Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form, page 16
Hitler’s objection to the Freemasons must not have been a dislike for the occult. Indeed, Hitler was obsessed with the occult, a fact that is far more well-known among scholars today than it was fifty years ago. It’s more than likely that Hitler perceived the Freemasons as being members of a rival gang that simply needed to be eliminated in order to clear the playing field.
To my knowledge, the first writers to discuss Hitler’s involvement with the occult were Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels in their 1960 book The Morning of the Magicians . Though entertaining, the book’s claims were not exactly well-documented. And even less well-documented was Trevor Ravenscroft’s 1973 book The Spear of Destiny: The Occult Power Behind the Spear Which Pierced the Side of Christ . Among its wilder claims was that Hitler experimented with mescaline, which led to his “Luciferic possession” (82), and that his rise to power was made possible by his possession of the Spear of Longinus (the Roman soldier who killed Christ). You’ll be happy to know, according to Ravenscroft, that the Spear fell into the hands of the U.S. military at 2:10 P.M. on April 30, 1945 (342). If true, we can only hope they’re using it wisely today.
Since these initial chimerical takes on the legend, professional journalists and historians have picked up the rumor, dusted it off, and found genuine facts lurking just below the surface. In 1992 a scholar at the University of Wales, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, wrote a book called The Occult Roots of Nazism that delved into these areas in a dry, academic manner. But the best recent book on the subject was written by investigative journalist Peter Levenda. First published by Avon Books in a mass market paperback edition in 1995, it could easily be mistaken for a sensationalistic expose along the lines of The Spear of Destiny . Its full title is Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult . (To underscore the book’s marginalized status, it might be noteworthy to point out that its only official recognition from the entire publishing world was to be nominated for a “Bram Stoker Award” under the “Best Non-fiction” category by the Horror Writers of America. To add insult to injury, Levenda wasn’t even notified of its nomination until long after the award ceremony was over. One wonders what did win.) Since then, the book has been reprinted by Continuum with an introduction by bestselling novelist Norman Mailer.
In order to write the book, Levenda flew all the way to South America to investigate rumors that Martin Bormann, Hitler’s former Riechsleiter , fled to Chile with the help of an “underground railroad” of sympathizers at the end of World War II. Once there, Bormann reportedly settled down in a heavily guarded encampment called “Colonia Dignidad” (i.e., “Colony of Righteousness”). Through circumstances too strange and complicated to detail here, Levenda did manage to locate the stronghold, investigate the place, and come out alive. He discovered that the “Colony” was a Jim-Jones-like compound where the most esoteric rites of Nazism were still being practiced.
This dramatic encounter led to his investigation into the occult roots of Nazism. Over the course of his book, Levenda introduces the reader to an eccentric cast of characters who, under modern conditions, might have ended up living somewhere outside San Francisco, getting stoned every day, telling each other’s fortunes, perhaps attending lectures at Esalen once in awhile, and desperately attempting to sell their poetry and artwork to a cold, unsympathetic world. The core members of the Nazi Party were, without a doubt, proto-New-Agers par excellence . In the early 1900s, Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorff created a secret society called Thule Gesellschaft whose members mixed paganism, Theosophy and quasi-Masonic rituals to form an overarching, racist, right-wing aristocratic philosophy, the main goal of which was to cleanse the world of “impure” races. These occultists and eugenicists believed that once this goal had been accomplished, the God-like “Hidden Masters” who lived beneath the north pole (i.e., “Thule”) would emerge from the inner earth and renew their ancient relationship with Mankind. It was this secret society that created the National Socialist Workers’ Party and placed Hitler in power, manipulating him from behind the scenes. Of course, this would not be the last time a major world leader would be manipulated from behind the scenes by racist assholes far smarter than him.
