User talk:Gnostrat

Welcome to Gnostrat's talk page.

Please post your new topic at the bottom of this page. Please start each new topic with a new ==Heading==. Please indent your posts with ":" if replying to an existing topic (or "::" if replying to a reply, and so on). Please be civil. Please sign and date your posts by adding four tildes (~~~~) at the end. I will generally respond here to comments that are posted here, so you may want to Watch this page until I respond. Please let me know if you'd prefer me to post the reply on your Talk page. Remember that I am busy in real life. Please be patient if I sometimes take a few days to reply.

National-Anarchism

Hi Gnostrat, there's been some trouble a-brewing over at the N-A article - nothing to worry about just yet, but I think we should keep an eye on things for now. Belzub (talk) 12:55, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Well, I see the crisis is over and matters are well in hand. Sorry for my non-involvement but I've had some crises of my own and really needed a couple of months' break. This place was also getting me down what with being dragged into an endless weary round of editorial conflicts with people I wasn't even looking for a fight with. Political articles especially are a dog and I've resolved to keep more to zoology, linguistics and religion/mysticism where there's more of a spirit of cooperation. N-A got sorted nicely without any help from me, but I'll keep an eye on it and help out if things get really hairy. Though IMO the contemporary Gnostic mythos that is Doctor Who may have become more vitally important to the well-being of the culture than any political ideology, however enlightened. Gnostrat (talk) 18:34, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

No problem, mate, good to have you back anyway. I know exactly what you mean about the political pages - it can be rather disheartening to discover how many people feel their take on reality is objective truth. I haven't been around much lately myself, what with starting university next week and suchlike. Ah well. Belzub (talk) 21:15, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Black Ram

I was wondering if you could send me some scans of the Black ram or would like to discuss anarchism please respond either on my user talk page (http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/User_talk:Freedom_nation) or you can email me at wolfsnguns@aim.com nothing has interested me this much in years and I would love it if you would please respond —Preceding unsigned comment added by Freedom nation (talk • contribs) 03:32, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Hi Gnostrat, I believe you have a copy of the Black Ram magazine, as you seem to be the first person to add references to it. Do you by any chance have a scan of it please? Many thanks! Please can you drop a message here: fyrnsidu-zine@hotmail.co.uk 62.30.131.10 (talk) 17:52, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

Ariosophy related articles

Hi, I don't know if you're still there, but after Nazi occultism got some negative attention recently, I've decided to clean up some of the worse issues around Ariosophy and neo-völkisch movements. I've flagged The Secret King, Iduna (literature society) and Literarische Donaugesellschaft for deletion, and you might want to object. Zara1709 (talk) 08:06, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, Zara. I'm still here (just). Apart from some personal issues, I lost connectivity for awhile and I'm not sure that's resolved yet as one of my PC's chips seems to be giving up the ghost. I suppose it's too late now, but The Secret King is an important enough book to deserve an entry as long as it sticks to the facts and doesn't preach. The other two look to me like they could be merged/redirected to Guido von List but I doubt they deserve separate entries. Why not fill out the Iduna article from Goodrick-Clarke first, then it'd be better referenced. Gnostrat (talk) 14:57, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Concerning The Secret King: You've got Mail. :) I'll probably be able to take another look at those two articles in a few days or weeks, but if not, that won't hurt anyone. Zara1709 (talk) 21:02, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

National-Anarchism

I've radically improved the National-Anarchism article. Any thoughts you would like to share on its talk page? --Loremaster (talk) 01:05, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

I've improved the National-Anarchism article enough that I now consider it well-written, comprehensive, factually accurate, neutral and stable enough to meet Wikipedia's good article criteria. Any thoughts you would like to share on Talk:National-Anarchism page? --Loremaster (talk) 23:15, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

By the way, can you complete the newly-created infobox for Troy Soutgate in the Troy Southgate article? You can look at Karl Marx's infobox in the Karl Mark article to give an idea of what a completed infobox looks like. --Loremaster (talk) 00:31, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Gnosticism

