FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

SPECIAL THANKS TO


New Age "Asiatic" thought ... is establishing itself as the
hegemonic ideology of global capitalism. (Zizek)

SATURDAY, MARCH 18, 2006

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

Came across a book today that was published just a year ago by Cambridge University Press: Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism 1917-1945. Bummer that it costs 80 bucks. No wonder nobody ever hears about these things.




Saul Friedlander of Tel Aviv University says...
Kellogg's work succeeds in introducing a dimension never so thoroughly explored: the essential impact on early Nazi world-view of ideological elements and political themes carried over to Germany by White-Russian émigrés.

Hmmm... And an Amazon reader-reviewer writes: "I strongly recommend this book which should be read alongside Karla Poewe New Religions and the Nazis" -- which I first mentioned a month ago in connection with the esoteric Yoga "scholarship" of Nazi German Faith Movement leader Jakob Wilhelm Hauer.

There is also much fascinating occult -- and just plain bizarre -- Russian background in the literally wonder-full Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia, including, lots of stuff about Madame Blavatsky.

Russia... double hmmm. In my post of 27 December last year, The Russians Are Coming, I included a quote from Gurdjieff: The Key Concepts about the proliferation of occultism in Russia. Here it is again...
Moscow and St. Petersburg were centres for the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occult revival. From 1881 to 1918 thirty occult journals and more than 800 occult titles were published in Russia, reflecting interests in spiritualism, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, alchemy, psycho-graphology, phrenology, hypnotism, Egyptian religions, astrology, chiromancy, animal magnetism, fakirism, telepathy, the Tarot, black and white magic, and Freemasonry (Carlson 1993: 22). Gurdjieff took notice of contemporary interests and presented his teaching accordingly. The cosmological form of his teaching was fully outlined between 1914 and 1918 in a form that takes account of the occult revival in Russia.Tournament of Shadows certainly corroborates that statement, and adds much detail. For instance (p. 234):
At Tashilhunpo, seat of the Tashi or Panchen Lama, [George] Bogle heard about "Shambul." Madame Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, kept the legend alive, offering a geographic variation in The Secret Doctrine (1888), writing that "fabled Shambhallah, the headquarters of the Mahatmas, the sacred brotherhood" was located "somewhere in the Gobi."

To see where I, up-close-and-personal-like, came in on all this -- and part of the reason I'm writing this book -- clap your hands together while repeating "I want to Tinkerbell to live!" Then click the graphic...




Whoops, sorry. Looks like you didn't clap hard enough.

But back to Tournament of Shadows, the story continues (p. 242) with a description of a trip to Ceylon in 1891 by the young Tzar-to-be, Nicholas II, and his considerable entourage...
Now his imperial highness informs the Russian Consul in Colombo that he wishes to "have the honor of meeting" Colonel Olcott (1832-1907), a retired American officer who sports an enormous Santa Claus beard and is the champion of a worldwide Buddhist revival. It happens that Henry Steel Olcott, now resident in Colombo (the Sinhalese are Buddhists), is also the "chum" and associate of the Tsar's compatriot Helena P. Blavatsky. Together in 1875 they founded the Theosophical Society.

Imagine: Madame B. hangin' with the Tzar. Who knew?

The answer to that one, apparently, is damn few -- then or now. The history is there if you know what you're looking for and you dig for it like a demented dog. That would be me, rabidly indefatigable in the cause of grinding new lenses for a credulous world so awash in the occult it can no longer see the trees for the forest. Carl Solomon, I am with your mother, baby, standing in the shadows. Howl on that.

One more clip from Tournament, this one concerning the set designer (and so much more) for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes production of Rite of Spring (p. 450)...
The ballet's composer, Igor Stravinsky, claimed Roerich looked "as though he ought to have been a mystic or spy." In fact, recently opened intelligence archives suggest that at points in his career, he was both.

Nicholas Roerich was a worthy successor to Madame Blavatsky. A Russian mystic with a devoted following, he managed like her to baffle the intelligence departments on three continents. Like her, he was a Theosophist in quest of Shambhala who eventually made his home in India. But in two respects he surpassed HPB. Roerich gave his name to an an international treaty and in America he played an off-stage role in two Presidential campaigns.

