Beast Men & BLM: 
Lanz von Liebenfels’ Prophetic Visions

5,583 words

Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels
Ostara and the New Templars
Translated by George Klanderud
GermanenOrden Series, vol. 4
The 55 Club, 2019

Deep-sea fish, bats, clairvoyant Frisians in foggy country, the saurian with the electrical central eye in an equally dim, misty world, the wise Nibelung-dwarves have a strange and conspicuous connection to the results of the most recent natural scientific research.

— Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, Theozoology

Constant Readers will know that I love to find an opportunity to quote something from perhaps my favorite book, Lanz von Liebenfels’ Theozoology. And why not? Just look at that title, in full: Theozoology, or The Science of the Sodomite Apelings and the Divine Electron (An introduction to the most ancient and modern philosophy and a justification of the monarchy and the nobility). Sixty years before Ray Dennis Steckler’s (surprisingly similar) Incredibly Strange Creatures or, How I Stopped Living and Became a Mixed-Up Zombie, [1] [1] this is a book that dares you to not cite it.

And speaking of citations, check out the author: Dr. Jörg Lanz von Liebenfel, no less. Born with the almost cliché cognomen Adolf Josef Lanz, by the time he produced Theozoology he had not only acquired a doctorate (of which more anon) but also “discovered” a connection to the aristocratic Baron Johan von Liebenfels. [2] [2]

As you might expect, this was no ordinary Biblical scholar. The occult experts at Weiser Books provide a nice precis of his career [3]:

A defrocked former monk, von Liebenfels published his anti-Semitic and Völkisch theories in a magazine called “Ostara” which was said to have numbered a young Adolf Hitler amongst its readership, although the extent of its influence on the latter remains disputed. His “Theozoölogie oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-Äfflingen und dem Götter-Elektron” was first published in 1904/1905. The work presents as a work of Biblical exegesis, in which the author uses a wide range of sacred texts and folklore to advance a theory that certain common words in the Bible are actually euphemistic references to various, bizarre, non-human creatures (including the “Sodomite Apelings” of the title) that were the second Adamites, created from dust in Genesis 2, as opposed to the true humans who alone were endowed with the “Divine Electron” and created in God’s own image. From this von Liebenfels descends rapidly into the depths of racial theory, expounding that only Aryans represented the true humanity, and that darker races were the degenerate result of interbreeding with the non-human creatures of Genesis 2. Sadly much of what follows is pretty predictable: a call for the sterilization of the “lower races,” the elevation of the “Aryan race” and opprobrium for those guilty of miscegenation. The work was of some significance in Nazi occult thought and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke devotes several pages to it in his major study “The Occult Roots of Nazism [4].”

Indeed, the late (and bona fide [5]) Dr. Goodrick-Clarke was the source from which I, and I suppose many others, made the happy discovery of Dr. [?] Lanz [von Liebenfels?]; the latter is only one of several forgotten cranks who made up the brain trust of Ariosophy, a sort of volkish, and later Nazi, version of New Age crystalology. [3] [6]

What separates Lanz from later similar figures, like Erich Anton Paul von Däniken, [4] [7] Joseph Farrell, [5] [8] or Dr. “Happy” Harry Cox [9], is that unlike these self-educated cranks, Lanz gives every evidence of a deep and wide education in the relevant disciplines, in the good old German academic tradition. (Also, of course, these authors don’t discuss the need for mass extermination and the return of our womenfolk to harems to counteract their insatiable lust for ape sex).

Indeed, although, like his title of nobility, there has been some question about doctorate, it cannot be denied that he received a thorough education in Biblical languages, history, archeology, and various sciences at the distinguished Cistercian monastery at Heiligenkreuz, during which time he was already publishing in scholarly journals, and even after leaving the monastery in 1899 (with the usual “he said, they said” accounts; was he “seduced by the lies of the world” or were they betraying the strict discipline of St. Benedict?) he collaborated with many renowned Biblical scholars, Catholic, Lutheran and, strangely, given his evolving doctrines, Jewish.

