Bavaria, the Thule Society, the SOSJ and the Making of a Revolutionary Faith Part II

Bavaria, the Thule Society, the SOSJ and the Making of a Revolutionary Faith Part II

Welcome to the second installment in my examination of the notorious Thule Society. In the first part of this series I sought to vaguely outline my objective as well recap some of the common misconceptions surrounding Thule. As was noted there, many popular accounts of the Society such as those that appear in Pauwels and Bergier's The Morning of the Magicians and Trevor Ravenscroft's The Spear of Destiny are largely fictitious. The reality of the Thule Society is both far stranger and more terrible than the popular perception created by such works and grafted onto popular culture by Hellboy and such like.

It is this reality that we shall begin to explore in this post. Before addressing Thule, however, I must first broadly outline the individuals and organizations that played a role in laying the groundwork for the creation of the society. The roots of Thule lay with a curious group of mystics who have had an extensive, if little acknowledged, influence upon metaphysical traditions for several decades now.

"The three godfathers of the Nazi Thule were Guido von List (1848-1919), Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874-1954), and Rudolf von Sebottendorff (1875-1945). It is significant that all three decided at some point to adorn their plain bourgeois names with the particle von (which in German suggests noble descent even when it is not further defined by Graf, Baron, etc.). One of the hallmarks of master-race philosophy is that no one is known to have embraced it who does not consider himself a member of that race. And what is more tempting, having once adopted the belief that one's own race is chosen by Nature or God for preeminence, than to put oneself at its aristocratic summit?

"The Viennese Jorg Lanz, a former religious of the Cistercian Order, was the founder in 1907 of the Order the New Templars (ONT), a chivalric, gnostic, and ritualistic order with the most extreme of racist ideals. There can be little doubt that the ONT, with its lodges in ruined castles, was the prototype for Heinrich Himmler's Schutzstaffel (the notorious 'SS'), as it was transformed after 1930 to become the training- and breeding-ground for the masters of a New Age of Aryan supremacy. Lanz was a very copious writer on biblical exegesis, astrology, antifeminism, and many other topics. One of his earliest creations, in about 1900, was Theozoology: a new 'science' inspired by H. P. Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine.

"Blavatsky had explain the origin of the anthropoid apes, not as remnants of the ancestors mankind, but as the descendants of bestiality committed by the Third Race (Lemurians) with monstrous animals. Lanz applied this principle in the most perverted way: the non-Aryan races, he said, were the result of bestiality on the part of the ancient Aryans, after their departure from the northern Garden of Eden. To deal with these peoples, thus regarded as only semi-human, Lanz recommended variously: enforced sterilization and castration; deportation to Madagascar; enslavement; incineration a sacrifice to God; and use as beasts of burden. As Goodrick-Clarke comments, 'Both the psychopathology of the Nazi holocaust and the subjugation of non-Aryans in the East were presaged by Lanz's grim speculations.'

"It is no surprise that Lanz had a theory about the original homeland of the Aryans: it was a vanished polar continent called Arktogaa (from the Greek: 'northern earth'). This was adopted by his older acquaintance Guido von List, another Viennese mythomaniac who, more than anyone else, laid the foundation for the romantic blend of ideas that links the proto-Nazis uncannily with the Greens and New-Agers of today: an interest in natural living, vegetarianism, anti-industrialism; an appreciation of prehistoric monuments and the wisdom of those who built them; a feeling for astrology, earth energies, and natural cycles; a religious outlook vaguely resembling that of Theosophy. The generic name given to this kind of thinking was volkisch, an untranslatable word on the borderlines between nationalistic and folkloric."

(Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival, Joscelyn Godwin, pgs. 48-49)

German children from the World War I-era sporting Halloween costumes influenced by the Volkisch movement

Both List and Lanz would have an enormous influence on the Volkisch movement in pre-World War I Austria and Germany and would pioneer a mystical variation of the ideology that came to be known as Ariosophy (which was, roughly speaking, a strange brew of Volkisch ideology and H.P. Blavatsky's Theosophy system). An in depth examination of the philosophy of List and Lanz is far beyond the scope of this series, but I shall briefly touch upon it. Let us begin with List, whose work served as the basis for what would eventually become known as Ariosophy.

"Guido von List (1848-1919) had begun his career as a nature worshiper and lover of ancient German folk myths and culture, a man who believed in the reunification of his native Austria with Germany, and who came to despise both Jews and Christians as alien forces in Europe who had robbed Germans of their spiritual and territorial birthrights. He wrote a series of romantic novels about the ancient to Teutons, and dreamed of reestablishing the ancient priesthood of Wotan, an organization he called the Armanenschaft either after the Teutonic warrior Arminius, who defeated the Roman Legions under Varus at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest (A.D. 9), or after a qabalist bowdlerization of the name of one of three Teutonic tribes mentioned by Tacitus in Germania, the Hermiones.

"In 1875, the same year that Blavatsky founded her Theosophical Society in New York, List was invoking Baldur, the Teutonic Sun God, on a hilltop outside Vienna. In Baldur's honor, he buried eight wine bottles there in the shape of the swastika and pledged himself to the worship of the Old Ones, Baldur and Wotan being prominent among them. At this time, the Armanenschaft – the priesthood of the sun – was but a gleam in his Aryan eye.

"He took of journalism after his family's fortunes went awry, and began daydreaming in print about the prehistoric Teutons, a hypothetically pure race free of the taint of spiritually retarded blood.

"However, during his convalescence after cataract surgery at the age of fifty-four – dwelling in a temporary but none the less unnerving state of blindness – he understood that his main preoccupations of politics and race were the two halves of a single coin. Always interested in the past more than the present..., List had developed an intense fascination with the signs and symbols of heraldry, as well as those of the proto-Aryan language he believed could be found in runes and ancient inscriptions..."

(Unholy Alliance, Peter Levenda, pgs. 55-56)

List

List was one of the first of these German Volkisch thinkers to appropriate the swastika and apply a mystical Aryan significance to it.

"List had been fascinated with swastika since his early youth, recognizing it as the Ur-symbol of the Teutonic (read: 'Aryan') peoples; a pagan sign equivalent in power and emotional meaning to the cross for Christians, or the Star of David for Jews. He first pointed this out in a series of articles published about 1905-1908, and thereafter the symbol began to take on more than just a cosmological or theosophical significance and would soon come to represent an entire body of ideas – both occult and political – that would eventually culminate in the formation of the Thule Gesellschaft nearly two decades later...

"While an educated perspective on the swastika reveals the symbol as an ancient Eastern symbol of good fortune, words themselves have their own intrinsic power. Thus, when a German calls the swastika by the term hakenkreuz he is calling it a 'hooked cross.' To a German of the twentieth century (as for a German of the thirteenth century), the word cross has decidedly Christian overtones; a hooked cross therefore imply some deviation from, or modified form of, Christianity. In this way, the link between the inherently amoral swastika and questionable religious beliefs is made by way of the mostly loaded term 'hooked cross.' When the various volkisch and German cultural societies began adopting the hakenkreuz as their emblem, then, they were just as conscious of its anti-Christian potential as they were of their own anti-Semitic intent. This was not paganism as a pure, Earth-Mother-worshiping cult (such as the modern Wicca phenomenon), but paganism as a movement set up in opposition to Judeo-Christianity as well as to Communism, Capitalism, and Democracy, which are all creatures of the Jewish-Masonic conspiracy..."

(ibid, pgs. 58-59)

While List's ideas were largely shunned by academia, they found support among wealthy patrons of Austrian and German high society. To better spread List's idea, the Guido van List Society was officially founded in 1908 (though it had been in the making since at least 1905). The List Society, with its prominent individual members, would provide the financial backing as well as the legitimacy for the Austrian's ideas to receive a mass following.

List's ideology combined the study of symbolism, numerology, astrology, onomatology, toponymy, runology, megaliths, folklore, and so forth to rediscover the language and faith of the ancient Aryans. As such, List's work bares more than a few passing resemblances to the concept of "twilight language" pioneered by James Shelby Downard, William Grimstad, and (fascist sympathizer) Michael A. Hoffman II. The similarities between these two concepts is a fascinating topic that is unfortunately far beyond the scope of this present series. But I urge my readers to keep this topic in mind as I shall return to it at some point in the future.

