The Hidden Thread, Part I: The Occult Roots of Nazi Ideology

In this episode, Fortean Winds begins a multi-part exploration of an esoteric current that predates the Third Reich, shaped the worldview of key Nazi figures, and may still be influencing modern systems of belief, power, and perception today.

We trace the "occult thread" from the mystical teachings of Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, through the racialized myth-making of Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, into the heart of Nazi ideology—particularly its grip on Heinrich Himmler and the SS. Along the way, we look at the Thule Society, the Ahnenerbe, and why Hitler—though perhaps skeptical—couldn’t escape the esoteric storm swirling around him.

Is there a system of symbolic control, ancient myth, and psychological manipulation at work—one that's bigger than any single regime?

Join RamX, Bones and the Fortean Winds team as we open this investigation into the hidden currents beneath modern history.

Follow along with the WW2 Fortean Timeline on our website

Transcript

Welcome to the Fortean Winds podcast where we 
 talk about UFOs and all of its related 
 high stranges. I go by Bones and with us 
 is the notorious RamX. Hey. Hey 
 everybody. Hey Ram. So I listened to the 
 previous episode with historian Dr. 
 Bruce Soulheim. It was a great episode. 
 I'm sorry I missed it. But um what we 
 want to do is kind of continue from 
 there, right? Yeah. I think we'll keep 
 going with our existing conversation and 
 Dr. Bruce helped set up the Nazis and 
 the occult, which is something that 
 we've been talking about diving into for 
 a while. So, I think we're going to get 
 into that in this episode, but I think 
 it's good for us to recap kind of where 
 we are in the conversation for newer 
 listeners. So, we did record the hacking 
 UFO understanding and the follow-up 
 episode which really put out our 
 conclusions, current conclusions about 
 the phenomenon. And we're open to being 
 wrong. We're open to changing our minds, 
 right? As as more information comes out. 
 I just want you to know that those 
 weren't philosophical ideas. Those were 
 based on both our UFO research, where 
 science is at from our perspective and 
 the philosophical stuff. I opened with 
 Plato to talk about these ideas because 
 I thought it was a good analogy to 
 explain to people what science is 
 pointing to, not what philosophy is 
 pointing to. But science is changing all 
 the time. As we've said, things are 
 almost never proven, per se. So, we'll 
 see where that goes. But but as far as 
 the basis for that again I would point 
 out to Donald Hoffman. I would point to 
 spooky action at a distance in quantum 
 physics right which is what Einstein 
 called it where there is information 
 that travels faster than light between 
 particles that indicates that they're 
 connected in ways we don't understand. 
 So things like that that's where we got 
 all of that. We'll see. We'll see where 
 where all of that goes. But what we do 
 know is that our material sense of 
 reality is limited by our mechanical 
 senses, right? It's limited by our eyes 
 which can see between 700 and 900 
 nanometers of light. So you're not 
 seeing anything else beyond that. Our 
 ears can hear a narrow band of 
 frequencies as well. So you're not 
 hearing anything outside of that. Right. 
 Right. And so it's silly to think that 
 nothing outside of those mechanical 
 devices can affect you physically, 
 right? I mean, even even as we know, 
 there are certain animals that can 
 detect certain things that we can't. 
 Like I I have a I have a beagle and 
 beagles actually, from what I've read, 
 they they actually can sense odors or or 
 smells or whatever beyond what our 
 instruments can detect, which is crazy, 
 right? So I think about that every time 
 I take them for a walk. Yeah, Beagle's 
 saying the same thing as Jacqu Fole, I 
 think, and John Peele and us, right? And 
 so, we're all saying the same thing. 
 We're all pointing to the right 
 direction. If you want to hopefully as 
 we dive in further, we can start 
 unpacking it on a piece by piece basis, 
 but I think we're we're headed in the 
 right direction here. So, we'll 
 continue. And I feel that Dr. Bruce 
 supported a lot of our conclusions as 
 well in our conversations with him. What 
 do you think? Oh, yeah, for sure. I 
 mean, just the fact that, you know, he's 
 got such experience as a historian and 
 as a medium, I mean, he's a tremendous 
 source, right? And he helped us kind of 
 introduce the idea of Nazis in the 
 occult. And we kind of talked about it 
 briefly there, but I think we're going 
 to dive into it more from a fortune 
 perspective and a scholarly perspective 
 because this is a very interesting and 
 important scholarly debate. It is 
 terrible. Like everything about the 
 Nazis and everything that we're going to 
 talk about is terrible. And I I want to 
 start with that because I don't want any 
 of this to sound like we're being 
 dismissive of that or sensationalizing 
 it. We actually want to understand it. 
