28. Theosophy

Order of the Swastika

Paradoxically, the doctrines of the Nazis were derived ultimately from the Kabbalah, by merging the ideas of Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race and the theory of the Atlantean origins of the Aryans developed by Blavatsky. Like René Guénon and Julius Evola, Blavatsky believed in the polar origins of mankind in a proto-Aryan civilization called Hyperborea, a legendary country supposedly in the far North polar regions. Following Blavatsky, the Anthroposophists and Ariosophists viewed Atlantis as Thule. This mythology became the basis for the founding of the Thule Society, who adopted the swastika, which had a long history in Ariosophic circles, including Guido von List Society’s Armanen and Lanz von Liebenfels’ Order of the New Templars (ONT), an offshoot of the OTO. The Thule Society was responsible for development of the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei, or DAP), founded in January 1919, which was joined by Adolf Hitler, and which was eventually renamed as the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), known as Nazi party.

Wagner’s opera Rienzi was based on one of novels of Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803 – 1873), the pre-eminent personality of the era, a member of the L’Aurore Naissante (“Loge zur aufgehenden Morgenrothe”), or “the Nascent Dawn,” known as the Frankfurt Judenloge, through whom the Asiatic Brethren would also become the prime influence behind the Occult Revival of nineteenth-century England.[1] Like Victor Hugo, Bulwer-Lytton was closely acquainted with the famous occultist Éliphas Lévi (1810 – 1875), whose real name was Alphonse Louis Constant, whom he purportedly initiated into the tradition of the Judenloge.[2] He left the Grand Orient de France in the belief that the original meanings of its symbols and rituals had been lost. In 1855, under his civil name of Constant, Lévi published a series of articles in the Revue entitled “The Kabbalistic Origins of Christianity” and the Kabbalah as the “Source of all Dogmas,” which was the first time that he expounded his “Kabbalistic” theories to a wider socialist readership.

After Constant had adopted his occult name of Éliphas Lévi, he would become one of the most important esoteric writers of all time, largely through the influence of his Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie. Lévi was initiated into the occult by Jozef Maria Hoene-Wronski (1776 – 1853), a Polish philosopher and crackpot scientist. According to crypto-Frankist Adam Mickiewicz, Hoene-Wronski inspired in France at the beginning of the nineteenth century, “a numerous Israelite sect, half Christian, half Jewish, which also looked forward to Messianism and saw in Napoleon the Messiah, at least his predecessor.”[3] Over a dozen years earlier, Mickiewicz’s Chopin had set two of  his poems to music. Mickiewicz was also a friend of Margaret Fuller, who collaborated with Mazzini.[4] Certain characters in the novels of Honoré de Balzac (1799 – 1850), a friend of Giacomo Meyerbeer, were inspired by Wronski. Ewelina Hańska, Balzac’s famous patron and wife, was one of the adepts of Lévi.[5] Like Heinrich Heine, Balzac’s patron was James Mayer de Rothschild. Balzac was interested in Swedenborg, whom he refers to throughout Séraphita, a novel dealing with the themes of androgyny first published in the Revue de Paris in 1834.

Lévi collaborated closely with Charles Nodier (1780 – 1844) was an influential French author and librarian who introduced a younger generation of Romanticists to the conte fantastique, gothic literature, and vampire tales. As early as 1790, at the age of ten, Nodier was involved in the secret society of the Philadelphes.[6] In 1815, he published anonymously one of his most influential works, the History of Secret Societies in the Army. Nodier successfully adapted John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” for the stage in 1820. “The Vampyre” was taken from the story Lord Byron told as part of a contest among Polidori, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley, which also produced the novel Frankenstein.

In 1824, Nodier was appointed librarian of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris, a position that he kept for the rest of his life. The Bibliothèque was originally founded by Francis I of France, a patron of the alchemist Guillaume Postel. Nodier and his associates methodically explored the library, which included an exhaustive collection of works on magic, Kabbalah and Hermetic thought, including the original manuscripts of The Book of Abramelin, Book of the Penitence of Adam and the Grimoire of Armadel. Nodier became a source of influence for artists and intellectuals such as Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Dumas, Delacroix, Gérard de Nerval. Dumas incorporated his recollections of Nodier into his novelette La Dame au Collier de Velours. Hugo, who was friends with Berlioz and Liszt, particularly enjoyed the music of Mozart, Weber and Meyerbeer. According to Nodier:

 

…that marvellous Germany, the last country of poesy and belief in the West, the future cradle of a strong society to come-if there is any society left to be created in Europe.[7]

 

Around Hugo, a “cénacle” was formed, so called in part because of the success of the work of de Balzac who staged in his cycle of the Comédie humaine, the Cénacle (1819). Hugo’s Cénacle attracted, among others, de Nerval, Pétrus Borel and Théophile Gautier. Towards the end of 1830, Gautier began to frequent meetings of Le Petit Cénacle (“The Little Upper Room”), a group of artists who met in the studio of Jehan Du Seigneur. Among its members were the artists Gérard de Nerval, Alexandre Dumas, père, Alphonse Brot, and Philothée O’Neddy.[8]