Goodrick-Clarke quotes for a number of Lanz’s works, but the only one readily available in English was his 1905 Theozoology, a stapled pamphlet that appeared in 1989. As for Ostara, there doesn’t even seem to be agreement on how many issues were published (between 95 and 115, probably 101, from 1905 to 1930, suggests the Introduction), and even the internets haven’t helped much; as the Introduction observes, “any old copies are still ancient and at times difficult to read, much less translate. It is no easy task to translate a century-old, blurred photocopy written in Fraktur!” Alas, we are not as lucky as Uncle Adolph, who, legend has it, picked up some free back issues from Lanz himself, who took pity on the little tramp who was so interested in Lanz’s predicted thousand-year “Reich of the Blonds.” [6] [10]

Imagine my delight in finding this anthology! The 55 Club has given us some 300 pages of Lanz’s work, arranged chronologically, and covering all his areas of interest. There are documents on the founding of his Order of the New Templars (ONT) in 1900, four complete issues of Ostara (“Aryan Kristianity,” “Holy Grail,” “Racial Mysticism,” and the inaugural issue, “Reich of the Blonds”), his translation of Psalms 1-25 (“The Teutonic Psalms”), Theozoology, of course, in a new translation, along with two other of his “Bibeldokumente” studies on what might be called “Biblical Bestiality,” and his last essay, from 1950: “Coincidence or Destiny.”

Lanz’s basic idea, pursued relentlessly through everything from Babylonian bas reliefs to cryptozoological fossils to modern theories of electricity and biochemistry, is simple to the point of monomania. [7] [11] “The Godman endowed with magical divine powers” is the Aryan of the North; to the South and East belong the “ancient beastly creatures (non-Aryans).” The Godmen had numerous psychic powers, mostly electrical, which are now dormant in modern, degenerative man. This Fall of Man was occasioned by the lust for sexual intercourse with the beastly creatures, resulting in the various non-Aryan races, the most clever of which are the Jews.

Like many today, Lanz believed the Bible had a code, which he was able to crack. Various apparently ordinary words were code words; “stones” were apes, “crucifixion” was Sodomitical rape, etc. “Race and spirit are inseparable,” and thus the Bible is actually the history of Aryan miscegenation, a warning against it, and a prophecy that the return of the Golden Age can occur, but only through strict eugenic practices (and genocide of the ape-human hybrids, of course). Christ’s life is an allegory of this process; he represents “the Heroic-Aryan Godman crucified upon the lower animal nature of the world awaiting resurrection.”

As with the works of so many scientific outsiders, this bald summary cannot account for the fascination (to use Sontag’s word) exerted over readers from prewar Vienna (Lanz claimed a circulation of around 100,000!) to today; that can only be accounted for by Lanz’s writings themselves, where a truly unique voice rings out. Here’s perhaps my favorite passage from Theozoology, which I quoted in several essays and reviews:

The one-time Paradisiacal fields are completely exploited and plundered like a wheat-field in which a thievish horde of apes has taken up residence. Our bodies are infected with a mange which despite every kind of soap remains udumu-ized, pagutu-ized and baziat-ized [that is, acquired the DNA of various ancient beast men]. Never has human life been as miserable as it is today — despite all its technical advancements. Devilish human beasts oppress us from above, slaughtering millions of people in unconscionably murderous wars conducted for the enrichment of their personal money-bags. Savage human beasts undermine the pillars of culture from below. . . . What do you want with Hell in the Beyond?! Isn’t the one we are living in now, and in which we are now burning, terrible enough? [8] [12]

Rather than attempting to summarize and critique all the ramifications of Lanz’s ideas, as collected together here, let me just note some passages that suggest why, over a hundred years later, you may find some of it still surprisingly modern and thought-provoking.

You can buy James O’Meara’s book Green Nazis in Space! here. [13]

Lanz’s racial theories are rather familiar, being derived (apart from his experience of “enlightenment” on uncovering an old stone carving of Templar knight subduing a bestial creature, during his novitiate at Heiligenkreuz) from Blavatsky, [9] [14] and influencing (many say) Hitler and others; however, it is remarkable that for all his talk of racial hygiene and the specially-bred love-pygmies that seem to have been the main interest of ancient civilizations, his definition of “race” seems more like Evola’s [15], rather than the what Trotsky called the “human zoology” of the National Socialists; here it is, from the very first issue of Ostara, “The Reich of the Blonds”:

I thus define “race” as this: the complex of all inheritable physical, mental and spiritual characteristics of a human being. The term “race” is therefore a purely anthropological concept.

