the formatting for this is going to be tricky with the nested blockquotes and shit:
culturejam wrote:phantasmagorovich wrote:And, dubkitty, are you positive that Hitler himself was into the whole Thule Society stuff? From what I knew it was mainly the second line, Goebbels and I think Himmler that were so attached to the occult.
This is my understanding as well. I've read a ton of books on the Third Reich, and everything that is occultish or really out-there wacky shit is from Himmler. I think he was easily the craziest of the lot, surpassing even Hitler himself. Himmler was also the source of all the Norse gods bullshit that sprang up.
from everything i've read that isn't excessively speculative in nature, Hitler was at least strongly influenced by the Thule Society/
OSTARA magazine set and held some occult beliefs; however, his interest in these matters was less than that of other high-ranking Nazis. Himmler was perhaps the most obvious example of this, what with the pseudo-mystic feudal-order aspects of the SS, searches for Tibetian secrets and the Holy Grail, and whatnot, but IIRC Rosenberg and Hess (who, for the non-history-obsessed, was Hitler's personal secretary) were also particularly notable for their occult interests. much of Himmler's faux Aryanism was cobbled together from interwar Thule/
OSTARA-type ideas, but those ideas didn't create the Holocaust any more than did the philosophers who are often blamed for Naziism. even if you're going to try to lay Naziism on Nietszche's "whatever is done for love is beyond good and evil," it's not the idea that made men killers, it's the logical error of equating that statement to "it is excusable to do evil in the service of something you define as 'good' by defining your desired 'good' as 'love'."
in general i agree with much of Bassus' take on these matters, though as i've said i think German neo-Norse faux-paganism served as more of a philosophical underpinning of the Reich than he does. he is absolutely accurate to point out that occult organizations, lodges, and sects which were not favored by the Nazis were ruthlessly supressed very early in Hitler's reign, and i'll point out as well that many of the remaining
pro-Nazi astrologers and other mystics were eliminated by 1944.
i find myself in the odd position of being kind of in the middle range on this question. i'm not particularly a fan of Crowley--in a nutshell, i think his writings had the unfortunate effect of attracting to potentially dangerous things the attention of people unqualified to cope with same (and yes, i know AC specifically warned about this at length)--but to impute the kind of unseen-controlling-hand-of-Evil effect to Crowley as does the OP IMO is not supportable. and i'm someone who takes questions of good/evil exceedingly seriously.
the one thing i've got to put the boot in about, though, is the purported "mind control" in the music of the Beatles and Rolling Stones. i thought the Beatles' backwards messages thing had been settled decades ago as examples of John/Paul fucking with the impressionable consumer; the only definitive association between the Beatles and AC is that John asked that Crowley be included among his choices for the faces in the crowd on the cover of
Sergeant Pepper's. Sabbath have been on record in interviews since the beginning as being
anti-"Satanic," and Ozzy's Crowley song isn't a celebration but rather depicts him as something of a horror-show character.
connecting the dots only draws a picture if you connect the correct dots.