The theosophical roots of Nazism / Sri Aurobindo on theosophy

Many start with it [theosophy] but have to leave it if they want to get to real spiritual life and knowledge — Sri Aurobindo

I just read The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology by British historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2004). Continually in print since its first publication in 1985, the book has been translated into twelve languages. This is from the author’s preface to the 2004 edition:

As we witness the renewed growth of the far right across Europe, America and the former East Bloc, The Occult Roots of Nazism helps illuminate its ideological foundations. By examining the occult ideas that played midwife to the Hitler movement, the most destructive rightwing ideology in history, we can better understand their implications today.

When the book first appeared, popular literature on the link between Hitler, Nazi ideology, occultism and Tibetan mysteries had proliferated since the 1960s and Nazi "black magic" was regarded as a topic for sensational authors in pursuit of strong sales. The very existence of this sort of literature tended to inhibit serious historical enquiry into the religious and occult aspects of German National Socialism. [p. vi]

The Occult Roots of Nazism aims the set the record straight.

There are, at a minimum, three kinds of accounts of the origins of Nazism. First come the historians trained in the evaluation of concrete events, causes, and rational purposes. To them, politics and historical change are driven chiefly by concrete material interests. Then there is the realm of speculative history just touched on by Goodrick-Clarke — “built on slender evidence and tenuous associations” and “typically sensational and under-researched” — which suggests that National Socialism was linked with occultism. In his own words:

According to this mythology Nazism cannot have been the mere product of socio-economic 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. [p. 218]

And then there is the author’s account, whose

proper subject is not the parties, policies and organizations through which men rationally express their interests in a social and political context. Rather, it is an underground history, concerned with the myths, symbols and fantasies that bear on the development of reactionary, authoritarian, and Nazi styles of thinking. [p. 1]

Its principal characters are “mystics” and “seers” who “had little to do with the outer realities of politics and administration” but “had the imagination and opportunity to describe a dream-world that often underlay the sentiments and actions of more worldly men in positions of power and responsibility.” It was their “abstruse ideas and weird cults” that “anticipated the political doctrines and institutions of the Third Reich.”

All this makes it seem rather disingenuous to pretend that the book is about the occult roots of Nazism. To Goodrick-Clarke, the word “occult” does not refer to what is genuinely occult, nor do such terms as “mystic” and “seer” refer to the genuine article.

Now, it is certainly true that fantasies are “an important symptom of impending cultural changes and political action,” and that they “can achieve a causal status once they have been institutionalized in beliefs, values, and social groups.” The particular fantasies discussed by Goodrick-Clarke “were generated within an extreme right-wing movement concerned with the creation of a superman elite, the extermination of lesser beings, and the establishment of a new world-order,” and under the Nazi regime they did achieve the most devastating causal status.

But — and that’s a point I want to stress — there is no reason, apart from rationalist hubris, why the three historical accounts cannot each contain some modicum of truth, and why the true truth cannot be closer to a web of material, economic, sociopolitical, notional, imaginative, and genuinely occult factors. Just as the concrete factors of the historian of the first kind can be affected by ideas, beliefs, and imaginations — that’s the very point of this book — so such causally efficacious ideas, beliefs, and imaginations can have the backing of bona fide occult factors.

Much of The Occult Roots of Nazism is devoted to the influence of the Theosophy of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky on Hitler and his Nazi henchmen. (A combined count of “theosophy” and “theosophical” yields 166 occurrences in the book.) Goodrick-Clarke traces this influence by presenting an historical account of the lives, doctrines and cult activities of the “Ariosophists” Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels and their followers in Austria and Germany:

The Ariosophists, initially active in Vienna before the First World War, combined German völkisch nationalism and racism with occult notions borrowed from the theosophy of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, in order to prophesy and vindicate a coming era of German world rule. Their writings described a prehistoric golden age, when wise gnostic priesthoods had expounded occult-racist doctrines and ruled over a superior and racially pure society. They claimed that an evil conspiracy of anti-German interests (variously identified as the non-Aryan races, the Jews, or even the early Church) had sought to ruin this ideal Germanic world by emancipating the non-German inferiors in the name of a spurious egalitarianism. The resulting racial confusion was said to have heralded the historical world with its wars, economic hardship, political uncertainty and the frustration of German world power. [p. 2]

According to Goodrick-Clarke, the direct link between the fantasies of the Ariosophists and Adolf Hitler is to be found in the Ostara, a German nationalist magazine that was founded in 1905 by Lanz von Liebenfels in Vienna. Hitler lived in Vienna from 1907 to 1913. Later, in Mein Kampf, he wrote that his experiences at Vienna had laid the granite foundation of his outlook, and that he had studied racist pamphlets at this time. Goodrick-Clarke has collected substantial evidence of Hitler’s familiarity with the Ostara and the influence it had on him. For example, on 11 May 1951 Lanz told Wilfried Daim, a psychologist with a particular interest in sectarian beliefs and political ideologies, that Hitler had visited him at the Ostara office during 1909.

