The 20th century produced the most systematic state use of occult methodology in documented history. It also produced the most systematic effort to deny that this happened. Both things are thoroughly documented. The denial is the more interesting story.
The occult tradition we’ve traced through this series — from Egyptian heka through the grimoire tradition to the 19th-century revival — made contact with state power at multiple points in the 20th century. The most consequential contact point is the one most people treat as a historical curiosity: the Nazi occult program. It is not a curiosity. It is the trunk from which the CIA’s consciousness research programs, the Soviet psychic warfare programs, and the current state interest in non-local consciousness and contact phenomena all grew. Understanding the chain is necessary for understanding where we are now.
The Three Who Made the Nazi Occult Program
The standard framing of Nazi occultism treats it as marginal — a quirk of Himmler’s, tolerated but never central. This framing is wrong. The occult was structural to the Nazi project from its origins, and the three key figures make this clear.
Hitler was primarily a functional user of the esoteric. He understood that occult symbolism, ritual structure, and the invocation of mythic narratives could be weaponized for mass psychological manipulation. The Nuremberg rallies — their architecture, their lighting, their choreography — were ceremonial magic operations conducted on a population that didn’t know it was being worked on. Carl Jung noted at the time that Hitler had activated Wotan, the Germanic god of storm and war, as a psychological force in the German collective unconscious. Later in the war, as Himmler’s mysticism threatened to create a parallel power structure, Hitler moved to suppress it. Mysticism as a personal experience promotes too much independence.
Rudolf Hess was a true believer — genuinely convinced of astrology, genuinely involved in occult practice. His 1941 solo flight to Scotland was almost certainly influenced by astrological consultation. He flew on the alignment of several planets he believed to be propitious. The British treated him as mad. The more interesting reading is that he was operating from a framework that the rest of the Nazi leadership only used instrumentally.
Heinrich Himmler is the most important figure for the continuing story. He was a true believer in a way Hitler never was, and his beliefs drove operational programs with consequences that extend to the present. Himmler believed in a psychic Aryan race — that the Germans were descendants of an Atlantis-like superior civilization that had possessed genuine supernatural abilities. The evidence, in his framework, was the historical record of European witch trials: all those people burned for witchcraft must have had real abilities, and since they were German, those abilities were racial attributes.
Project Hexen — Hexen meaning witches — was the operational consequence. Himmler sent undercover teams across Germany and occupied Europe to collect documentation from every witch trial record they could find. They assembled tens of thousands of pages of first-person testimony, court records, and execution documents. The actual result was the most comprehensive dataset of human beings undergoing extreme physical and psychological circumstances and reporting contact with non-human entities ever assembled. Those documents, held at Wewelsburg Castle, fell under Russian control at the end of the war.
Wewelsburg and the SS as Occult Order
Himmler conceived the SS not as a military organization but as an occult knightly order — a new Teutonic Knights, organized around initiatory principles, rituals, and a genuine esoteric framework. The SS had grades of initiation. It had ceremonial spaces. Wewelsburg Castle was its spiritual center, redesigned at Himmler’s direction to serve as a ritual space. The crypt beneath the castle’s north tower was designed for ceremonies whose exact nature was deliberately left undocumented.
The SS skull ring, given to all SS members after three years of service, was not decorative. It was a ritual object. The runic symbolism throughout SS insignia was not stylistic. It was drawn from Guido von List’s Armanen rune system, a Theosophical/Ariosophical reinterpretation of proto-Germanic mystical traditions that List claimed to have received in a vision during a period of temporary blindness in 1902.
The ideological source material for the SS runs directly through Ariosophy — the synthesis of Blavatsky’s Theosophy with Germanic nationalism and eugenics produced by List and Lanz von Liebenfels. This is the same Theosophical tradition that produced the Golden Dawn and ran through Crowley. The traditions diverged — one went toward individual consciousness work, one toward racial supremacy and genocide. But they shared source material, and tracing that shared source is uncomfortable for the Western occult tradition in ways it has never fully confronted.
What Happened to the Nazi Research
Three threads ran out from the Nazi occult program at the end of the war.
Thread one: Project Hexen into Russian hands. The Soviets took the documentation and did not shelve it. Soviet psychic research, which was extensive from the 1950s onward, built on the Nazi foundation. By the late 1960s, Soviet psychic warfare programs had advanced to the point that US intelligence agencies became alarmed. The Soviet research wasn’t fringe — it was institutionally serious, lavishly funded, and producing results the CIA could not explain away.
Thread two: Operation Paperclip. Paperclip is usually discussed in terms of rocket science. But the scientists brought over included personnel from programs that went beyond rockets. The CIA’s assessment of what the Soviet psychic program was producing drove the development of MKUltra, which began in 1953. MKUltra was the US government’s response to the possibility that human consciousness could be directly manipulated, weaponized, and extended beyond the boundaries of the individual body — the same possibility the Nazi program had been exploring under different ideological framing.