And then there's a highly specialized treatise called No Religion Higher Than Truth: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875-1922 by Maria Carlson. Its publisher (Princeton UP) says...
Among the various kinds of occultism popular during the Russian Silver Age (1890-1914), modern Theosophy was by far the most intellectually significant. This contemporary gnostic gospel was invented and disseminated by Helena Blavatsky, an expatriate Russian with an enthusiasm for Buddhist thought and a genius for self-promotion. What distinguished Theosophy from the other kinds of "mysticism" -- the spiritualism, table turning, fortune-telling, and magic -- that fascinated the Russian intelligentsia of the period? In answering this question, Maria Carlson offers the first scholarly study of a controversial but important movement in its Russian context.

Carlson also wrote a paper called "Fashionable Occultism: Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Hermeticism in Fin-de-siecle Russia," which was collected in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. In this piece, Carlson writes:
Mme Blavatsky's new Theosophy seemed to offer an alternative to the dominant materialism, rationalism, and positivism of the nineteenth century. Sometimes called Neo-Buddhism, Theosophy strikes the modern student as an eclectic, syncretic, dogmatic doctrine, strongly pantheistic and heavily laced with exotic Buddhist thought and vocabulary. Combining bits and pieces of Neoplatonism, Brahminism, Buddhism, Kabbalism, Rosicrucianism, Hermeticism, and other occult doctrines, past and present, in a frequently undiscriminating philosophical mélange, Theosophy attempted to create a "scientific" religion, a modern gnosis, based on absolute knowledge of things spiritual rather than on faith. Under its Neo-Buddhism lies an essentially Judeo-Christian moral ethic tempered by spiritual Darwinism (survival of those with the "fittest spirit" or most advanced spiritual development). One might describe Theosophy as an attempt to disguise positivism as religion, an attempt that was seductive indeed in its own time, in view of the psychic tension produced at the fin de siècle by the seemingly unresolvable dichotomy between science and religion.In The New York Review of Books (subscription required), Frederick C. Crews reviewed Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America. After describing the strange attraction Blavatsky held for William Butler Yeats -- who was similarly drawn to many forms of occultism and ritual magic -- Crews writes:
If Yeats's case were unique, we could dismiss it as a curious footnote to modern cultural history. But from the 1880s straight through the 1940s an imposing number of prominent figures, from Kandinsky and Mondrian through Gandhi and Nehru to Huxley and Isherwood, intersected the Theosophical orbit long enough to have their trajectory significantly altered by it.

Following is Publishers Weekly brief review of Blavatsky's Baboon...
Around the turn of the century, renegade Russian aristocrat Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky declared herself the chosen vessel of the wisdom of the East through her reputed contact with a dematerializing Tibetan master, who unveiled a Hidden Brotherhood located in the Himalayas and Egypt. The Theosophical Society, which she cofounded in 1875 in New York City with Civil War veteran Col. Henry Olcott, attracted a wide following with its amalgam of Hinduism, Buddhism and occultism. In this enormously entertaining, witheringly skeptical, highly colorful chronicle, British journalist Washington deflates the self-mythologizing and woolly philosophizing of theosophists and rival schools and gurus, including flamboyant Armenian-Greek mystic George Gurdjieff, Austrian philosopher/holistic healer Rudolf Steiner and Jiddu Krishnamurti, Indian ex-theosophist turned California sage. Those who came under their influence include Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, Christopher Isherwood, W.B. Yeats and Frank Lloyd Wright, making this a heady intellectual adventure as well as a clear-sighted saga of human foibles, charlatanry, bizarre antics and genuine spiritual hunger extending to New Age cults from the 1950s to the present.Am I making notes for a book that's been written dozens of times already? In my darker moments, I can begin to think so. But if that's so, why do so many people continue to be surprised by this sort of material? To wrap this up on no less depressing a note, in the end, it seems, people believe what they want to. Which I guess is why we live in the best of all possible worlds.
http://mysticbourgeoisie.blogspot.com/2006/03/from-russia-with-love.html

Russia's bizarre obsession with psychics and the occult

By Zack Beauchamp@zackbeauchampzack@vox.com  Nov 13, 2014, 

A fortune-telling session in Moscow.

