Showing posts with label Occult Reich. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Occult Reich. Show all posts
Marija Oršić (Maria Orsitsch)
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The Nazi Search for Shambhala and Agharti II
According to Ravenscroft
by dr Alexander Berzin
A slightly different account of the Nazi search for Shambhala and Agharti appeared in The Spear of Destiny (1973) by the British researcher Trevor Ravenscroft. According to this version, the Thule Society believed that two sections of Aryans turned to worship of two evil forces. Their turning to evil brought about the decline of Atlantis and, subsequently, the two groups established cave communities in mountains submerged beneath the Atlantic Ocean near Iceland. The legend of Thule arose from them. One group of Aryans followed the Luciferic Oracle, called Agarthi (Agharti), and practiced the left-hand path. The other group followed the Ahrimanic Oracle, called Schamballah (Shambhala), and practiced the right-hand path. Note that Ravenscroft reported the reverse of Pauwels, Bergier, and Frére’s assertions that Agharti followed the right-hand path and Shambhala the left.
Ravenscroft went on to explain that according to the “Secret Doctrine” – alluding to Blavatsky’s book by the same name – which appeared in Tibet ten thousand years ago, Lucifer and Ahriman are the two forces of Evil, the two great adversaries of human evolution. Lucifer leads people to set themselves up as gods and is associated with the lust for power. Following Lucifer can lead to egotism, false pride, and the misuse of magic powers. Ahriman strives to establish a purely material realm on the earth and uses the perverse sexual craving of people in black magic rites.
Recall that although Blavatsky had written about Lucifer and Ahriman, she did not make the two a pair and did not associate either of the two with Shambhala or Agharti. Moreover, Blavatsky explained that although Latin scholastics had transformed Lucifer into a purely evil Satan, Lucifer had the power both to destroy and to create. He represented the light-bearing presence in everyone’s minds that could uplift people from animalism and bring about a positive transformation to a higher plane of existence.
It was Steiner who had emphasized Lucifer and Ahriman as representing the two poles of destructive power. However, Steiner described Lucifer as the ultimately benevolent destructive force for regeneration and Ahriman as purely malevolent. Moreover, Steiner associated Lucifer with Shambhala, not Agharti and, in fact, like Blavatsky and Bailey, did not mention Agharti at all. In addition, none of the three occult authors described Shambhala as located underground. Only the Roerichs had associated Shambhala with the underground city of Agharti, but had clarified that the two were different and never asserted that Shambhala was underground.
Ravenscroft, like Pauwels, Bergier, and Frére, also asserted that through the initiative of Haushofer and other Thule Society members, exploratory teams were sent to Tibet annually from 1926 to 1942 to establish contact with underground cave communities. They were supposed to convince the masters there to enlist the aid of Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers to further the Nazi cause, especially for creating an Aryan superrace. The adepts of Shambhala refused to help. As followers of the Ahrimanic Oracle, they were concerned only with furthering materialism. Moreover, Shambhala had already affiliated itself with certain lodges in Britain and the United States. This was perhaps a reference to Doreal, whose Brotherhood of the White Temple in America was the first major occult movement to assert Shambhala as an underground city. Moreover, this account also fits well with Haushofer’s disdain for Western materialistic science, which he called “Jewish-Marxist-Liberal Science,” in favor of “Nordic-Nationalistic Science.”
Ravenscroft continued that the masters of Agharti agreed to help the Nazi cause and, from 1929, groups of Tibetans came to Germany, where they became known as the Society of Green Men. Joined by members of the Green Dragon Society of Japan, they set up occult schools in Berlin and elsewhere. Note that Pauwels and Bergier asserted that colonies of not only Tibetans, but also Hindus were present in Berlin and Munich from 1926, not 1929.
Himmler was attracted to these groups of Tibetan-Agharti adepts and, from their influence, established the Ahnenerbe in 1935. Recall that Himmler did not establish the Ahnenerbe, but rather incorporated it into the SS in 1937.
The Nazi Search for Shambhala and Agharti I
According to Pauwels, Bergier, and Frére
by dr Alexander Berzin
by dr Alexander Berzin
A number of scholars have questioned the accuracy of the postwar studies on Nazism and the Occult. Whether or not they accurately represent Nazi thought during the Third Reich, still they represent a further popularized distortion of the Shambhala legend. Let us examine two slightly different versions from among them.
According to the version found in Le Matin des Magiciens (The Morning of the Magicians) (1962) by the French researchers Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier and in Nazisme et Sociétés Secrètes (Nazism and Secret Societies) (1974) by Jean-Claude Frére, Haushofer believed that two groups of Aryans migrated south from Hyperborea-Thule. One went to Atlantis, where they intermarried with the Lemurians who had also migrated there. Recall that Blavatsky had associated the Lemurians with Atlantis and Shambhala, and Bailey had associated both the Lemurians and Atlanteans with the Shambhala Force. The descendents of these impure Aryans turned to black magic and conquest. The other branch of Aryans migrated south, passing through North America and northern Eurasia, eventually reaching the Gobi Desert. There, they founded Agharti, the myth of which had become popular through the writings of Saint-Yves d’Alveidre.
According to Frére, the Thule Society equated Agharti with its cognate Asgaard, the home of the gods in Norse mythology. Others assert, less convincingly, that Agharti is cognate with Ariana, an Old Persian name known by the ancient Greeks for the region extending from Eastern Iran through Afghanistan to Uzbekistan – the homeland of the Aryans.
After a world cataclysm, Agharti sank beneath the earth. This accords with Ossendowski’s account. The Aryans then split into two groups. One went south and founded a secret center of learning beneath the Himalayas, also called Agharti. There, they preserved the teachings of virtue and of vril. The other Aryan group tried to return to Hyperborea-Thule, but founded instead Shambhala, a city of violence, evil, and materialism. Agharti was the holder of the right-hand path and positive vril, while Shambhala was the keeper of the degenerate left-hand path and negative energy.