Hoffman

Another point worth mentioning at this juncture is Ariosophy's rather schizophrenic view concerning Freemasonry. While attitudes were certainly not uniform across the board, the general perception among Ariosophists seem to have been that Masonry had begun as a part of the high Aryan tradition but had gradually been polluted by Jewish influences over the centuries to the point that it become a grave threat to the survival of the volk by the modern era.

"...The notion of an anti-Semitic group organized like a secret quasi-masonic lodge appears to arisen arisen among volkisch activists around 1910. Some anti-Semites were convinced that the powerful influence of Jews in German public life could be understood only as the result of a widespread Jewish secret conspiracy; it was supposed that such a conspiracy could best be combated by a similar anti-Semitic organization. In spring 1910 Philipp Stauff, a prominent volkisch journalist, mentioned in his correspondence the idea of an anti-Semitic lodge with the names of members kept secret to prevent enemy penetration. The following year Johannes Hering, who belong to the local Hammer group in Munich as well as the Alldeutscher Verband, and who was friendly with both List and Lanz von Liebenfels wrote to Stauff about Freemasonry. Hering stated that he had been a Freemason since 1894, but this 'ancient Germanic institution' had been polluted by Jewish and parvenu ideas; he concluded that a revived Aryan lodge would be a boon to anti-Semites."

(The Occult Roots of Nazism, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, pg. 127) 

Thus, many of Ariosophy-centric organizations adopted the structure and trappings of Freemasonry despite frequently associating the Masons (as well as the communists) with an international Jewish conspiracy. More about the Hammer groups and Philipp Stauff shall be said in a moment. For now, let us consider the individual chiefly responsible for the spread of various anti-Semitic secret societies in Germany and Austria during the early twentieth century.

Guido von List's protege, the former Cistercian monk Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, would effectively craft a kind of Gnostic ideology out of List's theories. His really lasting effect on volkisch thinking and Ariosophy, however, was his obsession with Medieval military orders such as the Teutonic Knights, the Knights Hospitallers and especially the Knights Templar. Any number of nationalist and proto-fascist groups would attempt to create their own secretive orders based upon these Medieval predecessors both before and after World War I thanks to Lanz's writings. Lanz himself would found the Order of the New Templars (ONT), an organization that would have a considerable influence on both the Thule Society as well as the later SS.

"The Order of the New Templars was an occult lodge that met at a ruined castle high on a cliff over the Danube – the eerie Burg Werfenstein in Upper Austria, a few miles upriver from Hitler's childhood home – among other sites. The members were white, surplice-style robes emblazoned with the red cross of the Templars, a cross that von Liebenfels believed was formed of two, superimposed and counterrotating, swastikas...

"Von Liebenfels – in Ostara and in other publications, such as his weirdly entitled Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-Aefflingen und dem Gotter-Elektron (1905), which we may translate as 'Theozoology, or the Science of the Sodom-Apelings and the Electron of the Gods' – prescribed sterilization and castration for inferior races. and, of course, denounced miscegenation owing to its pollution of the pure-blooded German Volk. He also sounded a theme that was to occupy all other racist ideologues, including Hitler, and that was the forced submission of women to Aryan men. To the Nazis and their ideological predecessors, feminism was an evil on the same level as Freemasonry, international Jewry, and Bolshevikism. In fact, the Nazis believed feminism (like Bolshevikism) to be the creation of international Jewry for the express purpose of finishing off the Aryan race. The irony has come full circle, of course, for the term 'feminazis' has has become a staple of Rush Limbaugh-style, talk radio agit-prop.

"But von Liebenfels did not stop at sweeping political indictments. He included occult biology in his repertoire, with a concentration on the pineal and pituitary glands. He believed – as did Blavatsky and as do many current mystics and theosphists – that a space between these glands in the hypothalamus of the brain was formally a supercharged area that gave Aryans the twin powers of telepathy and omniscience: the third Eye; but that – because of the pollution of Aryan blood with that of members of the inferior races – these two glands had so atrophied that the Aryan people had lost their psychic abilities. This is a somewhat liberal borrowing of the teachings of legitimate Eastern adepts who train their devotees in methods of awakening this innate potential (regardless of their racial background).

"According to Liebenfels, however, the solution to the problem of the incipient physical and spiritual degeneration of the Aryan race was not hatha yoga or Transcendental Meditation, but the creation of a new priesthood of the Holy Grail; a new Knights Templar of the German Blood (for that was, according to von Liebenfels, what the Grail represented). As for the inferior races? They were to be deported; or incinerated as a sacrifice to God; or simply used as slave labor."

(Unholy Alliance, Peter Levenda, pgs. 68-69)

Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels

Now that I've addressed List and Liebenfels somewhat, let us move along to the secret order that spawned the Thule Society: the Germanenorden. The chief figure behind the creation of the Germanenorden was publisher and anti-Semitic agitator Theodor Fritsch, one of the most revered Ariosopohists of the Nazi regime.

"The Reichhammerbund and the Germanenorden were established by one of the most important early racist and violently anti-Semitic publicists, Theodor Fritsch (1852-1933). A milling engineer by trade, Fritsch came to anti-Semitism by way of the Lebensreform movement in the 1870s. Echoing widespread anxiety in the Western world over the decline of artisans and the inability of small business to compete against larger concerns, Fritsch's first political foray was an attempt organize German millers into a guild to combat the influence of corporations. The cry for artisanship against mass production and smallholders against big capital had already found its most influential exponent in England's John Ruskin, who like many of his volkisch counterparts idolized medieval life. The sentiment was widespread. As far afield as the American Midwest, the Grange, a fraternal farmers guild organized on Masonic lines, fought the railroads over unfair freight charges. Neither was Fritsch unique in his view that corporate interests were pawns of the Jews. However, he soon took unreflective, resentful anti-Semitism into the emergent realm of quasi-Darwinian biology. In his 1881 book Leuchtkugeln (Flares), Fritsch anticipated Lanz's line of thought with the supposition that Jews were transitional beings between apes and humans. He followed Leuchtkugeln with a succession of pamphlets called Brennende Fragen (Burning Questions) before producing his Antisemiten-Katechismus (later retitled Handbuch der Jugenfrage).

"The catechism, whose impact on German anti-Semitism can be measured by its print run, numbered forty editions by 1936, condemned capitalism as a Jewish conspiracy and denied the Jews could create anything of culture and beauty. Hitler himself testified to the importance of Fritsch's catechism. 'I have thoroughly studied the Handbuch der Jugenfrage since my youth in Vienna. I'm convinced that it helped prepare the ground in a very special way for the national socialistic anti-Semitic movement.' Fritsch's familiar public persona as an anti-Semitic agitator may be the reason why he was accorded greater honor in the Third Reich than most figures associated with Ariosophy. To the Nazis, he was the Altmeister, the Old Master. Drawing from similar volkisch influences, Fritsch had developed his own perspective on Aryan racism and neopaganism independent of List, but he seems to have been drawn gradually into List's orbit through association with the Vienna Ariosophist's network of initiates and followers. His Utopian tendencies were expressed in his 1896 book, Stadt der Zukunft (City of the Future), which envisioned garden cities whose dwellers could live in harmony with nature."

(Hammer of the Gods, David Luhrssen, ps. 62-63)

Fritsch

Around the last decade of the nineteenth century Fritsch tried to organize a formal political party based around anti-Semitism. It was a colossal failure. Not only did the Deutsch-Soziale Reformpartei fail to gain widespread popular support, but it began to grow progressively more moderate as it entered the political field. This alarmed Fritsch to the point that he decided political reform was impossible. As a result, he began to focus on publishing as a way of changing the cultural landscape to the point that a fanatically anti-Semitic political party would be viable in general elections. It was this path that led him to the Reichshammerbund and, ultimately, the Germanenorden.

"Fritsch was in all events determined to work outside the system. Like List, he was more concerned with changing the cultural paradigm than with changing the government. Fritsch wrote that 'Anti-Smitism is a matter of Weltanschauung, which can be accepted by anyone, no matter what party he belongs to.... Our aim is to permeate all parties with the anti-Semitic idea.' In 1902 in Leipzig he founded the Hammer; a monthly and later fortnightly publication subtitled 'Blatter fur Deutschen Sinn' ('Bulletin for German Thought'). He railed in those periodicals against all symptoms of modernism: big department stores, motion pictures, women's fashions, mass media. He perceived the Jews behind every despised aspect of modern life. Lebensreform permeated the Hammer, including vegetarianism, a bias for agrarian over industrial life, and the call for a practical and nationalistic socialism. After the war, Hammer circulation increased to some eight thousand subscribers. Contributors to the Hammer included Lanz, Ernst Wachler, and other List Society members...

