The Occult in National Socialism

240213 The Occult in National Socialism by Stephen E. Flowers, Ph.D.

This is an odd book. On the one hand, it has a lot of solid scholarship about German culture prior the Third Reich. The author, Stephen E. Flowers, seems to document and footnote his points. He makes some solid observations about a variety of points.

On the other hand, he lurches into some weird territory. The agenda of his book seems to be about unlinking National Socialism from accusations about its alleged occultic, pagan, or Satanic antecedents. At times, Flowers seems to come off as a National Socialist (NS) apologist who wants to make sure that they are not wrongly accused of that kind of nonsense. Given what they are accused of this seems like a lawyer claiming victory by exonerating a serial killer of jaywalking.

In addition, Flowers goes off on paranoid tangents accusing the Christian Churches of spreading lies about the Nazis occult history. He also blames the Christian Churches of causing the Holocaust by allegedly cultivating anti-semitism, He doesn't offer an explanation for why the Holocaust happened in Germany, and not anywhere else in Europe, even though he acknowledges that the German culture responsible for the Holocaust was post-Christian.

Likewise, Flowers drops in casual references to the “left hand path” as if that was something known to people with no prior knowledge of occultism (or as if it described something real.) He also talks about “magic” as if it were real. He seems to mean something like using rituals, rites, or memes to elicit psychological responses in an audience. In other words, what most people would call “psychology.”

Flowers clearly has an agenda. Given his casual references to the “left hand path” of occultism, trusting his readers to understand this “inside Baseball” reference, and the anti-Christian animus, I suspected he was an occultist.

Bingo! Wiki reports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Flowers#cite_note-1

Stephen Edred Flowers, commonly known as Stephen E. Flowers, and also by the pen-names Edred Thorsson, and Darban-i-Den, is an American runologist, university lecturer, and proponent of occultism, especially of Neo-Germanic paganism and Odinism. He helped establish the Germanic Neopagan movement in North America and has also been active in left-hand path occult organizations. He has over three dozen published books and hundreds of published papers and translations on a disparate range of subjects. Flowers is still an active representative of heathenry and Odinism, and has appeared online in spaces associated with neo-Nazi activity, such as Red Ice TV.

It seems like Flowers is not protecting Nazism from paganism; he's protecting paganism from Nazism , although apparently there is something of a practical overlap between these things according to this article. https://www.spiralnature.com/culture/heathens-nazi-problem/

Knowing Flowers' agenda and bias is a useful tool for reading this book. I don't think anyone should fear contamination by racist ideas because this book is not racist or antisemitic. (It may be more anti-Christian and anti-Catholic, but who cares? Right?) Apart from that, there is nothing wrong with undercutting hysterical tropes that want to explain the cosmic evil of the Nazis with cosmic evil causes.

I have read several books on the history of National Socialism and occultism. My interest comes from a perspective 180 degrees off from Flowers. My interest as a Catholic is the Catholic relationship with National Socialism. This interest has a tendency to lead to investigations into German culture and the German counterculture.

Flowers takes the reader through 19th century occultism. The reader is introduced to Guido von List, Baron Heinrich von Sebbottendorf, and Lanz von Liebenfels, who are usually identified as mysterious sources that led to National Socialist ideology. Flowers offers some of the best biographical descriptions of these odd figures, although he generally distances them from National Socialism on the grounds that they were not antisemitic or represented some other departure from what would become National Socialism. The nineteenth century occult world is murky and Byzantine with its theosophy, ariosophy, Madame Blavatsky, various occult lodges, and, of course, Aleister Crowley. The characters come and go and change sides in a way that is possible only for fanatics in a tiny community .

One of the interesting points that Flowers makes is to explain many of the quirks of Nazi leaders on the Lebensreform (Life Reform)/Reformbewegungen (“Reform Movement.) This was the nineteenth century movement toward health and clean living by practices like vegetarianism and nudity. Why was Hitler a vegetarian? Because he was influenced by the Reform Movement. Flowers points out:

The Reform movement is the great-grandfather of the American hippies†23 of the 1960s and must be viewed as a broad and all-inclusive movement beyond the model of partisan politics. The men who made up the Nazi leadership came of age when this movement was in full swing, which perhaps accounts for a great deal of the unorthodox beliefs held by many of these men—for example, why Hitler was a teetotalist, antivivisectionist vegetarian!