The division of right-hand and left-hand paths had appeared already in Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine. There, she wrote that at the time of the Atlanteans, humanity branched into right- and left-hand paths of knowledge, which became the germs of white and black magic. She did not associate the two paths, however, with Agharti and Shambhala. In fact, she did not mention Agharti at all in her writings. The terms right- and left-hand paths derive from a division within Hindu tantra. Early Western writers often characterized left-hand tantra as a degenerate form and misidentified it with Tibetan Buddhism and its teachings of anuttarayoga tantra.
According to Pauwels and Bergier, the Thule Society sought to contact and make a pact with Shambhala, but only Agharti agreed to offer help. By 1926, the French authors explained, there were already colonies of Hindus and Tibetans in Munich and Berlin, called the Society of Green Men, in astral connection with the Green Dragon Society in Japan. Membership in the latter society required ritual Japanese suicide (Jap. hara-kiri,seppuku) if one lost one’s honor. Haushofer had purportedly joined the society during his early years in Japan. The leader of the Society of Green Men was a Tibetan monk, known as “the man with green gloves,” who supposedly visited Hitler frequently and held the keys of Agharti. Expeditions to Tibet followed annually, from 1926 to 1943. When the Russians entered Berlin at the end of the war, they found nearly a thousand corpses of soldiers of the Himalayan race, dressed in Nazi uniforms but without identification papers, who had committed suicide. Haushofer himself committed hara-kiri before he could be tried at Nürenberg in 1946.
The Vril Society / The Luminous Lodge
The Vril Society was formed by a group of female psychic mediums led by the Thule Gesellschaft medium Maria Orsitsch (Orsic) of Zagreb, who claimed to have received communication from Aryan aliens living on Alpha Cen Tauri, in the Aldebaran system. Allegedly, these aliens had visited Earth and settled in Sumeria, and the word Vril was formed from the ancient Sumerian word "Vri-Il" ("like god"). A second medium was known only as Sigrun, a name etymologically related to Sigrune, a Valkyrie and one of Wotan's nine daughters in Norse legend.
The Society allegedly taught concentration exercises designed to awaken the forces of Vril, and their main goal was to achieve Raumflug (Spaceflight) to reach Aldebaran. To achieve this, the Vril Society joined the Thule Gesellschaft to fund an ambitious program involving an inter-dimensional flight machine based on psychic revelations from the Aldebaran aliens.
Members of the Vril Society are said to have included Adolf Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, and Hitler's personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morell. These were original members of the Thule Society which supposedly joined Vril in 1919. The NSDAP (NationalSozialistische Deutsche ArbeiterPartei) was created by Thule in 1920, one year later. Dr. Krohn, who helped to create the Nazi flag, was also a Thulist.
With Hitler in power in 1933, both Thule and Vril Gesellschafts allegedly received official state backing for continued disc development programs aimed at both spaceflight and possibly a war machine.
After 1941 Hitler forbade secret societies, so both Thule and Vril were documented under the SS E-IV unit.
The claim of an ability to travel in some inter-dimensional mode is similar to Vril claims of channeled flight with the Jenseitsflugmaschine (Other World Flight Machine) and the Vril Flugscheiben (Flight Discs).
The Society allegedly taught concentration exercises designed to awaken the forces of Vril, and their main goal was to achieve Raumflug (Spaceflight) to reach Aldebaran. To achieve this, the Vril Society joined the Thule Gesellschaft to fund an ambitious program involving an inter-dimensional flight machine based on psychic revelations from the Aldebaran aliens.
Members of the Vril Society are said to have included Adolf Hitler, Alfred Rosenberg, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Göring, and Hitler's personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morell. These were original members of the Thule Society which supposedly joined Vril in 1919. The NSDAP (NationalSozialistische Deutsche ArbeiterPartei) was created by Thule in 1920, one year later. Dr. Krohn, who helped to create the Nazi flag, was also a Thulist.
With Hitler in power in 1933, both Thule and Vril Gesellschafts allegedly received official state backing for continued disc development programs aimed at both spaceflight and possibly a war machine.
After 1941 Hitler forbade secret societies, so both Thule and Vril were documented under the SS E-IV unit.
The claim of an ability to travel in some inter-dimensional mode is similar to Vril claims of channeled flight with the Jenseitsflugmaschine (Other World Flight Machine) and the Vril Flugscheiben (Flight Discs).
This secret society has it's roots and inspirtion from a science fiction book!
Vril: The Power of the Coming Race (original title), also known as The Coming Race is a novel published in 1870 by Edward Bulwer-Lytton.Edward Bulwer-Lytton was a member of British Royalty. He was involved in politics and became the Secretary of State for the Colonies. He was a poet, playwright and novelist who authored many books, the most popular being, "The Last Days of Pompeii". He also wrote Zanoni and the Coming Race. He was a member of the Hermatic order of the Golden Dawn. Most people associated with secret societies and occult lodges never took his work, The Coming Race as mere fiction. but truth veiled in a fictional story The novel is an early example of science fiction, sometimes cited as the first of this genre. The elements believed as truth was that a superior subterranean master race with the energy-form called Vril , and their claim to rise and conquer the surface race someday,was accurate, to the extent that some wealty and influential members Bulwer-Lytton who were theosophists accepted the book as truth and began to act upon their beliefs.
The plot of the novel centers on a mining engineer, who accidentally finds his way into a subterranean kingdom occupied by beings (the race of the Vril-ya), who seem to resemble angels. The hero soon discovers that they are descendants of the inhabitants of Atlantis. They have access to an extraordinary force called "Vril" that can be controlled at will. However their spiritually elevated hosts controlled the Vril.The uses of Vril in the novel amongst the Vril-ya vary from an agent of destruction to a healing substance. According to Zee, the narrator's host, Vril can be changed into the mightiest agency over all types of matter, both animate and inanimate. It can destroy like lightning or replenish life, heal, or cure.
