Th0usand-Year Reich

The Third Reich was to be a “thousand-year Reich,” based on the millennial expectations derived from the Book of Revelation, with Hitler as “messiah.” While Hitler did not explicitly mention the “Third Reich” in Mein Kampf, early Otto Strasser claimed that Hitler was aware of Moeller van den Bruck’s work, and the phrase Third Reich entered into common use throughout Germany after Hitler became chancellor in 1933.[1] Van den Bruck’s Das dritte Reich also provided the basis for the founding of the Deutsche Herrenklub (“German Men’s Club”) was an association that included important industrialists who supported the Nazi cause, like Fritz Thyssen and politicians like Hjalmar Schacht. With the formation of presidential cabinet in 1932, headed by Franz von Papen, a member of the Herrenklub, the club—which at the time had some 5,000 members—gained considerable influence on German politics as Papen’s “main source of political inspiration.”[2] Though Hitler sought contact with the members of the club, he also attacked them publicly time and again in order to win over left-wing voters. In 1933 the association was renamed Deutscher Klub. In the same year it established the Dirksen Foundation, which was intended to promote contacts between the traditional elites and the National Socialists. The foundation’s board of trustees included Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Röhm.

Julius Evola addressed the Herrenclub in Berlin in 1934, of which he wrote, “there I was to find my natural milieu.”[3] Evola also shared a number of acquaintances with Schmitt, including Ernst Jünger, Armin Mohler and Prince Karl Anton von Rohan (1898 – 1975), who founded the Kulturbund, the Austrian counterpart of the Herrenclub. After the World War I, there appeared a large number of movements dedicated to the economic and political union of European. One example was the fascist-leaning Verband für kulturelle Zusammenarbeit founded in Vienna in 1921 which cooperated closely with its sister organization, the Fédération des Unions intellectuelles, with which it later united as the was the Association for Cultural Cooperation (“Kulturbund”).[4]

Rohan, an active supporter of the idea of conservative revolution, was the scion of one of the most prestigious aristocratic families in Europe. Karl’s aunt was Berthe de Rohan (1868 – 1945), who participated in Max Theon’s Cosmic Movement.[5] The Kulturbund later opened individual centers in Paris, Milan, Frankfurt and Heidelberg, and its membership reads like a “Who’s Who” of European industry and intelligentsia.[6] Future Chancellor of Germany, Konrad Adenauer was among the leading members. Foreign authors featured in the Kulturbund’s periodical, Europäische Revue included Winston Churchill, Julius Evola, Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, Arrigo Solmi, José Ortega y Gasset and Carl Jung.[7] The Kulturbund’s periodical, Europäische Revue, which Rohan founded in 1925 and edited until 1936, was identified by Armin Mohler as one of Germany’s leading “young conservative” publications.[8] After the onset of the Great Depression, IG Farben subsidized the journal and other Kulturbund activities. Lilly von Schnitzler, whose husband George was a director of IG Farben, was one of the Kulturbund’s treasurers.[9] Lilly was in extensive correspondence with Carl Schmitt. Foreign authors featured in the Europäische Revue included Winston Churchill, Julius Evola, Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, Arrigo Solmi, José Ortega y Gasset and Carl Jung.[10] The revue appeared from 1925, but in 1933 came under the control of the ideology of National Socialism. The journal would continue its publication until 1944, with the aid of Joseph Goebbels.[11]

Jung was an important figure in the circles of the Conservative Revolution.[12] Despite his known dabbling in the occult, Jung insisted that he was not a mystic. In a series of lectures given at London’s Tavistock Clinic in 1935, which form one of the best introductions to his ideas, Carl Jung pointed out that “There is nothing mystical about the collective unconscious.”[13] At various times Jung spoke of his concept of the collective unconscious in biological and genetic language, or metaphysically as similar to Plato’s Ideas, or at other times, mystically, as something along the lines of that experienced in Eleusinian mysteries.[14] Jung told his audience that, “Mystics are people who have a particularly vivid experience of the processes of the collective unconscious.”[15] Yet Jung himself claims to have had “a particularly vivid experience of the processes of the collective unconscious.”[16] Yet, criticizing the Theosophy and Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, Jung argues that the collective unconscious is the source of precisely “the same phenomena which the theosophical and Gnostic sects made accessible to the simple-minded in the forms of portentous mysteries”[17] and complains that these groups appropriate the term “unconscious” because they are “fond of scientific terms in order to dress their speculations in a ‘scientific’ guise.”[18]

However, to support his theories in Psychological Types (1923), Jung cited writers like Barlach, Kubin, and Meyrink who wrote tales that explored the dark, irrational dimension of the reality. Gustav Meyrink (1868 – 1932) was a member of the Golden Dawn and for a brief time also a member of the Theosophical Society. His preoccupation with occult themes is found in his two most famous novels The Golem (1915) and The Green Face (1916). The Hebrew phrase Chevrat Zero Or Bocher, which translates to “The Society of the Dawn Light” appears twice in The Golem. Also in The Golem, Meyrink links the Tarot cards to the Jewish Torah, and in turn to the Kabbalah.[19] Jung discussed these works in his 1925 and 1928 English language seminars and owned a number of Meyrink’s other books.[20]

Jung lived in Prague and then moved to Munich where he worked for the satirical German weekly magazine, Simplicissimus, which published the work of writers such as Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke. According to Mann, he originally planned The Magic Mountain as a satirical follow-up to Death in Venice, which he had completed in 1912. The pedophilic Death in Venice is the story of an ennobled writer named Gustav von Aschenbach who visits Venice  and takes a suite in the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido island, and becomes increasingly obsessed by the sight of a beautiful Polish boy, Tadzio, so nicknamed for Tadeusz, based on a real boy Mann had observed during his 1911 visit to the city. One night, a dream filled with orgiastic Dionysian imagery reveals to him the sexual nature of his feelings for Tadzio. The novella contains allusions to the connection between of erotic and to philosophical wisdom proposed in Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, and secondly to the Nietzschean contrast between Apollo, the god of restraint, and Dionysus, the god of excess and passion.

Richard Noll, in The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, has argued that the early Jung was influenced by Theosophy, sun worship and völkisch nationalism in developing the ideas on the collective unconscious and archetypes.[21] Jung initially interpreted the Nazi Movement as a manifestation of the “Wotan” archetype that had been reactivated in Germany.[22] The accusation that Jung was a Nazi sympathizer stems from a magazine article he wrote in 1918, in which he drew distinctions between Jewish and German psyches to illustrate the variety of heritable elements of the collective unconscious. Jung is also accused of complying with the Nazi authorities, in particular with the cousin of Hermann Göring, Matthias Göring, who became the leader of organized psychotherapy in Germany. Jung remained affiliated with German psychoanalysis from the rise of the Nazi regime in the 1930s, through the first years of the war—though he insisted that his main motivation was to aid disenfranchised Jews. As his Jewish friend James Kirsch noted, Jung was “a man with his contradictions.” Another commentator later argued that Jung was “—to put the best face on it—confused by the politics of his day.”[23]

In Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke reports how Jung described “Hitler as possessed by the archetype of the collective Aryan unconscious and could not help obeying the commands of an inner voice.” In a series of interviews between 1936 and 1939, Jung characterized Hitler as an archetype that often took the place of his own personality. “Hitler is a spiritual vessel, a demi-divinity; even better, a myth. Benito Mussolini is a man.”[24] Jung, explained Goodrick-Clarke, likened Hitler to Mohammed, the messiah of Germany who teaches the virtue of the sword. “His voice is that of at least 78 million Germans. He must shout, even in private conversation… The voice he hears is that of the collective unconscious of his race.”[25]