 Anastasiya Markelova/Sovfoto/UIG/Getty Images)

Modern Russia is, apparently, a hotbed of psychic activity. Recent reports have estimated that Russia's psychic industry is worth between $15 million and $2 billion. These aren't super-reliable figures, but that they exist at all indicates the scale of psychic devotion in Russia. A new book, by freelance journalist Marc Bennetts, explores the scale of this phenomenon — and the reasons behind it.

In a tweet advertising his book, Bennetts advertises stories of "Kremlin-backed psychics, 'resurrections' for $1,500 a corpse, [and] urban witches with too much make-up." His previous reporting on Russia's psychic underground, like this piece in Sabotage Magazine last year, certainly delivers some equally crazy stories:

• "Town halls that had once hosted Communist Party meetings [and] now saw sorcerers armed with ouija boards attempting to conjure up Lenin's spirit."
• A Moscow witch who promised that her "mixture of psychic and magical abilities as yet unknown to science" could help a client land a promotion (maximum six year guarantee).
• Since 2008, the Russian government has required an official license to advertise any services as "magic." In other words, the Russian state is formally licensing magicians, as well as any sorcerers, wizards, witches, or other characters who would like to sell themselves as performing magic. But it does not require a license to advertise "paranormal" services.

So why is this so prevalent?

The basic explanation offered by Bennets and others has to do with Soviet communism's collapse. Since the Warsaw Pact began falling apart in the late 80s, large numbers of Russians turned to psychic and spiritual beliefs to make up for the ideological void that communism left.

Take faith healer Anatoly Kashpirovsky, who first became famous in October 1989. Kashpirovsky "would appeal to viewers to place pots and pans full of water by their television sets during his show, so that their contents would be charged with healing properties by being exposed to his waves of telepathic energy," Radio Free Europe correspondent Tom Balmforth writes in Russia Profile. According to Balmforth, a 1990 poll found that 52.3 percent of respondents believed that Kashpirovsky's techniques could cure illnesses.

Bennetts reports that Kashpirovsky began performing mass healings again in 2010, despite claims that his hypnosis sessions had driven hundreds if not thousands of people insane. And Kashpirovsky is just one man. There's a lot more in Bennetts' book, which you can buy here

The Occult in Modern Russian and Soviet Culture 
AUTHOR: Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal 
https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1993-806-03-Rosenthal.pdf
THE NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR SOVIET AND EAST EUROPEAN RESEARCH

CONTENTS
Summary
Introduction 1
Occult as Symptom of Social and Cultural Stress 2
The Occult in Late Imperial Russia 4
Background 4
The Russian Fin de Siecle 7
Occultism in the Early Soviet Period 1 3
Stalinist Assimilation of the Occult 1 7
The Current Scene 1 8
Summary of Conference Papers 24
Annex I 28
Summary
"Occult" means that which is covered or hidden . The term applies to a wide variety
of doctrines and practices, ranging from elaborate belief systems such as Theosophy an d
Anthroposophy to sorcery, witchcraft, and a wide-range of divinatory practices (astrology ,
palm-reading tarot cards, et . al), and from the seances of the Spiritualists to the orgiasti c
rituals of certain sectarian cults. Occultism comes to the fore in times of social stress,
cultural confusion, and religious uncertainty .

The occult revival of late 19th and early 20th century Russia was a response to th e
fading credibility of the Russian Orthodox Church, the spiritual/psychological inadequacy of
intelligentsia ideologies, the destabilizing effects of rapid industrialization, and continue d
political upheaval. Interest in the occult cut across political divisions and class lines, but ha d
a special appeal to women . Sophisticated doctrines coexisted, often in the same persons ,
with ideas or practices taken from Kabbala, Buddhism, Yoga, Siberian shamanism, an d
practices of the mystical sectarians, and folk beliefs, often taken from the pagan Slavs, in
magic and "spoiling . "

Occult doctrines influenced the art and thought of late Imperial Russia . Symbolist
writers and painters of the era held that there was another higher world which only the artist ,with his/her special powers, could perceive . Cubo-futurist and suprematist painters belui that geometric and abstract forms constituted the authentic reality hidden beneath or beyond the illusions of empirical reality . Occult emphasis on mind-body interaction ,
parapsychology, and hypnotism helped set the agenda for the new science of psychology .

