The Eugenic Ancestors of “Animist” Ancestral Healing: An Introduction
by Alyssa Storrs and kg
CW: sexual assault, discussion of sex cults/trafficking, infiltration, alt-right/incel predator dynamics, eugenics, white supremacy
It’s hard to grasp where we’ve been in the last year. Or in the last 4 years. Leftist uprisings, alt-right insurrections, and a predicted return to a Trump presidency in 2024. Many are fearful for the state of U.S. elections, as the U.S. is now declared, for the first time, as a “backsliding democracy”. We’ve had more cult documentaries on our streaming devices than our nervous systems can probably handle. We’ve moved through major trials related to violence against Black people and to global sex trafficking, as movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo gain broader public traction. All of this has been happening within a worldwide mass death, mass disabling event.
We write you as two chronically ill, disabled, class-advantaged white folks in pandemic. We are white anti-racists who are looking to undo oppression in our systems, cultures, communities, and bodies. We are survivors who wrote a statement last year at this time (that Medium has since deleted, probably at the request of the alleged perpetrator it was highlighting). That statement, and the responses we received from it, brought us down a learning path we never anticipated. We write now, a year later, to share some of “the tea” from our node in the organizing constellation. We will share with you here the updates on what has been made visible to us, and what still is lurking and organizing itself in nearly plain view among us. This is especially important and timely as we watch more and more “ancestral healing” programs launch here in early 2022.
What we have learned and want to share is both terrifying and deeply clarifying. This is just the beginning of what needs to be excavated and shared. We have not pieced this puzzle together alone. Last January we thought we were publishing a ‘simple’ intra-movement call-out letter. As our inbox flooded with survivor stories and we began connecting with other anti-racist leftists nationally+internationally, we watched the infiltrator publicly confess that he was never on the left, and was instead operating to undermine Black feminist organizing and to “fuck SWJs [social justice warriors]” (an alt-right term applied to leftist organizers). We learned what was happening in our midst was far deeper than we realized: What we were dealing with was alt-right infiltration and aspiring incel cult-builders creating harm, confusion, and chaos within our movements. And, that this tactic of infiltration is not new at all.
What do you do when you’ve lost most of your anti-racist white organizing base — the one you spent the last 4+ years building — to alt-right conspiracies and cults? When you realize you’ve been infiltrated by white-supremacist incel leaders posing as leftists? When you learn that white supremacist groups aren’t just for white people anymore? When the infiltration tactics experienced — surveillance, smear campaigns, stealth hypnosis, sexual abuse, harassment, and more — are based on techniques used in white supremacist, ableist cults like NXIVM and Scientology, and infiltration programs such as COINTELPRO? When you discover the main infiltrator’s culty group about “ritual” and “justice” happens to be using a playbook that is real fuckin’ similar to the one used in the NXIVM sex cult; and hell, he even follows one of its ring leaders, Nicki Clyne, on Instagram?
When the sources for faux-leftist leaders you followed have been eugenic, fascist Nazi textbooks they never told you about. When a leader in “ancestral healing” makes consistent calls for sympathizing with incels like Elliot Rodger. When that same leader starts to build a campaign declaring we cannot, scientifically and rationally (read: Intellectual Dark Web), #BelieveSurvivors, and people in your networks are actually buying it… You wonder: Why would such small organizing groups and networks like ours be targeted? You would find refuge in the writings of Courtney Desiree Morris:
“Any organization, be it large or small, can provoke the scrutiny of the state. Perhaps your organization poses a large threat, or maybe you’re small now but one day you’ll grow up and be too big to rein in. The state usually opts to kill the movement before it grows. And informants and provocateurs are the state’s hired gunmen…To save our movements, we need to come to terms with the connections between gender violence, male privilege, and the strategies that informants (and people who just act like them) use to destabilize radical movements.”
-Courtney Desiree Morris (from the INCITE! article: Why Misogynists Make Informants: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements)
Ancestral Healing and “animism” as lenses for radical leftist movements gained a lot of steam, particularly after the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections. Many white anti-racists, including us, adopted its practices as a tool for undoing racism. We’ve been on podcasts, attended and presented at ‘ancestral healing’ summits and workshops. Had 1–1 ‘ancestral healing’ sessions, invited BIPOC to speak to us as white folks about the topic, and set-up our ancestry.com accounts. It (initially) felt like balm for the culture-lessness we had learned white supremacy left us with; a solution for tracing our ‘pre-colonial’ European cultures in hopes of finding nourishment; for documenting the horrific harm our white ancestors had embedded in the foundations of a global, eugenic, racist society so that we could find a path to repair.