Throughout his regime, Hitler relied heavily on a core group of occultists to advise him on the most crucial aspects of military strategy. This group included Dietrich Eckart, Alfred Rosenberg, Franz Six, Otto Ohlendorf, Erik Jan Hanussen, Wilhelm Gutberlet, Rudolf Hess, Heinrich Himmler, and Karl Haushoffer. All of them believed in ancestor worship, believed they regularly spoke to the dead, believed the earth was hollow, believed the ruins of Atlantis would soon be found (revealing the Aryan roots of pre-historical civilization), believed in the veracity of runes, believed that mating in ancient cemeteries would release the spirits interred within the tombs, believed that the Third Reich would truly last a thousand years.
This belief , blind faith in a mystical force that prevented human beings from exercising free will, resembled the faith of the Inquisitors-General of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church more than the theosophical and Masonic philosophies the Thule Society appropriated for their own ends. Hitler ended up becoming exactly what he railed against in his book: a “useless eater,” a withered appendage dependant on a body far larger than his limited intellect could ever hope to understand; an appendage that, once severed, had no mouth with which to speak, no brain with which to reason, no legs with which to flee from his own worst nightmare. The appendage died, but the body metamorphosed and survived….
The Great School, whether Black or White, is indestructible. Names change, acolytes die, beliefs alter, and reason persists. As long as history itself continues, so will the influence of secret societies.
Works Cited
Billington, James H. Fire in the Minds of Men . New York: Basic Books, 1980.
Campbell, Joseph and Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth . New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Hall, Manly P. The Adepts In the Western Esoteric Tradition Vol. IV: Masonic Orders of Fraternity . Los Angeles: Philosophical Research Society, 1950.
---. The Secret Destiny of America . Los Angeles: Philosophical Research Society, 1944.
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf . New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.
Levenda, Peter. Unholy Alliance . New York: Avon, 1995.
Lomas, Robert. Freemasonry and the Birth of Modern Science . Gloucester, Massachusetts: Fair Winds, 2003.
Getler, Warren and Bob Brewer. Shadow of the Sentinel . New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.
Rizopoulos, Andreas. “European Freemasons and the Greek War of Independence.” Heredom . Washington, D.C.: Scottish Rite Research Society, 2005. 223-46.
Ravenscroft, Trevor. The Spear of Destiny . York Beach: Samuel Weiser, 1982.
Pike, Albert. Morals and Dogma . Richmond: L. H. Jenkins, 1956.
Wilgus, Neal. The Illuminoids . Albuquerque: Sun Publishing, 1978.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Mystery of Albert Pike
The enigma of Albert Pike is a persistent one. Certain facts are known about him, facts that detractors and supporters alike can both agree upon. He’s a little-known figure whose impact upon American history far exceeds his notoriety. He single-handedly created the higher degrees of Scottish Rite Freemasonry (degrees 4 through 33). He was Sovereign Grand Commander of the Southern Jurisdiction of Scottish Rite Freemasonry from 1859 to 1891, the year of his death. He was a Confederate General during the American Civil War. He was a powerful attorney in his day. He was also a prominent poet, whose literary works have been forgotten except by a small handful of devotees. He is the author of one of the most important works on Masonic ritual, philosophy and symbolism, i.e., Morals and Dogma .
On these facts, everyone can agree. It’s the interpretation of these facts that begins to grow a bit misty.
Pike is a polarizing figure. There seems to be very little objective analysis of his impact on history. Mainstream historians rarely, if ever, refer to him. Therefore, we are left with volumes of questionable interpretations that often draw upon half-truths, rumors, innuendoes, misinterpretations, and outright forgeries. Pick up any book that contains even a minor reference to the man and you will find that the interpretation of the author falls into one of two categories: 1) Pike was a genius and a Saint whose very touch turned men’s souls into alchemical gold, or 2) Pike was a Satan worshipper whose noxious acts still stain the very heart of the United States of America—indeed, the entire world.
There is no middle ground among these “researchers.” Pike was either good or evil. Of course, the world would be much simpler if everyone were wholly good or wholly evil. Zen Buddhist Alan Watts once wrote a book titled The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are in which he advises his readers to drop that dialectic way of thinking, what he calls “the game of Black-versus-White” (30). It only causes confusion because it is a model that does not reflect reality. Human beings are far more complicated than that, and this includes Pike.
