HITLER AND THE OCCULT: NAZISM, REINCARNATION AND ROCK CULTURE
by Suzanne M. Rini
In a headshop-boutique window downtown, a t-shirt dangles on a
wire hanger. None other than Adolf Hitler, looking
disconcertingly urbane, is silkscreened in the center, a mocking,
euphemistic phrase underneath: "Hitler's European Tour:
1939-1945." On-a garage wall in the university section of town, a
crude, misspelled, "Sieg Hail!" is scrawled, replete with
swastika. Three blocks away, a record store window puffs a heavy
metal band's abrasive song titles: "Never on Your Knees,"
"Witchdoctor," and "Scream Bloody Murder."
If we have eyes to see them, the signs of the rise in Satanism
and its conflation with neo-Nazism are fairly commonplace and
even rife. Unfortunately, in the U.S. information culture,
nothing exists until it can't be ignored any longer, until the
causes and proportions are irremediable. Undoubtedly, I myself
only noticed the props of what Cynthia Kisser, Director of the
Cult Awareness Network, calls a "growing social movement" because
I'd received a copy of Satanism and Occult-Related Violence: What
You Should Know by Michael Langone, Ph.D. and Linda O. Blood, of
the American Family Institute, a consortium of professionals who
have been tracking cults and logging cult information since the
1970s.
The above book's startling documentation piqued my awareness from
an intellectual and journalistic viewpoint. But soon after I'd
read it, I visited an old high school friend of mine, now a
pastor at a suburban Pittsburgh parish. One of his teenage
parishioners had recently committed suicide; Nazi and Satanist
paraphernalia were found at the scene. In this context, however,
the word "suicide" has to be a matter of caution, for those
paying homage to the Devil kill themselves as "sacrifices" to
their nether god, believing that with promised reincarnation,
Satan will reward them with another, more powerful existence.
The young Catholic boy's suicide may reflect a point reported by
Langone and Blood. According to the Gallup Youth Survey Release
of May 10, 1988, "Approximately one- third of teens who are
regular attendees at Protestant or Catholic churches believe in
reincarnation, a belief rejected by Christianity but upheld by
most Eastern and New Age religious philosophies." "A large
minority of teens," the authors continue,
a) are not very
well grounded In their religions b) believe In witchcraft
and...the Devil, and c) are attracted to heavy metal music. If
even one or two percent of these teens were seriously Influenced
by Satanism. the total number would be in the tens of
thousands.
Reincarnation, in a
materialistic culture, feeds the fires of wanting power both in
the here and now and in an second, more powerful one. It is a
belief to which teens in the present social context are
particularly prey. Reincarnation can, in turn, become the
aperture to belief in the Devil. This brand of belief in the
Devil is not the usual Catholic one in which Satan is an
ontological, personal force who preys upon and tempts even the
best persons, who must practice virtue and pray for grace in
order to resist. This traditional Christian approach to the devil
was, according to some professionals working in the fields of
Satanist cases, effective yesterday, but today is a largely
vanishing artifact of a receding Christian culture. For instance,
Louise M. Edwards, a Canadian social worker with much experience
treating ritual abuse cases, terms the Catholic catechesis on
Satan as dearly a bygone, "European" one. The awareness of ritual
or Satanic assaults," she writes in "Differentiating Between
Ritual Assault and Sexual Abuse" (Journal of Child and Youth
Care, Special Issue, 1990),
is fairly new
to North America, but to those of us with roots in Europe it Is
something taught at the earliest ages.... The Catholic Church
taught that the Satanic cults do the reverse of the church ....
It was presented as the battle of good versus evil. [A] catechism
book used by the Catholic church In 1955... clearly spells out
the obstacles to happiness and Indicates that there Is such a
person as the devil who tempts people to do
wrong.
In a post- 1955 world
bereft of Catholic catechesis, reincarnation initiates the
psychologically vulnerable and theologically ignorant into homage
to the devil in exchange for the goods of this world and power
beyond the grave. For the more "sophisticated" neopagan, there is
the paying of homage to a god who has both a light and dark side,
but who shares enough conventionally Christian-defined satanic
properties to pass for Satan. One popular neo-pagan deity such as
this is Baphomet, who, via the "theology" accompanying the
belief, demands blood or symbolic sacrifice, or burnt offering.
These sacrifices are "Dionysian" at base, in other words, geared
to ensuring "renewal."
In The Return of the Goddess (Crossroads, 1982) Edward C.
Whitmont, a New Ager, advocates worship of the goddess, who was
the consort of Baphomet. He also believes that the Grail legend
is the belief for our time, which he calls "the post-Christian
era." Feminism is duly accommodated in Whitmont's system, for the
"restoration of the Grail (will occur) by honoring the Feminine
aspect of existence." "The Grail myth," according to
Whitmont,
has replaced
the original form of Christian messianism in terms of
psychological effectiveness. From the late Middle Ages on through
our present post-Christian days, It has had a most powerful
effect. It is also an integrative myth. It unifies preChristian
with Christian and modern post-Christian elements. The ancient
cauldron of the Great Goddess is filled now with the blood of
Christ and awaits redemption of the redeemer through human
search, through the conscious effect of a seeker who dares to ask
the socially forbidden question "Where or what does It serve?"
and "What is the meaning?"
