HIGHER THAN TRUTH
[S1E10] MURPHY RANCH — ÂRYA
DID NAZI OCCULTISTS BUILD A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR DOOMSDAY MANSION IN LOS ANGELES DURING WWII?
Note: Higher Than Truth is an ongoing series taking deep dives into strange mysteries, conspiracies, and forgotten history. Please refer to the table of contents for all articles in their chronological order.
“I told you before, that the highest people now on earth (spiritually) belong to the first sub-race of the fifth root Race; and those are the Aryan Asiatics; the highest race (physical intellectuality) is the last sub-race of the fifth — yourselves the white conquerors.” —Mahatma Koot Hoomi to Helena Blavatsky, 1882
In the course of writing this series of articles, I receive the occasional message or comment, and in one of these recent communications I was politely informed by someone—who I believe to be a practicing theosophist—that my theories about racist or anti-semitic undercurrents in Blavatsky’s evolutionary Root Race model are off base. They write:
Some thoughts on how “race” is used by Blavatsky: she doesn’t say that one race or sub-race is meant to rule or control the others. And that wouldn’t make sense anyway — a new sub-race has phases to go through before it is mature. An older race has a lot going for it, from its history. A younger brother is not superior to an older brother. And no matter what race a person incarnates into, there are opportunities for advanced souls, and such souls are found in all races.
I appreciate the clarification and difference of opinion.
Too often, it seems, that within the corridors of “conspiracy” or “weird history” media, the Nazis’ beliefs are attributed solely to the occult influences of Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society. And as I tried to piece together the threads of the Murphy Ranch legend, those accusations became even more apparent once I connected the property’s owners to the Theosophical Society. How else to explain Blavatsky’s teachings that the most advanced race is the Aryan? Or the occult leanings of the Nazi party? Himmler and the Ahnehnerbe? Secret Nazi trips to Tibet?
Of course Blavatsky inspired the Nazis! It all made sense! Case closed!
But the longer I studied the details, the less certain—and more disappointed—I was that I couldn’t fit that simplistic explanation into the tidy package I’d hoped for. The reality, I think, is far more complex, more subtle, and more interesting than those presumptions would suggest. The truth is rarely simple, but it’s worth looking for.
And with that in mind, I would like to offer some clarification, a difference of opinion, and a conspiracy theory of my own.
The term “Aryan”, now synonymous with the Nazis’ ideas about racial purity, was first used by French linguistic scholars in 1771 who were studying the development of language in ancient Iran — “Aryen”. The term was translated into German five years later, and by the mid-19th century “Aryan” found its way into the English language.
In 1861, Oxford University’s first professor of comparative linguistics, Max Muller, popularized the usage of “Aryan” in his book Lectures on the Science of Language. A scholar of ancient Sanskrit, Muller promoted the concept that the development of language was related to the development of culture, in particular the notion that early Indian civilization influenced later European linguistic and religious movements. His examination of Indian texts such as the Rig Veda, whose pages contain the earliest examples of the “Indo-European” or “Aryan” language, made ideas about non-Christian religions like Buddhism and Hinduism accessible to the West for the first time—twenty years before Helena Blavatsky.
Influenced by German Romanticism’s attempt to synthesize “art, philosophy, and science,” Muller was wary of the cold logic of the Enlightenment. And although he was one of Charles Darwin’s “diligent readers and sincere admirers” he found it inconceivable that language developed from the inarticulate sounds of lower animals as Darwinian evolution suggested. Muller believed the gift of language was what elevated man above the beasts—the theoretical “divine spark” discussed in [S1E9] Light Bringer—and it was language that created religion.
In Müller’s view ‘gods’ began as words constructed in order to express abstract ideas, but were transformed into imagined personalities.
Thus the Indo-European father-god appears under various names: Zeus, Jupiter, Dyaus Pita. For Müller all these names can be traced to the [Proto-Indian] word ‘Dyaus’, which he understands to imply ‘shining’ or ‘radiance’. This leads to the terms ‘deva’, ‘deus’, ‘theos’ as generic terms for a god, and to the names ‘Zeus’ and ‘Jupiter’ (derived from deus-pater).
