Wotanist doctrine held that the natural evolutionary cycle of the Universe was from unity to multiplicity and back to unity. The first stage of this evolution (unity to multiplicity) was represented symbolically by anticlockwise triskelions and swastikas and inverted triangles. The second stage (multiplicity back to the unity of the godhead) was represented by clockwise and upright symbols. In this scheme, the Ario-German was seen as the highest possible form of life, since he occupied the ‘zenith of multiplicity at the outermost limit of the cycle’. (44)
List was a fervent believer in the lost civilisations of Atlantis and Lemuria, and claimed that the prehistoric megaliths of Lower Austria were actually Atlantean artefacts.
In his Die Ursprache der Ario-Germanen (The Proto-Language of the Ario-Germans) (1914), he included a chart comparing the geological periods of Earth with a Hindu kalpa (4,320,000,000 years), which also corresponded to a single theosophical round. We will have much more to say on the Ariosophist belief in lost civilisations later in this chapter, and in the next.
For now, let us turn our attention to the other principal personality in Ariosophy, List’s young follower Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, who founded the notorious anti-Semitic hate sheet Ostara and created the Order of the New Templars in 1907. Like his mentor List, Liebenfels had a middle-class Viennese upbringing, which he would later deny in favour of an imagined aristocratic background.
Liebenfels chose as a headquarters for the Order of the New Templars a ruined castle, Burg Werfenstein, perched on a cliff on the shores of the River Danube between Linz and Vienna. He was obsessed with the idea of a Manichaean struggle between the ‘blond’ race (characterised by creativity and heroism) and the dark ‘beast-men’, who were consumed with lust for ‘blonde’ women and who were bent on the corruption of human culture. Two years earlier, Liebenfels had established the racist periodical Ostara (named after the pagan goddess of spring) that called repeatedly for the restoration of the ‘blond race’ as the dominant force in the world. This could only be achieved through racial purity, the forced sterilisation or extermination of inferior races, and the destruction of socialism, democracy and feminism. (45)
These racist concerns led Liebenfels to conceive the bizarre notion of founding a chivalrous order based on the monastic and military orders of the Crusades. As Goodrick-Clarke notes, Liebenfels had been drawn since childhood to ‘the Middle Ages and its pageant of knights, noblemen, and monks. His decision to enter the Cistercian noviciate owed much to these sentiments, and it is likely that his adult desire to identify with the aristocracy derived from similar fantasies.’ (46) Liebenfels’s fantasies also included holy orders, which perhaps naturally resulted in an intense interest in the Order of the Knights Templar. This interest was fuelled by the medieval Grail Romances, which were at the time enjoying a widespread popularity due to their treatment by Richard Wagner in his operas. To Liebenfels and many of his contemporaries, such romances were significant in their painting of the Grail Knights as searchers after sublime and eternal values: this view provided a powerful antidote to the hated modern world with its rampant industrialisation and materialism.
The most renowned and applauded Order in Christendom at the time of the Crusades was undoubtedly the Knights Templar, and Liebenfels developed a fantasy in which these knights became champions of a racist struggle for a Germanic order that would enjoy a hegemony over the Mediterranean and the Middle East. According to Goodrick-Clarke:
In 1913 he published a short study, in which the grail was interpreted as an electrical symbol pertaining to the ‘panpsychic’ powers of the pure-blooded Aryan race. The quest of the ‘Templeisen’ for the Grail was a metaphor for the strict eugenic practices of the Templar knights designed to breed god-men. The Templars had become the key historical agent of [Liebenfels’s] sexo-racist gnosis before 1914. (47)
At this point, it is worth looking very briefly at the history of the Knights Templar and how their rise and fall influenced Liebenfels’s Weltanschauung (world view). The Order of the Knights Templar became one of the most powerful monastic societies in twelfth-century Europe, and came to symbolise the Christian struggle against the infidel. In AD 1118, a knight from Champagne named Hugh of Payens persuaded King Baldwin I of Boulogne (whose elder brother, Godfrey, had captured Jerusalem nineteen years before) to install Payens and eight other French noblemen in a wing of the royal palace, the former mosque al-Aqsa, near the site where King Solomon’s Temple had allegedly once stood in the Holy Land. The Order later comprised three classes: the knights, all of noble birth; the sergeants, drawn from the bourgeoisie, who were grooms and stewards; and the clerics, who were chaplains and performed non-military tasks. (48) Choosing the name Militia Templi (Soldiers of the Temple), (49) they vowed to defend the mysteries of the Christian faith and Christians travelling to the holy places. The Order initially derived its power from St Bernard of Clairvaux, head of the Cistercian Order, and from Pope Honorius II, who officially recognised the Templars as a separate Order in 1128. (50) It is believed that the Templars took their inspiration from the Hospitallers, who protected Catholic pilgrims in Palestine and pledged themselves to a life of chastity and poverty.
The Seal of the Templars showed two knights riding on a single horse — a sign of their poverty (at least in their early days); the design was retained for decades after the Order had become one of the richest of the time. (51) The vast wealth that the Templars were to acquire was partly the result of the Order’s exemption from local taxes, coupled with their ability to levy their own taxes on the community. The Templars honoured their vow of poverty for the first nine years of their existence, relying on donations from the pious even for their clothes. Their battle standard was a red eight-pointed cross on a black-and-white background; their battle cry was ‘Vive Dieu, Saint Amour’ (‘God Lives, Saint Love’), and their motto was ‘Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed Nomini Tuo da gloriam’ (‘Not for us, Lord, not for us, but to Thy Name give glory’). (52)
Over the next century and a half, the Templars amassed a truly staggering amount of wealth, property (with over seven thousand estates in Europe) and power, and had branches throughout Europe and the Middle East, all run from their headquarters in Paris. This led to jealous rivalries, and during the Crusades rumours began to circulate that the Templars were not the pious Christian knights many believed them to be. Attention was focused on their secret rituals, which their enemies claimed were centred upon their worship of Allah; others suspected them of actually worshipping the demon Baphomet, practising horrendous black magic rites involving sodomy, bestiality and human sacrifice, of despising the Pope and the Catholic Church, and various other crimes.