Proponents of witchcraft,
especially among "Catholic" feminists, usually insist that belief
in "The Goddess" has nothing to do with Satanism. Whitmont,
however, indicates that this "benign" witchcraft has a darker
side, noting:
that the horned
god, the consort of the Great Goddess, is an integral aspect of
the Grail dynamic .... In medieval witches' cults this figure
appears as the horned attendant of the goddess. Called the Devil
by the church, he was known as the Lord of Reincarnation by the
witches. As with Dionysius's death and renewal, blood rites were
undoubtedly associated with this figure in pre-Christian pagan
cults.
Whitmont recognizes, as we
shall see, that both Goddess and Grail were intrinsic to Nazi
religlo/ philosophy. However, Whitmont takes pains to separate
his New Age cleavage to these myths from Hitler's attraction to
them by castigating the latter's overlaying both with racial
hatred. However, any resurgence of Grail/ Goddess belief must be
seen as direct opposition to Christianity, which was the first
principle underlying Nazi philosophy and policy. Certainly, the
Jews were hated on a racial basis; but much more, they were
despised, in the gnostic sense, for the 'bad conscience" they
brought to Christianity and to the person of Christ, through
Judaic foundations. Jehovah, the God of the Jews, is responsible
for Genesis, for material creation, and for establishing the
concept of sin. Thus, the charge often leveled against the Jews,
that of materialism, traces back to the gnostic antipathy to
matter. This deeper reason for hating the Jews, from whose law
and morality Christ emerged, is neglected by contemporary
historians. As Whitmont demonstrates, denunciation of
Judeo-Christian hierarchic principles and doctrine, and thereby
of its believers, is de rigueur for gnostics, whose heresy must
be seen yesterday and today as a form of protest against
established religion. Whitmont, who believes we should be able to
live totally by trial and error, by experiencing both sides of
our nature, and especially the Shadow side, regrets then the loss
of the Dionysian offering. For Dionysius is the "god of wildness
and spontaneity," and the blood offering to him is "to be
presented before the Lord and atoned for, but sent away
alive."
So, in combination, we see that in the U.S. today we have the
frontal aspect of Satanism as represented by teenagers'
increasing attraction to it, and we see the more subtle form
emerging from out of the goddess regions of neo-pagan New Age.
For both, the bottom line, whether one dresses it up in Jungian
terminology, or scrawls a pentagram on an underpass in the
suburbs, is the Satanic commandment to do whatever one wants, and
to experience everything, extolling personal power and its final
agent, the Devil, aver submission to moral law. Refusing to
consider oneself a sinner is the common ground of both. And both
varieties, as witnessed by the suicide related above and
Whitmont's colloquial and knowledgeable references to nazism, are
no more or less than the current blossoming of the Nazi legacy,
come home to roost in the good old U.S.A. not quite 50 years
after its defeat in Germany. One could run about warning that the
Cathars are coming, but even this is not exact. For what were the
Cathars and the Albigensians but the reiteration and
transmogrification of the old, pagan Teutonic religion, never
quite eradicated with the coming of Christianity, and ever at
hand in any anxious or defiant age.
After the suicide/sacrifice event, my priest friend decided to
hold a workshop for religious educators in the area, especially
as he-d unfortunately learned from the police that his bucolic
suburb is prime territory for Satanist activity in the county.
(As per my friend's police information, Satanists will sometimes
put a pentagram over a local or national map, choosing spots for
rituals where the points of the pentagram fall.) Invited to this
workshop were specialty task force police and a local
psychiatrist, Dr. Earl Hill, the Director of the Adolescent Drug
and Alcohol Unit at St. Francis General Hospital here in
Pittsburgh. He told the group that an increasing number of
teenagers admitted there for alcohol and/or drug dependency were
reporting involvement in Satanism. At first, Dr. Hill was
skeptical, "blowing it off" as peripheral or perhaps a delusional
effect of the alcohol or drug abuse. But at last he could no
longer ignore it as merely incidental. The kids were talking as
much about belief in the Devil as they were reporting partaking
in Satanist activity. Out of his realization, Dr. Hill has become
an expert, and not, as with many other professionals-including
journalists--skeptic who categorizes the adolescent "dabbling" in
Satanism as merely a new evocation of teenage rebellion.
