In June 1914, as nationalist sentiments presaging the outbreak of war rose across Europe, Hubbe-Schleiden speculated, German Theosophists would now have to find ways to induce their compatriots to reject petty nationalism and embrace "world civilization" (Weltkultur) instead.

By 1914, however, the war was not the only force working against the original Theosophical goal of universal brotherhood. Yet another was what the popular German philosopher Hermann Keyserling called "the increasing tendency of all advanced people to be their own saviors ."

The reality of the occult world became an article of everyday knowledge for him, as his actions over the next few years testified. In Colorado, for instance, he lost a great deal of money by following the advice of clairvoyants who told him where to dig for gold. On the other hand, consultation with "a spiritual power" resulted in the alleviation of an unspecified problem he had acquired in his childhood through the "evil practice" of vaccination.

In the case of Franz Hartmann contact with a talented medium in Denver made materialized spirits a daily part of his existence and resulted in Hartmann himself ‘levitating’ in air.

A letter expressing this desire to joint the Theosophical Society was followed by an anxious wait, which soon ended with the arrival of a reply from Olcott and Blavatsky that, on behalf of the Masters, invited Hartmann to come to India to collaborate with them in the Theosophical project.

Initially at the Adyar headquarters and then in the Theosophical movement more generally, Hartmann finally found what he had long sought for in vain: personal spiritual experience ensconced in an intellectually satisfying framework. Sittings with Blavatsky became occasions not for communion with dead spirits from the beyond but for profoundly moving encounters while she conversed with a Master. Although he himself was unable to see the Master and therefore had to rely on Blavatsky for full account of the conversation, Hartmann nevertheless experienced this mediated presence as a powerful stimulus to spiritual consciousness, recalling later that the Master's "influence pervaded my whole being and filled me with a sensation of indescribable bliss.

Admitting that Blavatsky produced occult phenomena not through her own mediumship but through conscious fraud, Hartmann nevertheless directed Theosophists to focus on her purpose, which was "to induce the people to study the higher laws of life, to raise them up to a higher conception of eternal truth, and teach them to do their own thinking. "

At times, Hartmann echoed Hubbe-Schleiden's laments about those Theosophists who forgot that the overarching goal of Theosophy was universal brotherhood. In a particularly scathing reference to this tendency of some Theosophists to dwell excessively on the subgoals of comparative study and occult research, for example, Hartmann dismissed those who pursued the former as grasping for mere "multitudes of facts" (Vielwisserei) and the latter after mere ‘dreaming around’ (Schwaermerei). But in the end, whatever his ideological commitments, Hartmann's brand of openly expressed and self-focused occultism soon became dominant in the German Theosophical movement.

Occurring at multiple levels of the movement, it was especially clear in the life of Rudolf Steiner, who devoted most of his adult years to developing an occult system suitable for “incorporation into modern life.”

Steiner's commitment to scientific method echoed Hubbe-Schleiden, while his frank dedication to convincing others of the reality of the spiritual world by helping them experience it within themselves echoed Hartmann.

While still in high school, Steiner read Kant and Hegel, and Steiner felt pulled first to philosophy and then to the arts.

In Vienna in the 1880’s, he developed contacts with various literary, progressive, and mystical groups. The circle of the feminist and Theosophist Marie Lang, for instance, which attracted artists, literati, and social reformers, also took in Steiner. It was here that Steiner first met Franz Hartmann, who had introduced Lang to Theosophy. Vienna also contained the mystical circle around Friedrich Eckstein, whose knowledge of ancient esoteric texts Steiner found impressive but whose insistence on keeping his knowledge secret Steiner found repellent.

Steiner submitted a dissertation to Heinrich von Stein, a philosopher of Christian Platonism at the university in Rostock, and received a doctorate in philosophy. Moving to Berlin, Steiner continued to pursue his attempt to give voice to the inner life of the spirit and earned a living as editor of the Berlin literary journal Magazin fur Literatur, which was then an organ of the Freie literarische Gesellschaft (Free literary society).

This also resulted in an invitation to deliver a lecture on Nietzsche at the home of the famous Berlin Theosophists Cay and Sophie von Brockdorff. Steiner later wrote that this speech had great personal significance for him since it allowed him, perhaps for the first time, "to speak in words coined from the world of spirit. "

An exchange between Steiner and his pupil Eliza von Moltke, the wife of a famous general, Helmuth von Moltke, gives a sense of how this worked in practice. In a 1904 letter, Moltke begged Steiner to send her instructions on how to work on herself in order to be able to help humanity. Leaving aside the question of how to help humanity, Steiner sent back a personalized exercise plan, with an accompanying note implying that these instructions came not from him but from higher powers (presumably. the Great White Brotherhood) utilizing him as a vehicle of communication .

The nature of these "exercises" was made clear in a letter Steiner sent to another pupil, a science teacher named Hans Wohlbold, to whom Steiner explained that the purpose of his exercises was to train the mind to perceive spiritual reality directly.

