From Rome to the Reich: Mithras, the Aryans and the Return of the Sun
In the last study, we followed a disturbing thread from Thomas Aquinas’s sacramental theology into Agrippa’s occult philosophy: the language of character, seal, power conferred from without, priestly mediation, sacred signs and invisible spiritual effects. The point was not that Aquinas simply copied Agrippa, but that the theological structure we had been examining stood uncomfortably close to concepts openly employed within Renaissance magic. That trail then carried us further back, into Vermaseren’s study of Mithras; a mystery religion of initiation, grades, sacred marking, celestial powers, the Sun, and Sol Invictus, which travelled through the Roman world and took particularly deep root among the legions.
Today the trail turns north. Vermaseren’s Mithras does not remain in Persia (Iran) or Rome: his cult reaches the Rhine and Roman Germania. And centuries later, German racial mystics would take the language of the ancient Aryans, the Sun, primordial religion and even Mithras himself and weave it into an entirely new mythology. What began with sacramental “character” has therefore led us unexpectedly from Aquinas to Agrippa, from Agrippa to the mystery religions, from Mithras to Rome; and from Rome into Germany. That is where today’s investigation begins.
From Rome to the Reich: Mithras, the Aryans and the Counterfeit Sun
In the previous study we followed a theological trail that began with Thomas Aquinas and led somewhere far darker than the sacramental language with which it began. Aquinas's theology gave us the language of an indelible character, a spiritual mark impressed through sacramental initiation, and a priestly power conferred upon a man from without. When we then opened Henry Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, we entered another system concerned with characters, seals, consecrations, invisible powers, celestial intelligences and spirits, ritual actions, sacred names and the transmission of spiritual effects through material signs. The argument was never that Aquinas copied Agrippa—Agrippa lived centuries later—but that concepts presented as sacramental theology stood disturbingly close to categories which Agrippa openly placed within occult philosophy.
From there the investigation drove us further backwards, into the ancient mystery religions and particularly into Mithraism, where initiation, sacred grades, a ritual meal, religious marking in early Christian testimony, celestial symbolism, resurrection imagery, planetary hierarchy and the power of the Sun were already woven into an ancient religious system.
Once M. J. Vermaseren's Mithras, the Secret God was examined closely, however, the trail did not stop in Rome. It travelled backwards into India and Iran, where Vermaseren explicitly encountered the ancient “Aryans,” and then westward again with the Roman armies until Mithras stood on the Rhine in Roman Germania. Centuries after the temples had fallen and their images had disappeared beneath German soil, an ideological movement obsessed with Aryan origins, ancient religion, celestial symbols and the Sun would turn back towards precisely that past. That does not establish an uninterrupted secret Mithraic organisation stretching from antiquity into the twentieth century; there is no evidence for such a claim. What the evidence establishes is a sequence of religious forms, symbols, rediscovery and ideological appropriation, and that is more than sufficient to make the biblical question of counterfeit light unavoidable.
Before following that trail, one distinction has to govern everything that follows. Jesus Christ is not the physical Sun. He is the true Light who created it. John calls Him “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (John 1:9, KJV), while Revelation makes the difference absolute by describing the New Jerusalem as having “no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it,” because “the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof” (Revelation 21:23, KJV). The Lamb does not derive His glory from the created Sun. The created Sun becomes unnecessary in His presence.
That distinction matters because Scripture simultaneously warns that darkness does not always present itself as darkness. Paul says, “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14, KJV). A counterfeit Christ, therefore, should not necessarily be expected to appear hideous, anti-religious or recognisably satanic. Counterfeit depends upon resemblance. Revelation gives us exactly this principle when the second beast possesses horns “like a lamb” yet speaks “as a dragon” (Revelation 13:11). The outward form resembles the Lamb while the voice reveals another source. The question, therefore, is not simply whether a religion speaks of light, salvation, resurrection or supernatural power, but whose light it is and whom that light ultimately causes men to worship.
The Early Christians Already Saw Mithraism as Counterfeit Religion
Long before Aquinas and Agrippa, Christians living in the Roman world were confronting Mithraism, and their interpretation of its similarities with Christianity was uncompromising. Justin Martyr describes Christian bread and the cup and then says that “wicked devils” had imitated these things in the mysteries of Mithras, where bread and a cup were likewise placed before initiates. Justin's argument was not that Jesus was simply another version of Mithras. His argument was precisely the reverse: he understood Mithraic resemblance as demonic imitation of Christian truth.
Tertullian becomes even more important after our earlier study of sacramental character. In The Prescription Against Heretics, he describes the devil as imitating divine rites and specifically mentions Mithras marking his soldiers upon the forehead, using bread, and presenting an image of resurrection. Whether the marking was a literal permanent brand is debated and should not be treated as archaeologically settled, but Tertullian's theological judgment is perfectly clear: he regarded Mithraic initiation as an imitation of sacred things. The parallel is therefore not something modern critics have invented after the fact. Christian writers living much closer to the ancient mysteries themselves explicitly interpreted those similarities as counterfeit religion.
