Krishna & Orpheus

The Great Initiates of the East & West - 1919
by Edouard Schure, R. Rothwell (Translator)

Exploring another Pillar of Nazi Philosophy
March 14, 2001

Written in the aftermath of World War I, The Great Initiates sold hundreds of thousands of copies across Western Europe. This international bestseller promised spiritual salvation to a defeated, hungry, and desperate people - especially Germans who considered themselves a special, elite race called Aryans.

This ambitious tome, subtitled "a study of the secret history of religions", claimed to chronicle the evolution of spiritual seekers across time and space. It also claimed to identify both children of the light (Aryans) and children of the dark (Semities/Jews)as engaged in an eternal struggle for man's destiny. The confusing prose appears academic to many lay people, yet there are no footnotes, index, or bibliography. Readers were expected to simply accept these revealations, without question, from a great spiritual master. The only people who could "understand" the secrets were people whose soul was worthy of "perceiving the veil."

Here is a typical passage from p.45: "The Semitic current contains absolute and superior principles: the idea of unity and universality in the name of a supreme Principle which, in itas application, leads to the unification of the human family. The Aryan current contains the idea of ascending evolution in all terrestrial and supra-terrestrial kingdoms, and its application leads to an infinite diversity of developments in the richness of nature and the many aspirations of the soul. Semitic genius descends from God to man; Aryan genius ascends from man to God."

In simple words, the author claims Jews are humanitarians who wanted a peaceful, artificial, and universal culture based on man as he is today. The Aryans, on the other hand, wanted an advanced civilization for natural elite who understood that war was nature's way to push evolution and mastery over both the external and internal worlds.

Weak vs Strong. The many vs. the few. Artifical vs. Natural. Pacifist vs. Warrior. Egalitarian vs. Elitism. Material vs Spiritual. The past vs. the future. Fossils vs. Masters. These "innocent" beliefs spread across Weimar Germany, increased the prevalent anti-Semitism, and provided intellectual justification for the dehumanization of Jews as "germs infecting the Aryan Fatherland." The Bible says you can judge the seeds by the fruit it bears. The Holocaust was one of the fruits of this wildly popular and false explanation of "secret spiritual messages."

 

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