Hello Gnostrat, Lately I've been getting increasingly interested in Gnostic ideas, partly through studying the work of Philip K Dick, so I decided to break my Wiki-hibernation and re-initiate contact. A lot of the ideas make an intuitive kind of sense, but I have a couple of reservations towards certain aspects or forms of Gnosticism that, as an entirely ignorant newcomer to Gnosticism, I'd be interested in hearing your views on:
1: Certain strands of Gnosticism appear to demonstrate an extreme anthropomorphism or anti-cosmicism that I find untenable. The epilogue of The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas makes an explicit correlation between Descartes' monstrous contempt for the Universe and the denial of the material world central to certain Gnostic sects; is this a fair comparison? A publication by an Australian Gnostic group appeared to argue against this view of Gnosticism, so I'd be interested in other ancient or modern Gnostic strands that lack this anthropomorphic anti-nature worldview.
2: How intrinsic is dualism to the Gnostic worldview?
3: Could a Gnosticism exist that does not view the Demiurge as the creator of the material universe, but simply a corrupter?

I'm probably way off the mark with all of these, so my apologies if I come across as rather cretinous. Hope you are well anyhow. Belzub 12:08, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. :) I'm well enough, and I hope you don't mind the delay in replying. I felt that your entirely non-cretinous questions merited an answer in some depth.

Jonas did the best analysis that could be done for Gnosticism in his day, sweeping aside academic speculations and going straight for the essence revealed in the then known texts. But he himself was caught up in the mania for Heidegger and Spengler and the search for some response to the "crisis of the West", which I suppose conditions the way he reads the sources, refracted through the prism of Heidegger's existentialism. After decades of research on the Nag Hammadi library it is now rather evident that anyone who tries to straitjacket the ancient Gnosis into an interpretive framework derived from Heidegger is going to come seriously unstuck. Especially when Jonas uses a shared anti-cosmism as his criterion for lumping Marcion in with the Gnostics. A whole raft of misconceptions need clearing out of the way before we can even appreciate what the ancient Gnostic position was.

The supposed Gnostic anti-cosmism has a number of explanations. I'm not claiming the following as exhaustive: (1) A good deal of it is just misperceived apophatic theology, familiar from most of the major religions, that stresses the impossibility of describing a transcendent deity in finite and phenomenal terms. (2) In the past, some ascetic writings were wrongly attributed to Gnostics. This particularly applies to the "Thomas literature", which is actually the work of fairly typical Syrian Christians. The Gospel of Thomas may be an exception, at least in part, but this is controversial. (3) Plotinus, Porphyry and other Neoplatonists wrote against "gnostic" groups who denied the goodness of the natural universe. That this was no exaggeration is confirmed by texts in the Nag Hammadi library: for example, the longer recension of the Apocryphon of John inserts a passage which demonises the parts of the human body. We discover that this is an interpolated extract from the "Book of Zoroaster", possibly the one which Porphyry exposed as a Christian forgery. At any rate, it is evident that pre-existing Gnostic texts were being 'adapted' by Christian ascetics. Several other Nag Hammadi texts have had a superficial Christian makeover: the Epistle of Eugnostos exists in both a Christian and a pre-Christian version so we can see the process happening before our eyes. (4) Some Gnostic positions can now be recognised as unrepresentative. The Testimony of Truth, a Nag Hammadi book with a pronouncedly anti-cosmic and anti-somatic stamp, bears the hallmarks of a sectarian offshoot (probably ex-Valentinian) which abjured not just ecclesiastical Christianity, but the entire Gnostic mainstream as well. (5) Anti-somatic Christian movements tend to have their ultimate roots in Jewish Christianity (Ebionism, broadly defined) or sectarian Judaism, not in Gnosticism. The Manichaeans originated in a schism within the Jewish-Christian sect of the Elkesaites which pushed that sect's already-rigid asceticism to extremes. The fact that they took over some Gnostic (as well as Marcionite and "Thomasite") material doesn't erase the basic Jewish-Christian conceptual framework into which they shoehorned it.