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 66). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

Political developments often lag twenty to forty years behind popular culture. If you want to find out why leaders today are doing something, it is useful to look at what was popular and cutting edge when they were young.

Germany prior to the Third Reich had a strong counter-culture. Theosophy and related occult ideas found a culture already manured by the Reform Movement. At the elite level, Germany was not a conservative Christian culture during the nineteenth century:

//This changed in the nineteenth century. Rational idealism, practiced by Kant and Hegel, was turned into a materialistic economic political philosophy by Karl Marx. Traditional Christian theology was subjected to widespread rationalistic attacks by the new biblical criticism. At the same time, there was an influx of exciting and apparently effective religio-philosophical conceptions from the East. Ideas imported from the Buddhistic and Brahmanic religions, especially as embodied in the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, all led to a new way of thinking that was ready to wipe away the old established philosophies and theologies. One of the most important figures in popularizing the new revolutionary way of thinking was the artist Richard Wagner, followed by his former acolyte, Friedrich Nietzsche. This package of ideas was a potent mix for cultural change.

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (pp. 38-39). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

Richard Wagner was the nineteenth century “rock star” who used his influence to make paganism/antisemitism “cool.” Wagner mediated Schopenhauer's philosophy to a broader culture. He mentored Nietzsche. His son in law was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose “Myth of the 19th Century” was important to the subsequent Volkisch movement. Flowers writes:

//The roots of the Nazis' conception of Positive Christianity lie in the late nineteenth century with the school of Richard Wagner and his son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. They crystalized a vision of an Aryanized Christianity, devoid of what they considered Judaic elements. Jesus Christ was seen as the Aryan Man, and, commenting on his use of ancient pre-Christian Germanic imagery and myth in some of his operas, Wagner himself identifies Wotan and Christ (Steigmann-Gall 2003, 101).

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 424). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

Flowers offers an explanation of the NS concept of “Positive Christianity” that I haven't seen before. The citation of authority for his approach is scant or non-existent, but it does make sense and fits a lot of the facts:

Technically, the term Positive Christianity meant a Christianity shorn of its miraculous fables and its Jewish context. It posits the role of the historical individual named Jesus as an exemplary model of the Aryan Man.*96 The foundational documents of Christianity (i.e., the Bible) were subjected to text-critical examination by which all irrational elements were eliminated and the whole message and nature of the religion remade in the image of the philosophical approach of the nineteenth century. The roots of the Nazis' conception of Positive Christianity lie in the late nineteenth century with the school of Richard Wagner and his son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. They crystalized a vision of an Aryanized Christianity, devoid of what they considered Judaic elements. Jesus Christ was seen as the Aryan Man, and, commenting on his use of ancient pre-Christian Germanic imagery and myth in some of his operas, Wagner himself identifies Wotan and Christ (Steigmann-Gall 2003, 101).

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 424). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

Flowers defines “positive” in the sense of “critical”:

//Because later mythology about Nazi occultism has focused so much on ideas of paganism and “weird science,” one aspect of the movement that has gone virtually unremarked—although it is the only occult topic that would later be explicitly mentioned in the Party Program of the NSDAP—is “Positive Christianity.” At first glance this formula appears to be a general reference to some sort of “affirmative” Christianity. But this is not the case. In this context, the German adjective positiv (from the French positif) actually refers to the philosophical concept of the application of critical knowledge and reason to the questions of theology and biblical text criticism pioneered by nineteenth-century thinkers such as Emil-Louis Burnouf (1821–1907) and Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891).

For some, the practice of what became known as biblical textual criticism among German philologists in the nineteenth century provided a deep blow to the possibility of believing in the doctrines taught by the church over the previous centuries. Such criticism had begun as early as the late seventeenth century, but it reached a high point among German philologists of the nineteenth century. As the Bible was scientifically (linguistically) demonstrated to be a hodgepodge of texts written at different times by various interests and authors, with little underlying coherence, it became harder for thinking men to believe in the mythology constructed by the churches. This, then, opened the door for elite thinkers to engage not only with a burgeoning atheistic scientism but with various forms of neopaganism as well.

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 78). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

Flowers also notes:

German biblical criticism developed an agenda of “deJudaizing Christianity in the name of Reason.” The “grandfather” of German Positive Christianity was Paul de Lagarde, a professor of Oriental languages, who was influential on both Wagner and Chamberlain. “Through the pens of these writers, Jesus was transformed into an Aryan hero struggling against Jews and Judaism.”