The hero is looked upon as a pet who might have to be put down or at least kept for all time with them. He escapes this subterranean realm with the knowledge that this race intends to someday resurface to take control of the surface dwellers, hence the title The Coming Race.
The book was quite popular in the late 19th century, and for a time the word "Vril" came to be associated with "life-giving elixirs".
When the theosophist William Scott-Elliot describes life in Atlantis in The Story of Atlantis & The Lost Lemuria (first published 1896), the aircrafts of the Atlanteans are propelled byvril-force. Obviously he did not regard that description as fiction, and his books are still published by the Theosophical Society.
Behold the Green Dragon: The Myth & Reality of an Asian Secret Society
Dr. RICHARD SPENCE
—
History certainly has no shortage of enigmatic or controversial brotherhoods, orders, lodges and societies. The Knights Templar, for instance, are a perennial object of fascination and speculation. Whether the Templars were the inspiration for the no less controversial Freemasons, a band of depraved heretics or the innocent victims of a conspiracy born of greed and envy remains a topic of lively debate.
What no one can contest, however, is that the Knights existed. The beginning and formal end of the Order can be dated with precision, and the names of its leaders are a matter of historical record. Even a dubious organisation like the Priory of Sion can be shown to have had a genuine, if recent, existence, though its claims to centuries of tradition and hidden influence remain unsubstantiated. But there are other groups which seem to exist only in that gray zone between reality and imagination, ones whose origins, number, scope and purpose remain maddeningly vague.
One such entity is the quasi-mythical Green Dragon Society (GDS), also known as the Order of the Green Dragon or simply the Green Dragon. It most often is mentioned as a Japanese secret society, but that is not necessarily the whole story. Other evidence, or at least allegation, argues that its true origins lay in China or Tibet and that its influence extended to the power centres of Tsarist Russia and Nazi Germany. Historical figures from the Emperor Hirohito, to Adolf Hitler to Rasputin have been tied to the Green Dragon, legitimately or not. The waters have been further muddied by role-playing games which have combined the Society with H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and other fictional elements. Determining what is “real” and what is the playful figment of someone’s imagination can be tricky.
What follows will not solve the mystery of the Green Dragon, but it will try to separate fact from fiction and explain where claims and information came from. In doing so, it will offer a tantalising glimpse into a mysterious organisation that may have played a significant role in shaping modern history.
Enter the Black Dragon
The simplest explanation for the Green Dragon Society is that it is a muddled reference to the better known, and definitely real, Black Dragon Society (BDS) or Kokuryukai. The BDS first appeared about 1901 and was an offshoot of another, older Japanese secret society, the Black Ocean or Genyosha. Like its parent, the Black Dragon was a militant, “ultra-nationalist” body which worked to expand Imperial Japan’s influence on the Asian mainland. The BDS initially concentrated on combating Russian interests in the vast Chinese province of Manchuria. Indeed, the Society took its name from the “Black Dragon” or Amur River which separated Manchuria and Siberia. The Black Dragon’s network of spies and saboteurs took an active part in the subsequent Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) and the Black Dragons later expanded their operations and influence throughout Asia and Europe and even the Americas.
The nominal founder and leader of the Black Dragon was Ryohei Uchida, but the true master, or “darkside emperor,” was Uchida’s shadowy and sinister mentor, Mitsuru Toyama, also a founding member of Genyosha. He reputedly was steeped in “extreme Eastern religious beliefs.”1 That suggests the mysticism and occultism attributed the Green Dragon Society. Might the scheming and secretive Toyama have played a guiding role in both societies?
Were the Black and Green Dragons, if not one and the same, two sides of the same conspiratorial coin? For instance, just as the Black Dragon (Amur) River delineated the northern limit of Manchuria, further south the much smaller Qinglong or Green Dragon River roughly followed the dividing line between Manchuria and China proper. If the Black Dragon Society was primarily anti-Russian in its focus, might the Green Dragon have been anti-Chinese or anti-Western? While the Black Dragon focused on the political side, did the Green deal with the more secretive occult realm?
One obscure but important reference which clearly distinguishes between the Black and Green societies appears in the memoir of Chinese strongman Chiang Kai-shek’s “second wife,” Ch’en Chieh-ju.2 She recalls that her husband contemplated a “completely secret system of private investigators” and considered as models the “Green and Black Dragon Societies of Japan and the Triad societies of Shanghai.”3 Thus, in Chiang’s mind at least, the two Dragons were entirely separate (though not necessarily unrelated), Japanese, and appropriate models for secret intelligence gathering.
As noted, the Black Dragon Society was heavily involved in spying and the kindred spheres of propaganda and subversion. As such, it basically functioned as an extension of the Imperial Army’s “special organ,” the Tokumu Kikan. Not to be outdone in anything, the Japanese Imperial Navy maintained its own secret service, the Joho Kyoko. Just as the Army utilised the Black Dragon to augment or handle its “special needs,” might the Navy have used the Green Dragon in the same way?