 We take this stuff very seriously. We 
 take what happened very seriously and we 
 want to understand it better. So in 
 classic 14 wins fashion, we begin with a 
 question and not a hypothesis. and we 
 go, well, if we wanted to trace this 
 esoteric current with both historical 
 rigor and cultural depth, then we're 
 really asking, is there an occult thread 
 that predates the Nazis, influenced 
 them, and continues into our modern 
 system? And that's central to 
 understanding how esoteric ideology can 
 mutate into political, cultural, and 
 even technological systems or control 
 systems um or systems of transformation, 
 which definitely happened to Germany in 
 World War II. So, we're going to try to 
 sketch this out from pre-Nazi esoteric 
 roots that shaped the ideology of some 
 key figures. We would identify those 
 three key figures as Hinrich Himmler, 
 who was most famous for being the head 
 of the SS, Rudolph Hess, who was 
 Hitler's deputy, and Hitler himself, who 
 was into the occult. Those three key 
 figures, I would 
 argue, were most influential on the Nazi 
 party and in shaping the Nazi party 
 according to the their occult beliefs. 
 And you can, of course, you got to mix 
 in their their um just lust for power. 
 Absolutely. So, and that's where things 
 get very gray, right? You go, well, 
 there's certain tactics that fascists 
 always use. Blaming minorities, you 
 know, focusing the lower class on the 
 minorities in order to get them on your 
 side, moving the oligarchs into 
 positions of power. These are classic 
 fascist tactics, right? So, you go, 
 where did the occult get involved? At 
 what point were the conventional fascist 
 tactics what moved Germany? And at what 
 point was it the occult? We won't get to 
 the answer to that question without 
 asking it. And there's a fear in 
 conventional academia that if you ask 
 that question you and make it sound too 
 woo obviously you get away from those 
 very dangerous sort of political 
 movements that can turn people into into 
 nasty monsters. So I think you guys 
 touched on it a little bit last episode 
 about the where it originated where the 
 basis of their occult beliefs originated 
 and it came from the 19th century. 
 Right. Right. There was a famous 
 character that I we've mentioned before, 
 but is really worthy of a deep dive in 
 and of herself, and that is Madame 
 Blovatzki, right? Helena Blovatzky. So, 
 she was extremely influential on what we 
 consider to be the occult in the West. 
 And hermeticism, as we've pointed out 
 before, is what we generally equate the 
 occult with in the West. So, when we're 
 talking about this, we're kind of 
 talking about it in those terms. There 
 are Eastern traditions. There are 
 traditions in the west which are not 
 popular which we probably won't get into 
 too much but the traditions that we're 
 mostly talking about are the hermetic 
 traditions and and that's what people 
 think of when they think of tarot you 
 know the usual. So Madame Blovatzky was 
 incredibly influential on that 
 hermeticism idea. She claimed to have 
 had contact with some adept masters. She 
 she built a lot of credibility in the 
 19th century and then she influenced a 
 number of occultists at the time. 
 Certainly influenced some of the the big 
 oultists we talked about like Alistister 
 Crowley. So those three key figures that 
 we discussed Himmler, Hitler and Hess 
 were born into this idea. So even in 
 Austria these ideas were getting bigger. 
 These ideas were spiritualism was big at 
 the time. We've talked about some of 
 those figures and there wasn't as much 
 differentiation between conventional 
 religion and spiritualism as they would 
 consider it. Like in what we're calling 
 the occult, they would consider 
 spiritualism communicating with spirits 
 and it wasn't 
 necessarily as so not everything at that 
 time would have been considered 
 witchcraft. It would have been 
 considered normal for people. And we 
 talked about how very Christian people 
 like Joseph Smith were doing things like 
 scrying. And so what we would consider 
 occult practices were much more common 
 then. And so these three key key figures 
 were born into that. And Bulvatki 
 influences two key figures that would go 
 on to influence the Nazi party. And 
 those two key figures were Guido von 
 List and Yorg Lans von Lebenfelds. We're 
 going to talk about them quite a bit. 