If you Google “ancestral healing”, a long list of white podcasters, authors, coaches, and “shamans’’ will likely result. The first book to pop-up will probably be “Ancestral Medicine: Rituals for Personal and Family Healing ‘’ by Daniel Foor. Some of them will even appear to be “decolonized” or “anti-racist” and, as books like Foor’s does, proclaim to “[explain] how ancestor work can help us transform problems such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and religious persecution”. Even among long-standing leftist organizers, there is a concept forming that to end white supremacy, means (in large part) to return to the ways of our Nordic, Celtic, Hellenistic, etc. lineages.
We’ve found among the various white ancestral healing groups we’ve moved within and/or observed from the sidelines a pervasive belief that ‘ancestral healing’ and ‘animist’ ritual will eradicate oppression on its own, and an increasing shift away from prioritizing systemic organizing or even teaching movement history. We believe this to be really dangerous, especially the way in which it is currently being applied in most white anti-racist circles, and we hope you will hear us out as to why. This may challenge your existing worldview, and we hope alongside us that you will let it. We ask that you practice curiosity and care as you read, and that you ask questions of the ancestral healing industry and work collectively to allow “answers” to surface. We believe that the future of our multi-racial movements for justice rely on this questioning and discernment. We invite you into the hard place of recognizing where mainstream brands of “ancestral healing” may be leading us astray, into an alt-right pipeline rooted in the legacy of eugenic ancestors.
“Goddess of the Market”
“A lot of these young guys… especially from the software world, who are being sucked into white nationalism, started out being worked up about Ayn Rand in high school.” — David Neiwert, author of Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump
“[Ayn] prized individualism above all else, and saw those who tried to crush the spirit of individualism as evil and immoral… When the Great Depression hit and Americans started looking at communism as a possible alternative, Rand was so horrified that she decided to spend the rest of her life defending capitalism and the rights of the individual.” — Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
The main infiltrator of our U.S.-based, white anti-racist organizing was a Canadian masc person of color (whose pronouns we understand to presently be he/his/him). This was difficult to digest. It made more sense as we uncovered that Ayn Rand, the “Goddess of the Market” and one of Trump’s beloved authors, made it big through her connections to elite Canadians, and that this movement infiltrator’s work aligned with Ayn’s philosophies. Since this infiltrator publicly admits to mirroring tactics of ringwing celebs like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson in order to be famously cancelled, we’ll call this infiltrator: “J”.
Members of our organizing group often chose to cross-pollinate with J’s “community” in the name of accountability to People of Color, particularly because J had effectively worked to become officially and informally endorsed by various trusted movement organizers and organizations. We came to learn J’s group, while it proposed to be about undoing racism and promoting “justice”, was covertly having his students pray to Trump as a way of allegedly helping Trump to ancestrally heal at the “quantum level”. When we asked J what his source texts were for this “animist”, lineage-based, ancestral practice, J would often say that his sources were all written in Japanese so we wouldn’t be able to read them, and insinuated it would be racist for us as white folks to believe that running a group to help white people pray to Trump was not in fact anti-racist.
As we began to listen to survivors coming forward about profound abuse happening within (and beyond) J’s group, we realized over time this person was not a leftist, but in fact someone adhering to doctrines of white supremacy and misogyny, utilizing his platform to sexually terrorize (mostly) leftists and/or liberal folks who were disabled, femme, poly, queer, non-binary, and/or cisgendered, heterosexual women — and to create a pipeline in general from the political center+left to the right. This became strikingly apparent when after we publicly called him out, J began posting images with his face pasted on Jordan Peterson’s body (a known rightwing, Canadian professor), and later stated the following on social media:
- “Transparently, I no longer consider myself ‘left’, ‘woke’, ‘progressive’, ‘social justice advocate’, ‘advocate’, etc., and I also never have.”
- “Healing and manipulating are two sides of the same coin… I wanted to get famous so I can get paid and laid.”
- “…we need to offer sacred recognition and thanks to those involved in incidents of violence, including both survivors and perpetrators…”
- described himself as having “a little bit of incel energy, to be honest”
- and in reference to survivors of his abuse, saying: “in many ways with the people who’ve cancelled me, like the ultimate restorative justice is like making a porno with them… That’s the kinda place I’m going.”