Evola’s hopes would be dashed, however, by Lanz’s immediate conclusion, which echoes some rather divisive discussions among the Dissident Right today:

The word “Aryan,” in particular, has caused great confusion in the field of racial science. . . . [It possesses] a merely philological or ethnological meaning; it is therefore. . . to be avoided as being misleading. For today’s Italians [16], Greeks, Armenians, Persians [17], and Indians all speak an Aryan language, but they no longer belong to the same race as the vast majority of men who speak the equally Aryan languages of the Northern French, German, Anglo-Saxons, and Scandinavians.

Once more, wogs begin at Calais [18]. For this reason, Lanz prefers to use the term “Heroic-Aryan.” But rather than going into this vexed matter now, I’d like to just pull out some passages that suggest Lanz may have some useful insights for us today.

In discussing the five races of man, Lanz notes that the Aryan “alone is the ‘social’ man.”

A state that does not cultivate this higher man or, as most modern “culture” states, even routinely eradicates it in favor of racially inferior, unemployed, antisocial and purely parasitic Candalen hordes, collapses hopelessly.

By contrast, the Mediterranean race (which the editors gloss as “Semites”), though physically and psychologically closest to the Aryan, is “too weak for manual labor” and “of low intelligence, purely reproductive and not mentally productive.” As a result,

They are the race of gawky lawyers [19], literati [20] and Talmudists, traders and merchants, orators, actors, the super active revolutionaries and agitators. They are nervous and impatient, and for every people a ferment of unrest [21], they are the audacious gamester [22], stock brokers and speculators [23]. . . born swindlers and fraudsters, their only “invention” is the so-called “democracy” and “socialism,” a worldview that makes the robbery and rape of the blond Heroic-Aryan race into a political, economic and ethical system. . . . And yes, they can almost be called the race of slave [24] and girl traders [25].

Sounds pretty contemporary, right down to the slave-trading (though never mentioned by BLM) and girl trading (Epstein and Weinstein). I would also note that the “purely reproductive” intelligence” combined with the Aryan as the only state-building race, reminds me of my own thesis — in line with a tradition going back to Socrates — that the Semites’ focus, even obsession, with physical reproduction is exactly what has prevented them from creating a state and culture of their own for thousands of years. [10] [26]

And yet, there is a greater threat: the Yellow Peril! The big-headed Mongolian race is also of purely reproductive intelligence, but physically powerful and easy to organize, as well as vast in population; — two thirds of all (so-called) people! As a result, “the major human and cultural catastrophes, from the collapse of the ancient Near Eastern cultures [to] the Bolshevik Flood of recent times, are the work of this hostile-culture and blindly destructive race.”

The ones doing the organizing are of course the Semites; “the Jewish Soviet gorillas in Russia based their rule chiefly on the Chinese and Korean terrorist guards. . . . ‘The blonds are too soft!’”

By contrast, the Negro race is “naturally inert and lazy,” though with “well-developed” hearing and vision. They are “suitable for lighter labor in warmer climates, e.g. their use in cotton plantations.” More importantly, “Because of their low intelligence and their proportionate minority they are culturally and politically less harmful.”

We seem to have here the roots of Hitler’s ruinous policy of killing or enslaving all the Slavs, rather than using them as allies and fifth columnists; later Lanz will casually refer to Slavs as a “horde of ape men.”

On the other hand, Lanz seems to have badly misjudged the Negro race, at least in terms of how “culturally and politically. . . harmful” they could be, once “organized” by the Semites, as we see in America, from the founding of the NAACP to the BLM riots today. Those apes undermining the pillars of culture — do we not see them every night?

Also of contemporary relevance — to issues of guilt and reparations for slavery and mass immigration — is Lanz’s interpretation of Jesus’ reply to the Pharisee’s question about the greatest commandment:

God is not loved and served in external customs, prayers and fasting, but rather by sexually loving his “neighbor,” i.e. a human close to his own kind…. Brotherly love in our sense is unknown in the Bible.

Reparations are due to the White man, not the negro:

Culture is impossible without slavery. . . . The brain-value that the noble race of man — above all, the Germanics — gave to humanity must now be repaid as brain-interest by those of lesser value in the form of manual labor.

