Occult Causes of the Present War

The Occult Causes of the Present War is an early example of the Nazis-as-devil-worshippers genre, but somewhat more subtle than most. It was written during the war itself. It does seem to have a rather odd slant, which is that Britain is the appointed nation of God while Germany is the historical root of all evil and specifically of the witch-cultus. The evidence provided, although studiously avoiding English history, doesn't provide evidence of a German root for the witch cult, but rather implicates France, presumably not intentionally.

He does, however, do a good job of dispelling the then-popular notion that Hitler was the root of Nazism, rather than a mere front for an ancestral and habitual evil, the witch-cultus. He presents the cultus as an anti-Christian movement but puts its origins before the advent of Christianity in Europe, opposing the religion of Jupiter (zeu pater) and Zeus.

He paints a sad picture of the former Kaiser in a library of occult books, long after his deposition, wondering where it all went wrong, looking for clues as to that force which once used him as its puppet in the first world war.

On the "the more things change the more they stay the same" front, he lists among the activities of the cult "the traffic in illegal drugs" and the "hideous trade in the souls of women" (p.9). The "ministers" of the cultus, he says, protect themselves by "assuming the guise and character of very ordinary folk", although some examples of the contrary spring to mind. A certain tower-based Sicilian black magician. Specifically mentions the cultus meeting in "faultless evening attire", a la Eyes Wide Shuti (p16).

Weishaupt gets a mention, as you might expect.

"Good ... is one and single, while evil, as the negation of rule, is multiple, and without order and system. So that good has no opposite reality confronting it at all. It stands beyond all contrasts, because evil is not a principle equal and opposite to the principle of good. It is merely the denial of principle altogether, an out-and-out negation." Compare the analysis in Levenda's Sinister Forces of the "left hand path" in tantra.

He mentions the idea that Christianity invented satanism, "a kind of bogey contrived by it to keep the masses in terrified subjection." However, he points out it was encountered by the very earliest Christians. It had, he says, "been the uncompromising foe of the official religion of imperial Rome long before the advent of Christianity", and lists some Roman measures taken against them. Again, compare Levenda. Compare also Shelby Downard's tales about elaborate inter-racial sex rituals amongst the upper ranks of the Ku Klux Klan.

Covers the rise of the Manichaean heresy. Describes it in a way very similar to the description of Four Pi given in Ultimate Evil. Traces from it the cults of the Bogomiles, Aldonistae, Cathars, and others. Makes the Cathars, quite rightly, out to be dictatorial, "impressing their dreadful doctrines upon the people whereever they went". The Cathars, of course, were a mystery cult, levels of knowledge being stratified as in the cult of Scientology. The bottom ranks, for example, entirely abstained from sex due to believing the flesh to be of satanic origin, while the leadership ran mass orgies amongst themselves.

The book catalogues at some length the great religious criminals or European history, dominated by the French. du Retz doesn't get much of a mention, "too well known", nor does his close associate Joan d'Arc, commonly believed to have been wrongly accused for political reasons. The rest are mostly men of the highest order of society, the King of France Henri 3, with his forest lair found to contain the remains of at least one child sacrificed to his unholy lord. I have seen a dungeon once used my a mysterious cult, fourteenth century. The legend, which is local goes that the Templars were kept there during their belated confinement in this area, held for trial down the road in Lincoln. Certainly there is Templar graffiti in the dungeon, as there also is in the remains of their preceptory nearby and the tower in which they were held in Lincoln itself. This dungeon, in fact, was owned by the Bishop of Lincoln at that time. The legend continues that in 1906 a major member of the Royal family, as was, went into the dungeon and retrieved something unknown from the wall. Certainly there is a hole in the wall, behind which lay a niche in the original stonework suitable for stoarage of a small object. The confessions state the local preceptory, Temple Bruer, was one of the four places in England with a Baphomet idol. But I digress.

The list continues with Gaufridi, a priest allegedly causing a nunnery to be plagued by demonic possession at Aix, a more detailed account of which is available in Colin Wilson's Mammoth Book of the Supernatural. A couple of other French nunneries possessed by devils, too.

Onto the milieu of another King of France, Louis XIV, the famous Affair of the Poisons, involving yet another priest, the king's favourite mistress the Madame du Montesspan, La Voisin, &c.. A killer cult operated, infants were purchased from prostitutes who had given birth without the modern day prophylactics then being in use, and were sacrificed, the naked bodies of aristocratic women acting as altars. A "vile traffic in drugs" is mentioned, but I think that's just the poisons, this being prior even to the founding of HSBC, currently the most successful bank explicitly founded for the purposes of the drug trade. I do wonder if the prominence of priests may be in any way related to the infamous "Wandering Bishops", so ably retailed by Levenda in the first book of the Sinister Forces trilogy.

The Affair of the Poisons ended with the king suppressing investigation, as the Salem witch-trials ended when the wife of the Governor of Massachusetts was accused. de Sade is mentioned as a devil-worshipper, not surprising given his early adherence to the principles of social darwinism, an anarchist philosophy much beloved by Passolini's "true anarchists", the fascists. More tales, orgies, black masses, satanist chapels, from all over Europe. The modern day Nice case, too, obviously later than the book. A new edition should be written, given the revelations of later years about the transnational cults presenting Gladio, with its attendant tales of perversion, murder, illicit trade in children, drugs, guns and so on.

Bathory not mentioned.

A thought comes to me from the book The History of the Religion of Atlantis, by the same very prolific author, in which he also reports near-identical rituals met with by the first white men to meet the natives of Mexico, as it is now.

That's about a quarter of the book. After that it goes to the Nazis themselves. Hitler, Rosenberg, Eckhart.

That'll do.