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung cites Nietzsche as a major influence, and he hoped that WWI would alert Europe to the danger of the “blond beast.” In his 1935 lecture series at Tavistock, Jung broke off his remarks to refer to his prophecy of 1918. “I saw it coming,” he told his fellow psychologists in the audience, “I said in 1918 that the ‘blond beast’ is stirring in its sleep and that something will happen in Germany. No psychologist then understood at all what I meant . . .” Commenting on the power of the archetypes to overrun conscious decision, Jung called them “the great decisive forces.”[26]

George-kreis & Cosmic Circle 

Notions of a “thousand year Reich” and “fire of the blood” were adopted by the Nazis and incorporated into the party’s propaganda from Stefan George (1868 – 1933), who was identified by Mohler as an exemplar of the German Conservative Revolution.[27] George was a German symbolist poet and a translator of Dante, Shakespeare, Hesiod, and Charles Baudelaire. He is also known for his role as leader of the highly influential literary group called the George-Kreis (“George Circle”), who had called for a spiritual aristocracy, what he called a “Secret Germany,” to rebuild the nation. Members of the George-Kreis also belonged to the Cosmic Circle, a group of writers and intellectuals in the famous bohemian Schwabing district of Munich, at the turn of the twentieth century, founded by occultist Alfred Schuler (1865 – 1923), philosopher Ludwig Klages (1872–1956), and German-Jewish poet Karl Wolfskehl (1869 – 1948). From about the turn of the century, Schuler kept in touch with occultists such as Papus, and later took part in spiritualist séances directed by Albert von Schrenck-Notzing. A two-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Klages, he is considered one of the most important German thinkers of the twentieth century, and his place in modern psychology has been compared to that of Freud and Carl Jung.[28] Klages is also sometimes placed among thinkers of the Conservative Revolution.[29] Wolfskehl’s friends and associates included Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, Alfred Kubin and Martin Buber. Along with Theodor Herzl, Wolfskehl had established a local chapter of the Zionist movement in Munich.[30]

Klages was a central figure of characterological psychology and the Lebensphilosophie, referred to as the German vitalist movement, a dominant philosophical movement of German-speaking countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lebensphilosophie was inspired by the life and work of Nietzsche, and a cult developed around him who were inspired by the “Dionysian” Nietzsche. Klages, explains Steven E. Aschheim, “was the most radical German exponent of irrationalist Lebensphilosophie, taking its Nietzschean premises to their most extreme conclusions.”[31] Klages drew a distinction between Geist (“spirit” or “intellect”), representing the forces of “modern, industrial, and intellectual rationalization,” and Geist (“spirit” or “intellect”), representing the possibility of overcoming “alienated intellectuality in favor of a new-found earthly rootedness.”[32] The distinction, Klages wrote, was basic, an Ubergriff similar to Nietzsche’s juxtaposition of the Dionysian and the Socratic. “Nietzsche said,” Klages lectured, “that with collapse new sources reveal themselves, and so is it also in life. Violent destructions must proceed first before the new sources out of which the future flows are brought to light.”[33]

For Klages, Nietzche’s Will to Power was “de-eroticized sexuality.”[34] Like the George-Kreis, the Cosmics were a Männerbund, a homoerotic society of men. Both George and Schuler were openly homosexual. The Cosmic’s neo-paganism was related to their efforts toward sexual revolution.[35] The Cosmic Circle developed a doctrine according to which the Occident was plagued by downfall and degeneration, caused by the rationalizing and demythologizing effects of Christianity, which they believed could only be resolved, according to the “Cosmic” view, by a return to the paganism. George and his followers Schuler and Klages, were known to walk the streets of Munich disguised with Dionysian masks and robes, sometimes brandishing knives. They also enacted the rituals of the pagan cults, indulging in orgies, accompanied by the music of Wagnerian. In one bizarre episode, Schuler and Klages proposed to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche that they cure her brother of his insanity by performing an ecstatic Dionysian dance around him. In spite of her own involvement in the circle, she refused.[36]

An important interest of the Cosmics was the work of Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815 – 1887), a Swiss anthropologist and sociologist, and his research into matriarchal clans. The Cosmics then began conducting elaborate rituals dedicated to Erdmutter (Great Mother Earth). In ancient times, the worship of the Cybele, the Magna Matter, included acts of sacrifice, castration, as well as orgiastic practices.[37] After their growing anti-Semitism led to their break with George and Wolfskehl in 1903, Klages and Schuler combined their ideas of an Earth Mother and vitalism, and promoted völkisch paganism based on the mystical sacralization of blood, conceptualized as die Blutleuchte (“blood lights”).[38] In the sign of the “Blood Beacon,” and the swastika, its incarnate emblem, a healthy state of life were to be regained. As Schuler was interested in ancient cult practices such as “blood brotherhood, blood vengeance, atonement through blood, and the use of blood in healing and protective magic,” the Cosmics Schuler and Klages aspired to “forging the desired connection with the past through a magical blood sacrifice.”[39]

Otto Gross, Jung’s student and a resident of Schwabing, explains Richard Noll, “knew several of the members of the circle and probably developed his interest in matriarchy and Bachofen through them.”[40] Gross was connected to the Cosmics through his relationship with Klages’ lover, Contessa Franziska “Fanny” zu Reventlow, whom Klages described as a “pagan saint.” Fanny left Munich for Monte Verità in in 1910, where she wrote her “Schwabing” novels. She also got to know Rainer Maria Rilke and Theodor Lessing (1872 – 1933) political ideals, as well as his Zionism made him a very controversial person during the rise of Nazi Germany. In her 1913 autobiography, she described the Cosmics as “a spiritual movement, a niveau, a direction, a protest, a new cult, or rather an attempt to use old cults to achieve new religious possibilities.”[41]

Nevertheless, George and his entourage’s use of the swastika in some of his publications, such as the Blätter für die Kunst (“Journal for the Arts”), was derived from the influence of the Cosmic Circle. The George-Kreis’ ideas have been identified as preparing the ground for the rise of Nazism by Marxist scholars such as Bruno Frei or writers like Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Thomas Mann. However, George apparently detested the Nazis’ racial theories, especially the notion of the “Nordic superman” and when Goebbels offered him the presidency of a new academy for the arts, he refused, and went to live in exile in Switzerland, where he died in 1933. According to Michael and Erika Metzger, “When Stefan George died in 1933, there was a grim dissonance between the eulogies from inside and outside Germany, the former claiming George as the prophet of the Third Reich, which had taken power that year, the latter often interpreting his silence as expressing his utter contempt for the new regime.”[42] Twenty-five members of the George-Kreis, including Jewish members like Wolfskehl, attended the funeral. The laurel wreath later delivered by the German Foreign Office bore a swastika printed on a white ribbon. Some of the younger members of the George-Kreis were seen given the Nazi salute.[43]

Ernst Jünger’s friend, Graf Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, began to have doubts about Hitler because his belief in the ideas of his mentor Stefan George. Stauffenberg was one of the leading members of the failed plot of 1944 to assassinate Adolf Hitler and remove the Nazi Party from power. Those closest to the “Master,” as Stefan George had his disciples call him, included several members of the assassination plot. George dedicated Das neue Reich (“the new Empire”) in 1928, including the Geheimes Deutschland (“secret Germany”) written in 1922, to Stauffenberg’s eldest brother, Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. When Stauffenberg was executed, his last words were, “Es lebe das heilige Deutschland!” (“Long live our sacred Germany!”), or, possibly, “Es lebe das geheime Deutschland!” (“Long live the secret Germany!”).[44]