That becomes difficult to ignore once placed beside what we found in Aquinas and Agrippa. We began with an invisible sacramental character, an enduring mark associated with initiation and spiritual power. We then entered Agrippa's occult world of characters, celestial powers and spiritual agencies. Going still further backwards, we find a second-century "Christian" writer discussing Mithras in terms of religious marking, initiation, bread and resurrection and deliberately placing the whole structure within the devil's imitation of divine rites. This does not prove that Aquinas secretly derived sacramental theology from Mithraism, and the evidence should not be forced to say that. It does prove that the religious architecture of mark, initiation, sacred meal and resurrection imagery was already present within pagan mystery religion and was already being identified by Christians as a counterfeit.
Agrippa then adds a numerical and celestial dimension that is extraordinarily difficult to dismiss.
Agrippa's Celestial Magic: the Sun, Its Character, Its Spirit and 666
Agrippa's occult philosophy is explicitly celestial. Book II is built around the principle that heavenly bodies possess virtues and correspondences which can descend into earthly things and be engaged through numbers, images, materials, planetary timings and characters. In chapter 22 he sets out the magical numerical tables of the planets, and when he reaches the fourth table; the table belonging to the Sun; he describes a six-by-six square containing thirty-six numbers. Every row and diagonal totals 111 and, as Agrippa himself states, “the sum of all is 666.” He then says that divine names, an intelligence towards good and a spirit towards evil stand over the table, and that from it are drawn the “Characters of the Sun, and the spirits thereof.” (www2.esotericarchives.com)
The corresponding list removes any need for later speculation, because Agrippa gives the names numerically:
“111 Nachiel The Intelligence of the Sun.”“666 Sorath The spirit of the Sun.”
Agrippa himself therefore joins the Sun, its magical character, a spiritual entity and 666. This is not a calculation imposed retrospectively upon his work by modern conspiracy literature. It is printed inside the occult system itself.
Revelation does not say that 666 simply means “the Sun,” and it would be irresponsible to rewrite Scripture in order to fit a theory. Revelation calls it the number of the Beast and “the number of a man” (Revelation 13:18). Yet neither should the historical occult association be minimised. Within Agrippa's Renaissance celestial magic, the Sun's numerical structure totals six hundred threescore and six, and Sorath is explicitly identified as its spirit.
The later occult tradition makes the opposition even more explicit. Rudolf Steiner, interpreting Revelation within his own esoteric system centuries after Agrippa, called Sorath a Sun-demon and an adversary of the Lamb and likewise connected the name with 666. Steiner's interpretation is not evidence for the beliefs of ancient Mithraists and it is certainly not authoritative biblical exegesis, but historically it demonstrates that an occult line of thought consciously joined Sorath, the Sun, 666 and opposition to the Lamb. The contrast with Scripture could scarcely be sharper: Scripture declares the Lamb to be the true Light, while an occult tradition identifies a solar spirit with 666 and places it against Him.
This is why the central issue is not simply the recurrence of “light.” Scripture already warned that false light could exist. The issue is whether the light leads to the Lamb or replaces Him.
Irenaeus Had Already Placed 666 Beside Rome and the Sun
The pattern becomes even more striking when we move backwards from Agrippa to Irenaeus in the second century. Irenaeus knew that Revelation's number was 666, but he was exceptionally cautious about pretending to know the final name of Antichrist. He explicitly warns that numerous Greek names can produce the required numerical value and refuses to pronounce certainty where John had not done so. That restraint should govern us as well.
Nevertheless, among the possibilities he considered, two are particularly remarkable.
The first is ΛΑΤΕΙΝΟΣ — LATEINOS. Irenaeus says that it totals 666 and calls it a “very probable” solution because it fits the ruling kingdom, explaining: “For the Latins are they who at present bear rule.” The common explanatory phrase “Latin man” is a gloss rather than Irenaeus's own English wording, but the substance of his reasoning cannot be disputed: one of his strongest 666 candidates points toward Latin/Roman rule. (New Advent)
His second candidate is TEITAN, which also produces 666. Irenaeus says the name is ancient, royal and associated with tyranny, and then adds the startling observation that “even the sun is termed ‘Titan’.” Yet once again he refuses to declare that this must be Antichrist's name.
The importance lies precisely in that combination of evidence and restraint. One of our earliest Christian discussions of Revelation's 666 places within the same field Latin rule, Rome, TEITAN, the Sun and a tyrannical royal name. More than thirteen centuries later, Agrippa's occult solar table again gives us 666, but now the relationship is no longer simply speculative gematria: 666 is formally assigned within a system of solar magic and attached to Sorath, “the spirit of the Sun.”
