There is another strain of Atlantean esoterica not discussed in the fascinating article, “A Description of the Lost Land of Atlantis & The Reason For Its Downfall – According To Plato,” posted today on LRC. That is how the mythos of Atlantis was at the seminal core of how Adolph Hitler and the Nazi regime made use of ancient mysticism and occultism to manufacture a new Germanic mythology, the religion of National Socialism, that combined ancient legends and esoteric cosmologies with cutting-edge theories of genetic science, in their quest to create an Aryan super race.

The study of the construction of pseudo-secular gnostic religions has been one of the principal obsessions of my life since I heard Gerhart Niemeyer of Notre Dame lecture on it in 1975 at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Western Summer School at Thomas Aquinas College.

Niemeyer was a keen student of Eric Voegelin on these matters, as was Murray Rothbard. I believe understanding this 2000 year battle between orthodox Christianity and Gnosticism is the ultimate key to unlocking the history of the previous two millennia.

Christianity and the West have been at war for hundreds of years with a succession of gnostic political religions and mass movements seeking to impose brutal elite rule and mastery of their subject peoples.

These sinister efforts have been responsible for untold death, destruction, and misery.

Over one hundred million persons alone perished in the 20th Century as a result of these murderous totalitarian regimes.

For decades distinguished scholars such as Michael Burleigh, Eric Voegelin, Murray N. Rothbard, James H. Billington, Rudolf Rocker, Hannah Arendt, Norman Cohn, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Raymond Aron, and Gerhart Niemeyer have intensely discussed and debated the concepts of totalitarianism and political religions to describe such destructive phenomena as National Socialism and Communism, as well as their heretical predecessors.

The Best of Charles Burris