The term "dabbling is belied by some of the recorded cases. In
1988, Tommy Sullivan, of New Jersey, killed his mother with a Boy
Scout knife, attempted to kill his father and brother, torched
the family home and fled, finally committing suicide by slashing
his wrists and throat. "An investigation revealed that Tommy's
interest in Satanism had escalated after he began reading about
witchcraft for a religion report to the eighth- grade class at
the parochial school he attended. His friends reported that he
told them that the devil appeared to him in a vision and ordered
him to kill his family and preach Satanism." "Dabbling" implies
that there exists some type of consecutively empirical stages in
Satanic belief and resulting action. This hypothesis, which can
be neither verified nor quantified, should be dismissed as
overloading hyper-rationalism and skepticism onto the real
supernatural forces at work in Satanism and in the individuals it
ensnares. In fact, this hypothesis boldly demonstrates a kind of
opposition to grounding the discussion of burgeoning U.S.
Satanism in matters religious. And pushed further. it encourages
seeing such a view as an enabling factor of Satanism because the
seriousness of the phenomenon is undercut by using Satanism for a
certain kind of secularist propaganda.
Tommy Sullivan's fatal opening to Satanism was, amazingly, a
school report on witchcraft assigned at a Catholic school. But a
larger number of teenagers are initiated into Satanist beliefs
through the skinhead and heavy metal music movements, often one
and the same thing. According to Langone and Blood, "Some
satanist cults are suspected of recruiting at heavy metal
concerts .... They may employ teenage members as recruiters or to
lure other teens to rituals where they are seized, forced to
participate, and threatened with death if they leave the cult or
tell anyone about it." Of course, not all skinheads or heavy
metal music fans are satanists. But both are at high risk. The
skinhead thrives on violent motifs that are highly likely to
spill over into actual violence. The lyrics to heavy metal music
abound with vivid images of rape, murder, suicide, Satan, blood
and mayhem, and even necrophilia. If some writers are willing to
mitigate the possible effects of heavy and dead metal bands'
influence on the spiritual state of fans. the police are not. The
above-mentioned police documents on ritualistic crime mentioned
above contain pages of the abominable lyrics.
Detective Richard Mihalic, part of an intra-professional task
force based in Pittsburgh, told this reporter that Michael
Aquino, a nationally known, avowed Satanist and Nazi devotee,
recently said on a BBC broadcast that he is actively recruiting
skinheads. This means that the skinhead cum heavy metal music
"movement" may be the hiring hall for a new phase of formal
organization by "professional" Satanists like Aquino. Carl A.
Raschke, in the 1989 book, Painted Black, alleges that Aquino
also reports having visited Wewelsburg Castle, SS Chief Heinrich
Himmler's luxurious and gothic Third Reich outpost where Himmler
initiated and educated his vicious corps in the "lost knowledge"
of many offbrand occult traditions, as well as in absurd
historical. cultural, and even geographical theories put forward
by a host of revolting quacks who were actual professors at the
time. Although Aquino recruits skinheads, who are walking time
bombs of violence, he demurs on the issue of his agreement with
Nazi racial hatred and anti-Semitism. (Of course, who can trust
him to tell the truth?) Rather, writes Raschke, Aquino says he
went to Wewelsburg to exploit the "working" there that is, its
evil. As a devoted, believing pilgrim, Aquino expects the evil
that was wrought at Wewelsburg to surge into himself, broadening
his own "powers." Obviously, the most paradigmatic evil wrought
by Himmler and the SS involved the extermination of millions of
people. Thus Aquino begs the question when he publicly plays down
any personal, Satanist antipathy toward Jews, Catholics, and
Blacks; for Satanism's first law is preying upon the "weak," and
using others ritualistically to gain power for themselves.
From the evidence, then, of the convergence of contemporary
Satanism with neo- Nazism, it can be said that Nazism, and within
that, the person of Hitler, and the dramatis personae surrounding
him, provide a demonology for today's devil- worshippers. They
can look into the totally accessible film of history in their own
century and see a living hell led by Hitler as Satan and his
totally subservient legion, who were, above all, "obedient" to
his dark. predatory will. Hitler, however, was only making use of
symbols that were already familiar in occult circles. The SS
characters were resurrected from Germanic tribal runes. The
swastika was originally a Sanskrit sun symbol, denoting a
heliocentric cosmos ordered by an Aryan nature god who became the
reinterpreted "God" of the Nazis. Before Hitler's rise, many
German racists had adopted the swastika as the emblem of their
several quasi-political movements, and the occult societies which
often lay behind the public, political constructs. The most
relevant of these was the Thule Society, whose meetings Hitler
attended while in the' German Army during World War I and after.,
It was there that he met Rudolf Hess, as well as his future
"philosopher/intellectual," Alfred Rosenberg. The Thule Society
was the quasi-secret gnostic society behind Munich's tiny German
Workers Party which, in turn, provided the philosophical basis
and early membership for Hitler's German National Socialist
Party. Dusty Sklar, in the very well-researched Nazis and the
Occult, establishes that Hitler took many ideas and props from
the Thule Society: the fuhrerprinzip, the swastika (which a
dentist who was a Thule member ultimately designed into the Nazi
flag), the idea for the stormtroopers, and the very salute, "Sieg
Heil!" But at the bottom of alt of these lay a barbarian's
antipathy to none other than Christianity, as well as to Judaism,
and especially to the Catholic Church. Had the war been won by
Germany, the Church would have probably been pandemically
persecuted. Thus, the swastika and the SS runes are historically
the symbols of satanism and beneath them lay visceral hatred of
Judeo-Christian civilization.
