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21720977? ago

Appendix Part 2

"Michael Aquino was on television this week," Mae Brussell reported. "The police in San Francisco had taken some of his video tapes. He claimed they were mostly Carl Sagan’s Space, but in there you could see a photograph of the Waffen SS, just one of his belongings in a place filled with swastikas and Nazis. And the news accounts told about the Nazi uniform." The Pentagon at first denied that Aquino was even in the Army, then reversed itself and stood by Aquino and his top-security clearance. Brussell: "In 1981 he was a reserve attaché to the Defense Intelligence Agency, and a year later a student at the Foreign Services Institute, sponsored by the State Department." In 1981, [Reagan appointee] Daniel Graham – the head of ‘Star Wars,’ the ‘high frontier’ – was head of the Defense Intelligence Agency…."14

Aquino (once a national commander of the Eagle Scouts Honor Society) sneers at the Nazi allegations. The Temple’s "very minor interest" in Nazi occultism, he insists, "is every bit as responsible as that of Public Television documentaries on the topic."15 Aquino has written that Nazism is "a very powerful area of magic … unrealized by the profane?"16 He has praised the "unique quality" and "uncanny attraction of the Third Reich" in his introduction to the "Order of the Trapezoid," Occult "techniques perfected by the Nazis continue to be used/abused – generally in an ignorant and superficial fashion – by every country of the world in one guise or another.17

Carl Rashke, a professor of religious studies at the University of Denver, asks: "You can have the heart of Hitlerism without six million dead Jews?"18

In 1985, a small group defectors - including his brother-in-law William T. Butch and a ranking Setian - went on to establish a sect of their own, the Temple of Nepthys in Mill Valley, citing Aquino’s "obsession" with Nazism as the deciding grievance.19

And the SS uniform? "I have never worn a Nazi uniform in my life, in or out of a parade," he informs us.20 Most responsible clergymen do not have Nazi apparel hanging about the rectory. Perhaps he didn’t actually wear the uniform (?).

There are questions about his bloodline. On November 23, 1987, a local televised interview with Aquino kicked off with a report that his mother "was engaged to a member of the Waffen SS." Aquino denies it. In 1929, after his mother, a sculptor, graduated from Stanford University, he wrote in response to the criticisms of a Temple defector, "she went to Germany to study as an apprentice to the famous sculptor Georg Kolbe." Aquino neglects to mention that Georg Kolbe, according to the Weisenthal Center, "adapted" to Nazi rule just fine. Ms. Ford-Aquino’s mentor indulged his art throughout the Third Reich period, "cheap pathos largely geared to the Nazi mythology of the Nordic-Germanic 'master race.'" Kolbe’s studio was "a favored venue for guided tours by members of the 'Strength through Joy' organization." A artist beloved by the Nazi Party, he died in Berlin in November 1947.21

While in Germany, Aquino explains, his mother "had a romance with a university student named Karl Eitel Roth, who was not a member of the Nazi Party (or the SS). In the late 1930s, my mother returned to the United States and married my father, who served as a sergeant in Patton's 43rd Cavalry in World War II and was decorated with the Purple Heart for wounds in action."

Michael Aquino insists that his father was not a Nazi, but his own literary efforts could have been written by Goebbels. In the Crystal Tablet of Set, he claimed that the genocidal Nazis – who believed in "total war" and performed hideous terminal medical experiments on captive "subhumans" in highly-efficient death camps – worshipped "life." (And Dr, Aquino is actually regarded as an "intellectual" in some quarters.) "The ‘life," he explained, "is the life of the state, or more precisely the Volk (perhaps best translated as the ‘soul of the people’)."22 National Socialists worshipped the soul of the Caucasian volk, perhaps, and indeed they constituted the life of the state … but why is this admirable, and why is Aquino's respect for mass murderers not merely the blather of a twisted neo-Nazi?

His October 1982 "Stifling Air" rituals at Wewelsberg Castle, the haunt of Himmler’s Waffen SS, certainly smudged Aquino’s priestly polish. "I indeed performed a magical ritual in the Wewelsberg Castle in Westphalia," Aquino explained to me by e-mail, "but there was nothing in the least pro-Nazi about it. It was rather a ritual concerning the unique location of that particular castle at what certain occult lore terms ‘the middle-point of the world.’ That happens to be ‘coincidentally’ why Heinrich Himmler appropriated that same castle during the Nazi era. Its occult history and significance date back to 1604, which is, I think it is fair to say, pre-jackboot."23

On November 3, 1987, the San Francisco Chronicle offered another, more sinister perspective on Dr. Aquino’s occult rituals at Wewelsberg: "Nazis considered the black arts and satanic worship part of an ancient Germanic tradition. In his book Crystal Tablet of Set,’ [Aquino] writes that he performed the rituals to recreate an order of knighthood for followers of Satan."

True-crime reporter Michael Newton considers Aquino’s public stance on the Reich "deliberately ambiguous," a tactical position.24 (Set, the mythical Egyptian core of Aquino’s religious beliefs, was the god of confusion, and the psyops veteran often taps the well to dilute criticism and frustrate the hounds nipping at his tail.)

See Appendix Part 3