Along with the poets Lamartine, Ballanche, Sainte-Beuve and Lamennais, and the Romantic historians, Augustin Thierry, Henri Martin and Jules Michelet, Hugo was a member of the circle of Ferdinand Eckstein (1790 – 1861), or Baron d’Eckstein, who under the influence of Friedrich Schlegel, converted to Lutheran Protestantism and settled in France, after Napoleon’s defeat. In 1824, Eckstein, known as the Sanskrit Baron, or the the “Baron Buddha” as Heine dubbed him, founded a paper, Le Catholique, in which he argued that a “natural revelation” had been made to the Indians, and that Europe owed the best of its blood, culture and institutions to the Germans. Also included in his circle was Frederic Ozanam (1813 – 1853), founder of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, a movement “for the restoration of Christianity by Science,” which tended to attribute the revelation of Moses from the universal revelation of India. According to Hegel, Eckstein was the dispenser of funds for governmental neo-Catholic propaganda.[9]

Nodier was also a purported Grand Master of the Priory of Sion. Successive Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion after Ludovico Gonzaga were associated with Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, like Robert Fludd, Johann Valentin Andreae, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and the Jacobite Charles Radclyffe, also a Grand Master of the Order of the Fleur de Lys, who founded the Grand Lodge of Paris. As a grandson of Charles II of England and Catherine of Braganza, Radclyffe was a cousin of Bonnie Prince Charlie and Cardinal York. Radclyffe was succeeded by Charles de Lorraine (1712 – 1780, who in turn was succeeded by his nephew, Maximilian de Lorraine (1756 – 1801). Maximilian was the brother Joseph II reportedly had an affair with Frank’s daughter Eva. Both Charles and Maximilian were also Grand Masters of the Teutonics Knights. Most importantly, Maximilian would become Grand Master of the Order of the Fleur de Lys.[10] The remaining four Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion, before Plantard himself, included Charles Nodier, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy and Jean Cocteau.

 

Ordo Templi Orientis

Novak reported that, after Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel’s death in 1836, the Asiatic Brethren moved to Denmark, where they were comprised largely of members of the Baltic aristocracy, adopting the swastika as a symbol for recognizing each other and taking on distinctly Germanic and anti-Semitic tendencies.[11] According to Godwin, the Occult Revival begins with the formation of a very small group within the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia (SRIA), who were recognizable by their use of the swastika, which they identified with the red cross of the Rosicrucians. Bulwer-Lytton was the “Great Patron” of SRIA, which was restricted to high-ranking Freemasons. The Asiatic Brethren, or Fratres Lucis, were derived from the German Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross (Gold- und Rosenkreuz), from which much of the hierarchical structure was used in the SRIA.[12]

In the 1880s, the Theosophical Society, founded by H.P. Blavatsky, adopted a swastika as part of its seal, along with an Om, a hexagram or star of David, an Ankh and an Ouroboros. After she published Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky was conferred a Masonic initiation in 1878 by John Yarker (1833 – 1913), another founding member of the SRIA, who was friends with both Blavatsky and General Giuseppe Garibaldi. In 1881, Garibaldi prepared to fuse the Rites of Misraïm and of Memphis, which succeeded the Illuminati front of the Philadelphes, and which came to be known as the Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis-Misraïm.[13] Yarker seems to have had a hand in the founding of the Theosophical Society, whose leading members were also members of Memphis-Misraïm, headed by Garibaldi.

The Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) was founded in Germany or Austria between 1895 and 1906, by Karl Kellner (1784 – 1855) and Theodor Reuss (1855 – 1923), who would succeed Yarker as Grand Master Garibaldi’s of Memphis-Misraïm. Reuss was a professional singer in his youth and took part in the first performance of Wagner’s Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1882.[14] Reuss first met Wagner in 1873, along with Wagner’s patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Ludwig I of Bavaria, Ludwig II’s grandfather, had an affair with Lady Jane Digby, a friend and traveling companion of H.P. Blavatsky.[15]

 

Synarchism

In the early 1870s, Blavatsky went to Cairo, where she associated with a group she would later call the Brotherhood of Luxor. Theosophical historian David Board argues from various allusions to Blavatsky’s and Mackenzie’s works that the Brotherhood of Luxor was inspired by the Fratres Lucis. The Brotherhood of Luxor’s relation, if any, with the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor (HBoL) is not clear.[16] The HBofL, that was later reborn as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, drew on the teachings of Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Brotherhood of Eulis.[17] The HBofL became the key organization behind the rise of the Occult Revival, and which, as occult historian Allen Greenfield has demonstrated in The Roots of Modern Magick, was chiefly responsible for the transmission of Frankist sex magic to its leading organizations and exponents.[18] Blavatsky was also instructed in occultism by Max Theon (1848 – 1927), the supposed leader of the HBofL. Theon gathered a number of students, including Charles Barlet (1838 –1921) and a Zionist and Kabbalist named Louis Themanlys, and they established the “Cosmic Movement,” based on material channeled by Theon’s wife, which includes an account of creation that incorporates elements of Lurianic Kabbalah.[19]

Barlet was influenced by Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (1842 – 1909), the founder of Synarchism. In 1877, in England, Saint-Yves married Marie de Riznitch, Comtesse de Keller (1827 – 1895), a Polish noble woman with mediumistic abilities from Odessa. Marie was a relative of Ewelina Hańska, the wife of Honoré de Balzac, and one of the adepts of Éliphas Lévi.[20] Marie was also a good friend of the Danish Queen Louise of Hesse-Kassel. Queen Louise married her double second cousin, Christian IX, King of Denmark (1818 – 1906), the grandson of Prince Charles of Hesse-Kassel, Illuminatus and Grand Master of the Asiatic Brethren. Christian IX and Louise’s six children married into other royal families across Europe—including the children of Queen Victoria and the Romanovs of Russia—earning him the sobriquet “the father-in-law of Europe.”[21] Their descendants include Prince Philip and his wife Queen Elizabeth II, and their son King Charles III, as well as Juan Carlos of Spain.