Trevor Ravenscroft & Karl Haushofer
The identification of the Green Dragon as a fundamentally mystical order most evidently appears in Trevor Ravenscroft’s 1973 The Spear of Destiny. It is not insignificant that Ravenscroft was a follower of Anthroposophy and its founder Rudolf Steiner, and his book is a distinctly Anthroposophist take on the nefarious occult forces behind Hitler and his Nazi Regime. Ravenscroft firmly connects the Green Dragon to German geo-politician and mystic Karl Haushofer, one of Hitler’s presumed spiritual mentors. According to Ravenscroft, Professor Haushofer “gained… extraordinary gifts through membership of the Green Dragon Society of Japan in which the mastery of the Time Organism and the control of the life forces in the human body is the central aim of ascending degrees of initiation.” Ravenscroft adds that “one of the highest tests of this type of initiation in the Green Dragon Society demands the capacity to control and direct the life force in plants in a somewhat similar manner to the former powers of the Atlantean people.” “Only two other Europeans have been permitted to join this Japanese Order,” [and who, one wonders, were they?] continues Ravenscroft, “which demands oaths of secrecy and obedience of far more strict and uncompromising nature than similar secret societies in the Western world.”4
The major problem with all this is that Ravenscroft’s sources are hazy or non-existent. He likely took a cue from the 1960 work of Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians. Those authors claim that Haushofer “is said [by whom?] to have been initiated into one of the most important secret Buddhist societies and to have been sworn, if he failed in his ‘mission,’ to commit suicide in accordance with the time-honoured ceremonial.”5 Assuming this to be an allusion to the above GDS, we are still faced with the lack of any identifiable source for the authors’ information.
Ravenscroft goes on the claim that members of the Green Dragon Society set-up shop in 1920s Germany and there joined forces with a group of Tibetan monks called the “Society of Green Men.” The latter were, in fact, the “Adepts of Agharti and Schamballah” and their leader was a mysterious “Man with the Green Gloves.”6 It also turns out that the Green Dragons and the Green Men had “been in astral communication for hundreds of years.”7 The united brethren soon established communication with the rising Herr Hitler.
Others have since elaborated on the above by turning the Green Dragons into an “inner cabal” of bothGenyosha and the Black Dragon, and making them “but an outpost of a much larger conspiracy based on the even more secretive group known and the Green Men.”8 While fascinating, such assertions appear not to have any basis in hard fact.
But that is not to say they may not have a germ of truth. For instance, there was an occult figure in late Weimar Berlin sometimes referred to as the “Magician with the Green Gloves” who did become a short-lived soothsayer for Hitler and the Nazi Party. He was no Tibetan but, of all things, a Jew who went under the name of Erik Jan Hanussen. When he became inconvenient by accurately predicting the Reichstag Fire (or arranging it), his erstwhile Nazi pals killed him.9
Likewise, there could very well be something to a Green Dragon-Tibet connection. A green dragon, orZhug, plays an important role in Tibetan mythology where it symbolises the “God of Thunder… bravery and all-conquering force.”10 More to the point, perhaps, a Japanese Buddhist monk named Ekai Kawaguchi made two visits to Tibet in the years before World War I, around the same time Haushofer was in Tokyo. On the surface, Kawaguchi seemed a simple religious devotee, but he is known to have had contact with at least one Japanese secret agent while in the Land of Eternal Snows, Narita Yasuteru, as well as an operative of British Indian intelligence.11 Kawaguchi also had links to Annie Besant and her Theosophist sect, another group accused of subversion and general skullduggery.12 More significantly, Kawaguchi was a devotee of Zen Buddhism.
In his 1989 The Unknown Hitler, Wulf Schwarzwaller claims that Haushofer was a master of various Eastern mystical traditions and “had familiarised himself with the Zen teachings of the Japanese Society of the Green Dragon.”13 More recent sources emphasise the Green Dragon’s intimate association with Zen, specifically its Soto branch, and claim that the “Green Dragon has had a tradition of secret propagation,” whatever that means.14
The Buddhist connection may offer some important clues. Buddhism originated in India and spread to Tibet and China, and from there to Japan. Zen (Cha’an) doctrine also had its roots in China. One of the most revered Buddhist “saints” in Japan is Kukai, an 8th-9th century mystic who spent years studying in China. Interestingly, his main place of enlightenment was the Green Dragon Temple in Xian where he was trained in occult, tantric traditions originating in Tibet. Returning to Japan, Kukai incorporated these into his version of True Land (Shingon) Buddhism.15 The problem is that Shingon was and is quite distinct from Zen, so which, if either, is connected to the Green Dragon?
To further complicate the picture, there are numerous references to a Chinese Green Dragon Society. Most are linked to the martial arts. Green Dragon kung fu societies are active throughout the world, but most appear to be of fairly recent origin. Oddly enough, during the 1960s, the Chicago-based Green Dragon Society was locked in a bitter feud with the rival Black Dragon Society! One version of the Chinese Green Dragon’s history pegs it as a Taoist secret society formed in response to the 17th century persecutions launched by the Jesuit-influenced Emperor Kiang Hsi. According to this, the secret society emerged from the Pure Thought Mystical School of Tao, and along with an implacable hatred for the Manchu Dynasty, it remained dedicated to the “practice of Taoist Alchemy and Immortalist Techniques.”16 That sounds a bit like what Ravenscroft described. The Green Dragon also reputedly operated under numerous aliases and disguises. A secretive and even sinister Green Dragon Society also shows up in at least two martial arts films: ‘The Deadly Sword’ (1978) and ‘Seven Promises’ (1980). Finally, a Green Society or Green Gang was (and arguably still is) a major force in the Chinese underworld.
So, could there be two Green Dragon Society’s, one Japanese and Buddhist and the other Chinese and Taoist? This much seems clear: the inter-pollination of Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, and the sects and secret societies they spawned, is centuries old. Within that context, just about anything is possible.
Other oddments, which may or may not mean anything, include the fact that during his marriage to another wife, Chiang Kai-shek paid a visit to a Green Dragon monastery. The late scholar Charles Rice, after sifting through everything he could find on the Green Dragon Society, wondered whether it might be nothing more than the karate club of the Japanese Emperor’s Imperial Guard!17 Strangest of all, perhaps, is a 2004 article from the South China Morning Post which describes the recent arrest of three members of the “Green Dragon Temple Cult” on charges of running a prostitution ring.18 The female victims were assured a place in heaven if they earned enough money for the cult.
