It was easy to identify a document produced in nineteenth-century France in the Protocols, because it abounds in references to problems in French society at the time, but it was also easy to spot many very famous popular novels among its sources. Alas, the story—once more—was so convincing in narrative terms that it was taken seriously.
The rest of this story is History. An itinerant monk, Sergej Nilus, in order to further his “Rasputinian” ambitions, and obsessed with the Antichrist, printed and commented on the Protocols. After this the text travels across Europe until it comes into Hitlers hands….*
We have explored some false ideas that have made history, and about which everyone has more or less heard. But there are other crazed ideas we have forgotten about.
From 1925 onward publicity was given in Nazi circles to the theory of an Austrian pseudoscientist, Hans Hörbiger, a theory called WEL, that is, Welteislehre, the theory of eternal ice. It had enjoyed the favor of men such as Rosenberg and Himmler. But with Hitler’s rise to power Hörbiger was taken seriously even in some scientific circles—for instance, by a scholar like Lenard, who had discovered x-rays along with Roentgen.
According to the theory of eternal ice (expounded as early as 1913 by Philip Fauth in his Glacial-Kosmogonié), the cosmos is the theater of an eternal struggle between ice and fire, which produces not an evolution but an alternation of cycles, or of epochs.* There was once an enormous mass at a very high temperature, millions of times bigger than the sun, which collided with an immense accumulation of cosmic ice. The mass of ice penetrated this incandescent body, and after working inside it as vapor for hundreds of millions of years, it caused the whole thing to explode. Various fragments were projected both into icy space and into an intermediate zone where they became the solar system. The moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn are made of ice, and the Milky Way is a chain of ice that traditional astronomy has viewed as stars; but in fact these are photographic tricks. Sunspots are produced by blocks of ice detaching themselves from Jupiter.
Now the force of the original explosion is decreasing, and every planet completes not an elliptical revolution, as official science erroneously believes, but something approximating an (imperceptible) spiral around the bigger planet that attracts it. At the end of the cycle through which we are living, the moon will come closer and closer to the earth, gradually making the waters of the oceans rise, submerging the tropics, and allowing only the tallest mountains to emerge, while the cosmic rays will become more and more powerful and cause genetic mutations. Finally the moon will explode, turning into a mixture of ice, water, and gas, which in the end will plummet down onto the earth’s globe. Because of complicated events due to the influence of Mars, the earth too will turn into a sphere of ice and in the end will be reabsorbed by the sun. Then there will be a new explosion and a new beginning, just as in the past the earth had already had and then reabsorbed another three satellites.
This cosmogony presupposed a sort of Eternal Return that went back to very ancient myths and epics. Once more, what today’s Nazis call the wisdom of Tradition was in this way set up against the false knowledge of liberal Jewish science. Furthermore, a glacial cosmogony seemed very Nordic and Aryan. In The Morning of the Magicians Pauwels and Bergier attribute to this profound belief in the glacial origins of the cosmos the confidence, encouraged by Hitler, that his troops would be able to cope very well in the frosts of Russian territory.* But they also maintain that the need to prove how cosmic ice would react had slowed down the experiments on the V1s. Still in 1952, a certain Elmar Brugg published a book in honor of Hörbiger, whom he hailed as the twentieth-century Copernicus, claiming that the theory of eternal ice explained the profound links between earthly events and cosmic forces, and concluding that the silence of democratic-Jewish science about Hörbiger was a typical example of the conspiracy of mediocrities.
The cultivators of magical-Hermetic and neo-Templar sciences operating around the Nazi Party—for instance, the adepts of the Thule Gesellschaft founded by Rudolf von Sebottendorf— is a phenomenon that has been widely studied.† Apparently in Nazi circles they also paid attention to another theory, which posits that the earth is empty and we live not on its outside, on its eternal, convex crust, but inside it, on the internal concave surface. This theory was articulated at the beginning of the nineteenth century by a certain Captain J. Cleves Symmes of Ohio, who wrote to various scientific societies: “To the whole world: I declare the earth is hollow, habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres; one within the other, and that it is open at the pole twelve or sixteen degrees.” A wooden model of his universe is still preserved in the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.
The theory was taken up again in the second half of the century by Cyrus Reed Teed, who specified that what we think is the sky is a mass of gas filling the inside of the globe, with some zones of brilliant light. The sun, the moon, and the stars are not, he said, celestial globes, but rather visual effects caused by various phenomena.
After the First World War the theory was introduced into Germany by Peter Bender, and then by Karl Neupert, who founded the Hohlweltlehre (hollow-earth theory) movement. According to some sources, the theory was taken seriously in the upper echelons of the German hierarchy, and in some quarters of the German navy it was held that the hollow-earth theory would allow them to establish more accurately the positions of British ships, because if they used infrared rays, the curve of the earth would not obscure their observation.* It is even said that some shots with the V-1s missed their targets precisely because they calculated their trajectory on the hypothesis of a concave, not a convex, earth’s surface. Here—if this is true—we can see the historical, even providential usefulness of deranged astronomical theories.
But it is easy to say that the Nazis were mad and that they are all dead, apart from good old Martin Borman, who is always said to be in hiding somewhere. The fact is that if you go on the Internet and ask any search engine to find sites dealing with Hollow Earth, you will find that there are still very many followers of the theory. And it is no use saying that the sites (and the books they publicize) have been created by some cunning old foxes counting on a public of idiots and/or devotees of New Age ideas. The social and cultural problem is not the cunning foxes, but the idiots, who are clearly still legion. *
What unites all the stories I have mentioned, and what made them so persuasive and credible? The Donation of Constantine was probably created not as a deliberate forgery but as a rhetorical exercise that people only began to take seriously later.
The Rosicrucian manifestos were, at least according to their presumed authors, an erudite game and, if not a joke, at least a literary exercise that could be categorized under the genre of Utopias.
Prester Johns letter was certainly a deliberate fake, but equally certainly it did not intend to produce the effects it in fact created.
Cosmas Indicopleustes was guilty of fundamentalism, a pardonable weakness considering the times in which he lived, but as we have seen, no one really took him seriously, and his text was maliciously exhumed as an “authoritative” work only more than a thousand years later.
The Protocols emerge initially on their own, through an accumulation of novelistic themes that gradually kindle the imagination of a few fanatics and become transformed en route.
And yet each one of these stories had an advantage: they appeared convincing in narrative terms, more so than day-to-day or historical reality, which is much more complex and incredible, and they seemed to provide a good explanation for something that otherwise was more difficult to understand.
Let us turn again to Ptolemy’s account. We now know that Ptolemy’s hypothesis was scientifically false. And yet, if our intelligence is now Copernican, our perception is still Ptolemaic: we not only see the sun rising in the East and traveling across the sky throughout the hours of daylight, but we behave as though the sun went around us and we stayed still. And we say: “the sun rises, is high in the sky, is going down, sets….” Even a professor of astronomy speaks, thinks, and perceives this way: Ptolemaically.
Why did the story of the Donation of Constantine have to be disproved? It guaranteed a continuity of power after the collapse of the empire, it perpetuated an idea of Latinity, it indicated a guide, a point of reference amid the flames and slaughters perpetrated by the many suitors who were competing for the nuptials of Europe….
Why reject Cosmas’s account? In other respects he was a careful traveler, a diligent gatherer of geographical and historical curiosities, and in any case his theory of the flat earth—at least from a narrative point of view—was not entirely improbable. The earth was a huge rectangle bounded by four immense walls upholding two layers of the heavenly vault: on the
