ABSTRACT
At the outbreak of World War I, Rudolf Steiner began closing his co-ed masonic lodges, citing conspiracies against Germany by ‘black magicians’, who were using such lodges to bolster the Entente Powers. During a lecture in Stuttgart, he told audiences ‘this war is a conspiracy against German spiritual life’. Some scholars have characterised Steiner’s views as a ‘conspiracist interpretation of the war’. Was there any basis for Steiner’s claims? Or was he falling a victim to nationalistic paranoia? Owen Davies has detailed how the World War I was awash in supernatural and occult imaginations. British Theosophist A.P. Sinnett wrote about the Great War in terms of a cosmic battle between good and evil, or White and Black Lodges, a battle going all the way back to Atlantis. The 1916 annual convention of the Theosophical Society in America announced that the forces of the White Lodge were led by France, while the forces of the Black Lodge were led by Germany. Across the Atlantic, Aleister Crowley apparently infiltrated German-sponsored periodicals in New York: the propagandist The Fatherland and the literary journal The International. This essay traces the nationalist tendencies of these esotericists during World War I, arguing that in times of wartime trauma, esotericism gets enrolled in conspiracism and political conflict.