Occultism blended with apocalypticism, and with radical political doctrines which preached
the dissolution of the (egoistic) self in a larger macrocosmic Self . On the right, all sorts of
demonic conspiracies were attributed to Jews and freemasons . " Occultism reached the
highest circles of the Imperial Court; Rasputin was but the tip of an ice-berg .
Occultism was an element in Soviet culture as well. The line between magic and
science disappeared in the utopianism of the early Soviet period . 

Hopes formerly invested inreligion and magic were transferred to technology and science . Stalinist political culture utilized ideas taken from the occult elements in its attempt to influence the masses . Stalin' s name assumed incantational significance .
Contemporary Russian occultism is fueled by destalinization, the collapse o f
communism, and the resulting spiritual/cultural confusion and economic chaos . There are
marked parallels to the New Age Movement in the West, but on the far right, a occul t
variant of Russian messianism, seems to be developing .

Magic: History, Theory, Practice Kindle Edition

by Ernst Schertel (Author), Adolf Hitler (Author)  Format: Kindle Edition

  https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B002IPG3YW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

In May of 2003, Timothy Ryback, the author of "Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life" had an article published in The Atlantic Monthly. In the article he detailed several of the books held in a portion of Hitler's library at Brown University. Mr. Ryback also mentioned some of the passages Hitler marked in these books. One particular passage was worthy of attention: "He who does not carry demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world." That passage appeared in the book "Magic: History / Theory / Practice", written by Dr. Ernst Schertel. Schertel was a researcher of alternative sexual practices, nudism, and the occult. After finishing his book Magic in 1923 he sent a dedicated copy to Adolf Hitler. Now, for the first time ever, "Magic: History/Theory/Practice" has been translated into English, with all sixty-six Hitler annotations intact.

Hitler's Religion: The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich 

by Richard Weikart (Author)  Format: Kindle Edition  https://tinyurl.com/ya5qjodv

Review

"Atheists who claim that Hitler was a Christian will be sorely disappointed by this excellent and well documented book. It clearly shows the anti-Christian nature of Hitler’s ideology and religious beliefs. Given today’s culture wars it is essential reading for all Christians and anyone interested in knowing the truth about National Socialism."
— IRVING HEXHAM, professor of religious studies, University of Calgary, and author of Understanding World Religions

"This fascinating and elegantly written new book will challenge scholars to rethink existing interpretations of 'Hitler’s Religion.' In ten well-researched and tightly argued chapters, Weikart shows that Hitler was neither an atheist, a Christian, nor an occultist. Rather, he marshals convincing evidence that Hitler was a pantheist who embraced a brutal, Darwinian religion of nature."
— DR. ERIC KURLANDER, professor of modern European history, Stetson University, and author of Living with Hitler and (forthcoming) Nazi Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich

"Many prominent Western intellectuals have dispensed with the view that humans are created in the image of God and thus have immeasurable value and inalienable rights,’ writes Professor Weikart. In my four decades of speaking in university open forums, I have witnessed the logical consequences of this belief that humanity is a cosmic accident: wherever I go I meet student after student troubled by haunting questions of meaning and purpose. Weikart demonstrates the impoverishment of philosophies that reject the Judeo-Christian worldview—but ‘still retain some of the vestiges of the Judeo-Christian morality that they claim to spurn'—and shows how Christianity uniquely makes sense of our questions of meaning, purpose, morality, and dignity. His book [The Death of Humanity] will sober and challenge you."
— RAVI ZACHARIAS, speaker and author of Why Jesus? Rediscovering His Truth in an Age of Mass Marketed Spirituality, and other books

From the Inside Flap

The Twisted Beliefs that Drove the Third Reich

For a man whom history can never forget, Adolf Hitler remains a persistent mystery on one front—his religious faith. Atheists tend to insist Hitler was a devout Christian. Christians counter that he was an atheist. And still others suggest that he was a practicing member of the occult.

