11. The SChool of Wisdom

East and West

Hitler’s mentor Dietrich Eckart introduced him to Thule Society members, including Dr. Gottfried Grandel, nationalist publisher Julius Lehmann, General Erich Ludendorff, as well as piano company executive Edwin Bechstein and his wife Helena, society matron Elsa Bruckmann, Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried and his English-born wife Winifred Wagner, who saw Hitler as “destined to be the savior of Germany.”[1] In 1923, Edwin, Helene and Eckart took Hitler to visit Siegfried Wagner and introduced them. Winifred, along with Helena and Elsa Bruckmann (1865 – 1946), the wife of Thule Society member Hugo Bruckmann (1863 – 1941), helped to teach Hitler table manners and helped reform his public image.[2] Elsa held the “Salon Bruckmann” and made it her mission to introduce Hitler to leading industrialists. Attendees at their salon included Rainer Maria Rilke, Heinrich Wölfflin, Rudolf Kassner, Hermann Keyserling, Karl Wolfskehl, Harry Graf Kessler, Georg Simmel, Hjalmar Schacht and her nephew Norbert von Hellingrath.[3] In 1922 and 1923, Hitler was known to have attended there some of lectures of Alfred Schuler, who founded the Cosmic Circle with Ludwig Klages and Wolfskehl, who established a Munich chapter of the Zionist movement with Herzl in 1897.[4]

After his break with Freud, Carl Jung became more active in Germany attending conferences at the School of Wisdom founded by Count Hermann Keyserling (1880 – 1946), who was married to Countess Maria Goedela Bismarck, granddaughter of Otto Bismarck. In 1902, Keyserling had received his doctorate at Vienna, where, under the influence of the racist theorist and Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, he turned to philosophy.[5] Keyserling was also an influential theorist of the idea of Europe, combining critiques of contemporary Europe with the prophecy of a future supranational European state.[6] Keysering was the first to coin the term Führerprinzip, later adopted by the Nazis, who believed in placed the will of the Führer word above all written law.[7] Keyserling promoted a type of aristocratic rule inspired by Plato’s Republic, where, on the basis of Social Darwinism, certain “gifted individuals” were “born to rule.”[8]

In 1920, through a donation from Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse (1868 – 1937), Keyserling founded his School of Wisdom in Darmstadt, Germany, in order to synthesize the knowledge of East and West.[9] Keyserling invited many of his friends to participate in this new venture, including Carl Jung, psychologist, sinologist and translator of the I Ching, Richard Wilhelm, theologian Paul Tillich, German novelist and Noble prize winner, Hermann Hesse, and Rabindranath Tagore, a member of the Forte Kreis and leader of the Brahmo Samaj.[10] Also included were Gustav Richard Heyer, Thomas Mann, Alfred Adler, Paul Dahlke, Leo Frobenius, Leopold Ziegler, Max Scheler, Ernst Troeltsch, and, from the Stefan George circle, Rudolf Kassner and Oskar A.H. Schmitz.[11] Among the most important influences on Keyserling’s work was the Academy at Santiniketan, today known as Visva-Bharati University, founded in 1921 by Rabindranath Tagore on the location of his father’s Ashram.[12] Keyserling first met Tagore during the Indian part of his world tour in 1912, when he stayed with Tagore in Calcutta, then again in London in 1913, and after the foundation of the School of Wisdom in 1920, he invited Tagore on a lecture tour of Germany.[13] Keyserling wrote: “Rabindranath, the poet, impressed me like a guest from a higher, more spiritual world. Never perhaps have I seen so much spiritualized substance of soul condensed into one man.”[14]

While in India, Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877 −  1947), who was one of the founders of the Traditionalist School, following René Guénon, was part of the literary circle around Tagore. Coomaraswamy was also a friend Aleister Crowley, who introduced himself to him, according to Crowley, “knowing my reputation on Asiatic religions and Magick.”[15] In early 1909, Coomaraswamy and a band of eminent English writers and artists from diverse fields established the Royal India Society, led by Jewish-English artist William Rothenstein (1872 – 1945), friend and admirer of Tagore, and his friend and copyist Lady Christiana Herringham.[16] The earliest members were T.W. Rolleston, Alice L. Cleather, Walter Crane, E.B. Havell, Paira Mall and T.W. Arnold, a trustee of the Woking Mosque Endowment Fund.[17] Alice L. Cleather, a pupil of Blavatsky and a member of her Inner Group.[18] T.W. Rolleston (1857 – 1920) corresponded with the American poet Walt Whitman and Yeats described him in his memoirs as an “intimate enemy.”[19] E.B. Havell (1861 – 1934) was the principal of the Government School of Art, Calcutta from 1896 to 1905, where, along with Tagore he developed a style of art and art education based on Indian rather than Western models, which led to the foundation of the Bengal school of art.[20] Rothenstein  was a close friend of Walter Sickert (1860 – 1942), who several authors and researchers suspect of having been Jack the Ripper. Sickert believed he had lodged in a room used by the murderer, which he painted in 1905–1907 and titled it Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom.

Although Martin Buber and Tagore met only three times, they showed the utmost respect for each other’s philosophical and political views, including perceptions of Zionism. In 1921, Buber saw Tagore for the first time when he attended one of Tagore’s public lectures in Darmstadt, Germany. Buber wrote to his friend, Louise Dumont, about his meeting with Tagore, whom he found to be a “lovable, innocent, venerable” individual “with a touchingly beautiful faith…”[21] While Tagore had expressed his profound appreciation of the Jewish people, and shared with Buber his sympathy for the Zionist settlement in Palestine, he expressed serious doubts about its alignment with Western powers. Buber met with Tagore again in Düsseldorf in 1926 and Buber agreed with Tagore about the potential danger that Jewish people faced if they were to embrace a “narrow-hearted nationalism” of the Western nations under Zionism. Buber clarified his position by stating that the threat of danger must be confronted on two fronts: “internally, to fill Zionism … with that inherited treasure, reverence for the spirit and universalism, and thus to install the antidote within it.”[22] Buber proposed that Zionism needed to form a spiritual alliance with the East on the external front. While Tagore agreed with Buber, he nevertheless expressed his hope that the Jewish people would sever their ties with the West rejecting their “machines and canons” and opposing it with the “genuine meditation of the East, demonstrating to the Occident the emptiness and meaninglessness of its freneticism and teaching it, together with the Orient, to immerse itself in the vision of the eternal truth.”[23]