"Whatever Fritsch's influence as a publisher on shaping the intellectual landscape, his activity soon took concrete form in a new organization. In 1905 Hammer subscribers began organizing themselves into Hammer Gemeinden (Hammer groups), local circles that studied Fritsch's ideology and even discussed establishing a utopian community according to the master's principles.

"Growing from this modest soil where organizations that would enjoy greater influence. Stung by anti-Semitsm's failure in parliament, especially after the January 1912 elections, which left the Social Democrats as the largest party in the Reichstag, Fritsch called in March 1912 for a new anti-Jewish association, one that would remain 'above the parties.' Out of a meeting in his Leipzig home on May 24-25, 1912, with some twenty prominent Pan-Germans and List Society members came the Reichshammerbund. Headed by Karl August Hellwig, a retired colonel living in Kassel and a List Society member, the Bund consisted of activists from the Hammer groups. A fortnight earlier, on March 12, 1912, Fritsch approved the transformation of the Wodan Lodge, a secret society within the Magdeburg Hammer group, into the nucleus of the Germanenorden under the leadership of Herman Pohl, a sealer of weights and measures. The Germanenorden became the Reichshammerbund's secret parallel organization.

"Along with Hellwig and Fritsch, authority over the Reichshammerbund was vested in a twelve-member Armanen Rat, a council whose name derived from List's imaginary ancient Aryan priesthood. Members had to prove that they and their spouses were of unimpeachable Aryan stock. The Reichshammerbund canvassed actively for members. Fritsch and Hellwig were interested in making common cause with Roman Catholics and reaching out to farmers and workers, teachers and civil servants, the military and the universities. However, the atmosphere of Wilhelmine Germany was not conducted for a mass volkisch movement with occult undertones. The Hammerbund recruited no more than a few hundred members scattered along nineteen chapters. Its most active branch, in Nuremberg, numbered only twenty-three members by the end of 1912. In spring of 1914 a Reichshammerbund chapter was established in the Thule Society's future home, Munich. It was founded by Wilhelm Rohmeder, who later joined Thule."

(Hammer of the Gods, David Luhrssen, pgs. 64-66)

As one can imagine, the aims and rituals of the Germanenorden were quite bizarre.

"This history of the early Germanenorden must be supplemented by an account of its aims, rules, and rituals. According to circular of the Franconian province, the principal aim of the Germanenorden was the monitoring of the Jews and their activities by the creation of a centre to which all anti-Semitic material would flow for distribution. Subsidiary aims included the mutual aid of brothers in respect of business introductions, contracts, and finance. Lastly, all brothers were committed to the circulation of volkisch journals, especially the Hammer, their 'sharpest weapon against Jewry and other enemies of the people.' The articles of the Germanenorden betray an overt ariosophical influence. All nationals, male or female, of flawless Germanic descent were eligible for admission to the Order. Application forms requested details about the colour of the applicant's hair, eyes, and skin. The ideal coloration was blond to dark blond hair, blue to light brown eyes, and pale skin. Further details regarding the personal particulars of the applicant's parents and grandparents, and in the case of married applicants, those of the spouse were also required...

"The emblems of the Germanenorden indicate a further source of ariosophical inspiration. From the middle of 1916 the official Order newsletter, the Allgemeine Ordens-Nachrichten, began to display on its front cover a curved-armed swastika superimposed upon a cross... In due course advertisements for volkisch jewelry, rings, pendants and tie-pins, incorporating various runes and the swastika, appeared in this publication. The supplying firm, Haus Eckloh of Ludenscheid in Westphalia, worked from designs submitted by members of the List Society during the war. Although the swastika was current among several contemporary volkisch associations in Germany, it was through the Germanenorden and the Thule Society, its successor organization in post-war Munich, that this device came to be adopted by the National Socialists.

"The ceremony and ritual of the Germanenorden demonstrate its strange synthesis of racist, masonic, and Wagnerian inspiration. A summons to an initiation ceremony of the Berlin province on 11 January 1914 informed brothers that this was a frock-coat and white-tie affair and that any new candidates would have to submit to racial tests by the Berlin phrenologist, Robert Burger-Villingen, who had devised the 'plastometer', his own instrument for determining the relative Aryan purity of the subject by means of cranial measurements. A surviving ritual document of c. 1912 describes the initiation of novices into the lowest grade of the Order. While the novices waited in an adjoining room, the brothers assembled in the ceremonial room at the lodge. The Master took his place at the front of the room beneath the baldachin flanked on either side by two Knights wearing white robes and helmets adorned with horns and leaning on their swords. In front of these sat the Treasurer and Secretary wearing white masonic sashes, while the Herald took up his position in the centre of the room. At the back of the room in the grove of the Grail stood the Bard in a white gown, before him the Master of Ceremonies in a blue gown, while the other lodge brothers stood in a semicircle around him as far as the tables of the Treasurer and Secretary. Behind the grove of the Grail was a music room where a harmonium and piano were accompanied by a small choir of 'forest elves.'

"The ceremony began with soft harmonium music, while the brother sang the Pilgrims' Chorus from Wagner's Tannhauser. The ritual commenced in candlelight with brothers making the sign of the swastika... and the Master reciprocating. Then the blindfolded novices, clad in pilgrimage mantles, were ushered by the Master of Ceremonies into the room. Here, the Master told them of the Order's Ario-Germanic and aristocratic Weltanschauung, before the Bard lit the sacred flame in the grove and the novices were divested of their mantles and blindfolds. At this point the Master seized Wotan's spear and held it before him, while the two Knights crossed their swords upon it. A series of calls and responses, accompanied by music from Lohengrin, completed the oath of the novices. Their consecration followed with cries from the 'forest elves' as the new brothers were led into the grove of the Grail around the Bard's sacred flame. With the ritual personifying lodge officer as archetypal figures in Germanic mythology, the ceremonial must have exercised a potent influence on the candidates."

(The Occult Roots of Nazism, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, ps. 128-130)

an image inspired by Wagner's Tannhauser, an influence on the Germanenorden's rituals

With the onset of World War I, a schism developed with the Germanenorden.

"With the outbreak of World War I, many Orden brothers volunteered for service and lost their lives at the front. Lodge activity became relatively dormant. Towards the end of 1916, the remnant of the Orden underwent a schism after a power struggle between Pohl and the Berlin lodge. Chief among the anti-Pohl faction was Philipp Stauff, an anti-Semitic journalist who had risen to high station in the List Society before the war, in part on his claims of having spoken in séances to members of the long-dead priesthood of pagan Germany. Stauff embellished List's ideas on the esoteric significance of runes in his book Runenhauser (1913), which discovered the secret runic language of the wooden beams of medieval buildings."

(Hammer of the Gods, David Luhrssen, pg. 67)

Philipp Stauff and his wife

It was from the faction of the Germanenorden that continued to follow Herman Pohl that the Thule Society would emerge. Before getting to Thule, however, a bit should be said about the "anti-Pohl" faction of the Germanenorden that followed Philipp Stauff as it will have some bearing on this narrative in future installments. The Stauff faction would become mixed up with some very curious company in post-World War I Germany.

"After the armistice in November 1918 former brothers of the loyalist Germanenorden set about its revival. The Grand Master, Eberhard von Brockhusen (1869-1939), was a Brandenburg landowner and a generous List Society patron. He was rather preoccupied with the revolt of Polish laborers on his estates, and complained that Order administration was chaotic owing to the lack of a constitution; in early 1919 he asked Erwin von Heimerdinger or to relieve him of his office. Although Stauff informed Brockhusen that his resignation had been accepted at the beginning of March, the affair seemed to drag on as Brockhusen was still pleading for a constitutional reform in the summer, and accusing Stauff of slander. Brockhusen's correspondence reveals a deep dismay at post-work conditions and a hatred of the Poles. In the late summer Heimerdinger abdicated the Chancellorship in favor of the Grand Duke Johann Albrecht of Mecklenburg, who was very enthusiastic about the Order and the Free Corps expedition to the Baltic countries in 1919. The Order soon lost this prominent patron when he died of a heart attack on 6 February 1920. Brockhusen remained in office and finally got his constitution accepted in 1921, which provided for an extraordinarily complex organization of grades, rings, and provincial 'citadels' (Burgen) supposed to generate secrecy for a nationwide system of local groups having many links with militant volkisch associations, including the Deutschvolkischer Schult- und Trutzbund.

