FROM UFOs TO YOGA

A version of this book review is published in the Southern Poverty Law
Center's Intelligence Report, Summer 2002


Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity
By Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
New York: New York University Press 2002
369 pp., $29.95


George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party until his
violent death in 1967, gushed about having had a mystical experience when
he first read Hitler's Mein Kampf. "I realized that National Socialism
[was] actually a new religion," said Rockwell, who considered April 20th
the holiest day of the calendar year. That's when neo-Nazis around the
world celebrate Hitler's birthday at secretive gatherings with Aryan
shrines, devotional rituals, white power regalia, and other racialist
kitsch. These annual conclaves are akin to religious ceremonies where true
believers worship Adolf as an infallible avatar whose every utterance is
gospel.


The quasi-religious and mythic elements that proliferate within the
contemporary neo-Nazi milieu are explored by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in
his important, new book Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the
Politics of Identity. While there has always been a theocratic strain among
fascist movements, several factors are contributing to a latter-day,
folkish revival among Caucasian youth who are beset by an acute sense of
disenfranchisement in Western societies. In response to the challenges of
globalization, multiculturalism, and large-scale Third World immigration,
neo-Nazi racism in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere has morphed
into what the author describes as "new folkish religions of white
identity." This neo-folkish resurgence encompasses a hodgepodge of
anti-Semitic pagan sects, Christian Identity churches, variants of eastern
mysticism, devil-worship cliques into Satanic black metal music, occult
influences, and New Age conspiracy subcultures.


Goodrick-Clarke, a British scholar who writes in an engaging and accessible
style, has long foraged on the farther shores of right-wing extremist
politics. His first book, The Occult Roots of Nazism, is a masterful study
of a much sensationalized subject -- pre-Nazi folkish and pan-German racist
groups in early 20th century Austria that embraced occult notions of
ancient Aryan wisdom. Politically ostracized in a hostile world, these
groups incubated reactionary ideologies of German racial identity. Building
on his previous work, Goodrick-Clarke draws a parallel in Black Sun between
folkish ferment in the post-World War One era and the incubatory function
of today's marginalized neo-Nazi sects, which have repackaged the old
ideology of Aryan racism in new cultic guises involving esotericism and
eastern religions. A crucial difference between then and now, the author
maintains, is the shift in emphasis from the virulent German nationalism of
the Third Reich to a broader racist ideology of global white supremacy.


"It is highly significant that the Aryan cult of white identity is now most
marked in the United States," says Goodrick-Clarke, who observes that
American neo-Nazi organizations behave like persecuted religious sects
preparing for the final, armed showdown against an thoroughly corrupt
world. Incorporated as churches, Christian Identity groups explicitly
present themselves as religions. Other white power zealots gravitate toward
Odinism, which rejects the Judeo-Christian heritage of the West by invoking
pre-Christian Norse and Teutonic gods. Still others take their cues from
non-denominational, runic cults such as the National Alliance led by
William Pierce, America's unabashed guru of apocalyptic violence. While
each have their specific theological eccentricities, all of these groups
espouse millenarian visions of a white racial utopia, while vilifying
people of color and demonizing Jews as the cosmic enemy.


American neo-Nazi spear-carrier James Madole, who rejected Christianity as
a degenerate Jewish construct, became a key figure in the development of
"esoteric fascism" after he founded the National Renaissance Party, the
first U.S. neo-Nazi organization, in 1952. Although he never attracted more
than a small cluster of followers, Madole established himself as "the
father of postwar occult fascism" by saturating his extremist politics with
a mish-mash of science fiction and esoteric notions drawn from theosophy
and eastern traditions. During the 1960s and 1970s, a Church of Satan
spin-off cultivated close links with Madole's neo-Nazi party -- an alliance
that anticipated the recent emergence of a violent, international fringe
network devoted to Nazi Satanic rituals, Nordic gods, black magic, and
occultism.