School of Wisdom 

As noted by Richard Noll, “It has heretofore escaped notice that Jung was very much a product of the vitalistic Lebensphilosophie,” whose “irrationalism” Georg Lukacs attributed as the source of the rise of fascism and Nazism in Germany.[45] As described by Jay Sherry’s Carl Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative, Jung’s interest in Nietzsche was emblematic of his involvement in Germany’s Conservative Revolution. After his break with Freud, Jung became more active in Germany attending conferences at the School of Wisdom founded by Count Hermann Keyserling (1880 – 1946). Keyserling, who came from an aristocratic Russian Baltic family, was an important figure in the intellectual life of Weimar Germany. He married Countess Maria Goedela Bismarck, granddaughter of Otto Bismark. Before losing his fortune in the Bolshevik Revolution, Keyserling traveled around the world and wrote a book about his adventures, The Travel Diary of a Philosopher, which became a bestseller. 

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. Ernest Louis was the elder son of Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine and Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. One of his younger sisters, Alexandra, would marry Tsar Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia, while another sister, Victoria Mountbatten, would be the mother of Queen Louise of Sweden and of Princess Alice of Battenberg, who was the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth II. Prince Philip’s father, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, was the son of George I of Greece, the son of Christian IX of Denmark and Louise of Hesse-Kassel, a friend of Comtesse de Keller who married Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, the founder of synarchism. Andrew’s mother Olga Constantinovna of Russia, granddaughter of Tsar Nicholas I, a niece of Tsar Alexander II and first cousin of Tsar Alexander III. While their only son, Prince Philip, served in the British navy during World War II, all four of their daughters were married to Germans, all of whom had ties to the Nazi party.

Through her uncle Ernest, Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, became a student of the works of Keyserling. Alice became interested in occultism through her favorite book, Les Grands Initiés (“The Great Initiates”), by Eduard Schuré, a member of Max Theon’s Cosmic Movement. A friend of Richard Wagner and Rudolf Steiner, Schuré was listed by Lanz von Liebenfels’ among the “ario-christian” tradition of mystics that included Eliphas Lévi, Josephin Péladan, Papus, H.P. Blavatsky, Franz Hartmann, Annie Besant, Charles Leadbeater. Alice became deeply religious, converting to the Greek Orthodox Church in 1928. She believed herself to be married to Christ, with whom she was “physically” involved, and through whom she met spiritual leaders such as the Buddha. She believed it was her duty to serve as the link between these various gods and the people of earth.[46]

Keyserling founded the School of Wisdom under the “particular and unusual personality” of Ernest, as he described him, “whose magnanimous initiative made possible the material founding of the school.”[47] At the opening ceremony, Keyserling gave two lectures, one on the Indian and Chinese legacy, the other on the wisdom of the classical and the modern world, themes that were later to play a central role at Eranos. Keyserling invited many of his friends to participate in this new venture, including psychologist, sinologist and translator of the I Ching, Richard Wilhelm, theologian Paul Tillich, German novelist and Noble prize winner, Hermann Hesse and Noble prize-winning Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore, who was heavily involved with members of the Theosophical Society in England and India. Paul Tillich (1886 – 1965) was a German-American Christian existentialist philosopher and Lutheran Protestant theologian who is widely regarded as one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century.[48] From 1924 to 1925, Tillich served as a Professor of Theology at the University of Marburg, where he met and developed a relationship with Heidegger.[49] When Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933, Tillich was dismissed from his position at the University of Frankfurt. When Reinhold Niebuhr travelled to Germany in the summer of that year, he contacted Tillich and convinced him to join the faculty at New York City’s Union Theological Seminary. There has, however, been criticism of Tillich as belonging to the “Conservative Revolution” and for having anti-democratic ideas. Tillich did proclaim the desire for overthrow the Weimar system with its capitalistic economy and parliamentary democracy.[50]

According to Noll, Keyserling “was unabashedly a völkisch German in his metaphysical outlook.”[51] One of Keyserling’s central claims was that certain “gifted individuals” were “born to rule” on the basis of Social Darwinism. Keyserling was the first to use the term Führerprinzip (“leader principle”), which prescribed the fundamental basis of political authority in the governmental structures of the Third Reich. Führerprinzip can be most succinctly understood to mean that “the Führer’s word is above all written law” and that governmental policies, decisions, and offices ought to work toward the realization of this end.[52] It was at the School of Wisdom that Jung met Prince Karl Anton Rohan and became active in the Kulturbund. Jung published frequently in Rohan’s Europäische Revue. In a newspaper article entitled “The Fight against Neurosis and the Renewal of Europe,” Rohan wrote that “Jung stands among the leading avant-garde in the fight for a new Europe.”[53]

At Keyserling’s School of Wisdom, Jung also met Jakob Wilhelm Hauer (1881 – 1962), a German Indologist and religious studies writer. As Hauer boasted, “By the way, regarding the expression ‘conservative revolutionary’, I can tell you, if that expression is now popular, I am its source.”[54] In 1920, Hauer formed the Bund der Köngener, a youth movement that came into contact with the Wandervogel tendency. The Bund, which was for a time was led by Rudolf Otto, became attracted to the ideals of the völkisch movement, especially as Hauer began to move more towards developing his own religion.[55] In 1932, Hauer founded the German Faith Movement, a religious society aimed at replacing Christianity in German-speaking countries with an anti-Christian and anti-Semitic modern paganism based on German literature and Hindu scripture. As the basis for this religion he envisaged, “the Nordic literature, the sacred scriptures of ancient India, the writings of the Greek world including Neoplatonism, German mysticism as exemplified by Meister Eckhart, German idealism and the works of our great poets.”[56]

Hauer had initially hoped that his cult might be adopted as the state religion of the Third Reich. Hitler, however, thought little of Hauer and laughed at his followers who “made asses of themselves by worshipping Wotan and Odin and the ancient, but now obsolete, German mythology.”[57] The movement had around 200,000 followers at its height. In his 1936 essay “Wotan,” Jung speaks of Ergriffenheit, explained in the English version as “a state of being seized or possessed,”[58] and characterizes Germany as “infected… rolling towards perdition.”[59] However, Jung saw Hauer’s German Faith Movement as “decent and well-meaning people who honestly admit their Ergriffenheit and try to come to terms with this new and undeniable fact.” He commends Hauer’s book Deutsche Gottschau as an attempt “to build a bridge between the dark forces of life and the shining world of historical ideas.”[60]

Eranos Conferences

As detailed by Hans Thomas Hakl in Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, Eranos was an intellectual discussion group founded in 1933, dedicated to the study of psychology, religion, philosophy and spirituality which met annually in Ascona, near the site of Monte Verità. The group was founded by the Dutch socialite and spiritualist Olga Froebe-Kapteyn (1881 – 1962) at the suggestion of the eminent German religious historian, Rudolf Otto. Her mother, Truus Muysken (1855 – 1920), a feminist and social activist, befriended like-minded people as Bernard Shaw and Peter Kropotkin. In 1920, Froebe-Kapteyn and her father visited the Monte Verità Sanatorium in Ascona, and a few years later her father bought the Casa Gabriella, an ancient farmhouse nearby. She began to study Indian philosophy and meditation and to take an interest in theosophy. Among her friends and influences were German poet Ludwig Derleth, Carl Jung, and Richard Wilhelm, whose translation of the I Ching greatly interested her. Wilhelm first introduced the I Ching to Jung, who immediately consulted it and was impressed by the message that he received.[61]

Froebe-Kapteyn also had early contacts with members of the Ramakrishna movement as well as with the Theosophical Society, and she is said to have even been close to the then-president Annie Besant and Krishnamurti.[62] In the late 1920s, after the seven years of “disciplined concentration,” while visiting her brother living in Long Island, United States, she was introduced to the theosophist Alice Ann Bailey (1880 – 1949). In 1920, a dispute arose over leadership of Annie Besant, whose position as president had been undermined by the fallout over the “World Teacher” Krishnamurti. Following independently channeled messages she became to receive in 1919, Bailey broke with the Theosophical 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.