A shared source for the occult teachings of Blavatsky and  Saint-Yves was a purported leader of an order named the Brotherhood of Luxor, who would have been Jamal ud Din al Afghani (1838/1839 – 1897), British spy, Sufi mystic, Islamic reformer, notorious intriguer and British agent.[22] Despite the appellation “Afghani,” to claim Afghan nationality, scholars generally believe that he was instead an Iranian Shia. There are some reports that he was a Jew.[23] While also acting as Grand Master of the Freemasons of Egypt, Afghani was simultaneously the founder of the fanatical “Salafi” fundamentalist tradition of Islam, which has contributed to the majority of twentieth-century Islamic terrorism, primarily through the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an offshoot. In Afghani’s own words, as cited in Elie Kedourie’s Afghani and Abduh: An Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Activism in Modern Islam: “We do not cut off the head of religion except with the sword of religion. Therefore, if you were to see us now, you would see ascetics and worshipers, kneeling and genuflecting, never disobeying God’s commands and doing all that they are ordered to do.”[24]

Lady Jane Digby was close friends with Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1840 – 1922), who was Jamal ud Din al Afghani’s British handler along with Edward G. Browne (1862 – 1926).[25] Blunt married Lady Anne, who was the grand-daughter of Lord Byron, a member of the Carbonari. Blunt and Lady Anne were also friends with Jane Digby and Sir Richard Burton, a member of the so-called Orphic Brotherhood led by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.[26] Like Burton, Digby was also acquainted with Blavatsky, as well as with Lydia Pashkov, who along with her partner James Sanua, was friends with Jamal Afghani.[27] Jane Digby died in Damascus, Syria as the wife of Arab Sheikh Medjuel al Mezrab.

From his studies with Afghani, going by the name of Haji Sharif, Saint-Yves supposedly mastered the art of astral travel, by which he claims to have travelled to Agartha himself in a state of “waking dream,” details of which he reported in Mission de l’Inde. Edward Bulwer-Lytton penned the Rosicrucian and Martinist-themed novels named Zanoni and The Coming Race or Vril: The Power of the Coming Race (1871), which featured a superhuman civilization living in a hollow earth, and influenced the legend of Agartha. Agartha was first referred to by Ernest Renan in the 1870s. Inspired by Nordic mythology, Renan placed Asgard of the Viking sagas in Central Asia. The myth of Agartha was further developed by another French writer, Louis Jacolliot (1837 – 1890), who was quoted by Blavatsky. The legend of Agartha was linked to the myth Shambhala. Blavatsky mentioned the mythical lost city of Shambhala in her main work, The Secret Doctrine, the teachings for which she said she received telepathically from her teachers in Tibet.

Saint-Yves’s ideas were adapted by Gérard Encausse (1865 – 1916), more popularly known by his alias Papus, who founded the Martinist Order based on synarchist ideas. A close friend and colleague of Max Theon’s disciple Peter Davidson, Papus joined the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor (HBofL) and the Golden Dawn. [28] In 1888, Papus and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, along with celebrated occultists Stanislas de Guaita and Joséphin Péladan, had founded the Rosicrucian Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix (OKR+C), which came to be regarded as the “inner circle” of the Martinist Order. [29]  Apparently, Éliphas Lévi, who would have been initiated in the tradition of the L’Aurore Naissante, or Frankfurt Judenloge, by Bulwer-Lytton, handed it over to Abbé Lacuria, author of Harmonies of Being, after he returned to France, who would have then passed it to Adrian Péladan, who transmitted it to his brother Joséphin and to Guaita.[30]

Golden Dawn

In England in 1885, Reuss became friends with William Wynn Westcott, the Supreme Magus of the SRIA, under whose authority Reuss founded irregular Masonic and Rosicrucian lodges in Germany.[31] Westcott was one of the founders of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, named after the L’Aurore Naissante (“Loge zur aufgehenden Morgenrothe”), or “the Nascent Dawn,” the full name of the Frankfurt Judenloge. Just before his death, towards the end of 1887, Arthur Edward Waite (1857 – 1942), a member of the SRIA, passed on the so-called “cipher manuscripts” which resulted in the establishment of the Golden Dawn. By some accounts, Bulwer-Lytton received a copy of the manuscripts from the Judenloge, which was acquired by his friend Frederick Hockley, a founding member of the SRIA.[32] The manuscript contained an address by certain Anna Sprengel, countess of Landsfeldt, the supposed love-child of Ludwig I of Bavaria and the actress Lola Montez, who was the member of the “Goldene Morgenrothe,” referring to the Judenloge.[33] Sprengel is supposed to have given Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers (1854 – 1918) a charter authorising him to found lodges of the Golden Dawn in Britain. Named in reference to the Golden and Rosy Cross and the Nascent Dawn, the order, known simply as the Golden Dawn claimed to be a continuation of the Kabbalistic school of Rabbi Samuel Falk.[34] Reading the first folio page of the cipher manuscripts one finds the words Chevrah Zerach Aur Bequr, which relates to the Hebrew name of the Judgenlodge, Chevrah Zerach Bequr Aur, which translate to “The Society of the Rising Light of Dawn.”[35]