Tagore became renowned throughout much of Europe, North America, and East Asia. In 1927, he and two companions began a four-month tour of Southeast Asia. They visited Bali, Java, Kuala Lumpur, Malacca, Penang, Siam, and Singapore. In early 1930, he left Bengal for a nearly year-long tour of Europe and the United States. Upon returning to Britain he lodged at a Birmingham Quaker settlement. He wrote his Oxford Hibbert Lectures and spoke at the annual London Quaker meet. Tagore also met with the Aga Khan III, with whom he had previously shared a voyage from Bombay to Europe, during which they had long talks, where the Aga Khan read to him from Hafez and discussed Sufism.[24] Tagore toured Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany from June to mid-September 1930, then went on into the Soviet Union. In April 1932, intrigued by the Persian mystic Hafez, Tagore was hosted by the Shah of Iran.[25] In his other travels, Tagore interacted with Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, Thomas Mann, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and the French historian Romain Rolland (1866 – 1944)—who was involved in the Forte Kreis—and who was also an admirer of Tagore and Gandhi.[26] After 1889, Rolland spent two years in Rome, where his encounter with Malwida von Meysenbug—a friend of Nietzsche and Wagner—and his discovery of Italian masterpieces were decisive for the development of his thought.[27] Rolland was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915. In 1921, his close friend Stefan Zweig—who was also a close friend of Herzl, Arthur Schnitzler and Freud—published his biography.[28]

 

Dartington Hall

Tagore stayed at Dartington Hall, which was mostly derelict by the time it was bought in 1925 by the British-American millionaire couple Leonard Elmhirst and his wife Dorothy, through the influence of Tagore.[29] Railway heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney (1887 –1968) was a member of the prominent Whitney family. Dorothy’s first marriage was to Willard Dickerman Straight (1880 – 1918), an American diplomat who has had a career in the Far East.[30] While working as American Consul-General While in China, Straight and Mary Harriman were reportedly romantically involved, but their marriage was prevented by her father E.H. Harriman.[31]

Dorothy was known for building the Willard Straight Hall at Cornell University, and founding The New Republic, and the New School for Social Research in New York City.[32] Founded in 1919, the New School was an important “front” organization created by the American Fabian Socialists.[33] In 1920, a New York State Legislative Committee found that the New School was “established by men who belong to the ranks of the near-Bolshevik Intelligentsia, some of them being too radical in their views to remain on the faculty of Columbia University.”[34] British Fabians such as Sir William Beveridge, J.M. Keynes, Graham Wallas, Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell, J.B.S. Haldane and Harold Laski lectured at the New School for Social Research. The American counterparts of the British Fabians included such personages as: John Dewey, Clarence Darrow, Roger Baldwin, Felix Frankfurter, Franz Boas, Wesley C. Mitchell, Harry A. Overstreet, Max Ascoli and Walter Lippmann. Soviet partisans such as: Moissaye Olgin (later exposed as a top Soviet agent) also participated in the New School activities.[35]

The New School for Social Research would become closely associated with the Frankfurt School, founded in 1923 by a predominantly Jewish group of philosophers and Marxist theorists as the Institut für Sozialforschung, “Institute for Social Research,” at the University of Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School’s most well-known proponents included Max Horkheimer (1895 – 1973), Erich Fromm (1900 – 1980), media theorist Theodor Adorno (1903 – 1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898 – 1979), Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940) and Jurgen Habermas (b. 1929). Following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, members of the Frankfurt School left Germany for Geneva before moving to New York in 1935, where they became affiliated with the New School. There, they became associated with the University in Exile, which the New School had founded in 1933, with financial contributions from the Rockefeller Foundation, to be a haven for scholars dismissed from teaching positions by the Italian fascists or Nazi Germany. Notable scholars associated with the University in Exile include Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. As Frankfurt School historian Martin Jay explains, “And so the International Institute for Social Research, as revolutionary and Marxist as it had appeared in Frankfurt in the twenties, came to settle in the center of the capitalist world, New York City.”[36]

Referring to its mix of conversations and experimentation around psychology, mysticism, and spirituality, which attracted British intellectuals like Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, George Bernard Shaw called Dartington a “salon in the countryside.”[37] As the estate’s activities expanded during the 1930s, Dorothy enlisted the help American psychologist William Sheldon (1898 – 1977), a student of Jung and Freud, to advise upon the well-being of children attending Dartington’s experimental school.[38] Sheldon created the field of somatotype and constitutional psychology that correlate body types with temperament, illustrated by his controversial Ivy League nude posture photos.[39] Huxley last novel Island relied on Sheldon’s somatotyping system to fashion a utopian society in Pala, blending elements from western science and eastern Mahayana Buddhism, and adopting a multiple-parents child-rearing strategy of mutual adoption clubs (MACs).[40] The gardens created by Dorothy at Darlington feature a sculpture of Henry Moore, a 2000-year old yew tree and a purported graveyard of the Knights Templar.[41]

“The Bahai Faith had a profound impact on the lives of a few at Dartington,” explains Anna Neima, as “Its unity-seeking and inclusiveness meant that it fitted well into the community at Dartington.”[42] The Bahai group at Dartington was led by the artist Mark Tobey (1890 – 1976). In 1918, Tobey met American Bahai Juliet Thompson—a friend and neighbor of Kahlil Gibran—who invited him to Green Acre Bahai School in Eliot, Maine,  where he converted.[43] In 1930, Tobey exhibited at MoMA, and the following year a resident artist of the Elmhurst Progressive School while teaching at Dartington Hall. Tobey, who was so devoted to faith that he was “nearly like a priest,” gathered a number of followers into his group, sharing his ideas and literature with them.[44] Among them was Bernard Leach (1887 – 1979) regarded as the “Father of British studio pottery,” who converted to the faith.[45] Dorothy, who was impressed by the Bahai idea of merging the individual self with the universal, kept a copy of a pamphlet on the faith tucked into one of her books of spiritual reflections.[46]