According to her own account, Eranos first emerged in 1927, when Froebe-Kapteyn was working a series of “Meditation Plates,” geometrical drawings produced in a meditative state and following Bailey’s instructions. Many of the images revolved around the theme of the Holy Grail.[63] In 1928, following a “vision” she experienced in 1927, Olga Froebe-Kapteyn built a lecture hall near her Casa Gabriella, called, Casa Eranos. When Fröbe-Kapteyn met Carl Jung at Keyserling’s School of Wisdom, he suggested the auditorium be used as a “meeting place between East and West.”[64] During her stay in the US, Froebe-Kapteyn proposed to Bailey collaborating in the creation in Ascona of a “nondenominational spiritual center open to all scholars of esotericism of any geographical origin and religious faith.” This enterprise, the International Center for Spiritual Research, lasted three years, from 1930 to 1932, and is considered the “roots” of Eranos.[65] The Summer School attracted a considerable number of people from the nearby colony of Monte Verità, despite Bailey’s disapproval. Bailey believed that the area around Ascona was afflicted by a curse, due to the fact that in ancient times it had been the “centre of Black Mass in Central Europe.”[66] 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.”[67]

By 1930, there had been ten meetings or seminars. Lecturers included Leo Baeck, Jung, Gerardus van der Leeuw, and Erwin Rousselle who were also to reappear at Eranos. Also included were Thomas Mann, Alfred Adler, Paul Dahlke, Leo Frobenius, Leopold Ziegler, Max Scheler, Ernst Troeltsch, Rabindranath Tagore, and, from the Stefan George circle, Rudolf Kassner and Oskar A.H. Schmitz. Of all her friends and all the artists and writers with whom she interacted, the one who influenced her most strongly was Ludwig Derleth (1870 – 1948), who while living in Munich became part of the George-Kreis and also the Munich Cosmic Circle.[68] Derleth professed an ascetic and militant Christianity, in which Christ and Caesar were merged into the figure of Christus Imperator. Derleth associated with Papus and Péladan, and the very prolific writer Paul Sédir (1871 – 1926), who became Superior Inconnu Initiateur and a member of the Supreme Council of the Martinist Order.[69] Italian professor of German literature, Furio Jesi, has claimed that Derleth had devised pseudo-magical and anti-Semitic rites. Froebe-Kapteyn herself was allegedly an “extremely willing disciple” in these “anti-Semitic rituals.”[70] Mann regarded Derleth as a precursor of National Socialism and took him as the model for two of his fictional characters, first in The Magic Mountain (1924) and then again as Daniel zur Höhe, both in the short story At the Prophet’s (1904) and in Doctor Faustus (1947).[71]

Eranos Circle

The theme of first Eranos conference, which took place in 1933, was “Yoga and Meditation in East and West.” Discussions were opened by the first scholar that Froebe-Kapteyn invited, Heinrich Zimmer (1890 – 1943), with an address on “The Meaning of Indian Tantric Yoga.” Zimmer first became interested in Tantra through his discovery of the works of Sir John Woodroffe, also known as Arthur Avalon. Zimmer was particularly interested in the Tarot and the legends of King Arthur, and in the 1920s and 1930s he befriended Alexander von Bernus, a practicing alchemist, whose two books on the subject are still considered classics by specialists.[72] Bernus’ entourage included Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, and members of the Stefan George circle. Bernus was also a close friend of Rudolf Steiner. Steiner also wrote articles for the journal Das Reich, edited by Bernus, which appeared between 1916 and 1920 and to which Emil Preetorius and Max Pulver also contributed, who would both later be speakers at Eranos.[73]

Accommodation for lecturers, at least in the period 1933–39, was usually in the Hotel Monte Verità. From 1923 to 1926, Monte Verità was operated as a hotel until it was acquired in 1926 by Zimmer’s friend, Baron Eduard von der Heydt, who showed suspicious sympathies for Nazi Germany.[74] In her private notes on her meditation images, she 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.[75]

Also participating in the first conference was the theologian and scholar of religion Friedrich Heiler (1892 – 1967), with whom Froebe-Kapteyn was particularly close. Heiler also wrote for the journal Zeitschrift für Buddhismus, and he was a leading exponent of religious phenomenology, which strongly influenced the Eranos meetings. Heiler was also in contact with the influential occultist Arnoldo Krumm-Heller, the founder of the Fraternitas Rosicruciana Antiqua, belonged to the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), and knew Theodor Reuss as well as Aleister Crowley and others. Heiler was also patriarch of the Gnostic Catholic Church, the ecclesiastical arm of the OTO.[76]

The theme of the second conference held in 1934 “The Psychopomp in Eastern and Western Symbolism.” In her welcoming speech, Froebe-Kapteyn emphasized that there had always been both an Eastern and a Western one: “One only needs to think of the Hermetic and Pythagorean schools or, later on, the alchemical and Rosicrucian traditions.” In the analytical psychology of Jung she detected “the beginnings of a modern and Western yoga… a method of spiritual orientation, guidance and discipline.”[77]

Invited to speak in at the 1934 conference were Martin Buber and Rudolf Bernoulli (1880 – 1948), a member of a famous Basel family of scholars, who lectured on the symbolism of the Tarot. Bernoulli was well acquainted with Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing, the “leader of parapsychology in Germany.” Bernoulli co-founded the Hermetische Gesellschaft (“Hermetic society”), which is said to have had an important influence on the direction of Eranos. The most important co-founder of the Hermetic Society was Fritz Allemann, who for many years was vice-president of the Swiss Banking Corporation (today UBS). Allemann was also in friendly contact with the German psychotherapist and Zen master Count Karlfried Dürckheim, and had several meetings with the Dalai Lama. Bernoulli also admired the writer of occult fiction and Golden Dawn member, Gustav Meyrink.[78]

According to Oskar Rudolf Schlag (1907 – 1990), Jung was well had been a member of the Hermetic Society, until—his expulsion was made necessary due to the rivalry between “Atma,” the guiding spirit of the Hermetic Society, and “Philemon,” Jung’s spirit guide, whom he claimed had accompanied him since the age of three.[79] It was apparently through Allemann that Jung made the acquaintance of Schlag, who is considered and one of the most gifted mediums of the twentieth century.[80] Already in at the age of sixteen he experienced paranormal manifestations, which soon attracted the attention of von Schrenk-Notzing. Although he had no formal academic qualification, from 1938 he was a lecturer at the Zurich Institute for Applied Psychology, and in the 1940s he was lecturing on the psychology of yoga, Tantra, alchemy, and magic. On Schlag’s instructions, the Swiss artist Max Hunziker finally created his own version of the twenty-two major Arcana of the Tarot. In 1948, Schlag joined the Masonic lodge Sapere Aude in Zurich and in 1949 the lodge Uhland in New York. In the Swiss Alpina Lodge he held the office of Worshipful Master.[81]

