Authors: Tom Martin
FEATURES. JUNE 1979
The Thule Gesellschaft, or Thule Society in English, was founded on August 17th 1918 in the Four Seasons Hotel in Munich, by Rudolf von Sebottendorff, a German occultist. Its aim was to promote ideas about the origins of the blue-eyed, blond-haired Aryan race. Thule was the name of what the members believed was the mythical Aryan homeland.
At the time of the society’s foundation, the First World War had just finished and Communist revolutionaries were plotting to overthrow the German government. Adolf Hitler was one of the one million defeated and angry soldiers who had returned from the front. He had recently been awarded the Iron Cross, the German army’s highest honour for bravery, and like many other soldiers, his patriotism burned brightly despite the defeat.
The Thule Gesellschaft decided to capitalize on this unstable situation, and in 1919 they started something called the German Workers’ Party. This was created in order to disseminate the society’s ideas of German and Aryan supremacy amongst Germany’s general population. In the following year, the German Workers’ Party became the NSDAP, the political vehicle through which Hitler would ascend to power. In due course, the NSDAP became known as the Nazi Party.
Among the early members of the Thule Society was Dietrich Eckart. He was a wealthy German publisher and a master of black magic. It was Eckart who spotted Adolf Hitler’s potential, after he saw him speak in a Munich beer hall. He took Hitler under his wing and trained him in the occult arts of charismatic projection, mass persuasion and oratory.
Hitler’s talents for rhetoric and propaganda far surpassed Eckart’s, as history attests. Eckart died in 1923, from damage to his lungs caused by mustard gas in the trenches, but before he died he told the other Thule Society members: ‘Follow Hitler. He will dance but it is I who have called the tune. We have given him the means of communicating with Them. Do not mourn for me: I shall have influenced history more than any other German.’
Before his final ascent to power, Hitler spent some time in jail. During his stay in jail he was visited many times by General Karl Haushofer, another Thule Society member. Haushofer, a Professor at Munich University, had long conversations with Hitler in which he told Hitler how he had travelled to Tibet and studied under the highest Tibetan lamas. The Thule Society thought that the Aryan race had its homeland in Iceland but that it had also been forced to spend time in the high Himalayas, after the last world had been destroyed in a cataclysm. Haushofer knew this, but he was less interested in history and more in power.
Haushofer believed that the secret mystical lodges of Tibet possessed the knowledge of the ‘superman’, which they had been entrusted to look after by the Aryan kings. He was convinced that, using ancient Aryan occult practices, the Tibetan holy men could somehow transform normal men into supermen. It was this power and knowledge that the Nazis sought. The powers of mass hypnosis and mass suggestion that Eckart had taught to Hitler were as nothing compared to the powers of the superman. As soon as Hitler’s Nazi Party had enough money, it organized expeditions to Tibet to locate the hidden Kingdom of Shangri-La, which was supposed to be the seat of the grand lodge of the High Masters.
The chief object of their searching, and what they thought of as the work containing the secrets of the superman, was ‘Das Buch des Ringes’ – The Book of the Ring. This was the name that the Nazis gave to what had always been known in Western esoteric traditions as ‘The Book of Dzyan’. It was the Russian occultist Madame Blavatsky who called it that.
But the Nazis did not consider this book to be a Tibetan creation at all, and so refused to use the Tibetan name. They thought that it was the ancient Aryans who had made the book. Its cover was rumoured to be made of jet-black leather that came from the skin of a now extinct animal, and on its front was a picture of a gold ring with a serpent twined around it, swallowing its tail.
The Nazis never found the book. In the modern era the Tibetan lamas, including the Dalai Lama himself, have denied its existence altogether, and since the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959 so many monasteries and libraries have been destroyed that we will probably never learn the truth about the mythical book. But it is worth noting that the Chinese Communist Party has acknowledged the existence of the book and voiced a desire to bring it for so-called safe keeping to Beijing. In official Party doctrine the Book is referred to simply as ‘The Black Book’, and it is considered to be an object of ill-omen and superstition capable of seeding counter-revolutionary activity.
Nancy read in mounting horror, at first unable to grasp the implications of what she was learning. In desperation, she clicked some of the other links, but they only verified the story, giving different takes on the same information.