His desire to establish a seamless link between the occult and the everyday represented a decisive break with nineteenth-century spiritualism and its focus on the trance personality of mediums. It also broke with the original Theosophical program of bending the occult to the progressive enlightenment of humanity and the achievement of universal brotherhood. For Steiner, the occult in its dominant tenor was individualist, not universalist. The occult now became a matter of personal will and conscious expression.

These trends away from an old emphasis on universalism to a new focus on individualism did not go unremarked or indeed uncriticized by other Theosophists. In a letter to a friend written in 1911, for instance, Hubbe-Schleiden bewailed Steiner's following among German Theosophists, implying that Steiner's teachings were nothing more than subjective occultism. Against this tendency, Hubbe-Schleiden reiterated his commitment to occultism based both on "authentic science and philosophy." In a series of letters written to Steiner that same year, Hubbe-Schleiden stated (not quite honestly) that what had drawn him to the Theosophical Society in the first place in 1884 was not the occult but rather the project of universal brotherhood, implying that Steiner needed to return to Theosophical basics .

Such complaints, however, did little to curtail the rising Theosophical tide of self-focused occultism. At a 1912 meeting hosted by the appropriately named Internationale Theosophische Verbruederung (International Theosophical brotherhood), for instance, lectures featuring personal development dominated the program. These included talks with titles like "Barriers to Self ­Knowledge" and "The Meaning of Art for the Life of the Spirit. " Businesses and commercial clearing houses also enthusiastically exploited the Theosophical cult of the self for profit. A good example of this was the Zentrale fuer praktischen Okkultismus (Center for practical occultism), which took "know thyself" ("Erkenne dich selbst") as its slogan in the 1920’s. Sporting the common Theosophical symbol of the sphinx, its promotional brochure divided into departments of astrology, chiromancy, graphology, geomancy, dream interpretation, and so on. The flyer urged potential customers to send in their photos, samples of handwriting, dream descriptions, and questionnaires along with a fee.

The ecumenical and utopian rendition of some Theosophists contrasted sharply with the words of Karl Kern also a Theosophist initially, who insisted however instead that "God is purified race! Coming from a member of the Theosophically influenced movement known as Ariosophy, Kern's statement neatly captured the volkisch variant of German Theosophical thinking.

At a basic level, there should be nothing surprising about such links between Theosophy and the volkisch milieu, given the similar conditions in which both movements were born. With roots in the 1880’s, both belonged to the experimental field of fin-de-siecle modernism and overlapped significantly with the Lebensreform movement. Tapping the spiritual dissatisfactions of their age, both attracted followers hungry for a new kind of religiosity and proved adept at exploiting the new technologies of mass communication to spread their message. Both, finally, tapped the imaginative powers of the occult to articulate an "alternative modernity."'

And yet, just as it would be a mistake to ignore the overlap between Theosophy and the volkisch movement, one must also be careful not to stretch the links between these two movements too far. Only eight groups in Germany practiced the volkisch variant of Theosophical occultism known as Ariosophy, whereas more than fifty larger groups belonged to mainstream Theosophy. Nor, despite their overlaps, were the two movements identical. Indeed, as the examples of Rudolph and Kern indicate, one of their most basic differences was ideological. Whereas Theosophy sought to build an esoteric religion , the volkisch movement sought instead to fashion a race-specific religion that would speak to the spiritual needs of "Ario-Germans" exclusively.

This is not to say that considerations of race played no role in mainstream Theosophy: race did in fact matter to the movement as seen in the example of the …. Theosophy aimed, after all, to bring the so-called "sixth root race" into existence, and its cosmology invoked a complicated hierarchy of racial development to explain the trajectory of human history.

Drawing on the popularity of Social Darwinian thought, Theosophical doctrine mixed biological and spiritual notions of race in an often incoherent manner. Theosophists could insist that the race to which one belonged had primarily to do with one's degree of spiritual maturity, yet at the same time claim that such biologically understood "races" as the North Indian Aryans had achieved a particularly high degree of spiritual maturity. Considerations of race, moreover, could enter the Theosophical milieu in other guises. Rudolf Steiner, for instance, often claimed that white Europeans had achieved a higher level of spiritual perfection than the African, Asian, or Jewish races. Sometimes, he even went so far as to claim that in the grand cycle of spiritual evolution, the Germanic race had advanced the furthest. At other times and with comparable frequency, however, Steiner reiterated the core spiritual unity of all the world's peoples.

In a private letter that Hubbe-Schleiden wrote in 1902, he dismissed an aspiring Theosophical leader as nothing more than a "Berlin Jew." However, it is important to remember that this was a relatively typical statement for the times, and one that Hubbe-Schleiden did not voice in public gatherings. So although concepts of race and certain forms of prejudice were undeniably to be found in the mainstream German Theosophical movement, in no way, were overt racism or anti-Semitism enshrined at the movement's ideological core.

