Catechism Of The Germanic Religion: Part Six

Thesis 12

“The German Religion recognizes no dualism or conflict between the body and soul, any more than duality and conflict between God and the world and God and man. We think of the being, body-soul, as a natural unity and entity.”

Comments: What is the Body-Soul and Entity?

In religion a sober knowledge of truth is more important than metaphysical fantasy. 

The belief in the body-soul unity is a basic Indo-Germanic conviction. It was so among the Greeks and Romans (a healthy mind in a healthy body). The Nordics had it; so had Goethe. Modern Eugenics is based upon it. 

It was in the Southern religions of near-eastern origin which developed the dogma of conflict between soul and body, mind and flesh. The flesh was condemned as subject to Satanic powers, while the soul was deemed holy.

‘“Crucify thy Flesh” was the demand of the aesthetic Christian ethics of decadence, which overlooked that at the same time the mind was crucified. For in a sick and tortured flesh dwells a sick or tortured mind.

‘In the National Socialist State this dualistic Christian anthropology is completely out of date. Whoever seeks to weed out the inferior and cultivate the gifted and best of our inheritance, whoever seeks a Social-Aristocracy, can be no longer Christian. For Christianity is the religious form of Social Democracy. Both are international, democratic and believing in human equality.’

This dualism has been the main cause of decay of the European culture peoples. 

Thesis 13

“The living world is the Womb-Mother of the high human mind. Knowing Being and Mind is a birth of the All-Mother. The mother-child thought is hence the right indication of the God-world secret. We speak in a modern Nature religion of the Mind-child God, who rests in the womb of the All-Mother.”

Comments: How is this to be understood?

‘God-Mind is not the Author of the World, but a late appearance and growth in the world-evolution, a birth in the sacred womb of the All-Mother God-Nature.’

The reaching out of the Motherhand of Nature is German piety. Thousands realize this need. Hence the return to blood and soil, the home-soil which is always mother-soil. 

‘What nonsense it is to say that the child is the author of the Mother and the one born created the Mother-womb out of nothing. This, however, is the Christian mode of thought.’

For Germans the symbol of the God-Mother with the God-Child in her arms is an ancient Nordic symbol, which many Southern peoples took over and adopted. It found its way into the Christian Madonna cult.

‘If we seek a symbol of our faith, we put in the place of the Christian Trinity of God (all male persons), the natural, harmonious with life, two-in-one and unity-of-two of the Mother and her Child, as it was celebrated in the old Nordic birth festival of Julgott. We feel the great sacred truth that man is the place of the birth of God in the womb of the All-Mother and that a modern teaching of God cannot be achieved in any other way.’

-excerpted from “The 25 Theses of the German Religion: A Catechism” by Ernst Bergmann (1936)