What is Reddit's opinion of The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology?

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If you're interested in the occult roots of Nazism, there is a book with this exact title

Very interesting read

Here are some books that I found might be interesting.

The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology

Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons -- Rocket scientist by day; sex magician by night. Also blew himself up accidentally.

Secret Teachings of All Ages -- This is the book I am getting soon and this edition as it has most of the illustrations. This is a survey on a bunch of different topics.

My amazon wishlist is a fucking mess now...

Close. Hitler had some very interesting views and he is what we would describe as spiritual. But he was NOT a Christian by any means. Hitler thought of himself as a totally rational and intelligent human being who rejected the dogmas of religion. He was the OG r/Atheism bro. As Tim O'Neill states:

" Hitler’s mother was a devout Catholic and so he was baptised into the faith as a baby. The young Hitler, however, did not share his mother’s piety and was only confirmed as a Catholic at the age of 15 very reluctantly and at her insistence. According to several reports, he ceased attending Mass once he left home at 18 and seems to have abandoned all practice of the Catholic faith around this stage.

He also thought of the religious elements of other Nazi leaders to be childish and stupid:

"The evidence regarding his adult beliefs is complex, but it does not support the idea that he was a Christian, let alone a Catholic. Nor does it support the idea that he was an atheist, despite the claims of some Christians. Hitler made repeated, unambiguous references to his belief in God or what he called “Divine Providence” and did so both in his public speeches and writings but also in his private conversations. He also actively rejected atheism, which he associated with Bolshevism and socialism generally and which he declared to be “a return to the state of the animal”. But unlike several leading Nazis, particularly Party ideologue Albert Rosenberg, Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach and SS head Heinrich Himmler, Hitler had little interest in the occult or Germanic neo-paganism. He said that moribund beliefs died out for good reason and ridiculed those “who brandish scholarly imitations of old German tin swords, and wear a dressed bearskin with bull’s horns over their heads”. (1)

His other views are more based on pseudo-science rather than religious conviction when considering Nazi occult ideas.

" The truth is, however, that Hitler had no such “obsession” and generally regarded most occultism as ridiculous or irrational. - While there was some influence of these occult ideas on Nazism, their influence on Hitler personally is far less clear. There are certainly some parallels between Hitler’s ideas and those of List and Lanz, but these are mostly ideas that were widely discussed and written about at the time. The elements that were unique to the esoterics and occultists, on the other hand, are generally not found in Hitler’s speeches, writings or reported discussions. Whereas they took pseudo scientific and pseudo historical claims about Aryans and ancient Germanics and added an occult or religious layer to them, Hitler generally stuck to the crackpot science and history and gave it a more political edge. Nicholas Goodridge-Clarke’s excellent study of the connections between the esoteric and occult fringe and the Nazis, <em>The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology</em> (Aquarian Press, 1985), actually concludes, despite its title, that Nazism did not really have occult roots. Goodridge-Clarke notes that “Ariosophy is a symptom rather than an influence in the way that it anticipated Nazism.” (p. 202) Hitler did have an enthusiasm for some of the strange ideas that overlapped with those of the Ariosophists, such as Viennese engineer Hanns Hörbiger’s kooky “World Ice Theory“, but these were more pseudo scientific theses rather than occult systems.

Also, Nazi Germany vilified religion and persecuted thousands of Catholics within Germany, with many priests being captured and killed. The Vatican was in a tough political spot but their interactions with Nazi Germany were of fear, mistrust, suspicion, hostility, mutual dislike. and downright vehement opposition. (1)

His remark on Jesus Christ as a warrior fighting against the Jews was actually just a piece of political rhetoric.

"

His views on Jesus are best described as “eccentric”, as he seems to have regarded him as an Aryan warrior battling the forces of “Jewishness”. In 1922 he declared:

>My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognised these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison.
(Speech delivered at Munich 12 April 1922)

Here Hitler depicts Jesus not only as a “fighter” but as an anti-Semite and it is telling that the gospel episode he cites is the only one where Jesus is depicted as engaging in an act of violence. Of course, many have noted his words “my feeling as a Christian” both here and in other speeches as well as in his manifesto, Mein Kampf, as evidence that he did regard himself as a Christian. However, this and similar statements need to be understood in context.

As already mentioned, in November 1923 the Nazis tried to seize power by force, staging a coup by seizing key Bavarian politicians in a Munich beer hall and declaring Hitler head of a new government. This putsch quickly collapsed and Hitler and other leading Nazis were jailed. Hitler decided that armed revolution was not the path to power and used his imprisonment to write Mein Kampf, laying out his vision of a new greater Germany. On his release in 1924 Hitler then undertook a decade long campaign to win power via the ballot box.

One of his problems was the fact that Germany was substantially Christian – 64% Protestant and 32% Catholic – and much of Hitler’s ideology was counter to fundamental Christian ideas. So he did his best to present himself as friendly to Christianity in general, mainly condemning “political priests” and any form of Christianity that was not sufficiently “nationalist” and stridently “German”.

In Mein Kampf Hitler characterised Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular as an impediment to “Pan-Germanism” and noted that in the Kulturkampf of the previous century “the Catholic clergy was infringing on German rights”. He wrote:

>Thus the Church did not seem to feel with the German people, but to side unjustly with the enemy. The root of the whole evil lay … in the fact that the directing body of the Catholic Church was not in Germany, and for that very reason alone it was hostile to the interests of our nationality.

https://www.amazon.com/Occult-Roots-Nazism-Influence-Ideology/dp/0814730604