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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