This entire line of thinking is clearly invoked by Blavatsky in her 1888 work The Secret Doctrine—from its use of Sanskrit texts as source material; its conception of the “shining” Sun as the physical manifestation of God whose rays (“Solar Logos”) permeate everything; the interconnectedness of myth and culture; and the rejection of Darwinian evolution. Blavatsky even mentions Muller’s work in Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, though she typically takes issue with his conclusions:
Mythology is the repository of man’s most ancient science, and what concerns us chiefly is this — when truly interpreted once more, it is destined to be the death of those false theologies to which it has unwittingly given birth.
In Muller’s view, mythology was just an attempt to make sense of the world through language, and the commonalities he saw between Indo-European “Aryan” linguistics and religions demonstrated that. To prove this, Muller used a process he called The Science of Religion, which:
…rejected any reliance on divine revelation and sought to limit himself to sense perception and reason, two universally accepted sources of knowledge.
Like Muller, Blavatsky also taught that there was a science to religion, but instead of rejecting divine revelation she claimed to receive her wisdom telepathically from Ascended Masters in Tibet. And unlike Muller, in Blavatsky’s view the myths were literally true and their commonalities proved theosophical beliefs in a Planetary Hierarchy whose purpose was the cosmic evolution of humanity. That the Aryan race was the highest expression of that cosmic evolution — so far — was no coincidence.
In Lectures on the Science of Language, Muller writes:
Ârya is a Sanskrit word, and in the later Sanskrit it means noble, of a good family…[and] is distinctly appropriated to the three first castes — the Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas—as opposed to the fourth, or the Sûdras.
It was this distinction, perhaps, that lead to the change in the word’s meaning — that to be “Aryan” represented nobility among the upper classes. Like Muller’s theories on language, the word “Aryan” began as an abstract idea, but as the 19th Century gave way to the 20th, the concept of “Aryanism” evolved into a religion all its own.
Arthur de Gobineau, a French aristocrat, was a novelist and diplomat often credited with first linking together the concepts of class and race. Horrified by the Revolutions of 1848—in which, among other liberal reforms, serfdom was abolished in Austria and Hungary, absolute monarchy ended in Denmark, democracy was brought to France, and parliament established in Prussia—Gobineau dedicated his 1855 book, The Inequality of Human Races, to King George V, writing:
I was gradually penetrated by the conviction that the racial question overshadows all other problems of history, that it holds the key to them all, and that the inequality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of its destiny.
Gobineau’s pseudo-scientific work synthesized “anthropology, theology, linguistics and history” and divided humanity into three distinct races: black, yellow, and white. In his estimation, the white race was at the top of this hierarchy, and the purity or dilution of white blood with black or yellow blood determined the success or “degradation” of nations and civilizations. “Adam is the originator of our white species,” he wrote, and the most successful of the white races was, of course, the Aryans.
Of the first seven civilizations…six belong, at least in part, to the Aryans.
…No negro race is seen as the initiator of a civilization. Only when it is mixed with some other can it even be initiated into one. Similarly, no spontaneous civilization is to be found among the yellow races; and when the Aryan blood is exhausted, stagnation intervenes.…Such is the lesson of history. It shows that all civilizations derive from the white race, that none can exist without its help.
According to a biography by Michael D. Biddiss—titled Father of Racist Ideology—Gobineau explained to a friend in 1856 that he wrote The Inequality of Human Races out of:
“…a hatred for democracy and its weapon, the Revolution, which I satisfied by showing, in a variety of ways, where revolution and democracy come from and where they are going.”
Gobineau’s theories, blending ideas about the purity of Aryan blood, civilization, aristocracy, social class, and race mixing, would go on to directly and indirectly support the racial, political, and religious ideologies of generations after him, who picked through his arguments to find the ones that most closely suited their needs—and ignored the ones that didn’t.
In The Horse, The Wheel, and Language, author David W. Anthony states:
This toxic mixture of pseudo-science and Romanticism soon produced its own new ideologies. Language, culture, and a Darwinian interpretation of race were bundled together to explain the biological-spiritual-linguistic essence of the Northern Europeans who conducted these self-congratulatory studies. Their writings and lectures encouraged people to think of themselves as members of long-established, biological-linguistic nations and thus were promoted widely in the new national school systems and national newspapers of the emerging nation-states of Europe. The policies that forced the Welsh to speak English, and the Bretons to speak French were rooted in politicians’ need for an ancient and “pure” national heritage for each new state.