Seven Heads of the Green Dragon
There is another, more involved, though no less mysterious, description of the Green Dragon Society that predates Ravenscroft by forty years and Pauwels and Bergier by almost thirty. It is almost certainly the source for much of what he and others have had to say about the GDS since. The work in question is the 1933 Les Sept Tetes du Dragon Vert [“The Seven Heads of the Green Dragon”] by Teddy Legrand. The title evokes the dragon with “seven heads, ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads” mentioned inRevelations 12:3, although that beast is red, not green. At first glance the book seems to be just an obscure piece of French pulp fiction, albeit one replete with real people and real events along with many invented ones.
Basically, the book presents the Green Dragon or, more simply, “The Greens,” a sinister international cabal bent on world domination. An interesting detail is that these secretive conspirators number precisely 72 and were, presumably, the “72 unknown superiors” of conspiratorial legend.19 To achieve its nefarious aim, the Green Dragon generates war, revolution and chaos, and its hand is the unseen common denominator in such seemingly disparate events as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the instigation of the Bolshevik Revolution, the murder of the Romanovs, the 1922 killing of German foreign minister Walther Rathenau, the abduction of White Russian general A. P. Kutepov and the apparent suicide of millionaire Swedish “Match King” Ivar Kreuger. All in all, the Green Dragon sounds like another version of the infamous Illuminati who haunt so many conspiracy theories.
At the time of the book’s action, 1929-30, the mysterious Greens are busy facilitating the rise of the “The Man of the Two Z’s” under whose “sharp spurs” Europe would soon tremble.20 The latter is a thinly-veiled and rather prophetic reference to Hitler who had barely come to power when the book was published. The “Two Z’s” were the interlocking arms of the Swastika.
The central figure of Les Sept Tetes… is a British secret agent, the ace of L’Intelligence Service, James Nobody, who may be the original literary inspiration for James Bond. He had already starred in a series of pot-boiler spy novels by French writer Charles Lucieto, and the latest was an effort to continue the franchise after Lucieto’s recent death. Interestingly, Lucieto was a retired spy, having served the French secret service in World War I. He liked to claim that his Nobody and similar yarns were roman-a-clefs which revealed true, if hidden aspects of recent history and current events. His publishers later implied that this had something to do with his untimely demise.
To no great surprise, Lucieto’s successor, “Teddy Legrand,” was a pseudonym. In fact, the author was Pierre Mariel who turns out to be a rather interesting fellow. Nominally he was a journalist, but like Lucieto he had ties to French intelligence. That has led to the claim that the latter “inspired” or even directed his literary efforts as it had his predecessor’s.21 More importantly, perhaps, he was a self-proclaimed expert on the occult. Some years later, under the name Werner Gerson, he would author one of the first books on Nazi occultism.22 Mariel himself was a member of both the Freemasonic Martinist Order and a one-time French grand master of the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC).23Interestingly, in Les Sept Tetes… Mariel paints the Martinist Order as a conspiratorial sect which played a behind-the-scenes role in the French Revolution and later political upheavals, and which just might have links to the mysterious Green Dragon.24
In the book, brother spies Nobody and Legrand are inspired by their common curiosity about the fate of the Russian Imperial family. The chief object of fascination is an icon on St. Seraphim, supposedly found on the Tsarina Alexandra’s body, which bears a puzzling inscription, in English: “S.I.M.P. The Green Dragon. You were absolutely right. Too late.”25 They quickly determine that the first element, which is accompanied by a six point “kabbalistic” symbol, stands for “Superieur Inconnu, Maitre Philippe” [Unknown Superior, Master Philippe], a French Martinist mystic who was an early guru to the Tsarina Alexandra.26 They also note the Tsarina’s predilection for the “Tibetan” Swastika as a good luck symbol. The rest of the story follows the duo’s efforts to discover who or what constitutes the Green Dragon.
Some interest inevitably falls on Maitre Philippe’s successor as royal spiritual guide, Rasputin, who comes across as a tool of the Green Dragon, if not an outright member. Legrand/Mariel correctly observes that during World War I, the dissolute holy man maintained communication with mysterious “Greens,” or simply “The Green,” based in Stockholm in which Mariel portrays as another piece of a larger conspiracy.27 Interestingly, Colonel Stanislaus de Lazovert, one of the men later involved in the plot to kill the dissolute holy man, claimed that Rasputin was a member of the “Green Hand,” a secret order presumably backed by Russia’s Austrian enemies.28 Most recently and reliably, Russian investigator Oleg Shishkin linked Rasputin’s mysterious friends to a Berlin-inspired conspiracy which included German occult lodges and members of the ethnic-German Baltic nobility. Their secret brotherhood, Baltikum, used a green swastika as its symbol.
Coincidentally or not, one of the antagonists encountered by Nobody and Legrand is a Baltic Baron, Otto von Bautenas, whom they identify as no less than one of the “72 Verts.” Bautenas turns out to have been a very real person: an ex-adherent of Baltikum, a close ally of Lithuanian politico Augustine Valdemaras and leader of the fascistic Iron Wolf movement.
Mariel also implies that Anthroposophy kingpin Rudolf Steiner was mixed-up in all this skullduggery and “secret politics” through his connections to pan-German secret societies.29 He also drops Gurdjieff’s and Besant’s names in the same murky mess.