Thread three: MKUltra into Stargate. MKUltra’s consciousness research generated data. The Stanford Research Institute, under Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ, began formal remote viewing research in the early 1970s with CIA funding. The Stargate Project, which ran from 1978 to 1995, represented the US government’s institutional acknowledgment that remote viewing was real enough to fund as an intelligence asset. Personnel who went through Gateway training — the Monroe Institute’s consciousness-expansion protocol, which the CIA had been running participants through since the 1970s — continued to operate in classified contexts after the program’s official termination. Luis Elizondo has confirmed receiving Gateway training as part of his government work.
MKUltra: What It Actually Was
MKUltra is documented. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is Congressional record, confirmed by the Church Committee in 1977 and by FOIA document releases. What it was, stated plainly: the CIA, building on research from Nazi mind control experiments conducted under Operation Paperclip scientists, ran a program from 1953 to 1973 that tested LSD, other psychoactive compounds, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, torture, and various combinations on non-consenting subjects. Operation Midnight Climax involved CIA operatives running safe houses where prostitutes dosed clients with LSD while CIA observers monitored the effects. All of that is documented, confirmed, and in the history books.
What is less discussed is the theoretical framework. The research wasn’t just about mind control in the ordinary sense — it was about the boundaries of the self. What happens to individual consciousness under extreme chemical, psychological, and physical stress? Can those boundaries be dissolved? Can information be inserted from outside? Can the altered state be used to access non-ordinary perception?
These are the same questions the grimoire tradition was asking, through different methods, for six hundred years. The CIA asked them with LSD and torture rather than fasting and ritual. The underlying inquiry was identical: what is the relationship between consciousness and the contact interface?
Propaganda as Applied Occultism
The Nuremberg rallies were choreographed by Albert Speer with direct input from Himmler’s occult advisors. The Cathedral of Light — 130 anti-aircraft searchlights pointed vertically into the night sky, the mass assembled in geometric formation — was structured to invoke specific psychological states in the assembled crowd. Eyewitness accounts describe the effect as genuinely overwhelming, almost supernatural in its force.
The psychological mechanism being deployed was what Jung called the activation of archetypes — deep structures in the collective unconscious that, when triggered by the right combination of symbol, ritual, sound, and collective attention, produce emotional and psychological states that bypass individual rational judgment. This is the same mechanism the grimoire tradition documents. The difference is scale and intent: the grimoire tradition applies it to an individual practitioner seeking contact; the Nazi propaganda apparatus applied it to millions of people to manufacture consent for genocide.
The techniques did not disappear in 1945. Modern political communication — the staging of rallies, the use of specific colors and symbols, the orchestration of crowd response — reflects the same principles. Brands use them. Governments use them. This is not speculation. The field of political communication was substantially shaped by researchers who had direct access to the Nazi study of mass psychological manipulation.
The Gateway Documents and What They Confirm
The CIA’s Gateway Experience documents, declassified in 2003, are the clearest official confirmation of what the 20th-century state programs were actually after. The CIA analyst who wrote the internal assessment concluded that the Monroe Institute’s consciousness-expansion techniques were genuine — not speculatively genuine, operationally genuine. The analyst writes that the program produces real access to non-ordinary information and that the mechanism involves consciousness accessing a domain where time and space operate differently.
This is the Hermetic cosmology, stated in 20th-century scientific language, in a CIA internal document.
The analyst also concludes that the protocol produces contact with what he describes as intelligences native to the non-ordinary domain. Not visions. Not hallucinations. Contact with entities that operate in the domain the practitioner accesses through the altered state. The CIA has been, since at least 1973, in possession of documentation that the contact interface is real, can be reliably accessed through specific consciousness-altering techniques, and produces contact with non-human intelligences. The government’s own assessment is that the occult tradition was documenting something real.
What This Chapter Establishes
The occult tradition’s contact protocol was taken seriously enough by the most powerful state actors of the 20th century to fund, classify, and continue funding for decades. The Nazi program, the Soviet program, the CIA program, and their successors were all attempts to operationalize the same protocol the grimoire tradition had been refining since the 14th century. They all found the same thing: the protocol works. The contact is real. The information obtained has operational value.
What the contact is with, what it wants, and what the 70-year classified research has actually produced — those are questions for the chapters that follow.
Next: Chapter 7 — The American Occult. Joseph Smith’s scrying stone, the California current, Parsons and the space program, and the distinctly American lineage that runs from 19th-century treasure magic to the edge of modernity.
Previously in this series: Chapter 5 — The Orders · Chapter 4 — The Grimoires · Chapter 3 — The Transmission Problem · Chapter 2 · Chapter 1
Fortean Winds: Anolmalous Research 