From Lodge to Legend

The Thule Society did not spring up independently; it began as an existing Munich lodge of the Germanenorden, already catalogued in this atlas, reorganised and rebranded under the Thule name by Rudolf von Sebottendorff in 1918. That continuity matters for understanding what kind of organisation it actually was: not a wholly new movement built from scratch, but a repackaging of an established volkisch-esoteric lodge structure, ancestry requirements and Ariosophist racial ideology included, into a new outward identity better suited to the chaotic political moment of defeat and revolution that followed Germany's loss in the First World War.

Sebottendorff himself did much to inflate the society's later reputation. His postwar memoir, written years after the fact and after the Nazi Party had risen to power, presented Thule's role in the party's origins in considerably more dramatic terms than the documented record supports, an account historians treat with real caution precisely because Sebottendorff had every reason, both personal vanity and, briefly, an interest in currying favour with the new regime, to overstate his former society's historical importance. The society's genuinely traceable legacy, the small overlap of members between Thule circles and the founders of the German Workers' Party, is real but considerably narrower than the legend that grew up around it after the fact.