Aleister Crowley (1875 – 1947), godfather of twentieth-century Satanism, studied magic with the Golden Dawn, then went on to construct his own occult system using an amalgamation of the ritual working of Abramelin the Mage, the Goetia, and the Tantric sexual techniques of the OTO, among other sources. Crowley was convinced that he was the reincarnation of Éliphas Lévi, who died the year Crowley was born. It was Lévi who created the popular depiction of the “Baphomet”, the idol worshipped by the Templars. He described it as “The Sabbatic Goat,” inherited from the versions of the devil said to have been worshipped by medieval witches. He depicted the idol as a winged androgynous figure with parts of a male and female, but with the head of a goat, and a torch on its head between its horns. As Levi confessed: “…let us say boldly and loudly, that all the initiates of the occult sciences… have adored, do and will always adore that which is signified by this frightful symbol. Yes, in our profound conviction, the Grand Masters of the Order of the Templars adored Baphomet and caused him to be adored by their initiates.[36]

 

Die Sphinx

Together, they contributed the core ideas in the development of the occult doctrines of the Nazis. As noted by Goodrick-Clarke, Theosophy “enjoyed a considerable vogue in Germany and Austria.”[37] Its advent was tied to a wider neo-romantic protest movement in Germany known as Lebensreform (“life reform”), a type of proto-hippie movement that explored alternative life-styles, including herbal and natural medicine, vegetarianism, nudism and living in communes.[38] In July 1884, the first German Theosophical Society (GTS) was established under the presidency of Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden (1846 – 1916), whose periodical The Sphinx was a powerful influence in the German occult revival until 1895. Following a request from Blavatsky’s successor, Annie Besant (1847 –1933), Hübbe-Schleiden had introduced the Order of the Star of the East in Germany, which proclaimed the Hindu boy Jiddu Krishnamurti world teacher.

Among Hübbe-Schleiden’s circle at this time were Franz Hartmann (1838 – 1912), one of the founding members of the OTO, and the young Rudolf Steiner (1861 – 1925), founder of the Waldorf schools, who were both members of the GTS. Hartmann went to visit Blavatsky at Adyar, India, travelling by way of California, Japan and South-East Asia in late 1883. A German Theosophical Society, as a branch of the International Theosophical Brotherhood, had been established in 1896, with Hartmann as its president.

Steiner, who in 1895 had written one of the first books praising Nietzsche, visited him when he was in the care of his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who assumed the roles of curator and editor of her brother’s works. Nietzsche finally suffered total mental collapse in 1889. Within a week, Nietzsche’s family brought him back to Basel, where he was hospitalized and diagnosed with the syphilis. The Nietzsche scholar Joachim Köhler has attempted to explain Nietzsche’s life history and philosophy by claiming that Nietzsche was a homosexual, and he argues that his affliction with syphilis, which is “usually considered to be the product of his encounter with a prostitute in a brothel in Cologne or Leipzig, is equally likely, it is now held, to have been contracted in a male brothel in Genoa.”[39]

While his critics argued that Nietzsche’s disturbed ideas were a reflection of his mental illness, as explains Steven E. Aschheim in The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990, the pro-Nietzscheans, “sought instead to endow Nietzsche’s madness with a positively spiritual quality. The prophet had been driven crazy by the clarity of his vision and the incomprehension of a society not yet able to understand it...”[40] Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth even employed Steiner as a tutor to help her to understand her brother’s philosophy.[41] Referring to Nietzsche’s mental illness, Steiner said, “In inner perception I saw Nietzsche’s soul as if hovering over his head, infinitely beautiful in its spirit-light, surrendered to the spiritual worlds it had longed for so much.”[42]

After parting with the Theosophical Society, Steiner founded a spiritual movement, called anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. Steiner was a member of the völkisch Wagner club, and anthroposophical authors endorsed Wagner’s views on race.[43] Steiner had been made general secretary of the German Theosophical Society in 1902. Steiner published a periodical Luzifer in Berlin from 1903 to 1908. By 1904, Steiner he was appointed by Annie Besant to be leader of the Theosophical Esoteric Society for Germany and Austria. In 1906, Theodor Reuss issued a warrant to Steiner, making him Deputy Grand Master of a subordinate O.T.O./Memphis/Misraïm Chapter and Grand Council called “Mystica Aeterna” in Berlin. Steiner finally broke away to found his own Anthroposophical Society in 1912.