If all this was true, she thought, then the Nazi movement had essentially grown out of an occult society, or at the very least had its roots firmly in the occult, and specifically in the Thule Society, of which Anton’s father had been a member. Nancy had never heard about this before, and the thought of it chilled her to the bone. This same society had sent expeditions to Tibet hunting for an ancient Aryan relic,
Das Buch des Ringes
, or the Book of Dzyan, which they believed contained the secret of the superman. It was madness, complete madness; but she began to wonder if the Book of Dzyan might not have been the focus of Herzog’s journey to Tibet.
Nancy logged off feeling sick and confused. She found she was deeply disturbed by the thought not merely of occultists forging paths through Tibet searching for Aryan relics, but also of Anton Herzog embarking on his own version of this quest. For whatever reasons, and she couldn’t gauge what they might be, he had followed his father back through a particularly dark and sinister story. Surely he believed that the Book of Dzyan really existed, or perhaps he just wanted to understand his own origins, the strange heritage he had been born into. She didn’t know. She sat in the darkness, reeling from what she had learned.
Now what should she do? Where could she turn for advice? She had no experience that she could draw on; she had only ever known the kind of blameless life that is led by the vast majority of people throughout the Western world. All she thought, all her opinions, coincided perfectly with the version of reality that was presented in schools and universities. She was dimly aware that there were other ways of seeing life and history, but she had never really had to imagine what that might mean. But now, here in India and Tibet, new experiences and new ways of looking at the world were tumbling in on her every hour. Her former life in New York suddenly seemed like a daydream; she began to wonder if she had been sleepwalking all these years.
And she was remembering something Herzog had once written, an op-ed piece that had caused something of a stir at the time. When was it? A decade ago, perhaps – she couldn’t be certain. He had railed against materialism, the materialist view of reality and history. He had proposed – she was remembering now – that myth and magic coursed through all the seismic moments of history, that almost all the great turning points in history were reached by a handful of people acting on higher urges: revolutionaries, religious maniacs, crusaders and their descendants, the empire-builders. At the time everyone had admired his eloquence – he was overstating the case, they thought, but so beautifully, so richly – the guy could certainly write. It had caused a debate in the letters page: some eminent scholars, a few pundits, all of them swirling around each other, talking learnedly about ‘the real’. Now Nancy began to wonder if Herzog had been more in touch with reality than anyone else. Perhaps it was just that she had been in ignorance of the real driving forces of history. She had been living her life in the dark.
Then she remembered that she had to move. She had to get out of the apartment as quickly as possible. She remembered also the Oracle and its insistent, almost shrill advice that she go to Tibet. There was only one person she could think of to whom all this madness might make some kind of sense. She fumbled in her pocket for Jack Adams’s card and then punched the number into her cell phone. He had recognized the symbol on the bone trumpet and had even recognized the script, she was sure of that. And he had been prepared to drop his price to find out more. She was quite certain that he knew more than he was letting on, and in any case he was the one person who could take her into Pemako. The phone was answered after only one ring. She could barely hear anything though, there was so much noise in the background. He must be in a bar, she thought. She could go there and find him, then she wouldn’t have to mention the fact that she wanted to catch the flight. If the phone was being tapped, she could keep her plans from the police.
‘Mr Adams?’
‘Yes.’
‘I need to talk to you about what we were speaking about earlier – but I can’t talk on the phone. I need to meet you face to face. I need to meet now.’
Surely an unreasonable request, she thought to herself, though she was desperate for him to agree. She could hear the noise of the bar diminish; he must have walked away to somewhere quieter. His reply was immediate and deadly serious.
‘Come to Rick’s Bar at the Taj Mahal Hotel on Mansingh Road, I’ll be waiting for you there.’
The car pulled slowly out onto the road that ran up the side of the Lhodi Gardens. The Gardens were quiet; a few lonely figures could be seen in the darkness, making their beds or chatting amongst the sparse trees. Beyond, somewhere in the night, lay the dejected gothic ruins of Humayun’s tomb. She gazed at the empty scene, all thoughts, all emotion in abeyance. Her experience of life in those seconds was little more than a mood, a hollowness, a feeling of disengagement, as if she was not really in India at all, as if it was all a dream.