Whitmont claims
that the lore of the swastika traces directly back to the Knights
Templars, who were routed by the Church for allegedly
satanic-like practices. The Templars were also affiliated with
the Grail myth, a major element of which was worship of an
ancient, Celtic/Teutonic god involving prescribed rituals and
prayers: "All this purportedly constituted a Grail liturgy
dedicated to reviving the ancient forgotten mysteries of the old
sacred tradition (ascribed to a legendary Aryan Thule) from which
the whole Indo-Germanic culture was supposed to have
originated."
The central symbol of the Thule Grail mysteries was represented
by a swastika, &e ancient symbol of renewal, flanked by two horns
of the moon (the horns of the old Celtic shamanic god Cerunnus).
It is held within and over a moon sickle, as in a
cup.
Of the Nazis, those "new
Templars," Whitmont says, "This emblem was now said to be the
most secret symbol of the Armanentum Armandom, the name given to
the order by its high priests and spiritual directors. These new
Templars claimed to guard and serve the Grail of the racially
pure blood and the Thule mysteries of the ancient Aryan root
race." Thus, the old god Cerannus would have had to be
propitiated with blood rites, upon which pagan renewal was always
based. Hitler, when he came to power, often had himself pictured
in Grail regalia, and set up some of his forces as "orders" of
knights. It then becomes possible to hypothesize that perhaps the
ritual murders which took place in the German concentration camps
were seen, not figuratively as they are by some historians, but
literally as blood sacrifice. Hitler as Fuhrer was but the
reflection of Hitler, the down and out student in Vienna, the
occult aficionado. In those years, he was the reader of spoiled
monk turned occultist and racist Lanz von Lebenfels' Ostara, the
anti-Jewish, prurient publication whose name is a pagan
forerunner, it is said, of the Christian "Easter." Although
Hitler went far beyond the Thule society, some of his old
associates from it joined him when he acceded to power. Just as
the Thule Society was the gnostic secret society behind the early
German Workers Party, so too its beliefs and rituals may have
continued to be practiced behind the political/philosophical
facade of Nazism, and the god Cerannus may have come to be
bloodily propitiated in the name of renewing Germany.
But were the Nazis practicing Satanists? Here again, the answer
depends on the definition of Satanism. If one means organizing
covens-or "ghettos" as Church of Satan founder, Anton LaVey calls
covens nowadays-the answer from history is a probable no. But if
Satanism is defined as an occultist, pagan legacy of something
like the Knights Templars, the answer would be yes. Some writers
have drawn on the rich historical evidence of Nazi occult belief,
extending these to imply Satanist activity of the traditional
'coven kind. But unconvincingly so, although there are some
incidents which do seem to reek of that type of Satanism, such as
Hitler's ritualistic suicide on Walpurgis Night, the eve of the
Satanic high "holyday" of Beltane.
Other historians leave the question open, or treat it in a
lefthanded way. They exhaustively chronicle Hitler's excesses,
his politics, and his character, but finally they admit that they
cannot explain him. That is, they concur that his evil was too
great to be defined in merely human terms. But what is ignored by
nearly all of the writers is that Hitler clearly defined himself
as a messiah, and his most important henchmen and major
ideologues were self-proclaimed heretics, both of which
distinguishing marks wind better into the Templar/Thule
skein.
The Nazis do seem to qualify as Satanists in spite of the
seemingly paradoxical fact that they professed belief in God, but
much, much mitigated. In other words, unlike today's Satanists
and other historical ones, they did not denounce God out of hand.
But they did totally reject His teachings, especially as taught
by the Catholic Church. For instance, Himmler's SS men, at their
initiation rite, were asked a first question: "Do you believe in
God?" The correct answer was "yes." However, SS officers in
carrying out Himmler's depraved family policy of Lebensborn,
replaced priests at baptisms and marriages of fellow SS men, and
were charged by Himmler to couple anonymously with German
"maidens" as much to insult the Church as to produce children for
the Fuhrer. Like today's rock-addicted youngsters, Himmler's men
were instructed in the facts of reincarnation and in return for
taking leave from their consciences promised greater power in a
life to come.
The German people were ripe for the Anti-Christ figure of Hitler.
"By the turn of the century," writes James Webb in his book The
Occult Underground,
most of the
Occult underground which were known outside Germany had secured
some sort of foothold inside the country. Masters of all sorts
found a ready following. In the period between the two World
Wars... the choice of cults was large. Eastern and dubiously
Eastern religions rubbed shoulders with movements for Christian
revival. Prophets illuminated by God Himself contended with
creeds constructed from every religious dogma known at any period
in history.
By the 1930s, the Nazi
Occult was well on its way to replacing Christianity as Germany's
established religion. Dorothy Thompson remembers someone telling
her at the Oberammergau Passion Play that
It's a revival.
