Abstruse Ideas and Weird Cults Anticipated the Political Doctrines and Institutions of the Third Reich

This is an unusual history. Although it presents an account of past events relating to the origins and ideology of National Socialism in Germany, its proper subject is not the parties, policies and organizations through which men rationally express their interests in a social and political context. Rather, it is an underground history, concerned with the myths, symbols and fantasies that bear on the development of reactionary, authoritarian, and Nazi styles of thinking. It is also a marginal history, since its principal characters were mystics, seers and sectarians who had little to do with the outer realities of politics and administration. But such men had the imagination and opportunity to describe a dream-world that often underlay the sentiments and actions of more worldly men in positions of power and responsibility. Indeed, their abstruse ideas and weird cults anticipated the political doctrines and institutions of the Third Reich.

--Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, introduction to The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and their Influence on Nazi Ideology (1985; repr., London: Tauris Parke Paperback, 2005), 1.