 I'm trying to keep the names to a 
 minimum. Yeah. So I'm going to have a 
 really hard time with those. This 
 conversation is going to involve a lot 
 of names. We'll do some write up so that 
 you can go look into the individual 
 names, but I'm I did try to pair down 
 the names. So you devout historians out 
 there, please forgive me, but I'm trying 
 to keep this into our typical 14 wins 
 drunk history sort of retelling. So von 
 List and Levenfells, as we're now going 
 to refer to them, are the key 
 translators of theosophy, which is what 
 Bolvatzky created, like this idea of 
 theosophy that would go on to influence 
 many others. So von List and Levenfells 
 took Blovatzky's ideas of theosophy and 
 and incorporated some revived Norse 
 paganism, some runes, secret knowledge 
 of Aryan ancestors that they kind of 
 made up or pulled from other fictional 
 sources or other occult sources. Leven 
 Fels founds this magazine in Austria 
 called Oara and it claimed Aryans were 
 divine and that other races were 
 degenerate and this is Hitler's growing 
 up on this magazine. So we know he 
 collected this magazine. I think Lee 
 Fels claimed that Hitler went and 
 visited him and asked for back copies 
 but that was never proven. But Oara's 
 ideas certainly show up in Nazi 
 ideology. So it heavily influenced the 
 theology of the time. So now we've 
 traced it from Blovatsky who said just 
 to recap because this is what we're 
 trying to do here and I don't think that 
 this has been done this way before by 
 the way. So we're going to recap. So 
 hermeticism gets revived by Blovatsky 
 and turn towards theosophy. It 
 influences a lot of people including 
 Golden Dawn Crowley in different ways. 
 It influences von list and levenfells 
 and they turn it more towards this 
 Germanic Aryan Norse mix that would then 
 become Nazi ideology and theology. Okay. 
 An important sort of subset of that is 
 the vulkish nationalism movement and 
 romantic mysticism. And these were sort 
 of woven through arosophy. And it was a 
 mystical nationalism that these are 
 concepts that you hear a lot in 
 different fascist movements. Blood and 
 soil, sacred German landscapes like you 
 right revival of ancient Germanic and 
 Norse traditions. And this became a sort 
 of focus movement that really affected 
 Himmler and Himmler was probably the 
 most oult of these guys. Maybe Hess they 
 they would be in competition. We'll talk 
 about this later. turned himself in 
 because he thought it was his occult 
 destiny. So these guys were true 
 believers and as we'll discuss later on, 
 Hitler not so much dipped in and out. He 
 more saw it as a means to power. These 
 guys genuinely believed that there was a 
 paranormal supernatural force helping. 
 And the movement like a lot of focus 
 movements even today saw modernity as a 
 sickness as an illness. And it everyone 
 needs to return to the land, return to 
 farming, return to a more natural means 
 of medicine, right? 
 Return to folk medicine. And these and 
 these things were all coming out in 
 reaction to the industrial revolution. 
 We're hearing these same ideas come out 
 in sort of the same ways in reaction to 
 the AI revolution. Yeah. So these ideas 
 are still relevant and we're either 
 paranormal and the nonp paranormal ideas 
 that we're going to talk about couldn't 
 be more relevant than today. Yeah. Yeah. 
 Yeah, I mean culturally too, you think 
 about it. Um, you know, even in the 
 arts, I remember reading about how even 
 the, you know, early communism, they 
 they believe that history has stopped 
 and and everyone and humankind has it 
 all figured out now with with, you know, 
 with the natural sciences booming with 
 with Darwinism before that and then, you 
 know, the art artist art has started to 
 get fuzzy like surrealism and art 
 started to become really popular and a 
 lot of people in power didn't like that. 
 They thought that it was denigrating. It 
 was it wasn't good. And so they wanted 
 to stop it. They thought that the 
 history stopped now. We know how human 
 history works and we're just going to 
 replicate it in our own way. Right. And 
 so they're not Absolutely. And the 
 theology at the time was like, let's get 
 the workers to believe that it is their 
 divine destiny to overthrow the top of 
 Germany and place us in charge. Right. 