That does not establish a secret transmission from Irenaeus to Agrippa. It establishes something more careful but still extraordinary: Rome, the Sun and 666 were already capable of converging within second-century Christian apocalyptic thought long before Renaissance occultism formalised 666 inside its solar magic.
Vermaseren Takes Us Behind Rome—to Mithra and the Ancient “Aryans”
Roman Mithras, however, did not simply appear from nowhere. Vermaseren begins Mithras, the Secret God with a chapter entitled “Mithras in India and Iran.” He starts with the ancient Boghazköy treaty, approximately fourteenth century BC, in which Mitra appears as divine guarantor of a treaty, and then moves directly into Vedic India and Avestan Iran. He says that some of the earliest Indo-Europeans had already incorporated Mithra into their religious system; in India he appears as Mitra, while in Persia he is Mithra.
It is here that Vermaseren introduces a word that would acquire an entirely different and poisonous meaning in modern Europe. Among the lesser divinities associated with Indian Mitra he names Aryaman, whom he describes as:
“the protector of the destiny of the Aryans”
Beside Aryaman stands Bhaga, associated with providence. Vermaseren then proposes a developmental connection through the corresponding Persian Sraoša and Aši to the later Roman Mithraic figures Cautes and Cautopates, the twin torch-bearers who flank Mithras throughout Mithraic iconography.
Later, discussing the tenth Yasht of the Avesta, Vermaseren describes Mithra appearing in golden radiance upon the sacred mountain and looking out across the “lands of the aryans.”
The distinction here is crucial. Vermaseren's “Aryans” are not Hitler's supposed biological master race. The older usage belongs to an Indo-Iranian and Indo-European linguistic and historical context. What nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial theorists did was take that older category and transform it into a fictitious racial hierarchy. Nazi ideology then radicalised that distortion. That is why the overlap matters: the Nazis did not invent the word Aryan from nothing; they appropriated and racialised an older Indo-European concept. (Cambridge University Press)
And Mithra was already embedded inside the older world to which that term referred.
Mithra, the Aryans and the Solar Light
Vermaseren's Mithra is inseparable from light. In the religious scheme he reconstructs, Ahura-Mazda rules the luminous realm while Ahriman represents darkness, and Mithra fights among the powers of good. Vermaseren explicitly calls him a god of light and says that in India he was already regarded as the Sun.
In the Vedic material he discusses, Mitra and Varuna are so closely associated with solar vision that the Sun itself can be described as “the eye of Mitra and Varuna.”
Thus, long before Rome enters the story, the historical material has already brought together the ancient Aryan/Indo-Iranian world, Mitra/Mithra, divine light and solar symbolism.
Even Vermaseren's bibliography demonstrates how deliberately these subjects had been joined within modern comparative scholarship. Under “Eastern and Comparative Religions” he includes Paul Thieme's Mitra and Aryaman, Georges Dumézil's Mithra-Varuna and, remarkably, Georges Autran's 1935 Mithra, Zoroastre et la préhistoire aryenne du Christianisme—in essence, Mithra, Zoroaster and the Aryan Prehistory of Christianity.
The presence of that title in Vermaseren's bibliography does not mean he endorsed every argument Autran made. It does establish that Mithra, Christianity and an alleged Aryan religious prehistory were already being discussed together within twentieth-century comparative religion.
Then another element appears: a saviour.
The Solar Saviour and the Problem of a False Christ
In his discussion of Persian eschatology, Vermaseren describes the Saoshyant, the victorious end-time saviour associated with final renewal, resurrection and immortality, before relating this salvific field to the Sun-god Mithras in the western mysteries. Within the same discussion he cites a Manichaean text distinguishing a true Mithras from a false bull-riding deity which pretends to be the “true son of God” and demands worship.
That passage needs to be handled carefully. The accusation concerning a false son of God belongs to the Manichaean polemic Vermaseren quotes; it does not prove that Roman Mithraists themselves used precisely that confession. Nevertheless, the world Vermaseren is describing undeniably contains an unusual cluster of ideas: solar divinity, salvation, cosmic mediation, victory over evil, resurrection, immortality and competing claims to divine sonship.
Placed beside Scripture, that raises a legitimate question without requiring us to overstate the answer. Jesus warns that “false Christs, and false prophets” will arise and show “great signs and wonders” (Matthew 24:24, KJV). Paul says that the final deception comes “after the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders” (2 Thessalonians 2:9, KJV). Revelation presents something resembling the Lamb outwardly while speaking with the dragon's voice.
None of those passages names Mithras. Therefore we cannot responsibly declare, “Mithras is the final Antichrist.” But those passages do establish what a counterfeit Christ must do: imitate enough of the true Christ to become religiously persuasive. In that sense Mithraism presents an extraordinary historical pattern of counterfeit messianic imagery—a luminous saving figure, ritual initiation, religious marking in Christian testimony, sacred bread, resurrection imagery, cosmic mediation and solar supremacy—which early Christians themselves explicitly interpreted as demonic imitation.