According to Maor, the source of völkisch tendency was the influence of Martin Buber, who worked closely with Bosnian-Serb mystic Dimitrije Mitrinovic, one of the most important contributors to Alfred P. Orage’s New Age, and who was linked with Wassily Kandinsky. Along with Frieda and D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Alma Mahler, the wife of Gustav Mahler, Buber was a member of the sexual cult of Dr. Otto Gross [82] The direct influence of Herder’s approach, as well as that of Goethe, explains Shapira, is apparent in the views Buber expressed on nationalism at a special meeting of the Twelfth Zionist Congress in 1921, and which he later elaborated on in a 1949 article entitled, “Toward an Understanding of the National Idea.”[83] Buber, explains Maor, “advocated a new Jewish religiosity, based on his version of Hasidism, centered around the sanctification of the worldly aspects of life.”[84] As Zionists tended to regard increased Jewish spirituality with the degeneration resulting from exile, they aspired to revive “authentic” ancient Judaism, which was rooted in the soil and corporeality. Thus, Buber advocated that only a return to the material aspects of life could foster the “organic unity” of the people.[85] According to Maor, “The Nietzschean transvaluation that Buber presents as the authentic core of Hasidism follows from this hallowing of the natural.”[86] Buber wrote, “There is nothing that is evil in itself; every passion can become a virtue… Every act is hallowed, if it is directed toward salvation.”[87]

Speaking at Eranos between 1933 and 1935 was Munich psychotherapist Gustav Richard Heyer (1890 – 1967) of the Göring Institute, and Jung’s leading promoter in Germany. Heyer had connections with the George-Kreis and was a devotee of Klages’ völkisch Lebensphilosophie.[88] Friedrich Müller, Jung’s old medical school mentor, declared that the work of Heyer, was “not science, but Schwabing!”[89] This influence can be seen in his 1932 book The Organism of the Soul, published by Lehmanns Verlag, Germany’s leading publisher of medical books and major promoter of eugenics and other völkisch causes. The firm’s policy was a reflection of the convictions of Julius Lehmann, the firm’s founder, an early and vocal supporter of the Nazi Party. In 1940, the firm issued a fiftieth anniversary volume that recounted its history and included a bibliography of such leading eugenicists as Hans Gunther, Albert Hoche, and Ernst Rüdin.[90]

Heyer helped found the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy in 1926. Jung joined the society in 1928, and became its president in  1930. However, when Hitler came to power in 1933, all German professional societies were required to become gleichgeschaltet, “conformed” to Nazi ideology. In 1934, the leadership of the German General Medical Society for Psychotherapy was taken over by Matthias Göring (1879 – 1945), whose position as leader of organized psychotherapy in Nazi Germany stemmed from the fact that he was an elder cousin of Hermann Göring. The German Institute became popularly known as the Göring Institute. Göring, who had joined the Nazi party in 1933, preached against “Jewish” psychoanalysis and enforced the exclusion of Jewish psychoanalysts, particularly those from the Freudian school of thought.[91]

Also speaking at the conference in 1934 was Jung’s friend Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who a year earlier had joined both the Hitler Youth and Alfred Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (“Militant alliance for German culture,” and was subsequently inducted by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich personally into the SS and the SD.[92] Jung had met Hauer at Keyserling’s School of Wisdom in the late 1920s, where they discussed their common interest in yoga. Jung attended Hauer’s lecture on yoga at a conference of the International Society in Baden-Baden in 1930. A year later, Jung accepted Hauer’s offer to dedicate to him his book on yoga, Yoga als Heilweg. Subsequently, Hauer gave a number of lectures, including one on yoga, at Jung’s Psychology Club in Zurich. Jung was so inspired that in 1932 he broke off his own seminars on the active imagination visions of Christiana Morgan—mistress to both Henry A. Murray and Chaim Weizmann—in order Zimmer to lecture.[93] Jung invited Hauer and Zimmer to collaborate with him on an international journal with the publisher Daniel Brody, who later published the Eranos volumes. Keyserling also took part. Hauer also became close to Jung’s “muse” and mistress, Toni Wolff.[94]

A discussion between Buber and Hauer was recorded in the files of the SD, about a possible agreement between the Third Reich and the leaders of the Zionist movement, according to which the Jewish influence in Germany would be restricted.[95] Years later, when he was asked for his opinion on Hauer, Buber said, “Hauer is someone who lives according to an earnest and deeply religious worldview. This has led him to a passionate longing for a renewal of the German nationhood from its essential roots.”[96]

Froebe-Kapteyn invited Hauer to come again in 1935, but he was obliged to refuse. As Froebe-Kapteyn later explained, Martin Buber’s participation in the 1934 Eranos conference led to difficulties with the German Ministry of Education, which in 1936 forbid German speakers to travel abroad. In 1935, Hauer was forced to issue a press communiqué denying his membership in the Eranos circle, and he stated that he had not been aware of any “Judaeo-Masonic machinations or occult exercises.” A critique of Eranos was published by H. Rehwaldt in the Ludendorff’s journal Am Heiligen Quell Deutscher Kraft (“At the sacred spring of German strength”). Rehwaldt mentions Froebe-Kapteyn’s opening speech, placing it the context of Hermetic, Gnostic, Pythagorean, alchemical, and Rosicrucian traditions. The text then goes on: “So it is these occult teachings that are the basis of the learned Eranos Society, which perpetuates the venerable tradition of a “Count” of Saint-Germain, a Cagliostro—or whatever the names of these Rosicrucian and occultist swindlers may be—in the shape of Freudian psychoanalysis and the form given to it by C.G. Jung.”[97] However, she travelled to Berlin to meet with the Ministry and succeeded in convincing them to reverse their decision.[98]

Heyer spoke at Eranos again in 1938. Heyer was published in the two-volume work Reich der Seele, which, besides including essays by Heyer and his wife Lucy, also contained an essay by Zimmer and another by Sigrid Strauß-Klöbe, and covered a range of themes from philosophy and Greek mythology to the Indian doctrine of the “guiding of souls.” Strauß-Klöbe, who later also spoke at Eranos, first met Jung at the home of Count Keyserling. She and her husband, Heinz Arthur Strauß, also a noted astrologer and historian of astrology, produced their first astrology book in 1927. Strauß-Klöbe also produced a work comparing astrology and the symbols of the zodiac with the I Ching. This study group was eventually dissolved as part of the centralizing policy of the Nazis and was absorbed into the Göring Institute.  Heyer, who joined the Nazi Party in 1937, worked as a head of department of the Göring Institute from 1939 to 1944.[99] Jung’s earlier attempts to resign from the Göring Institute were blocked by Göring, who wanted to make as much use of Jung as possible. But Jung finally left the International Society in 1939. “But,” as Gary Lachman pointed out, “that he accepted the position at all and remained as long as he did has been taken as evidence that he didn’t want to get in the Nazis’ bad books too early in the game.”[100]