 

Theosophical Society of Vienna

Franz Hartmann is the one person who ties the Theosophical Society and the OTO to the occult movement known as Ariosophy, which inspired the bizarre racial theories of the Nazis. The ideology regarding the Aryan race, runic symbols, Nordic paganism and the swastika are important elements of Ariosophy, related to the occult systems developed by Guido von List (1848 – 1919) and his friend and pupil Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874 – 1954), as part the Völkisch movement. Liebenfels was the founder of the Order of New Templars (Ordo Novi Templi, or ONT) an offshoot of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), which included Aleister Crowley and practiced tantric sex rituals.[44] In the 1890s, Liebenfels was involved with a Viennese literary society, which included List, founder of the List Society, which adopted the Golden Dawn system of initiatory degrees.[45]

The membership of the List Society “implies that List’s ideas were acceptable to many intelligent persons drawn from the upper and middle classes of Austria and Germany.”[46] The success of List’s 1888 novel Carnuntum caught the attention of Pan-German publishers Georg von Schönerer and Karl Wolf, who commissioned similar works.[47] List was also supported by Karl Lueger (1844 –1910), the mayor of Vienna, who was also a supporter of von Schönerer and the German National Party. Lueger was known for his antisemitic rhetoric and referred to himself as an admirer of Edouard Drumont, who founded the Antisemitic League of France in 1889. Asked to explain the fact that many of his friends were Jews, Lueger famously replied, “I decide who is a Jew.”[48]

The German theosophists, explains Goodrick-Clarke, “acknowledged List’s nationalist popularization of their doctrines.”[49] Franz Hartmann became one of the leading followers of List, through his attraction of the parallels between his ideas and those of Blavatsky. List believed that the lost language of the ancient Germans could be found in the mystic writings of the Kabbalah, mistakenly believed to be Jewish, but in reality a compilation of ancient German wisdom which had survived the suppressions of the Christianity. Similarly, Blavatsky rejected the Jewish origins of the Kabbalah, considering it a survival of true and secret wisdom.[50] The principal financial contributor to Guido von List’s society was the an Austrian/German industrialist Friedrich Wannieck (1838 –1919), a firm believer in the Theosophical “Ascended Masters,” Morya and Koot Hoomi.[51] Prana, a German monthly for applied spiritualism which was published by the Theosophical publishing house at Leipzig, was edited by Johannes Balzli, the secretary of the Guido von List society, and secretary of the Leipzig Theosophical Society. Hartmann, Steiner, Liebenfels and Guido von List himself were contributors, as was C. W. Leadbetter, a close associate of an associate of Annie Besant.[52]

From 1908 to 1912, the völkisch List Society began to attract distinctive members, including the complete membership of the Vienna Theosophical Society, whose president was Franz Hartmann.[53] Vienna Theosophical Society was founded by Hartmann’s friend, Frederick Eckstein (1861 – 1939), an Austrian polymath, Theosophist born into an upper-class Jewish family.[54] In 1887, Eckstein visited Blavatsky for several days in Ostende. She presented him with a charter for the establishment of a Theosophical lodge in Vienna and a golden rose cross. In the same year, the first official theosophical lodge in Austria was created, with Eckstein as president.[55] Eckstein’s circle also included Rudolf Steiner. Eckstein’s wife was Bertha Diener, who like her husband, was a member of the Vienna Lodge of the Theosophical Society Adyar. Her book Mothers and Amazons (1930), is regarded as a classic study of matriarchy. Eckstein’s own esoteric interests included German and Spanish mysticism, the legends surrounding the Templars and the Freemasons, Wagnerian mythology and oriental religions. After meeting with Blavatsky in 1886, Eckstein gathered a group of theosophists in Vienna.[56]

In his book, Hammer of the Gods, David Luhrssen lists Mahler as a member of Vienna’s Theosophical Society. Mahler first came into contact with the Pernerstorfer circle in 1880 through the Polish Jewish poet Siegfried Lipiner (1856 – 1911). Lipiner wrote the epic Der entfesselte Prometheus (“Prometheus Unleashed”) in 1876, which caused quite a sensation and was appreciated by Nietzsche and Wagner. Lipiner is remembered today in German-speaking literary circles mainly for his translations of the Frankist and poet Adam Mickiewicz. Mahler developed his interest in mystical religion and Germanic myth by forming the Saga Society with Lipiner and a fellow university student, the writer Richard von Kralik (1852 – 1934) in 1881. Their meetings included listening to works by Wagner, reciting epic works such as the Edda and Nibelungenlied, and sharing each other’s original compositions, including Lipiner’s opera libretto for Jewish composer Karl Goldmark, Merlin (1880), which premiered at the Vienna Opera in 1886.[57]

Eckstein and Oskar Simony were also associated with the Austrian psychical researcher, Lazar von Hellenbach (1827 – 1887), who headed a spiritualist circle called the “Hellenbach lodge” or “Aurora” in Vienna and contributed to Die sphinx.[58] In 1883, Hellenbach published a response to Eugen Dühring’s work The Jewish Question. Hellenbach criticized anti-Semitism by explaining alleged Jewish characteristics through the circumstances under which Jews had to live. At the same time, as Ulrich E. Bach points out, he accepted anti-Semitic stereotypes as facts and, for example, characterized Jews as nomadic outsiders.[59] Based on Malthusian and Social Darwinist considerations, Hellenbach also advocated euthanasia under certain circumstances to prevent overpopulation.[60]

Eckstein corresponded with Golden Dawn member Gustav Meyrink (1868 – 1932), founder of the Blue Star theosophical lodge at Prague in 1891, who later achieved renown as an occult novelist. From 1907 to 1914, following E.T.A Hoffmann and Achim von Arnim, Meyrink wrote The Golem, about the Prague legends of Rabbi Loew, and which contains references to Kabbalah, Theosophy, Tarot and alchemy. The story’s descriptions of the Jews of the ghetto of Prague are in conformity with the usual anti-Semitic stereotypes, featuring Aaron Wassertrum, a millionaire junk dealer, blackmailer, and criminal. There are also two saintly Jews, Kabbalist Hillel and his daughter Miriam. The story also features the Kabbalist Hillel and his daughter Miriam, and follows Athanasius Pernath who encounters the Golem. Pernath learns that a man called Zottman, called the Freemason, was murdered at the same time when Pernath felt Golem’s presence. Pernath ends up in “Goldmakers Alley,” the Street of the Alchemists, where he learns of the legend of a house where there is a rock beneath which there is a huge treasure buried by the “Order of Asiatic Brethren.”