As for the Pope:

All the babble about brotherly love is just a conjuring trick of words. As if from a thousand documents we did not know that Popes, bishops and abbots have sold and exchanged their bondsmen like merchandise? If the Church tolerated slavery, what should we be — more papist than the Pope? [11] [27]

In short:

Away with false and suicidal brotherly love which was invented by the Sodomite apelings and their pastors in order to strangle us, just like Russia convened the Peace Congress in order to subdue East Asia “in peace and quiet.”

Lanz briefly mentions a fifth, “primitive and crossbred” race, comprising peasants on the “cultural fringes”; I assume this is where Evola and the other modern “Italians” would be placed.

And then there is the subject of women.

Women can only make up for the sin of Eve through reasonable love, devoid of ape-nature (Timothy 2.15). Woman indulged in more Sodomite lust, therefore she must suffer more today — especially at the hands of the sons of the Sodomite lovers of her mother.

Prefiguring today’s man-o-sphere, Lanz demands that “their quite strange preference for Satyr-like — so-called ‘interesting men’ — must be obviated as much as possible.” Men however will also be called on to do their duty; the natural choosiness of the Aryan male “must be further developed and expanded in a systematic way so that husbands will only be potent with their own wives, and with all other women they will be impotent in the literal sense.” [12] [28]

At the same time, we must “intensely fight against the intrusion of women into public life.”

The ultimate outcome of these efforts would be. . . unilateral women’s rights, which would make the world into a brothel in which everything revolves around penises and pussies in a silly and absurd satyrs’ orgy while the proper wife, the loyal mother of the house, and the healthy strong troop of children will be mercilessly driven out of the chaste and legitimate home.

No one other than those women with their lascivious ape-like natures destroyed the cultures of antiquity and they will bring down our culture as well if men do not stop and think soon.

Extreme? Provocative? Indeed. Yet, as we see in today’s media the BLM mobs composed almost entirely of black males and white women (with a handful of what Lanz would perhaps call “soyim”), the mobs of white women proudly holding signs reading “Welcome Immigrants,” the TikTok exhibitionists and OnlyFans whores advertising for black audiences, and the horde of she-mayors and she-governors and she-prime ministers imposing more and ever-greater restrictions “because virus,” one may find oneself saying. . . “up to a point, Lord Copper.” [13] [29]

Let’s now turn to the religious side of Lanz’s racial religion, Kristianity.

You can buy James O’Meara’s book The Eldritch Evola here. [30]

As someone whose review of Neville Goddard’s At Your Command [14] [31] has been cited as providing evidence that Neville’s book “reads like a pocket guide for fascists,” [15] [32] I was particularly struck by passages that indeed seem to echo (if you will) Neville.

Reflecting on the “inexhaustible source of inspiration” to be found in the Book of Psalms, Lanz insists that:

This would be unthinkable and impossible if one were to translate and interpret the Bible only as the story of the little and miserable Jews and their kings and forefathers [or] as only the private history of the Jewish king David, who was but a king like thousands of other kings. . . . [The] content of the book does not simply speak of a specific time and place, but instead speaks of a racial law and racial mysticism that spans ages. Because it is not the localized historical stories in the Bible and Psalms that have a superior and lasting value, but their Ariosophic, ethical and esoteric content.

Similarly, Neville stated, bluntly, and over and over again:

The Bible has no reference at all to any persons that ever existed, or to any events that ever occurred upon earth. The authors of the Bible were not writing history, they were writing a great drama of the mind which they dressed up in the garb of history, and then adapted it to the limited capacity of the uncritical, unthinking masses.

The difference between the form of the Bible and its substance is as great as the difference between a grain of corn and the life germ within that grain. As our assimilative organs discriminate between food that can be built into our system and food that must be discarded, so do our awakened intuitive faculties discover beneath allegory and parable, the psychological lifegerm of the Bible; and, feeding on this, we, too, cast off the form which conveyed the message. [16] [33]

For both, the Bible is a coded allegory, telling the story of how each of us has fallen away from a consciousness of the vast powers (creative imagination or electron-based clairvoyance) we (or our race) once possessed; and with proper procedures (training the imagination, or racial hygiene), we can regain them. Of course, though they derive rather different esoteric content, I think Lanz would appreciate Neville’s gastric metaphor.

