As a boy in the 1980s, there were no movies I loved more than the Indiana Jones films. I had myself a fedora and whip, and I used to stand in my front yard trying to wrap it securely around a tree limb. So I grew up under the assumption that Hitler was obsessed with finding relics of power, like the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail. As I grew up and learned more about who Nazis were, I thought that, if those jackbooted boogeymen were real, then perhaps those powerful talismans were also real, a notion my Sunday school teachers were all too happy to reinforce. So, just as I tried to wrap that whip around that branch, I tried to wrap my head around the idea that Judeo-Christian artifacts imbued with God’s magical power might somehow aid in evil men’s plans of world domination and genocide. A tale like Ravenscroft’s about the Spear of Destiny would have drawn me in and convinced me entirely, as it has so many others. But returning to this topic with a more critical perspective, and finding legends like Ravenscroft’s to be entirely implausible and impossible to credit, I had been ready to accept that Nazis weren’t the archaeologists of the weird that Raiders and Last Crusade made them out to be. Imagine my surprise, then, when through my research, as the story of the neo-pagan and occult notions behind Nazism unfolded to me, I discovered that, in many ways, this legend was entirely true.

Long before the rise of the Nazi party, the development of the myth of an Aryan race that came from some mysterious northern homeland and spread southward over the world, propagating their Indo-European language, led to the identification of the imagined Aryan race with certain lost civilization myths. It was these myths that drove Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, the dark pontiff of the SS Death’s Head Cult, and his archbishop Karl Maria Wiligut, to organize and bankroll numerous pseudoscientific archaeological and anthropological expeditions. Essentially, their interest in the ancient past extended only as far as proving their occult theories about their racial heritage, and that meant seeking to prove the existence of places long held by empirical historiography to be mere myth. One of these places was Atlantis, the history of whose myth is so rich and byzantine that I could not hope to do it justice in one short passage here. Suffice to say, then, that Atlantis was a mythical mid-Atlantic lost continent and civilization that originated in an allegorical story told by Plato. I encourage you to listen to Sebastian Major’s coverage of Atlantis in Our Fake History for a better understanding of the myth. What is relevant here is that to some, the idea arose that Atlantis could have been the homeland of the Aryans, even though a Mid-Atlantic continent could not be considered as being to the north of Europe. The reason for the connection is the Oera-Linda Book, which I covered in my last patron exclusive Blindside podcast episode. That seemingly ancient Frisian text, believed to have been written in a runic script, told the tale of a Northern European, Nordic civilization descended from Atlanteans that would go on to be the progenitor of the Germans and basically all white Europeans. Despite the fact that, after the book first came to light in the late 19th century, it was conclusively proven to be a forgery and hoax, its ideas were so appealing to German believers in the Aryan myth, that in 1933, a Völkisch pseudo-scholar named Hermann Wirth published a translation of it. This version so caught the imagination of Heinrich Himmler that in 1935 he recruited Hermann Wirth to be the head of his newly formed Study Society for Primordial Intellectual History and German Ancestral Heritage, later renamed Research and Teaching Community for Ancestral Heritage, Das Ahnenerbe, for short, a word ostensibly meaning ancestral heritage, but which amusingly is translated by Google as “guessed heritage,” as in heritage about which one is only guessing. For years, until the beginning of World War II, the Ahnenerbe would devote much time and research to attempting to prove the Oera-Linda Book genuine, at which task, of course, they failed. But this was far from the sole focus of the Ahnenerbe, for to begin with, the Atlantis of the Oera-Linda was not the only mythical land believed to have been the Aryan origin place.

1665 map by Athanasius Kircher placing Atlantis in the mid-Atlantic, via Wikimedia Commons