 

Parapsychology

Eckstein became a life-long friend of Sigmund Freud, who shared with him membership in the Pernerstorfer Circle. Freud’s family came from Moravia, a stronghold of the Sabbatean movement, in the 1860s. Freud’s wife Martha was the niece of Michael Bernays. Freud’s nephew was Edward Bernays (1891 − 1995), one of the founders of the modern field of “public relations,” was Isaac’s grandson. Freud also read Nietzsche as a student and analogies between their work were pointed out almost as soon as he developed a following. In Sigmund Freud and The Jewish Mystical Tradition, Bakan has shown that Freud too was a “crypto-Sabbatean,” which would explain his extensive interest in the occult and the Kabbalah. The Hidden Freud: His Hassidic Roots, by Joseph H. Berke, explores Freud and his Jewish roots and demonstrates the input of the Jewish mystical tradition into Western culture through psychoanalysis.

Freud, Nietzsche and this Jewish friend Paul Rée had a common acquaintance in Lou Andreas-Salomé. Rée met Salomé in Rome in 1882 at the literary salon of Forty-Eighter Malwida von Meysenbug. Rée proposed to her, but she instead suggested that they live and study together as “brother and sister” along with another man for company, and thereby establish an academic commune. Rée accepted the idea, and suggested that they be joined by his friend Nietzsche. After discovering the situation, Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth became determined to get Nietzsche out of the hands of what she described as the “immoral woman.”[61] Salomé claimed that Nietzsche was desperately in love with her and that she refused his proposal of marriage to her.

Salomé was a pupil of Freud and became his associate in the creation of psychoanalysis. She developed Freud’s ideas from his 1914 essay On Narcissism, and argued that love and sex are a reunion of the self with its lost half. Freud considered Salomé’s article on anal eroticism from 1916 one of the best things she wrote. This led him to his own theories about anal retentiveness, where prohibition against pleasure from anal activity “and its products,” is the first occasion during which a child experiences hostility to his supposedly instinctual impulses.[62] It was also rumored that Salomé later had a romantic relationship with Freud.[63]

Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (1862 – 1929), an associate of Sigmund Freud and an important influence on him, was a German medical doctor and a pioneer of psychotherapy and parapsychology, who had participated in Max Theon’s Cosmic Movement.[64] Schrenck-Notzing was also the founder of the Gesellschaft für psychologische Forschung (“Society for Psychological Research”) with Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden and Max Dessoir (1867 – 1947).[65] Schrenck-Notzing devoted his time to the study of paranormal events connected with mediumship, hypnotism and telepathy. British Society for Psychical Research (SPR), invited Schrenck-Notzing to attend sittings with the notorious Italian medium Eusapia Paladino, who converted previous sceptics, such as Cesare Lombroso, Enrico Morselli and Pierre Curie to a belief in paranormal phenomena.[66] Founded in 1882, the SPR included Fabian Society member Bertrand Russell, Arthur Conan Doyle, Round Tabler Lord Balfour, John Dewey and John Ruskin.

Both Dessoir and Schrenck-Notzing were regular contributors Hübbe-Schleiden’s periodical The Sphinx. Dessoir, who was born in Berlin into a German Jewish family, was an associate of Pierre Janet and Freud. Dessoir was an amateur magician who had used the pseudonym “Edmund W. Rells,” and was interested in the history and psychology of magic. Dessoir is also known for his coinage of the term “Parapsychologie” in an attempt to delineate the scientific study of a certain class of “abnormal,” though not necessarily pathological mental phenomena.[67] Dessoir skipped his first semester at university to pursue “theosophical studies,” he met several time with Annie Besant, “whose enthusiasm… could attract and win over even a stubborn doubter,” and he had met Blavatsky, “together with the squire Henry Steel Olcott, who faithfully shielded her.”[68]

According to Dr. Sanford Drob, the Chabad psychology is, “an important precursor of Freud’s famous description of psychoanalytic cure.”[69] Maya Balakirsky Katz revealed that in consultation with Freud, the Viennese psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel (1868 – 1940) treated the sixth Chabad rebbe, Sholom DovBer Schneerson (1860 – 1920), commonly referred to as the Rashab. The Rashab confessed that a “man-servant,” whose tasks included watching over him as a child, sexually molested him from the time he was “five or six” until his marriage. The Rashab’s brother habitually took the rabbi into his wife’s bedroom, “where he displayed her in scant attire, with the idea of arousing him, and to hold his wife’s beauty before his eyes.” In his brother’s absence, the Rashab remained with his sister-in-law, playing with her and “having fun.” The Rashab occasionally wrestled with a friend in his wife’s presence, and, after successfully pinning his friend on the floor, the rabbi triumphantly took his wife to bed.[70]