Coming to the Marcionites, of whom Jonas makes so much: Marcion's anti-cosmism was thoroughgoing but he wasn't a Gnostic and what he took over from his Gnostic contact, Cerdo, was superficial. In fact, Marcionism is so essentially different from Gnosticism that the Valentinian Gnostics in second-century Rome preferred to side with the Catholics! What is telling is that Marcion builds his entire system around faith and grace. He knows nothing of an esoteric tradition offering initiation into higher knowledge, especially experiential knowledge of the Self as rooted in the divine, which is the irreducible core of gnosis. He has no concept of the human soul as consubstantial with God, because he makes man entirely a creature of the Demiurge and his dualism posits that God and the Demiurge are separate from eternity. If he had been accepted for initiation into a Gnostic circle he would have learned that the Demiurge, as a 'fallen' aspect of consciousness blinded by ignorance of his own origins, derives his essential existence from the divine world...as does matter itself, with which the Demiurge has in some sense identified himself. Because Marcion has no doctrine of emanation, the entire Gnostic mythology is likewise absent, and the Hebrew Bible (which for Gnostics is an inspired source of knowledge about the relationship between the natural universe, the Demiurge and the beings superior to the Demiurge, provided it is interpreted from a perspective contrary to Judaism) is discarded by Marcion as a worthless irrelevance. Marcion's disciple Apelles rectified these deficiencies after establishing contact with a genuine Gnostic tradition and as a result, remodelled the entire Marcionite system.

Insofar as the concept of "dualism" has any interpretive validity, I would approach the ancient Gnostics by starting from quantum physics and consciousness studies, which they seem to have anticipated through introspection. We don't directly perceive things-in-themselves and when we try to get a handle on reality through experiment, it slips through our fingers via weirdness like nonlocality or the uncertainty principle. It emerges that matter/energy is constructed from a 'quantum field' of pure mathematics. The equations of physics describe a continuum that is colourless, soundless, odourless, timeless and only takes on appearances when it is observed by a conscious mind. Primary experiences (colours, sounds, hot and cold, pleasure and pain, the feeling of something being solid or fluid, the sense of time passing) are not derivable from or explained by matching them up with sensory impulses set off by abstract numbers. All actual qualities are imposed by consciousness when it plugs into the field of numbers and interprets it. The world of everyday concrete reality is a world of the mind: the substrate of matter/energy being no more than an (in itself unknowable) grid out of which mind constructs its reality. Which leads to the question of what conscious reality will look like when it unplugs from the quantum field (at physical death)? Because if the qualia of everyday experience do not derive their essential existence from matter/energy, the disembodied consciousness experiences a reality that is equally as concrete as what we are wont to call the "material universe"...and no less worthy of respect. A number of scientists have now come out in favour of a form of dualism. I'm not sure if this is really the same outlook as Descartes, in fact I'm pretty sure it's not. There are points of resemblance (as there are also certain resemblances to magical thinking), but is it really contemptuous of the natural universe to locate it within consciousness rather than within matter/energy? Within a world of concrete quality rather than abstract quantity?

The main line of the Gnostic tradition asserts that matter/energy really should not have existed but is a by-product generated by consciousness which had fallen outside of its proper sphere...resulting in individual consciousnesses becoming, for a period, plugged into and conditioned by a deficient plane of existence which is transient, ephemeral, and therefore filled with tragedy and suffering. That's the negative part of the judgment, and I wouldn't call it monstrous, just realistic (especially given what we now know about the truly monstrous cruelty involved in the blind processes of Darwinian natural selection). The positive part is that the beauty and order which consciousness imparts to the universe reflects something of the perfection of the nonmaterial world (the "fullness" or Pleroma) and is worth infinitely more than the mortality and corruption which it takes over from its compromising association with the matter/energy substrate. The plenitude of form versus the deficiency of substance. I'm not sure how this differs in any way from classical Platonism except in being stated a bit more strongly. Platonists, of course, viewed matter as eternal but some Gnostic traditions contain hints of that and, as Gnostics set the creation of matter in 'mythic time', there's no need to go looking for a contradiction there. Though it does seem to me that classical Platonism is more dualistic than Gnosticism because it has no satisfying theory of why an eternal substrate of matter exists in the first place. Gnosticism has an inherently monist answer: emanation from the immaterial world.

