Tulhu Academy

The Thule Society appears in the trio’s construction of the Plan as a secret society connecting racist, pan-German politics with occult traditions and, in their account, the rise of Nazism. The novel gives the claim a foothold in publicly available names and dates, then shows how the trio turns those fragments into a sweeping theory of hidden influence. The Society thus functions both as a purported link in their conspiracy and as an example of how a conspiracy narrative can convert association into proof.

Place in the Plan

Belbo introduces the Thule Society while arguing that the trio is not inventing its material from nothing: they begin with information in the public domain. His outline says that the Germanenorden formed in 1912 advocating Aryan superiority, and that in 1918 Baron von Sebottendorf founded the related Thule Society. Belbo casts it as another version of the Templar Strict Observance, now with strong racist, pan-German and neo-Aryan tendencies. In this account, the Society supplies a modern political branch for the Plan’s older secret traditions.

Belbo’s chain of associations continues through Sebottendorf’s later claims and publications. He says Sebottendorf wrote in 1933 that he had sown what Hitler reaped, published a pamphlet on alchemy in 1924, and later edited an astrological magazine. The narrative also invokes Trevor-Roper’s account that Nazi leaders, including Hitler, consulted horoscopes, and mentions a 1943 consultation of psychics to locate Mussolini. These details are assembled to make occult influence seem continuous and organized; their force in the scene comes from the trio’s arrangement of them, not from independent confirmation of a single directing organization.

The Society and Nazi Occultism

The conversation extends the Society’s supposed influence beyond its own membership. Belbo names Rudolf Hess, Rosenberg and Hitler among those associated with Thule circles, then draws the broader conclusion that Nazi leadership was connected with Teutonic neo-occultism. Casaubon joins the imaginative reconstruction by proposing that Hitler’s ability to inflame crowds might be explained through psychic power and contact with subterranean currents. The suggestion turns political charisma into a supernatural mechanism: Hitler becomes, in the trio’s speculation, a channel for forces beneath the earth.

The trio carries this reasoning further when it folds Nazi genocide into the Plan. Belbo claims that the elaborate procedures of persecution and murder must have served a hidden search for a message carried by a representative of the Thirty-six Invisibles. In his version, Hitler sought a clue that would let him use the Pendulum to locate the convergence of telluric currents beneath the earth. The Society is not itself shown carrying out this search; rather, its alleged occult and political associations help the trio construct a story in which Nazi power becomes one instrument of a universal secret design. This invented explanation appropriates the reality of the Holocaust and converts it into conspiracy lore, a distortion the novel’s larger treatment of fabricated plots makes impossible to regard as historical evidence.

Evidence, Association, and Invention

The Society’s role illustrates the Plan’s method: begin with fragments that appear verifiable, connect them through analogy, and treat the resulting pattern as confirmation. A related passage traces how the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were attributed to a supposed Russian conspiracy. The trio’s account links their circulation to the anti-Semitic political maneuvering of Rachkovsky and to earlier texts, including Maurice Joly’s work and a document attributed to Sue. Rather than establishing a hidden continuity, this sequence exposes how texts can be copied, reassigned and used to authorize accusations against Jews.

That history matters to the Thule episode because the trio applies the same conspiratorial procedure to occultism and Nazism: names, publications and reported associations are made to prove a single concealed cause. Belbo’s insistence on objective data sits uneasily beside the imaginative leaps that follow. The Society’s narrative significance lies in that tension. It is presented as a purported historical organization, but its place in the story is chiefly as a node in an ever-expanding theory whose apparent coherence depends on turning limited connections into certainty.