One purveyor of myths about ancient lost civilizations who had a tremendous influence on Nazi occult pseudohistory was Madame Helena Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society, whose contributions to Ariosophy I’ve already discussed. In her 1888 book The Secret Doctrine, she outlined her cosmogony, or version of the origin of the universe, as well as her claims about anthropogenesis, the origins of mankind. By her reckoning, there had been multiple ages, during which different root races of mankind had seen their rise and fall on continents now lost to time. She claimed that mankind as we knew it, the Aryans or fifth race, were descended from the fourth race, Atlanteans, a race of giants with psychic powers. The Atlanteans, in turn, before being nearly wiped out by the sinking of their continent, had been descended from the third race, who had lived in the lost southern civilization of Lemuria. And before them, had been the second race, who lived in Hyperborea near the North Pole, as so on. Hyperborea, meaning “beyond the North Wind,” had been a mythical place since time immemorial. The earliest surviving mention of it was in Herodotus, who indicated other, now lost records of the continent, such as in a lost work of Homer’s. Poets, philosophers, and geographers of antiquity all had their own ideas about the location of Hyperborea. It was a northerly location, as the very name suggested, and the myth tells us it was beyond the Riphean Mountains, but no one was quite certain of those mountains’ location. Despite what you might find written about it online, none thought of it as an arctic or polar island. Diodorus Siculus, Pliny the Elder, and Pomponius Mela described Hyperborea as a utopian paradise, which of course doesn’t square well with the Arctic’s less than temperate climate. Actually, most scholars believe the myth of Hyperborea may represent evidence of Greek contact with Celts on Britain. French occultist Antoine Fabre d’Olivet appears to be the first to propose the Arctic north as the location of Hyperborea and the origin of the “white race,” and from there it passed through the writings of countless occultists, who like Blavatsky are an incestuous group, metaphorically, in that they seem to have little qualm about repeating claims, source unseen, and even plagiarizing lengthy passages.

The idea of Hyperborea being located at the farthest point northward, beyond the Arctic circle, seems to have come from a conflation of that lost civilization with another mythical northerly island: Ultima Thule. Like Hyperborea, the myth of Ultima Thule originated in antiquity, and its location was likewise debated by many of the same names, such as Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Pomponius Mela, and Claudius Ptolemy. However, Thule had a much stronger claim to actually be a land in the Arctic north. It was first written about during the time of Alexander the Great’s conquests by Pytheas of Massilia, a mariner exploring the Atlantic. Only a few quotations of Pytheas’s writings have survived, but enough that we know he described Thule as “the place where the sun sets. For it happened that in these parts the night becomes extremely short, sometimes two, sometimes three hours long, so that the sun rises a short while after sunset” (Cassidy 595). The myth of Ultima Thule—this ultimate, as in utmost or farthest, island—presents the greatest evidence that mankind indeed penetrated the Arctic circle in ancient times, for it is a clear description of the midnight sun phenomenon now known to occur there. However, even some geographers in antiquity doubted Pytheas, such as Strabo, who called him an “archfalsifier” (Cassidy 595). Doubt is understandable, for just as Hyperborea was said to be icebound yet to enjoy a comfortable climate, so Ultima Thule was described by some, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, to experience “an eternal spring, green throughout seasons” (Cassidy 600). Among those who gave him credence, Ultima Thule’s location was debated with just as much verve: it was variously seen as being somewhere northwest of England, then to the northeast, then far out west into the Atlantic, and once, a confusion of names had some thinking it was in the Persian Gulf! Today, most believe that if it ever existed, it was likely a Shetland Island, or Iceland, whose evergreens would go a long way toward explaining claims about its year-round greenery. (Cassidy 597-599). Of its inhabitants, however, little was claimed beyond them being barbarians, and later, that they enjoyed a perfect utopian existence. In another indication that myths about Hyperborea have become confused with myths about Ultima Thule over the years, we see Pomponius Mela state that Hyperboreans did not die but rather “laughingly” cast themselves into the sea “when sufficiency of living…has come upon them,” while in the 15th century English encyclopedia The Mirror of the World, it is claimed that the Thuleans only die “whan they ben so olde & feble that…they had [rather] dye than lyve” (Cassidy 602).

1623 map of a mysterious Arctic continent by Gerardus Mercator, via Wikimedia Commons