"Despite the petty and futile debates of its senior officers in Berlin, the Germanenorden provinces initiated clandestine activities involving the assassination of public figures associated with the new German Republic, the loathsome symbol of defeat and disgrace to radical nationalists. The Germanenorden was used as a cover-organization for the recruitment of political assassins in 1921. The murderers of Matthias Erzberger, the former Reich Finance Minister and the hated signatory of the armistice, were Heinrich Schultz and Heinrich Tillessen, who had been strongly influenced by volkisch propaganda after demobilization at the end of the war. They had settled in June 1920 in Regensburg, where they met Lorenz Mesch, the local leader of the Germanenorden. In May 1921 Schultz and Tillessen went to Munich, where they received their orders to kill Erzberger from a person who claimed to have the authority of the Germanenorden. The attempted assassination of Maximilian Harden, the republican author, was also traced to the Order. The impressive secrecy and ideology of the Order thus inspired volkisch fanatics to murder the Jewish and republican enemies of the German nation in a modern 'Vehm.'"

(The Occult Roots of Nazism, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, pg. 132-133)

That Germanenorden patron and Chancellor Grand Duke Johann Albrecht of Mecklenburg was involved with the Baltic Campaign, a now largely forgotten military expedition launched by various Freecorps with tentative approval of the Weimer Republic and the British that nonetheless captivated German nationalists in the interwar years, will be highly significant point as this series unfolds, so do keep it in mind dear reader.

It is also significant that the broader Germanenorden, from which the Thule Society began as a lodge of, was involved in the Freecorps movement and latter manifestations, such as the Deutschvolkischer Schult- und Trutzbund. The Thule Society was of course famously involved with the Freecorps movement as well. Many mainstream historians, if they mention Thule at all, depict its affiliation with several of the Bavarian Freecorps as an isolated incident. But in point of fact, more than a few of those Ariosophical-centric occult lodges were actively involved in the Freecorps movement as the above cited passage makes clear. Mainstream accounts of the Freecorps and affiliated organizations such as the Deutschvolkischer Schult- und Trutzbund (of which virtually all leading members of the Freecorps movement had been members of at one time or another, according to Robert G.L. Waite's Vanguard of Nazism [pg. 206 n. 87]) have on occasion subtly acknowledged this connection.

"The Schultz-und-Trutzbund was organized in October 1919 by Alfred Roth, man who had been active in prewar racist groups such as the Reichshammer-Bund. The purpose of the S-u-T is stated in its constitution:

"'The Bund fights for the moral rebirth of the German Volk... It considers the pernicious and destructive influence of Jewry to be the main cause of defeat [in World War I] and the removal of this influence to be necessary for the political and economic recovery of Germany, and for the salvation of German Kultur.'

"Well before Hitler became a dominating influence in the struggling German Workers Party, the Schultz-und-Trutzbund had establish its own printing presses and was flooding the country with the most violent and scurrilous anti-Semitic propaganda. 'In the year 1920 alone,' declares its founder, 'we distributed over 7,642,000 pieces [of propaganda material].' The Bund had its own newspaper, the Deutschvolkischen Blatter, and its own psuedoscientific magazine, the Politische-Anthropologische; both publications carried the swastika on their mastheads. This was long before Hitler adopted the crooked cross as the symbol of mystic Aryan racism and the official sign of his party. Before it was ostensibly dissolved in January 1923, the Bund had a total membership of almost a quarter of a million men.

"The Schultz-und-Trutzbund did important work in preparing Germany for Nazi racism, but it made a more specific contribution than that. A list of only its most distinguished graduates who figured prominently in Nazi Germany would include the following Julius Steicher, Gauleiter of Nuremberg, editor of the unspeakable Sturmer; Dietrich Eckart, with Alfred Rosenberg co-editor of the Volkischer Beobachter, also a charter member of the Thule Society; Reinhard Heydrich, SS Grupenfuhrer, Chief of the Security Service of the Gestapo; the Duke of Saxe-Coberg-Gotha, President of the German Red Cross; Wilhelm Murr, Federal Governor of Wurtemberg; Walter Buch, Reichsleiter and President of the Party Court; and Fritz Sauckel, Federal Governor of Thuringia, notorious Chief Administrator of the Labor Draft Law."

(Vanguard of Nazism, Robert G.L. Waite, pgs. 206-207)

As was noted above, the Reichshammer-Bund was the organization that had spawned the Germanenorden, making it entirely possible that Orden members were the controlling force behind the Schultz-und-Tutzbund. Reportedly Theodor Fritsch himself, the chief figure behind the Germanenorden, played a leading role in the Schultz-und-Tutzbund, as did several individuals associated with the Thule Society.

"... The tireless Fritsch was one of the national leaders of the Schultz-und-Trutzbund, which grew from 25,000 members in 1919 to 110,000 by the following year. Among the leaders of the Schultz-und-Trutzbund's Munich chapter were such familiar associates of the Thule society as Dietrich Eckart, Julius Lehmann, and Gottfried Feder, along with Max Sesselmann, an editor of the Munchener Beobachter who later marched with Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch. Like the Thule Society, the Munich Schultz-und-Trutzbund met at Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten."

(Hammer of the Gods, David Luhrssen, pg. 240 n. 113)

Dietrich Eckart, of whom much more will be said later

All of this would seem to indicate that, despite the schism, some type of link remained between the anti- and pro-Pohl (from which the Thule Society derived) factions of the scattered post-WWI Germanenorden. Another indication of this link is that the above mentioned Schultz-und-Trtuzbund assassins, Heinrich Schultz and Heinrich Tillessen, had previously served in the Oberland Freecorp of Bavaria before joining the secret order. The Oberland Freecorp was in turn one of the Freecorps that the Thule Society played a role in founding.

Its also interesting to note that Schultz and Tillessen were also said to be members of the Organisational Council (O.C.), a clandestine organization founded by leading figures of the Freecorps. They may in fact have been operating under the orders of the O.C. when they assassinated Matthias Erzberger. The O.C., which was effectively a kind of nationalist Murder Inc., claimed to be carrying on the work of the notorious Vehmic courts of Medieval Germany. The Holy Vehm have of course long fascinated the conspiratorial right and this modern manifestation of the Vehm is most significant in that regard. It shall be addressed at length in a future installment.

Next's weeks blog, however, will begin an examination of the Thule Society in earnest. Stay tuned.

Posted by Recluse athttp://visupview.blogspot.com/

The Walking Dead is now where brains are eaten, not used

Understanding is a vital part of zombie fiction's DNA; there's a better show to watch.

by Nathan Mattise - Apr 26 2014, http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/04/understanding-and-the-zombie-apocalypse/

• Web Culture

Mark Lobo

Warning: this post contains mild spoilers on modern zombie films and TV.

For a show that's often been criticized for painfully slow pacing, there was no shortage of action in the Walking Dead's recent Season 4 finale. Our heroes arrived at a survivor camp called Terminus, a rumored safe haven that was teased all season long. But unlike the show's previous settings—say Hershel's farm, the Prison, or Woodbury—no time was wasted. Incumbent introductions gave way to gunfire within a single episode.
It's the first time The Walking Dead moved beyond walker-speed through a location since Season 1, when the survivors stumbled in and exploded out of the Atlanta-area CDC within a single hour. But there's a key difference between the show at these two plot points, one which makes following the series going forward feel like a chore.
No one on The Walking Dead cares about understanding what the hell is going on anymore.