…Proto-Indo-European, the linguistic problem, became “the Proto-Indo-Europeans”, a biological population with its own mentality and personality: “a slim, tall, light complexioned blonde race, superior to all other peoples, calm and firm in character, constantly striving, intellectually brilliant, with an almost ideal attitude toward the world and life in general.”
Max Muller was disappointed to see his theories on language twisted into new meanings about race—and he said so, in what I can only assume was a sick burn among linguistic scholars at the time:
“…An ethnologist who speaks of Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary or a brachycephalic grammar!”
[Dolichocephalic: having a relatively long head. — Brachycephalic: short-headed or broad-headed.—Gobineau and others referred to the Aryan race as “dolicho-blond” or long headed blond.]
How do we reconcile the Theosophical Society’s claims that, “the term Root-Race does not refer to ethnicities or to racial concepts of the modern world,” when the evolutionary theories of The Secret Doctrine so clearly align with the theories first put forth by not just by Muller, but by Gobineau as well? Let’s recall Blavatsky’s Root Race system one more time:
- Third Root Race—Lemurian: Black.
- Fourth Root Race—Atlantean: Yellow.
- Fifth Root Race—Aryan: White
On a physical level, Blavatsky’s racial system exactly mirrors the hierarchy Gobineau proposed thirty years before she wrote The Secret Doctrine—Black, Yellow, White.
Gobineau says:
The negroid variety is the lowest, and stands at the foot of the ladder. The animal character…is stamped on the negro from birth, and foreshadows his destiny.
Morally irresponsible, it was these third Race “men” who, through promiscuous connection with animal species lower than themselves, created that missing link which became ages later (in the tertiary period only) the remote ancestor of the real ape as we find it now in the pithecoid family.
Gobineau:
The yellow races tend to mediocrity in everything…[but] are clearly superior to the black. Every founder of a civilization would wish the backbone of his society, the middle class, to consist of such men. But no civilized society could be created by them.
Blavatsky:
Intellect has an enormous development in this Round. The hitherto dumb races acquire our present human speech on this globe, on which, from the Fourth Race, language is perfected and knowledge increases.
Gobineau:
The white race…are gifted with an energetic intelligence…an extraordinary instinct for order…[a] love of liberty, and are openly hostile to the formalism under which the Chinese are glad to vegetate, as well as to the strict despotism which is the only way of governing the negro.
Blavatsky (via theosophist A.E. Powell):
A man was an Âryan, a “noble man,” and this fact imposed on him a certain code of behaviour. The children of the Manu were aristocrats, in the true sense of the word, proud of their high descent, and fully recognising the demands it made upon them. For them noblesse oblige was no empty phrase.
In a 2019 article titled Answering Back: How to Reply to Slanders against Theosophy, the author states:
The racism allegations are of course unjustified. Although HPB writes of races, for example, Root Races, this term means nothing else than humankind; according to the teachings, the present Fifth Root Race includes all people currently living. The term Root Race therefore has nothing to do with racism.
…Blavatsky often makes one point very clearly, and that was absolutely contrary to the prevailing opinion of her century: “In reality there are no ‘inferior races,’ for all are one in our common humanity” (Blavatsky, Collected Writings, 8:406). This view is also evident in The Secret Doctrine: “Thus the reason given [the karmic cycles] for dividing humanity into superior and inferior races falls to the ground and becomes a fallacy.” (Secret Doctrine, 2:425).
But A.E. Powell, whose 1930 book, The Solar System, attempts to simplify the teachings of The Secret Doctrine, clearly contradicts these claims:
The [Third] Race is the Negroid, and some of its descendants still exist, though by this time much mixed with offshoots of later races.
The [Fourth] Race, inhabited the continent of Atlantis, or Kusha, most of which has now disappeared beneath the Atlantic Ocean. Most of the present inhabitants of the Earth to-day belong to this race.
The [Fifth] Âryan Race…includes at present the most advanced members of the Earth’s inhabitants.
Powell goes on to explain that a caste system even exists within the Aryan race, which needed to be protected from mixing with other races:
In order to prevent the Âryan blood from being lost amidst the enormous majority of the Atlanteans and Atlanto-Lemurians, the [Hierarchy] again forbade intermarriage, and to this end instituted the caste system; about B.C. 8,000. At first [were] founded only three castes: Brâhmana or pure Âryans, white; Râjan or Âryan and Toltec, red; and Vish or Âryan and Mongolian, yellow. Hence the castes were called Varnas or colours. Later, all those who were not Âryan at all were called Shûdras, but even here a small amount of Âryan blood sometimes appeared. Many of the hill tribes are partly Âryan, some are wholly so, like the Siaposh people and the Gipsy tribes.