While the book’s action stays within the geographic confines of Europe, shifting from Constantinople, to Scandinavia, to Paris to Berlin, there are numerous references to the Orient, especially Tibet. Legrand and Nobody enlist the aid of one of their old antagonists, Jewish-born “international spy” I.T. Trebitsch-Lincoln, whom has transformed himself into the Tibetan lama Dordji Den. Here again, there is at least a kernel of truth; in 1931 the chameleon-like Trebitsch was ordained a Buddhist monk and became “the Venerable Chao Kung.”30
The pair eventually find themselves in Berlin, in the presence of The Man with the Green Gloves, an apparently Asian soothsayer who has set himself up much as the real Hanussen. They observed an eerie figure that seemed to have “complete mastery of his reflexes.”31 Was this the “control of the life forces” mentioned by Ravenscroft? Like a living statue, “not a muscle in his face moved” as the weird seer conversed in “excellent Oxford English.” Nobody and friend finally realise that they are standing face-to-face with “one of those famous Greens.” The description has led one recent author, Christian von Nidda, to conclude that the Greens were nothing less than “reptilian” beings!32
In the end, Mariel never clearly defines just what the Green Dragon Society is and is not. Doubtless, that was never his intention. Interestingly, there is no suggestion of any Japanese connection. However, as the episode with the Man with Green Gloves suggests, there is the spectre of a powerful, mysterious Asiatic hand at work. The true purpose of the Russian Revolution, he believed, was to destroy Europe’s eastern barrier against Asiatic intrusion. Mariel sensed a kind of “permanent conspiracy against the white race – against Western Greco-Latin civilisation – which seeks to sap, fracture and shake the edifice of already unstable Europe.”33 When the time came, the conspirators would “substitute him” [the Man of the Two Z’s] as a means of bringing about a New Order.
It also remains uncertain to what degree Mariel intended Les Sept Tetes… to be taken seriously. Clearly, that has not prevented some from doing so. Truth, fiction, or some strange amalgam of the two, Mariel’s little book is undoubtedly the inspiration for most of the claims about the Green Dragon Society which have sprung up since. We are still left to wonder whether, if all the exaggeration, obfuscation, superstitious dread and outright lies were cleared aside, there would be anything there at all. Maybe.
Footnotes:
1. “Japan’s Dark Background, 1881-1945.” www.fortunecity.com/tatooine/lieber/50/bds1.htm [15 Oct. 2008].
2. Chieh-ju Ch’en, Chiang Kai-shek’s Secret Past: The Memoir of His Second Wife, Westview Press: Boulder, 2000.
3. Ibid.
4. Trevor Ravenscroft, The Spear of Destiny: The Occult Power behind the Spear which Pierced the Side of Christ, Weiser Books: Boston, 1982, 246-247.
5. Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, Avon Books: New York, 1960, 279.
6. Ravenscroft, 256.
7. Ibid.
8. Gil Trevizo, “The Order of the Green Dragons” (2003), http://odh.trevizo.org/green_dragons.html[15 Oct. 2008]. This and like articles are connected to the Delta Green role-playing games.
9. On Hanussen’s bizarre career, see Mel Gordon, Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant, Feral House: Los Angeles, 2001.
10. “Tibet’s Dragon Culture,” courtesy of Charles Rice, August 2006.
11. Alexander Berzin, “Russian and Japanese Involvement with Pre-Communist Tibet: The Role of the Shambhala Legend,”www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/archives/kalachakra/shambhala/russian_japanese_shambhala.html. [10 Sept. 2008]
12. Richard Spence, Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult, Feral House: Los Angeles, 2008, 184, 189.
13. Wulf Schwarz waller, The Unknown Hitler: Behind the Image of History’s Darkest Name, Berkley Books: New York, 1990, 100.
14. For a highly critical view of “Green Dragon Zen,” See: groups.google.com/group/alt.philosophy.zen/browse_thread/thread/da7a81921050f728.
15. Trevor Corson, “The Magic of Buddhism,” Kyoto Journal (1 July 2000),www.scrawlingclaw.com/blogs/ArticleArchive/Entries/2000/7/1_The_Magic_of_Buddhism.html [10 Nov. 2008].
16. “The Green Dragon Society & Brotherhood, Chi Tao Ch’uan Gung Fu: A Recent History,”www.orientalherb.com/index.php?cPath=35 [1 Nov. 2008].
17. Charles Rice to author, 3 July 2003.
18. Clifford Lo, “Sex Cult Might Have Lured 30 Women,” South China Morning Post (16 Jan. 2004).
19. Nolan Romy, Les Grandes Conspirations de Notre Temps, Bruxelles, 2002, 35-50.
20. Teddy Legrand, Les Sept Tetes du Dragon Vert, Berger-Levrault: Paris, 1933, 78.
21. Oleg Shishkin, Ubit’ Rasputina, Olma Press: Moscow, 2000, 36-37.
22. Werner Gerson, Le Nazisme: Societe Secrete, Productions de Paris: Paris, 1969.
23. Shishkin, 36.
24. Legrand, 32.
25. Legrand, 30-33.
26. True name: Nizier Anthelme Philippe.
27. Legrand, 39-40.
28. “Stanislaus Lazovert and the Assassination of Rasputin, 29 December 1916,”www.firstworldwar.com/source/rasputin_stanislaus.htm.
29. Legrand, 228-230.
30. Bernard Wasserstein, The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln, Penguin Books: New York, 1989, 274.
31. Legrand, 243-244.
32. Christian Von Nidda, Our Secret Planet, Lulu Publications, 124-125.
33. Legrand, 132
.
Dr. RICHARD SPENCE is a professor of History at the University of Idaho. Among other works, he is the author of Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly (Feral House, 2002). His latest book is Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult, published by Feral House.
The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 112 (January-February 2009).