Bollingen Series

In 1938, Froebe-Kapteyn had applied for financial support to the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, but was turned down. Her fortunes changed when she met Mary and Paul Mellon, of the influential Mellon family, thanks to her friendship with Jung.[101] Paul was the son of Andrew Mellon, who through the bank established by his father, Thomas Mellon, the patriarch of the family, had developed some of the leading American industries, including Gulf Oil, Standard Steel Car Company, and the Aluminum Company of America. Prior to becoming Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, a supporter of Hitler, controlled interests such as Alcoa, and formed several cartel arrangements with I.G. Farben.[102] In college, Paul became vice-chair of the Yale Daily News and to the board of the Yale Literary Magazine. He was also the first man to be tapped by both Skull and Bones and Scroll and Key, but turned down Bonesmen for Keys. Paul Mellon was co-heir to one of America’s greatest business fortunes, derived from the Mellon Bank. Paul Mellon was one of the four richest men in the United States, the others were Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew’s brother Richard.[103]

Paul Mellon served with the OSS in Europe during World War II, working in Berne with Allen Dulles, who worked closely with Jung, whom he first met in 1936. Mary Mellon began reading Carl Jung’s work in 1934 and she and her husband were deeply impressed on hearing Jung speak to the Analytical Psychology Club in New York in 1937. In New York the Mellons underwent a Jungian analysis with Ann Moyer and her husband, Erlo van Waveren, the “business manager” of Alice Bailey. The Mellons travelled to Zurich in 1938, attending Jung’s later famous seminars on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra at the Psychology Club, where they came for the first time into contact with the I Ching. One of the participants, the psychologist Cary Baynes, a friend of Froebe-Kapteyn, with Jung’s encouragement, had begun to translate Wilhelm’s German version of the oracle into English. Mary Mellon’s first consultation of the oracle was so successful that she immediately said she was prepared to finance the publication. After the seminar, Baynes and the van Waverens suggested to the Mellons that they visit to Ascona to meet Froebe-Kapteyn. As Erlo later recounted, “Olga cast her spell on Paul and Mima. They clicked right away. Olga had magic, but so had Mima, and she caught fire immediately.” Paul Mellon also remembered that “Olga was a very powerful, mysterious sort of woman, brimful of all kinds of mystical learning.”[104] Even before they left Ascona, the Mellons had committed themselves to funding the publication of the proceedings of the forthcoming conference at Eranos on the “The Great Mother.”[105]

Mary Mellon conceived of a plan that would make the work of Jung available in English in a uniform edition. The Bollingen Foundation, which she was established to achieve this publishing goal, was named after Bollingen Tower at Jung personal retreat outside of Zurich, where Mary Mellon proposed the project to him on a visit in 1940.[106] In that same year, Froebe-Kapteyn flew to the United States at the invitation of Paul and Mary Mellon, to give a series of lectures. The return flight to Zurich proved problematic, as she had to go via Stuttgart and her passport was stamped with a German visa. Froebe-Kapteyn had fallen under the suspicion of the FBI since 1941. It had also been noticed that all her travel expenses had been paid by Paul Mellon and that she had given his residence as her address during the visit. In early 1943, Froebe-Kapteyn once again came under accusations of pro-Nazism. On Jung’s advice, she turned to Dulles, who investigated the case and found no evidence, thus putting an end to the suspicions once and for all. Dulles’ mistress Mary Bancroft is also said to have spoken out in Olga’s favor.[107]

Nevertheless, due to outbreak of the war, and aggravated by the FBI’s suspicions about Froebe-Kapteyn, the Mellons were forced to break off all contact with everyone apart from those living in the United States or England. As a result, the Mellons closed their bank account in Switzerland and handed over the entire Swiss correspondence to the FBI. This action had the support of Heinrich Zimmer, who confirmed for them that the I Ching was fully supported the decision. In the early summer of 1942, the Bollingen Foundation was completely dissolved. Despite the dissolution of the foundation, Mary Mellon did not want to give up her publishing activities.  Therefore, Zimmer suggested Kurt Wolff, whose publishing house in Leipzig and later in Munich had enjoyed great success. Already in Munich Wolff had moved in the influential circle of Frobenius and Edgar Dacqué, where he met Oswald Spengler among others. As Wolff’s mother was Jewish, he emigrated to the United States, where he founded Pantheon Books. His aim had been to publish in America editions of European authors such as Jakob Burckhardt, Stefan George, Goethe, Dante, Jan Comenius, Leo Tolstoy, and many others. Finally, in May 1943, the Mellons set up a budget for a publishing project called the Bollingen Series. For the logo of the series, the Mellons chose the Gnostic wheel.[108]

It was also the custom that each speaker at Eranos donated the text of his lecture in exchange for lodging and hospitality, which resulted in the collection of over seven hundred articles published in over seventy Eranos Yearbooks. Parallel with the development of the conferences was the creation of an Eranos-Archiv für Symbolforschung (“Eranos Archive for Symbol Research”), to hold the numerous reproductions of images derived from Eastern and Western iconographic traditions, including alchemy, folklore, mythology, and contemporary “archetypal” representations. The Eranos Archive supported studies, such as Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy (1944), Mircea Eliade’s The Forge and the Crucible—The Origins and Structure of Alchemy (1956), and Erich Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness (1954) and The Great Mother—An Analysis of the Archetype (1955). The material is preserved at the Warburg Institute in London as the Eranos Collection of Jungian Archetypes. The Eranos Archive also represented the basis for the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS) in New York.[109]

Agent 488

US military intelligence apparently found that claims of Jung’s Nazi sympathies were unsubstantiated, and cleared him for employment in the OSS, where he was known as “Agent 488” by Allen Dulles. Jung had a devoted student in Mary Bancroft, who became Dulles’ mistress. Dulles later remarked: “Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof Jung contributed to the allied cause during the war.”[110] Nearing the end of the war, Dulles exchanged letters with Jung on the best use of psychological techniques for turning the German “collective mind” from Nazism towards democracy.[111]

Likely the most widespread application of Jung’s theories is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment developed during the World War II, designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. Briggs and Myers adapted Jung’s four psychological types, which were based on the four elements of classical cosmology on which the zodiac, with its corresponding human character traits, was structured. Nicholas Campion comments that this is “a fascinating example of ‘disguised astrology’, masquerading as science in order to claim respectability.”[112]

In conversation with Margaret Ostrowski-Sachs, a friend of Hermann Hesse, Jung admitted that he had kept his “secret knowledge” to himself for years, and only finally made it public in Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, in 1951.[113] Jung was also a student of astrology. He read Ptolemy’s Almagest and worked up charts for some of his patients. He was familiar with the astronomical phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes. He was greatly interested in certain gradual transformations of archetypes, which he believed corresponded to the Platonic Great Year and the procession of the equinoxes, which results in the vernal equinox changing about every 2100 years, for a complete cycle 25,000 years.

As early as 1940, Jung was talking about the coming Age of Aquarius.[114] Aion is, in fact, an essay in the evolution of consciousness, using the astrological ages as symbols of the collective unconscious, a kind of “precession of the archetypes.” Fish symbolism surrounds Christ because Christ was the central symbol of the Age of Pisces, the astrological sign of the fish. Previous ages, of Taurus and Aries, produced bull and ram symbolism. The coming age is that of Aquarius. As an example of how the archetypes work on the collective consciousness, Jung notes that Pope Pius XII’s decree on November 1, 1950, making the Assumption of Mary, Christ’s mother, part of Christian dogma, showed that Christianity recognized the need to include the feminine in the Godhead. The masses demanded it and their insistence was, Jung writes, “the urge of the archetype to realize itself.”[115]

Jung’s work and writings from the 1940s onwards focused on alchemy. Though Evola rejected Jung’s interpretation of alchemy, Jung described Evola’s The Hermetic Tradition as a “magisterial portrayal of Hermetic philosophy.”[116] In 1944, Jung published Psychology and Alchemy, in which he analyzed the alchemical symbols and came to the conclusion that there is a direct relationship between them and the psychoanalytical process. He argued that the alchemical process was the transformation of the impure soul, symbolized by lead, to perfected soul, identified as gold, and a metaphor for the process of individuation.