And Blavatsky even contradicts her own “fallacy” statement in the exact same volume, just four pages earlier:
Mankind is obviously divided into god-informed men and lower human creatures. The intellectual difference between the Aryan and other civilized nations and such savages as the South Sea Islanders, is inexplicable on any other grounds. No amount of culture, nor generations of training amid civilization, could raise such human specimens as the Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African tribes, to the same intellectual level as the Aryans, the Semites, and the Turanians so called. The “sacred spark” is missing in them and it is they who are the only inferior races on the globe, now happily — owing to the wise adjustment of nature which ever works in that direction — fast dying out. Verily mankind is “of one blood,” but not of the same essence. (Secret Doctrine, 2:421)
Not only are we not all members of the Fifth Root Race, but “happily” the less advanced races are dying out. Blavatsky and Gobineau both tie the “fitness” of a race with the rise and fall of civilizations across history, and often attribute the “purity” of a culture’s blood with the success or collapse of a society. For instance, A.E. Powell writes:
…Mongol tribes have more than once overflowed from northern Asia into America, across Bearing’s Straits. The last of these emigrations, that of the Kitans, some 1,300 years ago, has left traces which have been followed by ethnologists, such as in some tribes of North American Indians. The Hungarians are an offshoot of this race, ennobled by a strain of Aryan blood, whilst the Malays are another offshoot, though degraded by mixture with the effete Lemurians.
And in this model, the degraded race’s blood must eventually be eradicated in order for civilization to advance:
…We know that the great catastrophe, which destroyed Atlantis in 75,025 B.C., must have occurred about the middle of the fifth sub-race of the fourth Root-Race, and was therefore a “Judgement Day” of the fourth order, rejecting those unfit to continue with the remainder of the fourth Root-Race.
Had Blavatsky written her evolutionary system first, it would be relatively easy to claim that Gobineau was influenced by her, but given both the timing and the startling similarities, one can only conclude that she borrowed her system from him—or, that the Ascended Masters of Wisdom were only capable of telepathically transmitting the same 19th century pseudo-science.
But why? What could possibly be the point of plagiarizing a blatantly racist theory like “Father of Racist Ideology” Gobineau’s and—counterintuitively—reinventing it as a spiritual model for Universal Brotherhood?
While much has been made of the racial arguments within Gobineau’s Inequality of Human Races, less has been said about its other focus:
Class.
After publishing Inequality of Human Races, Gobineau went on to befriend the German composer, Richard Wagner, who along with the anti-semitic journalist Ludwig Schemann, helped found the Gobinism movement in Germany in 1894, thus bringing “the term ‘Aryan’ into vogue amongst German racists.” Other works, inspired by Gobineau’s ideas, soon followed.
Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, published The Foundations of the 19th Century, in which he argued the superiority of Teutonic Aryans:
…Wherever the Aryans went they became masters. The Greek, the Latin, the Kelt, the Teuton, the Slav — all these were Aryans: of the aborigines of the countries which they overran, scarcely a trace remains. So, too, in India it was “Varna,” colour, which distinguished the white conquering Arya from the defeated black man, the Dasyu, and so laid the foundation of caste.
And in 1916, Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race, which like Gobineau and Blavatsky, categorized humanity into three distinct racial categories: Caucasoids (White), Negroids (Black), and Mongoloids (Asian). And just like Blavatsky, the White race is further subdivided into a hierarchy, which in Grant’s system is: Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean.
The July 1916 edition of Theosophical Quarterly reviews Grant’s theories:
The book is of special interest to theosophists [for] two reasons. One is because anything having to do with the races of mankind, their genesis and distribution, touches upon a theme to which The Secret Doctrine gives special attention; the other reason has to do with Grant’s conclusions as they relate to the great problems of political science and the structure and nature of societies and of government.
…Grant’s thesis is that heredity is a very much more powerful influence than education or environment. People are what they are born to be, and this racial tendency can only be modified with great slowness over enormous periods of time.
…However, I am lead to suspect a fundamental deficiency in this whole racial theory…The facts call for a fourth race, which will correspond with the four castes of India; which, as we know, were based originally on differences of race.
…The other point of interest is the political and social significance of this racial theory. It is one of the best arguments against the validity of democracy I know.