Dorothy was also fascinated by the East. She and Leonard developed a friendship with Basiswar “Boshi” Sen (1887 – 1971), founder of the Vivekananda Laboratory in Calcutta.[47] Sen was also associated with the Ramakrishna Order and was intimately associated with Swami Sadananda, also called Gupta Maharaj, a direct monastic disciple of Swami Vivekananda. He was a friend of many notable people, such as Indian Prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, Julian Huxley, and D.H. Lawrence. Sen’s interest in the psychology and spirituality led him to visit Carl Jung, Romain Rolland and Albert Einstein, and inspired his long friendship with Rabindranath Tagore.[48] Rolland was strongly influenced by the philosophy of Vedanta through the works of Vivekananda. In 1929, he wrote Life of Sri Ramakrishna (1929) and the Life of Vivekananda (1930). In a correspondence that began in 1923, Roland introduced Freud to the concept of the “oceanic feeling,” a feeling of “being one with the external world as a whole,” inspired by the trance experiences of Ramakrishna, among other mystics.[49] Freud opened his book Civilization and its Discontents (1929) with a debate on the nature of this feeling, which he mentioned had been noted to him by an anonymous “friend,” referring to Rolland, who would remain a major influence on Freud’s work, with their correspondence continuing until Freud’s death in 1939.[50]

 

Lucis Trust

Through her association with the School of Wisdom, Keyserling befriended Olga Froebe-Kapteyn, who in 1933 founded the famous Eranos Conferences, an intellectual discussion group dedicated to the study of psychology, religion, philosophy and spirituality which met annually in the Theosophical community in Ascona, near the site of Monte Verità.[51] In 1889, OTO founder and List Society member Franz Hartmann established, together with Alfredo Pioda and Countess Constance Wachtmeister, the close friend of Blavatsky, a theosophical monastery at Ascona. There, Hartmann published his periodical Lotusblüten (“Lotus Blossoms”), which was the first German publication to use the theosophical swastika on its cover. In 1900, Henri Oedenkoven and Ida Hofmann founded Monte Verità (The Mountain of Truth), a utopian commune near Ascona. In 1916, Theodor Reuss moved to Basel, Switzerland where he established an “Anational Grand Lodge and Mystic Temple” of the OTO and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light at Monte Verità.[52]

In the late 1920s, Froebe-Kapteyn was introduced to the theosophist Alice Ann Bailey (1880 – 1949). In 1920, a dispute arose over leadership of Annie Besant, whose position as president of the Theosophical Society had been undermined by the fallout over the “World Teacher” Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895 – 1986). Following channeled messages she began to receive in 1919, Bailey broke with the society. In 1923, she founded the Arcane School on the basis of her channelings from an “Ascended Master” whom she called Djwahl Khul, the “Tibetan.” The Arcane School emphasized the belief in a New Age, the “Age of Aquarius,” and an expected messiah, or Christ, who is identical with the Buddha Maitreya. After losing her struggle with Annie Besant for leadership of the Theosophical movement, together with her husband Foster Bailey (1888 – 1977), a 32º degree Mason, Alice launched Lucifer Publishing Company in 1923, which published the theosophical periodical Lucifer. Originally called the Tibetan Lodge, she changed its name once more in 1922 to the Lucis Trust. As the Arcane School, the Lucis Trust and The Beacon began to gain an international reputation, Bailey developed a friendship with Grand Duke Alexander of Russia, a mystical Freemason and Rosicrucian, who was the Grand Master of the Russian Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem (SOSJ).[53]

In her private notes on her meditation images, Froebe-Kapteyn speaks of her admiration for Germany. One of these images shows a swastika and is captioned “The Beginning of Creation.” According to Froebe-Kapteyn:

 

The Golden Swastika is a Sun symbol = a symbol of sun-energy and power. The black swastika or the lefthand swastika, as it is in Germany = a symbol of dark power = destruction. With both these symbols I was identified!!! Here lies the root, the deepest root of my identification with Germany!!! Both these black symbols of highest but destructive power mean possession by the Devil. Just as Germany is possessed by him, the dark aspect of the Self. Or by Kali the Destroyer.[54]

 

In 1928, following a “vision” she experienced in 1927, Froebe-Kapteyn built a lecture hall near her Casa Gabriella, called, Casa Eranos, to be “undenominational, non-sectarian, and open to esoteric thinkers and occult students of all groups in Europe and elsewhere.”[55] Fröbe’s was to provide the venue, and Alice Bailey would initiate the project, lecture and teach. On August 3, 1930, the summer school commenced. As Froebe-Kapteyn explained:

 

Our purpose is to create a meeting point where those of every group and faith may gather for discussion and synthetic work along spiritual lines… We are profoundly conscious that the source and the goal of humanity are one and the same for every unit, and that here lies the fundamental truth of Brotherhood.[56]

 

In addition to Alice, other lecturers included Bailey’s husband Foster Bailey, Grand Duke Alexander, Frederick Kettner, Shri Vishwanath Keskar, Roberto Assagioli and his associate Professor Vittorino Vezzani, who spoke on Yoga, Irish poet and Theosophist James Henry Cousins, and Scottish author and Spiritualist Violet Tweedale, who spoke about “The Cosmic Christ.”[57] Shri Vishwanath Keskar (1903 – 1984) was a member of the Indian National Congress. Frederick Kettner (1886 – 1957) founded the Spinoza Institute in 1928, and established its headquarters in 1929 at the Roerich Museum, upon the invitation of Nicholas Roerich.[58] Jewish psychologist Roberto Assagioli (1888 – 1974), who gave four lectures, including one titled “Rays, Planets and Astrological Signs,” had worked with Freud and Jung. After working as deputy director of the Theosophical journal Ultra, whose contributors included Julius Evola and the Tibetologist Giuseppe Tucci, he founded in 1926 his Institute for Psychosynthesis.[59] Bailey and Violet Tweedale (1862 – 1936), a close associate of Blavatsky and a member of the Golden Dawn, became  close friends.[60]

James Henry Cousins (1873 – 1956) produced several books of poetry while in Ireland as well as acting in the first production of Cathleen Ní Houlihan with the famous Irish revolutionary and beauty Maud Gonne in the title role. In 1891, Gonne joined the Golden Dawn, which included W.B. Yeats who was in love with her.[61] In 1888, Gonne had travelled to Russia, where she met Round Table founder W.T. Stead, who wrote of meeting in St Petersburg “one of the most beautiful women of the world.”[62] Cousins also wrote widely on the subject of Theosophy and in 1915 travelled to India with the voyage fees paid for by Annie Besant the President of the Theosophical Society.[63] In his The Future Poetry, Sri Aurobindo acclaimed Cousins’ New Ways in English Literature as “literary criticism which is of the first order, at once discerning and suggestive, criticism which forces us both to see and think.”[64] In India, Cousins became friendly with many key Indian personalities including Rabindranath Tagore, Indian Theosophist and classical dancer Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904 – 1986) and Gandhi. Rukmini was married to George Arundale (1878 – 1945), a Freemason, president of the Theosophical Society Adyar and a bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church. Initially, he was privately tutored by Charles Leadbeater. Ater their marriage, Rukmini traveled around the world, meeting fellow Theosophists and also forged a friendship with the educator Maria Montessori (1870 – 1952), best known for her philosophy of education, the Montessori method.[65] Montessori herself had been personally associated with the Theosophical Society since 1899.[66] In 1929, Montessori founded Association Montessori Internationale (AMI), whose sponsors included Freud, Jean Piaget, and Tagore.[67] Gandhi, who was very interested in the role her method could play in helping to build an independent India, met with Montessori in London in 1931.[68]