In a letter to Arthur Schnitzler—another member of the Pernerstorfer Circle and a close friend of Theodor Herzl—Freud confessed “I have gained the impression that you have learned through intuition—although actually as a result of sensitive introspection—everything that I have had to unearth by laborious work on other persons.”[71] Schnitzler’s works were also often controversial for their open description of sexuality. Schnitzler was branded as a pornographer after the release of his play Reigen, in which ten pairs of characters are shown before and after the sexual act, leading and ending with a prostitute. A diary which Schnitzler kept from the age of 17 until two days before his death, and which runs to almost 8,000 pages, recorded his sexual conquests. He was often in relationships with several women at once and for a period of some years recorded every orgasm. In response to an interviewer who asked him what he thought about the criticism that his works all seemed to be devoted to the same subjects, he replied “I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?”[72]

Frederick Eckstein’s sister Emma Eckstein (1865 – 1924) was one of Freud’s “most important patients and, for a short period of time around 1897, became a psychoanalyst herself.”[73] When she was 27, Freud diagnosed Eckstein as suffering from hysteria and believed that she masturbated to excess.[74] Max Schur (1897 – 1969), Freud’s friend and physician, argued that Freud’s dream known as “Irma’s injection” was heavily influenced by an incident involving Emma, where Freud had referred her to Wilhelm Fliess (1858 – 1928) for nasal surgery, the consequences of which were almost fatal for Eckstein and left her permanently disfigured.[75] Freud ultimately defended Fliess’ competence, blaming Emma, claiming instead that her post-operative haemorrhages were “wish-bleedings,” caused by her hysterical longing for the affection of others.[76]

 


[1] Wynn Westcott. “Data of the History of the Rosicrucians.” S.R.I.A. (1916); cited in A. Butler. Victorian Occultism and the Making of Modern Magic: Invoking Tradition (Springer, Jan. 5, 2011), p. 79.

[2]  “L’Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose Croix.” Splendor Solis, IV (2006), p. 6.

[3] Duker. “Polish Frankism’s Duration,” p. 292.

[4] Kazimierz Wyka. “Mickiewicz, Adam Bernard.” Polski Słownik Biograficzny, vol. XX, 1975, p. 703.

[5] Markus Osterrieder. “Synarchie und Weltherrschaft,” in Die Fiktion von der jüdischen Weltverschwörung (Wallstein Verlag. 2012), p. 111.

[6] Pingaud. La Jeunesse de Charles Nodier, p. 39. Cited in Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln. Holy Blood, Holy Grail, p. 134.

[7] Statement of 1803, in P. Harivel. Nicolas de Bonneville, Pre-romantique et revolutionnaire 1760–1828 (1923); cited in Billington. Fire in the Minds of Men, p. 62.

[8] Georges Gusdorf. Le Romantisme, t. 1, (Paris, Payot, 1993), p. 150.

[9] Poliakov. The Aryan Myth, p. 202.

[10] “Maximilian Von Habsburg.” The Order of the Fleur de Lys. Retrieved from https://www.orderofthefleurdelys.org.uk/order-history/maximilian-von-hapsburg/

[11] Novak. Jacob Frank, p. 129.

[12] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 121.

[13] Melanson. Perfectibilists.

[14] “Albert Karl Theodore Reuss.” Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon (July 2, 2014). Retrieved from http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/biography/esoterica/reuss_t/reuss_t.html

[15] Johnson. Initiates of Theosophical Masters, p. 161.

[16] Godwin, Chanel & Deveney. The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, p. 6.

[17] Nevill Drury. Stealing Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 93.

[18] A. H. Greenfield. The Roots of Modern Magick: An Anthology (Lulu.com, 2005).

[19] Max Théon & Alma Théon. La Tradition Cosmique, 6 Vols, (Bibliothèque Chacornac/Publications Cosmiques, Paris, 1903).

[20] Markus Osterrieder. “Synarchie und Weltherrschaft,” in Die Fiktion von der jüdischen Weltverschwörung (Wallstein Verlag. 2012), p. 111.

[21] “HM King Christian IX of Denmark.” European Royal History.

[22] K. Paul Johnson. Masters Revealed, pp. 47-51.

[23] Dreyfuss. Hostage to Khomeini, p. 118.

[24] Elie Kedourie. Afghani and Abduh: An Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Activism in Modern Islam (New York: The Humanities Press, 1966), p. 45.

[25] Dreyfuss. Hostage to Khomeini.

[26] Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: A Biography, cited in K. Paul Johnson, The Masters Revealed: Madam Blavatsky and the Myth of the Great White Lodge (State University of New York, 1994) p. 65.

[27] Johnson. The Masters Revealed, p. 66.

[28] Nevill Drury. Stealing Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 104.

[29] Marcel Roggemans. History of Martinism and the F.U.D.O.S.I (Lulu.com, 2009), p. 36.

[30] “L’Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose Croix.” Splendor Solis, IV (2006), p. 6.

[31] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 223; Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. The Occult Roots of Nazism: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany 1890-1935 (Wellingborough, England: The Aquarian Press, 1985), p. 59.

