Most of us know a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But a lot of knowledge can be even more dangerous, depending on the spirit of those who employ it. Mob mentality needs only a little primitive emotion; mass movements, on the other hand, borrow authority from higher learning, learning best left to the unworldly. The strangest case of such ersatz justification is that of Nazism borrowing from esoteric Tibetan teachings. The Aryan superman, as fantastic as he seems now, has a back story more incredible than most of us know, a story with origins on the roof of the world.

The World Ice Theory

The nice thing about most creation stories is that one needn't bother poo poo them. Giant turtles rising above the waters, God blowing into a handful of dust, obviously allegorical. Unfortunately, a dash of pseudo science  makes things much harder to disprove to the shallow thinker. Enter Austrian Hans Horbiger, who proposed that our solar system was born of cosmic ice kissing a super-nova.

Fairly Sagan-esque, no? Hold on. Horbiger claimed his cosmological evidence had been worked out nine thousand years ago, in Tibet. 150,000 years before that, an extra moon had collided with Earth, the cataclysm ending the golden age of paradise kingdoms Lemuria, Atlantis, and Thule.  It also ended the dinosaurs and started Noah's flood, but so what? The divine Aryans had lost their Atlantean home. The deity Manu led them to a subterranean realm underneath, you guessed it - Tibet -, that they named Agarthi.

Karl Willigut, known as Himmler's Rasputin, took enough stock in this tale to travel to a Lamaist monastery, and come back babbling about journeying to an astral plane. There it was revealed to him that Lhasa, Ulan Bator, the Egyptian Pyramids, and Vienna formed a quadrangle of cosmic juju power.

Thule and Vril

But who relies on the rhetoric of some half-cocked Austrian? Herodotus himself identified the ancient polar realm of Hyperborea, and sturdy, reliable Swede Olad Rudbeck later concluded that the Atlanteans founded it.  The land later split into Thule and Ultima Thule. Sober British astronomer Sir Edmund Halley looked inward and discovered the earth was hollow, and a consensus of nineteenth century European armchair-archeologists claimed that the people of Thule went subterranean. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Indian nationalist Gangadhar Tilak deduced from the Vedas that these Thuleans migrated south, under the capacious Himalayas, to found the Aryan race.

Besides being devoted troglodytes, what made these Aryans so special? Vril power, psychokinetic energy harnessed from the earth's core. A slew of early German nationalists soon clamored to reharness the vril vibes that would allow them to reclaim their place as the earth's supermen.  Among them, one Felix Neidner, who founded the Thule Society in 1910. More ambitious than the Kiwanis, if not the Shriners, the Thule Society gave birth to the German Workers Party, but not before Thule insider Dietrich Eckart initiated a young Adolf Hitler into its ranks, showing him the workings of vril, whereby the Aryan supermen might be reawakened.

The Swastika

German WWI general  Karl Haushofer, a great student of Tibetan culture, was invested enough in vril power to start the Vril Society in 1918, in Berlin. In his spare time, he developed the doctrine of Geopolitics and professed the subject at a Munich university. Central to the discipline of Geopolitics, conquering territory so that a superior folk could gain enough lebensraum, that is, living space.

Haushofer's prize student was none other than Rudolf Hess, who introduced his teacher to an imprisoned Hitler in 1923. Haushofer took the swastika, ancient Sanskrit symbol of immutable luck, as the talisman for the vril power that would endow the Aryan supermen's descendants with the power to  conquer enough raum to do their leben in.

Haushofer also  used chiefly the swastika, among other ‘evidence', to convince Hess, Hitler, and later Himmler that  the forefathers of the Aryan race had dwelt in and near Tibet, and that the country held secrets indispensable to the Nazi cause. How the swastika got reversed to become the Nazi party symbol, involves diabolical black magick beyond the scope of even the jaded to go into without several hours and a strong snifter of brandy.

Ahnenerbe and the Schafer Expedition

Haushofer also persuaded Hitler to establish the Ahnenerbe, Bureau for the Study of Ancestral Heritage, in 1935. Its chief mandate - to research the origins of the swastika, and locate indisputably the origins of the Aryan race. The Ahnenerbe put Tibet at the top of a short list of likely candidates.

An expedition was in order. The Ahnenerbe turned to Ernst Shafer, who had already been on two Tibet expeditions, for a third. This third expedition, incidentally, came with an official invitation from the Tibetan government, wishing no doubt to balance the German and Japanese allies against the threat of the British and Chinese.

Off Schafer went in 1938, leading a large expedition that would return a year later with thousands of herbal and zoological specimens, ancient texts, reams of cultural notes, film footage, but no Aryan equivalent of the Ark of the Covenant - none reported, anyway. Schafer did report a Tibetan oracle's prophecy that although the Germans had brought sweet presents and words to Tibet, its leader would be as unto a dragon.

Schafer's expedition associate Bruno Beger took charge of callipering and plaster-casting hundreds of Tibetan heads to scientifically assess their racial inferiority, while Schafer busied himself with detailing the homosexual practices of monks and their acolytes. He accomplished an impressive collection of Tibet's flora and fauna, for all that, and after WWII ardently disavowed any occult motives for the expedition, claiming that he had simply manipulated the Ahnenerbe to fund a trip he had longed to take.

But others, most famously Trevor Ravenscroft in his book The Spear of Destiny, assert that Nazis, under the influence of Haushofer and the Thule Society, had arranged less public annual expeditions to Tibet frequently between 1926 and 1943. The search for Aryan forefathers in both Agharti and the mythical Shambala, monks versed in the use of vril power, such was their provenance, granted much of Ravenscroft's research has been charged with dubiety. Yet their can be no gainsaying the deep interest of leading Nazis in Tibetan occult practices, their own dubious connections to the country, or the disaster of turning esoteric concepts to mundane use.