Ancient Mysteries no. 16, July 1980 (continuation of Journal of Geomancy)
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One afternoon in 1942, a messenger brought Adolf Hitler the latest reports of the fighting in Russia. The German Army was engaged in a life-or-death attempt to break through the Caucasus to Tbilisi along the old mountain road from Grozny. What with serious reverses at Stalingrad, and disastrous losses elsewhere, things were beginning to look bleak. The news from the Caucasus front was little better. Suddenly, the Führer exploded with rage. “The madmen!” he raved “they belong before a court-martial for pursuing their idiotic hobbies in time of war!”
Hitler had seen the report that a detachment of mountaineers had broken away from the main column and had climbed Mount Elbruz in order to plant the swastika flag upon its summit. Such an act of bravado did not impress Hitler, weighed down with the realization that Germany was losing the war. What could these men have been doing climbing mountains when they ought to have been combatting Bolshevism? Surely it was not just the motivation of hobbyists. For days after, Hitler railed against the mountain-climbers with more than usual vehemence. What was going on?
To find out, we must go back to the eighth century of our era. In that century, a corpus of old Persian writings called the Bundahish was collected together. It is a treatise on the world mountain and the hierarchy of spheres associated with this cosmology. That world mountain, sacred to the Aryans who worshipped Ahura Mazda, was none other than Elbruz. In the Bundahish, it is visualized as the firmament within which the sun travels and is restrained. Indeed, Elbruz is significant for it is the highest peak in the Caucasus and hence the tallest in continental Europe.
The Bundahish says of Elbruz:
“Of Mount Elbruz it is declared that around the world and Mount Terak the revolution of the sun is like a moat around the world; it turns back owing to the enclosure of Mount Elbruz around Terak. For there are a hundred {16} and eighty apertures in the west through Elbruz; and the sun every day comes in through an aperture and goes out through an aperture; and the whole connexion and motion of the moon and constellations and planets are with it.”
The original name of Elbruz was Hara Berezaiti, and it was held to be the source of the two heavenly rivers of Persian mythology.
Adolf Hitler has often been portrayed as a black magician, occultist devotee of astrology, necromancer or satanist or at least to have been in the grip of Ahrimanic forces. But when one attempts to verify this claim from original authentic sources, one finds that all these ideas originated several years after his suicide in 1945. Occultism certainly was rife in Germany between the wars, but then so it was in France and England. In Russia, it had been suppressed by Stalinism.
Today it is admitted that Hitler had no time for astrologers, but that they were interested in him. No doubt other dictators like Mussolini and Franco were also idolized by admiring opportunist astrologers. The cult of the personality thrives in such political systems. Hitler is on record as denigrating the church, whilst remaining Roman Catholic to his dying day. He felt that any method of keeping the people in thrall was useful for his purposes. Not so Heinrich Himmler.
It is an interesting fact that all the leading lights of National Socialism in Germany were Roman Catholic originally: Goebbels, Hitler, Goering and Himmler. Only the latter ever gave it up. His creed may shed some light on the geomantic revival which occurred in the Germany of the 30s and early 40s.
Heinrich Himmler was the feared and hated chief of the S.S., with the power of life and death over millions. His vision of the New Order of National Socialism was more far reaching than even Hitler’s. Himmler set about {17} creating not only the New Order, but the new man. To belong to the SS was to be one of National Socialism’s elite. Applicants had to prove that they were of German stock, with no traces of Jewish ancestry. They had to be physically fit and of high intelligence. And they had to renounce all of the trappings and value-systems of Judaeo-Christian belief.
Himmler himself renounced his Catholicism at an as yet undetermined date. What we do know is that he believed in another sort of faith – but what was it? Christian writers often call Himmler’s SS faith ‘paganism’, yet an analysis of it will show several unusual characteristics. Others, steeped in a more sensationalist creed, will think of it as the satanism beloved of the News of the World and other Sunday papers. But it was none of these.