Lanz recalled that Hitler mentioned his living in the Felberstrasse, where he had been able to obtain the Ostara at a nearby tobacco-kiosk. He said that he was interested in the racial theories of Lanz and wished to buy some back numbers in order to complete his collection. Lanz noticed that Hitler looked very poor and gave him the requested back numbers free, as well as two crowns for his return fare to the city centre.

Lanz’s statement was confirmed by several pieces of independent evidence. According to police records, Hitler was indeed resident from 18 November 1908 to 20 August 1909 at Felberstrasse 22/16, a dreary street on the north side of the Westbahnhof.... Daim also discovered from the Austrian Tobacco Authority that a kiosk had been leased at this time on the ground floor of Felberstrasse 18. Lanz is not likely to have known these details unless told [of] them by Hitler himself. The mention of Hitler’s poverty also rings true, for Hitler’s funds began to run very low in the course of 1909; the autumn and winter witnessed the most wretched period of his life when he was forced into short-stay warming-houses and doss-houses for heat and shelter at night. Finally, it must be remembered that Lanz would have been unlikely to fabricate an association with Hitler and Nazi ideology in 1951: Vienna was under Allied occupation and political investigations were still in progress. [p. 195]

Hitler, however, never mentioned the name of Lanz in any recorded conversation, speech, or document, and he never acknowledged his ideological debt to the Ostara. To Goodrick-Clarke, this does not come as a surprise: “given his rapid political advance in Germany during the 1920s, and his titanic stature in the 1930s, it is not likely that he would point to the scurrilous pamphlets of an abstruse mystic in Vienna as his original inspiration.”

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What follows are excerpts from Sri Aurobindo’s written statements on theosophy.¹ They are from his Essays Divine and Human (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department, 1997) and dated circa 1910–12. In their Note on the Texts, the editors of this volume wrote:

However much he [Sri Aurobindo] disagreed with some of the methods or doctrines of the Theosophical Society, he was well aware of the pioneering work done by this movement, which “with its comprehensive combinations of old and new beliefs and its appeal to ancient spiritual and psychic systems, has everywhere exercised an influence far beyond the circle of its professed adherents” (The Renaissance in India, p. 70). He assured a disciple who had been associated with the Theosophists: “I have nothing against it [the Theosophical Society] nor against any of the Theosophists, to all of whom I wish the best. I am not against them” (Talk with a disciple, 11 January 1926).

“From one point of view I cannot find praise warm enough to do justice to the work of Theosophy; from another I cannot find condemnation strong enough to denounce it. It has forced on the notice of an unwilling world truths to which orthodoxy is blind and of which heterodoxy is afraid or incredulous. It has shown a colossal courage in facing ridicule, trampling on prejudice and slander, persisting in faith in spite of disillusionment, scandal and a continual shifting of knowledge. They have kept the flag of a past & future science flying against enormous difficulties. On the other hand by bringing to the investigation of that science — not its discovery, for to the Hindu Yogin it is known already — the traditional European methods, the methods of the market-place and the forum, it has brought on the truths themselves much doubt and discredit, and by importing into them the forms, jugglery and jargon of European mystics, their romanticism, their unbridled imagination, their galloping impatience, their haste, bragging and loudness, their susceptibility to dupery, trickery, obstinate error and greedy self-deception, Theosophists have strengthened doubt and discredit and driven many an earnest seeker to bewilderment, to angry suspicion or to final renunciation of the search for truth. They have scattered the path of the conscientious investigators, the severe scientists of Yoga who must appear in the future, with the thorns and sharp flints of a well-justified incredulity and suspicion.

