Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (15 January 1953 – 29 August 2012) was a British historian and professor of Western esotericism at the University of Exeter, best known for his authorship of several scholarly books on the history of occultism in Nazism and Western esotericism. Quotes The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985) Page numbers taken from 2004 edition. For historians trained exclusively in the evaluation of concrete events, causes, and rational purposes, this netherworld of fantasy may seem delusive. They would argue that politics and historical change are driven only by real material interests. However, fantasies can achieve a causal status once they have been institutionalized in beliefs, values, and social groups. Fantasies are also an important symptom of impending cultural changes and political action. p. 1 It is a tragic paradox that the colourful variety of peoples in the Habsburg empire, a direct legacy of its dynastic supra-national past, should have nurtured the germination of genocidal racist doctrines in a new age of nationalism and social change. p. 16 The Nazi dreams did not come true. The Great Hall of Berlin with its enormous dome was not completed in 1950; the Wewelsburg was not reconstructed as a gigantic SS vatican by the 1960s; the giant motorways and broad gauge railways as far as the Caucasus and the Urals were never laid; Western Russia was not transformed into a huge colonial territory for German soldier-peasants; nor did the SS libensborn stud-farms produce 150 million pure-blooded Germans for the New Order. The glorious One Thousand Year Reich actually ended a mere twelve years after its proclamation with the military defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. But even if these grandiose plans and megalomaniac visions had not gone beyond the stage of maps, memoranda and miniature models, the Third Reich had accomplished sufficient demolition of the old order in Europe for it to remain an outrage which still haunts literature, films, and the memory of survivors. p. 204 Hitler's Priestess (1998) Powerful ideas of anti-Semitism as a form of world-rejecting gnosis, Aryan paganism as a global religion of white supremacism, and Hitler as a divine being within a cosmic order together compose an unholy theology of the Aryan myth. Seen in this light, neo-Nazism has all the characteristics of an international sect with a religious cult. There are devotional practices, initiates and martyrs, prophecies and millennial expectations, and even relics. pp. 5–6 All nature has intrinsic worth and equality, and whatever science that remains should be nondominating. p. 228 The cybernetic encirclement of man and his complete divorce from nature could well foster a more fundamental alienation. In a congested and automated world, Savitri Devi's sentimental love of animals and hatred of the masses may find new followers. The pessimism of the Kali Yuga and her vision of a pristine new Aryan order possess a perennial appeal in times of uncertainty and change. pp. 231–232 Black Sun (2002) THE RELIGIOUS AND MYTHIC elements of German National Socialism often made the Third Reich resemble a cult in power. p. 1 The risks of racist religiosity are great. By projecting grievances, fears and anxieties onto the "shadow" figures of other races, religious transcendence is stunted and perverted into the dynamics of exclusion and hatred. Instead of genuine spirituality, there is partiality, separation, restriction. A rigid self-righteousness leads down into the spiritual basement of a primitive dualism, where pseudo-salvation depends on the elimination of the Other. The political projection of religious Manichaeism onto human differences inevitably leads to strife and violence. Whenever human groups are interpreted as absolute categories of good and evil, light and darkness, both the human community and humanity itself are diminished. Such degraded religion never leads to light but only into darkness. p. 6 Both the trappings and the myths of American Nazism reflect the behavior of a persecuted religious sect that prepares for militant action against a fallen world. p. 29 Outside a purely secular frame of reference, Nazism was felt to be the embodiment of evil in a modern twentieth-century regime, a monstrous pagan relapse in the Christian community of Europe. p. 107 RACE IS THE lodestone of the Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism, the guiding principle of their historical and political worldview. American neo-Nazism, represented by George Lincoln Rockwell and his successors, adopted the Nazi view of the Jews as the ferment of liberal society, variously promoting communism, civil rights and race mixing. p. 303 Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism posit powerful mythologies to negate the decline of white power in the world. The cultural pessimism of Julius Evola, Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano all express the fear of (Aryan) white submergence in a degenerate age dominated by social and racial inferiors. Their adoption of Hindu chronology is intended to plot the curve of that decline into the Kali Yuga with the millennial promise of regeneration through a new golden age in the cycle of the ages. Francis Parker Yockey likewise articulates a mythic philosophy of history, whereby the European races are (temporarily) disabled by alien Jewish influences and prevented from fulfilling their destiny in a powerful new Imperium or world empire. p. 304 We cannot know what the future holds for Western multicultural societies, but the experiment did not fare well in Austria-Hungary, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The multiracial challenges in liberal Western states are much greater, and it is evident that affirmative action and multiculturalism are even leading to a more diffuse hostility toward liberalism. From the retrospective viewpoint of a potential authoritarian future in 2020 or 2030, these Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism may be documented as early symptoms of major divisive changes in our present-day Western democracies. p. 306 The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (2008) What is esotericism? From the Enlightenment until the middle of the last century, magic, astrology, and occultism, to take a few of the subjects now considered under the rubric of esotericism, were generally perceived as survivals of superstition and irrationalism. The intellectual status of such topics was denigrated, and they were kept in epistemological quarantine lest they cause a relapse from progressive rationalism. Just as the established churches had once excluded heterodox doctrine as heresy, the modern post-Enlightenment world rejected magic and occultism as a violation of reason, its dominant criterion of acceptable discourse. pp. 3–4 As long as the West upholds an image of the free human being within an integrated vision of God, heaven, and earth, esotericism will undoubtedly remain a feature of its intellectual and religious landscape. p. 248 External links Category:1953 births Category:2012 deaths Category:Academics from England Category:Non-fiction authors from England Category:Historians from England Category:University of Oxford alumni