In 1950, on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, Jung set up a stone cube on the lakeshore, just west of Bollingen Tower, inscribing it on three sides. One side contains a quote taken from the Rosarium philosophorum, a sixteenth-century alchemical treatise. The second side depicts a Telesphorus figure, a homunculus bearing a lantern and wearing a hooded cape. The inscription includes “Time is a child at play, gambling; a child's is the kingship,” a fragment attributed to Heraclitus, and “He points the way to the gates of the sun and to the land of dreams,” a quote from Homer’s Odyssey, which refers to Hermes the psychopomp, who leads away the spirits of the slain suitors. The second side also contains a four-part mandala of alchemical significance. The top quarter of the mandala is dedicated to Saturn, the bottom quarter to Mars, the left quarter to Sol-Jupiter [male], and the right quarter to Luna-Venus [female]. The third side, that faces the lake, bears a Latin inscription of sayings which, Jung says, “are more or less quotations from alchemy.”[117]

In 1951, near the end of his life, Jung published a book called Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, named after the Hellenistic deity of time and the zodiac, with a cover photograph featuring Deus Leontocephalus, in reference to the lion-headed god of Mithraism. According to Noll, “When Jung became one with Aion in his visionary initiation experience, in his imagination he was not only becoming a full participant in the mysteries of Mithras; he was experiencing a direct initiation into the most ancient of the mysteries of his Aryan ancestors.”[118]

By the 1950s, Jung began to include numerous references to Kabbalistic ideas and sources in his works. Jung claimed to have read the “whole of Kabbalah Denudata” of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, and quoted the works of Gershom Scholem.[119] He acknowledged his debt to the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria in the writing of his Answer to Job for the idea that man must help God in completing creation.[120] Jung’s last great work, Mysterium Coniunctionis, is a treatise on alchemy completed in 1954, filled with discussions of such Kabbalistic symbols as Adam Kadmon, the divine archetypes or Sefiroth, and the union of the Holy One and his Shekhinah. As Drob explains:

These Jewish symbols (which in some but not all instances were mediated for Jung through the Christian Kabbalah) became important pivots around which Jung constructed his final interpretations of such notions as the archetypes and the collective unconscious, and his theory of the ultimate psychological purpose of man.[121]

In an interview conducted in 1955, Jung remarked that “the Hasidic Rabbi Dov Baer from Mezeritch [a disciple of Rabbi Yisrael Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism], whom they called the Great Maggid… anticipated [my] entire psychology in the eighteenth century,” calling the Maggid “a most impressive man.”[122] As Drob points out, the Maggid had posited a notion that clearly anticipated Jung’s own “psychologization” of the objects of religious discourse.[123] In his autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung described experiencing visions, following his heart attack in 1944, which involved overtly Kabbalistic themes.[124] Finally, in his Kabbalistic vision, Jung identifies himself with Rabbi Simon ben Yochai, who, according to Jewish tradition, is the author of the Zohar.

[1] Ray, Michael. “Why Was Nazi Germany Called the Third Reich?” Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved from: https://www.britannica.com/story/why-was-nazi-germany-called-the-third-reich

[2] Manfred Schoeps. Der Deutsche Herrenklub. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Jungkonservativismus in der Weimarer Republik, Diss. phil (Erlangen-Nürnberg 1974).

[3] Sedgwick. Against the Modern World, p. 105.

[4] E. Kövics and Mary Boros-Kazai. “Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europe Movement on the Questions of International Politicsduring the 1920s.” Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, Vol. 25, No. 3/4 (1979), pp. 233.

[5] Pascal Themanlys. “Le Mouvement Cosmique.” Retrieved from http://www.abpw.net/cosmique/theon/mouvem.htm

[6] Guido Müller. “France and Germany after the Great War,“ in Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Frank Schumacher, ed. Culture and International History (Berghan Book, 2003), p. 103.

[7] Guido Müller. Europäische Gesellschaftsbeziehungen nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Das Deutsch-Französische Studienkomitee und der Europäische Kulturbund (Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2014), p. 391, n. 247.

[8] Jay Sherry. Carl Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 84.

[9] Ibid., p. 93.

[10] Müller. Europäische Gesellschaftsbeziehungen nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg, n. 247.

[11] Guido Müller. “France and Germany After the Great War.” Culture and International History. Ed. Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht & Frank Schumacher (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), p. 104.

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

[13] C. G. Jung. Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), pp. 44-45.

[14] Lachman. Jung the Mystic, p. 3.

[15]  C. G. Jung. Analytical Psychology, p. 110.

[16] Lachman. Jung the Mystic, p. 3.

[17] C.G. Jung. Collected Works, Volume 10, p. 16.

[18] Ibid., p. 3.

[19] June Leavitt. Esoteric Symbols: The Tarot in Yeats, Eliot, and Kafka (University Press of America, 2007), p. 62.

[20] Jay Sherry. Carl Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 40.

[21] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, (New York: New York University Press, 2002), p. 335.

[22] Jay Sherry. Carl Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 4.

[23] Deirdre Bair. Jung: A Biography, (Little Brown and Company, 2003) p. 431.

[24] Goodrick-Clarke. Black Sun, p. 178.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Jung. Analytical Psychology, p. 167.

[27] Armin Mohler. The Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1918-1932 (ARES Verlag, Gmbh, 2018).

[28] Paul Bishop. Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life: A Vitalist Toolkit (Routledge, 2017).

[29] Nitzan Lebovic. The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. AIAA, 2013).

[30] Richard Wollin. “Walter Benjamin Meets the Cosmics.” Retrieved from https://media.law.wisc.edu/m/ndkzz/wolin_revised_10-13_benjamin_meets_the_cosmics.doc

[31] Steven E. Aschheim. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890 - 1990 (University of California Press, 1994), p. 80.

[32] Steven E. Aschheim. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (University of California Press, 1992), pp. 80–81.

[33] Steven E. Aschheim. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (University of California Press, 1992), pp. 81.

[34] Steven E. Aschheim. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (University of California Press, 1992), pp. 81.

[35] Jason Ananda Josephson Storm. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017), p. 212.

[36] Nitzan Lebovic. “Dionysian Politics and The Discourse of "Rausch’.” UCLA Working Papers (December 20, 2004). Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/content/qt9z91f2vs/qt9z91f2vs.pdf

[37] Robert E. Norton, Stefan George and His Circle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 329; cited in Wollin. “Walter Benjamin Meets the Cosmics.”

[38] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement. p. 166.

[39] Hans Thomas Hakl. Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 24.

[40] Richard Noll. The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung (Random House, 1997), p. 143.

[41] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement. p. 168.

[42] Michael & Erika Metzger. Stefan George (Twayne’s World Authors Series, 1972), p. 41.

[43] Peter Hoffmann. Stauffenberg: A Family History, 1905-1944 (2008), p. 73-74.

[44] Eugen Georg Schwarz. “Das ‘geheime’ Deutschland.” FOCUS (1994).

[45] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement. p. 38.

