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Everything on Culture and related to the Maier files series. A cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings

The Face That Tells No Lies

There is a scar on Otto Skorzeny’s face that irritated him deeply — not the scar itself, but the name given to it. Scar face. He knew exactly where the label came from, and he rejects it in his 1962 memoir with the precision of a man who has thought about this more than once: “Ich darf also feststellen: Ich...
Himmler's book stash Czech Library

Heinrich Himmler’s hidden book collection

The Daily Mail published an article related to one of the Maier files backstories. An unusual collection of books on witches as well as the occult that was collected by SS chief Heinrich Himmler in the war has actually been found in the Czech Republic. The books – part of a 13,000-strong collection – were discovered in a depot of the National Library of Czech Republic in close proximity to Prague which has not been accessed since the 1950s. Norwegian […]...

Thursday’s Secret: Why Thor Is the God You Call When the World Burns

If Wednesday belongs to the master of masks, Thursday belongs to the one god in the entire Norse pantheon who could never wear one. Thor’s day. We say it every week — the same way we say Wednesday without hearing Wodan — and we don’t think twice. But Thursday carries something different from Wednesday. Something rawer. Something that still rumbles....

The Living Logos

If one were to seek the very lifeblood of a people—that invisible yet palpable force which binds the generations, conveys the inner most thoughts of a community, and gives unique expression to its encounter with the divine and the eternal—one need look no further than its language. It is the specific cornerstone of culture, the vessel of history, and the...

The Heart Was Never Simple

The heart symbol is everywhere. On greeting cards, phone screens, jewellery, tattoos. We use it without thinking, assuming it is simply shorthand for love — universal, timeless, obvious. It is none of those things. The heart symbol as we know it today does not accurately represent the shape of the muscle that pumps our blood. That small detail — easy to miss — should alert us to how thoroughly we have been cut off from the symbolic world that gave […]...

The Door and the Destination

Last week we followed the initiatory roots of the man who founded Germany’s most influential ‘Germanic’ esoteric society. Those roots pointed to Turkey, to Sufi orders, to a Jewish Rosicrucian merchant — anywhere but the tradition the organisation claimed to be recovering. This week: why that pattern wasn’t unique to Sebottendorf. And what genuine Northern transmission actually looks like. Related:...
Wheel of the year

A Trip Through the Wheel of the Year

The 8 ancient festivities for each sign an essential point in nature’s yearly cycles. They are generally portrayed as 8 equally spaced spokes on a wheel symbolizing the year in total; the days on which they fall are approximately equally spaced on the calendar, as well. The wheel of the year consists of two sets of four holidays for each....

The Fire of the Gods: What 56 Civilizational Collapses Tell Us About Our Future

For the common man, economics is a dreary subject, a confusing litany of numbers spoken in a tongue he does not understand. He feels its effects in the shrinking of his wallet, the anxiety at the grocery store, and the vague sense that the foundations of his world are softening like sand beneath his feet. He has been told it is complex, that only experts can understand it. This is the great lie. The truth is both simpler and far […]...

Children of Ash and Elm – A Vikings Story

Based on the latest archaeological and textual evidence, Children of Ash and Elm tells the story of the Vikings on their own terms: their politics, their cosmology and religion, their material world. Known today for a stereotype of maritime violence, the Vikings exported new ideas, technologies, beliefs, and practices to the lands they discovered and the peoples they encountered, and...

Irminsul: The Pillar Charlemagne Had to Destroy

772 AD. A military campaign pauses. Charlemagne’s army doesn’t press the advantage — it tears down a wooden post. Why? You don’t stop a war to demolish something unless that something is the war. The Column That Carries Heaven Around 850 AD, the monk Rudolf of Fulda wrote down what the Saxons had believed before the conquest. He described a...

She Kept the Fire

Every Holy Saturday, across the fields and river margins of northern Germany, enormous fires are lit. Communities gather. Children run around the flames. Someone hands out mulled wine. Local firefighters stand by. It is called the Osterfeuer — the Easter bonfire — and the tourist brochures will tell you it is a charming old custom, a way for neighbours to dispose of winter hedge-trimmings, a folk tradition that the Church incorporated into its Easter liturgy sometime in the Middle Ages. That is […]...

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