Ariosophists, however, the most important exemplars of Theosophical occultism in the voelkisch mode, rested on the thinking and writing of the Austrian Guido von List, who had made a name for himself in the 1870’s as a writer of fantasy novels about a glorious Teutonic past, and read key Theosophical works.

Relying in part on a series of clairvoyant visions received at the supposed ruins of ancient Teutonic battles, he began to imagine an ancient religion called Wotanism. By 1908, his fantasies extended backwards to a Teutonic past in which an Aryan priesthood presided over a racially homogeneous society, and forwards to an ideal future in which Germans would live once more in a state of total race purity. Through publications and the founding of the Guido von List Society in 1908, he drew a following among voelkisch groups all over German-speaking Europe. The writings of his followers may have introduced Adolf Hitler to new varieties of political racism.

Links between the Ariosophical milieu and early National Socialism bring up the question of just what Ariosophy and Theosophy did and did not share, beginning at the most superficial level with the movements' names. Coined in 1915 by Joerg Lanz von Liebenfels, one of List's most important followers, Ariosophy played on the term Theosophy.

In the preface to the Handbuch der Ariosophy (Handbook of Ariosophy, 1931-32), for instance, the publisher Herbert Reichstein noted Ariosophists' support for such occult practices as mind reading, clairvoyant vision, and prophecy. These "Kabbalograms," he claimed, would help customers answer such weighty questions as whom to marry or whether and when to have a child. Ariosophy and Theosophy were also united in invoking the occult knowledge of spiritual masters. According to Ariosophical lore, occult knowledge belonged exclusively to an elite priesthood, a clear echo of the Theosophical concept of a Great White Brotherhood. But behind these similarities lay an important difference based in Ariosophists' rejection of the Theosophical interpretation of occult knowledge. Whereas mainstream Theosophists believed that the main purpose of the Great White Brotherhood was to share its occult knowledge with humanity in spite of giving each ‘race its place; without limits to race, religion, or sex, for Ariosophists, occult knowledge was a tool for erecting a racially pure social order.

Theosophists and Ariosophists however, on occasion sought out the same spiritual gurus. Ariosophist Seiling (calling himself a Kathar), patronized the mystic Alois Mailander, whose other disciples included Franz Hartmann and Wilhelm Hubbe­Schleiden, neither of whom belonged to the Ariosophical milieu. So Theosophists and Ariosophists moved indeed in the same social circles without bothering too much about their movements' ideological differences. Or when List's Die Bilderschrift der Ario-Germanen (The picture-writing of the Ario-Germans) appeared in 1910, Franz Hartmann praised it in his Theosophical periodical.

Yet significant is the fact that voelkisch groups that did make use of Theosophical concepts did not absorb the Theosophical cult of the self or or a practical sense for universal brotherhood to any great degree. Rather, they appropriated Theosophy's invocation of an idealized past and cosmic scheme of racial evolution in order to underpin their developing interest in imagining a new social order based on nationalist grounds.

And provides an example of how far nineteenth-century ideologies and institutions like Theosophy could migrate in the twentieth century. A fruitful comparison here might be made with eugenics. Given the broad popularity of eugenic thought in early-twentieth-century, it is not to remarkable for it to also become absorbed by Theosophical circles to some degree. Rudolf Steiner frequently spoke of ‘Eugenic’ Occultism as a future development and around the same time

The Nazi-Occult myth however started late 1930’s in France, and although best known is the early 1960’s “Morning of the Magicians” by Pauwels and Bergier, there were others before. In fact were the 1970’s Occult New Age like Ravenscroft “The Spear of Destiny” indeed largely used the ideas first presented by Pauwels and Bergier (re-told to Ravenscroft in part by various mediums he consulted while writing his book), there was another book that had in fact was used at one point by even a serious historian like Trevor -Roper.

Der Spiegel of 7 September 1985 (article can be read on the Spiegel website), however concluded that Rauschning’s “Conversations with Hitler”: are a falsification, an historical distortion from the first to the last page. And Der Spiegel revealed that Rauschning contrary to the claims in “Conversations with Hitler” did not have even a single a private meeting with Hitler. A more in depth (and balanced) study is presented in http://www.fibre-verlag.de/einzeltitel/hermann_rauschning.html

And in the latter book one reads that in Herman Rauschning allowed two French reporters to re-write his anti-Nazi tract published in Switzerland 1938 “Die Revolution des Nihilismus”, and ad whatever it needed to be widely read. But where Rauschning’s earlier work did not mention anything mystical less so ‘occult’ about Hitler, the French book suddenly contained the often quoted private scene where Hitler is described as if he where some kind of a ‘medium’ (for ‘occult’ forces is the suggestion). This was of course in line with the 19th century artistic literary creation of a ‘Satanic seducer’ of people. In fact there might have been a deeper irony why the French reporters decided to bend it this way, some of Hitler’s compatriots had in fact done the same by turning average Jewish citizens into part of an ‘occult Masonic plot’ to ‘control the world’.

 

 

For updates click homepage here

April 18, 2004