Black Sun #4: The Spiritualization of Nazism
How occult myth turned historical evil into something fascinating
The last Book Club session on Julius Evola generated some attention.
A clip I posted on X about his influence in New Right / alt Right / Dank Right circles surprised some people who hadn’t realized how deep his fingerprints go. Some knew already, praise God. But most didn’t.
I’ve had conversations with friends and colleagues since then as they’ve begun to recognize Evola’s themes woven through modern dissident right thinking—“hiding in plain sight,” as it were. My sincere prayer is that this work continues to spread, and more people see what’s been percolating under the surface is now rising into public consciousness.
This past week we covered three chapters: Imperium and the New Atlantis, Savitri Devi and the Hitler Avatar, and The Nazi Mysteries.
This is where things get weird, and they don’t stop being weird.
As we learned in session 1, Lincoln Rockwell drove a “hate bus” around and led street provocations. In session 2, we saw how Colin Jordan did the same in England.
What both men shared in common was that they focused on material concerns like ground-level activism, public confrontation, and what we might call “earthly” grievances. They used Nazi symbolism explicitly to refer to the actual, historical Nazis.
Yes, Rockwell had a moment of “universal awareness” where he felt called to continue Hitler’s mission. But that cosmic consciousness wasn’t his emphasis. He wanted provocative violence in the streets.
Julius Evola, on the other hand, marked a shift into something else entirely. He took Neo Nazism into explicitly cosmological territory.
Before we continue, one important note is that Black Sun isn’t organized linearly by time. Rockwell didn’t lead to Jordan who led to Evola in sequence. Instead, their streams of thought (if you want to call it that) run parallel, intersect, and then influence groups across the subsequent decades.
For example, Evola was already active before the war. His ideas then sprang back up afterward, infusing neo-Nazi movements with dark spiritual life.
So, think of Black Sun as layers of transparency that Goodrick-Clarke is separating for us to illustrate the complicated picture underneath.
This is important, because rhe material we covered this week includes both the post-war era AND thinkers who were active in the 1850s through the 1930s. And that’s what I mean about these ideas percolating in the underworld for a long time. Before the internet, they circulated in obscure publications, fringe communities, and bulletin board systems (BBS’es for you 90’s kids). When conspiracy thinking went mainstream, they flooded out from exile directly into online communities, feeding what young men think about history, masculinity, and meaning.
That’s why I’m doing this work.
The Spiritual Foundation
In chapters 4 and 5, Black Sun focuses on three key figures in the development of the postwar neo-Nazi religious worldview: Francis Yockey, James Madole, and a woman named Savitri Devi.
Francis Parker Yockey wrote his work Imperium in 1948, when the rubble had barely stopped smoking in Europe. He was working from a premise called “meta-historical antisemitism,” or the idea that “Aryans” and “Semites” (Jews) have been locked in a Manichean struggle between light and dark since the beginning of time. Yockey in turn was borrowing from Oswald Spengler’s work Decline of the West, which similarly claimed that Jews exploited rationalism, capitalism, and democracy to destroy Western traditions.
To justify his worldview, Yockey even gave an early version of Holocaust denial, claiming that the gas chambers had been faked. And Imperium is dedicated to “the hero of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler.”
Is all this sounding familiar?
As Goodrick-Clarke writes: “It is impossible to overestimate Yockey’s importance in early postwar Nazi networks.” (Black Sun, p.77)
The second key figure of this section, James Madole, was celebrated as “the father of post-war occult fascism.” For more than three decades he haunted the New York City streets calling for fascist revolution. His National Renaissance Party (NRP) also fused political beliefs with occult spirituality, drawing from Theosophy, Hinduism, paganism, and satanism. It had even been confirmed that Madole had a satanic altar in his apartment with an image of Baphomet (p. 83).
Common to many satanists and pagans, Madole saw Christianity as Jewish in origin, and condemned it as a Semitic aberration forced upon the proud Aryans. And similar to Evola’s idea of authoritarian spiritual elitism, Madole saw his NRP “Security Echelon” activists as occult warriors upholding the order of the cosmos.
The third figure, Savitri Devi (born Maximiani Portas) played a pivotal role via her creation of a Hindu-baesd framework for Hitler veneration. Devi adopted the Hindu cycle of ages, agreeing with Evola that the modern era is located in the Kali Yuga. And Devi believed Adolf Hitler was an avatar of Vishnu, a divine incarnation sent to redeem humanity. She didn’t mean this metaphorically, she meant it literally. Her Hitler cult even included prayers to Shiva while clasping Hitler’s likeness to her breast, and reading the Nazi Party program alongside the Bhagavad Gita.
She was no fringe figure in neo-Nazi circles, either; her books inspired Lincoln Rockwell, William Pierce, and Colin Jordan, and she was a founding member of the World Union of National Socialists (WUNS) at their camp-conference in 1962. Through Rockwell and Pierce, her ideas about Hitler’s significance as an avatar and savior for “the white race” reached an international readership.
In other words, the founders of the neo-Nazi movement in the United States and Britain loved her work.
Again, none of this is Christian, nor has it ever been. Neo Nazi cosmology and anthropology is explicitly anti-Christian AND anti-Jewish. This has been the spirit animating Nazi beliefs in the underground of the internet for 80 years or more.
The Mystification
In perhaps one of the most important sections of the book, chapter six shows how Nazis were stripped of their negative stigma and infused with occult mystical power. The great losers of World War 2 were invested with a satanic aura. It was meant to be a criticism, but it tragically ended up giving them a dark fascination.
By the early 1960s, a sort of “Nazi mystique” had emerged based on a sensationalized presentation of the movement. The Nazis were stripped of their brutal political and historical context, which enabled them to enter mainstream popular culture through the backdoor as the perennial “supervillain.”
The massively popular books The Morning of the Magicians (1960) by Pauwels and Bergier and The Spear of Destiny (1972) by Trevor Ravenscroft tantalized the West’s comfortable imagination with enticing images of Nazi mystery. Much later, the “Indiana Jones” films in the 80’s brought worldwide awareness to SS interest in ancient traditions, including the Lost Ark, the Holy Grail.
The “Nazi mysteries” thus became a very profitable genre. As a result, today we have what Goodrick-Clarke calls a “Nazi mysteriosophy” that has divorced the modern image of the Nazis from historical realities.
As he writes, “The original stigmatization of Nazism as pure evil was thus inverted to celebrate the taboos of the liberal democratic world as forbidden gods of a dark realm.” (p. 127)
That’s what we live in today. Nick Fuentes can say that Hitler is “effing cool” because young men don’t have images of people shot in the back of the head on cold concrete. Instead, they have in their minds an occult mystique driven by fictional images that divorce Nazis from historical reality and turn them into profitable film villains.
Why This Matters
Christ doesn’t call men to romantic fantasies of civilizational collapse or mystical participation in cosmic racial warfare. He calls men to obedience, humility, courage, endurance, and faithfulness across generations.
If you have sons, brothers, or young men under your influence, you can’t afford to ignore that these ideas are shaping their imagination online.
You’ll hear much more in the Book Club. Full video and audio below.
Next Book Club Meeting
Wednesday, February 25
2:30pm Pacific / 5:30pm Eastern
For discussion:
Chapter 7: The SS Experiment and Nazi UFOs
Chapter 8: Antarctica and Aldebaran
Chapter 9: Miguel Serrano and Esoteric Hitlerism
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Video, audio, and summary notes follow for paid subscribers 👇