Dead people walking + unknowns = zombie fic

Different from the Haitian voodoo variety, pop-culture zombies started as cultural commentary, an analogy for whatever mindless, rapidly spreading thing was taking over the population. That very purpose is rooted in understanding—trend X is sweeping the nation, let's depict the struggle to figure it out in the face of its potential danger. The very best zombie films of the past 15 years get this, each incorporating the pursuit of understanding in some unique way.
Take 28 Days Later, where the basic plot is driven by curiosity. The zombie virus (called rage in the film) jumps to humans in a lab where scientists study chimps suffering from its bloodlust characteristics. And after the apocalypse begins, the four survivors the film follows constantly push on, hoping to find a military base broadcasting messages of safety and cures. You can probably guess how that turns out (the military's grasp on the virus is limited at best, and the zombie they're "studying" isn't helpful in the end), but the plot is unquestionably propelled by the survivors' desire to understand what's going on around them. (The film's radical alternative ending only furthers the necessity of understanding—as the four survivors eschew the military and find a scientist who offers them a true, albeit seemingly fatal, solution.)

You can nearly copy and paste the paragraph above for World War Z, the highest grossing zombie film in the US during this modern zombie renaissance. The role of understanding is even deeper here, though, as Brad Pitt's character hops from global organization to organization chasing pieces of a cure-puzzle he only puts together in the end. And unlike 28 Days Later, World War Z takes the idea of pursuing knowledge all the way to true solutions—even if those come with concerns and a daunting timetable.
This crucial bit of zombie fiction DNA isn't even limited to the genre's traditional films. In Shaun of the Dead, Shaun and Ed discover the means to fend off the undead through TV news reports (theoretically seekers of knowledge), and the film's ending is entirely based on the premise that understanding a zombie apocalypse is feasible. Like World War Z, the revelation makes it possible for life to truly move forward in the end. Zombieland is less scientific and more practical in analyzing the apocalypse—Tallahassee and Columbus survive essentially because they develop an ongoing list of experiential-based survival rules to restore some order to the chaos around them.

Brains are eaten, not really used

This all brings us back to The Walking Dead, arguably the most important (inarguably the biggest) zombie franchise nowadays. At one point, this show knew how to handle its understanding too.
Beyond the quick rendezvous at the CDC (where the shacked-up scientist kept studying, but failing to find, zombie solutions), the show's most memorable moments are all wrapped in evolving knowledge. The giant reveal in Season 2, for instance, came after Rick dispatches Shane... only to discover that you turn into a zombie when you die, bitten or not. And over time, the survivors have found a number of awesome zombie hacks—Glen and Rick cover themselves in zombie guts in Season 1 to escape a horde; Michonne walks slowly with two walkers on leashes to camouflage while traveling. You can say what you will about the overall effectiveness of the Governor as a big bad, but even he strived to solve this zombie problem. His lair was filled with fishtanks of zombie heads, and he employed a brains-guy named Milton to conduct experiments on whether zombies could retain any human characteristics.
"Once you get into environments like the CDC —kind of a no brainer—or Woodbury, which is safe and quiet to a certain extent, you would be able to have a lab and start to discover things," series creator Robert Kirkman told Ars at the time. "It’s the nature of man to want to find answers, and that's something people would definitely focus on. We’re trying to portray it as realistically as possible through Milton."
One season later and the show doesn't value understanding anymore. The lone manifestation of science currently is an obvious mulleted red herring named Eugene. The fact that the competent military man (another new character this season, Abraham) is convinced Eugene has zombie answers for Washington instantly destroys his credibility too. You'd imagine that as our survivors became more adept at navigating the day-to-day over time (which, to the show's credit, they have), some of them would turn their attention to a few big-picture ideas. Instead, it's constantly up to new faces to assume this role (the Governor, Milton, now Eugene) in a series of quickly diminishing returns. And to make matters worse, our survivors have reached a level of zombie efficiency where even those former micro bits of learning have vanished.
"Safe and quiet to a certain extent," Terminus perfectly fits Kirkman's definition of when understanding should re-enter a zombie world. It's advertised to both characters and audience as some type of safe haven, but not one inch of it indicates that the residents care about figuring this apocalypse thing out. In that sense, it's not worth using as a giant plot set piece. Good riddance. The show may have rushed in and out of the CDC quickly for non-narrative reasons (a first-season show without a guaranteed second will often rush plot and can't spend much on expensive sets), but the speed of escalation at Terminus highlights The Walking Dead's new priorities—action, and not much substance beyond that.

The French have a smarter undead fix—The Returned

When zombie stories are no longer about understanding the zombies and the new zombie world, it's time to move on. The Walking Dead seems to care more about bloodshed, the possible evil nature of man, and ruin porn-ish themes you can get everywhere from military narratives to Law and Order. What sets the zombie genre apart and ultimate characterizes it (beyond that surfacey detail of dead people walking) is trying to understand a mass cultural movement and the changed society it creates.
So don't let the major network knock-off (ABC's Resurrection) scare you away, Sundance's The Returned is the real deal. Even though the French sci-fi series isn't traditional zombie fare—there are no green brain-eaters—this is the academic's best bet for finding current undead satisfaction.
The show's premise is a clever alteration of the dead rising: individuals who were thought dead (many in gruesome fashion) begin coming back to their small mountainside town without having aged. The returned don't show any immediately alarming characteristics—they're hungry but eat what's in the fridge; they don't stand out in a crowd due to physical appearance; they talk like others talk and can remember most of their previous lives (besides what happens after each accident of course).
Beyond the anticipation of finding what these "people" are and what they may be capable of, watching how everyone else reacts is gripping. Since the returned can be just about anyone (we see children, single twins, grooms who never made it to the alter, doctors, and more), the show can explore how virtually every kind of basic relationship copes with zombification. And beyond the interpersonal navigation, the town (at times collectively, many times as individuals) wants to get to the bottom of this phenomenon. Responses to the returned run the gamut from full acceptance to fear, solution-searching through religion to secret observation. Frankly, it's the exact opposite of The Walking Dead—void of instant-gratification kills and focused instead on learning the "how," "why," and "what next" of living with the undead. It's by far the liveliest story in today's dead landscape.
The Walking Dead is beginning to fail its fans by neglecting an essential part of the zombie world. It's not an immediate death sentence for the show—it's so popular a spin-off is coming—but there's a declining marginal utility for cheap thrills and kills. If what interested you in the genre are its brains and not the process of eating them, it's time to think it through. Season 1 of The Returned is now streaming on Netflix. And instead of more Rick and company this fall, Season 2 of The Returned should come to Sundance roughly around that time.

America’s Next Agricultural Revolution Will Happen Indoors

Sarah Kunst

Tech + Health

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/26/america-s-next-agricultural-revolution-will-happen-indoors.html

04.26.14 //

With climate change wrecking havoc on the world’s crops, it’s time to consider other options. Warehouse farms might be the answer to the global food crisis.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released their first report in seven years, and like many sequels, it wasn’t good. Beyond melting ice caps and unprecedented heat waves, the news that most shook readers was that "all aspects of food security are potentially affected by climate change."
Early proof of this impending disaster is playing out in California where farming-related losses in 2013 are estimated to be $5 billion and 2014 is not on track to be any better. Chipotle noted in a recent investor letter that they might cut back on their signature guacamole because of avocado scarcity. In a wry twist, this news caused much more concern for many Americans than the United Nations Nobel Prize winning team’s research tome of impending doom.
Meanwhile in China, the Chinese are also contending with human made pollution on an epic scale: 60% of the groundwater supply is polluted and the ubiquitous air pollution is so severe that it may be threatening photosynthesis and food supply. Other parts of the world are not faring much better. Banana republics have been ordered to more closely monitor their yellow fruits for signs of a virus poised to wipe out 45% of the world’s banana supply. In Mexico, a triple threat of extreme weather, bacterial infection, and drug cartel activity has driven lime prices to such heights that the government has intervened and bars in the U.S. have begun charging by the slice.
Mother Nature, it seems, is a bitch. Her revenge is perhaps understandable given the centuries of mistreatment, replete with oil spills, coalmines and running water while brushing ones teeth. Worldwide deaths by starvation are a punishment severe enough to stave off but until recently, finding ways to do so has been hard.
Now, the tech business has forgotten their cleantech scars and is finding happiness with their new darling, agtech. Everything from CRM for crops to machine learning weed pullers have been funded in a frenzy, but few of the startups address core issues. We live on the edge of food scarcity and are slowly making our water and land inhospitable to growing crops.

In the space roughly the size of an acre, Roeser’s farms produce 100 acres worth of produce.