In any event, Lanz’ esoteric Christianity (or Kristianity) contained more than racial hygiene. For example, from Ostara no. 78, “Racial Mysticism: An Introduction to the Secret Teachings of Aryan Christianity,” we find this:

The secret to the incredible successes of the Americans, English and Jews in business and finance [is] partially due to their misuse of the ancient formula for victory: one part deliberate, deep and contemplative prayer combined with one part intense focus of the Will combined with one part self-suggestion and suggestion of others. [17] [34]

A veritable cocktail for success! And strikingly like Neville’s method: intense concentration on an imaginary scene implying the success of one’s wish, which he considered to be the true method of prayer:

First, clarify a sincere and deeply felt desire. Second, enter a state of relaxed immobility, bordering on sleep. Third, enact a mental scene that contains the assumption and feeling of your wish fulfilled. Run the little drama over and over in your mind until you experience a sense of fulfillment. Then resume your life. Evidence of your achievement will unfold at the right moment in your outer experience. [18] [35]

Closely tied to use of the method, as Colin Wilson recognized, is an increasing sensitivity to the meaningfulness of so-called “coincidences;” [19] [36] Here is Lanz from 1950, around the same time Jung was struggling to formulate a non-[physically] causal principle he termed “synchronicity”:

There is a specific way to receive the messages that emanate from these light-bearing spirits of the cosmos, which is more reliable and more trustworthy than any of the ordinary “spiritualistic” methods of receiving information. . . . The declarations and tidings that I am speaking of here are the messages that coincidence [synchronicity] [20] [37] and that destiny every day bestows upon each one of us. We only need to pay close attention to our minute individual experiences, and to recognize any so-called “coincidences,” especially with regard to numbers, times, places, names and things, and to regularly make note of them. When paying specific attention to these details, we will then not only marvel, but will actually experience for ourselves that the cosmos is NOT merely composed of random, blind, thoughtless and uncaring elemental forces, but instead that it is composed of those forces of nature that are both thionic and demonic, and both intelligent and spiritual, and chose to speak to us through their divine undertakings full of wisdom.

And that reminded me of something I had seen earlier: from his 1942 account of “The Founding of the Order [of New Templars]”:

In order to see, one must first open one’s eyes, and, most of all, one must WANT to see the light. Thus it is only through the desire to see that one can truly be able to see. It was then that the thought occurred to me: this experience in the church of the pilgrimage [of Maria-Lanzendorf in 1900] was no simple coincidence: it was indeed a sign.

Thus providing his life, his work, and this anthology, with a nice circular finality.

The shadowy 55 Club is to be thanked for putting together this anthology. Whatever one thinks of his ideas, Lanz was an important figure in the intellectual ferment leading up to the National Socialist seizure of power, and I hope the quoted material will have given a sense of how much gosh darn fun he is to read. Does he have something to teach us today? You be the judge!

It may just be synchronicity, but I find more and more examples of the Lanz mode of thought appearing, and in the strangest of places; here’s earnest liberal Thomas Greene trying to explain [38] how Trump could possibly win again, and (unknowingly?) striking the Lanzian note:

Workers now sense that economic justice — a condition in which labor and capital recognize and value each other — is permanently out of reach; the class war is over and it was an absolute rout: insatiable parasites control everything now, and even drain us gratuitously, as if exacting reparations for the money and effort they spent taming us. The economy itself, and the institutions protecting it, must be attacked, and actually crippled, to get the attention of the smug patricians in charge. Two decades of appealing to justice, proportion, and common decency have yielded nothing. I’d rather not see four more years of Donald, but I understand the impulse to use him as a cat’s paw.

Indeed, we live in strange times.

Notes

[1] [39] This was not, however, the originally intended title of the film. As Steckler relates, the film was supposed to be titled The Incredibly Strange Creatures, or Why I Stopped Living and Became a Mixed-up Zombie, but was changed in response to Columbia Pictures’ threat of a 5 million dollar lawsuit over the name’s similarity to Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which was under production at the same time. Steckler offered to change the title if he could talk to Kubrick; a call was set up with Kubrick in London, and the latter gave his OK to the new title. In his video commentary [40], Joe Bob Briggs notes such “incredible similarities” to Kubrick’s film as both being on film stock.

[2] [41] Those who confine their research to this dimension consider his parents to have been middle-class burghers, and his mother was “probably Jewish [42].”