The Green Glove
written by Clint Werner
concept by John Helmer
- Name: Ljang Khu Arihant (The Green Destroyer of Enemies)
- Location: Tibet
- Group Affiliation: SS-Ahnenerbe
- Powers: The Green Glove is skilled in powers that tap into abilities locked deep within the human mind. He has mastered the powers of the mind to a level few men have ever achieved, able to control the chakra not only of his own body, but of those around him.Employment of tumo, the ability to endure sub-zero temperatures with nothing more than manipulation of his chakra is the least of his powers. He is able to induce crippling pain and accelerated healing with the touch of his hand. By exerting his will, he can hypnotize almost anyone who dares to meet his gaze, displaying varying levels of control over his subjects. Those who fall deepest under his control have their will completely subjugated, becoming slaves to the Green Glove’s mind.The Green Glove can also induce hallucinations by deceiving and manipulating the senses of his victims, making them see or hear things that are not there, or else fail to see things that are. The other Adepts of Agarthi are able to also able to exert these abilities, although in an extremely limited fashion. A normal ‘Green Man’ might be able to control the will of a half-dozen men at the same time, the Green Glove can command the minds of hundreds.
The Green Glove has many powers that are unique to himself, as well. He is able to enter several trance-like states that allow him to transcend the barriers of time and space. He can astrally project his consciousness, allowing him to send an intangible ‘ghost’ of himself to a specific target destination.Although able to be seen and heard, this astral form of the Green Glove is not material and incapable of interacting with his environment. He is also unable to project himself to any site which exact location is unknown to him. Another trance state projects his spirit back in time, allowing him to observe past events at whatever location his physical body is occupying.Unfortunately forward projection in this fashion is almost impossible as ‘the future is constantly in motion’. However, theGreen Glove is skilled in the arts of both Tibetan and Chinese astrology, and has made several uncannily accurate predictions through these forms of divination.
- History: In 1936, the Ahnenerbe, a scholarly division of the SS charged with uncovering archaeological and anthropological evidence for the origins of the Aryan race, mounted an expedition to Tibet, a region which some scholars felt might very well hold the secrets of the genesis of the Aryan race.The expedition employed many methods toward achieving their goal, examining the cultural, historical and religious aspects of the Tibetans, seeking any trace of Aryan influence, and even physiological comparative anatomy to determine if there was a genetic link between the Tibetans and ancient Aryan peoples.
Another goal of the expedition was to disprove the evolutionary claim that men had descended from apes by proving that the notorious ‘abominable snowman’ was nothing more than a Himalayan bear, certainly not any manner of ‘missing link’. A small group detached itself from the main Ahnenerbe expedition, climbing high into the mountains to seek the elusive Asian black bear and prove it to be the source of the yeti legend. The German hunting party soon found itself high in the icy mountains, climbing peaks perhaps no man before them had ever trod upon.Their Sherpa guides and porters grew increasingly nervous as the Germans pressed them onward, here they said was the domain of the yeti, a place it was unsafe for men to be. Threats kept the Sherpas from deserting, and after an arduous climb, the Germans stood upon the roof of the world, gazing down into windswept valleys and snow-covered mountains. The Sherpas urged that they should turn back, that the Nazis had already tempted fate too long. The Germans would not abandon their hunt, however and ordered their porters to begin the climb down into the valley.
That first night, camped upon the walls of the icy valley, three porters vanished, snatched from their tents with such impossible skill that the men beside them had not been disturbed from their sleep. The morning sun was blotted from the sky, blackening the landscape as though a shroud had been thrown over the world. The Sherpas begged the Germans to turn back, but there would be no turning back. After the most vocal of the guides had been silenced with a bullet in his skull, the expedition pressed on.All that day, as they descended into the valley, every man felt malevolent eyes watching him.That night, the screams began – sharp, piercing and unearthly; echoing from the summits all around them, wailing their haunting challenge into the darkness. In their tent, the German leaders conferred with one another, wondering if perhaps they should not turn back after all. They had been charged with proving the yeti a myth, nothing more than a mountain bear. They weren’t equipped to deal with… with whatever it was that had been stalking them. After long hours of debate, a decision was reached – in the morning they would turn back. But it was already too late.
The yeti attacked in the darkest of night, descending upon the German camp in an avalanche of bestial fury and superhuman strength. The Sherpas were slaughtered as they cowered before the hulking, ape-like hominids. The Nazis tried to resist, firing wildly at their inhuman attackers. But bullets seemed to have no effect upon the yeti, rounds fired at the beasts seemed incapable of finding their mark. As they had with the Sherpas, the yeti tore the German mountaineers apart with their brutal strength. Not a man of them was left alive, bar one. Of all the men who had set out on their ill-fated hunt, Gestapo agent Erich Wunsche was the least equipped for survival.He was no mountaineer, no big game hunter, not even a naturalist familiar with the animals of the Himalayas. He was a watchdog for the Party, an agent sent along simply to ensure that any discoveries made by the expedition would be disclosed to Himmler and the SS before they were made known to anyone else. It was somehow absurd that Erich should be the one spared by the yeti. Yet spared he was, the monsters leaving him alone as he fled into the night.
Erich ran, ran until his heart felt like it would burst and he dropped into the snow, quivering with terror. Then he picked himself up and ran some more. At some point, he fell and did not have the strength to rise again. He resigned himself to his fate, letting his eyes close as sleep crashed down upon his exhausted frame.
Erich never expected to see another dawn, yet when his eyes fluttered open, he found himself staring into the golden disc of the sun. Against all the odds, he had survived. He had endured the cold of the night, he had managed to keep from falling into a crevasse in his flight through the darkness, he had escaped the murderous wrath of the yeti.Erich laughed, a sense of victory filling him. He looked at the bleak, icy landscape around him, trying to find his bearings. As he did so, he found his eyes drawn to something, something that he would have sworn had not been there a moment before, something that stared at him with bestial eyes and grinned at him with massive fangs.Before his eyes, more of the creatures seemed to materialize from the thin air, glaring at him with their inscrutable gaze. He hadn’t escaped the yeti at all. Erich leapt to his feet, fleeing once more down the mountain. The yeti followed him, their long stride easily matching Erich’s frantic dash. But the monsters made no effort to close with their quarry.Sometimes one would draw ahead of Erich, blocking his path and forcing the German to change his direction. Whenever the Nazi stopped to rest, one of the monsters would hoot or growl, urging the man onward. Erich understood now that the yeti were more than simple beasts, more than some ‘missing link’. There was intelligence about them, a cruel intelligence that was playing with him, herding him toward some final and horrible destination.