Just as occultists took the myth of Hyperborea and asserted its connection to their notions of racial descent, so German Ariosophists took the myth of Ultima Thule and claimed it as part and parcel of their Aryan myth. Among these, of course, were the members of the aforementioned Thule Gesellshaft, or Thule Society. The Thule Society did not necessarily hold fast to the notion that a green and verdant land that enjoyed a perpetual spring had ever existed at the North Pole. But they thought, perhaps, it could have existed beneath it, and so throughout their literature can be seen references to Hohlweltlehre, or Hollow Earth Theory. The idea that the earth might be hollow, and that conditions beneath the surface might possibly support life was not exactly new. The astronomer and explorer Edmund Halley, for example, had developed a detailed theory about it. I spoke of this briefly last year, in my discussion of the Green Children of Woolpit, and I guested on an episode of the podcast The Conspirators with host and friend of the show Nate Hale in which we spoke all about it. I encourage you to go listen to those episodes for more on the notion of the Hollow Earth. Here, what is most germane to mention is that the Thule Society, along with other proponents of the Hollow Earth theory, looked to Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth as inspiration, which featured a German scholar deciphering the ancient rune script of a Nordic saga to discover the hidden entrance to the inner realms of the earth in Iceland. One imagines the members of the Thule Society finding this fiction not only plausible but almost a revelation, perhaps theorizing that Verne had some occult knowledge that they might uncover themselves with further research. Other novels featuring a civilization inside a hollow earth that they might have taken inspiration from include the Pellucidar novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the satirical Utopian novel The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Indeed, Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, which revolved around a race of subterranean superbeings called the Vril-ya, was accepted by numerous occultists, including many of Blavatsky’s Theosophists, as revealing some hidden truth about the world. And in the 1930s Willy Ley, a German rocket scientist who defected to America and wrote about Nazi pseudoscience, offered the supposed revelation that another secret German society, called the Society for Truth, existed for the sole purpose of discovering and harnessing Vril, the mysterious force wielded by Bulwer-Lytton’s hollow earth dwellers. This has turned Bulwer-Lytton’s fiction into a touchstone for Aryan theorists and enthusiasts of occult Nazi myths ever since, resulting in legends of Vril-powered Nazi UFOs, of course. Ironically, another important literary legacy of Edward Bulwer-Lytton has to do with bad writing, for he famously coined the ultimate cliché, “It was a dark and stormy night….”

Whether or not the Hollow Earth theory was given credence by a great many Nazis or only a few, it is evident that among Nazis and occultists in Germany at the time, eccentric conceptions of how the earth was formed seem to have been prevalent. One such theory, proposed by Dr. Cyrus Reed Teed after a series of surveys he completed in 1890s Florida, suggested that the earth was concave. Some researchers have argued that both Hitler and Himmler had become convinced of this “Cellular Cosmogony,” as it was called, which had seen a resurgence in the weird atmosphere of early 20th century Germany. Essentially, this theory holds that there is a hollow earth, and we are on its concave inner surface, looking up at a gaseous blue cloud lit by a small sun, on the other side of which could possibly be seen the far side of the world. Supposedly, Hitler sent a radar expert to the Baltic Sea to aim his radar equipment into the sky at a certain angle in hopes of tracking the British fleet in the Atlantic. While this theory and projects undertaken based on it might seem ridiculous, another, no less absurd, might even make it seem sensible by comparison. It seems that Himmler and Hitler both also became enamored of Welteislehre, or World Ice Theory, the brainchild of one Hanns Horbiger, an engineer and inventor. He seems to have been a man of science, until one day, while gazing at the moon, he claimed to have had an epiphany—almost like the visions of Guido von List, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, and Karl Maria Wiligut—that all planets were composed of ice and that ice was the basic building block of all things, making the Milky Way not a galaxy of stars but a vast swathe of icebergs. In 1912, he published his theory of “Glacial Cosmogony,” and some elements of it were actually prescient. For example, he suggested that the universe had begun in an explosion like the Big Bang. Other aspects of his theory, however, definitely show it to be a product of the Austro-German revival of occultism and esotericism at the time, such as that the ancient and superior races of man had arrived on earth when moons of ice had crashed into it, and that impacts of these sorts had further resulted in the sinking of Atlantis and in Noah’s flood. Particularly appealing to Ariosophists and specifically to Heinrich Himmler was this notion of a master race originating from an icy world, for this struck his ear as very like the myth of Ultima Thule being the frozen homeland of the Aryan master race.