When that same solar field later acquires 666 and Sorath in occult philosophy, the pattern becomes considerably harder to ignore.
Saturn Is Not Outside Mithraism—It Stands Near Its Centre
In the Mithraic pantheon Vermaseren describes Zervan, the Persian (Iranian) God of Time, standing above the opposing powers of Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman. Zervan can be represented as a youthful deity resembling Mithras, expressing the belief that Mithras was the Time-god reborn:
“a second Kronos-Saturn.”
Vermaseren then describes Mithras as mediator between the worlds of light and darkness and as a figure linking the realm of pure light with the world of man.
Elsewhere he traces the identifications still more explicitly. Saturn was equated with the Titan Kronos, Kronos was connected through the similarity with Chronos, the God of Time, and Chronos with Persian Zervan and Greek Aion. Vermaseren then writes that Mithras could likewise be represented as the youthful God of Time while, as Sun-god, directing the Sun through the zodiac. His conclusion is strikingly direct: “Mithras is Saturn and Oceanus as well.”
Saturn is therefore not an arbitrary occult symbol being imposed upon Mithraism centuries later. Vermaseren finds the association inside the ancient religious system itself. Saturn even appears in the Mithras narrative: on a Dieburg relief he sits upon a rock holding a dagger, and Vermaseren explains that Saturn gives Mithras the weapon with which to kill the bull—or, in the symbolism of the divine reaper, gives him the harpe.
The planetary hierarchy becomes even more important when Vermaseren reaches the seven grades of Mithraic initiation. He says the mysteries were “steeped in astrological concepts,” with the seven grades placed under the seven planets. At the summit stood the Pater, the Father and earthly representative of Mithras, and the Pater stood specifically beneath the guardianship of Saturn. At Santa Prisca the inscription proclaimed:
“Hail all Fathers from East to West, under the protection of Saturn.”
The Pater's symbols included the sickle of Saturn alongside the Phrygian cap of Mithras, staff and ring.
Thus the Mithraic system already joins Sun, Saturn, Time, cosmic mediation, planetary initiation, astrology and an earthly Father. None of that requires a modern occult reconstruction; it comes from Vermaseren's survey of the cult itself.
That becomes important when we return to Europe.
Rome Carries the Mystery North
Mithras possessed an intensely militant character, and one of the seven grades was literally Miles—Soldier. Vermaseren describes earthly existence within the mysteries as something like military service beneath the victorious god and explains why Roman soldiers found the religion attractive. He states that soldiers throughout the legions were drawn to the cult and that military discipline and oath-taking materially aided its spread.
He then gives the mechanism in remarkably simple language: the soldiers followed the legions, the legions followed their commanders, and the Mithras cult followed the army.
One of the great destinations of that military movement was Germania. Vermaseren specifically describes the Roman frontier stretching through Germany along the Rhine and says Mithraic evidence appears among these military outposts.
At Mainz; Roman Mogontiacum, the conjunction survives in stone. A Mithraic dedication associated with Rome's military presence invokes the unconquered Sun-god Mithras, placing an eastern god of light, Roman soldiers, solar religion and German soil together in a single archaeological setting. Nor was Mainz isolated. Heddernheim, Dieburg, Stockstadt, Rückingen, Neuenheim, Besigheim and Osterburken all preserve Mithraic remains or imagery. At Neuenheim Vermaseren interprets Mithras as simultaneously the Sun-god and ruler of the cosmos, the kosmokrator.
The ancient chain therefore requires no speculation: Indo-Iranian Mithra, associated with light and the Sun, develops within Roman Mithraism; Rome's army carries the mysteries into Germania; and Mithraea, solar reliefs and cult monuments remain beneath German soil after the religion itself disappears.
The temples fell, but their stones survived, and those stones would eventually be excavated by a very different Germany.
From the Ancient “Aryan” to Hitler's Manufactured Race
What happened to the word Aryan in modern Europe is essential to understanding the next stage.
The ancient term did not mean Hitler's racial master race. Nineteenth-century racial thinkers gradually transformed an Indo-European linguistic and historical category into a supposed biological race and then located its imagined purest form in northern Europe. By the Nazi period this distortion had become political doctrine. The Nazis placed “Aryan” ancestry at the centre of a racial worldview in which Jews were regarded as its principal enemy. Modern Holocaust scholarship is explicit that Nazi antisemitism defined Jews racially rather than merely by religious belief; even people who had converted to Christianity could still be legally classified as Jews because ancestry, not profession of faith, governed the Nazi category. (Holocaust Encyclopedia)
That distinction is important when we approach the Holocaust. Hitler did not murder Jews simply because they worshipped YHWH, and it would be historically false to present Nazi genocide as though it were merely a theological dispute over the God of Israel. Nazi antisemitism was racial, conspiratorial and exterminatory. Approximately six million Jews were murdered because the regime imagined Jewish ancestry itself as a racial threat. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Yet when viewed biblically, the theological collision remains enormous. The people targeted as the supreme enemy of the invented Aryan race were the people to whom “were committed the oracles of God” (Romans 3:2), the people “of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came” (Romans 9:5), and the people concerning whom Jesus Himself declared, “salvation is of the Jews” (John 4:22).