The second summer school session in 1931 comprised a similar line up of lecturers, with the addition, among others, of Bahai teacher Mizra Ahmad Sohrab, and director of the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, Gerald Reynolds.[69] Mizra Ahmad Sohrab (1890 – 1958), was a Persian-American author and Bahai who served as Abdul Baha’s secretary and interpreter from 1912 to 1919. Sohrab emigrated to the United States in 1919. In the 1920s, while living in Los Angeles, he helped write a screenplay for a movie dealing with Mary Magdalene, for the actress Valeska Surratt. In 1927, Cecil B. Demille released The King of Kings, which depicts the last weeks of Jesus before his crucifixion, and which Sohrab and Surratt claimed he had stolen from their screenplay. Through Surratt, Sohrab was introduced to Lewis Stuyvesant Chanler (1869 – 1942), whose mother was a member of the wealthy and influential Astor family. Chanler married Julia Lynch Olin, daughter of Stephen Henry Olin (1847 – 1925) the president of Wesleyan University. After Julia’s mother’s death in 1882, Olin married Emeline Harriman, the daughter of Oliver Harriman and sister of Anne Harriman Vanderbilt, Oliver Harriman, Jr., J. Borden Harriman, and Herbert M. Harriman. Together with Chanler and his wife, Sohrab formed the New History Society in 1929 as an indirect way of spreading the teachings of the Bahai Faith.[70] The New History Society was addressed by several prominent intellectuals, including Albert Einstein in 1930.[71] Another speaker was eugenicist Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in January 1932.[72]

Froebe-Kapteyn finally decided to donate her collection of mystical pictures to the Warburg Institute.[73] Paul and Max’s brother Abraham “Aby” Moritz Warburg (1866 – 1929) would found the Warburg Institute in London, which would come to house one of the largest collections of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley’s writings in the world—the “Gerald York Collection.” Based originally in Hamburg, Germany, in 1933 the Warburg Institute was moved to London, where it became incorporated into the University of London in 1944. It is devoted to academic investigations of the influence classical antiquity on Western civilization. Scholars associated with the Warburg Institute include Ernst Cassirer, Rudolf Wittkower, Otto Kurz, Henri Frankfort, Arnaldo Momigliano, Ernst Gombrich, Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, D.P. Walker, Michael Baxandall, Anthony Grafton, Elizabeth McGrath and Dame Frances Yates, the famed scholar of Rosicrucianism.

When Froebe-Kapteyn met Carl Jung at Keyserling’s School of Wisdom, he suggested the auditorium be used as a “meeting place between East and West.”[74] It was finally Jung who induced Froebe-Kapteyn to turn away from the group surrounding Bailey. When Jung saw her “Meditation Plates,” he told her that one could see that she “was dealing with the devil.”[75] Eranos soon attracted a number of renowned European academics including: philosopher and student of Jung, Erich Neumann; zoologist Adolf Portmann; psychologist, philosopher, theologian and Professor of Islamic Studies at the Sorbonne Henry Corbin; and historian of religion, Professor Mircea Eliade. Aside from Islamic thought, Corbin wrote on Christian mysticism, especially Emanuel Swedenborg and the Holy Grail. Another current of thought, emanating from Germany, was to have a decisive influence on his life and work, namely the Romantic thinkers such as Johann Georg Hamann, Schelling, and Franz von Baader. Between 1931 and 1936, Corbin made frequent visits to Germany, where he met Karl Barth, Karl Löwith, Ernst Cassirer, and, most notably, Martin Heidegger. He maintained friendships with figures as diverse as the specialist on Indo-European mythology Georges Dumézil, the “transgressive” writer Georges Bataille, mythologist Roger Caillois, playwright Eugène Ionesco, painter René Magritte, Nikolai Berdyaev (1874 – 1948).[76]

Many identified communism with characterization Nikolai Berdyaev of the Third Rome with what he believed was “Russian messianism,” which differentiated Russians from all other peoples and defined their historical mission.[77] As noted by Konstantin Burmistrov and Maria Endel, the religious and political views of the Russian Rosicrucians exerted a great influence on the development of Russian Romantic philosophy and social utopianism in the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as of the Slavophile movement, which in turn influenced Russian religious philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov and Berdyaev. Thus, the authors conclude, “as a component of masonic outlook, Kabbalah has become an important factor in Russian history and culture.”[78] According to E.D. Kuskova, a prominent Russian journalist, she and her husband, along with Berdyaev, were founding members of the political Masonic organization that originated just after the turn of the century, and which subsequently founded the Union of Liberation, the organization that Russian liberals and radicals used to bring about the Revolution of 1905, known as the First Russian Revolution.[79]

 

Fontainebleau

Along with the School of Fine Arts at Fontainebleau, the American Conservatory was one of two Fontainebleau Schools founded in 1921, in the Palace of Fontainebleau, one of the largest French royal châteaux located southeast of Paris. The following year, the “rascal guru” George Gurdjieff established the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man south of Paris at the Prieuré des Basses Loges in Avon near the famous Château de Fontainebleau. Gurdjieff also worked closely with Thomas de Hartmann (1884 – 1956), a friend of Kandinsky and Rainer Maria Rilke, who were friends of Karl Wolfskehl of the George-Kreis. Gurdjieff’s thought is an amalgam of Theosophy, Neopythagoreanism, Rosicrucianism and alchemy. According to James Webb, Blavatsky’s Theosophy was his single most important source. Gurdjieff explained, “The way of the development of hidden possibilities is a way against nature and against God.”[80]

