Hidden Cults: The Thule Society

A. Royden D'souza
Feb 15
6 min read

The group called the Thule Society began in Munich around 1918 as a small völkisch/occult study circle that promoted racialist mythology and anti-Marxist politics.

It intersected with the chaotic post-war Munich environment and with people who later joined the early National Socialist movement, but its direct organizational power was limited.

After 1925 it essentially dissolved; since World War II it has been the subject of extensive mythmaking and conspiracy theory (from sensational wartime propaganda to post-war occult fantasies).

Origins of Thule Society: Who Set it Up and Why

The group that historians call the Thule Society grew out of wider völkisch currents in Germany — that is, movements combining romantic nationalism, racial theories about “Aryans,” and interest in pre-Christian/Germanic myth and occultism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In Munich after World War I, those currents met a city in political chaos, marked by insurrections (left and right), defeat, and a sense of national humiliation.

The immediate founder of the Bavarian Thule circle was Rudolf von Sebottendorff, who rebranded and reorganized an older secretive lodge (part of the Germanenorden milieu or the Germanic Order) into a more public “study group for Germanic antiquity” (Studiengruppe für germanisches Altertum) and — in his vocabulary — the Thule Society.

The name invoked Thule, the classical/romantic myth of a remote northern homeland that occultists and racial thinkers equated with Aryan origins.

Thule Myth: The “Land of Thule” (often called Ultima Thule) originates in Greco-Roman geography rather than in German mysticism. The earliest known reference appears in the account of the Greek explorer Pytheas, who around the 4th century BCE described a distant northern land reached after sailing beyond Britain.

Later writers such as Strabo and Pliny the Elder repeated or debated Pytheas’s claims, calling the place Thule — the farthest edge of the known world.

In classical literature, Thule symbolized the extreme north, the boundary of civilization, where the sun barely set in summer and barely rose in winter. Scholars have long debated what real location Pytheas might have meant — candidates include Iceland, coastal Norway, the Shetland Islands, or even Greenland (which Israel/US is interested in, strangely). There is no firm archaeological proof identifying one exact place though.

During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Thule transformed from a geographic curiosity into a poetic symbol. It came to mean “the ultimate frontier,” a land at the edge of reality — hence the Latin phrase Ultima Thule.

Maps from the 15th–17th centuries often placed Thule vaguely in the North Atlantic, reflecting both myth and incomplete geographic knowledge.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, romantic nationalist and occult thinkers reinterpreted Thule as the supposed primordial homeland of the “Aryan” or Nordic race.

Note: The use of 'Arya' is inspired from the mythology of Theosophical Society, whose use of 'Arya' to represent the current human race (descended of Atlantean race) was inspired from the Indo-Aryan term used for the Sanskrit-related language family.

Aryan (Indo-Iranian language speaking steppe tribes of 1800-1500 BC) >inspires> Mythical Aryans (Current spiritually awakened human race according to Theosophical Society that borrowed concepts from Hinduism) >inspires> Mythical Aryans (People of the mythical Nordic land of Thule)

So, Thule was not based on classical evidence but on speculative racial mythology. Groups such as the Thule Society adopted the name to evoke an imagined ancient northern source of spiritual and racial purity. In this usage, “Thule” was no longer a geographic hypothesis but a mythic symbol of origins, destiny, and lost greatness.

Note: A reason for the conceptualization 'Aryan' race was to create a Germanic national identity that could counter the Zionist bankers, industrialists, academics who were dominating the country, and considered everyone other than 'Jews' as goyim (equivalent to cattle). So, Aryanism was adopted to directly battle the supremacist attitude of the elite at the time.

The Thule Society combined esoteric studies (astrology, runology, Germanic legend), racialist ideas, and explicit anti-Bolshevik and anti-Zionist politics.

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Activities and Political Role (1918–1925)

What the Thule Society actually did in 1918–1920 is relatively well documented and far less dramatic than many later legends.

Publishing and meetings. The Thule circle held lectures and published pamphlets and ran a small network of local lodges and supporters. It also had a political face: Thule members sponsored and supported right-wing and anti-socialist agitation.

Connection to the DAP. The Munich Thule milieu provided social space and contacts that helped launch the early Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers’ Party — the DAP), the organization that would be reorganized into the NSDAP.

A few early DAP/NSDAP figures were present in the Thule scene; Thule patrons provided meeting rooms, lists of contacts, and local legitimacy. But documentary evidence suggests the Thule Society was not the single engine that created Nazism, it was one of many nationalist, völkisch, and paramilitary networks in Bavaria.