Generally speaking, early twentieth-century German opposition to Christianity and Christian doctrines was not so much rooted in pre-Christian paganism as it was in hypermodernistic materialism and scientism. The hostility to Christianity and to traditional religion that many leading Nazis felt was largely rooted in the same soil as the opposition to these ideas found among Russian Bolsheviks. In both cases their particular political and economic ideologies were envisioned as replacements for the church and religion. A revived form of paganism, as understood based on scholarly evidence of the past, would have been far too difficult to control over time.

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 112). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

Given its genesis as a form of Protestant exegesis, “Positive Christianity was mainly anchored in Protestant areas of Germany.” The deJudaizing of Christianity made major inroads into Protestantism in the form of the German Christian movement. A substantial number of German Protestants were associated with the deJudaizing German Christians but ran up against the “Confessing Church” that refused to jettison the Jewish roots of Christianity. Flowers notes that Luther's antisemitism was a salient point of contact between the NS party and Protestants.

The anti-modern trend among conservatives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was well stocked with quotes from the works of Luther. Lutherans tended to vote disproportionately for the NSDAP, as compared to Roman Catholics.

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (pp. 197-198). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.


In contrast, affiliation with the NS party led Catholics to apostasy. There were many apostate members of the NS party, including Himmler and Goebbels, who left the Catholic Church, and Hitler, who did not. This tendency to apostasy had historical roots:

Lanz joined the Pan-Germanic political/esoteric movement—and there is even the suggestion that he converted to Protestantism (Goodrick-Clarke 1985, 92). The gravitation toward Protestantism was common among the generally Catholic “conservative” revolutionaries of Austria as they undertook to alter their cultural environment in a radical way. This was done in a spirit of nationalism, to rid German culture of Roman influence, and was known as the Los-von-Rom! (Away from Rome!) movement. The main basis of Lanz's protest against the church was his belief that it had abandoned its original purpose, which according to him was to serve as an Ariosophical institute for the sacred and heroic cultivation of the race. What Lanz intended to do was to reform this state of affairs by founding his own order of Templars, which would restore the church to its original purpose as an overseer of racial purity.

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (p. 140). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

Flowers is keen to protect paganism from Nazism. I question the high percentage of pagans he estimates (15 to 20%) but clearly the pragmatic Hitler was not going to alienate the majority of Germans who still remained factually or notionally Christian:

In the final analysis, after accessing and studying the original sources in the German language for more than forty years of research, it is my conclusion that the occult, esoteric, and even pagan elements present in National Socialism are almost entirely a matter of something that was present in the individual Party leaders and the rank and file of the membership, not something that was official or overtly promoted by the regime. There was a struggle between the pagan and Christian wings of the Party on a deep ideological basis; Hitler gave the victory to the Christian faction. The pagan faction of the country, almost all of whom did sympathize to some degree with the NSDAP program (in the beginning, at least), accounted for 15 to 20 percent of the population. This was a significant minority, but not numerous enough to constitute “the masses” Hitler was so interested in manipulating. To have sided with that minority, toward which he had no personal ideological sympathy in any event, would have been ideological suicide. The Nazis, and Hitler in particular, were masters of the magic of propaganda aimed as acquiring power and maintaining it. The secrets and ritual of this form of magic are on display in Mein Kampf and in the ceremonial programs of the NSDAP. These methods were not, however, aimed at a revival of paganism or at some worship of anything or anyone other than Hitler, the apparatus of the NSDAP, and the idealized (Nazified) image of the German Volk and state. Hitler's models were largely taken from those of his rivals, the Bolsheviks of Russia. The Nazis imitated the game of the Sozis, they just looked much better doing it.

Flowers, Stephen E.. The Occult in National Socialism: The Symbolic, Scientific, and Magical Influences on the Third Reich (pp. 595-596). Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.

Flowers is definitely correct in describing National Socialism as a hodge-podge of attitudes depending on a particular leader. Himmler, Rosenberg, and Hess were pagans or occultists. Hitler believed in “magic” in the psychological sense used by Flowers. Goebbels and Goring were probably just opportunists who lived like de facto atheists. There was no core ideology like Communism's official atheistic position that Nazis had to adhere to.

This is an exhaustive and exhausting book. At times, I did not know how much stock to give its claims given Flowers' heterodox – even kooky – beliefs. On the other hand, he may be right about a lot of his claims. If you have an interest in the subject, I would say read other books before coming to this one, but don't necessarily avoid this book.