Between Science and Myth: Nazi Mysticism and the Research of the Ahnenerbe

Beneath the rational and militarized surface of the Third Reich existed an underground current of esoteric, symbolic, and mythological thought that influenced not only the ideological construction of Nazism, but also some of its scientific pursuits. Central to this tension between science and mysticism was the Ahnenerbe, the pseudo-scientific institute founded in 1935 to investigate the “heritage of the ancestors.” This article examines the roots of Nazi mysticism, the operational structure of the Ahnenerbe, and its most emblematic expeditions—from Tibet to Karelia—revealing the most occult and ideological face of German archaeology between the two world wars.

Nazi ideology was not merely a political construct, but a true totalizing worldview, in which the present was conceived as a reflection of a mythic past to be restored. In this framework, technical rationality coexisted with a vision of the world rooted in archetypes, runic symbols, Aryan genealogies, and racial cults. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and central figure in shaping the sacred sphere of the Reich, was the chief promoter of a "German spiritual science" tasked with recovering the remnants of a primordial Nordic race. The primary instrument of this endeavor was the Ahnenerbe – Society for the Study of the Primordial History of the Spirit.

Officially founded on July 1, 1935, the Ahnenerbe was initially conceived as a center for historical and folkloric research, but quickly became an ideological container for racial anthropology, comparative linguistics, Germanic esotericism, symbolic archaeology, and naturalistic mysticism. Funded by the SS and granted surprising operational autonomy, the Ahnenerbe undertook numerous “scientific” expeditions in regions deemed vital to the construction of the "Aryan myth."

The archaeology promoted by the Ahnenerbe did not aim for objective truth, but rather the symbolic confirmation of a preordained narrative: the idea that the Germanic peoples were the original matrix of civilization, the bearers of the sacred Indo-European flame. Excavations and research were conducted with an appearance of philological rigor, but deeply distorted by an ideological tension that transformed every archaeological fragment into a sign of “Aryan belonging.”

Unsurprisingly, many expeditions were directed to peripheral and “liminal” areas of the Eurasian continent—places where the present still seemed inhabited by archaic remnants. Ahnenerbe researchers moved more as priests of a secular cult than as scientists. Theirs was a “sacred science”, not based on overt falsification (not always), but on symbolic reinterpretations and syncretic readings of genuine ethnographic material.

Among the most famous missions was the expedition to Tibet (1938–1939), led by ethnologist Ernst Schäfer. Officially tasked with collecting zoological and anthropological data, the expedition was in reality motivated by the search for traces of a lost Hyperborean civilization and parallels between Tantric Buddhism and the presumed pre-Christian Nordic religions. The SS viewed Tibet as a possible “periphery” of an ancient Aryan empire, preserved in the monastic lamaist traditions.

Less well-known but equally significant was the 1936 expedition to Karelia, led by Finnish scholar Yrjö von Grönhagen, alongside musicologist Fritz Bose and illustrator Ola Forsell. Its goal was to document the last survivals of Finno-Ugric shamanism, regarded as pure expressions of ancestral Germanic spirituality. Special attention was given to figures like Miron-Aku, a wise woman and seer who performed rituals to summon ancestral spirits: in the eyes of the SS researchers, she embodied the living continuity of the primordial soul cult of the Nordic peoples.

It is important to stress that Nazi mysticism was never entirely separate from the official science of the Reich. On the contrary, it was through the linguistic apparatus of science—graphs, cranial measurements, ritual photographs, botanical classifications—that a worldview based on race, blood, and the spiritual destiny of the Volk was legitimized. The Ahnenerbe operated in a hybrid territory: too sophisticated to be mere occultism, too ideologically compromised to be genuine science.

Far from being a personal whim of Himmler, the Ahnenerbe was in fact an intellectual pillar of the Third Reich, as it provided a narrative of the past that served the present—a “pure,” Hyperborean, virile, and spiritual past against a present contaminated by cosmopolitanism, Jewish modernity, and liberal weakness. The use of myth as a political instrument is not unique to Nazism, but with the Ahnenerbe it took on a new form: that of mythological knowledge disguised as philological science.

To study the Ahnenerbe today is to confront the dark side of modern knowledge—not ignorance, but the cultivated and methodical manipulation of it. Nazi mysticism was not merely a curiosity, but one of the intellectual engines of annihilation, a mythological system constructed to naturalize domination, to give genocide a cosmic justification. And it is precisely in its power to evoke the sacred—land, blood, lineage—that these ideologies reveal their most dangerous potential. The Ahnenerbe was not a scientific error: it was an aestheticized degeneration of science, a warning of what happens when the search for origins becomes a cult of purity.

Doktor Lazarus