They think Hitler is God. Believe it or not, a German woman sat
next to me at the... play, and when they hoisted Jesus on the
cross, she said, "There he is. That is our Fuhrer, our Hitler!"
[A]nd when they paid out the 30 pieces of silver to Judas, she
said, "That is Roehm, who betrayed the
leader."
The heresies most
applicable to the Nazis are also those most pervasive in the West
today: Gnosticism and its extension, Catharism. Interestingly,
today's trackers of contemporary Satanism who end up penning
books invariably carry a chapter or section on both of these, but
fail to trace the Nazis' involvement in the "theologies" of both;
nor do they draw logical analogies between these "ancient"
heresies and today's culture. As there is no dearth of examples,
so it must be judged that these analysts are too entrenched in
the gnostic mindset themselves to be able to critique Satanism
other than superficially. Yet, heresy is writ large upon the
pages of Nazi memoirs and records. Consider, for example, the
words of Alfred Rosenberg, Reich sophist and author of The Myth
of the 20th Century, who explains in his Memoirs that
a certain
heretical attitude grew up in me quite early, particularly during
the 6 lessons. But it received its strongest impetus, as was the
case with so many others, from Houston Stewart Chamberlain's
Foundations of the 19th Century.
Rosenberg then describes a
trip to France where he made a special trip south to the seat of
the Albigensian heresy. "The struggles and fate of this huge sect
of Cathari," he continues, "had always interested me. . .moved me
deeply." He goes on to describe them as a "queer movement,
combining the religious desire for freedom of will and character
which was essentially West Goth, with late-Iranic mysticism." The
Cathari, he continues, "rejected the Old Testament, avoided the
use of any and all Jewish names ... and shunned even the name of
Mary. The crucifix to them appeared an unworthy symbol since,
they claimed, nobody could venerate the rope with which a human
being, even though he be a martyr, had been hanged."
Rosenberg must have also known that the Cathars are credited,
even by the most Inquisition-hating historians as having been the
first heretics to propitiate Satan as the god of matter. They are
credited too, with being the first to celebrate the Black Mass
and to offer human sacrifice, both of which were drawn upon by
19th Century Satanists. It was the 17th century Cathars who
introduced to devil-worship the ritualistic elements today passed
off as ancient but which were unknown in both the early Christian
centuries and in the Renaissance, when black magic became
influential through the work of Pico de Mirandola, who believed
that white magic was not efficient enough for the matters at
hand. It was the ritualistic, propitiatory Cathar "tradition"
which was adapted by the surge of Satanism that took place in the
19th century, well-described by Huysmanns in La Bas.
Raschke nails down the Cathar-Nazi convergence and its connection
to contemporary Satanism. Donald Nugent in "Satan is a Fascist"
(The Month, April 1972) analyzes the "unholy Trinity of Adolf
Hitler, Charles Manson ... and Anton LaVey;" For all three the
"satanist and the 'superman are one," Nugent writes. He also
points out that mysticism and humanism are "the two routes to
satanism." Catharism mixed with the secular ideology of state
control became Hitlerism. German mysticism mingled with LaVey's
libertarian philosophy of laissez aller, or "let anything pass,"
becomes the nine satanic statements [of LaVey]."
Nugent also
discusses Manson's fanatical racism; his sporting of Nazi
swastikas, which he wears on his forehead to this day and his own
cryptic allusions to "superman." He cites the congruity with
LaVey's political objectives of a "benign police state" in which
the weak are winnowed away. In the satanist mentality, according
to Nugent, "[T]he world is a hospital--and a mental hospital. The
world is the lustful will to power, wanton destructive violence,
man's inhumanity to man. The world is the paradise that has been
polluted. The world is the exploitative society, the place where
nothing is holy and everything has its price. The world is a
brothel." That has been LaVey's sentiment to the letter. If the
world is a brothel, then destruction and violence are the most
justifiable course. All of one's corrupt surroundings must be
unmasked, dismembered, and dispersed into
nothingness.
Raschke errs, however, in
pinning the blame for describing the world as a hospital and a
brothel where the weak are "winnowed away" only on people like
LaVey and Manson. For already in America, the law itself has
legitimized expunging the weak via legalized abortion and
euthanasia. The extremist reaches of the environmental, peace,
and animal rights movements look upon the world-and man- as
hopelessly "polluted." Brothel needs no discussion. And mental
hospital could describe the proceedings of many auspicious,
recent commissions of physicians, lawyers, ethicists, and
clergyman who have legitimized such things as fetal and embryo
experimentation. euthanasia of incurables, etc. The image is also
a glove-fit, to use author and activist Jeremy Rifkin's phrase,
for today's "algynists," who seek, as present-day alchemists,
through the revealed secrets and power of recombinant DNA, the
key to matter and the Philosopher's Stone; who dream the
megalomaniacal, Faustian dreams of cloning, hybridizing, and
"creating" life.
