Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
University of Exeter

From the Externsteine to the Sphinx: esoteric theory and practice in twentieth-century astroarchaeology

Modern archaeoastronomy chiefly relies on alignment-orientated statistically-led methods, thereby claiming empirical scientific status for its studies of ancient astronomies.  Scant prehistoric ethnographic data in the Old World has inhibited cultural astronomy, whereas native Indian customs and beliefs have facilitated studies of cultural astronomy in New World pyramid cultures.  However, the old stones of Europe have spoken.  Beginning in the late Renaissance, antiquaries and philosophers have applied various forms of cultural astronomy and astroarchaeology to present ideal or lost societies from Atlantis to Druidic England.  Since the late nineteenth century, esotericists have used cultural astronomy to elicit hidden secrets from Stonehenge or to discover ‘pre-sand’ Egypt.  This paper examines the ideas of romantic and nationalist cultural astronomers and cosmographers who interpreted prehistoric sites in early twentieth-century Germany.  Despite German defeat in 1945, their legacy acquired a universalist coloration and resurfaced across the western world in the 1960s onwards.  I examine these ideas with respect to their philosophical sources, and identify their political and religious inspiration in modernity since 1800.  Golden age myths, ancient wisdom-traditions, prophecy and apocalyptic feature in powerful echoes of Platonic, Gnostic, and neo-Hermetic thought.

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke is Professor of Western Esotericism and Director of the Centre for the Study of Esotericism (EXESESO) in the College of Humanities at the University of Exeter. He is the author of The Western Esoteric Traditions (OUP, 2008) and studies of Ramon Lull, Paracelsus, John Dee, Emanuel Swedenborg and Helena Blavatsky, as well as a trilogy of monographs on the esoteric-political connection, The Occult Roots of Nazism, Hitler's Priestess, and Black Sun (New York University Press).  He is General Editor of Western Esoteric Masters Series (North Atlantic) and joint-editor of Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism (Brill).  http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/exeseso/staff.php