Let me translate that into statements from the ancient Gnostic texts. According to the Simonian tradition reflected in the Great Revelation, a single infinite power exists within everything and divided itself in two: "One of these appears on high, namely the great power which is in the universe, which governs all things, male; and the other below, a great conception, which is female, which generates all things". The elements of the natural world are 'materialised' powers of the mind: for example, the sky is "mind" itself and the earth is "thought", air is "reflection" and water is "conception". And thus, "the earth below receives her kindred intelligible fruits brought down to earth from heaven". The Peratae described a mediating principle, the Son or Logos, whom they likened to a snake continually circulating between consciousness (the Father) and the world of matter. The Logos takes the forms or archetypes from the Father and imprints them on matter; later in the cycle he recovers them from matter and returns them to their source. The natural universe is the place where the divine forms manifest, and "anyone whose eyes are so favoured will see, on looking up into the sky, the beautiful form of the Serpent coiled up at the grand beginning of the heavens and becoming, for all born beings, the principle of all movement. Then he will understand that no being, either in heaven or on earth, was formed without the Serpent." The treatise Zostrianos alludes to a comprehensive transcendent realm of archetypes for the natural world: people, animals, trees, fruit and even weeds. In the Trimorphic Protennoia and other so-called 'Sethian' (or more accurately, Classic Gnostic) treatises, the goddess Sophia (Wisdom) reveals herself to be the Father's first thought who is dispersed as a breath or seed within every creature: "I am the life...that dwells within every power...within invisible lights and Archons and angels and demons and every soul dwelling in [the underworld] and in every material soul". It's not an anthropocentric concept: there is no life-form into which consciousness has not plugged itself and no part of the natural universe which cannot in the long term be restored to its proper sphere. Marsanes (another 'Sethian' tractate) pronounces that the observer is "blessed...whether he is gazing at the two [sun and moon] or is gazing at the seven planets or at the twelve signs of the Zodiac" and furthermore, that "in every respect the sense-perceptible world is worthy of being saved entirely". And in the Carpocratian system any dualism is strictly secondary, as Epiphanes' argument for free love and community of wealth rests on the natural order: Moses' laws affirming marriage and property legalise covetousness and violate the equal sharing which "the rest of the animals show".

These observations should set "Gnostic dualism" in its overall context. In 1966 the Congress of Messina proposed a definition that has stood up rather well: Gnosticism "can be summarised in the idea of a divine spark [pneuma] in man, deriving from the divine realm, fallen into this world of fate, birth and death, and needing to be awakened by the divine counterpart of the self in order to be finally reintegrated....this idea is based ontologically on the conception of a downward movement of the divine whose periphery (often called Sophia or Ennoia) had to submit to the fate of entering into a crisis and producing, even if only indirectly, this world, upon which it cannot turn its back, since it is necessary for it to recover the pneuma, a dualistic conception on a monistic background, expressed in a double movement of devolution and reintegration."

The Demiurge is actually not as important within this scheme as Sophia. Ancient Mediterranean cultures assumed that the architect of a project would not be the same as the workman who implemented it. The latter tended to be of rather limited intelligence, as it wasn't necessary for the executor of the plans to actually understand them. Our sources view the Pleromatic Christ or Logos as the original architect or designer, "the first universal creator" as he is described somewhere or other (I've lost track of where). In other texts it's his female aspect or counterpart, Sophia. The Demiurge or workman has a subordinate role. Heracleon says that the Logos "provided the Demiurge with the cause for creating the world" and, in the Tripartite Tractate, the Logos uses the Demiurge as his instrument in "beautifying" the creation. According to Ptolemy, "the Demiurge believed that he had created all this of himself, but in fact he had made them because [Sophia] had prompted him. He made the heaven without knowing the heaven; he formed man without knowing him; he brought the earth to light without knowing it. And in every case...he was ignorant of the ideas of the things he made, and even of his own Mother, and imagined that he alone was all things." These texts show that Gnostic opinions of the Demiurge and of the cosmos which he formed were not unremittingly negative. On the whole, the sources are ambivalent. The execution is flawed only because of the artisan's use of a deficient material substance and/or because his own insecure need to be top dog generates conflicts in an otherwise good creation. The Demiurge is usually distinguished from the devil; his origin is a tragic accident, his ignorance is not wilful, his arrogance is born of fear and ultimately he, too, is enlightened and redeemed.