“I admit the truths that Theosophy seeks to unveil; but I do not think they can be reached if we fall into bondage even to the most inspiring table talk of Mahatmas or to the confused anathemas and vaticinations hurled from their platform tripods by modern Pythonesses of the type of Mrs Annie Besant, that great, capacious but bewildered and darkened intellect, now stumbling with a loud and confident blindness through those worlds of twilight and glamour, of distorted inspirations, perverted communications and misunderstood or half-understood perceptions which are so painfully familiar to the student and seeker.” [p. 61]

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“Unfortunately, as always happens to a great effort in unfit hands, it [the Theosophical Society] stumbled at the outset & went into strange bypaths. It fell into the mediaeval snare of Gnostic mysticism, Masonic secrecy & Rosicrucian jargon. The little science it attempted has been rightly stigmatised as pseudo-science. A vain attempt to thrust in modern physical science into the explanation of psychical movements,.... to accept uncritically every experience & every random idea about an experience as it occurred to the mind & set it up as a revealed truth & almost a semi-divine communication, to make a hopeless amalgam & jumble of science, religion & philosophy all expressed in the terms of the imagination — this has been the scientific method of Theosophy. The result is that it lays its hands on truth & muddles it so badly that it comes out to the world as an untruth.” [p. 66]

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“There can be nothing more contemptibly ignorant than the vulgar prejudice which ridicules Theosophy because it concerns itself with marvels. From that point of view the whole world is a marvel; every operation of thought, speech or action is a miracle, a thing wonderful, obscure, occult and unknown. Even the sneer on the lips of the derider of occultism has to pass through a number of ill-understood processes before it can manifest itself on his face, yet the thing itself is the work of a second. That sneer is a much greater and more occult miracle than the precipitation of letters or the reading of the Akashic records. If Science is true, what more absurd, paradoxical and Rabelaisian miracle can there be than this, that a republic of small animalcules forming a mass of grey matter planned Austerlitz, wrote Hamlet or formulated the Vedanta philosophy? If I believed that strange dogma, I should no longer hold myself entitled to disbelieve anything. Materialism seems to me the most daring of occultisms, the most reckless and presumptuous exploiter of the principle, Credo quia impossibile, I believe it because it is impossible. If these minute cells can invent wireless telegraphy, why should it be impossible for them to precipitate letters or divine the past and the future? Until one can say of investigation “It is finished” and of knowledge “There is nothing beyond”, no one has a right to set down men as charlatans because they profess to be the pioneers of a new kind of Science....

“[I]f men claim to be the pioneers of a new kind of Science, they must substantiate their claims. And if foreigners come to the people of India and demand to be accepted as instructors in our own special department of knowledge, they must prove that they have a prodigious superiority. Has the claim been substantiated? Has the superiority been proved?

“What Indians see is a body which is professedly and hospitably open to all enquiry at the base but entrenches itself in a Papal or mystic infallibility at the top. To be admitted into the society it is enough to believe in the freest investigation and the brotherhood of mankind, but everyone who is admitted must feel, if he is honest with himself, that he is joining a body which stands for certain well-known dogmas, a definite and very elaborate cosmogony and philosophy and a peculiar organisation, the spirit, if not the open practice in which seems to be theocratic rather than liberal. One feels that the liberality of the outer rings is only a wisely politic device for attracting a wider circle of sympathisers from whom numerous converts to the inner can be recruited. It is the dogmas, the cosmogony, the philosophy, the theocratic organisation which the world understands by Theosophy and which one strengthens by adhesion to the society; free inquiry and the brotherhood of man benefit to a very slight degree.

“One sees also a steady avoidance of the demand for substantiation, a withdrawal into mystic secrecy, a continual reference to the infallible knowledge of the male & female Popes of Theosophy or, when that seems to need bolstering, to the divine authority of invisible and inaccessible Mahatmas. We in India admit the Guru and accept the Avatar. But still the Guru is only a vessel of the infinite Knowledge, the Avatar is only a particular manifestation of the Divine Personality. It is shocking to our spiritual notions to find cosmic Demiurges of a vague semi-divine character put between us and the All-Powerful and All-Loving and Kutthumi and Maurya taking the place of God.