One startup toeing the line between doomsday preppers and expensive salad aficionados is Garden Fresh Farms. The Minnesota-based company has patented their Lettuce Gardens and Orbiting Gardens—industrial-grade hydroponic chambers set up in warehouses and used to grow greens and mushrooms with incredible efficiency. Hydroponics first brings to mind greenhouses and basement weed growing operations, but the practice of growing plants in fish filled water has been around since the Roman Empire. For most of its history, the process has not been energy efficient or scalable but Dave Roeser, founder of Garden Fresh Farms, found a way to change that. The CleanTech Open Global Forum, where they won the National Sustainability award in 2013, has lauded his proprietary system.
The farms are “modular commercial indoor agriculture systems that can be configured for the size of the warehouse, consumer market size, variety of crops to be sold and the investors budget. The farms can start in as little as 5,000 sq. ft.” and go up to 50,000 sq. ft. In the space roughly the size of an acre, Roeser’s farms produce 100 acres worth of produce. Harvesting is continual and despite the cold local winters at headquarters, the food stays warm in the indoor fields. Because of the controlled environment, pesticides aren’t needed and the food is virtually organic. (Actual organic certification is possible but a time consuming process.)

gardenfreshfarms.com

Local food and farm to table movements assume proximity to a farm that produces year round, but for most of the world that is unrealistic. With Garden Fresh Farms, their ability to turn old warehouses into urban farms has drawn attention from redevelopment zones, blighted cities, and metro areas outside of farming centers. They have a community supported agriculture program, with a unique partner in Williams-Sonoma. The home goods chain serves as a pick up point for locals who want to shop for cooking supplies and then pick up food to prepare as well.
Those less fortunate can benefit as well, with food deserts becoming an increasing cause for concern among poor urban Americans. The deserts, meaning a lack of ready access to healthy, fresh food, are linked to skyrocketing obesity rates among adults and children. Food security is also a concern, ensuring that a country grows enough on its own soil to avoid starvation in the event of trade isolation or war.
Unlike many do-good products, Garden Fresh Farms does not exist as a social good company. It benefits as much from its distribution in Whole Foods, where the price point is similar to expensive boutique brands, as it would in the event of a world food shortage disaster of action movie proportions.  The founders have a pragmatic view of it, saying, “We live in a period of time between ice ages. Our farms prepare us for whatever happens to our climate. We improve access to healthy food anywhere, not just areas with year round outdoor farming. Since it is local, fresh and natural this improves the diets of all customers. Because of rising gas prices, economics will dictate growing food closer to the consumer year round. Our methods are revolutionary to farming.”
One area that Roeser doesn’t play in? The slowly legalizing marijuana industry—but not for the reasons you may think. According to him, “We have looked at the figures, and growing legal herbs is a more profitable business and doesn't violate any federal laws. Many varieties of marijuana sell for $7/lb. wholesale. Basil sells for $10/lb., so the economics are better.”
So next time you complain about salad costing a fortune, remember that you could literally get high for less.

Experts: Civilians not ready for EMP-caused blackout

By Josh Peterson  /   April 21, 2014  /  http://watchdog.org/138940/solar-flare-emp/

 

  

 

 

Wikipedia

THEY’RE TESTING: The government testing electromagnetic pulses uses a simulator hanging over an airborne command post.

By Josh Peterson | Watchdog.org
The catastrophic effects of an electromagnetic pulse-caused blackout could be preventable, but experts warn the civilian world is still not ready.
Peter Vincent Pry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, both congressional advisory boards, said the technology to avoid disaster from electromagnetic pulses exists, and upgrading the nation’s electrical grid is financially viable.
“The problem is not the technology,” Pry said. “We know how to protect against it. It’s not the money, it doesn’t cost that much. The problem is the politics. It always seems to be the politics that gets in the way.”

IT’S STOPPABLE: Peter Vincent Pry says technology exists to protect against the damage from electromagnetic pulses.

He said the more officials plan, the lower the estimated cost gets.
“If you do a smart plan — the Congressional EMP Commission estimated that you could protect the whole country for about $2 billion,” Pry told Watchdog.org. “That’s what we give away in foreign aid to Pakistan every year.”
In the first few minutes of an EMP, nearly half a million people would die. That’s the worst-case scenario that author William R. Forstchen estimated in 2011 would be the result of an EMP on the electric grid — whether by an act of God, or a nuclear missile detonating in Earth’s upper atmosphere.
An electromagnetic pulse is a burst of electromagnetic energy strong enough to disable, and even destroy, nearby electronic devices.
The scenario sounds like something in a Hollywood film, but the U.S. military has been preparing its electronic systems for such an event since the Cold War. The protective measures taken to harden facilities against a nuclear attack also help in some cases to protect against EMPs.
The civilian world is another story.
States have been working to fill in the legislative and regulatory gap left by Congress, as previously reported by Watchdog.org, and private companies have been developing technologies that would protect against EMPs.
In 2011, state utilities commissioners recognized the need to invest in equipment that could help protect the power grid, but experts continue to warn that time to do so is running out.
READ ALSO: IRS gave more than $1 million in bonuses to its own tax-cheating employees

Much focus during the past several years has been placed on society’s cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Sophisticated computer hackers working in secret, most likely sponsored by nation-states, can steal identities, money and even potentially hijack airplanes.
National Geographic, in the movie American Blackout, explored the catastrophic effects a cyberattack on the grid would have on society.
The movie premiered in October 2013 at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C., accompanied by a panel of national security experts from the U.S. intelligence community.
Cyberattacks against the grid are possible. Stuxnet, the computer virus developed by the United States and Israel to sabotage Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, demonstrated that such an attack is not only possible, it can be done.
Computer viruses are software programs designed to attack specific entities. But even computers need electricity, otherwise they are little more than expensive paper weights.
Electricity is the lifeblood of the modern world. Food, transportation, medical facilities and communication systems all need it to function.
An EMP attack from a nuclear missile launched by a country like North Korea, on the other hand, would indiscriminately cripple whole regions.
Unlike nation-states, which can be deterred through diplomacy and force, however, the universe acts of its own accord.
An EMP from a super solar flare would behave similarly to one generated by a nuclear missile that detonated in Earth’s upper atmosphere.
Solar flares are explosions on the surface of the Sun; coronal mass ejections (CME), a solar flare’s accompanying EMP, can disturb the space weather around the Earth and affect communications signals traveling through the upper atmosphere.
On multiple occasions during the past 155 years, large enough CME’s have disrupted electrical systems on Earth. One of the largest recorded solar flares happened in 1859. The CME, called the Carrington Event, disrupted telegraph systems in Europe and North America, and lit up the evening sky.
A solar flare in 1989 caused a blackout in Quebec that lasted more than nine hours, and systems as far away as New Jersey were also damaged. In 2013, Space.com ranked the solar storm that caused the blackout as the fourth worst in history.
Space.com ranked a solar storm in December 2006 as the worst, and U.S. government officials reported that the event disrupted satellite communications and GPS signals for about 10 minutes and damaged the satellite that took the picture of the storm.
A joint study published in 2013 by researchers at Lloyd’s of London and Atmospheric and Environmental Research found that a similar event today would cost the world economy $2.3 trillion.
Risk of another Carrington-class solar flare is expected to peak by early 2015. In the summer of 2012, Earth narrowly missed one estimated to have been more powerful than the Carrington Event and 35 times the size of Earth.
Contact Josh Peterson at jpeterson@watchdog.org. Follow Josh on Twitter at @jdpeterson

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THE SUPERNATURAL WORLDVIEW
Examining Paranormal, PSI, and the Apocalyptic
Posted: April 27, 2014
8:00 am Eastern //http://www.raidersnewsupdate.com/Supernatural9.htm
by Cris Putnam \ FOLLOW THE SERIES!

PART 1	PART 2
PART 3	PART 4
PART 5	PART 6
PART 7	PART 8
PART 9

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PART 9 - Latent Powers of the Soul

Is it possible for thoughts to be projected across vast distances? Can someone leave his or her body and “see” things in a faraway land or even the future? Some may be surprised to learn The Supernatural Worldview of the Bible has always supported such ideas. 