 Right. And it gets really mixed up 
 because Hitler saw it as a means to an 
 end. But Hess and Himmler were like I 
 said true believers. So these occult 
 ideas because of that end up getting 
 operationalized within the Nazi party 
 and Nazi institutions both to to promote 
 Hitler to power and because Himmler and 
 Hass are true believers. So it ends up 
 showing up in a number of different 
 ways. And one of the societies that 
 formed within the Nazi party that was 
 very occult was the duel society and it 
 was a esoteric society that sponsored 
 the German workers party. So they went 
 directly to the lower classes and said 
 let's let's incorporate them with our 
 occult ideas and that began with a 
 belief in a lost Aryan civilization sort 
 of like Atlantis and anti-semitic 
 esotericism. So the idea is that the 
 Jews began their Hebrew Christian God in 
 order to denigrate you and take your 
 psychic powers away. Like they believe 
 that the Aryan Superman was a psychic 
 Superman by the way, not a physical 
 Superman. They thought he was physically 
 powerful and perfect, but their 
 superpowers were psychic. That is 
 important. Yeah. So, and then there was 
 this prophecy that was all over these 
 guys that was talking about a Tutonic 
 Messiah, right? and they were setting 
 Hitler up to become a Tutonic messiah. 
 And Hitler played along and he liked the 
 idea, but it was clear that the other 
 people around him thinking he was, you 
 know, a divine wasn't his main 
 intention. He was he was more grounded. 
 Ed Himmler, on the other hand, wanted to 
 truly operationalize esoteric and occult 
 knowledge, and he probably got the 
 furthest. Now, as I mentioned, he 
 claimed to have contact with some sort 
 of spirit during his focus days. Himler 
 did. Yes. So, right, that's very 
 interesting. And we're still digging 
 into that. I really want to find out 
 what that contact was and what he 
 claimed to have happened. It may not 
 have happened, but whether it happened 
 or not, what he claims to have happened, 
 as we've discussed, is very important, 
 right? He goes on to create this castle, 
 Weldsburg Castle in Germany. And it came 
 up before because the crypt in that 
 castle is designed very similar to the 
 crypt in Malta that we discussed in some 
 of our subterranean explorations. So he 
 was definitely trying to tap into some 
 of those same forces, some of those same 
 currents that they were doing all the 
 way back in Malta. And then of course he 
 was responsible for pursuing the grail, 
 pursuing the ark, pursuing a lot of like 
 he had the SS going all over the world 
 looking for these objects of power. And 
 there was two reasons there like and 
 again this is how you get both a 
 functional and an esoteric society to 
 work together. They saw Jews and 
 Christianity as a threat. So by them 
 going out and get taking their objects 
 of power and owning them this would be 
 like now our Aryan esotericism owns your 
 divine gods. Right. Sure. So there was 
 both a political and a theological 
 motivations behind. Right. And of course 
 just a simple search for a justification 
 to you know to conquer and to create the 
 Third Reich. Right. Yeah. So now I want 
 to introduce one more name which come 
 will come up and this was an astrologer 
 and a cultist that ended up influencing 
 them the party heavily Carl Maria 
 Willigot and Himmler was a big follower 
 of his and Willigot believed that he had 
 ancestral memories that were given to 
 him by ancient Aryan gods. So imag this 
 was for Himmler this was his Bruce like 
 he thought like Bruce is in touch with 
 his ancient alien like he thought he had 
 a direct line and we know that that 
 stuff happens so that's very interesting 
 and then there's all the symbolism 
 there's all the the schwashika itself 
 which was a theosophical symbol that was 
 changed by Hitler in order to be it's on 
 the Nazi flag every time you see a Nazi 
 flag you are looking at an oult symbol 
 there's all the ruins there's the the SS 
 symbols, all of the symbolism of the 
 Nazi party had a cult significance and 
 it was designed as 
 such. And Himmler believed in like a 
 cosmic mission for the Aryan race in 
 order to sort of raise humanity up. It 
 was their divine intention. They had 
 very grandiose ideas about all of this. 
