The Franklin Files

Omega · Guru

RE: The Thule Society II

Omega · Guru

Sebottendorff often spoke of the rediscovery of some lost thread of knowledge that once was "a torrent which nourished everything at the time of primitive Christianity, and which in the Middle Ages gave rise to the most marvellous civilisations". His references to "communities of dervishes" and a "Moslem Brotherhood" point us to the custodians of this lost Wisdom.

Rene Alleau relates that Sebottendorff also wrote that: "...‘secret Muslim Masters’ had entrusted him with the mission of ‘illuminating’ Germany through the revelation of the secrets of advanced magic and initiation into ancient Oriental mysteries." (Hitler et les Societes Secretes)

How does one evaluate or reconcile Sebottendorff’s Oriental Islamic mysticism with the Thule Society’s stated aim to revive pagan ‘Aryan’ culture, symbolism, and mythology? The two traditions are not as mutually exclusive as they may first appear. E.H. Palmer, in his widely respected 19th century text Oriental Mysticism, held that Sufism is "the development of the Primaeval religion of the Aryan race". Both the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons of Europe find the ultimate source of their teachings in the Orient. Sufi-European links are discernible in much of the West’s hidden history.

A 9th century Celtic cross, now in the British Museum, incorporates the Islamic Arabic declaration Bismillah ir Rahman ir Rahim, suggesting close connections. The Sufi Master, Hakim Jami, said that Sufism predated the Prophet Mohammed, declaring that Plato, Hippocrates, Pythagoras and Hermes were part of an unbroken line of Sufic transmission. As an initiate of Islamic mysticism, Sebottendorff could rightly call himself a Rosicrucian, a Muslim Brother, and an Odinist.

Sebottendorff drew from Oriental Freemasonry a complete initiatory system requiring a probationary period before the admittance of a candidate to the Thule Lodge. Once admitted the member had to take a ritualistic vow of obedience and loyalty. "Symbolically," wrote the Baron, "it was the return to Halgadom."

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Halgadom was central to the Baron’s mission. According to Jean Mabire, Sebottendorff had as his ultimate goal the creation of a spiritual community that he called Halgadom.

"This temple of Halgadom is simultaneously spiritual and material. It belongs to earth and to heaven, to the past and the future. It is the Hyperborean equivalent of the Ark of the Covenant of the Israelites. Halgadom, in Sebottendorff’s mind, far surpasses that Second Reich which Wilhelm’s Germany had incarnated since 1871. It is the empire of all the Germans, but also many other Europeans: the Scandinavians, faithful to their Nordic origins; the Netherlanders, more German than the Germans; the British, divided between Celts and Saxons; the French, heirs of the Franks and regenerated by the Normans or the Burgundians; the Italians, in whose veins runs the blood of the Lombards; the Spaniards, who still carry many an imprint of the Visigoths. And also the Russians, whose country was founded by the Swedish Varegs, those Vikings of the rivers and steppes."

Clearly, Hitler’s Third Reich was a monstrous parody of this profound vision. The Pan-European spiritual outlook of Sebottendorff and Thule was distorted by Hitler and the Nazis into a bloody Germanic chauvinism.

The core of National Socialism was the racism of Social Darwinism, summed up in the myth of ‘Blood and Soil’. A legacy of the nineteenth century which believed blindly in the reality of matter.

In a direct attack on the spiritual worldview, a leading Nazi thinker declared, "We do not agree with the proposition that the spirit creates the body." The interests of those of ‘Germanic blood’ were therefore paramount. Before this, said Hitler, "considerations of party politics, of religion, of humanity - in a word, every other consideration - can have no place whatever."

Thus this myth of ‘Blood and Soil’ was one of physical ties, of heredity, of the land, of living space, of property, of possessiveness, of natural life. And as William Blake noted: "Nature teaches nothing about spiritual life, only about natural life. The devil is the mind of natural structure."

This narrow Germanism ultimately cost Hitler the war.

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"Thus it fell out that Hitler’s Germany missed the mark, and it is very fortunate that it missed it; for it was necessary that things should have happened as they did, and not otherwise", writes the novelist Jean Parvulesco in La Spirale Prophetique. "Why should the Europe of the End have been a German Europe? The Europe of the End must be European, and it will be so; the Europe of the End cannot be otherwise than European. For such is the sole question that is truly and totally revolutionary at the present time, the sole liberating question: when the time comes (and it is already here), will the European nations find, in their deepest selves, the burning reality of the ‘nation before all the nations,’ the transcendental legacy of the ‘Indo-European nation’ of our former origins?"

Hitler had little time for the revolutionary pan-European vision of Thule and only used it to get him on the road to power. His dream of a Thousand-year Reich had no room for the love of individual liberty with which the Thulists romantically endowed their ancestors. Advocating ‘mysticism as politics’ and calling for a ‘spiritual revolution’, the Thulean vision was ruthlessly stamped out by the Nazi state. Addressing the 1938 Nazi Party Congress, Hitler said:

"At the pinnacle of our program stands not mysterious premonitions, but clear knowledge and hence open avowal. But woe if the movement or the state, through the insinuation of obscure mystical elements, should give unclear orders. And it is enough if this lack of clarity is contained merely in words. There is already a danger if orders are given for the setting up of so-called cult places, because this alone will give birth to the necessity subsequently to devise so-called cult games and cult rituals. Our cult is exclusively cultivation of that which is natural and hence willed by God."

One of the few early members of the Thule Society not purged from the Nazi Party in the 1930s was Hitler’s close advisor Rudolf Hess (1894-1987). Hess, strongly influenced by the ideas of Sebottendorff, ate biodynamic food, studied Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, as well as mysticism, astrology and herbalism. After Hitler’s coming to power, Hess had applied for a substantial grant to establish a cult place, the Central Institute of Occultism, but this never materialised.

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No one more than Hess knew the secrets of the early Nazi links with the Thule. Was this the reason the victorious Allies had Hess held in isolation in Spandau prison for over 40 years?

Jean Mabire shows that Hess’s flight to Britain in May 1941 on a desperate mission to bring an end to the war, was the last attempt of the old Thule Society - long dissolved or driven underground - to counter the actions of a Fuhrer who had so completely deformed their vision. We read in Jean Mabire’s Thule: Le soleil retrouve des Hyperboreens:

"Hess knew of the projected attack on Russia. He wanted to warn the English. It has been said that he dreamed of a reversal of alliances. I believe that it was even more complicated. He simply wanted peace. He hoped to defuse this bomb, more fatal than the atomic bomb. He knew the inner workings of the regime well enough to know that the Fuhrer was not only going to attack the East, but that he could only be following the most stupid of politics. Hess had understood that it was certainly not the spirit of Thule that was reigning in Germany, but the narrowest pan-germanism. All these Gauleiters from South and West Germany understood nothing of the Slavic world. Have you already noticed how little importance the North and East Germans had in this Third Reich, which considered itself so ‘nordic’? I think that the Baltic Germans would not have allowed such elementary and, to be honest, such criminal foolishness."

Only days after Hess’s arrival in Britain, the official Nazi Party newspaper the Volkischer Beobachter published an article that included the following:

"As was well known in Party circles, Rudolf Hess was in poor health for many years and latterly increasingly had recourse to hypnotists, astrologers and so on. The extent to which these people are responsible for the mental confusion that led him to his present step has still to be clarified."

Warrants were issued for the arrest of Hess’s adjutants, a number of his close friends and even his chauffeur. Hundreds of other people including astrologers, faith healers, spiritualists, Anthroposophists and mystics of every kind, were rounded up by the Gestapo to die in the concentration camps.