That brings us to His name.
Yeshua: YHWH Saves
The English Jesus comes through Greek Iēsous from Hebrew/Aramaic Yeshua, the shortened form of Yehoshua. The name incorporates the divine name YHWH and the Hebrew idea of saving or delivering, giving the sense “YHWH saves” or “YHWH is salvation.” Matthew deliberately draws out that salvific meaning when the angel says, “thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21, KJV).
A distinction is useful here because the names are sometimes compressed together.
Yeshua/Yehoshua is the name that carries that confession. The point is therefore even stronger when stated accurately: the very name of Jesus announces salvation from the God of Israel—YHWH saves.
Now place that beside what occurred inside German Christianity under National Socialism.
Nazi-Aligned Theologians Actually Tried to Manufacture an “Aryan Jesus”
This is not speculation or retrospective symbolism.
The pro-Nazi German Christians explicitly portrayed Jesus as Aryan, denied or suppressed His Jewish identity, rejected the authority of the Old Testament and sought to remove what they called Jewish elements from Christianity. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum documents this directly. (Holocaust Encyclopedia)
In 1939 an antisemitic theological institute was established under the name Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life. Historian Susannah Heschel's research documents how its theologians attempted to separate Christianity from Judaism and to reconstruct Jesus within Aryan racial categories. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
The historical significance is profound. The Nazi project did not simply persecute Jews politically while leaving the identity of Christ untouched. Some theologians aligned with its worldview attempted to retain “Jesus” while replacing the historical Yeshua. The Jewish Messiah was detached from Israel; the Old Testament was treated as contamination; and an Aryan Christ was placed where Yeshua stood.
From a biblical perspective, the contradiction could hardly be sharper. Yeshua means YHWH saves, yet the ideological project wanted a Christ severed from YHWH's covenant people, Israel's Scriptures and Jewish history. Jesus says “salvation is of the Jews”; Aryan Christianity attempted to make salvation independent of them. His fleshly lineage was Jewish; racial theology attempted to rewrite it. His Scriptures testified to YHWH; ideological Christianity attempted to remove them. And after the Reich fell, some Roman Catholic clergy helped Nazi fugitives escape justice through the notorious ratlines to Argentina—where, strikingly, the national flag itself bears the radiant Sun of May.
This provides one of the most concrete historical examples imaginable of what counterfeit Christology can do. It does not necessarily abolish the name Jesus. It can retain the name while changing the identity behind the name.
That is precisely why a false Christ should not be expected merely to deny Christ outright. A more effective counterfeit preserves enough of Him to be recognised and removes whatever obstructs the new system.
The Roman Mithras of Germany Returns in Herman Wirth's Aryan Myth
At precisely this point the Mithraic thread re-enters the modern story.
Herman Wirth constructed a vast racial-mystical theory in which he imagined an ancient Nordic civilisation as the source of humanity's primordial religion and symbolic language. Modern scholarship treats that reconstruction as pseudohistory, but for our investigation the critical issue is not whether Wirth was right. It is what Wirth himself chose as evidence and where those ideas subsequently travelled.
Wirth's primeval Aryan religion was explicitly solar. A recent Antiquity study documents his belief in an Ur-Monotheismus, a primordial Aryan religion which he imagined as having no priesthood or institutional church but a cult of the soil and the Sun. Wirth urged Germans to recover it, and he interpreted prehistoric symbols through the assumption that they preserved an original Nordic solar religion. (Cambridge University Press)
Then Wirth explicitly turned to Mithras.
In Die Heilige Urschrift der Menschheit he discusses Mithras within his Vedic and Iranian context, presents him as a light-god and saviour and then forces the history into his Nordic scheme. He calls Mithras a “Nordlandlicht,” a light of the northern land, and names his Roman manifestation Sol Invictus, “die unbesiegte Sonne”—the unconquered Sun.
Most revealing of all is Wirth's statement:
“Mit dem Imperium Romanum wanderte sein Kult den Rhein abwärts wieder bis zur Nordsee.”
With the Roman Empire, he says, the cult travelled down the Rhine “again” as far as the North Sea.
That single word wieder—“again”—reveals his entire theory. The historical fact was that Roman Mithraism genuinely travelled into the Rhine provinces. Wirth then rewrote that movement as a return, imagining an original northern solar religion which had migrated eastwards, appeared there in the form of Mithras and then travelled home again through Rome.
Modern history does not accept this supposed Nordic origin of Mithras. Yet Wirth's belief is unmistakable, and his next move makes the link still stronger: he turns directly to the Mithras-Kultbild von Heddernheim, the genuine Roman Mithras cult image excavated at Heddernheim, modern Frankfurt.
