Mathilde Ludendorff - Attacks On The Occult

Attacks On The Occult

She trained in psychiatry at Munich alongside Emil Kraepelin and in the course of her study developed a strong opposition to the occult, attacking the work of Albert von Schrenck-Notzing and arguing that occult practices had been responsible for the development of mental illness in a number of her patients. This topic was dealt with at length in her work Insanity Induced Through Occult Teachings.

She went on to launch a number of attacks on astrology, arguing that it had always been a Jewish perversion of astronomy and that it was being used to enslave the Germans and dull their reasoning. The title of her main work on the subject, Fraud of Astrology, indicated her position succinctly.

Anthroposophy was also a target for Ludendorff, notably in her 1933 essay The Miracle of Marne. She argued that General Helmuth von Moltke the Younger had lost the First Battle of the Marne because he had come under the control of Lisbeth Seidler, a devotee of Rudolf Steiner. As a consequence of these writings Ludendorff added occultists to the Stab-in-the-back legend.

She also attacked the works of Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, an Indologist who supported völkisch ideas but emphasised the Indo-European origins of the Germans. She criticized the lack of depth and tendency towards jargon in his seminal 1932 work Der Yoga als Heilweg and further argued that the teachings of Krishna and Buddha had in fact been adopted by the writers of the Old and New Testaments, making Indian religion off-limits given her aversion to Christianity. Hauer, fearing the power wielded by Ludendorff in völkisch circles – given her body of work and her influential husband, would de-emphasise the Indian aspects of his ideas in subsequent writings.

On a personal level, Ludendorff's hatred of the occult also stemmed from her support for the völkisch movement and her desire to construct a new. specifically-German religion. As such she feared that if Germany was won away from Christianity it would fall instead into existing occult practices, which she felt were no more German in origin than the Christian faith. She believed that the Dalai Lama was controlling the Jews in their supposed attempts to destroy Germany through Marxism, Roman Catholicism, capitalism and Freemasonry.

In spite of her personal hatred of occultism, her involvement in the völkisch movement and Germanic cultural identity meant that she co-operated with a number of devotees of occult practices. This was notably the case in the Edda Society of Rudolf John Gorsleben, of which she was a member and whose other members included Friedrich Schaefer, a follower of Karl Maria Wiligut, and Otto Sigfried Reuter, a strong believer in the astrology which she so roundly condemned.