Depiction of our galaxy according to Horbiger’s World Ice Theory, via the Moscow Society of Astronomy Lovers

Much of the work of Himmler’s Ahnenerbe was directed toward finding evidence to support these various Ariosophist pet theories of anthropogenesis and cosmogenesis, but of course, by the time the Second World War came around, when Himmler and his Death’s Head Cult took on far more horrific tasks and put their academic undertakings on hold, they had nothing to show for their research. One should attribute this to the fact they were seeking evidence of something that only existed in their minds, though, and not to any lack of effort on their part. In search of archaeological proof of German superiority and lost Aryan civilizations, the Ahnenerbe sent teams all over the world. In order to gather more Nordic folklore to pore over, teams visited Scandinavia in 1935, recorded the traditional songs of pagan forest dwellers, and met with a legendary sorceress named Miron-Aku. Perceived similarities between prehistoric petroglyphs and runes led to numerous expeditions to Sweden, the Baltic Sea, and Italy, and the theory that Aryan paganism was the progenitor of all Middle Eastern religions led to an expedition to Iraq to study the ancient sites of Babylon. The Ahnenerbe truly were the villainous archaeologists portrayed in Raiders of the Lost Ark, exploring prehistoric Celtic settlements close to home in the Black Forest and planning expeditions as far afield Iceland, where they hoped to study the culture for any echoes of their mythological Ultima Thule and the Aryan race, and Bolivia and Peru, where they believed they saw parallels between the ancient Incans and Nordic culture. Perhaps the most far-flung operation ever taken on by the Ahnenerbe was their mission to Tibet in hopes of finding there the source of their imagined master race. There was a theory at the time that plant and animal life had all come from a common source up in the Himalayas, an idea that resonated well with Ariosophist notions of a root or master race of human beings coming from some icy realm. Tibet wasn’t exactly to the north of Europe, but there was another legend, of the so-called Mountain of Tongues, called Jabal al-Alsinah by medieval Arab geographers who claimed it was the birthplace of Indo-European languages. While this mythical mountain had long been supposed to be in the Caucasus, Himmler thought that perhaps the tales had been mistaken and it might be in the Himilayas. Moreover, the mad mystic Karl Wiligut was apparently very interested in stories he’d heard about Tibetan women keeping magical stones in their vaginas, so off they sent a team to Tibet, where after an arduous seven-month journey, they eventually reached the forbidden capital city of Lhasa… and of course found no sign of any blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryans.

True to the image of Nazi archaeologists in Raiders and The Last Crusade, though, the Ahnenerbe did more than sift around in ruins and squint at glyphs. They were on the lookout for artifacts of legend. Perhaps the earliest such artifact to interest Himmler and Wiligut was the Irminsul, a great pillar said to be sacred to the pagan Saxons, that legend says was destroyed by Charlemagne. Völkisch neo-pagans associated the Irminsul with Yggdrasil, the World Tree of Nordic mythology, and saw parallels to the object in numerous world religions, such as Christianity’s Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, the sacred Hindu fig tree the Ashvastha, and the bodhi tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment. Völkisch pseudo-scholars like Karl Maria Wiligut believed that the Irminsul was none other than the Externsteine, a formation of natural sandstone pillars in the Rhineland that Roman historian Tacitus had written about as the Pillars of Hercules. At this site are a number of 12th century Christian carvings, the most prominent of which depicts Christ’s descent from the Cross, but Karl Maria Wiligut and other neo-pagans believed that long before these carvings were made, it had been a pagan place of worship and appreciated it as such, coaxing Himmler and other SS officers to make pilgrimages out to the site. In fact, Himmler came to be so preoccupied by it that before he established the Ahnenerbe, he established a precursor organization called the Externsteine Foundation whose focus was to study the stone outcropping he and WIligut believed was the Irminsul. In those early years, the madman Wiligut was far more influential in the archaeological undertakings of the SS, mounting expeditions of his own to places where he believed there to be intersections of “energy lines,” like planetary chakra points or ley lines, and digging up stone ruins from which he felt “vibrations.”