It was nearly nightfall before Erich saw it, rising from the side of the mountain, perched atop a jagged outcropping of rock. It looked like a Buddhist monastery, but there was about it a suggestion of something even older. Somehow, the structure looked wrong in some way Erich could not define. He only knew that the place filled him with dread, that it was the last place he wanted to go. But the yeti seemed to have other ideas, continuing to drive the German toward the foreboding monastery.
Exhausted, driven to the limits of endurance by his ordeal, Erich collapsed before the gates of the monastery. The yeti withdrew, seemingly content to leave the man on the doorstep of the monastery. As they had appeared, so did they vanish, seemingly to blink out of existence back into the ice and snow of the mountain. Erich tried to make sense of what he had seen. It was impossible, how could such massive creatures simply vanish into nothingness in the twinkling of the eye?He did not have long to consider this affront to his logic and reason, however. His attention was soon fixed upon the massive doors of the monastery, twin portals that appeared to have been crafted from solid gold. The great doors were slowly swinging open.
Erich could see nothing of the interior of the monastery, even when the doors stood gaping before him. What was beyond those doors was darkness, a darkness deeper than what mere shadow should achieve. It was the darkness of the Pit, the blackness beneath the world. From that darkness, a man emerged. He was Tibetan, dressed in dark green robes, his hands clothed in what looked like gloves of green velvet. There was age and wisdom in his face, yet also a strength and vitality Erich had never seen in even the most robust athlete.The Gestapo agent could feel the power of the monk’s will wash over him as the Tibetan strode toward him.- ‘Erich Wunsche,’ the monk said. It was not a question. ‘No man may gaze upon this place unless he has been called here. You have been called. You will serve the Adepts of Agarthi.’
Erich’s mind reeled as the Tibetan spoke, his words uttered in such a precise, articulate German. There was something more than simple words in the monk’s tones, there was something deeper and more sinister, something that seemed to crawl through his very soul.- ‘Please, I need rest,’ the Gestapo agent begged. ‘Creatures… beasts chased me here… I need sanctuary.’
The monk looked down upon him, his expression never changing.- ‘The yeti watch over this place… there is no sanctuary here for you.’
The monk stepped forward, placing one of his gloved hands against the German’s forehead. Erich wanted to scream as he felt the monk’s nauseating touch, but found himself unable to utter a sound. Then a strange energy seemed to course through his body, running through his exhausted limbs and tired mind. Fatigue and confusion passed from him as though they had never been there.He tried to remember the fear and revulsion the sinister monk had filled him with, but even these had slipped away from him.- ‘The comos stands at a crossroads,’ the monk said. ‘It is an auspicious time, when the stars themselves may turn from the sky. The age of prophecy has come. I would see the man from Thule, the warlord who would make the earth his own. You shall take me to the great Khan in the west that I may… attend him and give him council.’
Erich did not speak, did not give any sign that he understood the monk’s words, yet the monk knew he would obey. There were few who could not. From the darkness of the monastery, more green-robed monks emerged. Like their master, the adepts were all Tibetans. Unlike their master, their hands were bare.Silently, they filed after Erich Wunsche as the Gestapo agent retraced his passage through the mountains, bringing theAdepts of Agarthi to the small Himalayan village where the rest of the Ahnenerbe expedition was conducting its investigation. A few weeks later, the Ahnenerbe returned to the Fatherland.With them they took nearly a hundred Tibetan monks and their enigmatic leader.
The Adepts of Agarthi were introduced to Heinrich Himmler, who was impressed by the mystical abilities of the monks and decided that they could be of use to the occult studies of the SS. For their part, the monks seemed to ask nothing in return, professing that they had come to Germany merely to serve the ‘great khan of Thule’.Their assurances rang hollow in the ears of many, but Himmler decided that there was too much that could be learned from the monks to turn them away. The hypnotic and spiritual powers the Adepts of Agarthi displayed could be of immense value to the Reich if only they could be tapped properly.
The leader of the adepts has neither name nor title, such an inconsequential detail is beneath him.Officials in the Reich have taken to referring to him as simply ‘The Man with the Green Gloves’ or just ‘The Green Glove’. He has become one of the most inscrutable enigmas in the Reich, moving through the corridors of power, exerting his influence at even the highest levels of the party.The Green Glove has advised Himmler on numerous occasions and even consulted with Hitler several times. Great value is placed on his occult predictions. He does so on his own terms, however, the Tibetan does not ‘perform on command’, nor would even the head of the Gestapo consider trying to give the monk orders.Indeed, only the Fuehrer seems to have the force of will to match the Green Glove’s dominating presence.
Whatever the Green Glove’s purpose is, it is not serving the Third Reich. Although he has lent his considerable powers to Germany, although he has allowed his adepts to become guinea pigs of the SS, the Green Glove’s ultimate loyalties lie elsewhere.There are some who wonder exactly what the true nature of the Adepts of Agarthi is, and who… or what… they ultimately serve.
The Green Glove has been seen all across Europe, visiting the oldest and most ancient of sites. He has been involved in recovery operations organized by the SS to capture mystical artifacts and eldritch texts. There are even reports that he has been seen far behind enemy lines, stalking the streets of London and Moscow in pursuit of whatever dark purpose has drawn him down from the roof of the world.
- Description: He wears a traditional Tibetan robe and sandals. He carries an incense staff and has a hand-carved bone necklace draped on his chest. His head is shaven revealing a small black swastika on his upper forehead. He his is often seen wearing a Tibetan monk ceremonial headdress.
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