[3] [43] Goodrick-Clarkes’ bibliography is itself another delight, as it contains pages and pages of stuffy Germanic versions of items whose later, airy-fairy English language versions could easily find a home at Shambhala or Inner Traditions (where indeed most of Evola’s books have appeared).

[4] [44] Interestingly, according to Wikipedia [45], the ghostwriter for Chariots of the Gods was Utz Utermann, who used the pseudonym of Wilhelm Roggersdorf. Utermann was a former Schriftleiter for Völkischer Beobachter and had been a Nazi bestselling author.

[5] [46] Farrell’s doctorate in Patristics from Oxford is impressive, but hardly relevant to Nazi UFOlogy. Ironically, it would, however, make him a worthy colleague for Lanz.

[6] [47] Hitler himself despised Fraktur, considering it looked “Jewish [48]” and as a cause for German being isolated from modern Europe; eventually he banned it [49]. In Timur Vermes’s Look Who’s Back [50], Hitler angrily rejects Fraktur as the appropriate font for his “internetwork” homepage (rejecting “heimatseite” as well — “we are not antiquarians!”).

[7] [51] “However daring what I am presenting may sound, it is nevertheless formulated from thoroughly reliable historical sources according to strictly scientific methods and it will be confirmed in the most astounding way by the latest discoveries of the natural sciences and ancient finds of art historians.” Theozoology.

[8] [52] From the previously referenced booklet (Europa House, 2004).

[9] [53] “When H. P. Blavatsky wrote her brilliant Anthropogenesis [note: “The German-language version of Blavatsky’s two-volume The Secret Doctrine, translated by Max Altmano], she surpassed her era and her contemporaries in anthropology by an entire generation. Only today has recent anthropological research brought to light with complete certainty findings that are startingly identical to those of this spirited theosophist.” Opening of “Theosophy and the Assyrian Beast-Men – in relation to the latest results of anthropological research.” Midway through Theozoology, after proving to his own satisfaction that the four ancient elements – earth, air, fire and water – refer to sodomitical beasts, he exclaims “We have torn away the ancients’ veil of the elements, now the way of God is open to us!’, perhaps alluding to Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled.

[10] [54] See The Homo & the Negro: Masculinist Meditations on Politics & Popular Culture [55]; Second, Embiggened Edition; edited by Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2017). Lanz says in Theozoology: “Restriction of sexual indulgence is advantageous in spiritual men. To one is given the ability to generate beautiful and good children, to the other to create immortal spiritual works.” Laurent Guyénot:

In biblical anthropology, there is no other immortality for a man than through his male offspring. . . . All [Bible] stories are pretty consistent in their representation of women and sexuality. Women have two functions: sex slaves if they are non-Jewish, and reproductive mates if they are Jewish. . . . The absence of ideality in relationship to love in the Hebrew tradition has had a profound influence on the Jewish mind. The main reason why romanticism is foreign to Jewish culture is that there can be no truly romantic conception of love without faith in the immortality of the soul, and Jewish anthropology is fundamentally materialistic. It is therefore no surprise that romanticism has been regarded with contempt by most Jewish intellectuals. Moses Hess judged it “decadent,” preferring Jewish novels, since “the Jews alone had the good sense to subordinate sexual to maternal love.” [The neocon and his lectures on “family values”!] He admits, however, that Jewish writers are perfectly capable of imitating romanticism, like anything else.

The Crucifixion of the Goddess: The rise and fall of Western Romanticism [56].”

[11] [57] Evola would likely dismiss this as more of the Protestant abuse of Catholicism he deplored in Alfred Rosenberg. The Pope in 1905 was Pius X, something of an icon to TradCaths today, and the namesake of the Society of St. Pius X, which we met in our reviews of In the Closet of the Vatican [58] and Unlikely Collaborators [59]. 1904 was when Frederick Rolfe, aka “Baron Corvo,” published his wish-fulfillment tale Hadrian VII, in which the narrator, whose vocation was rejected, like Rolfe, somehow becomes Pope. Both Rolfe and Lanz not only ennobled themselves (Rolfe claimed that the Duchess Sforza Cesarin adopted him as a grandson), but both also founded LARPing Orders: Lanz’s Order of New Templars (ONT) in 1900, Rolfe’s Order of Sanctissima Sophia in 1906; the latter, in true Rolfe fashion, never went beyond elaborate designs for costume and certificates, and eventually led to a falling out with his collaborator, C. H. “Harry” Pirie-Gordon, for all of which see of course A. J. A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (1934; Valancourt, 2014).