In some systems where there are more than one Demiurge, the original ignorant and arrogant one is cast out of the highest of the material heavens and is replaced by his more benevolent son, on the model of Kronos and Zeus (or Yahweh Elohim "Lord God" versus Yahweh Sabaoth "Lord of Hosts", if we prefer the Hebrew equivalents). Attested in such tractates as the Hypostasis of the Archons and On The Origin of the World, this type of cosmogony allows the gods or angels who govern the natural cosmos (the Archons) to be viewed in a positive light: they're doing the best they can with what they've inherited from their deposed father. This may have been the original scheme since, even in systems which acknowledge only a single Demiurge, he is regularly named Ialdabaoth and if we etymologise that to mean "Begetter of Sabaoth" (the younger Demiurge), he would have acquired his name within a theology of multiple Demiurges.

The most nature-affirming tractates in the Coptic Gnostic corpus are those works such as the Perfect Discourse (also called Asclepius) which are attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Here, as in Hermetic gnosis generally, the portrayal of the Demiurge (identified with Zeus, not Kronos) is essentially positive: his purpose is to purge disorder and restore the world to being an image of the highest God.

If I could recommend just one book as an up-to-date introduction to the subject it'd be Ancient Gnosticism: Traditions and Literature by Birger A. Pearson (Fortress Press, 2007; ISBN 978-0-8006-3258-8). This is a welcome and scholarly corrective to popular, slightly sensationalist offerings like Benjamin Walker's Gnosticism: Its History and Influence (1983) which is looking seriously dated now (and its referencing system is ridiculous). Numerous sects which Walker catalogues ('Sethians', 'Cainites', 'Ophites', 'Barbelognostics') never existed; Early Catholic heresiologists were just splitting hairs. The main line of the tradition simply referred to itself as "Gnostic", and the fairly fluid theology and cosmology bear witness to lively internal debate rather than a schism mentality. On the particular question of "anti-cosmism", see especially Michael A. Williams, "Negative Theologies and Demiurgical Myths in Late Antiquity" and other essays in Gnosticism and Later Platonism: Themes, Figures, and Texts (John D. Turner & Ruth Majercik, eds., Symposium Series no. 12, Society of Biblical Literature, Atlanta, GA, 2000; ISBN 0-88414-035-0). This volume may be difficult to get hold of, but it well repays the trouble. I'll leave you with Williams' central proposition:

"narrow emphasis on formulas of negation in [Gnostic] myths has frequently been one of the key building blocks in the characterization of an alleged "gnostic" worldview as so "anticosmic" that it could find no help from the visible cosmos in the quest for knowledge of the divine....the category [of Gnosticism] tends to be constructed out of clichés that too often turn out to be misrepresenting many of the supposedly "gnostic" sources. "Anticosmism" is one of the most common of such clichés, and...it is one of the least enlightening and most problematic....it is noteworthy that just those "gnostic" sources that contain the most remarkable instances of extended negative theological discourse happen also to be among the very sources where arguably the most positive -- not most negative -- relationship is depicted between true divinity and the material cosmos."

Hope this has been of some help. Gnostrat (talk) 07:27, 17 February 2010 (UTC)

Fantastic, thanks for your response. I think what Jonas was probably trying to do was make Gnosticism seem more palatable to a mid-20th-century audience. I'll try and get hold of the Pearson book.

Would it be fair to say, then, that Gnosticism is quite close to the idea of panentheism? Particularly in relation to the idea of emanation. Belzub (talk) 17:38, 05 April 2010 (UTC)

Note

There is a thread here that may be of interest to you. Thanks, –xeno^talk 13:16, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Goodrick-Clarke on N-A

Hello Gnostrat. Could you please provide me with a full quote of what Goodrick-Clarke has to say about N-A in his 2002 book Black Sun? --Loremaster (talk) 19:55, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

The entire passage takes up a paragraph on pp. 49-50:

[49] Meanwhile, Troy Southgate's National Revolutionary Faction was achieving prominence in the militant underground. Southgate had begun his political career in 1983 with the "Political Soldiers" faction of the National Front, then followed [Nick] Griffin and others into the Italian-inspired International Third Position in 1989. This association lasted until September 1992, when Southgate formed the English Nationalist Movement (ENM). Between 1992 and 1998, the ENM returned to the revolutionary principles of the NF, with an emphasis on the writings of Otto Strasser and Walther Darré alongside the socialist ideas of William Morris, Robert Owen and William Cobbett. Renamed National Revolutionary Faction [50] (NRF) in 1998, the party is committed to "national revolution," advocates a strong Europe and has joined the European Liberation Front, a pan-European alliance of national revolutionaries based on the ideas of Otto Strasser, Francis Parker Yockey and Jean Thiriart. Like other groups in the Euro-American radical right, the NRF is committed to the fight against ZOG and the "New World Order," rejects the democratic process and aims to establish autonomous all-white zones. In August 2000 its strategy of infiltration led to joint actions alongside violent anti-hunt saboteurs of the Animal Liberation Front.

