undercurrent

May 04, 2004

The rearing of love-pygmies

Thanks to The Pill Box's post (ages ago) I got hold of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism. This is the one book in a thousand on the subject that isn't written by a total nutter (not that those books are necessarily bad, but when you've read one or two they tend to become a bit wearing). Goodrick-Clarke is a 'proper' scholar, and this is a rewrite of his PhD thesis. For me, the highlight so far is the chapter about Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, who wrote Theo-Zoology or the Lore of the Sodom-Apelings and the Electron of the Gods, a work dedicated to proving that:
...the chief pursuit of antiquity appeared to have been the rearing of love-pygmies (Buhlzwerge) for deviant sexual pleasure. The prime purpose of the Old Testament had been to warn the chosen people (the Aryans!) against the consequences of this bestial idolatry.
Just to connect this to the previous post too:
Lanz...interpreted the Passion as the attempted rape and perversion of Christ by pygmies urged on by the disciples of the satanic bestial cults devoted to interbreeding.
Any laughter this provokes starts to ring hollow when you begin to understand just how deeply the roots of this quasi-religious aristrocratic racism went, and how widespread (albeit in diluted form) apparently outrageous ideas became (amongst the 'intelligentsia' particularly - hello Martin H), simply because they fulfilled the need for comforting ritual, for chiliastic revenge fantasies and for some sort of order. An important book if you know the economic/political story and want to know the other origins, less seriously treated (this is still the main book on the subject, 20 years later) but just as important, of Nazi ideology. And more importantly, the complex relationships between romantic anti-modernism, mysticism, racism and fascism.