All of these cultural signs point to the gnostic/ Cathar hatred
of the world of matter, which leads inexorably and logically to
blood sacrifice to the god of matter, that is, to Satan, whether
he is propitiated by that name or another. Sexual perversion, an
intrinsic feature of the war between body and spirit, was as rife
among' the Nazis as it is in the U.S. today. Norbert Bromberg,
M.D. and Verna Valz Small in Hitler's Psychopathology claim that
no less than eight women who underwent sexual perversions with
Hitler, during affairs with him, committed suicide. Hitler
cryptically described the "suicide" of his niece/lover, Geli
Raubel as a "sacrifice to Germany," a fact which historians glide
over as merely figurative.
In the Nazis' case, the image of the mental hospital is no less
apt. Their Gnosticism mandated a frontal assault on western
Christian civilization. They rowed energetically backwards to
traditions like Atlantis, to legends of a superrace in ancient
India whose deposit of lost knowledge they thought they could
resurrect through mere desire. This caused the Nazis to wallow in
any occult mania.
In his unrepentant Memoirs, penned in a prison cell at Nuremberg,
Alfred Rosenberg denied that his ideas led to violence. Today,
Anton LaVey makes the same claim. "The Church of Satan," writes
Langone,
conducts its
business publicly, and LaVey does not promote acts of physical
violence .... However, The Satanic Bible ... has been enormously
influential with satanists of various persuasions, and is
frequently reported to have been found by police investigators
among the paraphernalia of teenage dabblers as well as by
individuals suspected of occult-related crimes.... Sean Sellers
claims to have used The Satanic Bible as a guide for his
"sacrifice" of a convenience store clerk.
LaVey, ever aware of his
belief's protection by the First Amendment, disavows human
sacrifice at the same time he outlines times when it's warranted;
once condoning it, he quickly retreats, calling it "symbolic." In
another vein, today's Satanists, when they are implicated in
crimes or logically accused, as was Rosenberg, of inciting crimes
by the very violence of their ideas, like to cry foul against the
intolerance of society and religion. "A vocal fraternity of
publicly professed 'orthodox satanists"' Roeschke writes in
Painted Black,
have begun to
counterpunch against all the media coverage of ritual abuse ....
Like a scene from The Untouchables, where Capone denounces Eliot
Ness for dishonesty and treachery, the normal perception of fair
is made to seem foul, and the foul fair. It is the Christians who
are out to besmirch sand spread the blood libel against the
upstanding, decent "good people." The Christians are
consolidating their regiments for the massive assault on satanist
virtue.
This kind of mind game has
a Satanic logic. The neo-pagan, card-carrying Satanist has so
severed his will from reason and faith that Christianity is seen
as the aggressor against "human nature." The rhetoric is usually
monomaniacal and grandiose. Hugh- Trevor Roper, in his prologue
to Hitler's Secret Conversations, notes that Hitler "casually
informed Mussolini (that) the last fifteen hundred years-the
years between Attila and himself, the whole span of Christian
civilization-had been a mere interruption of human development,
which 'is now about to resume its former character.'"
In 1935, Hitler Youth was deployed to confiscate the pamphlet
written by Cardinal Faulhaber against the Aryan Paragraph of the
Reich's Constitution, which outlawed as criminal all civil,
intellectual and commercial activity of Jews, as well as their
right to marry German, indeed, any Gentile women. This, despite
the fact that the earlier Nuremberg Laws, which rescinded most
anti-Semitic reaction in Germany, had brought an influx of Jews
from eastern Europe. Cardinal Faulhaber's document is a paen not
only to Catholic courage but to the Church's unconditional
support for protection of the disenfranchised members of society.
It finds its approximation today in Catholicism's defense of all
those whose personhood is is attacked. The Cardinal, like the
Pope 1500 years before, stared unafraid into the eyes of the new
Attila, a dramatic confrontation described by Mario Bendiscioli,
in Nazism versus Christianity:
The Cardinal
Archbishop of Munich... emphasized the unquestionable
contributions for which Germany was indebted to Christianity.
He... quoted the description, which was not by any means
deprecatory, given by Tacitus of the ways and customs of the
ancient Germans, Instituting a comparison between them and
Christian morality, which showed the superiority of the latter,
and the consequent inconsistency of the National Socialist
contention that the German should revert to those ancient usages.
This was all the more so as it was actually in the Christian
atmosphere that the German nation had been formed from the
individual, obscure tribes which were in perpetual fruitless
strife among themselves. The first historical records and
literary monuments of the German nation were Christian
compositions. It was through the medium of a Christian
institution, the Holy Roman Empire, that Germany attained a
mission and a universal meaning.
"Christianity," he went
on,
did not come as
a foreign imposition thrust on the Germans, but it was welcomed
on account of its religious and social value through the medium
of German missionaries, as a religious elevation of their
national life and of their ancestral customs. Consequently, there
is no internal antithesis between the German nation or race on
the one hand and the Christian religion on the other, but there
is a purification and perfection of the German nature through the
medium of truth and grace of the Church.