This means Wirth was not constructing his Aryan solar religion from imaginary archaeology. He was taking real Roman Mithraic remains excavated from German soil, with Mithras, Sol and the zodiac, and making them witnesses to his invented history of a primordial Aryan Sun religion.
The archaeological monument was genuine.
The racial interpretation was pseudohistory.
Yet the authentic ancient object gave the racial mythology precisely the appearance of antiquity that Wirth required.
Then Himmler Gives the Search an Institution
Wirth was not simply an eccentric writer whose books existed somewhere on the fringes of German nationalism. In 1935 he co-founded the Ahnenerbe alongside Heinrich Himmler and Richard Walther Darré. The organisation was intended to investigate the supposed heritage of the “Indo-Germanic” peoples, revive their imagined ancient ideals and provide tangible material around which a new racial identity could be constructed. Himmler and Wirth believed that Scandinavian rock art preserved traces of an ancient Aryan civilisation. (Cambridge University Press)
The same modern research makes clear why Himmler found this useful. He wanted archaeological objects, symbols and supposed sacred sites to establish an identity for the SS as an elite guardian of Germanic heritage. Wirth's solar religion was therefore not simply a private fantasy. For a period, Nazi institutional resources were placed behind his search for its ancient traces. (Cambridge University Press)
The significance for our present investigation is difficult to miss. The man who explicitly wrote about Mithras as Sol Invictus, about Rome carrying his cult back down the Rhine and about the real Mithras relief at Heddernheim became a founder of the institution Himmler used to search for an ancient Aryan religion.
That is a direct documentary bridge between Roman Mithraic archaeology and Nazi-era Aryan religious reconstruction. It is not proof of an unbroken Mithraic priesthood. It is proof of conscious modern appropriation of the ancient solar past.
Wirth's standing did not last indefinitely. Himmler eventually marginalised him, and the Ahnenerbe moved in other directions. That fact matters because it prevents us from turning Wirth into the single theological architect of the SS. Yet the institutional connection remains: Wirth and Himmler founded the Ahnenerbe together, and its first expeditions pursued precisely Wirth's supposed evidence of ancient Aryan civilisation. (Cambridge University Press)
Celestial Ideas Around the Nazi World
This is also where Agrippa's celestial magic deserves to be brought back into the argument, but with an important distinction. There is no evidence before us that Himmler simply opened Agrippa's Book II, copied the Sun square and deliberately invoked Sorath. Such a claim would go beyond the evidence.
What is demonstrable is that strands of Nazi and völkisch thought were deeply interested in astrology, cosmic cycles, ancient symbols, supposed primordial wisdom and celestial influence. Himmler's circle included men engaged in esoteric interpretations of Germanic religion; Karl Maria Wiligut, for example, influenced Himmler's mythological ideas concerning the SS and Wewelsburg. Nazi attitudes towards occultism were inconsistent, many occult organisations were suppressed, while certain practitioners and ideas were tolerated or exploited when considered useful—but the regime was certainly not intellectually sealed off from esoteric and celestial speculation.
That distinction matters because it allows us to compare systems without inventing direct transmission. Agrippa's celestial magic worked upon a universe of correspondences: planetary forces, numbers, metals, celestial images, characters and spiritual entities were thought to connect heaven and earth. The völkisch and SS search for ancient Aryan religion likewise invested symbols, cosmic cycles and archaeological objects with spiritual significance capable of shaping earthly racial and political destiny.
The claim is not “Agrippa taught Himmler.”
The stronger and more defensible observation is that the same broad religious temptation appears repeatedly: the attempt to locate invisible power in celestial structures and sacred symbols and then translate that heavenly order into earthly authority.
Once again, Scripture offers a very different movement. Christ does not teach men to manipulate celestial correspondences so as to draw power down from heaven. He teaches that the Father sends the Holy Ghost, that the Spirit dwells within believers, and that spiritual authority belongs to God rather than to magical manipulation of the created heavens.
The Black Sun—What Is Genuine and What Is Later Mythology
The subject of the Black Sun requires unusual care because modern mythology has overwhelmed the surviving historical evidence.
There is genuinely a twelve-spoked solar-wheel ornament in the floor of the former SS Obergruppenführer Hall in the North Tower of Wewelsburg Castle, a building Himmler intended to use as an important SS ideological centre. That symbol is real.
What is not historically established is that Himmler himself called it the “Black Sun”, or that the SS attached to it the elaborate occult doctrine found in later extremist and esoteric literature. The official Wewelsburg museum is explicit that the sun-wheel came to be widely known as the Schwarze Sonne—Black Sun—primarily from the 1990s onward, and that post-war mythmaking has surrounded the castle with claims about occult rituals that cannot simply be projected backwards into the Third Reich. (Wewelsburg)
That caution actually strengthens the investigation because it separates a real historical symbol from later mythology.