Nothing really that we didn't already know. You'll notice that G-C emphasises the rather routine points of resemblance with other white separatists and omits to mention the post-ENM expansion of anarchist, green and decentralist thinking as increasingly crucial elements in the developing synthesis; and other details are of course obsolete since the NRF dissolved itself and severed its links with its erstwhile Strasserite and National-Bolshevik associates in ELF. It's rather odd that G-C describes the NRF as a party...and has it sandwiched between paragraphs on Combat 18 and David Myatt's National-Socialist Movement, neither of which has the slightest connection with national-anarchism. I have never had that much confidence in Goodrick-Clarke's organisational skills. ;) However, he matters for notability purposes, as one more third-party academic who has 'noticed' this current. Gnostrat (talk) 00:20, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Thule Society membership

Dear Gnostrat, I see you reverted my edits to the membership of the Thule. While I agree that some of the names may be questionable others were without doubt active members or had accepted honorary positions.

The list I provide was from: - Dietrich Bronder (“Before Hitler Came”) and E. R. Carmin (“Guru Hitler”) .

However, Guido von List is referenced by : - Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism. Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, U.K.: Aquarian Press, 1985. hb, 293pp, illust, ISBN: 0-85030-402-4. Also see: Gemäss Glowka (1981:25) soll die Thule-Gesellschaft als "Verein zur Pflege deutscher.

I can provide endless solid references for many of the others on the list in particular Bernhard: -" In the spring, Sebottendorff passed the editorship to Hanns Georg Müller; the staff included Wilhelm Laforce and Marc Sesselmarin, both Thule members and later persons of note in the NSDAP; among the contributors were Gottfried Feder and "Redivivus" that is, Bernhard Stempfle, a Catholic völkisch friar who, after being a warm ally of Hitler in the early years, dropped away and was murdered in the Röhm purge of 1934". Source : - Before Hitler came: Thule Society and Germanen Orden Reginald H. Phelps.

"Several people who would become important Nazis, like Hans Frank, Rudolph Hess, and Alfred Rosenberg, were members of the fighting society." Source: - Conservative Radicals: The Einwohnerwehr, Bund Bayern und Reich, and the Limits of Paramilitary Politics in Bavaria, 1918-1928. History, Department of Dissertations, Theses, & Student Research, Department of History. University of Nebraska. Mrfh (talk) 07:12, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

Goodrick-Clarke is our leading historian in this field. His appendix E states that Bronder's book is not a reliable source, describing his membership list as "spurious" and his account of the Thule Society as "fictitious". I can't comment on Carmen's book, but you imply that it has a similar membership list and this rings immediate warning bells. Plus, the title Guru Hitler sounds like a typical example of that genre of popular speculation which Goodrick-Clarke describes as "cryptohistory", meaning that it postulates occult connections and influences which have escaped the attention of all serious scholars. The inclusion of Rudolf Steiner (denounced as a false prophet in certain of these 'Aryan' circles and Public Enemy Number One for the Nazis) is as fanciful as it gets.

As for List, nowhere in his book does Goodrick-Clarke describe him as a member of the Thule Society. It would have been rather difficult, as the Society's formal dedication was on 18 August 1918 in Munich. At around this time, List was in ill health in Vienna; he died on 17 May 1919 in Berlin. So the overlap when the ailing List could have joined the TS was short. He was more concerned with the spiritual side of his ideas and wasn't involved with political offshoots like the Germanenorden and TS. Nauhaus and Sebottendorff simply regarded him as a source of inspiration, that is all.

