Hitler and his God

The Living and the Dead

The years we are looking back to were also those of a high tide of spiritism, then together with astrology the most practiced form of occultism. Spiritism in its many varieties has been since times immemorial a way of contacting the invisible worlds and the beings that are supposed to populate them; it plays an important role in the world’s myths and legends. Nowadays spiritism is called “channelling”, which is essentially the same occult practice.

The denigrating ways in which some people at present look down on contacts with the dead ignore the seriousness of the spiritist movement which conquered America and Europe about a century ago. This movement originated in the USA, with the poltergeist experiences of the Fox Sisters in 1848, and developed rapidly into a craze which contributed to the preparation of the soil for the seeds of the Theosophical Society, planted by Blavatsky and Olcott in 1875. It is worth a moment of reflection that the Enlightenment as well as spiritism and Theosophy emerged in Anglo-Saxon countries, generally known for their realism and pragmatism. (The Americans commonly use the term “spiritualism”; we will use the term “spiritism”, not to cause confusion with the practice of spirituality.)

Spiritism was considered no less than a new religion by its adherents. “The question of the continuation of life and the hope that death at the end is actually not the end are too deeply anchored in the human being not to try to respond to them.” 663 “It is for the most part people thirsting for instruction and enlightenment who gather in what one might call a ‘circle’. The official way of the [Christian] Churches and their regular sermon on Sunday, which the mass of those present lets passively go over their heads without actually listening to it, does not satisfy them any longer. Their living spirit demands more nourishment than that.” 664 As such, spiritism is clearly part of the pulling out of the medieval roots and the transition toward new times.

“In the 1860s and 1870s numerous progressive spiritist groupings began to hold their own gatherings on Sundays, as an alternative to the Christian religious services. They consisted of lectures, prayers and sermons, held by trance mediums, and community singing for which there even were spiritist song books. One did not hesitate to call these spiritist organizations ‘churches’. Still, the faith which was propagated there had to be free of dogmas and revealed truths, and be entirely founded on verifiable and commonly understandable natural phenomena.” 665 The medium replaced the priest. “Spiritism gave especially the educated the exciting feeling to be present at the crossing of the frontiers between the revealed Christian creed and the empirical knowledge of the material sciences. In this sense, Spiritism was an avant-garde science in the era of the belief in progress. After the discovery of electricity, telegraphy and X-rays, the concept of concrete matter had begun to dissolve; it now seemed more than plausible that the realm of the supersensory too would no longer remain closed to empirical research. One was on the way to a ‘transcendental science of spiritism’.” 666

What answers had spiritism to offer, especially concerning the problem of our own death and the death of those near and dear to us, and therefore about the meaning of life? “The answer of spiritism was that our dear ones lived on in ‘summerland’, continuing there the development of their souls, and that they also were invisibly present among us in individuals, took an active part in our lives, and that contact with them was possible at any time. In this way the individual personality as well as the community of family and friends remained in existence beyond death. In a kind of revolt against the prevailing ideas about death and immortality spiritism therefore propagated an interpretation of death according to which there was no reason to mourn, because it did not mean an extinction of the personality and the ties with others.” 667

It is a fact that spiritism saw itself as scientific, or at least as part of the research that would lead to a new science in which the extra-material would have its legitimate share and even could be seen as the foundation in which the material was embedded. Scientists of renown were interested in spiritism, such as the astronomer Camille Flammarion, the physiologist Charles Richet, the psychologist Jean Piaget and the chemist and physicist William Crookes (as were the writers Victor Hugo and Arthur Conan Doyle). A main point consisted in establishing the immortality of the soul and of reincarnation, no longer as articles of faith but experimentally. “Occultism”, stated the German researcher Carl du Prel, “is nothing but as yet unknown natural science. It will be proved by the natural science of the future.”

The natural environment of the spiritist “séance”, or sitting, was the restricted circle, generally dominated by a medium. There were speaking mediums, giving voice to a spirit through their mouth, writing mediums, who lent their hand to a spirit to write a message or who made tables or other objects communicate the message by means of an agreed upon code, and their were mediums who healed, painted, played or composed music, and even danced. These mediums were mostly women, “admired priestesses”. “Spiritism was, at least partially, a feminist religion. As is known, the new creed was founded by the Fox Sisters in the USA. Even if most of its theorists were men – Andrew Davies, Allan Kardec, Aleksander Aksakov and others – the greatest number of trance mediums were women. They dominated the circles.” 668 Therefore spiritism played an important role in the first stages of the feminist revolt, one of the principal changes in recent times. Ulrich Linse is reminded, by the women who functioned as the priestesses of the new “Churches”, of the prophetesses in the apocalyptic movements of the past. In 1871 Arthur Rimbaud wrote: “When the endless servitude of the woman will be come to an end, when she will live for herself and by herself … she will be a poet, she too!” By “poet”, Rimbaud meant the highest condition a human being can attain. “The woman will discover matters that are still unknown!” 669

Linse also points to “the obvious relation of the art of the modern avant-garde with occultism”. True, inspired art is, after all, occultism and as such a permanent stumbling block in the dogmatic universalization of positivist science. Where does art originate? Where do the poet and the painter see, and where does the composer hear? If the soul is an illusion and the mind an epiphenomenon of matter, then there is no place for the artistic inspiration and no possible explanation of it. The greatest creations of humanity are then something like matter gone mad.