We began to see similarities between how J was operating, the terms he was using (e.g. “accountability abuse”), his nonconsensual/predatory use of neuro-linguistic programming (what he calls “trance work”), his attempts to influence the 2020 election towards a pro-capitalist candidate, his “protocols for relationship” that served as a binding relational contract and non-disclosure, and the playbook that other incel cult leaders use. In particular, this was how Keith Raniere laid the foundations for NXIVM: a sex cult that, among many horrific things, worked to influence U.S. elections towards right-leaning canidates and help white folks ancestrally heal from allegedly being Nazis in a “former life”. In fact, J follows Nicki Clyne on Instagram , a known member of DOS who continues to infiltrate abolitionist organizing for the purposes of getting Raniere out of prison. A main common text and/or philosophy between J and Raniere was rooted in the writings of “The Goddess of the Market”, a eugenic ancesor of ancestral healing: Ayn Rand.
As Sarah Berman at Vice outlines in the article NXIVM, Jordan Peterson, and the Reincarnation of Ayn Rand’s Cult: “As Raniere’s arrest made it easier for former students to speak freely, I realized Rand’s philosophy was copied and pasted throughout the NXIVM curriculum, barely adapted for seminar room discussion… Raniere saw himself as the hero in [Rand’s book] Shrugged, and on may occasions referred to the women he pursued sexually as “Dagny Taggart” — the book’s main heroine”. Similar to how many NXIVM survivors today may not know about Keith’s obsession with Rand’s philosophy of objectivism, many of us also did not sense quickly into J’s rootedness in this “goddess of the market”’s work until later as survivor stories came in and we started to trace the citations of people J was/appears-to-be still grooming. Now, we see it plainly in their curriculum on the importance of “selfishness” in “activism”, the usefulness of capitalism, etc. which all stem from Ayn Rand’s work, and in particular her book: The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism.
J estimates himself that there is around a thousand or more organizers who have called him out for abuse and are asking him to stop “practicing” in our movements. As one BIPOC therapist, who was one of the earlier folks to call him out, stated on his IG:
“Don’t you find it even a little odd that you’ve been called in for literally years, for different reasons, across disciplines and still somehow manage to make yourself the victim? At what point do you realize that ‘accountability abuse’ is just… accountability?”
“Hitler’s Priestess”
“Savitri was always clear that she preferred animals to humans. Like Hitler, she was a vegetarian. She viewed the world as if from a great distance, caring more for what she saw as the deep patterns of nature than for human lives. Visiting Iceland, she spent two nights on the slopes of Mount Hekla as it erupted. ‘The original sound of creation is ‘Aum’,’ she wrote. ‘The volcano says every two or three seconds, ‘AUM! AUM! AUM!’ And the Earth is trembling under your feet all the time.’ — BBC News
If your education was like ours, you most likely have the image of a Nazi Fascist as being white, male, and outfitted in military regalia. This is because what much of the world is not taught, is the new age and occult roots of Nazi Germany. We’ve learned (the hard way) that this helps a hell of a lot to explain why so many white women “healers” today, appropriating eastern cultural wear and practices, fell into (or were already aligned with) the white supremacist ideology of QAnon. We’d like to introduce you to another eugenic ancestor of ancestral healing, the high priestess of Hilter, Savitri Devi.
Like many new age white women today, Devi blamed Judeo-Christianity for the destruction of a pre-colonial, european utopia. It’s tricky, right? Because in part, this is true: Christendom destroyed so much of European pagan culture+lands, and imposed within itself many of the colonial policies that it would later export around the globe in the name of white supremacy. However, like many alt-right white women today, Savtiri belived in an ideology that allowed her to both critique Christian colonization and uphold racism. Savitri Devi was a white supremacist and eugenicist priestess, and her story reveals that it is possible to be a pagan/vegan/spiritualist, and be a white supremacist. In fact, as the story of Samantha Freedom reveals, it’s even possible to be involved in a fascist, European “identity”group and still not fully grasp that you are engaging in white supremacy.
Devi believed in the superiority of the “Aryan race” and found that ideology could be upheld within Hindu nationalism and the caste system in India. In the article, Savitri Devi: the mystical fascist being resurrected by the alt-right, which details Devi’s major life events, along with her spiritual and political beliefs, it states that Devi, “sailed for India in search of a living version of Europe’s pagan past, convinced that the caste system, by forbidding intermarriage, had preserved pure Aryans there.” Savitri Devi’s motivation for recovering a white pagan past and cultural practices was rooted in white supremacy.
The white “leftist” ancestral healing critique is usually: “Well, we can recover our pagan past without succumbing to white supremacy.” Or: “BIPOC folks have asked us to look back into our own lineage to heal from cultural appropriation.” Or, in defensiveness: “I’m not in the alt-right and I’m angry that you would even suggest that.” We are not writing this because we have all the answers. We are writing this because history is repeating itself and that’s the conversation most folks don’t want to have, particularly as white anti-racist “healers.”
