The Cult Dossier · No. 034 · Racial / Nationalist
Thule Society and Ariosophy
Thule-Gesellschaft; Ordo Novi Templi; Guido von List Society
1907 – 1935 · Vienna, Munich
IV. THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
Occult-racial religion feeding a political movement
Who led it
GUIDO VON LIST (1848–1919), Armanist runic mystic; JÖRG LANZ VON LIEBENFELS (1874–1954), ex-Cistercian monk, founder of the Ordo Novi Templi and publisher of Ostara; RUDOLF VON SEBOTTENDORF (born Adam Glauer), founder of the Thule Society in 1918.
What it worshipped and taught
A racial mysticism: an Aryan-Nordic master race descended from a lost polar homeland (Thule / Hyperborea), runes as a magical alphabet, the swastika as a solar-Aryan sign, and the theory (Lanz's Theozoology, 1905) that lower races were the product of bestial interbreeding and should be eliminated. Blavatsky's root-race doctrine supplied the framework; the Ariosophists racialised it.
Who was in it
Guido von List; Lanz von Liebenfels; Rudolf von Sebottendorf; Dietrich Eckart, dedicatee of Mein Kampf; ANTON DREXLER and KARL HARRER, who founded the German Workers' Party (DAP) as a Thule front in 1919; Rudolf Hess; Hans Frank; Alfred Rosenberg; Heinrich Himmler, whose personal obsessions ran through this material; Karl Maria Wiligut, Himmler's private runic mystic, code-named Weisthor.
How it ended, or where it stands
Absorbed into, then partly purged by, the regime it helped birth.
The dead
Indirect: this ideological strand contributed to the Holocaust and the deaths of millions
Of note
Careful framing required. Nazism was not caused by occultism, and the popular idea of an occult Third Reich is heavily exaggerated (Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, 1985, is the sober treatment). But Ariosophy did supply the racial-mystical vocabulary, the swastika and the Aryan-Thule myth, and the SS Ahnenerbe was real.
Its timeline
- 1905 Lanz publishes Theozoology; Ostara magazine follows in 1905–1917.
- 1908 Guido von List Society founded in Vienna.
- 17 August 1918 Sebottendorf founds the Thule Society in Munich as a cover name for the Germanenorden.
- 5 January 1919 The German Workers' Party, later the NSDAP, is founded by Thule-linked men Drexler and Harrer.
- 30 April 1919 Communist Räterepublik forces seize and execute seven Thule members in Munich — a propaganda gift to the far right.
- 1 July 1935 Himmler founds the AHNENERBE, an SS research bureau for Germanic prehistory, later notorious for the Tibet expedition of 1938–39 and, under Wolfram Sievers and August Hirt, for lethal human experiments at Natzweiler and Dachau.
- 1937–1941 Hitler bans occult orders, Freemasonry and astrology; Hess's flight to Britain in May 1941 triggers the Hess Aktion against occultists.