[12] [60] The narrator of Mann’s Dr. Faustus is outraged by a medieval history lecture that retails the story of a young Aryan buck who denounces his beloved to the Inquisition as a witch, due the fact that he is unable to perform with prostitutes.

Even now in my thoughts I flare up at him, snorting and calling him a murderous ass in the full sense of that term! What did the imbecile have to complain about? Why did he have to test the thing out on other women, when he had one that he loved, so much apparently that· he was left cold and ‘impotent’ with others? But what does ‘impotency’ mean in this case, when he possessed love’s potency with the one? Love is certainly a kind of noble pampering of sexuality, and if it is not natural for that activity to hold back when love is absent, it is truly nothing less than unnatural for it to do so in the presence of and face to face with love.

I wonder if Mann had Lanz, or his disciples, in his roman a clef set in the whirling Saturnalia of prewar Germany? Postwar German doctors developed these ideas in another direction:

Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious. . . service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

DeSadeski: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.

Strangelove: Thank you, sir.”

For more on Strangelove and impotence, see my “From Odd John to Strangelove [61],” reprinted in Green Nazis in Space! New Essays on Literature, Art, & Culture [62]; edited by Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2015).

[13] [63] In Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1938), “Lord Copper, the newspaper magnate, has been said to be an amalgam of Lord Northcliffe [64] and Lord Beaverbrook [65]: a character so fearsome that his obsequious foreign editor, Mr. Salter, can never openly disagree with him, answering ‘Definitely, Lord Copper’ and ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper’ in place of ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Lord Copper’s idea of the lowliest of his employees is a book reviewer.” Wikipedia [66].

[14] [67]Lord Kek Commands! A Look at the Origins of Meme Magic [68],” reprinted in Mysticism After Modernism: Crowley, Evola, Neville, Watts, Colin Wilson & Other Populist Gurus (Melbourne, Australia: Manticore Press, 2020).

[15] [69] Michael Schulson, “Trickle Down Metaphysics and the Dawn of a Trumpian New Age [70].” Mitch Horowitz, as usual, is more sensible, and more interesting: “Neville can be seen as a kind of spiritualized objectivist. Or perhaps I could say that Ayn Rand. . . was a secularized Neville. Neville and Rand each believed, with uncompromising conviction, that the individual creates his own objective reality and circumstances. Rand saw this as a matter of personal will; Neville saw it as a matter of imagination. . . . Please realize that I am not writing about her ideas from a political perspective. Rather, I am trying to give a sense of the peak possibility from which you can experiment if you are willing to entertain the thesis of radical self-selectivity.” The Miracle Habits: The Secret of Turning Your Moments into Miracles (Gildan Media, 2020), p. 73 (italics his).

[16] [71] Neville (Goddard): Five Lessons: A Master Class (1948); reissued with a bonus chapter by Mitch Horowitz (New York: Tarcher/Perigree, 2018); Lesson One. See my review here [72].

[17] [73] It is interesting to note that Neville was from Barbados (hence, a British subject), from a merchant family whose success — even today, Goddard Enterprises is the largest conglomerate based in the Caribbean — he frequently attributed to the use of his imaginal method; after being drafted in 1942, he tells of using his method to obtain an honorable discharge, and thus American citizenship; finally, he learned his method while studying the Kabbalah under a mysterious man he called a “black Ethiopian rabbi”; thus American, English and Jewish!

[18] [74] Horwitz’s summary, from Five Lessons, op. cit. “Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them.” (Mark 11:24)

[19] [75] “Now I would argue that our natural power of intentionality can create visible effects. For example, I believe it is responsible for what Jung calls ‘synchronicity.’ I note that when I begin to focus on the idea of synchronicity, odd synchronicities begin to happen. . . .” See my “Neville and the Rebel: Reflections on Colin Wilson and Neville Goddard [76],” reprinted in my Mysticism After Modernism: Crowley, Evola, Neville, Watts, Colin Wilson & Other Populist Gurus [77] (Melbourne, Australia: Manticore Press, 2020).

[20] [78] Translator’s gloss.

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