With most historical figures, the latter statement could remain unsaid, but strange as it is to say, a very small minority of pundits have indeed implied that Albert Pike was not human at all (he was really a shape-shifting reptilian in disguise). I’m going to immediately crawl out on a limb, right here in the fifth paragraph, and propose we eliminate that theory for lack of evidence.
But first, picture a scene for me, if you will. Picture an underground train depot, a twisted set of metal tracks sunk about ten feet into the concrete. On either side of the tracks people are yelling at each other: men, women, children… all races, all creeds. Strangely, some of the people who are shouting the loudest have no faces at all. A giant bronze bust of Pike is sitting in the middle of the tracks. In the distance, a train is barreling down upon this immense monument. The train is so loud, nobody can hear what anybody else is saying.
Let’s slow this scene for a moment, turn the volume down on the train, and turn up the volume only on certain individuals… just one at a time. There’s no preferred order amidst this chaos. We’ll select our speakers at random….
A. Ralph Epperson, a Fundamentalist Christian and author of the book The New World Order , has concluded that Albert Pike was a Satanist whose secret goal was to stamp out all organized religions in the world. (But isn’t Satanism itself an organized religion? Oh, wait, sorry about that. Let’s leave aside editorial intrusions for a moment and just examine the claims.) Here’s Epperson in his own words:
…Pike considers Lucifer to be the God that is good, and the God of the Bible is the devil, the god of evil. That is what [Pike’s] statement about “that which is Below is as that which is Above” means. That means that the God in the heavens is the god that is below, and the god who is below is the god in the heavens.
So the Masons do believe in a god: it is in the fallen lightbearer, Lucifer. There can be no other reasonable explanation of what Mr. Pike just wrote. (159)
No other reasonable explanation? This is a common belief among Christians, particularly the Southern Baptists, many of whom are very concerned about the ongoing “threat” of Freemasonry. Most people reading this will no doubt already be aware of the fact that the hermetic dictum “As above, so below” is a common phrase among the ancient practitioners of alchemy and does not refer in any way to either God or Satan. In fact, the belief systems associated with alchemy no doubt existed long before the Christian religion came into being. But when one is viewing the world within a limited framework, the amount of information one has to draw upon will be equally limited… and this may lead to numerous misperceptions, like the one we’ve just heard.
Now let’s pan over to the other side of the tracks, shall we?
Manly P. Hall, a 33rd Degree Scottish Rite Freemason who wrote scores of books attempting to illuminate the esoteric meanings of Masonic symbolism (The Secret Teachings of All Ages being the most exhaustive) seems to have an endless supply of adoring adjectives to describe Albert Pike. He variously refers to Pike as “the Plato of Freemasonry,” “this Masonic Prometheus,” “the Homer of America,” “the Master Builder,” “the Real Master of the Veils,” “the Oracle of Freemasonry,” and (perhaps most confusing) “the Zoroaster of modern Asia” (37-8). And that’s just scraping the surface.
Hall chooses to introduce Pike in his illustrated review of occultism and Philosophy, The Phoenix , with the following anonymous tribute:
Albert Pike was a king among men by the divine right of merit. A giant in body, in brain, in heart and in soul. So majestic in appearance that whenever he moved on highway or byway, the wide world over, every passer-by turned to gaze upon him and admire him. Six feet, two inches, with the proportions of a Hercules and the grace of an Apollo. A face and head massive and leonine, recalling in every feature some sculptor’s dream of a Grecian god…. (37)
Hall does not mention who wrote the preceding tribute or where it was originally published. It’s hard to imagine what sort of prostrate position the writer was in when these words flowed from his (or her) pen. Perhaps Pike himself wrote it. Or maybe even Manly P. Hall. When it comes to attribution in Hall’s writing, everything’s in doubt. He had a bad habit of being rather too lackadaisical about citing his sources—a habit he shared with Pike himself. For this reason alone much of his writing is considered useless by mainstream historians, and I understand their dismissal of him on those grounds. But it could be that Hall didn’t want his work to be useful to historians. Like Pike himself, Hall was interested in history only on his own terms, and those terms involved the practice and explication of metaphysics. Every aspect of the mundane world somehow related back to the big Masonic “G”—whether that G stood for the initial letter of the Hebrew alphabet, “Geparaith,” “God,” “Geometry,” or “the generative principle” is entirely open to interpretation. Pike cites them all as possible candidates. (On pp. 780, 640, 40, and 632 of Morals and Dogma , respectively.)
