Cult of beauty - Minerva

However, the joys of the hunt had been
tempered when, only a year earlier, he
had shot and killed his wife in a hunting
accident. A British political officer
who encountered the German expedition
while it was in Sikkim described
Schäfer as ‘interesting, forceful, volatile,
scholarly, vain to the point of
childishness, disregardful of social
convention or the feelings of others,
and first and foremost always a Nazi
and a politician’. It was Schäfer who
had handpicked the four other SS scientists
who made up the party and
who, like himself, were all members
of the Ahnenerbe, the Nazi ‘Ancestral
Heritage Organisation’.
Founded by leading Nazi
Heinrich Himmler in the summer
of 1935 as Studiengesellschaft
für Geisteurgeschichte, Deutsches
Ahnenerbe (‘Study Society for Spiritual
History and German Ancestral
Heritage’), the organisation was primarily
intended to provide scientific
credibility for Nazi racial theories
and to strengthen German nationalism
through investigation of the country’s
history and mythology (Fig 5). To
achieve these ends, the principal weapons
in the armoury of the Ahnenerbe
were to be archaeology and anthropology,
and at the heart of its studies
was the investigation of the origins and
spread of the Ayran race.
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Minerva May/June 2011
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Fig 4. Map from
Ignatius L.
Donnelly’s 1882,
Atlantis: the
Antediluvian
World. The map
indicates the
extent to which
Donnelly believed
the mythical island
kingdom influenced
world civilisations
from the Americas,
through Europe and
north Africa, to central
Asia and India.
Fig 5. Emblem of the
Ahnenerbe.
Fig 6. Helena
Blavatsky (1831–91)
photographed in 1884.
It was her pseudoscientific
theories
linking migratory
Atlanteans to India
and Tibet that laid the
foundations which
eventually led to the
Nazi expedition of
1938-39.
Fig 7. Heinrich
Himmler (1900–45).
SS-Reichsführer, Chief
of the German Police,
including the Gestapo,
and founder of the
Ahnenerbe. Architect
of the Holocaust,
Himmler was named
‘greatest mass
murder of all time’
by German magazine
Der Spiegel in 2008.
Photo: courtesy of
the German Federal
Archive, Bild 183-
S72707.
Fig 8. Herma of Plato.
Plato’s dialogues
Timaeus and Critias
that first made
mention of the
mythical land of
Atlantis. Capitoline
Museum, Rome. Photo:
courtesy of Ricardo
André Frantz.
Tibet might not seem
the most likely location
to search for the origins
of the Aryan people,
the epitome of whom
– according to Nazi
racial theorists at least –
were the tall, blond-haired,
blue-eyed Nordic peoples of northern
Europe. For scientists of the 19th and
first half of the 20th centuries, however,
the inaccessible highland plateau of
Tibet seemed to offer tantalising possibilities
for understanding human
evolution and cultural development.
Before the unearthing of the hominid
fossils that today point to Africa as the
home of human evolution, Tibet was
seen as the most likely region to fill this
role. The great German philosopher
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) looked
towards Tibet as the birthplace of both
creation and civilisation, labelling this
first, mighty race of people ‘Aryan’ – a
name derived from the Sanskrit arya
meaning ‘noble’.
The theory of an Aryan ‘Master
Race’ was given additional impetus
in the late 19th 5
century by Helena
Blavatsky, a Russian clairvoyant who,
following a trip to India, published
The Secret Doctrine in 1888 (Fig 6).
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Archaeological history
The two-volume work combined legend
and folklore with Darwinian theories
of natural selection, producing
a pseudo-scientific version of human
evolution that claimed humanity was
derived from seven root races, one of
which had first appeared on a long lost
island in the middle of the Atlantic
Ocean. This was, of course, the legendary
island of Atlantis, first described by
the philosopher Plato (c. 427–347 BC)
in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias
(Fig 8). In these works Plato has the
great Athenian politician Solon visiting
Egypt, where priests inform him that
9000 years earlier, the militarily powerful
and technologically advanced
Atlanteans had dwelt on a large
island beyond the Straits of Gibraltar.
According to the tale set down by
Plato, the Atlanteans succeeded in
conquering all the lands of the western
Mediterranean and were only stopped
from subjugating the entire known
world by a military alliance led by
the Athenians. It was during this war
that Atlantis met its famous fate when,
according to the records Plato claimed
were held by the Egyptian priesthood,
‘there occurred portentous earthquakes
and floods, and one grievous
day and night befell them, when the
whole body of your warriors was swallowed
up by the earth, and the island of
Atlantis in like manner was swallowed
up by the sea and vanished’ (Timaeus
25c).
Blavatsky took Plato at face value
and wove into the Greek narrative
threads of folklore and legend drawn
from other regions of the world, creating
a post-catastrophe migration myth
for survivors from Atlantis, who took
refuge in the natural fastness of the
Himalayas and established a new kingdom
called Shangri-La. According to
Blavatsky, from this fabled hidden land
the Atlanteans had passed on their
ancient knowledge and wisdom to the
emerging Aryan race.
This Atlantean-Aryan migration
myth gained a wide following in
Germany during the early 20 th century.
The German archaeologist and popular
author, Edmund Kiss, for example,
published Die Letzte Königin von
Atlantis (The Last Queen of Atlantis)
in 1931, claiming that survivors from
Atlantis had migrated around the
world, establishing many of the great
civilisations, a theory first put forward
by Ignatius Donnelly in his best-selling
book of 1882, Atlantis: The Antediluvian
World (Fig 4). This pseudo-science
also came with a darker side when
men like Alfred Rosenberg, a prominent
Nazi Party ideologist and founder
of the organisation ‘Amt Rosenberg’
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