Like Hitler and his
coterie, today's neo-Nazi Satanists find themselves burdened with
the same task of legitimizing barbarism as a method of
repudiating, intimidating, and despising Christianity. In fact,
Christianity is forever in the forefront of their minds. This
makes them strong in the face of "Sunday Catholics," who labor
under the illusion that the enemies of God are as lukewarm as are
they, and leads them to minimize Satanism as a merely media hype
and chimera. But it is opposition to Christianity that is the
sole engine behind the Satanists' symbols. This is particularly
the case with the swastika. If today it is construed as purely a
symbol of a generalized will to mayhem, to Hitler it was the
emblem of his hatred for Christianity and his burning desire to
eventually expunge it; this he thought he would do by exploiting
Christianity's own internal weaknesses. "With these Confessions,"
Hitler said in one of his speeches,
whether this
one or that one, it's all the same. There's no future in them.
Certainly not for Germans. Fascism may make peace with the church
in God's name. [He alludes here to Mussolini--SMR] I'll do that
too. Why not? But that won't prevent me from tearing out
Christianity in Germany, root and branch . . . Italians, and
Frenchmen, when you see them in the country, are heathens. Their
Christianity isn't even skin deep. But the German is different.
He wants to be sincere. He is either a Christian or a heathen....
But for our people it is important to choose between the Jewish
belief in Christ with its wishy-washy whining about pity, and a
strong heroic belief in a God in nature, a God in their own
people, a God In their own fate, in their own blood ....
No matter whether it's the Old or the New Testament... It's all
the same Jewish swindle. It's all the same and doesn't make us
free. A German church, German Christianity is nonsense. You are
either a Christian or a German.
If Hitler's provides a
demonology for today's Satanists, they nevertheless seem to be
less subtly demonic than he. They go for the stage props of the
rituals, so far acted out in secret. But Hitler, early and late,
was guided constantly by explicit, and completely codified
"theological" ideas, whose consequences he played out, on the
grand scale, under the guise of politics and war. This does not
mean, of course, that today's Satanists are not authentically
evil. Obviously, the devil has something for ever one from the
evil genius to the mediocre sycophant. He will take anyone who
will "not kneel down."
Despite his belief that the destruction of Christianity would be
but a mere matter of time, Hitler, evil and determined as he was,
ended up vanquished. The spiritual struggle between good and evil
was, paradoxically, a clear reminder of God's primacy. Once
defeat was imminent and inevitable, Hitler ordered Albert Speer
to destroy the infrastructure of Germany. This Speer would not
do, as so much of the physical Reich was his own work as Reich
architect. Perhaps God chose to remind Hitler and the world of
His greatness by making it necessary for the Fuhrer to destroy
his own work. Hitler ordered the destruction, he said, because
his defeat proved that the German people were too weak to
prevail. They had not measured up to his Nietzschean, Luciferian
requirement. Or perhaps Hitler knew he had failed as black
magician and Anti-Christ. He wanted to burn Germany itself
because he had come to believe that the German people were too
"weak" to win the war.
He could have just as easily said they had not proven evil
enough. Like the devil Isacaron, who possessed Antoine Gay (See
"The Devil in Antoine Gay," Fidelity, April 1987), Hitler was
forced to say, "The greatest suffering that God can inflict on me
is to be obliged to destroy my own work." This is not to say that
Hitler was merely possessed, as Gay surely was. Hitler became a
function of the total degradation and depravity of his own will
to power, that "thing upon which he so often violently
expatiated, which he frighteningly and effectively exhibited in
so many public and private paroxysms. So demonic did that will
seem, so "perfectly" conformed to the highest standards of evil,
that arch-Satanist Aleister Crowley felt sure that Hitler had
followed his own prescriptions as laid out in his own Book of
Law. Crowley had also written Thelema, the Greek word for "will,"
recognizing its disordering as the first principle of opposition
to God. James Webb reports that "Crowley marked for attention all
the passages in Herman Rauschning's Hitler Speaks that referred
to a new world order or to the collapse of the old system of
values."
Just as Hitler's monomania led him to believe that Christianity's
weaknesses and accommodation would lead to his final victory over
it, so today, Anton LaVey clings to the same proud hope. "The
events that LaVey predicted," writes Burton H. Wulfe in his
prologue to The Satanic Bible,
in the first
edition of The Satanic Bible have come to pass. Repressed people
have burst their bonds. Sex has exploded, the collective libido
has been released, in movies and literature, on the streets and
in the home. People are dancing topless and bottomless. Nuns have
thrown off their traditional habits, exposed their legs, and
danced the "Missa Solemnis Rock" that LaVey thought he was
conjuring up as a prank.... There is a mood of neopaganism and
hedonism, and from It there have emerged a wide variety of
brilliant individuals... doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers,
writers, stockbrokers, real estate developers, actors and
actresses, mass communications media people (to cite a few
catagories of Satanists) who are interested in formalizing and
perpetuating this all- pervading religion and way of
life.