“One sees, finally, a new Theocracy claiming the place of the old, and that Theocracy is dominantly European. Indians figure numerously as prominent subordinates, just as in the British system of government Indians are indispensable and sometimes valued assistants. Or they obtain eminence on the side of pure spirituality and knowledge, just as Indians could rise to the highest places in the judicial service or in advisory posts, but not in the executive administration. But if the smaller hierophants are sometimes and rarely Indians, the theocrats and the bulk of the prophets are Russian, American or English. An Indian here and there may quicken the illumination of the Theosophist, but it is Madame Blavatsky or Mrs Besant, Sinnett or Leadbeater who lays down the commandments and the Law. It is strange to see the present political condition of India reproducing itself in a spiritual organisation; it illustrates perhaps the subtle interconnection and interdependence of all individual and communal activities in the human being. But the political subordination finds its justification in the physical fact of the British rule. It is argued plausibly, and perhaps correctly, that without this subordination British supremacy could have no sure foundation. But where is the justification for the foreign spiritual control?

“The argument of native incapacity may be alleged. But I do not find this hypothesis of superiority supported by the facts. I do not see that Mrs Besant has a more powerful and perfect intellectuality, eloquence, personality or religious force than had Swami Vivekananda or that a single Theosophist has yet showed him or herself to be as mighty and pure a spirit as the Paramhansa Ramakrishna. There are Indian Yogins who have a finer and more accurate psychical knowledge than the best that can be found in the books of the Theosophists. Some even of the less advanced have given me proofs of far better-developed occult powers than any Theosophist I have yet known. The only member of the Theosophical Society who could give me any spiritual help I could not better by my unaided faculties, was one excluded from the esoteric section because his rare and potent experiences were unintelligible to the Theosophic guides; nor were his knowledge and powers gained by Theosophic methods but by following the path of our Yoga and the impulse of an Indian guru, one who meddled not in organisations and election cabals but lived like a madman, unmattavat.²

“We must more and more begin to feel that to believe a thing because somebody has heard from somebody else that Mrs Besant heard it from a Mahatma, is a little unsafe and indefinite. Even if the assurance is given direct, we shall learn to ask for the proofs. Even if Kutthumi himself comes and tells me, I shall certainly respect his statement, but also I shall judge it and seek its verification. The greatest Mahatma is only a servant of the Most High and I must see his chapras³ before I admit his plenary authority....

“It is not that Theosophy is false; it is that Theosophists are weak and human. I am glad to believe that there is much truth in Theosophy. There are also considerable errors. Many of the things they say which seem strange and incredible to those who decline the experiment, agree with the general experience of Yogins; there are other statements which our experience appears to contradict or to which it gives a different interpretation. Mahatmas exist, but they are not omnipotent or infallible. Rebirth is a fact and the memory of our past lives is possible; but the rigid rules of time and of Karmic reaction laid down dogmatically by the Theosophist hierophants are certainly erroneous. Especially is the hotchpotch of Hindu and Buddhist mythology and Theosophic prediction served up to us by Mrs Besant confusing and misleading. At any rate it does not agree with the insight of much greater Yogins than herself. Like most Theosophists she seems to ignore the numerous sources and possibilities of error which assail the Yogin before his intellect is perfectly purified and he has his perfection in the higher and superintellectual faculties of the mind. Until then the best have to remember that the mind even of the fairly advanced is not yet divine and that it is the nature of the old unchastened human element to leap at misunderstandings, follow the lure of predilections and take premature conclusions for established truths. We must accept the Theosophists as enquirers; as hierophants and theocrats I think we must reject them.

“If Theosophy is to survive, it must first change itself. It must learn that mental rectitude to which it is now a stranger and improve its moral basis. It must become clear, straightforward, rigidly self-searching, sceptical in the nobler sense of the word. It must keep the Mahatmas in the background and put God and Truth in the front. Its Popes must dethrone themselves and enthrone the intellectual conscience of mankind. If they wish to be mystic and secret like our Yogins, then they must like our Yogins assert only to the initiate and the trained; but if they come out into the world to proclaim their mystic truths aloud and seek power, credit and influence on the strength of their assertions, then they must prove.” [pp.67–71]

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“There is ... this difference between my criticisms and much that I have seen written in dispraise of the movement, that I censure not as an enemy but as an impartial critic, not as a hostile and incredulous outsider but as an earnest and careful inquirer and practical experimentalist in those fields which Theosophy seeks to make her own. Theosophy was not born with Madame Blavatsky, nor invented by the Mahatmas in the latter end of the nineteenth century. It is an ancient and venerable branch of knowledge, which unfortunately has never, in historical times, been brought out into the open and subjected to clear, firm and luminous tests. The imaginations of the cultured and the superstitions of the vulgar played havoc with its truths and vitiated its practice. It degenerated into the extravagances of the Gnostics & Rosicrucians and the charlatanism of magic and sorcery. The Theosophical Society was the first body of inquirers which started with the set & clear profession of bringing out this great mass of ancient truth into public notice and establishing it in public belief. The profession has not been sustained in practice....