 Hess, on the other hand, was super into 
 astrology and he, as I mentioned, he 
 took a 1941 flight into Scotland that 
 was probably influenced by his esoteric 
 belief and and was probably inspired by 
 an astrologer. And after he goes into 
 Scotland and turns himself in and says, 
 "I'm here for my divine intervention." 
 And they just take him in and take him 
 for all of his knowledge of the Nazi 
 party, right? and he becomes very 
 important to ending the war. Hitler's so 
 mad he rounds up all the astrologers at 
 the time and he says there's no more of 
 this occultism and he takes that back 
 and he goes back on it. Oultism at that 
 point he realizes has gone way too far 
 beyond his control and he either has to 
 go with it or look powerless against it. 
 Right. So he ends up going with it but 
 for a minute he wanted to actually end 
 the occultism thread because Hess turned 
 himself interesting. Yeah. And then 
 there's Nazi archaeology which went to 
 Tibet, Iceland, South America, all in 
 search of power. They were very 
 interested and found some terraneian 
 structures that were anomalous. The 
 Carakora hole is one that the Nazis 
 found. And then there was a racial ties 
 to occultism. All of this eugenics had 
 occult foundings and it's difficult to 
 say what came first. Was their decision 
 to pursue eugenics the inspiration for 
 the occult ideas or were the occult 
 ideas the inspiration for the eugenics? 
 We can definitely find occult ideas that 
 were popular in Germany and Austria that 
 predate any Nazi eugenic experiments. So 
 if you if you're if you're looking for 
 evidence, the evidence suggests that the 
 occultism predated the eugenics ideas. 
 Okay. Yeah, that would make sense. It 
 does. So, I think that wraps up sort of 
 the very beginnings of those Nazi 
 threads as far as we can take it in a 
 short podcast. Next, we'll talk about 
 where those ideas went during the war 
 and then we'll follow up with an episode 
 about what happened to those ideas 
 afterwards and are they floating around 
 today. Good. Nice. Yeah. You know, we're 
 kind of we're here in the 21st century 
 and a lot of these ideas, you know, 
 still float around and you still have 
 movement movements. you could see them 
 online that uh follow them and believe 
 them. I mean, how does that fit in our 
 historical context, you know? Yeah, 
 that's a great question. I think we're 
 going to take that on because we can 
 find people that believe in all of these 
 ideas today and online movements that 
 support them and so they're not dead. 
 And then there's all the ideas that 
 movements that are analogous to it. So, 
 and that's for everyone to decide for 
 themselves. But we can at least go back 
 and unpack what happened then and how it 
 wound its way in today. Yeah. And you 
 know, and just just thinking about 
 earlier you mentioned earlier you 
 mentioned AI and how that is impacting 
 society today. That's huge cuz I I'll 
 say it again. Uh we live in 
 extraordinary times, man. And 
 historically it's it's big. And we talk 
 about how the occult came up at the turn 
 of the century at the end of the 19th 
 century. There was a lot going on 
 scientifically back then and culturally, 
 right? Just throughout the world. So, 
 yeah, we're we're living in a time I'd 
 love I'd love to reflect more on how AI 
 is going to impact society. Yeah, that 
 might be a good fourth episode. Well, 
 the fact that AI is arriving on the 
 heels of the internet, mobile 
 technology. I mean, we're looking at 
 another industrial revolution. And as 
 we've seen through history, both events, 
 ideas, and people seem to be moving in 
 cycles. So, I think it's very 
 interesting to look at it this way. 
 Sure. Well, thanks, Rahm. I guess we'll 
 end it there. Once again, I've learned a 
 lot 
 uh having this discussions with you. 
 We're going to keep going. Yeah. I mean, 
 this was great. It was really nice to 
 dive into like some history and 
 something more functional and not be out 
 on the edge where we're trying to solve 
 the entire problems of reality, right? 
 Yeah, this was fun. Just just remember 
 every time you see a beagle, that beagle 
 is experiencing something you can't 
 comprehend. Follow the beagle. 
 All right, man. Good talking to you, 
 Bones. Good talking to you, everyone. 
 Thank you for listening once again. And 
 uh you could always connect with us at 
 14wwinds.com. All right, everyone. Take 
 care of 
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 yourself. Heat. Heat. 
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