In her essay on the influence of spiritism on Vasili Kandinsky (1866-1944), Marion Ackermann shows how deeply this founder of abstract painting was influenced by the occult movements in the world around him, especially in Munich. “The thesis that there is a fourth dimension of space, since 1870 supported by several theories and discussed in popular scientific publications, had deeply penetrated the public consciousness around the year 1900, as had the connection of the fourth dimension with the spirit world … The concept of the fourth dimension influenced the artists already in the years before the First World War. The cubists, futurists, rayonists and suprematists believed in their ability to make the fourth dimension visible.” 670

The “new age” phenomenon around 1900 was as varied as the wave which shocked the world from the mid-1960s onwards. It was, as indicated before, closely connected with the various trends of the völkisch movement. Theosophy and spiritism, and occultism in general, often prospered in the same milieus as vegetarianism, reform centres, wholism, homeo- and naturopathy, magnetic healing, “back to nature” movements, nudism and orientalism. One will find substantial traces of all this in Nazism.

Occultism in general developed in parallel with the industrialization of Germany, so much so that “in almost no other country there were so many miracles performed, so many ghosts conjured, so many illnesses cured and so many horoscopes read as in Germany up to the Third Reich”. The spiritists themselves came in different flavours: New Psychologists, plain Occultists, Animists, Spiritualists of the Anglo-Saxon school, Davisians, Allan-Kardecians, Psychists, Theosophists, Neo-Occultists and Xenologists, among others, and not to forget the Christian spiritists. “All looked jealously towards France”, remarks Linse, “where all spiritists seemed to be united, at least in appearance, as followers of Allan Kardec”. Kardec (1804-69) said he had his name from the Gallic druid who he had been two thousand years ago. His real name was Hippolyte Rivail; he wrote the Book of the Spirits in 1857, which was reprinted again and again, and started publishing the “Spiritual Review” the next year. Soon the number of his followers ran into several millions and he was called “the pope of spiritism”.

The chief centres of spiritism in Germany were Berlin, Leipzig, with its very active spiritist publishing house Verlag O. Mutze, and above all Munich – more specifically that colourful part of the city called Schwabing, where in the streets walked practically all celebrities and eccentrics of the time. The poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George, the novelist Thomas Mann, the Russian communist leader Leon Trotsky, the artists of Der blaue Reiter, the group to which Kandinsky belonged, and so many more – all could be met in the Türkenstrasse or Schellingstrasse, on the Odeonplatz or in the neighbourhood of the university. Not to forget the personages populating the first chapters of this book.

Rudolf Hess tried out practically all occult fads. His Master at the Thule Society was the occultist and renowned astrologist Rudolf von Sebottendorff. The Thule Society itself was a chapter of the Germanenorden, of which many members and one of the founders, Philipp Stauff, were spiritists. The Thule Society was, moreover, a secret organization, founded officially to study and spread the völkisch, nationalist and occult sciences. David Clay Large writes that “magic rituals” were intended to bring present-day Nordic people into contact with the dead ancestors in order to find out their secrets, which would enable the Germans of the twentieth century to found a new master race. 671 Like Dr Gutberlet with his “astral pendulum”, many birds of occult plumage must have visited Thule’s seat, the hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in the Maximilianstrasse.

Heinrich Himmler is known to have practised spiritism. His biographer, Peter Padfield, mentions that Himmler read a book, Der Spiritismus, around 1923 and that this book, according to his diary, “allowed him for the first time really to believe in spiritism”. 672 As Peter Levenda has it: “It was within the great dining hall with its round table [in the Wewelsburg] that Himmler and his inner Court of Twelve [Ober]gruppenführers would engage in mystic communication with the realm of the dead Teutons and perform other spiritist exercises.” 673 And Heinz Höhne writes in his book on the SS: “Himmler was continually entering into contact with the great men of the past. He believed he had the power to call up spirits and hold regular meetings with them, though only, as he told Kersten, with the spirits of men who had been dead for hundreds of years. When he was half-asleep, Himmler used to say, the spirit of King Heinrich [“the Fowler”, 875-936] would appear and give him valuable advice; [Himmler] often began with the words: ‘In this case King Heinrich would have acted as follows’. He became so obsessed with his hero that he gradually came to regard himself as the reincarnation of the King”.

When the Nazis came to power, they forbade all forms of occultism, and many of its practitioners were thrown into concentration camps. Himmler said to the astrologer Wilhelm Wulff, who towards the end of the war was asked to work for him: “I am sorry that I had to have you imprisoned, but I simply had to put a stop [no doubt on Hitler’s orders] to the public practice of astrology … In the National Socialist state astrology must remain a privilegium singulorum [privilege of the few]. It is not for the broad masses … We base our attitude on the fact that astrology, as a universalist doctrine, is diametrically opposed to our own philosophical view of the world … A doctrine which is meant to apply in equal measure to Negroes, Indians, Chinese and Aryans is in crass opposition to our conception of the racial soul.” 674