She thought again of the Oracle, Anton Herzog’s guiding light. Perhaps what the Oracle really means is that you get precisely what you wish for in this life, she pondered, as the car pulled up behind a goods lorry and the night-time traffic began to gather all around. She had longed for more excitement in her life, and more recently she had yearned for distractions that would stop her brooding on her past, would take away her heartbreak, and now she had them in abundance. You get precisely what you wish for, she thought, but you are never able to foresee what that will really mean until it is too late. She still could not believe she had just spoken to James and that she’d felt so little pain. She had been too intrigued by the mystery of Herzog’s origins to wallow in their past. But did she really no longer care about him? There was a price to pay for this new perspective on life.
The traffic began to move forward again, in fits and starts, like blood in a clogged artery. She drifted into sleep, dreaming of the Book of Dzyan, the black covers decorated with the snake-entwined ring. There it was before her, resting amid burning ruins of a long-lost city. She stretched her arm out to hold it but it remained out of reach. All around flames rose higher and higher. She was forced back by the heat. The Book of Dzyan alone in the inferno did not burn.
She awoke to the sound of the driver’s voice. ‘Memsahib, we’re here. Please wake up.’
With an effort she opened her eyes; she would gladly have paid him to let her sleep all night. Stiff and tired, she stretched her neck and looked ahead through the windscreen. Here lay the magnificent front entrance to the Taj Mahal Hotel, clearly a six- or seven-star establishment, she thought, judging by the marble and gold atrium and the row of Bentleys waiting in line in front of her cab, taking it in turns to disgorge beautiful young Indian couples on to the glittering forecourt. It reminded her of a movie premiere or a fashion shoot.
A minute later it was her turn. With a great effort of will she sat up and grabbed her bag. She was just about to open the door when it was opened for her by a liveried footman. Feeling completely underdressed in khaki trousers and a white shirt, she got out of the car, paid the driver and scuttled into the air-conditioned lobby through a pair of huge double doors that opened before her as she approached.
The cool lobby was a vast expanse of marble and at its centre was a tulip-shaped fountain made of smoked crystal glass. Chairs and tables were scattered around, filled with elegant Indian society, at ease amidst this luxury. The high ceiling was decorated with huge three-yard-wide upturned bowls of light that were covered in elaborate Mughal designs; they reminded Nancy of the exquisite Persian carpets that hang in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
A smartly dressed Sikh doorman pointed the way to Rick’s Bar and she joined a horde of fashionable young Indians, the sons and daughters of fabulously wealthy oligarchs, heading in the same direction. As she walked, she looked at her watch. Nine thirty p.m.; clearly these people were coming from dinner. What on earth was Jack Adams doing in a place like this?
She passed a group of young Indian women dressed in beautiful saris, and hurried along one more white marble corridor. At Rick’s Bar she was greeted by a scene out of a Bollywood movie. To the right was a long green-glass bar top that ran the length of the room, and perched on leather stools all along the bar and draped on each other were yet more exquisitely dressed young Indians. To the right there were sofas and chairs filled with people and everywhere waiters were coming and going, reaching with outstretched arms to collect the empties before ducking out of the way of the guests.
This was the last thing Nancy had been expecting to see after the day’s harrowing events. The room was brightly lit and the noise so loud that she could barely hear the waiter. ‘Memsahib, may I help you? Would you like a drink? Or are you looking for someone?’
‘Yes. Mr Adams. Do you know him?’ She was already scanning the room.
‘Yes, Memsahib. Please, follow me.’
She struggled to keep up as the waiter weaved through the crowd, until finally they reached the far side of the room. There in the corner, sitting on the edge of a comfortable armchair, looking slightly ill at ease, was Jack Adams. He was talking to a plump-looking Indian man, who appeared to be in his late twenties. The Indian man was lounging back in his chair, and from their body language alone it was quite clear what their relationship was. Adams was trying to sell him antiques, thought Nancy. The waiter bowed to the lounging man and then whispered into Adams’s ear. Adams turned and she nodded at him. He nodded back without smiling. Perhaps he was in the middle of an important deal, she thought. He rose to his feet and then bowed to his companion, whose head moved almost imperceptibly in response, and then walked briskly over. He seemed to be very stressed.