The researches sponsored by the Occult Bureau – the Ahnenerbe – covered many things: the history of Germany; folklore; genealogy; genetics; ancient skills and wisdom; geomancy; symbolism; ancient astronomy and research into the origin and faith of the Aryans. Now the last term since 1945 has been unfairly suppressed as a ‘dirty’ word since it is supposed to bear the connotations of Nazi ideology and the Master Race (Herrenvolk). But a rapid perusal of histories of India published before the 1930s will show the word in perfectly normal use in its context of the ancient master race of 3000 years ago. Like the swastika, its connexion with National Socialism has twisted its use.
The Aryans are believed to have worshipped the divine principle of light – later to be called Ahura Mazda. The Iranians - their name derived from ‘Aryan’ – before their conversion to Islam worshipped the god, whose major prophet was none other than Zoroaster or Zarathustra (of Nietzsche fame). The Mazdean faith emphasized the struggle of righteousness and light, embodied in Ahura Mazda, against the powers of evil and darkness embodied in Ahriman. It was precisely in these terms that Himmler saw his mission. Ahriman to {18} him was represented by Bolshevism and the Jews whom he strove to eliminate from the world. The god of the Aryans, ‘The Lord’, was engaged in constant struggle against great odds and required the New Man in his combat. By selective breeding, eugenically eliminating all those who did not fit into the New Order, Himmler believed he could set up the Master Race who would re-live the glories of the ancient Aryans of India.
The Ahnenerbe became a means to resurrect the ancient arts and ways of the Master Race. Investigators were dispatched to many places to collate information which could later serve as a basis for a new mythology, a new science and a new religion.
Since 1915 there had been a school of geomantic research in Germany. Following the work of the English physicist Sir Norman Lockyer, German researchers like Leugering, Heinsch, Hopmann, Teudt and Röhrig studied the ancient patterns of the landscape. Others delved into the lore of runes, and Otto Sigfrid Reuter published several exhaustively scholarly works on the Edda and ancient German astronomy. Such material was a godsend to Himmler. Teudt was snapped up and given an official position, whilst magazines like Germanien and Hagal became popular vehicles for the dissemination of geomantic ideas and discoveries. Unlike the Britain of today, learned academics discussed the findings of Teudt and others in scholarly debate. Excavations were arranged and funded by the state to verify or disprove geomantic theories.
Such a flourishing scene has been portrayed by some writing recently as an example of the lunacy of the Nazis. The connexion of geomancy and Nazi Germany has led modern members of Marxist–Leninist groups to attack in print all modern geomants as ‘Fascist’, e.g. the magazine Searchlight. Such over-reactions are typical of propagandists of both left and right wings of orthodox politics. They do not concern {19} us here. A well-developed school of research was in effect appropriated by the SS state. Formerly, in the years before the Nazis’ election in 1933, the geomantic researchers were autonomous groups or individuals. The totalitarian state saw them as useful to its ends, and took over. Himmler’s motives were probably more clandestine than just promoting pagan knowledge and the love of the heroes of past Germanic glories. His raison d’être was control.
As master of the SS and Gestapo, Himmler was in control of the everyday lives of the German people and subject races in the Third Empire. His aim of spiritual regeneration was implemented by an attempt to revive the ancient geomantic practices of the Knightly orders of old Germany. During the medieval period the Teutonic Knights had rampaged across Poland and Russia exterminating pagans and unbelievers, subjecting the Slavs to the German Empire. Their atrocities are notorious and can be seen re-enacted in the Russian film Alexander Nevsky by Eisenstein. Himmler saw the Teutonic Knights as heroic bastions of civilization against the oriental hordes of Slavonic sub-humanity.