We must dig into our history, and not see that as “over-intellectualizing” from a “somatic” perspective. We must be able to be honest about the context we find ourselves in. So many of us white anti-racist “healers” are not equipped or are unwilling to have the honest conversations about COVID, about QAnon, about sexual assault in our “healing” movement spaces, about eugenics. We often over simplify to “ancestral healing”, “pleasure activism”, and “animism” without having much historical grounding at all, without doing any lineage work or power-mapping. Returning to history is important if we are going to understand where we find ourselves now, and actually be honest about it.
A simple historical fact to name was that the Nazi party was the National German Workers Party. It was the socialist party in Germany that was undergirded by occultism and esotericism. The Nazi party was a fascist, eugenicist party at its core, mirroring socialism and spirituality in order for its propaganda to be successful. Savitri Devi was a powerful white woman in service to Hitler and Nazi Germany, even though she literally never lived in Germany.
Devi was born to an English mother and Greek-Italian father and espoused Greek nationalist beliefs by the end of World War I. She called herself a National Socialist early on because coupled with her anti-Semitic beliefs she believed both Greece and Germany were victims of the Western allies. After moving to India in the 1930’s, she passed information from the British in India to the Japanese, and then wrote a piece combining Nazism and Hindu myth, describing Hitler as a “man against time” destined to bring about the end of the Kali Yuga and usher in a new golden age of Aryan supremacy.” She believed that Hitler was an avatar of Vishnu. While in India, she worked within the Hinduvta movement (led by the British) where they believed Hindus were the true heirs of the Aryans. In her lectures she would mix together Nazi propaganda with Hindu identity. After World War II, she moved back to England and wrote a children’s book with a Nazi-heroine cat-lover, like herself and re-entered occupied Germany to distribute pro-Nazi literature in 1948. When she died in 1982, she was buried in full-fascist honors, next to George Lincoln Rockwell, an American Nazi leader.
Savitri Devi set up altars to Hitler. She worshipped him. She dedicated her life to spreading Nazi propaganda, not from the frontlines, but across Europe and Asia, and eventually to the United States through the medium of spirituality. She cared about the “more than human” world deeply, as she spent her last years in India feeding the cats every morning. She devoted herself to nature at the expense of human life, while advocating for the death of millions and keeping Hitler’s beliefs alive for the next generation.
Why don’t we talk about her in ancestral healing space as COVID ravages the globe and conspiracy theories are everywhere? Is it possible that our altars, our spirituality, and our animist “concern” for the “more than human” world might lead us into alt-right propaganda, funnels, and recruiting without our knowing? If white supremacy is as rampant as we claim it is, are we beyond thinking that we could get swept up in the alt-right? Might there be correlations between Hitler altars and Trump prayers in “healing” space devoted to “justice”? Why are we scared to ask these questions?
In order to infiltrate leftist organizing, J was (and still is) targeting folks who could be groomed into behaving and believing just as Devi did. J, and other colleagues of his, position themselves conveniently as an alternative “animist” perspective to movement accountability, such as Transformative Justice (TJ) processes, pulling in leftists who are disillusioned by failed TJ processes. As Estelle Elliott highlights in the photoessay Is Transformative Justice a Sunken Ship?:
“…as many attempted (largely unsuccesfully) to call out individuals and leaders who had long gotten away with inflicting the same harm patterns on the same communities, near every group, milieu, and administrative body struggled to return the power they’ve enjoyed at the expense of others.
We saw people with everything to lose demonstrate just how counter-revolutionary co-optation can be. They exploited the vast number of poeple who simply had no way of getting up to speed on best practices for navigating high-risk interventions in harmful and violent conflicts within a few months (or even a few years)… In a cruel twist of fate, the opportunistic abuse apologists have gone all-in on this Frankenstein’s TJ.”
J actively works to connect with the people who are publicly called out to build his network and continues to state that “restorative” processes for abuse includes survivors needing to “check-in” or publicly “duel” with him before they speak, or at worst engaging in creating “porn” with him. While we’ve learned of many survivors of color who have been targeted by J, his “private practice” was originally focused exclusively on the white leftist community, strategically convincing white organizers that to be aligned with Black-led movements for justice was “codependent” and devoid of an “Asian energy” lens that he could provide them. He is diligently working to slowly move folks ideologically right and into “ancestral healing” practices, such as prayers to Trump, and incel-infused co-optations of “restorative justice” that covertly convert folks into implementing abuse apologism under the name of “animism”.
