of the century. There existed an Association for Occultism, which maintained a lending-library where its members could consult the works of Zöllner, Hellenbach and du Prel. The Association was close to Philipp Maschlufsky, who began to edit an esoteric periodical, Die Gnosis, from 1903. The paper was subsequently acquired by Berlin theosophists who amalgamated it with Rudolf Steiner's Luzifer. In December 1907 the Sphinx Reading Club, a similar occult study group, was founded by Franz Herndl, who wrote two occult novels and was an important member of the List Society. Astrology and other occult sciences were also represented in the Austrian capital. Upon his return from the United States to his native city, Karl Brandler-Pracht had founded the First Viennese Astrological Society in 1907. According to Josef Greiner's account of Hitler's youth in Vienna, meetings and lectures concerned with astrology, hypnotism and other forms of divination were commonplace in the capital before the outbreak of the war. Given this occult subculture in Vienna, one can better appreciate the local background of the movements around Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels, whose racist writings after 1906 owed so much to the modern occult revival in Central Europe.

Although modern occultism was represented by many varied forms, its function appears relatively uniform. Behind the mantic systems of astrology, phrenology and palmistry, no less the doctrines of theosophy, the quasi-sciences of 'dynamosophy,’ animal magnetism and hypnotism, and a textual antiquarianism concerning the esoteric literature of traditional cabbalists, Rosicrucians, and alchemists, there lay a strong desire to reconcile the findings of modern natural science with a religious view that could restore man to a position of centrality and dignity in the universe. Occult science tended to stress man's intimate and meaningful relationship with the cosmos in terms of ‘revealed' correspondences between the microcosm and macrocosm, and strove to counter materialist science, with its emphasis upon tangible and measurable phenomena and its neglect of invisible qualities respecting the spirit and the emotions. These new 'metaphysical' sciences gave individuals a holistic view of themselves and the world in which they lived. This view conferred both a sense of participation in a total meaningful order and, through divination, a means of planning one's affairs in accordance with this order.

The attraction of this world-view was indicated at the beginning of this chapter. Occultism had flourished coincident with the decline of the Roman Empire and once again at the waning of the Middle Ages. It exercised a renewed appeal to those who found the world out of joint due to rapid social and ideological changes at the end of the nineteenth century. Certain individuals, whose sentiments and education inclined them towards an idealistic and romantic perspective, were drawn to the modern occult revival in order to find that sense of order, which had been shaken by the dissolution of erstwhile conventions and beliefs.

Since Ariosophy originated in Vienna, in response to the problems of German nationality and metropolitanism, one must consider the particular kind of theosophy which the Ariosophists adapted to their völkisch ideas. A theosophical group had been active in the city as early as 1887, but its members were initially inclined towards a Biedermeier tradition of pious 'inwardness' and self-cultivation under the patronage of Marie Lang. Rudolf Steiner was a member of this group and his account of its interests indicates how little sympathy

led between the 'factual' Buddhistic theosophy of Franz Hartmann, who was also in attendance, and the more spiritual reflective attitude of the rest of the circle. During the 1890s Viennese theosophy appeared to reflect the predilection of the educated classes for piety, subjectivism, and the cult of feelings, a mood which corresponds to the contemporary vogue of the feuilleton and literary impressionism in the arts. Schorske has attempted to relate this cultivation of the self to the social plight of the Viennese bourgeoisie at the end of the century. He suggests that this class had begun by supporting the temple of art as a surrogate form of assimilation into the aristocracy, but ended by finding in it an escape, a refuge from the collapse of liberalism and the emergence of vulgar mass-movements. It appears plausible to locate the rise of Viennese theosophy within this cultural context.

When theosophy had become more widely publicized through the German publishing houses at the turn of the century, its ideas reached a larger audience. By this time theosophy represented a detailed body of teachings, as set down in the newly-available translation of Blavatsky's major work Die Geheimlehre [The Secret Doctrine] (1897-1901) and the numerous abridgements and commentaries by Franz Hartmann, Hermann Rudolph, Edwin Böhme and others. Whereas the earlier Austrian theosophical movement had been defined by the mystical Christianity and personal gnosticism of cultivated individuals, its later manifestation in Vienna corresponded to a disenchantment with Catholicism coupled with the popularization of mythology, folklore and comparative religion. The impetus came largely from Germany, and both List and Lanz drew their knowledge of theosophy from German sources. List was indebted to the Berlin theosophist Max Ferdinand von Sebaldt and counted Franz Hartmann, Hugo Göring, and Paul Zillmann among his supporters. Zillmann was the first to publish both List and Lanz on esoteric sub ects. Theosophv in Vienna after 1900 appears to be a quasi-intellectual sectarian religious doctrine of German importation, current among persons wavering in their religious orthodoxy but who were inclined to a religious perspective.