A depiction of Charlemagne having the Irminsul destroyed, via Wikimedia Commons

While the story of Hitler’s obsession with taking possession of the Spear of Destiny may be dubious, there are plenty of real stories involving the Ahnenerbe seeking out and sometimes snatching historical artifacts. The war put one plan on hold, to photograph the Behistun Inscription carved into a mountainside in Iran using a balloon-mounted camera, but as the Reich invaded other countries, the chance to loot relics was always seized on by the Ahnenerbe. They took possession of Gothic artifacts such as the Veit Stoss altarpiece and the Crown of Crimea, and they took great interest in the Bayeaux Tapestry upon invading France, believing it offered evidence supporting the notion of Germanic superiority. And the one probably mythical, supposedly magical artifact that actually did seem to cast a spell over Himmler and his black-clad archaeologists was the Holy Grail of legend. Spielberg and Lucas seem to have gotten this one spot on. Ever since Wagner based his opera Parzival on the 13th-century story of Percival, the Knight of King Arthur’s Round Table who quested after the Holy Grail, Germans and neo-pagan occultists had taken great interest in Grail mythology. As mentioned in the last episode, entire reading rooms at Wewelsburg had been dedicated by Himmler to the study of Arthurian Legend and the mythos of the Holy Grail, and some have said he envisioned the castle as a kind of twisted Camelot, with an almost 15,000-square-foot dining hall equivalent to Arthur’s Round Table. And within the ranks of the Ahnenerbe was a slick-haired, weaselly man named Otto Rahn who, like a quintessential Indiana Jones villain, had been obsessed with the Grail all his life, believing that the Gnostic French Cathar sect wiped out in a Catholic Crusade in 1244 had actually secreted the Grail away somewhere in the Languedoc region of western France. If you’re thinking that this sounds an awful lot like Holy Blood, Holy Grail or The DaVinci Code, you’re absolutely right. These kinds of conspiracy theories of hidden history are endlessly recycled. Like many who would come after him, he searched the castle at Montségur and various remote caves throughout the Pyrenees Mountains, finding nothing more concrete than material for a 1933 book. Himmler, it turned out, was a fan of his writings, gave Rahn a black uniform and an impressive rank, and bankrolled his Grail quest. But Otto Rahn was no Parzival and only ever produced some further writings about his search.

In the end, it may seem surprising that Himmler and the Ahnenerbe’s undertakings live in on legend, for they never turned up anything supportive of their pseudohistorical views, nor is there any evidence they ever discovered a mythical artifact and proved it to be true. The most they ever accomplished was turning up some remains or artifacts of passing historical interest, something it may have been hard not to do when sifting around through prehistoric sites. But enduring legends of Nazi survival remain to tantalize us. These unsupported and fantastical speculations suggest that perhaps the Nazis did discover objects of power or the secret places of the earth and kept their discoveries a secret, establishing what some call a breakaway civilization, an idea encouraged by the fact that some Nazis did escape Germany and take refuge across the world in South America. But these theories go further. They claim that it is all too suspect that entrances to the hollow earth were said to be located in Tibet and Antarctica, and the Germans mounted expeditions to both places. The Tibet expedition I have already discussed; as for Antarctica, the Nazis sent one Captain Alfred Ritscher to there in 1938 to claim 230,000 square miles in the name of Germany. If you dare visit the underbelly of Internet conspiracy and paranormal pseudohistory websites, you’ll find it said that, clearly, the Nazis found a path to the hollow earth, harnessed the power of Vril, and used it to found a new, underground society and power their flying saucers. The problem is there are far simpler explanations and more reasonable conclusions. The Tibet expedition was well documented, with surviving film and photographs, and it is apparent that the Nazi pseudo-anthropologists who undertook it did little more than place calipers on the heads of everyone they encountered and record their craniometric data. There is no indication that they did any sort of cave exploration or excavation. As for the Antarctic mission of Captain Ritscher, it was a territorial claim, pure and simple. Many nations had sent similar teams to the South Pole before them, including Norway, France, Britain, and the U.S., whose Admiral Richard Byrd had famously flown over it. It was only because of the Nazi’s aggression and the clear rumblings of war that Ritscher’s expedition raised eyebrows. But legend always finds a way to grow. Two years after the Reich fell, Admiral Byrd organized a task force of 13 ships, 33 aircraft, and nearly 5,000 men and went back to Antarctica in Operation Highjump, with a mission of training personnel in cold conditions, gathering information, and extending sovereignty. Conspiracy theorists, however, will tell you that it was a military operation to attack a secret Nazi UFO base. With their customary lack of supporting evidence, they won’t even try to prove their claims, looking instead to skeptics to somehow prove them wrong.

Emblem of the Nazi expedition to Antarctica, via Wikimedia Commons

Nazi Occultism, Part Three: The Hunt for a Hyperborean Heritage

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