Alfred Richard Orage (1873 – 1934), a friend of Aleister Crowley, also worked with George Gurdjieff after he had been recommended to him by Gurdjieff’s leading student, P.D. Ouspensky in 1922.[81] Orage married Jean Walker, a passionate member of the Theosophical Society. Orage first met Annie Besant and other leading theosophists at the Northern Federation headquarters in Harrogate, and began to lecture on occult topics in as publishing material in the Theosophical Review.[82] In 1907, Orage bought The New Age, which began as a journal of Christian liberalism and socialism, but he e-oriented it to promote the ideas of Nietzsche and Fabian socialism. Under the editorship of Orage, The New Age, according to a Brown University press release, “helped to shape modernism in literature and the arts from 1907 to 1922.”[83] The circle of The New Age contributors widely influential, and included Aleister Crowley, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Havelock Ellis, Filippo Marinetti, H.G. Wells, Florence Farr, George Bernard Shaw, C.H. Douglas, Hilaire Belloc and Ezra Pound. Marmaduke Pickthall was a regular contributor, writing sympathetically about Turkey.[84] When T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia” thought of two people to ask for advice about his manuscript of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Orage was one of them. The other was his friend George Bernard Shaw.[85] Orage sold The New Age and moved to Paris to study at the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man.

Another contributor was Bosnian-Serb mystic Dimitrije Mitrinovic (1887 – 1953), who was linked with Wassily Kandinsky and Martin Buber. The Forte-Kreis influenced Mitrinovic, who identified its founder Erich Gutkind—a fellow contributor to Orage’s New Age—among the bearers of revelations, along with Rudolf Steiner, Helena Blavatsky and Vladimir Solovyov, and promoted his work in Orage’s The New Age.[86] Mitrinovic first formulated the notion that all paths to truth could be reduced to three, contained in three major revelations to mankind. The first two were the pre-Christian Revelation found in Vedanta, Buddhism, Astrology, Kabbala and the wisdom of the ancient world, and second and the Christian Revelation. The Third Revelation is that which mankind is currently confronted with, but does not yet recognize as a new revelation. Its prophet, according to Mitrinovic, was Gutkind.[87] To contribute the Forte Kreis, Mitrinovic maintained correspondence with Henri Bergson, H.G. Wells, Maxim Gorky, Maurice Maeterlinck, Pablo Picasso, Filippo Marinetti, Anatole France, George Bernard Shaw, Knut Hamsun, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.[88] Mitrinovic believed that only Europe and the Aryan race could “establish a functional world system in which each of the races and nations is called upon to play its natural and organic part.”[89]

In 1927, Mitrinovic founded the Adler’s Society (the English Branch of the International Society for Individual Psychology), with Hungarian-born Jew, Alfred Adler, who was a first cousin of Victor Adler of the Pernerstorfer Circle and who apparently worked with Aleister Crowley. Adler was also well-acquainted with Dr. Leopold Thoma, one of the closest collaborators of Erik Jan Hanussen, Hitler’s Jewish clairvoyant.[90] Adler had also been assisted in his work with his patients by Aleister Crowley.[91] In collaboration with Freud and a small group of Freud’s colleagues, Adler was among the co-founders of the psychoanalytic movement and a core member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. To Freud, Adler was “the only personality there.”[92] Adler is considered, along with Freud and Jung, to be one of the three founding figures of depth psychology, which emphasizes the unconscious and psychodynamics, and thus to be one of the three great psychologist/philosophers of the twentieth century.

 

Group Ur

All of the leading participants at Eranos admired, almost revered Olga Froebe-Kapteyn as the founder of Eranos, with the exception of Italian fascist philosopher and occultist Julius Evola (1898 – 1974), who is known to have described her as “fanatical” with “highly spiritual” pretentions, a woman he “wholeheartedly” detested. This condemnation mirrors the caustic view of Alice Bailey held by Mircea Eliade (1907 – 1986), who considered her work “unreadable and absolutely worthless.”[93] Nevertheless, Eliade wrote in his book The Forge and the Crucible, “I am also indebted to my friend Mrs. Froebe-Kapteyn, who was kind enough to put at my disposal the collections of the Archiv für Symbol-Forschung which she has established at Ascona.”[94]

Evola was introduced to Traditionalism around 1927 after he joined the Theosophical League founded by Arturo Reghini (1878 – 1946). As an Italian representative of the OTO, Reghini also had a common friend in Crowley with Evola.[95] In 1927, Reghini, Evola and other occultists, including Giovanni Colazza (1877 – 1953), a disciple of Rudolf Steiner, founded the Gruppo di Ur, which performed rituals intended to inspire Italy’s fascist regime with the spirit of imperial Rome. The Ur group also included Eliade, also a central figure in the history of Traditionalism.[96] First interested in Theosophy and Martinism, Eliade became an intimate friend Evola who introduced him to the work of Guénon.[97]

Following Guénon, Evola’s philosophy was focused on a “primordial Tradition.” Guénon’s Traditionalism was developed from the notion, shared with the fascists, of the belief in the decadence of the modern world. Through the influence of Papus, Guénon insisted on the idea, already formulated before him by Joseph de Maistre and Fabre d’Olivet, of a primordial Tradition.[98] By tradition, Guénon meant the Perennial Philosophy. This notion was the same as the Prisca Theologia, or “Ancient Wisdom,” of Renaissance philosopher Marisilio Ficino. In reality it was the Jewish Kabbalah, which Ficino considered to be a pure tradition imparted to the wise men of antiquity, and the key to establishing a universal religion that could reconcile Christian belief with ancient philosophy. It was also known to Blavatsky as “Ancient Wisdom” or “Wisdom-Religion.” 

In 1927, in Le Roi du Monde (“King of the World”), in which he supported the tales of Agartha reported by the Polish explorer Ferdiand Ossendowski (1876 – 1945). Ossendowski wrote a book in 1922 titled Beasts, Men and Gods, in which he tells a story he claims was imparted to him of a subterranean kingdom that exists inside the earth, ruled by a king related to Blavatsky’s Sanat Kumara, who she claimed Christians “incorrectly” called Lucifer.[99] In La Crise du Monde moderne (“The Crisis of the Modern World,” 1927), which would profoundly influence Evola, Guénon, like Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner, compares the Hindu vision of the cosmic cycles with our current civilization, identifying the latter with the so-called era of the Kali Yuga, a dark age of degeneration coming at the end of one of the “great cycles” or Manvantaras.[100]