Could it be a coincidence that in Blavatsky’s system, the Fifth Root Race Aryan — “tall, fair, long-headed, with light hair and blue eyes” — whose evolution would result in “…the modern Russians…the Germans…the Scandinavians…the Indian” was also inherently “aristocratic…proud of its high descent”?
In 1872, three years before founding the Theosophical Society, Helena Blavatsky —
With her stout frame, piercing blue eyes, wiry blonde hair…[and] of aristocratic Russian and German ancestry,
— suggested in a letter to the Tsar’s secret police that she could act as a spy for Alexander II, who at that time found himself in the tenuous position of maintaining his monarchy while his citizens demanded freedom of speech, democracy, and representative government.
Alexander II came to power in 1855, inheriting the Crimean War from his father—which Russia lost a year later to an alliance between Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire. On the home front, Alexander II was faced with growing revolts among the peasants, whose demands for democracy posed a genuine threat to the throne. In 1861, Alexander II effectively ended serfdom in Russia with his Edict of Emancipation — but as undeniably “good” as that decision was, it appears that upon Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, Alexander II realized that a serf-based economy simply couldn’t keep up with more industrialized nations.
And so his reign was made up of contradictions that satisfied neither the leftists, who wanted the freedom to criticize the government and own their land, or the nobility, who wanted to keep their serfs. Even as he was known as a “great reformer”, Alexander II’s response to the revolutionaries grew increasingly despotic, with his secret police infiltrating the leftist political organizations asking for social reform: alleged terrorists were rounded up and killed, the Ukrainian language was banned in print, student rebellions were suppressed. It was to this secret police that Blavatsky proposed her help.
Researcher Maria Carlson uncovered Blavatsky’s letter in 1993, but I discovered it in the 1999 book Tournament of Shadows, which is the Russian term for what the British called The Great Game: a geopolitical battle between Russia, Great Britain, Germany, and the United States for control of India, Tibet, Afghanistan and all of Central Asia. As Gobineau himself put it:
England, an aging nation, is defending its livelihood and its existence. Russia, a youthful nation, is following its path towards the power that it must surely gain … The empire of the Tsars is today the power which seems to have the greatest future … The Russian people are marching steadfastly towards a goal that is indeed known but still not completely defined.
By 1879, Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society moved to India, where they quickly aligned with the Indian independence movements against the British colonizers. That same year, Blavatsky began writing for Mikhail Katkov, a Moscow newspaper publisher and political conspirator, who favored reactionary right wing domestic and foreign policies, and “encouraged a Russian attack on British India.” The introduction was made by Blavatsky’s uncle, Rostislav de Fadeev, “a prominent member of the military faction with which Katkov was allied,” who strongly opposed the liberalization of Russia. Says author K. Paul Johnson:
…Katkov, like HPB, had far greater admiration for the Russian military than for the government and its diplomats. And to whatever extent she had acted on behalf of Russian interests during her time in India, those Russian interests were defined for her by Katkov and his allies in the military…
By now, I think it’s safe to say that the accusations regarding the Theosophical Society’s influence on Nazi Germany are overblown, but rather than wholly exonerating Blavatsky and The Secret Doctrine, the evidence would seem to support the idea they were among the many movements also influenced by pseudo-scientific misunderstandings about Aryanism. Imperialists, racists, scientists and spiritualists picked freely from the grab bag of theories that Muller and Gobineau provided, interpreting them and reinterpreting them as needed. And Nazi ideology—more nationalistic and opportunistic than coherent—would add theosophy to that list of inspirations.
The idea that The Secret Doctrine may have been concocted for political purposes might seem like a conspiracy theory, but if true, it wouldn’t be the only forged document to come out of Tsarist Russia with worldwide implications about race, class, and religion. In 1901, a decade after Blavatsky’s death, the first copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—cobbled together from pre-existing manuscripts—emerged from the Tsar’s palace with the help of apocalyptic Russian mystics and secret police, alleging a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world through communism.
We’ll get to that.
But first, let’s re-divert our attention back to California circa 1910, where the complex, shifting allegiances of The Great Game brought Indian nationalists together with German politicians in a weapons smuggling scheme intended to overthrow British rule in India. To quote Tournament of Shadows,
The age of mystical imperialism had dawned.
Next, on:
[S1E11] Murphy Ranch—Shadow War: Part 1