None of these theories is true, says historian Richard Weikart. Delving more deeply into the question of Hitler’s religious faith than any researcher to date, Weikart reveals the startling and fascinating truth about the most hated man of the twentieth century: Adolf Hitler was a pantheist who believed nature was the only true "God."

In Hitler’s Religion, Weikart explains how the laws of nature became Hitler’s only moral guide, and why Hitler claimed—even believed—he was serving God by annihilating supposedly "inferior" human beings and promoting the welfare and reproduction of the allegedly superior Aryan race. Like the racist forms of Darwinism prevalent at the time, Hitler’s twisted religion was a direct attack on the Judeo-Christian ethics on which Western civilization is built.

Revisiting the "Nazi Occult": Histories, Realities, Legacies (German History in Context) 

Paperback – January 22, 2019

by Monica Black (Editor), Eric Kurlander  (Editor)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1640140506/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1



Scholars have debated the role of the occult in Nazism since it first appeared on the German political landscape in the 1920s. After 1945, a consensus held that occultism - an ostensibly anti-modern, irrational blend of pseudo-religious and -scientific practices and ideas - had directly facilitated Nazism's rise. More recently, scholarly debate has denied the occult a role in shaping the Third Reich, emphasizing the Nazis' hostility to esoteric religion and alternative forms of knowledge. Bringing together cutting-edge scholarship on the topic, this volume calls for a fundamental reappraisal of these positions. The book is divided into three chronological sections. The first, on the period 1890 to 1933, looks at the esoteric philosophies and occult movements that influenced both the leaders of the Nazi movement and ordinary Germans who became its adherents. The second, on the Third Reich in power, explores how the occult and alternative religious belief informed Nazism as an ideological, political, and cultural system. The third looks at Nazism's occult legacies. In emphasizing both continuities and disjunctures, this book promises to re-open and re-energize debate on the occult roots and legacies of Nazism, and with it our understanding of German cultural and intellectual history over the past century. Contributors: Monica Black; Jeff Hayton; Oded Heilbronner; Eric Kurlander; Fabian Link and J. Laurence Hare; Anna Lux; Perry Myers; John Ondrovcik; Michael E. O'Sullivan; Jared Poley; Uwe Schellinger, Andreas Anton, and Michael T. Schetsche; Peter Staudenmaier. Monica Black is Associate Professor and Associate Head of the Department of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Eric Kurlander is J. Ollie Edmunds Chair and Professor of Modern European History at Stetson University.

Eating Nature in Modern Germany: Food, Agriculture and Environment, c.1870 to 2000 

https://www.amazon.com/Eating-Nature-Modern-Germany-Agriculture-ebook/dp/B0716FDL6D/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian and the Dachau concentration camp had an organic herb garden. Vegetarianism, organic farming, and other such practices have enticed a wide variety of Germans, from socialists, liberals, and radical anti-Semites in the nineteenth century to fascists, communists, and Greens in the twentieth century. Corinna Treitel offers a fascinating new account of how Germans became world leaders in developing more 'natural' ways to eat and farm. Used to conserve nutritional resources with extreme efficiency at times of hunger and to optimize the nation's health at times of nutritional abundance, natural foods and farming belong to the biopolitics of German modernity. Eating Nature in Modern Germany brings together histories of science, medicine, agriculture, the environment, and popular culture to offer the most thorough and historically comprehensive treatment yet of this remarkable story.

Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia traces the history of occult thought and practice from its origins in private salons to its popularity in turn-of-the-century mass culture. In lucid prose, Julia Mannherz examines the ferocious public debates of the 1870s on higher dimensional mathematics and the workings of séance phenomena, discusses the world of cheap instruction manuals and popular occult journals, and looks at haunted houses, which brought together the rural settings and the urban masses that obsessed over them. In addition, Mannherz looks at reactions of Russian Orthodox theologians to the occult.