Hall saw himself reflected in Pike and came to admire him accordingly. They were both preeminent scholars of the arcanum, perhaps the most knowledgeable of their respective centuries, having each compiled his occult knowledge in encyclopedic works. Therefore it might be no surprise that Hall would place Pike on a such a lofty pedestal. And here we come to an important point about the enigma of Albert Pike: Because so much of Pike’s real life and career is shrouded in mystery, it’s easy for him to become a polymorphous Rorschach blot upon which people with an intense interest in the esoteric can project their own highest hopes or darkest fears.
To Anton Chaitkin, author of Treason in America , Albert Pike is nothing more than…
…one of the most physically and morally repulsive individuals in American history. Horribly obese—easily 300 lbs. or more—Pike was known in his adopted state of Arkansas as a practitioner of Satanism. His reported sexual proclivities included sitting astride a phallic throne in the woods, accompanied by a gang of prostitutes. He would bring to his revels one or more wagon-loads of food and liquor, most of which he would consume over a period of perhaps 48 hours, until he passed into a stupor.
Pike was thrilled at the chance he got to kill Spanish-Americans in the Mexican War; he pushed himself forward in Arkansas politics with noisy anti-Negro and pro-slavery rhetoric; and in the 1850s he became the leading Southern organizer and boss of the American Party or “Know-Nothing”—the third-party grouping based on hatred and fear of immigrants. (234-35)
Where Chaitkin is getting some of his information, particularly the bit about the prostitutes in the woods and the phallic throne (what is a phallic throne?), I have no idea. He doesn’t cite a source for these allegations.
In a Labor Day lecture delivered to the Schiller Institute in Washington, D.C., Chaitkin later attempted to delineate what he called “the Scottish Rite’s KKK Project” by attempting to connect Pike to the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. He said, “The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was a terrorist counterattack, beginning in Tennessee, designed to block Reconstruction and reverse the outcome of the Civil War. The Klan and the Scottish Rite were one and the same enterprise , continuing the imperial effort behind the slave owners’ rebellion.” 1
But to James T. Tresner II, author of the anecdotal biography Albert Pike: The Man Beyond the Monument , Pike is nothing less than…
…one of the most amazing men who has ever lived. During his long life, he was a teacher, an explorer of the American frontier, a poet, a newspaper editor, a lawyer—in fact he is still regarded as one of the outstanding legal scholars of the 1800s—a short-story writer, a linguist, a worker for reform in both education and the criminal justice system, an active advocate for the rights of women and the rights of Native Americans, an orator whose speeches are still reprinted in collections of Southern literature, a general in the Civil War, and a philosopher.
He made and gave away fortunes. He built the finest home in Little Rock, Arkansas. The society columns of the Washington, D.C. newspapers spoke of him as one of the most graceful dancers, cordial hosts, and knowledgeable connoisseurs of food in the capital city. He always had a joke to tell his legion of friends, and his hearty laugh was famous.
When, in the last years of his life, he moved to an apartment in the House of the Temple, his personal library contained thousands of books. He was a profound student of religion and philosophy. (39)
When researching this article, I decided to give Pike the benefit of the doubt. I wondered if writers like Epperson and Chaitkin might have given Pike short shrift; after all, facts can always be misinterpreted to bring about a negative conclusion. My first goal, therefore, would be to visit the library established by Manly P. Hall at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, one of the largest repositories of occult texts in the United States. Since Manly P. Hall was one of Pike’s most ardent admirers, I concluded that this might be the best place to go in order to get a more positive view of Pike and his work.
