“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.”
That’s the final sentence of Black Sun, by the British historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. He published it in 2002, less than a year after 9/11. This was before Obama, before Trump, before Biden.
Goodrick-Clarke looked at skinheads, white power music, and bizarre and violent new religions of white identity, and then he imagined how these trends would look to someone looking back from 2020 or 2030.
We’re living in his window right now.
This is the final session of my Black Sun Book Club. I recorded this live in May, before my son was born. Now the whole read-through is public, every session, for free. I pray this resource blesses you and others who need to hear it.
The Lodestone
“Race is the lodestone of the Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism.”
That’s the first line of Goodrick-Clarke’s conclusion. When I read it, I almost made the mistake of thinking I knew what a lodestone was. Thankfully, I realized that if there’s one word in this entire book I needed to define correctly, it’s that one. So I looked it up.
A lodestone is a natural magnet. Metaphorically, it’s anything that exerts a powerful attraction and draws people in toward it.
For the men documented in this book, that magnet is race. Race is the single idea that drives everyone in that world, even past the point where the idea started driving them. That applies to every figure Goodrick-Clarke studied, everyone who followed them, and tragically, so much of the right wing today, including in Christian circles.
But by the end of those last four pages, Goodrick-Clarke has told us what he thinks makes the lodestone stronger. That’s why I respect him as much as I do.
A Careful Historian
Goodrick-Clarke earned his doctorate at Oxford and later held a chair in Western esotericism at the University of Exeter. Before him, most of what was written about Nazism and the occult was sensationalized speculation. There was lots of mystery and little hard evidence. He was the first to do the archival work, even learning German to do so. In the process he separated the real core of truth from the tabloid nonsense. His landmark book, The Occult Roots of Nazism, came out of that work.
He died in 2012. Otherwise, you best believe I’d have interviewed him for several hours by now.
Not in a Vacuum
Now consider that Black Sun was published by NYU Press. Goodrick-Clarke was writing for academia, not the general public. One might imagine that after three hundred pages on skinhead gangs, Nazi Satanism, and Hitler as a Hindu avatar, the easy ending would write itself.
“Look at these spooky men!” he might have written. “They’re coming for your kids.” His readers would have nodded along, and he’d have gotten the applause of a left-leaning audience hearing its own assumptions confirmed.
But Goodrick-Clarke didn’t do that. Instead he wrote, “the racist far right has not grown in a vacuum.”
He said the movements he’d spent years documenting “clearly mirror the rising levels of immigration into Western countries and the ensuing pressures toward multiculturalism.” Read that sentence again.
Then he traced how civil rights policy moved from equal opportunity toward the equal outcomes of racial quotas, which he called “an unprecedented and remarkable deviation from the Anglo-American tradition of individual rights.” And he wrote a sentence that’s hard to say even today: “Government-mandated privileges on the basis of race have in turn fostered the growth of the racist far right.”
In other words, Goodrick-Clarke turned to his own lefty readers and told them to take a hard look in the mirror… in 2002! He said, in effect, “If you’ve been horrified by the last three hundred pages, understand that policies you may support have played a role in producing them.”
That’s the dynamic he puts his finger directly on. A disaffected man feels the ground shifting beneath him. The faster it shifts, the harder the “lodestone” of race pulls on him. More shifting, more attraction from the lodestone, like in this video illustration:
Then the Aryan cults hand him a mythology: Evola’s Kali Yuga, Yockey’s imperium, Devi’s Hitler avatar, Serrano’s supremacist cosmology, and finally Himmler’s sonnenrad—the Black Sun symbol—which carries these views in a form the public won’t recognize the way they might a swastika.
Every one of these cosmologies and anthropologies promises the same soteriology via eschatology: that the decline is temporary and “their people” will come out on top in the age to come.
Goodrick-Clarke calls them “powerful mythologies to negate the decline of white power in the world.”
Why I Respect Him
He could have made the subjects of his book into caricatures and monsters. He didn’t. He lets their crazy ideas speak for themselves, and every so often you can almost hear him chuckle at what he’s reporting, because he can’t not. But Goodrick-Clarke resists the urge to dehumanize them.
Yes, their responses are emotional, non-rational, and in many cases evil. They’re also responses to something that’s really happening.
I have enormous respect for him for not looking away from that fact. He didn’t take the cheap and easy way out, nor did he pander. If you ask me, that’s rare intellectual courage.
I suspect it’s also part of why Black Sun never got the acclaim of Occult Roots. But in my humble opinion, it’s no less of a landmark. Perhaps time will prove it so. (Though with all due respect to the doctor, I pray that providence renders him wrong.)
Their Lodestone and Ours
Here’s the most important part: understanding a dynamic doesn’t mean excusing the men caught up in it. They will own their responses before God. Goodrick-Clarke wasn’t a Christian and so doesn’t say that outright, but I think he’d agree.
Notably, he also never says which side his potential authoritarian future in 2020 or 2030 would come from. In this session, I argue it could come from the hard left or the hard right.
For both these reasons and likely others, Goodrick-Clarke gives no answer for what to do about what he sees. I don’t think he regarded it as his job. But it is ours.
So, the first thing is to point out error when we see it. I may not know yet what the right political response to all of this is, but I know which one is wrong. Not because I think so, but because Scripture is my standard.
Bitterness, cynicism, resentment, envy, hatred, violence: every character in Black Sun shows you where that road ends up. And now I’m watching men who call themselves Christians respond in many of the same ways.
So whatever our response turns out to be, it has to start with Christ as the lodestone. Not our race, not our people, not our skin. Those are natural goods not to be dismissed, but they can’t be our chief guiding principle.
Look, I get it. Identity has always had a powerful hold on people, and today even more so. Men long to belong with those who look like them and those they love. Belonging confers identity, identity confers meaning, and meaning often confers purpose. And if disaffected men are seeking anything today, they’re seeking purpose.
On the other hand, we’re called to choose Christ over our own people. Consistently. If you’re one of the seed of the woman and everyone around you who looks just like you is in the seed of the serpent, they’re not your people. Not ultimately. Not in the long view.
Goodrick-Clarke seemed to think an authoritarian future might be coming one way or another. I believe we still have the opportunity to prevent it, and our conduct as Christians will help determine that. A little leaven leavens the lump.
So, let race be their lodestone. And may Christ be ours.
Norman Cohn wrote that Black Sun “deserves the most serious attention and a wide readership.” Amen to that. So, please buy the book.
If you have a son, a brother, or a man in your church who’s drifting toward this stuff, you can hand him the book and the entire series to study along. Every session is free on the Black Sun Book Club page.
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In this session we talk about:
What a lodestone is, and why race pulls hardest on men who feel the ground shifting
Why Goodrick-Clarke told his own readers to look in the mirror
“Government-mandated privileges on the basis of race,” and the growth of the racist far right
The myths that promise the decline is temporary, from the Kali Yuga to the Black Sun
Why I respect a scholar who refused to turn his subjects into monsters
Choosing Christ over our own people, consistently
Resources
Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (Amazon)
The Occult Roots of Nazism by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
If you know a pastor, a father, or a friend who’s watching young men in his church get pulled by this lodestone, send him this session.
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