While Western scientific orthodoxy asserts that there are only five senses, there is surprising evidence for more. If Watchmen Nee was correct about the latent power of the soul, we would expect to find a growing body of evidence for these abilities. The soon-to-be released The Supernatural Worldview (coming May 15^th) contains overwhelming evidence for the existence of abilities popularly labeled “telepathy” and “remote viewing” and their relationship to dreams as well as “precognition” in supports of Nee’s prophetic warning. What I chronicle therein finds me behind closed doors examining well-documented, spontaneous cases, laboratory experiments, and even biblical analogs.

Take as example what is known as Remote Viewing, the ability to perceive out of sensory range. Sometimes this is connected to an out-of-body experience (OBE), but other times not. Parapsychologist Charles Tart recorded a remarkable instance of an OBE in a laboratory setting in which the subject was able to see something outside the range of access of the normal five senses:

On the first three laboratory nights, Miss Z reported that in spite of occasionally being “out,” she hadn’t been able to control her OBEs enough to be in position to see the target number (which was different each night). On the fourth night, at 5:57 a.m., there was a seven-minute period of somewhat ambiguous EEG activity, sometimes looking like stage 1, sometimes like brief waking states. Then Miss Z awakened and called out over the intercom that the target number was 25,132, which I wrote on the EEG recording. After she slept a few more minutes, I woke her so she could go to work, and this is what she reported regarding the previous awakening (Tart 1968, 17):

I woke up; it was stifling in the room. Awake for about five minutes. I kept waking up and drifting off, having floating feelings over and over. I needed to go higher, because the number was lying down. Between 5:50 and 6:00 a.m., that did it…I wanted to go read the number in the next room, but I couldn’t leave the room, open the door, or float through the door…. I couldn’t turn on the air conditioner!

The number 25,132 was indeed the correct target number near the ceiling above her bed.^[i]

This kind of evidence is rare. The fact that Miss Z reported the number was “lying down” rather than leaning against the wall as she expected (a detail verified by Tart) strongly suggests she somehow saw the card. What makes this especially compelling is that she couldn’t have gotten up to see the numbers, because she was hooked up to an EEG machine; any physical movement would have disturbed the recordings of her brainwaves. The odds of guessing a five-digit number are one hundred thousand to one. Although the distinction is somewhat arbitrary, the term remote viewing was invented to distinguish it from clairvoyance. It has received a lot of attention due to its modern use by intelligence agencies.

Remote viewing was popularized following the declassification of documents related to the Stargate Project, a $20-million-dollar CIA research program trying to determine possible military application of psychic phenomena. Much of the research was done at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, two former laser physicists, and Edwin C. May, a former nuclear physicist. The projects spanned from the 1970s until 1995, and were primarily handled by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Some believe remote-viewing programs still exist, but are now deeply classified black projects.

The star remote viewers of the SRI studies were Ingo Swann, Pat Price, and Joe McMoneagle. Swann, who died February 1, 2013, was an artist known for psychic abilities who wrote a book called Natural ESP: The Esp Core and Its Raw Characteristics, and another called Penetration: The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy that discussed extraterrestrial life. The latter work suggests that Swann was contacted by nonhuman entities in the guise of space aliens, an idea explored in my former work, Exo-Vaticana with Thomas Horn. Swann came to the attention of Targ and Puthoff when he demonstrated his ability to intentionally change the readings of Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID), which was buried deep underneath the Stanford physics building and shielded from electromagnetic influence by several layers of thick armor. Swann remotely viewed the SQUID and drew accurate pictures of its interior. Even more, he was able to influence its sinusoidal output, which was normally a consistent and predictable sine wave. When Swann projected his consciousness toward it, the wave doubled in frequency. He was able to repeat it at will, and the wave returned to normal frequency when he stopped. This was documented by several technical experts and recorded by Russell Targ.[ii] The successful experiments with Swann led to a visit from two employees of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology. Swann’s demonstrable ability to view locations all over world is what purportedly got the project off the ground. The initial CIA-funded project was later renewed and expanded. A number of CIA officials, including John N. McMahon (later the CIA’s deputy director), became strong supporters of the program. It is beyond question that significant evidence for psi drove the funding.

Pat Price was a retired police commissioner from California who had used his psychic abilities to solve crimes. While working for SRI, he was asked to investigate the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst, the teenaged newspaper heiress held hostage by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. After a visit to the location of the kidnapping, Price correctly identified Donald DeFreeze out of forty mug shots. Also, he was able to lead police to the location of the car used in the crime.[iii] Price is best known for his sketches of cranes and gantries retrieved by remotely viewing secret Soviet research at Semipalatinsk behind Soviet lines. His highly accurate sketches preceded the CIA intelligence photographs that confirmed them by many years.

Joe McMoneagle’s most amazing results include the time he drew the locations of a CIA team while the agents were hiding hundreds of miles away at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in the San Francisco area. He drew many of the laboratory buildings and structures in specific detail. Then the team moved to a nearby Windmill Farm, and McMoneagle drew the windmill structures and landscape with astounding accuracy. In 1984, McMoneagle was awarded a legion of merit for “producing crucial and vital intelligence unavailable from any other source.”[iv] This sort of evidence cannot simply be brushed aside, but very few people are aware of it to take it seriously. Even U.S. presidents have testified to the veracity of remote viewing.

President Jimmy Carter, in an interview with GQ magazine, revealed the use of psychics in parapsychological espionage directed against the USSR. He recounted a specific incident he was personally involved with that produced viable intelligence:

GQ: One of the promises you made in 1976 was that if you were elected, you would look into the reports from Roswell and see if there had been any cover-ups. Did you look into that?

Carter: Well, in a way. I became more aware of what our intelligence services were doing. There was only one instance that I’ll talk about now. We had a plane go down in the Central African Republic—a twin-engine plane, small plane. And we couldn’t find it. And so we oriented satellites that were going around the earth every ninety minutes to fly over that spot where we thought it might be and take photographs. We couldn’t find it. So the director of the CIA came and told me that he had contacted a woman in California that claimed to have supernatural capabilities. And she went in a trance, and she wrote down latitudes and longitudes, and we sent our satellite over that latitude and longitude, and there was the plane.

GQ: That must have been surreal for you. You’re the president of the United States, and you’re getting intelligence information from a woman in a trance in California.

Carter: That’s exactly right.[v]

Biblical Examples?

In the Old Testament, Samuel was called a “seer,” apparently because he was able to see what others could not, like the location of the lost donkeys of Saul:

Samuel answered Saul and said, “I am the seer. Go up ahead of me to the high place, and you will eat with me today; then I will send you away in the morning. I will tell you all that is on your mind. And as for your female donkeys that were lost three days ago, do not be concerned about them, because they have been found. For whom is all the desire of Israel? Is it not for you and for all the house of your father? (1 Samuel 9:19–20, LEB)

It isn’t clear that this entails remote viewing, but it seems like something akin. Samuel was gifted by Yahweh to serve as a spokesperson for God. It is essential to remember that the biblical prophets derived their authority from God. With that understood, Scripture does seem to imply that some people have these abilities.

In the book of 2 Kings, Naaman, the second in command to the king of Syria, suffered from leprosy. He heard about Elisha, the Lord’s prophet, who could invoke Yahweh to heal the dreaded disease. When Naaman arrived at Elisha’s house bearing great sums of money, a messenger instructed Naaman to bathe seven times in the River Jordan. Because of his immense pride he went away angry, refusing to wash in the muddy river waters. His servants convinced him to do so, and God healed him. Naaman declared, “There is no God in all the world except in Israel” (5:15). Although Elisha had refused a monetary gift from Naaman, the prophet’s servant Gehazi secretly followed Naaman to ask for money.

Somehow, Elisha was able to follow Gehazi’s wrongful actions and confront him with specific details on his return. “Then he said to him, ‘Did not my heart go with you as the man turned from on his chariot to meet you? Is it time to take silver, clothes, olive orchards, vineyards, sheep, oxen, male slaves, and female slaves?’” (2 Kings 5:26). The passage gives the impression that Elisha saw exactly what went on out of his normal sensory purview. This gift was evidently a divinely ordained ability for a prophet.