“I do not deny that the Theosophical Society increases in its numbers, but it increases as a mystic sect and not in the strength of its true calling. I do not deny that it has done valuable service in appealing to the imaginations of men both in India & Europe; but it has appealed to their imaginations & has not convinced their reason....

“Mrs Besant would have us believe that Theosophy is Brahmavidya. The Greek Theosophia and the Sanscrit Brahmavidya, she tells us in all good faith, are identical words and identical things. Even with Mrs Besant's authority, I cannot accept this extraordinary identification. It can only have arisen either from her ignorance of Sanscrit or from that pervading confusion of thought and inability to perceive clear and trenchant distinctions which is the bane of Theosophical inquiry & Theosophical pronouncements. Vidya may be represented, though not perfectly represented by sophia; but Brahman is not Theos and cannot be Theos.... We all know what Brahmavidya is,— the knowledge of the One both in Itself and in its ultimate and fundamental relations to the world which appears in It whether as illusion or as manifestation, whether as Maya or as Lila. Does Theosophy answer to this description? Everyone knows that it does not and cannot. The modern Theosophist tells us much about Mahatmas, Kamaloka, Devachan, people on Mars, people on the Moon, astral bodies, precipitated letters, Akashic records and a deal of other matters, of high value if true and of great interest whether true or not. But what on earth, I should like to know, has all this to do with Brahmavidya? One might just as well describe botany, zoology & entomology or for that matter, music or painting or the binomial theory or quadratic equations as Brahmavidya. In a sense they are so since everything is Brahman,— sarvam khalvidam Brahma. But language has its distinctions on which clear thinking depends, & we must insist on their being observed. All this matter of Theosophy is not Brahmavidya, but Devavidya. Devavidya is the true equivalent, so far as there can be an equivalent, of Theosophy.

“I am aware that Theosophy speaks of the Logos or of several Logoi and the government of the world — not so much by any Logos as by the Mahatmas. Still, I say, that all this does not constitute Theosophy into Brahmavidya, but leaves it what it was, Devavidya. It is still not the knowledge of the One, not the knowledge that leads to salvation, but the knowledge of the Many,— of our bondage & not of our freedom, Avidya & not Vidya. I do not decry it for that reason, but it is necessary that it should be put in its right place and not blot out for us the diviner knowledge of our forefathers. Theosophy is or should be a wider & profounder Science, a knowledge that deals with other levels & movements of consciousness, planes if you like so to call them, phenomena depending on the activity of consciousness on those levels, worlds & beings formed by the activity of consciousness on those levels,— for what is a world but the synthesis in Space & Time of a particular level of consciousness,— forming a field of consciousness with which material Science, the Science of this immediately visible world, cannot yet deal, and for the most part, not believing in it as fact, refuses to deal. Theosophy is, therefore, properly speaking, a high scientific enquiry. It is not or ought not to be a system of metaphysics or a new religion. [pp. 72–74]

1. The subtitle of this post is from a letter dated 4 November 1933. It has been reproduced in Letters on Yoga II, p. 511, and in Letters on Himself and the Ashram, p. 318.

2. This member of the Theosophical Society was Vishnu Bhaskar Lele, whom Sri Aurobindo met in 1908, and of whom he wrote in a reply (published in the Sunday Times of Madras on 24 June 1945) to a letter written by one K. Ghose to the editor of the Hindusthan Standard (published earlier in that newspaper):

the only help he received was from the Maharashtrian Yogi, Vishnu Bhaskar Lele, who instructed him how to reach complete silence of the mind and immobility of the whole consciousness. This Sri Aurobindo was able to achieve in three days with the result of lasting and massive spiritual realisations opening to him the larger ways of Yoga. Lele finally told him to put himself entirely into the hands of the Divine within and move only as he was moved and then he would need no instructions either from Lele himself or anyone else.

Sri Aurobindo’s reply was prefaced by a note stating that the information was provided by his secretary, Nolini Kanta Gupta.

3. Hindi, a badge (of authority).