In spite of its prominence, the role of the occult in turn-of-the-century Russian culture has been largely ignored, if not actively written out of histories of the modern state. For specialists and students of Russian history, culture, and science, as well as those generally interested in the occult, Mannherz’s fascinating study remedies this gap and returns the occult to its rightful place in the popular imagination of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian's  https://tinyurl.com/yatx4znc

The Secret King is the first book to explode many myths surrounding the popular idea of Nazi occultism, while presenting the actual esoteric rituals used by Heinrich Himmler's SS under the influence of rune magician Karl-Maria Wiligut, the Secret King of Germany."

https://tinyurl.com/yaodmedw

Stephen E. Flowers, PhD, is a prolific writer and translator in the fields of runology and the history of occultism. He is also the author of books on magical runic traditions under the pen name Edred Thorsson.

HE IS ALSO A PRACTISING SETIAN/SATANIST AND CO FOUNDER OF THE TEMPLE OF SET

Matysik on Treitel, 'A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern'
Author:
Corinna Treitel
Reviewer:
Tracie Matysik

Corinna Treitel. A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 366 pp. $46.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8018-7812-1.

Reviewed by Tracie Matysik (Department of History, University of Texas at Austin) Published on H-German (July, 2005)

The Occult in German Modernity: From Periphery to Center

What does it mean to write a history of occultism? Is it to study the fringes of society, the underworld of culture? Is it to study esoteric forms of reactionary escapism? In her thoroughly researched book, A Science for the Soul, Corinna Treitel suggests that to study the occult is not at all to study marginal phenomena. Rather, it is to access from an unlikely angle all of the complexities and contradictions of a most central concern: namely, what Treitel calls the "German modern." Treitel insistently and convincingly depicts the occult movements in Germany not as a retreat from modern society--with its urban masses, its industrial logic, and its depersonalized materialism. Rather, she suggests that the occult was one of the important ways in which individuals and organizations in modern Germany gave meaning to their own lives, and simultaneously gave meaning to the categories that have come to occupy center stage in modern German historiography, categories such as science, religion, state, liberalism, and subjectivity.

From the introduction, one might understand the primary purpose of Treitel's book to be the contestation of a previous historiography led by George Mosse and others that emphasized the influence of the occult movement on Nazi ideology.[1] This literature had understood the occult as a dimension of vlkisch ideology that fostered irrationalism, that in turn fed into a race-based mysticism in which Nazi leaders were to have cloaked themselves and their racial policies. A more recent literature has begun to contest the alliance between occultism and Nazism, and it is to this literature that Treitel adds her own work.[2] Painting the occult not as a form of reactionary mysticism, but rather as a set of practices aimed at negotiating modernism, Treitel seeks to clarify the lines between occultism and vlkisch ideology, recognizing in particular the embrace of the very modern, scientific practices that infused the occult movements--even as they pursued mystical ends. Not surprisingly, the relationship of Nazism to occult movements occupies center stage in the last chapter of the book. Here Treitel makes a careful distinction between individual interest by Nazi leaders in occult experiments and methods, and Nazi police and policy hostility to occult movements that were said to exhibit ideological tendencies inconsistent with Nazi aims (pp. 240-241).

While this is a very important intervention, and provides a valuable framework for the book itself, the real weight and strength of the book lies in its study of the occult at the fin de siecle and in the Weimar era. Here the book makes for a fascinating contribution to the newer literature on German liberalism. While it recognizes the importance of a former school of German historiography that stressed the authoritarian illiberalism of the state in the German Kaiserreich, it finds liberalism in the public sphere--in terms of civic organizations and public discussion--to be much more of a work in progress. In this regard, the book examines things such as the thriving publication industry that profited from the occultist movements; the role of the public in determining the reliability of evidence and experience in scientific demonstration; and the reliability of that same evidence and experience in public legal proceedings.

Pursuing this theme of a vibrant public sphere, Treitel makes two strategic decisions in the book that enable her to cut the widest possible swath through German culture. First, she takes as her focus not so much the beliefs of individuals in the occultist movements, but rather their practices--the occult "in action," as she calls it. While Treitel does not spend a lot of time explaining what this distinction means, or what the relationship(s) of belief to practice might be, one can discern from her own practice the implications of this move. By not focusing solely on true believers, those who make some variety of the occult the central and possibly single tenet of their own belief system, she is able to look at the occult within more of a "marketplace" of beliefs.[3] That is, she looks at the wide range of those who dabbled in the occult--those who, for instance, experimented with sances or with dowsing--but who did not necessarily make such occult practices the center of their belief structures. In this way, she points to the larger consumer culture in which the occultist movements participated, and on which their economic existence depended. Figures as seemingly diverse as Sigmund Freud and Hitler could both partake in the occasional sance or dowsing, without committing fully to occultism.

