For many decades I have been fascinated with esoteric and gnostic political religions and their tremendous impact upon Western civilization. It is one of the major topics I have discussed in various articles/blogs here at LRC — including those here, here, here, here.
The mythos of the lost continent 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 Roman Catholic 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. The subject of gnosticism is one of the most important and impactful areas of study in world history, with tremendous consequences both ancient and modern few non-initiates can fathom.
It has fascinated a wide range of dedicated scholars with which LRC readers are familiar such as James Billington, Michael Burleigh, Murray Rothbard, Henri de Lubac, Thomas Molnar, John Gray, Terry Melanson, Peter M. Burfeind, and F. A. Hayek, who have intensely discussed and debated the concepts of totalitarianism and political religions to describe such insidious phenomena as National Socialism and Communism, as well as their heretical predecessors.
This is the penultimate menace that Western Civilization, and especially the United States, faces today. This is what has motivated the destructive riotous mobs of thugs and looters in the streets, the craven willfully ignorant “cancel culture” corporatists, the seditious professoriat in court academia, and the prestitutes in the establishment regime media.
7:29 pm on July 8, 2020