Phelps also is silent about List's involvement, and he has nothing to say that gets anywhere near Bronder's wildly improbable membership roll (Himmler, Göring and crew). The names which he does supply are comparative small fry. Laforce and Seselmann are already noted in the third and final paragraph of the DAP section; I have no objection to reorganising this sentence slightly in order to source those names to Phelps.

Feder and Stempfle were only contributors to Sebottendorff's Beobachter newspaper (Feder being also a shareholder). Phelps does not claim that they were Thule members in the passage which you quote. Goodrick-Clarke (p.149) mentions Feder among the "Thule guests". The Society's rooms hosted political discussion by many different anti-Republican elements who weren't necessarily Thule members.

It's difficult for me to comment on a thesis or dissertation by an unnamed Nebraska student, but Goodrick-Clarke has stated that Frank and Hess were Thule members: this is already mentioned in the article and is uncontroversial. Rosenberg was not a member, but only attended Thule meetings as a guest, again according to Goodrick-Clarke (p.149).

One of the main conclusions of Goodrick-Clarke's book is that the occult roots of Nazism is exactly what groups like the Thule Society were not. By actually examining the membership lists, the author debunked decades of unsubstantiated claims that the NSDAP leadership in general were secret Thulists. I think that the onus is on those who perpetuate these myths to establish why their sources should be preferred to acknowledged reliable historians. Gnostrat (talk) 04:22, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

"One of the main conclusions of Goodrick-Clarke's book is that the occult roots of Nazism is exactly what groups like the Thule Society were not".

I could not agree more. We are on the same page in that regard. The problem with the membership list, is the Thule was mainly a 'front' for covert activity. As such, many of those I listed may well have been activists but never attended academic meetings. Clearly if the claim of over 1,500 members has any validity, few attended meetings as records show they consisted of just a handful of people, listening to lecutures in up market hotel rooms. To the best of my knowledge, meetings were only held in the one city, but cells are said to have existed across Germany.

The kidnapping of Thule members, by Communists, does however suggest the official membership list may have included activists and not just academics. All things considered, I agree the article is the best reflection of the truth now possible and determining the exact membership list probably is impossible. Thank you for responding in such great detail. Best wishes. Mrfh (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 04:47, 9 May 2010 (UTC).

Sorted

{{unblock|Innocent victim of IP range block by User:Jayron32 intended for User:ROBERT TAGGART}}

Fish article

I see that you are active on the fish article, where I see no mention of swallowing or tongues... So, do they have tongues? --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 03:04, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

Long time since I worked on that one. Some of them have something like a tongue, but it's not the same as ours. See Tongue#Non-human tongues. Gnostrat (talk) 19:41, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

National-Anarchism

Hello Gnostrat. I was wondering if you could intervene in the dispute we are having on the Talk:National-Anarchism page about whether or not Southgate's new NAM manifesto should be mentioned in the article. At the same time, your comments about the current version of the article would be very much appreciated. --Loremaster (talk) 21:06, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

My support for inclusion is on record. I'll take a read through the article but from the looks of things you don't really need help. BTW don't ask where I've been since May, it's a long story and I suppose I should have declared myself as semi-retired from WP. Whether I'll be more active here in the near future, I can't say for sure yet. Gnostrat (talk) 19:15, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Dispute resolution survey

Dispute Resolution – Survey Invite Hello Gnostrat. I am currently conducting a study on the dispute resolution processes on the English Wikipedia, in the hope that the results will help improve these processes in the future. Whether you have used dispute resolution a little or a lot, now we need to know about your experience. The survey takes around five minutes, and the information you provide will not be shared with third parties other than to assist in analyzing the results of the survey. No personally identifiable information will be released. Please click HERE to participate. Many thanks in advance for your comments and thoughts. You are receiving this invitation because you have had some activity in dispute resolution over the past year. For more information, please see the associated research page. Steven Zhang DR goes to Wikimania! 01:37, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

Vote on Billie Piper Talk Page

Hello! I opened a vote on the Billie Piper talk page. See: http://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Talk:Billie_Piper#VOTE:_.22Billie_Paul_Piper_.28born_Leian_Paul_Piper.29.22_instead_of_.22Lianne.22 Israell (talk) 17:05, 18 January 2013 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!

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Nomination of Neo-völkisch movements for deletion

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