The turn to occult practices rather than belief also enables Treitel to depict how a relatively widespread interest in the occult motivated other fields of inquiry to consolidate their own beliefs and practices against the occultist movements. This development is perhaps clearest in the first two chapters--which may be the best in the book--as Treitel explores the relationship of occult movements to the emerging "science" of psychology. Here she convincingly argues that this emerging field of psychology was deeply influenced by experiments in occult phenomena, but that it also sought to distance itself and its own modes of experimentation from the taint of the occult and connotations of mysticism or pseudoscience. It was precisely because of the proximity and overlapping areas of inquiry, however, that such a clarification was necessary to the professionalization of psychology as a scientific discipline. Such points of clarification, however, were not confined to psychology or other sciences dealing with human experience and knowledge. Treitel argues also that established religions--especially Catholicism--felt the need to resist the occult movements not so much because the occult tempted its followers, but rather because it needed to clarify how its own appeals to certain kinds of mysticism differed from those of the occultists. In this way, Treitel suggests throughout the book, the presence of the occultist movements helped to foster the clarification of terms such as "religion," "science," "psychology," and even the "individual."

It is here, in the definition of the limits of the occult in relationship to other spheres of knowledge that the second strategic decision of Treitel's book becomes important--namely, her decision not to define "the occult." Her book treats the occult as a fluid concept, as a concept that is in process, and whose character emerges only in relation to other fields of inquiry and practice. What emerges as the "lunatic fringe," as she often calls it, is determined more by the beholder than by the content of the fringe itself. So, for instance, Sigmund Freud would come to resist the occult in order, at least in part, to distinguish his own practice of psychoanalysis from the form of depth psychology elaborated by his wayward disciple, Carl Jung. Likewise, in a different moment and with a vastly different purpose, Heinrich Himmler would condemn the "hocus pocus" aspects of "the occult," while supporting "legitimate research on astrological questions" (p. 225). If the occultist movements prompted other cultural phenomena to clarify their own identity, the movement was reciprocal: a wide range of shifting fields of inquiry as well as political and cultural contexts worked actively in the early twentieth century to shape what constituted (and constitutes?) "the occult."

The book stretches from 1850 to 1945, but its real concentration is between the 1890s and the 1920s when the occult movements were establishing themselves institutionally. With this particular concentration, the reader will notice one strange lacuna: there is no sustained discussion of World War I. While the book often moves fluidly between the Wilhelmine era and the Weimar era, it does draw out some of the differences in occultist strategies before and after the war. In particular, it paints the occultist movements before the war as interested primarily in the subjective experience of the individual, and after the war as participating in many of the standardizing and objectifying methods that gained popularity in social reform during the Weimar era. Yet the reader is still left to wonder what exactly the effects of the war on the occultist movements were, and how such transitions came about. Were the occultist movements able to continue their publications during the war? Did they experience censorship from the state, as many organizations did? Did they, like the psychoanalytic movement and similar groups, have to halt local and/or international congresses? Did they learn some of their post-war standardizing methods from participation in the war effort itself? Clearly answers to these questions could fill an entire volume themselves. Yet the book might have benefited from at least some hint in their direction.

That said, the book is a very valuable contribution to the field of German cultural history. It offers three appendices that list the organizations, presses, and other institutions related to the occult, which will prove useful to the specialist researcher. In addition, its comprehensive bibliography will be a valuable resource for students of German cultural history more generally. Finally, the book is simply a pleasure to read, written in a very accessible, inviting style that will make it a treat for the specialist and non-specialist reader alike.

Notes

[1]. George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964).

[2]. See for example Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 1992).

[3] See Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969), pp. 137-138.