Also belonging to the Ur Group was Maria Naglowska (1883 – 1936), a Russian occultist who wrote and taught sex magic and referred to herself as a “Satanic woman.”[101] She was rumored to have been initiated by Hassidic Jews or by Rasputin, or by the Russian sect of the Khlysty to which Rasputin was rumored to belong.[102] Naglowska married Jewish musician, Moise Hopenko, against the wishes of his family. The resulting break with Maria’s aristocratic family led the young couple to leave Russia for Berlin, Germany and then Geneva, Switzerland. However, after he met Theodor Herzl, he became a Zionist, and decided to leave them and move to Palestine around 1910, abandoning her and their children.[103] Naglowska moved to Rome around 1920 where she became acquainted with Evola.[104] In 1929, she moved to Paris where she conducted occult seminars on her ideas on sex magic. Attendance at these sessions included notable avant-garde writers and artists such as Evola, William Seabrook, Man Ray and André Breton. These gatherings eventually led to the establishment of the Confrerie de la Flèche d’Or (Brotherhood of the Golden Arrow).[105]  Evola, in his book Eros Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex, claimed that Naglowska often wrote for shock effect, noting her “deliberate intention to scandalize the reader through unnecessarily dwelling on Satanism.”[106] In 1931, Naglowska compiled, translated and published in French a collection of writings by Paschal Beverly Randolph, who had a profound influence on the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light. Her publication of Randolph’s previously little known teachings was the source of his subsequent influence in European magic.[107]

Inspired by SS member Herman Wirth, Evola reinterpreted Guénon’s perception that the origin of the “Primordial Tradition” was Hyperborean.[108] Wirth, Guénon and Evola’s theories of Hyperborea were inspired by Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s immensely influential 1903 work, The Arctic Home in the Vedas. Wirth was a prolific völkisch-inspired author who combined themes from Guido von List, Lanz von Liebenfels, and Rudolf von Sebottendorf and Karl Maria Wiligut.[109] In his 1928 magnum opus, Der Aufgang der Menschheit: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Religion, Symbolik und Schrift der Atlantisch-Nordischen Rasse, Wirth argued that the bulk of humanity’s cultural traditions are derived from a primordial “Nordic-Arctic” or “Nordic-Atlantic” race, the “cultural circle of Thule.”[110] The Nordic pre or proto-Aryan race, in Wirth’s history, began to disperse out of the Arctic in the Paleolithic era, preserving only remnants of its “religio-linguistic-symbolic paradigm.”[111]

In 1928 Evola wrote the text Pagan Imperialism, which proposed the transformation of Fascism based on ancient Roman values and the Ancient Mysteries, and a restoration of the caste-system and aristocracy of antiquity. The core trilogy of Evola’s works are generally regarded as Revolt Against the Modern World, Men Among the Ruins and Ride the Tiger. Evola argues for a radical restructuring of society based on his version of “Tradition.” Like Guénon, Evola believed that mankind is living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of unleashed materialistic appetites, spiritual oblivion and dissolution. The Kali Yuga is the last of four ages, which form a cycle from the Satya Yuga or Golden Age through the Kali Yuga or the Iron Age described by Hesiod. To counter this and call in a primordial rebirth, Evola presented his world of Tradition. This idea was summarized in the title of the book, from metaphor of “Riding the Tiger” borrowed from the Left-Hand Tantra.[112] “In an epoch of general dissolution,” explained Evola, “the only path one can try… is the ‘path of the left hand’… despite all its risks.”[113] The Vatican-backed right-wing Revue Internationale des Sociétés Secrètes (RISS) in April 1928 published an article in its Partie Occultiste section called Un Sataniste Italien: Julius Evola (“An Italian Satanist: Julius Evola”).[114]

 


[1] Friedeland Wagner. The Royal Family of Bayreuth (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948), pp. 8–9. Redles. Hitler’s Millennial Reich, p. 122.

[2] Von Schmid. “Wohlklang aus Seifhennersdorf.”  Zeit Online (December 27, 2001). Retrieved from http://www.zeit.de/2002/01/200201_24_bechstein_hau_xml

[3] Oliver Rathkolb and John Heath (trans.) “Baldur von Schirach: Nazi Leader and Head of the Hitler Youth.” (2022). Chapter 4.

[4] Jackson Spielvogel & David Redles. “Hitler’s Racial Ideology: Content and Occult Sources.” In Michael Robert Marrus (ed.). The Nazi Holocaust, Part 2: The Origins of the Holocaust (De Gruyter Saur, 1989). Retrieved from https://atlantipedia.ie/samples/archive-2795/

[5] “Keyserling, Hermann Alexander, Graf von (1880–1946).” Encyclopedia of Philosophy (March 12, 2025). Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/keyserling-hermann-alexander-graf-von-1880-1946

[6] Dina Gusejnova. “Noble Continent? German-speaking nobles as theorists of European identity in the interwar period.” In: M. Hewitson & and M. D’Auria (eds.) Europe in Crisis. Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917-1957 (Berghahn: Oxford and New York, 2012), p. 122.

[7] “About Us and Our History.” School of Wisdom. Retrieved from https://schoolofwisdom.com/about/

[8] Ibid.

[9] Hugo Vickers. Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece (St. Martin's Publishing Group, 2013).

[10] “About Us and Our History.” School of Wisdom. Retrieved from https://schoolofwisdom.com/about/

[11] Hakl. Eranos, p. 39.

[12] Dina Gusejnova. “Noble Continent? German-speaking nobles as theorists of European identity in the interwar period.” In: M. Hewitson & and M. D’Auria (eds.) Europe in Crisis. Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917-1957 (Berghahn: Oxford and New York, 2012), p. 122.

[13] Dina Gusejnova. “Noble Continent? German-speaking nobles as theorists of European identity in the interwar period.” In: M. Hewitson & and M. D’Auria (eds.) Europe in Crisis. Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917-1957 (Berghahn: Oxford and New York, 2012), p. 123.

[14] Keyserling. Indian Travel Diary of a Philosopher. Bhavan’s Book University No. 60 (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay 1959), p. 227; cited in “Rabindranath Tagore and Hermann Keyserling: A Difficult Friendship.” The Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies. Retrieved from https://scotstagore.org/rabindranath-tagore-and-hermann-keyserling-a-difficult-friendship-by-martin-kaempchen/

[15] Richard Boyle. “The Riddle that was Crowley.” The Sunday Times (November 10, 1996). Retrieved from http://www.sundaytimes.lk/961110/plus4.html

[16] “History: Kedar Nath Das Gupta, Dharma’s Early Pioneer.” Hinduism Today (October 1, 2013). Retrieved from https://www.hinduismtoday.com/magazine/october-november-december-2013/2013-10-history-kedar-nath-das-gupta-dharmaa8099s-early-pioneer/

[17] S.V. Turner. “Crafting Connections: The India Society and the Formation of an Imperial Artistic Network in Early Twentieth-Century Britain.” in S. Nasta (eds). India in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2013).

