Talk:Nazi occultism/Nazi Religion At Source
Nazi Religion At Source
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Pure National Socialist religion, shorn of all the suspected occult trappings, was simply a revival of the Late Bronze Age sun cult, linked to belief in reincarnation, and headed by an elected king/priest in the Germanic tradition.
The French historian Mario Meunier in his Nordic Mythology (1911) quoted Caesar as saying that the Germanen worshipped the visible sun "because it gave light and heat", while according to Procopius the Scandinavians threw great festivals to celebrate the solstices. In the ancient Eddas the sun was a burning shield and only rarely a personification of the primaeval godhead. The Sun as a Germanic deity is feminine in the Eddas, "the brilliant wife of the heavens", as it is also in the magical formulae of Merseburg, and in the structure of the German language (die Sonne, (feminine) sun: der Mond, (masculine) moon). Meunier also commented on the widespread German practice of burning a wheel at the solstice "to communicate new strength to the young star", and "in these practices an ancient solar rite survives which was proscribed by the Church in the 11th century."
The idea of worshipping the sun may be difficult to understand for modern religionists steeped in the religions of the West. The pantheist Hitler clarified the point in his table talk of 24 October 1941 when he said: "Whoever sees the godhead only in an oak tree or a church, and not in everything there is in the Cosmos, that person cannot be inwardly holy, he remains beyond understanding." Since the godhead inhabits everything there is, the godhead is in the Sun, in the wife, in the kitchen table, but on the Sun alone we all depend for life itself.
Professor Schilling identified the reasons for the National Socialist belief in reincarnation in his paragraph on the cult of the gods. "One thing distinguishes the Germanic religion from all others. It does not recognize the concept of immortality. The gods, though superhuman, had faults and fell into error. These errors had to be atoned for on this plane. This is the meaning of the Twilight of the Gods, who must return in human form to atone. Nothing resists the march of time, not even the gods. From death new life springs. Nothing reflects so well the deep insight of the Germanic visionaries and poest into the Law of the All than this religious idea, the most highly developed of all religions of the Earth!"
Here Professor Schilling expounded the reason why the cults of Odinism and Wotanism are defunct, and Hitler followed his lead on reincarnation in a table talk (Heims, 13 December 1941) by saying that: "Spirit and soul return without doubt to the general reservoir as does the body. All form the basic material from which new life springs,": and Hitler confirmed the demise of Odinism and Wotanism in the paragraph quoted earlier. On 29 September 1941 (Heims) on the same subject, Hitler mentioned how the soul might "flow back in perhaps a few days in some form or another", hinting that the reincarnating factor might inhabit a body not necessarily human. He was undoubtedly thinking of the scale of the Cosmos during his reflections of 25 January 1942 (Heims) when he described the Cosmos as being "unendless in all directions, and endless not only outwards, but inwards as well." By "inwards" he was speaking of scale, for on 24 Ocotber 1941 (Heims) he spoke of the microscope proving how there was no limit to smallness of size, "microcosm-macrocosm!"
In his outright rejection of Christianity, "the foulest low blow ever struck at humanity" (Heims, 13 December 1941), Hitler was referring specifically to the doctrine of heaven and immortality. When Professor Schilling wrote that the idea of all living beings, including the gods, being subject to rebirth was a unique revelation to the Germanic mind, he was obviously referring to the experience in the West. The ancient Tibetan Book of the Dead, for example, makes clear that even if the former human soul achieves rebirth in the form of a god or demi-god, that is not synonymous with immortality, for unspent karma from previous existences will eventually cause the fall, death and rebirth even of a god. The visits by SS parties to Tibet in the 1930s were more likely aimed at learning as much as possible about the Tibetan doctrine of reincarnation and Tibetan practices in that regard, than for "espionage" as has been suggested by learned authors elsewhere.
Whereas a number of challenges have been raised by historians to Hermann Rauschning's testimony Hitler Speaks...A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on His Real Aims (Thornton Butterworth, London 1939), the following section appears genuine when the foregoing is taken into account: "Hitler said that Man's solar period is coming to an end...just as, according to the imperishable prophecies of the old Nordic peoples the world has continually to renew itself, the old order perishing with its gods, just as the Nordic peoples took the sun's passing of the solstices as figurative of the rhythm of life, which proceeds not in a straight line of eternal progress but in a spiral, so must Man now turn back in order to attain a higher stage."
An apt section from Mario Meunier's treatise on Nordic mythology is the following, since there is only one candidate to fill the role: "The Germanen had no closed priestly caste as did the Druids. In many peoples, especially the North and East of Germany, the king was simultaneously the priest, and was therefore obliged to exercise for his people the priestly functions. Amongst those peoples the king-priest was frequently held to be the incarnation of the deity on Earth. As such he was responsible to the community for all evils which befell it, especially bad harvests and lost wars. When his sacrifice was sterile, he had to sacrifice himself so that the divinity within him would reappear in his successor."
Influence of Islam
To Rauschning (op.cit) Hitler had claimed that through a process of mystical biology, a new variety of man was mutating. To have "magical insight" was Hitler's idea of the goal of human progress. Man was God in the making, Man had eternally to strain at his limitations. Hitler felt that he already had the rudiments of this gift himself. Since Hitler was no physical strongman, the "gift" was clearly some cerebral attribute.
"Those who listen to the immemorial message of Man, who devote themselves to our eternal Movement, are called to a new humanity," he told Rauschning. "Now do you appreciate the depth of our National Socialist Movement? Can there be anything greater and more all-comprehending? Those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it. It is more even than a religion: it is the Will to create Mankind anew."
What had to be transmuted? Mario Meunier stated in his Nordic Mythology: "Very widespread amongst the ancient Germanen was the belief in a second Ego in the human body. This was called by the Northern Germans Filgia. It was not the soul, because unlike the soul it died with the body. The Filgia inhabited the body, and was frequently its guardian. Depending on a man's level of psychic development, it advised him, let him see future events, explained to him the unknown. The Filgia could leave the body and appear as a man or animal, the most common form of the latter being the Werwolf, but very few men had this faculty."
Dr Paul Brunton is his book "A Search in Ancient Egypt" described how experiments by two psychiatrists, Preyes and Berger, into somnambulism showed that sleep-walkers can see perfectly well with their eyes closed, proving that consciousness is double. The second consciousness is clairvoyant and not subject to the limitations of matter. In Ancient Egypt the Filgia was known as the Ka, a ghostly, fluid copy of the everyday body. What was required to create the Nazi Superman was an integration of the Ka into the everyday body to the maximum extent. This would eventually provide the goal of maximum clairvoyance.
Four paragraphs remain to be copied up.