But there is a second tradition which should not be confused with the Wewelsburg symbol: the older esoteric and alchemical Sol Niger, the “Black Sun.” Within Western alchemical symbolism, darkness, lead, death and transformation could be associated with Saturn, and later esoteric interpretation sometimes related Saturn to a dark or hidden solar principle.
Here again we should resist drawing a line which the evidence does not give us. There is presently no proof that the Wewelsburg floor design was deliberately constructed as an alchemical Saturnian Sol Niger.
What we can say is that three distinct historical strands exist:
Vermaseren finds Saturn deeply embedded within Mithraism; Western esoteric symbolism contains a Saturnian or dark-Sun tradition; and the SS constructed a genuine solar wheel at Wewelsburg which post-war far-right esotericism later explicitly named the Black Sun.
Those facts should not be collapsed into one identical cult. Yet neither should their symbolic convergence be ignored when studying how solar, Saturnian and Aryan imagery was later assembled into extremist esotericism.
Saturn Makes the Solar Question More Complex
The presence of Saturn also prevents us from treating Mithraism as though it were merely simple Sun worship.
Vermaseren's own material places Mithras within an elaborate cosmic system involving the Sun, Saturn, Zervan, Kronos, Time and the zodiac. The supreme Mithraic Pater stands under Saturn; Mithras himself can be described as a second Kronos-Saturn; Saturn hands Mithras the weapon for the bull's death; Mithras moves as Sun-god through the celestial zodiac.
This resembles exactly the kind of celestial religious structure which later occult philosophy sought to systematise through planets, numbers, intelligences, spirits and magical characters.
Agrippa's system even distributes planetary intelligences and spirits mathematically. The Sun possesses Nachiel as its intelligence and Sorath as its spirit, numbered 666. Saturn possesses its own table, spirits and character. The entire cosmos becomes a hierarchy of celestial powers accessible through correspondence.
The point is not to claim that ancient Mithraists were reading Agrippa fifteen centuries before he lived. It is that both systems imagine the created heavens as populated or mediated by spiritual powers and encoded through cosmic correspondences.
Against this, Paul's warning about the true spiritual conflict becomes particularly significant:
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”— Ephesians 6:12, KJV
And his warning about false light becomes even more pointed:
“Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.”— 2 Corinthians 11:14, KJV
It is precisely the heavenly appearance of the counterfeit that makes discernment necessary.
The Holocaust and the Attempt to Sever Christ from YHWH
When this trail reaches Nazi Germany, however, the argument cannot remain only a study of symbols. It encounters something horrifically real.
The Nazi regime eventually murdered approximately six million Jews. As already noted, that genocide was driven by racial antisemitism rather than by a simple theological campaign against people because they worshipped YHWH. The regime's laws classified people according to ancestry, to the point that people whose Jewish ancestors had converted to Christianity could still be persecuted as Jews. (Holocaust Encyclopedia)
Yet from within the biblical story, an extraordinary theological inversion had nevertheless occurred. An ideology proclaiming the destiny of an invented Aryan race made the Jewish people its central racial enemy, while theologians sympathetic to the same racial worldview attempted simultaneously to strip the Jewish Messiah of His Jewish identity.
Jesus did not emerge from a mythical Nordic solar religion.
He was born into Israel.
He read Israel's Scriptures.
He worshipped the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
He identified Israel's God as His Father.
He declared, “salvation is of the Jews.”
And His very name—Yeshua—carries the proclamation that YHWH saves.
To retain the word Jesus while removing Israel, YHWH and the Hebrew Scriptures is therefore not simply to reinterpret a minor historical detail. It is to construct another identity beneath the same name.
This is why the German Christian attempt to manufacture an Aryan Jesus belongs at the centre of a study of false Christology. The counterfeit did not have to abolish Jesus. It could recreate Him in the image of the ideology.
And history shows that men actually tried.
The Counterfeit Christ Does Not Have to Call Himself Satan
This returns us to the biblical warning with which we began.
A great deception would be very poor deception if it announced: “I am the dragon.”
Revelation instead gives us something that looks like the Lamb.
Paul gives us Satan as an angel of light.
Christ gives us false Christs sufficiently convincing that their signs could deceive, “if it were possible, the very elect.”
The common assumption that satanic religion must be obviously satanic therefore misunderstands the biblical warning. The more perfect counterfeit is the one that retains the exterior features of what it replaces: light, salvation, priesthood, sacred signs, resurrection, divine sonship, supernatural power, even perhaps the language of Christ Himself.
History gives us a chilling illustration. Nazi-aligned theologians did not need to delete Jesus from their religion. They attempted to keep Jesus and erase Yeshua.
They retained the Christ but attempted to remove the Jew.
They retained salvation while rejecting the historical people from whom, according to Jesus Himself, salvation came.
