Wherefore Hitler?

7. The Secret Weapon

In chapter two we saw that the Faustian ego rejected God and pitted itself against the Christian religion. This thrust took an interesting twist in the latter nineteenth century with the rise of the Volkisch movement, mentioned in chapter four, which aimed to revive the pre-Christian pagan roots of the Germanic peoples. Guido von List created a mythology of ancient Teutonic priest-kings ruling a united Volk living in harmony with nature, worshipping Wotan and his pantheon. He promoted the view that the conversion of the Northern European peoples to Christianity in the Middle Ages was a great tragedy, inflicted by a campaign of slaughter and persecution. This Weltanschauung developed by List and his successors was enthusiastically embraced by Himmler and incorporated into SS ideology, including the doctrine that the Church was the historical adversary of the German spirit, the Volkgeist.

A sympathetic but critical overview of the situation was provided by Carl G. Jung. His analysis of the collective unconscious of the Reich was that Wotan had risen again and reclaimed his crown as God of the Germans; the clear implication was that Hitler was not the Avatar of the Christian God but of Wotan. None of this spilled over into the popular press, and Hitler maintained a politic tone in speaking about the Catholic and Protestant Churches; but Himmler reportedly had great plans for their comeuppance after the war was won.

The crucial issue is the relationship of Hitler and his Reich to Supernal Spirit. In The Spirit in Our Midst, we learned that this Spirit can manifest in different types of human sodalities (bonded groups). The most common form of Supernal sodality is religious, but not all religions harbor the Supernal Spirit in their midst. A case can be made that Christianity lost this vital Spirit when it consolidated into a Church in the second century. This in fact was the cause celebré of the Protestant Reformation, and the desire to regain immediate personal contact with the Spirit of Christ led to the creation of countless evangelical/charismatic/fundamentalist sects.

However, the Spirit can sustain its presence in subtler ways within an enduring ecclesiastical framework, especially when it’s rooted in a Supernal foundation as solid as the Christian mystery. The imagery of the Crucifixion and Resurrection is powerful esoteric symbolism which can lead souls into direct experience of the spiritual realities it represents. Likewise the mythology woven around it is inspirational for the multitude who are only capable of exoteric understanding. Church ritual can literally uplift devout souls to the higher realms, even if performed by disbelieving or corrupt hierophants. And most potent of all is the Supernal content that fills the Gospels and is scattered throughout the rest of the New Testament. We conclude that Christianity was the Supernal root of European civilization, which continued to transmit the Spirit to its people and their works through both of its major branches.

As the twentieth century progressed through the First World War and its aftermath, the cultural war between religion and science settled into an unspoken truce, a tacit agreement to coexist and cooperate despite the conflicting doctrines that fueled the fulminations of the hard core on both sides. Even though this truce was honored overtly by Hitler in his pact with the Pope and his public pronouncements, Himmler covertly orchestrated the bristling burgeon of collective will to breach it decisively and utterly destroy the Christian Church.

The racial paganism that was planned as a replacement was already practiced within the SS and its constituent circles. It was clearly a new creed, though it claimed continuity with the ancient traditions it had reconstructed and embellished. It was willfully forged as the metaphysical foundation and moral justification for victory in war, for the inherent superiority of the Germans to all other races and ethnicities, and hence for their subjugation of other peoples. This, in short, was the primal dualism of us-vs.-them which served as the basis of all societies and sodalities before the great historical tide of Supernal religion swept across Eurasia, beginning in the Axial Age around 600 BC. The primal traditions with their pantheons of deities were elevated to a Supernal plateau in the East. The Upanishads reveal this transmutation within Hinduism; Buddhism then arose from the same current, and Taoism sprang up farther east. This is in dramatic contrast to the West, where the Christian Church took an aggressive stance and wiped out not only the other Supernal sodalities that had appeared, like Mithraism and Gnosticism, but also the entire cultural complex of pagan traditions and religions while they were still in various stages of pre-Supernal development.

Now we can see that, despite the amazing social transformation it wrought, the ultimate thrust of National Socialism was actually a regression to a more primitive stage of human society. Likewise, despite all the complex issues woven into the warp of the war, despite all the unholy powers and unchristian cabals ranked on the side of the Allies, the final deciding factor is revealed in the primordial imagery of the otherwise crass propaganda poster displayed here: the passions of the devout masses could be aroused by the image of “Godless Nazis” attacking Christ on the Cross.

The Manhattan Project didn’t complete its mission in time to drop the atomic bomb on Germany. But it wasn’t needed after all, because the Allies’ secret weapon was Supernal Spirit, launched unerringly to its target by the vessel of Christianity. Even if all the military firepower of the Earth were unleashed against it, the Spirit will win every time.

8. What Could Have Been, and Still Can Be