Ariosophy

And then he read about two Austrian writers who mattered more than all the rest.

They preached something called Ariosophy.

It was a blend of Norse mythology, rune worship, and fake science that cast the blonde, blue-eyed Aryan as a godlike being at war with lesser races.

It was nonsense, and plenty of people knew it at the time, but for a young man looking for a grander story about himself, it was intoxicating.

Ariosophy taught that nobility was carried in your blood, waiting to be woken up.

Adam Glauer decided that his blood was noble.

Then he went and got the paperwork to match.

So what did Thule mean? To the ancient Greeks and Romans, it was the northernmost land in the world, a half mythical island at the edge of the map.

And, and in this milieu, this s- racial pseudoscience kinda goes hand-in-hand with it.

And, uh, when you get the racial s- pseudoscience, which is evolutionary in its origins, and you get the occult mysticism and they c- of the Völkisch movement, and they come together, it's what scholars call Ariosophy, so this philosophy of the, of the so-called Aryan race.

Hmm.

And, uh, this is the milieu out of which Hitler comes.

Uh, but in Germany, he's got to have the support of everyday Protestant families in order to get elected.

So you're saying at its core more than anything, it's this Ariosoph- What, what's-

Ariosophy.

Ariosophy.

or at least Atlantis-like cities that were described in the past.

They subscribed to Ariosophy, which claimed that the original pure Aryan race possessed godlike powers and originated on a sunken northern continent.

This was referred to in several ways, but in interchangeable ways in these circles as Thule, Hyperborea, or Atlantis.

Some conspiracies take this myth even further, claiming the Egyptian gods themselves came out of the same lost continent of Atlantis.

So the Nazis adopted a myth about themselves, the myth of the blood, that race science, that blood is central to the, to, to the, the fundamental meaning of what it is to be human, and that race science is the explanation for how the human world works, the laws of nature.

And the ma- uh, this is based on an incorrect understanding of the theory of evolution as it was in the '20s and '30s as Hitler and some of the other Nazis picked it up, combined with Ariosophy, which is this mystical pseudoscience that was based off of Theosophy, which is another mystical, I don't even know if pseudoscience, it's like new age, uh, belief system.

And anyway, they're consecrating this into a new belief system for themselves.

In fact, in this chapter, uh, Rosenberg ref- repeatedly refers to the myth of the blood as the religion of the blood, and as their religion, the Germanic religion, which is this idea that character, value, everything is determined by the blood, and people are put under the duress of ideological belief structures that are alien to their blood, and that the mixing of blood always causes the weakening of the stronger, and the destruction of the kind, and so on and so forth.

Today, Anthroposophy, a word meaning the wisdom of mankind, is mostly relevant as the origin of Waldorf education, one of the most popular forms of alternative education in the world.

But Theosophy also birthed another cult movement in early 20th century Germany, Ariosophy, the quote-unquote wisdom of the Arians.

And this movement embraced not only the idea of Germans as Aryans, but also of Aryans as superior.

They embraced the swastika as well, a Sanskrit symbol used in Hinduism and Buddhism that Blavatsky had popularized in Theosophy.

Ariosophists believed it a symbol of the ancient Aryans.

Ariosophy was an explicitly occult movement, like Theosophy.

In fact, the term is used as something of an umbrella to refer to numerous mystical and occult groups and schools of thought in the German counterculture at the time, such as the Arminism of Guido von List, the Theozoology of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, and extreme right-wing secret societies like the Order of the New Templars, the Germanin Order, and the Thule Society.

It was from this mystical counterculture that belief in Edward Bulwer-Lytton's Vril arose, and claims that Karl Schaeppler's phony device could harness this all-encompassing space energy were published, as discussed in my recent series on the myths of Nazi supertechnology and my patron exclusive on the Schaeppler device.