They kept the outward religious form while reconstructing the identity within it.
That is why the meaning of the name matters so profoundly: Yeshua—YHWH saves.
The name itself resists the counterfeit.
When the Whole Trail Is Placed Together
We can now trace the argument without claiming more than the sources permit.
Our earlier investigation began with Aquinas's sacramental character and spiritual power communicated through sacramental office. Agrippa then gave us occult characters, celestial influences, planetary intelligences and spirits, and a solar magical table whose total is 666, with Sorath explicitly named “the spirit of the Sun.”
Going backwards, Irenaeus had already found LATEINOS, the Latin ruling power, and TEITAN, a name he notes was used of the Sun, among possible names calculating to 666, while carefully refusing to identify either with certainty as the final name of Antichrist.
Going further backwards, Justin and Tertullian described Mithraic rites involving bread, initiation, religious marking and resurrection imagery and interpreted those similarities as the devil's imitation of sacred things.
Vermaseren then takes us into the Indo-Iranian world, where Mithra stands within the world of the ancient Aryans, associated with light and the Sun. He follows those traditions into Roman Mithraism, where Mithras becomes a cosmic mediator and saving figure while simultaneously occupying a celestial system in which Saturn, Zervan, Time, the zodiac and the seven planetary grades have profound religious significance.
Rome then carries the cult north with its legions into Germania, leaving Mithraea and solar monuments along the Rhine.
Modern racial theorists take the ancient term Aryan, wrench it from its Indo-Iranian historical context and transform it into a biological master-race mythology. Hitler makes this invented Aryan race the centre of National Socialist racial ideology, while Jews become its imagined racial enemy.
Herman Wirth then constructs a supposed primordial Aryan religion of soil and Sun, explicitly identifies Mithras as Sol Invictus, claims the Roman Empire carried his cult down the Rhine “again,” and interprets the genuine Roman Mithras monument at Heddernheim as evidence within his invented Nordic history. Wirth then co-founds Himmler's Ahnenerbe, which begins searching ancient symbols and archaeological sites for tangible proof of an imagined Aryan past. (Cambridge University Press)
Around this environment circulate interests in cosmic symbolism, ancient religion, astrology and esoteric reconstruction. Wewelsburg receives its genuine solar-wheel floor design, though the term Black Sun and much of the occult mythology attached to it are post-war developments. Meanwhile the older Western esoteric world already contains Saturnian dark-Sun imagery, while Vermaseren had independently shown us that Saturn stood deeply within Mithraic cosmology.
Finally, and most terribly, Nazi racial antisemitism leads to the systematic persecution and murder of Europe's Jews while Nazi-aligned Christian theologians attempt to reconstruct the Jewish Yeshua—whose name declares “YHWH saves”—as an Aryan Christ. The regime did not murder Jews because of that theological fact; the Holocaust was grounded in racial antisemitism. Yet within the biblical frame the inversion is still extraordinary: the supposed Aryan order attacks the people of Israel while attempting to take Israel's Messiah and refashion Him in its own image.
These are not proofs of one continuous underground conspiracy. They are historically distinct developments, and they should remain historically distinct.
But together they expose something deeper: a recurring architecture of counterfeit light.
The true Christ is the Light who needs no created Sun.
The counterfeit repeatedly turns towards created light and invests it with spiritual power.
The true Christ's name proclaims YHWH saves.
The counterfeit can retain His title while changing His identity.
The true Christ seals His people with the Holy Spirit.
Religious counterfeits repeatedly return to exterior marks, characters, initiated grades and mediated powers.
Scripture gives the Beast's number as 666.
Irenaeus finds that number potentially in Latin rule and solar TEITAN.
Agrippa later writes 666 directly into the magical table of the Sun and gives it to Sorath, the spirit of the Sun.
Ancient Mithraism places its highest earthly Father under Saturn, while Mithras himself can be described by Vermaseren as a second Kronos-Saturn, yet simultaneously as Sun-god and cosmic ruler.
Modern Aryan mysticism goes searching for an ancient solar religion and finds Roman Mithras waiting in German archaeology.
And under National Socialism an “Aryan Jesus” is deliberately constructed while the Jewish identity of Yeshua is being denied and the Jewish people themselves are being persecuted towards annihilation.
None of this gives us permission to write a name into Revelation that Revelation has not written.
It gives us something perhaps more useful: a biblical test.
Christ warned us about false Christs, not merely openly anti-Christian figures. Paul warned us about an angel of light, not merely visible darkness. Revelation warned us about something that looks like a lamb, while the dragon supplies its voice.
The final question, therefore, is not whether the counterfeit looks evil.
The biblical question is whether, beneath all the light, ritual, celestial glory, priestly power, sacred characters and claims of salvation, we are still looking at Yeshua—the true Lamb whose name declares that YHWH saves—or at another light wearing His likeness.
“And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.”— Revelation 18:4, KJV
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