The attraction of theosophy for List, Lanz, and their supporters consisted in its eclecticism with respect to exotic religion, mythology, and esoteric lore, which provided a universal and non-Christian perspective upon the cosmos and the origins of mankind, against which the sources of Teutonic belief, customs and identity, which were germane to völkisch speculation, could be located. Given the antipathy towards Catholicism among völkisch nationalists and Pan-Germans in Austria at the turn of the century, theosophy commended itself as a scheme of religious beliefs which ignored Christianity in favour of a mélange of mythical traditions and pseudo-scientific hypotheses consonant with contemporary anthropology, etymology, and the history of ancient cultures. Furthermore, the very structure of theosophical thought lent itself to völkisch adoption. The implicit élitism of the hidden mahatmas with superhuman wisdom was in tune with the longing for a hierarchical social order based on the racial mystique of the Volk. The notion of an occult gnosis in theosophy, notablv its obscuration due to the superimposition of alien (Christian) beliefs, and its revival by the chosen few, also accorded with the attempt to ascribe a long pedigree to völkisch nationalism, especially in view of its really recent origins. In the context of the growth of German nationalism in Austria since 1866, we can see how theosophy, otherwise only tenuously related to völkisch thought by notions of race and racial development, could lend both a religious mystique and a universal rationale to the political attitudes of a small minority.

…Since 1960 a number of popular books have represented the Nazi phenomenon as the product of arcane and demonic influence. The remarkable story of the rise of Nazism is implicitly linked to the power of the supernatural. According to this mythology Nazism cannot have been the mere product of socioeconomic factors. No empirical or purely sociological thesis could account for its nefarious projects and continued success. The occult historiography chooses to explain the Nazi phenomenon in terms of an ultimate and arcane power, which supported and controlled Hitler and his entourage. This hidden power is characterized either as a discarnate entity (e.g. 'black forces', 'invisible hierarchies', 'unknown superiors'), or as a magical élite in a remote age or distant location, with which the Nazis were in contact. Recurring themes in the tradition have been a Nazi link with hidden masters in the East, and the Thule Society and other occult lodges as channels of black initiation. All writers of this genre thus document a 'crypto-history,’ inasmuch as their final point of explanatory reference is an agent which has remained concealed to previous historians of National Socialism.

The myth of a Nazi link with the Orient has a complex pedigree of theosophical provenance. The notion of hidden sacred centres in the East had been initially popularized by Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine, based on the 'Stanzas of Dzyan,' which she claimed to have read in a secret Himalayan lamasery. Blavatsky maintained that there existed many similar centres of esoteric learning and initiation; magnificent libraries and fabulous monasteries were supposed to lie in mountain caves and underground labyrinths in the remote regions of Central Asia. Notable examples of these centres were the subterranean city of Agadi, thought to lie in Babylonia, and the fair oasis of Shamballah in the Gobi Desert, where the divine instructors of the Aryan race were said to have preserved their sacred lore. This mythology was extended by a French author, Joseph Saint-Yves d'Alveydre (1842-1909), who described the secret city of Agartha as a theocracy that guided the course of world history. According to telepathic messages which he claimed to have received from the Dalai Lama of Tibet, this city lay beneath the Himalayas. Ferdynand Ossendowski, who travelled through Siberia and Mongolia after the Russian Revolution, gave some credence to these fantasies with his account of local Buddhist beliefs, which referred to the subterranean kingdom of Agartha where the King of the World reigned. This utopian kingdom was credited with supernatural powers that could be unleashed to destroy mankind and transform the surface of the entire planet.