The Madame of New Age Nazism
Madame Helena Blavatsky is known for her spiritual teachings known as Theosophy, which means “knowledge of the Divine.” She is the eugenic ancestor we want to conclude this article with, because most esoteric teachings can be traced back to her in some way. Born in Russia in 1831, to an aristocratic family, she traveled the world extensively, even as a child and became interested in Western esotericism as a teenager. She encountered so called “Masters of Ancient Wisdom” who sent her to Tibet to train in the studies of religion, philosophy, and science. By 1875, she had moved to New York City and helped found the Theosophical Society, which would become the foundations of New Age spirituality as we now know it. The two books she is most known for include: Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. She believed this ancient wisdom to be at the core of all world religions and spiritualities. Blavatsky influenced Rudolph Steiner, who founded Waldorf schools, the occult movement as a whole, and the New Age movement which emerged in the US in the 1970’s.
While we do not have time to get into all the spiritual principles that Blavatsky believed, you can find the principles of Theosophy here. If you look at the Theosophy symbol it includes the words: “There is No Religion Higher Than Truth” with a swastika symbol at the top. Theosophists claim the swastika as a pure spiritual symbol, that wasn’t seen as evil until Hitler appropriated it. The question we want us to ask is: Why might Hitler appropriate the swastika?
Blavatsky believed the the reality of “root races” and the intellectual superiority of the Aryan race. In this article condemning Blavatsky’s racism, it it stated that Hitler had a copy of Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine on his bedside table. It also articles Blavatsky’s claim that the sixth “root race” is forming in America known for its intellectual prowess and spirituality. Whenever a spiritual belief system is trying to reduce and synthesize spirituality and science, particularly focusing on “human evolution,” it is being influenced by Social Darwinism, which is eugenics.
In this blog post entitled The Fascism of Theosophy, Morton Torboll states:
“As mentioned, then the reductionism of Theosophy is due to the attempt of synthesizing spirituality and science. Theosophy is especially inspired by Darwinism, and its theories about human evolution. And the idea continues today in New Age and Ufology, where spirituality, apart from Darwinism, furthermore is sought synthesized with new developments within psychology, psychotherapy, natural science, especially biology and quantum mechanics. The whole thing is presented as an ideology with a lot of attempts to predict the future evolution of Man, often connected with eugenics: the applied “science” or the bio-social movement (Social Darwinism) which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of people, usually referring to human populations.”
If the Madame of New Age Nazism helped create the spiritual conditions for eugenics and white supremacy to flourish under the guise of spirituality and has deeply influenced Nazi esotericism and our New Age movement in the US, where does that leave us, here in 2022?
What happens when we don’t tell the full history of our “not just bio ancestors?”
What happens when we settle for pseudo-history?
What happens when we don’t see how spiritual teachings hide eugenics in broad daylight?
What happens when we internalize eugenics, because it’s everywhere and we head towards spiritual and healing spaces to heal, and we find predators who use eugenics to preach “cure?”
These women and their teachings are alive and well in “white anti-racist healing” spaces, whether we want to acknowledge them or not. Our main learning has been: Ancestral healing (if redeemable) must be rooted in deep historical analysis if we aren’t going to fall into alt-right eugenics traps.
Stay tuned: In our next installment, we will unearth some history of eugenics & how we cannot talk about things like animism or ancestral healing without also talking about eugenics.
References and Credits
One particular organizer we want to give credit to for helping us connect many dots, is Caitie Gutierrez — a mental health consumer advocate and writer.
Ayn Rand and Her Canadian Connection by CBC
Is Transformative Justice a Sunken Ship? by Estelle Ellison
Madame Blavatsky: Who Was She?
NXIVM, Jordan Peterson, and the Reincarnation of Ayn Rand’s Cult by Sarah Berman at Vice
Savitri Devi: The mystical fascist being resurrected by the alt-right by BBC
Standing Up to Blavatsky’s Racism
The Breakup: Samantha Freedom On Leaving the Alt-Right on the A Little Bit Culty Podcast
The Swastika: A Pure Spiritual Symbol
The Women Making Conspiracy Theories Beautiful: How the domestic aesthetics of Instagram repackage QAnon for the masses. by Kaitlyn Tiffany at The Atlantic
Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun: January 6 was practice. Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election. by Barton Gellman at The Atlantic
U.S. Named A ‘Backsliding Democracy’ For the First Time on European Think Tank’s Annual List by Carlie Porterfield at Forbes
Why Misogynists Make Great Informants: How Gender Violence on the Left Enables State Violence in Radical Movements by Courtney Desiree Morris at Incite