[32] WRvL. “Golden Dawn and its Connection to Freemasonry.” Retrieved from http://www.mastermason.com/luxocculta/golden.htm

[33]  “L’Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose Croix.” Splendor Solis, IV (2006), p. 5.

[34] Godwin. The Theosophical Enlightenment, p. 223.

[35] Tomas Stacewicz. “The Origins of the Qabalistic Tradition of the Golden Dawn.” (2008, 2009, 2010).

[36] Eliphas Lévi. Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, II. 209.

[37] Goodrick-Clarke. The Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 22.

[38] Ibid., p. 22.

[39] Joachim Köhler. Zarathustra’s secret: the interior life of Friedrich Nietzsche (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) pp. xv.

[40] Steven E. Aschheim. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 (University of California Press, 1992) p. 27.

[41] Rudolf Steiner. Friedrich Nietzsche, ein Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit (Weimar, 1895)

[42] Quoted in Colin Wilson. Rudolf Steiner, The Man and His Vision: An Introduction to the Life and Ideas of the Founder of Anthroposophy (Wellingborough: Aqurian Press, 1985), p. 87-88.

[43] Peter Staudenmaier. Between Occultism and Nazism: Anthroposophy and the Politics of Race in the Fascist Era (BRILL, 2014), p. 79.

[44] Howard. The Occult Conspiracy.

[45] Levenda. Unholy Alliance, p. 57.

[46] Goodrick-Clarke. Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 43.

[47] Kenneth Hite. The Nazi Occult (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), p. 7.

[48] Amos Elon. The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743–1933 (2002), p. 224

[49] Goodrick-Clarke. The Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 45.

[50] G. L. Mosse. “The Mystical Origins of National Socialism.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 22: 1 (1961), p. 86.

[51] Goodrick-Clarke. Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 54.

[52] Mosse. “The Mystical Origins of National Socialism,” p. 87.

[53] Goodrick-Clarke. Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 43.

[54] “Schlesinger Therese, geb. Eckstein.” Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20080313155826/https://www.univie.ac.at/biografiA/daten/text/bio/Schlesinger_Therese.htm

[55] Karl Baier. “Occult Vienna: From the Beginnings until the First World War.” In Hans Gerald Hoedl, Astrid Mattes & Lukas Pokorny, (eds.). Religion in Austria, Vol. 5 (Vienna: Praesens, 2020), p. 30.

[56] Goodrick-Clarke. Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 28.

[57] Caroline A. Kita. “Student Culture in 1870s Vienna.” In: Youmans C, ed. Mahler in Context. Composers in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2020), p. 38.

[58]  Karl Baier. “Occult Vienna: From the Beginnings until the First World War.” In Hans Gerald Hoedl, Astrid Mattes & Lukas Pokorny, (eds.). Religion in Austria, Vol. 5 (Vienna: Praesens, 2020), p. 15.

[59] Ulrich E. Bach. Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire (New York: Berghahn, 2016), p. 42 f.

[60] Diethard Sawicki. Leben mit den Toten. Geisterglauben und die Entstehung des Spiritismus in Deutschland 1770–1900 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002), p. 334.

[61] R.J. Hollingdale. Nietzsche: The Man and his Philosophy (Cambridge University Press 1999), p. 151.

[62] Sigmund Freud. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, S.E. Vol. 7, p. 187.

[63] Julia Borossa & Caroline Rooney. “Suffering, Transience and Immortal Longings Salomé Between Neitzsche and Freud.” The Gale Group. (Sage Publications).

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

[65] Andreas Sommer. “Normalizing the Supernormal: The Formation of the ‘Gesellschaft Für Psychologische Forschung’ (‘Society for Psychological Research’), c. 1886–1890.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2013 Jan; 49(1): 18–44.

[66] Sommer. “Policing Epistemic Deviance.”

[67] Colin Williamson. Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2015), p. 203.

[68] Jan Stottmeister. Der George-Kreis und die Theosophie, mit einem Exkurs zum Swastika-Zeichen bei Helena Blavatsky, Alfred Schuler und Stefan George (Wallstein Verlag, 2014), p. 83.

[69] Dr. Sanford Drob. “Freud and Chasidim: Redeeming the Jewish Soul of Psychoanalysis.” The Jewish Review. Volume 3 , Issue 1 (Sept, 1989 | Tishrei, 5750).

[70] Maya Balakirsky Katz. “An Occupational Neurosis: A Psychoanalytic Case History Of a Rabbi.” AJS Review 34, no. 1 (2010).

[71] Sir David Hare. “Schnitzler’s hidden manuscripts explored.” Research Horizon, Issue 3 (April 2007). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20100315122800/http://www.research-horizons.cam.ac.uk/features/schnitzler-s-hidden-manuscripts-explored.aspx

[72] Nicholas Parsons. Vienna: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

[73] Michelle P. Ossa. “Who was Emma Eckstein and what contributions did she make to psychoanalysis?” eNotes. Retrieved from https://www.enotes.com/topics/soc/questions/who-was-emma-eckstein-what-contributions-did-she-467166

[74] Lisa Appignanesi & John Forrester. Freud’s Women (London: Phoenix, 2005), p. 138.

[75] Max Schur. Freud: Living and Dying (New York: International Universities Press, 1972), pp. 79–87.

[76] Frank J. Sulloway. Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 142.

Zionism