Social historians will note
that, as Hitler leaned heavily on his heathen volk to move him to
liberate Germany from Christianity, today LaVey clings to the
arrivistes and wannabees as his clay. The "innate" Germanic
spirituality which Hitler longed to "free" from Christianity
today has been replaced with LaVey's pose as the liberator of the
grossly aberrant materialistic and sexual individuals who believe
that totally loosening the bonds of Christian conscience and
worshipping the Devil will put them in a Maserati. It is
certainly unhinging to think of people like this carrying out
human sacrifice to attain such ends. It was no doubt inevitable
that as Hitler dropped names like Goethe and Darwin, LaVey drops
those of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. The former he claims
was his lover, the latter his witch. He also says he leveled a
curse on Mansfield's manager, whom he despised, and that it was
this curse that caused both to die in a car accident, Mansfield
literally losing her head.
Deriding the neo-Nazi Satanists will not make them go away or
delete the burgeoning crimes committed or encouraged by them from
the police blotters. Not all of today's devil worshippers are
imbued with LaVey's preening, which makes him seem a kind of
netherworld Liberace, making it temptingly naive to deride if not
dismiss him, which is probably his game. Some other current
Satanists inspire a more sobering response; they are the rough
types who stand to create widespread, large scale havoc. This is
the contingent which feels empowered by dark mandates from beyond
the grave. Alfred Rosenberg, during his imprisonment after the
War, while awaiting the finality of judgment at Nuremberg, wrote,
"In the future everything depends upon the need for the coming
generations to recognize the inevitability of this battle of our
times, so that they may not become weary and weak like those who
came before us." U.S. culture as anti-culture sinking steadily
into nihilism is already finding new expressions and forms. It is
ready to receive the inheritors of Rosenberg's legacy.
For instance, there is our fellow citizen, Mr. Nicholas Schreck.
As reported by Langone and Raschke, Schreck counts himself as an
avowed neo-Nazi. He has pledged himself to Rosenberg's plea for
dark historical continuity and his "apostolate" is the
resurrection of Joseph Goebbels' "resistance organization," Radio
Werewolf. Schreck has cast this Nazi program in the guise of a
heavy metal band. Goebbels founded the resistance/propaganda
movement once the Nazi defeat was inevitable. He wanted a music
and radio terrorist underground which would take the Nazi
doctrine and mission forward into the future, where it has deftly
landed. In Schreck's manifesto titled "Radio Werewolf
Indoctrination," he writes that his band "is the current
incarnation of a demonic manifestation," and its music's purpose
is-now quoting Hitler- "'to instill the gleam of pride and
independence of the beast of prey into the eyes of pitiless
youth.'" Considering that heavy metal and dead metal bands are
one of the main recruiting forums for professional Satanists, the
Nazi promise that their doctrine would not die with them is made
good by creatures like Schreck. Rosenberg and Goebbels, who ended
their abominable lives in nooses, symbolically find their
reincarnation in men like Schreck.
At Chicago's Hartgrave Hospital, psychiatrists created the Center
for Treatment of Ritualistic Deviance. The psychiatrist in charge
avers that "No one will be hospitalized for strange beliefs or
unusual values that we would disagree with." One can't help quip
that the Devil probably is very entertained by the pretensions of
psychiatrists. Perhaps the Devil is also a little angry that,
these days, the shrinks are reluctant to give him his due. Of
course, the Devil must be grateful at least that his presence in
a case "hampers conventional treatment." For author Langone,
however, the context of satanism is not religious. After
reporting pages of mayhem ascribed to Satanism, he ends his book
by saying: "I don't believe the problems associated with Satanism
have to be construed as a religious issue, although they can be,
and I am sure intelligent arguments could be made that they
should be. The analysis of evil I have advanced rests comfortably
(italics added) in psychological paradigms. It represents a
challenge to mental health, and I encourage my colleagues to
explore its ramifications for theory and treatment."
So should parents of youngsters who "dabble" in Satanism be
alarmed if Johnny has a Satanist altar in his bedroom? How will
they determine just how evil Johnny is at the moment or might be
tomorrow? Should they dwell at all on the fate of Tommy
Sullivan's dead mother? And as for the difference between
psychosis and evil, we must in all fairness point out to Dr.
Langone that Charles Manson, a true life Cathar who propitiates
both Gad and the Devil, is not doing life in a nuthouse, but in a
prison, and that his "delusions" were firm enough to inspire him
to commit mayhem. What Langone and his colleagues are advocating
is the whittling away of Christianity by its own internal
weakness, one of which is that of allowing various secular
forces, like psychiatry, to usurp its functions and ape its
wisdom, and its effectiveness against evil.
Hitler would have been edified.
Only something as serious as belief can be at the bottom of all
this, whether you want to be comfortable with it or not. And that
belief is exploited and aided by the real force of evil. The
rapidity with which Tommy Sullivan and others progressed from
curiosity to murder and suicide clearly demonstrates the presence
of a supernatural force. Although belief may be out of style, it
remains a potent cause.
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Further Reading:
Refutation of the New
Age Movement
Holy Spirit Watch