David Myatt, chief representative of Nazi Satanism in Great Britain,
defends human sacrifice and praises a new wave of satanic black metal
skinhead bands that spout obscene lyrics and demented anti-social rants.
Myatt's "religion of National Socialism" owes much to Savitri Devi, the
grand dame of postwar neo-Nazism, who had traveled from her native France
to India as a young woman. An admirer of the racist caste system, Devi
immersed herself in early Hindu texts. Noting that the Nazi swastika is
also an ancient, mystical Indian symbol, she romanticized the Third Reich
as "the Holy Land of the West."


Devi was the first Western writer to acclaim Hitler as a spiritual avatar,
a supernatural figure who pointed the way toward a future Aryan paradise.
The Jews, whom Devi blamed for all the world's suffering and alienation,
were predictably pegged as the main obstacle on the path to the Golden Age.


Devi's obsession with the pre-Christian origins of Indo-European culture
was shared by Julius Evola, an Italian Nazi philosopher whose racial
theories were adopted and codified by Mussolini in 1938. Calling for a
"Great Holy War" to battle national and ideological enemies, Evola exerted
a significant influence on a generation of militant neofascist youth in
postwar Italy. Among his protégés were the leaders of several right-wing
terrorist organizations linked to numerous bomb attacks from the 1960s to
the 1980s. Evola's mystical fascist writings include books on Tantrism,
Taosim, Zen Buddhism, yoga, alchemy, and the hermetic tradition in Europe.
After he died in 1974, his esoteric musings were rediscovered by New Age
publications. Today, many of Evola's books are available in English
translation in New Age bookstores in the United States, despite his status
as an avowed fascist and an icon of unrelenting opposition to political
democracy.


Another influential figure on the occult-fascist circuit is Miguel Serrano,
a former Chilean diplomat and Nazi die-hard who touts yoga, meditation, and
hallucinogenic drugs as techniques for raising consciousness in order to
make contact with higher Aryan intelligence. Serrano blends exotic oriental
religious themes with Jungian psychology, Gnostic doctrine, and fanciful
tales about the Knights Templar, the Cathars, the Rosicrucians, and other
secret societies. He likens the Nazi SS -- condemned in its entirety for
war crimes -- to an esoteric order of initiates seeking the Holy Grail.
This notion appealed to Wilhelm Landig, an Austrian SS veteran and postwar
Nazi activist, who coined the idea of the "Black Sun," a mystical energy
source allegedly capable of regenerating the Aryan race.


Goodrick-Clarke credits Landig with reviving the folkish mythology of
Thule, the supposed Arctic homeland of the ancient Aryans, in order to
prophesy the recovery and resurrection of Nazism as an earth-conquering
force. Landig and other occult-fascist propagandists have circulated wild
stories about German Nazi colonies that live and work in secret
installations beneath the polar icecaps, where they developed flying
saucers and miracle weapons after the demise of the Third Reich. The
abundance of UFO sightings, which began in the early 1950s, is attributed
to the amazing prowess of Nazi science and technology. Such accounts are
meant to evoke an ambience of immemorial Aryan superiority. The fall of
Third Reich is cast merely as a temporary setback; at any moment, a
battalion of Nazi extraterrestrials could zoom forth in their magical discs
to deliver Aryan folk from the ills of democracy and Judeo-Christian
decadence.


A hot item among promoters of holocaust denial and New Age conspiracy
theorists, stories about Nazi UFOs may seem ludicrous to anyone with their
feet firmly planted on terra firma. But these sci-fi legends underscore, in
the words of Goodrick-Clarke, how "Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism posit
powerful mythologies to negate the decline of white power in the world."
Moreover, if the past is any kind of prologue, the new folkish religions of
white identity "may be early symptoms of major divisive changes in our
present-day Western democracies."


"The risks of race religiosity are great," Goodrick-Clarke cautions. "By
projecting grievances, fears and anxieties onto the 'shadow' figures of
other races, religious transcendence is stunted and perverted into the
dynamics of exclusion and hatred . . . Whenever human groups are
interpreted as absolute categories of good and evil, light and darkness,
both the human community and humanity itself are diminished."


A timely warning, indeed.


Copyright 2002 Martin A. Lee.


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