[18] “Alice L. Cleather” Theosophy Wiki. Retrieved from https://theosophy.wiki/en/Alice_L._Cleather

[19] Richard Finneran. The Yeats Reader (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002).

[20] Partha Mitter. Indian Art (Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 177.

[21] P. Mendes-Flohr. Ex oriente lux: Tagore, Buber and Einstein in dialogue (Unpublished manuscript, Divinity School, the University of Chicago, IL, 2011), p. 3; Cited in Abhik Roy. “Rabindranath Tagore and Martin Buber: A Meeting of Two Great Souls.” The Scottish Centre of Tagore Studies. Retrieved from https://scotstagore.org/rabindranath-tagore-martin-buber/

[22] Ibid., p. 6.

[23] M.S. Friedman. Martin Buber’s Life and Work (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1981), p. 343; Cited in Roy. “Rabindranath Tagore and Martin Buber: A Meeting of Two Great Souls.”

[24] “1920” A Timeline of Tagore’s Life and World. Retrieved from http://rabindratirtha-wbhidcoltd.co.in/Rabisarani/event/VZlSXRVVONlUsRmeT1WNXJ1aKVVVB1TP

[25] Rabindranath Tagore. A. Chakravarty (ed.). A Tagore Reader (Beacon Press, 1961), p. 2.

[26] Ibid., p. 99–103.

[27] Robert Henderson. “Romain Rolland.” In Stanley Sadie &. John Tyrrell (eds.). The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan Publishers, 2001).

[28] John Fowles. Introduction to “The Royal Game” (New York: Obelisk, 1981). pp. ix.

[29] Susan Pedersen. “Do fight, don’t kill.” London Review of Books, 44: 20 (October 20, 2022).

[30] “Willard Straight, who is to marry Dorothy Whitney. A Career That Reads Like a Romance Is That of the Missionary’s Son Who Became a Figure in Finance, Politics and International Affairs, and Who Won the Love of Two Heiresses.” The New York Times (July 30, 1911).

[31] Ibid.

[32] Tara Mastrelli. “Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight Elmhirst.” Histories of the New School (May 25, 2018). Retrieved from https://histories.newschool.edu/people/dorothy-payne-whitney-straight-elmhirst

[33] Eric. D. Butler. The Fabian Socialist Contribution to Communist Advance (Australian League of Rights, 1964).

[34] Report, Joint Legislative Committee Investigating Seditious Activities, State of New York (April 24, 1920), p. 1119.

[35] Zygmund Dobbs. Keynes at Harvard: Economic Deception As a Political Credo 9 (Veritas Foundation, 1962).

[36] Jay. The Dialectical Imagination, p. 39.

[37] A. Ramachandran & P. Vertinsky. “William Sheldon, Aldous Huxley, and the Dartington connection: Body typing schemes offer a new path to a utopian future.” History of the Human Sciences, 37: 3-4 (2023), pp. 130.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Ron Rosenbaum. “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal.” New York Times (January 15, 1995).

[40] A. Ramachandran & P. Vertinsky. “William Sheldon, Aldous Huxley, and the Dartington connection: Body typing schemes offer a new path to a utopian future.” History of the Human Sciences, 37: 3-4 (2023), pp. 130.

[41] Anthony Meredith. Richard Rodney Bennett: The Complete Musician (Omnibus Press, 2010).

[42] Anna Neima. Practical Utopia: The Many Lives of Darington Hall (Cambridge University Press, 2022), p. 67–68.

[43] William Chapin Seitz. Mark Tobey (Ayer Publishing, 1980), p. 44.

[44] Neima. Practical Utopia, p. 67.

[45] “Bernard Leach (1887 – 1979).” British Council. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20160918133215/http://collection.britishcouncil.org/collection/artists/leach-bernard-1887

[46] Neima. Practical Utopia, p. 67.

[47] Ibid., p. 79.

[48] Ibid.. 66.

[49] Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. The Oceanic Feeling. The Origins of Religious Sentiment in Ancient India (Springer Science & Business Media, 2012), p. 32.

[50] William B. Parsons. The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 19.

[51] Hakl. Eranos, p. 26.

[52] Inquire Within. The Trail of the Serpent (London: Boswell Publishing, 1936), p. 258.

[53] “Sovereign Order of St. John of Jerusalem.” Knights of Saint John (accessed January 26, 2017). Retrieved from http://www.theknightsofsaintjohn.com/History-After-Malta.htm

[54] Cited in Hakl. Eranos, p. 99.

[55] Isobel Blackthorn. Alice A. Bailey: Life and Legacy (Blurb, 2021).

[56] William McGuire. “The Arcane Summer School” in Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1980), p. 150; cited in Blackthorn. Alice A. Bailey.

[57] Ibid.

[58] Ibid.

[59] Hakl. Eranos, p. 29–30.

[60] McGuire. “The Arcane Summer School”; cited in Blackthorn. Alice A. Bailey.

[61] W.B. Yeats. Memoirs (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1973), p. 49.

[62] Review of Reviews (June 7, 1892),

[63] “James H. Cousins” Theosophy Wiki. Retrieved from https://theosophy.wiki/en/James_H._Cousins

[64] “James H. Cousins’ Reminiscence of Sri Aurobindo.” Overman Foundation (August 19, 2016). Retrieved from https://overmanfoundation.org/james-h-cousins-reminiscence-of-sri-aurobindo/

[65] Shoba Sharma & Ashok Gangadean. “Rukmini Devi Arundale Centenary Celebration at Haverford College, February 28, 2004.” Naatya & Global Dialogue Institute (January 31, 2004). Retrieved from http://www.naatya.org/rda/RDAPressRelease.htm

[66] C. Wilson. “Montessori was a Theosophist.” History of Education Society Bulletin, 36 (1985), pp. 52–54.

[67] Rita Kramer. Maria Montessori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 311.

[68] Mira Debs. “Montessori in India: Adapted, Competing, and Contested Framings, 1915–2021.” History of Education Quarterly, 62: 4 (September 2022), pp. 387–417.

[69] McGuire. “The Arcane Summer School”; cited in Blackthorn. Alice A. Bailey..