The book of Revelation seems to be John’s accounting of an OBE:

After this I looked, and behold, a door standing open in heaven! And the first voice, which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet, said, “Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.” At once I was in the Spirit, and behold, a throne stood in heaven, with one seated on the throne. (Revelation 4:1–2, underline added)

This has been described as a “state in which the ordinary faculties of the flesh are suspended, and the inward senses opened.”¹⁵ In this altered state of consciousness, God brings a man’s spirit into direct contact with the invisible spiritual world. According to biblical scholar Robert Thomas:

“In the spirit” is descriptive of the prophetic trance into which the prophet’s spirit entered. This miraculous ecstatic state wrought by the Spirit of God was, to all intents and purposes, a complete translation from Patmos to heaven. All of the prophet’s senses were operative: his ears heard, his eyes saw, and his emotions were as real as though his body was literally in heaven instead of remaining on Patmos.^[vi]

John seems to be describing an altered state of consciousness similar to remote viewing. Many evangelicals have a fear of mysticism, probably from its association with Roman Catholic monasticism. Even so, Acts 10:10 speaks of Peter “falling into a trance” while praying. This was not a nighttime dream, but an altered state of consciousness induced by prayer. Peter describes it as an ecstatic vision using the Greek term ekstasis. In the first century, the term generally denoted “a vision accompanied by an ecstatic psychological state.”^[vii] While these examples certainly don’t suggest it is wise to attempt remote viewing for one’s own ends, they do demonstrate the existence of such phenomena is consistent with the Bible and a Supernatural Worldview. If one isn’t careful, he or she could beckon an uninvited guest.

Why have Christians usually associated clairvoyance with demonization? Other than divinely inspired prophecy, the Bible doesn’t tell us much. However, there is an instructive incident in Acts 16. On one of Paul’s visits to the Jewish place of prayer, he and his cohorts were met by a slave girl who had the gift of second sight and earned money for her owners by giving readings. The text reads, “And it came to pass, as we went to prayer, a certain damsel possessed with a spirit of divination met us, which brought her masters much gain by soothsaying” (Acts 16:16). The girl’s gift is attributed by Luke to a spirit of divination, penuma pythona, literally, “a spirit, a Python.” The background of this attribution reaches back into classical Greek mythology.

The Python was a legendary dragon serpent that guarded the temple and oracle of Apollo, located on the slope of Mt. Parnassus just north of the Gulf of Corinth. The giant serpent was supposed to have lived at the foot of Mt. Parnassus and to have eventually been killed by Apollo. The Latin scholar Gaius Julius Hyginus (64 BC–AD 17) elaborates:

Apollo exacted vengeance for his mother. For he went to Parnassus and slew Python with his arrows. (Because of this deed he is called Pythian.) He put Python’s bones in a cauldron, deposited them in his temple, and instituted funeral games for him which are called Pythian.^[viii]

Accordingly, the name is related to the site of Delphi (Pythō), the most important oracle in the classical Greek world, and is also associated with the putrid corpse of the serpent dragon stored in the cauldron (from the verb pythein, “to rot”). While the myth is well known, could it have any historical basis?

The historian Strabo (64 BC–AD 24) preserves a more ancient Greek historian, Ephorus’ (400–330 BC), interpretation of the classical legend. While reading this account, it is essential to note that Ephorus had previously issued a complaint concerning those who mix mythology and history, a seeming inconsistency as he proceeds to do just that, as Strabo perplexingly comments:

And that at this time Apollo, visiting the land, civilized the people by introducing cultivated fruits and cultured modes of life; and that when he set out from Athens to Delphi he went by the road which the Athenians now take when they conduct the Pythias; and that when he arrived at the land of the Panopaeans he destroyed Tityus, a violent and lawless man who ruled there; and that the Parnassians joined him and informed him of another cruel man named Python and known as the Dragon, and that when Apollo shot at him with his arrows the Parnassians shouted “Hie Paean” to encourage him (the origin, Ephorus adds, of the singing of the Paean which has been handed down as a custom for armies just before the clash of battle); and that the tent of Python was burnt by the Delphians at that time, just as they still burn it to this day in remembrance of what took place at that time. But what could be more mythical than Apollo shooting with arrows and punishing Tityuses and Pythons, and travelling from Athens to Delphi and visiting the whole earth? But if Ephorus did not take these stories for myths, by what right did he call the mythological Themis a woman, and the mythological Dragon a human being—unless he wished to confound the two types, history and myth?^[ix]

This begs the question of whether Ephorus was demythologizing the Python legend or, more interestingly, if the serpent dragon actually took the form of a man. Reptilian shape shifters or something like the nachash? Etymologically, there appears a semantic development from the specific serpent dragon to an oracle inspiring spirit in general. A massive, tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world known as the Suda defines the Python as a daimonion mantikos. The first word is the root of the modern term “demon,” examined in detail in my upcoming book, and the second, the Greek mantikos, is “prophetic, oracular, of or for a soothsayer,” from the word “mantis,” or “prophet”; literally, it means “one touched by divine madness.”^[x] In AD 60 or so when Luke wrote Acts, a person with “a spirit of the Python” was a demon-possessed person through whom a Python spirit spoke. This is corroborated by early writers like Pseudoclementine, Origen, and Jerome, who wrote of “Python-demons” inspiring pagan prophetic oracles.^[xi] Certainly, the practices of contemporary channelers and remote viewers do not significantly differ from the ancient world. Even so, perhaps it is pressing too hard to apply this text to clairvoyance across the board.

But What Does This Mean For Us?

It might come as a surprise that some very conservative theologians allow for innate human abilities—along the lines of Watchman Nee’s latent power of the soul—as an explanation for some forms of extrasensory perception. A contemporary and friend of the celebrated evangelist D. L. Moody, Frederick Brotherton Meyer (1847–1929), was a Baptist pastor and evangelist during the heyday of the popular spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century. In a polemic against spiritualism, Meyer railed against the mediums, but conceded that psi abilities are not necessarily occult:

Neither telepathy nor clairvoyance appears deserving of our censure. They are natural properties of the mind, and only reveal the wondrous faculties with which the Almighty has endowed us. If it is possible to send out circling waves of wireless telegraphy, which widen out as the rings from a stone cast into a pond Or lake, and can only be appreciated where the receiver and the transmitter are perfectly attuned, so it is not difficult to believe that our minds are constantly radiating motions and influences through our brains, which are perceived by sympathetic correspondence with other brains.^[xii]

Meyer allowed that telepathy and clairvoyance are human abilities endowed by the Creator. While dominant Western scientific consensus denies these abilities, the evidence for them is quite compelling and consistent with biblical revelation. While this may raise the hackles of a few critics, the biblical worldview has more in common with the findings of parapsychology than philosophical naturalism, and theologians have much to learn from the research. My conviction is that the Christian has nothing to fear from the pursuit of truth, even from unconventional sources... such as I infiltrated... where I found what I did not expect.

TO BE CONTINUED

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[i] Charles T. Tart, The End of Materialism (Oakland, CA: Fearless, 2012) Kindle edition, 3482–3491.

[ii] Russell Targ, Limitless Mind (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2004) 26.

[iii] Diane Hennacy Powell, The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009) Kindle edition, 939–940.

[iv] Edwin C. May, “The American Institutes for Research Review of the Department of Defense’s STAR GATE Program,” Journal of Parapsychology, 60 (March 1996) 3–23.

[v] Wil S. Hylton “The Gospel According to Jimmy,” GQ, January 2005, http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/200512/
jimmy-carter-ted-kennedy-ufo-republicans?currentPage=2 (accessed 11/28/13).

¹⁵ F. J. A. Hort, The Apocalypse of St. John (London: Macmillan, 1908) 15.

^[vi]Robert L. Thomas, Revelation 1–7: An Exegetical Commentary (Chicago: Moody, 1992) 338.

^[vii] Johannes P. Louw and Eugene Albert Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains (New York: United Bible Societies, 1996) 444.

[viii] Hyginus, “Fabulae” Classical E Texts, http://www.theoi.com/Text/HyginusFabulae3.html#140, (accessed 05/02/13).

^[ix] Strabo, ed., H. L. Jones, The Geography of Strabo (Medford, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press; William Heinemann, 1924).

[x] “Mantic,” Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=mantic&allowed_in_frame=0 (accessed 05/02/13).

^[xi] “Python,” Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 6, eds. Gerhard Kittel, Geoffrey W. Bromiley, and Gerhard Friedrich (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964) electronic edition, 920.

^[xii]Frederick Brotherton Meyer, The Modern Craze of Spiritualism (Joseph Kreifels, 1919).