Check out this interesting article at Reality Sandwich: An American Fascism? by Gary Lachman. The following is a slightly edited version of the afterword to his new book, Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen, to be published by Quest in November 2008.
Starting with the mysterious appearance of the Rosicrucian manifestoes in Germany in the early 1600s, and ending, as the afterword shows, with some recent developments in the US, I look at some examples of occult or "illuminated" politics in the modern world. Some areas covered include Rosicrucian utopianism and its collapse in the Thirty Years War; the esoteric sexual politics of 18th century London and its influence on Emanuel Swedenborg; Freemasonry and Mesmerism's impact on radicalism in England, as well as on the French and American Revolutions; the rise of "popular occultism" in the work of the cabalistic socialist, Eliphas Levi; spiritualism and its links to the early Women's Movement; Theosophy and Indian self-government; the 'progressive' occultism of the fin-de-siecle; the Great Game and the search for Shambhala; the birth of the counterculture in the early 1900s; matriarchy, myth and the rise of Nazism; Rene Schwaller du Lubicz and anti-Semitism; Rene Guenon, Traditionalism, and the retreat from the modern world; the magical fascism of Julius Evola; and Mircea Eliade's links to the far-right politics of the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Read on.
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