Notable early overlaps in personnel (some of whom later rose in the Nazi movement) included figures such as Rudolf Hess and others who frequented similar circles. But important scholarly point: being socially proximate to Thule is not the same as being directed by it. The causal arrows run both ways in the chaotic postwar setting.

Street politics and violence. Thule members were anti-Bolshevik and were implicated in Munich’s street conflicts (both as conspirators in small plot attempts and as part of citizen militias).

During April 1919, in the aftermath of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, Thule premises were raided and some members were arrested or executed by "communist" revolutionary authorities (Red Guards under Zionist Jew leadership); this precipitated counter-revolutionary mobilization.

Membership and Prominence

Claims in popular accounts often exaggerate numbers and influence. Scholarly estimates place the Thule Society’s peak membership in the low thousands (often cited ~1,500 in Bavaria, with a smaller active core in Munich).

Many prominent Nazi leaders passed through the same milieu or knew Thule figures — but most senior Nazis were not formal, long-term Thule initiates.

Important historians (and archivists) stress that the Society’s role was local and contextual rather than the center of a conspiratorial plot that mechanically produced Nazism.

Separating Facts from Propaganda and Myth

This is the crucial part for readers who want accurate history: the Thule Society has been the focus of three partly overlapping kinds of distortion.

Wartime and immediate postwar propaganda (British/American and other Allied narratives). During the wars and after, Allied and international reporting sometimes sensationalized German occultism as a way to explain or demonize the enemy, and wartime intelligence sometimes amplified rumors. Those contemporary reports fed popular narratives.

Fictional and sensational post-war accounts. From the 1950s onward, authors and pulp writers exaggerated the Thule link to occult technologies, secret Arctic bases, and supernatural Nazi plots. These stories entered popular culture (movies, novels, conspiracy books) and were repeated without archival confirmation. Examples include the Hollow Earth/Antarctic base myths and Nazi UFO narratives. These are not supported by credible primary documentation.

Modern extremist revivalists. Since the late 20th century a handful of groups and websites have adopted the “Thule” label as part of esoteric nationalist identity. These contemporary uses are revivalist and ideological; they do not represent an unbroken organizational lineage from the 1918 society.

Archival research and careful historiography show some real overlaps between völkisch occultism and the earliest Nazi networks, but not the kind of centralized mystical command center that conspiracists claim.

Below is a list of major conspiratorial claims and the historical reality:

“Thule created the Nazi Party and ran Hitler.”

Claim: Thule was the secret cabal that founded and controlled the NSDAP and Adolf Hitler.

Reality: Thule-adjacent people helped incubate local nationalist organization and some early NSDAP figures were in the same social universe, but no credible evidence shows the Society controlled Hitler or the NSDAP as a secret board of directors.

Hitler himself was not a documented long-term member of Thule. Scholarly consensus treats Thule as one of many strands that fed into the chaotic right-wing ecosystem in Munich.

“Occult rituals powered Nazi technology/secret weapons (UFOs, wattless energy, Hollow Earth bases).”

Claim: Thule occult science led to Wunderwaffen, flying discs, or Antarctic bases.

Reality: These ideas are post-war inventions or embellishments. The Nazi regime had technocrats and real weapons programs, and some fringe figures produced quack theories — but the specific claims about supernatural technologies or Antarctic launch bases rest on hearsay, later hoaxes, and sensationalism rather than archival proof.

“Continuous, clandestine network after the war.”

Claim: Thule survived WWII in secret and runs modern political events.

Reality: After WWII the original organizations were dismantled; the name has been reused by revivalist groups, but there is no verified, continuous, globally powerful “Thule” cabal tracing directly back to 1918 that secretly controls modern events.

Modern “Thule” websites are typically ideological revivalism or conspiracy entrepreneurship.

Post-1925 Dissolution and Modern Afterlives

The historical Thule Society faded as a distinctive force after the early 1920s and its formal structures were gone by the mid-1920s. Several factors contributed:

Internal quarrels and the fragmentation common to völkisch lodges.
Later the Nazi state suppressed autonomous secret societies that might rival its control.
The absorption of political energy into parties (like the NSDAP) and paramilitary groups (Freikorps, Stahlhelm).

Contemporary scholarship and security analysts treat modern “Thule” organizations as part of the far-right subculture rather than as a shadow government.