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

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

[48] Ted Peters & Carl E. Braaten (ed.). A map of twentieth-century theology: readings from Karl Barth to radical pluralism (Fortress Press, 1995).

[49] Hue Woodson. Heideggerian Theologies: The Pathmarks of John Macquarrie, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Karl Rahner (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2018), pp. 94–107.

[50] Hans Thomas Hakl. Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 368 n. 297.

[51] Richard Noll. The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung, (Random House, 1997), p. 143.

[52] “Nazi Conspiracy & Aggression Volume I Chapter VII: Means Used by the Nazi Conspiractors in Gaining Control of the German State.” A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust.

[53] Jay Sherry. Carl Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 84.

[54] Karla Poewe. New Religions and the Nazis (Routledge, 2006), p. 51.

[55] Hans-Christian Brandenburg & Rudolf Daur. Die Brücke zu Köngen. Fünfzig Jahre Bund der Köngener (Stuttgart, 1970).

[56] Hakl. Eranos, p. 77.

[57] Petteri Pietikainen. “The Volk and Its Unconscious: Jung, Hauer, and the ‘German Revolution’.” Journal of Contemporary History 35, No. 4, p. 527.

[58] C.G. Jung. Collected Works, Volume 10 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1970), p 184.

[59] Ibid., p. 185.

[60] Ibid., pp. 190-191.

[61] Hans Thomas Hakl. Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 41.

[62] Hans Thomas Hakl. Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 26.

[63] Riccardo Bernardini & Fabio Merlini. “Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881–1962): A Woman’s Individuation Process through Images at the Origins of the Eranos Conferences.” ARAS Connections, Issue 4 (2020).

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

[65] Riccardo Bernardini & Fabio Merlini. “Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881–1962): A Woman’s Individuation Process through Images at the Origins of the Eranos Conferences.” ARAS Connections, Issue 4 (2020).

[66] Hakl. Eranos, p. 130.

[67] Hakl. Eranos, p. 134.

[68] Hakl. Eranos, p. 21.

[69] “The Three Luminaries Collection Vol III.” The Three Luminaries. Retrieved from https://www.threeluminaries.com/2020/11/the-three-luminaries-collection-vol-iii/

[70] See Furio Jesi Italian translation of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (Il Tramonto dell’ Occidente) (Milan: Longanesi, 1981), esp. xvii.; Hakl, p. 21; cited in Hakl. Eranos, p. 21.

[71] Hakl. Eranos, p. 24.

[72] Hakl. Eranos, p. 56.

[73] Hakl. Eranos, p. 56.

[74] Ibid., p. 132.

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

[76] Hakl. Eranos, p. 59.

[77] Hakl. Eranos, p. 69.

[78] Hakl. Eranos, p. 92–93.

[79] Hakl. Eranos, p. 93.

[80] Hakl. Eranos, p. 93.

[81] Hakl. Eranos, p. 94.

[82] Michael Minnicino. “The Frankfurt School and ‘Political Correctness’,” (Fidelio, Winter 1992).

[83] Avraham Shapira. “Buber’s Attachment to Herder and to German Volkism.” Studies in Zionism, 14, no. 1 (1993), p. 16.

[84] Maor. “Moderation from Right to Left,” p. 86.

[85] Zeev Sternhell. The Founding Myths of Zionism (Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 85.

[86] Ibid., p. 86.

[87] Cited in Sternhell. The Founding Myths of Zionism, p. 86.

[88] Richard Noll. The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement. p. 168.

[89] Jay Sherry. Carl Jung: Avant-Garde Conservative (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), p. 42.

[90] Ibid.

[91] Daniel Goleman. “Psychotherapy and the Nazis.” The New York Times (July 3, 1984).

[92] Hakl. Eranos, p. 79.

[93] Gary Lachman. Jung the Mystic (Kindle Edition), pp. 164-165.

[94] Hakl. Eranos, p. 85.

[95] Hakl. Eranos, p. 85.

[96] Hakl. Eranos, p. 82.

[97] Hakl. Eranos, p. 87.

[98] Hakl. Eranos, p. 98.

[99] Hakl. Eranos, p. 63.

[100] Gary Lachman. Jung the Mystic (Penguin Publishing Group). p. 167. Kindle Edition.

[101] Hakl. Eranos, p. 109.

[102] Glen Yeadon & John Hawkins. Nazi Hydra in America: Suppressed History of America (Joshua Tree, Calif: Progressive Press, 2008), pp. 43, 80.

[103] Judith Ann Schiff. “The Man Who Helped Build Yale.” Yale Alumni Magazine (March/April 2007). Retrieved from http://archive.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2007_03/old_yale.html

[104] Hakl. Eranos, p. 110.

[105] Hakl. Eranos, p. 110.

[106] Thomas Bender. “With Love and Money.” New York Times (November, 14, 1982).

[107] Hakl. Eranos, p. 131.

[108] Hakl. Eranos, p. 131.

[109] “Iconographic collection.” Eranos Foundation. Retrieved from  http://www.eranosfoundation.org/page.php?page=19&pagename=iconographic%20collection

[110] Mark Vernon. “Carl Jung, part 2: A troubled relationship with Freud – and the Nazis.” The Guardian, (6 June 2011).

[111] Peter Grose. Allen Dulles, Spymaster : the Life & Times of the First Civilian Director of the CIA (Indiana University, 2006), p. 254.

[112] Nicholas Campion. A History of Western Astrology, Volume II (London: Continuum Books, 2009), p. 259.

[113] Lachman. Jung the Mystic, p. 190.

[114] Ibid., p. 189

[115] C.G. Jung. Aion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 87.

[116] Jung, Gesammelte Werke (1972), vol. xii, Psychologie und Alchemie, 267 and 282 (first edition,

1944); cited in Hakl. “The Symbology Of Hermeticism In The Work Of Julius Evola,” in Lux in Tenebris: The Visual and the Symbolic in Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2016), p. 354.

[117] Edward Armstrong Bennet. Meetings with Jung: Conversations Recorded During the Years 1946-1961 (1985), p. 31.

[118] Richard Noll. The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung (Random House, 1997), p. 143.

[119] J. Kirsch (1991). “Carl Gustav Jung and the Jews: The real story.” In A. Maidenbaum and S. A. Martin (Eds.), Lingering shadows: Jungians, Freudians, and anti-semitism (pp. 52–87) (Boston: Shambhala, 1991) p. 68.

[120] Carl G. Jung (1969/1952) Answer to Job. CW 11.

[121] Sanford Drob. “Jung’s Kabbalistic Vision.” Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, Vol. 7, no. 1, 2005.

[122] Carl G. Jung. C. G. Jung speaking (W. McGuire & R.F.C. Hull, Eds.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). pp. 268–72; pp. 271–2

[123] Drob, “Jung’s Kabbalistic Vision.”

[124] Carl G. Jung. Memories, dreams, reflections (A. Jaffe, Ed.) (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 293.

Volume Three

1. Synarchy

2. Ariosophy

3. Zionism

4. Eugenics & Sexology

5. The Round Table

6. The League of Nations

7. avant-Garde

8. Black Gold

9. Secrets of Fatima

10. Polaires Brotherhood

11. Operation Trust

12. Aryan Christ

13. Aufbau

14. Brotherhood of Death

15. The Cliveden Set

16. Conservative Revolution

17. Eranos Conferences

18. Frankfurt School

19. Vichy Regime

20. Shangri-La

21. The Final Solution

22. Cold War

23. European Union