These ideas of a secret theocracy in the East were supplemented by the power of vril. In his novel The Coming Race (1871) Sir Edward Bulwer-Lvtton had attributed this power to a subterranean race of men, the Vril-ya, psychically far in advance of the human species. The powers of vril included telepathy and telekinesis. This fictional notion was subsequently exploited by Louis Jacolliot, French consul in Calcutta under the Second Empire, in his studies of oriental beliefs and sects, which Blavatsky had herself quarried while working on the text of Isis Unveiled (1877). The vril was understood to be an enormous reservoir of energy in the human organism, inaccessible to non-initiates. It was believed that whoever became master of the vril force could, like Bulwer-Lytton's race of Vril-ya, enjoy total mastery over all nature.

Willy Ley, who emigrated to the United States in 1935 after a short career as a rocket engineer in Germany, wrote a short account of the pseudo-scientific ideas which had found some official acceptance during the Third Reich. Besides the World Ice Theory and the Hollow Earth Doctrine, which both found Nazi patrons, Ley recalled a Berlin sect which had engaged in meditative practices designed to penetrate the secret of vril.

Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier cited this article in their Le matin des magiciens (1960), the second part of which was devoted to the Third Reich under the suggestive title 'A few years in the absolute elsewhere.' They exaggerated the significance of this obscure Berlin sect, in order to claim that the Nazi leadership was determined to establish contact with an omnipotent subterranean theocracy and gain knowledge of its power. It was thought that this power would enable Germany to conquer the whole world and transform human life in accordance with a millenarian vision:

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 ... 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 dungheap that will nourish the roots of the New Cities that will arise.

Pauwels and Bergier claimed that Hitler and his entourage believed in such ideas. In their account the Berlin sect was known as the Vril Society or the Luminous Lodge (perhaps a garbled reference to the Lumenclub of Vienna) and credited with the status of an important Nazi organization. A French psychiatrist was quoted to the effect that 'Hitler's real aim was to perform an act of creation, a divine operation ... a biological mutation which would result in an unprecedented exaltation of the human race and the "apparition of a new race of heroes and demi-gods and god-men”’. In this way, racism was linked with the occult mythology of an Eastern theocracy and the vril force to evoke a millenarian image of the intended Nazi future.

This legendary account of Nazi inspiration and ambition was underpinned by a fanciful account of the Thule Society and certain of its members. Pauwels and Bergier singled out two particular individuals as Hitler's occult mentors at Munich during the early 1920s. Dietrich Eckart (1868-1923) was a völkisch playwright and joumalist of violently anti-Semitic prejudice, and a prominent figure among the nationalist circles of Munich. He is also known to have attended meetings of the Thule Society. It is accepted by scholars that Eckart not only gave force and focus to Hitler's burgeoning anti-Semitism after the war, but that he also introduced the young party leader to moneyed and influential social circles. The second individual was Karl Haushofer (1869-1946), who had served as a military attaché in Japan and became a lifelong admirer of oriental culture. After the First World War Haushofer embarked upon an academic career in the field of political geography, subsequently gaining the Chair of Geopolitics at the University of Munich, where Rudolf Hess was his student assistant Hitler was supposedly impressed by Haushofer’s theories, taken from Sir Halford Mackinder, that the 'heartland' of Eastern Europe and Russia ensured its rulers a wider dominance in the world.

According to Pauwels and Bergier, the influence of these two men upon Hitler chiefly related to the communication of arcane knowledge which was derived from unknown powers, with which contact had been established through the Thule Society and other cults. Eckart’s role as an occult counsellor was related explicitly to invisible hierarchies.

Thule was thought to have been the magic centre of a vanished civilization. Eckardt [sic] and his friends believed that not all the secrets of Thule had perished. Beings intermediate between Man and other intelligent beings from Beyond, would place at the disposal of the Initiates [i.e. the members of the Thule Society] a reservoir of forces which could be drawn on to enable Germany to dominate the world ... [its] leaders would be men who knew everything, deriving their strength from the very fountain-head of energy and guided by the Great Ones of the Ancient World. Such were the myths on which the Aryan doctrine of Eckardt and Rosenberg was founded and which these prophets ... had instilled into the mediumistic mind of Hitler. [The Thule Society] was soon to become ... an instrument changing the very nature of reality ... under the influence of Karl Haushofer the group took on its true character as a society of Initiates in communion with the Invisible, and became the magic centre of the Nazi movement.

This spurious account also maintained that Haushofer was a member of the Luminous Lodge, a secret Buddhist society in Japan, and the Thule Society. As an initiate of the Eastern mysteries, rather than as a geopolitician, Haushofer is supposed to have proclaimed the necessity of 'a return to the sources' of the human race in Central