In 1936 Himmler founded a “Society for the Promotion and Preservation of German Cultural Monuments” mainly concerned with the preservation of Teutonic Knights’ castles and also Sachsenhain bei Verden on the Aller, the site of the memorial to 4500 Pagan Saxons massacred in 782 by Charlemagne. He also intended to restore the great Saxon shrine at the Externsteine, three great pillars of rock which stand in the mystical heartland of Germany, Westphalia. This latter place had acquired the same sanctity in German eyes as Glastonbury has for British mystics.
In 1936 Himmler said “It is my aim that, if possible, the area of every Standarte (regiment) should include a similar cultural centre of German greatness and German history which should be restored and put into a condition worthy of a cultured people”. These sites were geomantically placed. Several papers published during the war by {20} Kurt Gerlach (soon to be reprinted by IGR) point to a more practical reason for this concern with ancient monuments.
The headquarters of the SS was chosen in 1937 as Wewelsburg Castle. Named after one of its early owners, the robber baron Wewel von Büren, the castle is one of the few mountain fortresses in Westphalia. Once the retreat of the Bishops of Paderborn, it had been rebuilt in triangular form in the 17th century. Such triangular sites have often been chosen for seats of government – the Kremlin in Moscow and Thorney Island, site of Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. As headquarters of the SS, the castle was voted local funds, 13 million marks by the end of the war.
Himmler set up a Wewelsburg Office under Standartenführer Albert Taubert, who became fortress commandant in 1937. SS architect Hermann Bartels was in charge of rebuilding, and work was carried out by a Labour Corps under a staff of SS experts.
The castle was fitted with a large hall, 100 by 145 feet. In it was a magnificent round table modelled on Arthurian legend, where Heinrich Himmler and 12 SS knights sat. On the chairs around the table the names of the 13 were inscribed on silver plates. Here Himmler and his 12 Obergruppenführers sat in conference and meditation.
It is this meditation which interests us here. The castle was obviously geomantic in position and construction – Himmler had a well-known interest in the layout of the countrysides and even ancient Jewish cemeteries. Meditation on a sacred geomantic point is a way of psychically influencing the country affected by the geomantic centre.
To return to Elbruz. We left it with the members of the Mountain Division standing on its summit unfurling the swastika banner of the Nazis. Hitler did not know or understand what they were doing there. Himmler would {21} have. In any system, the conquest of the central omphalos marks that system’s overthrow. The Christians realized this when they converted the shrines of the old religions to the service of their own gods. Each and every revolution, whether religious or secular, is marked by the overthrow of the symbols of power of the former state. The demolition of statues, such as the Tsar, Kwame Nkrumah or Queen Victoria has more than a purely symbolic value for it erases the thought-patterns aroused by the beholder of such trappings of might. The eradication of the mausoleum of the Iranian Shah’s father and the conversion of the site into a urinal for pilgrims is only the latest of such happenings.
When the most sacred place of a religion or system is taken then a psychic conquest has occurred. St Patrick converted the Holy Mountain of Ireland – it now bears his name as Croagh Patrick. Glastonbury Tor was rid of Gwynn ap Nudd by the Christian Collen. And the Russian army erected the Red Flag on the Brandenburg Gate of Berlin when that city fell in 1945. Even the Moon was overcome with the Stars and Stripes. So we have many examples of conquest. The Mount Elbruz incident is put into sharp focus when we consider the writings of Kurt Gerlach. Gerlach studied the colonization of Bohemia (now Czechoslovakia) by the Germans of the Ottonian Empire, which was effected by military knights. These knights set up monasteries at strategic positions which were also geomantically sited. At the key point in this scheme of control was Mount St. Gunther, named after the eponymous saint who sat in his cell psychically controlling the whole country through his meditations.
Himmler almost certainly attempted to do the same for Germany via Wewelsburg. The mountaineer team on Elbruz were trying to stem the tide of the war by a similar action in Russia. It failed.
More aspects of geomancy in Nazi Germany will be covered in Part 2 in the next issue of ANCIENT MYSTERIES.