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=10757

Citation: Tracie Matysik. Review of Treitel, Corinna, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern. H-German, H-Net Reviews. July, 2005. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10757

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A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern 

Hardcover – April 20, 2004

by Corinna Treitel  (Author)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0801878128/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Germany's painful entry into the modern age elicited many conflicting emotions. Excitement and anxiety about the "disenchantment of the world" predominated, as Germans realized that the triumph of science and reason had made the nation materially powerful while impoverishing it spiritually. Eager to enchant their world anew, many Germans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries responded by turning to a variety of paranormal beliefs and practices―including Theosophy, astrology, psychical research, graphology, dowsing, and spirit healing. No mere fringe phenomenon, the German occult movement had a truly national presence, encompassing hundreds of clubs, businesses, institutes, and publishers providing and consuming occult goods and services.

In A Science for the Soul, historian Corinna Treitel explores the appeal and significance of German occultism in all its varieties between the 1870s and the 1940s, locating its dynamism in the nation's struggle with modernization and the public's dissatisfaction with scientific materialism. Occultism, Treitel notes, served as a bridge between traditional religious beliefs and the values of an increasingly scientific, secular, and liberal society. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials, Treitel describes the individuals and groups who participated in the occult movement, reconstructs their organizational history, and examines the economic and social factors responsible for their success.

Building on this foundation, Treitel turns to the question of how Germans used the occult in three realms of practice: Theosophy, where occult studies were used to achieve spiritual enlightenment; the arts, where occult states of consciousness fueled the creative process of avant-garde painters, writers, and dancers; and the applied sciences, where professionals in psychology, law enforcement, engineering, and medicine employed occult techniques to solve characteristic problems of modernity. In conclusion, Treitel considers the conflicting meanings occultism held for contemporaries by focusing on the anti-spiritualist campaigns mounted by the national press, the Protestant and Catholic Churches, local and national governments, and the Nazi regime, which after years of alternating between affinity and antipathy for occultism, finally crushed the movement by 1945.

Throughout, A Science for the Soul examines German occultism in its broadest cultural setting as a key aspect of German modernism, offering new insights into how Germans met the challenge of pursuing meaningful lives in the modern age.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An important addition to the growing historiography that affirms that terms like 'irrationalism' fall short of describing the complex of Nazi Culture during the 1930s and 40s."

(Times Literary Supplement)

"Treitel offers a social history of the German occult, panoramic in scope, which seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of a variety of occult organizations and their relationship to Wilhelmine society at large."

(Choice)

"Corinna Treitel's A Science for the Soul is perhaps the most daring and innovative study in modern German cultural history since David Blackbourn's Marpingen. Challenging entrenched myths about occultism's embeddedness in völkisch and anti-modern thought, Treitel shows that the occult sciences were, in fact, comfortably at home in the essentially liberal, consumerist Wilhelmine Empire and played an important role in Germans' adjustment to the modern world. This highly significant insight is supported by research that is both deep and wide-ranging, as the author moves from private séances to university laboratories, from the market for horoscopes to the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke."

(Suzanne Marchand, Louisiana State University)

"An original and substantial contribution to the field of modern German―and European―cultural and social history. Corinna Treitel's scholarship is sound, her sources extensive and appropriate, and her writing clear and concise."

(Geoffrey Cocks, Albion College)

"A sophisticated and compelling contribution to the intellectual history of modern Germany."

(Kevin Cramer Canadian Journal of History)

"Treitel does a wonderful job of demonstrating the breadth of Germans' interests in the occult and exposing the developing market for spiritualists and their work."

(H. Glenn Penny Central European History)

"Treitel's detailed exploration... provides a valuable contribution to the literature on modern occultism."

(B. J. Gibbons Historian)

"Treitel's book provides much valuable information."

(Leslie Price Journal of the Society for Psychical Research)

"There is much to be admired in this thoroughly researched work."

(Alexander C T Geppert Medical History)

"Skillfully researched, strongly argued, beautifully written, Treitel's book adds to our understanding of the spiritual as a vital presence in modern culture."

(Kevin Repp Journal of Modern History)

About the Author

Corinna Treitel is an assistant professor of history at Wellesley College.