[70] “Mrs. Lewis S. Chanler, 78, Dies; Headed Reform Bahai Movement; Widow of Former Lieutenant Governor Formed Society in ‘29—Wrote Several Books.” The New York Times (March 12, 1961), p. 86.

[71] “EINSTEIN ADVOCATES RESISTANCE TO WAR; If Only 2% of Eligibles Refused to Join Army, Jails Would Not Hold Them, He Says. ASKS FUND TO BACK PLAN Tells Pacifists Action, Not Talk Is Needed for World Peace --He Sails Today. EINSTEIN ADVOCATES RESISTANCE TO WAR.” The New York Times (December 15, 1930). Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1930/12/15/archives/einstein-advocates-resistance-to-war-if-only-2-of-eligibles-refused.html

[72] Times, Special To The New York. “SMOOT WOULD PLUG CONGRESS 'RAT-HOLE'; Senator Points to $40-a-Page Cost of Printing Appendix to Congressional Record. EVERYTHING, ANYTHING IN IT Undelivered Speeches, Poetry, Arti- cles Pour Onto It -- Total Nearly $3,500 for Five Quiet Days.” The New York Times (January 18, 1932). Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1932/01/18/archives/smoot-would-plug-congress-rathole-senator-points-to-40apage-cost-of.html

[73] Hakl. Eranos, p. 255.

[74] Jay Sherry. Carl Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).

[75] Hakl. Eranos, p. 134.

[76] Ibid., p. 162.

[77] Marshall Poe. “Moscow, the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformations of a ‘Pivotal Moment’” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Neue Folge, Bd. 49, H. 3 (2001), pp. 424-425.

[78] Konstantin Burmistrov & Maria Endel. “The Place of Kabbalah in the Doctrine of Russian Freemasons.” Aries (2004), 4, 1, p. 57.

[79] Barbara T. Norton. “Russian Political Masonry and the February Revolution of 1917.” International Review of Social History, Vol. 28, No. 2 (1983), p. 244.

[80] P. D. Ouspensky. In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (Harcourt, 1949). p. 47.

[81] Peter Washington. Madame Blavatsky’s baboon: a history of the mystics, mediums, and misfits who brought spiritualism to America (Schocken Books, 1995) p. 170.

[82] Tom Steele. Alfred Orage and the Leeds Art Club 1893-1923 (The Orage Press, 1990), pp. 33–34

[83] “Modernist Journals Project Has Grant to Digitize Rare Magazines.” Brown University press release (April 19, 2007)

[84] Robert Scholes. “General Introduction to The New Age 1907-1922.” Modernist Journals Project. Retrieved from https://modjourn.org/general-introduction-to-the-new-age-1907-1922-by-scholes-robert/

[85] Ibid.

[86] Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017), p. 230.

[87] H.C. Rutherford. “Erich Gutkind as Prophet of the New Age.” Dimitrije Mitrinovic. Retrieved from http://afrodita.rcub.bg.ac.rs/~dpajin/dm/predavanja/1975.html

[88] Behr. “Wassily Kandinsky and Dimitrije Mitrinovic,” p. 86; van Hengel. “World Conquest Through Heroic Love,” p. 191.

[89] Andrew Rigby. Initiation and Initiative: An Exploration of the Life and Ideas of Dimitrij Mitrinovic (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1984) p. 80.

[90] Spence. Secret Agent 666, pp. 214-215.

[91] Crowley to Schneider October 5, 1944 GJY Collection, cited in Richard Kaczynski. Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (North Atlantic Book, 2010) p. 448.

[92] Freud, cited in Ernest Jones. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1964), p. 353.

[93] McGuire. “The Arcane Summer School”; cited in Blackthorn. Alice A. Bailey.

[94] Hakl. Eranos, p. 255.

[95] Marco Pasi, “The Neverendingly Told Story: Recent Biographies of Aleister Crowley,”

Aries 3:2 (2003): 243.

[96] Robert North. The Occult Mentors of Maria de Naglowska (Privately printed, 2010).

[97] Sedgwick. Against the Modern World, p. 49.

[98] Edouard Rix. Le Lansquenet, 15 (Sping 2002), pp 14-15.

[99] Blavatsky. The Secret Doctrine, Vol. II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) p. 243.

[100] Antoine Faivre. Western Esotericism: A Concise History (New York: SUNY Press, 2010), p. 96.

[101] Penelope Rosemont. Surrealist Women: An International Anthology. (Athlone Press, 1998). pp. lvi and xlii

[102] L’ésotérisme au féminin. (L’Age D’Homme, 2006), p. 118.

[103] Michael William West. Sex Magicians (Inner Traditions/Bear, 2021).

[104] Hans Thomas Hakl. “The Theory and Practice of Sexual Magic Exemplified by Four Magical Groups in the Early Twentieth Century.” Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism. (Fordham University Press, 2010) p. 465.

[105] William Traxler. “The Reconciliation of the Light and Dark Forces”, the Introduction to The Light of Sex by Maria de Naglowska. (Inner Traditions, 2011). pp. 4–8.

[106] Julius Evola. Eros Mysteries of Love: The Metaphysics of Sex. (Inner Traditions, 1991) p. 261.

[107] Arthur Versluis & Cathy Gutierrez (ed.) The Occult in Nineteenth Century America (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group, 2005). p. 29.

[108] Stéphane François. “The Nouvelle Droite and ‘Tradition’.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism , Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring 2014), p. 98.

[109] Jafe Arnold. “Mysteries of Eurasia: The Esoteric Sources of Alexander Dugin and the Yuzhinsky Circle.” Research Masters Degree in Theology and Religious Studies / Western Esotericism, University of Amsterdam (2019).

[110] Joscelyn Godwin. Atlantis and the Cycles of Time: Prophecies, Traditions, and Occult Revelations (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 2011), pp. 132-137.

[111] Herman Wirth. Der Aufgang der Menschheit: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Religion, Symbolik und Schrift der Atlantisch-Nordischen Rasse (Jena: Eugen Diederich, 1928), p. 193.

[112] Paul Furlong. Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola (Abingdon-on-Thames: Taylor & Francis, 2011), p. 99.

[113] Julius Evola. Il cammino del cinabro, Milano: Vanni Scheiwiller, (1972), p. 191; cited in Furlong. Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola, p. 99.

[114] Kevin Coogan. Dreamer of the day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia, 1999). p. 293.

Divide & Conquer