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Eyre . Early in the story the young Jane is seated in her aunt’s library trying to escape the reality of her situation by looking at a book on the Arctic when suddenly a reference is made to the rocks of Thule, a reference that sends her off in transports of delight, imagining the icy far north with its ‘vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space, that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the Pole, and concentrate the multiplied rigors of extreme cold.’ 4
    In other words, over the centuries Thule had come to represent many things to many people; a mythical landscape; a gothic terra incognita ; a symbol of remoteness and terror – anyone could interpret the land of Thule in any way they wished and Rudolf von Sebottendorff was no exception. Claiming that his society (only those Germans of pure racial blood over several generations were allowed membership) had been formed so that academics could pursue their interest in the Nordic Sagas, a diary of the group’s meetings from 1919 to 1925 shows a series of lectures on such topics as the original homeland of the Teutons, German poetry, megalithic culture and German myths. But these innocent-seeming agendas hid a much darker secret, one that was far more in keeping with the Germanenorden’s aims – the search for and reinstatement of the Germanic race’s true roots; a search that would eventually call for the expulsion from or, worse still, the annihilation of any ‘alien’ elements within the country. Little wonder that among the society’s members were included prominent industrialists and millionaires, not to mention high-ranking state officials such as Munich’s chief of police. At Thule Society meetings, the guests and guest speakers were men such as Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess, Alfred Rosenberg (Hitler’s chief propaganda minister) and Dietrich Eckhart.
    In fact, it was Alfred Rosenberg who, during the 1920s, ran the Thule Society’s newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter . Set in the kind of heavy, gothic-style typeface so beloved of Nazi and neo-Nazi groups, the paper spouted a mixture of anti-Semitic and anti-communist rhetoric. When, for instance, Kurt Eisner was in control of the local Bavarian government, the Völkischer Beobachter swore that it was a communist-Jewish attempt to ‘take over Bavaria’. They were obsessed by ‘outsiders’ overrunning their country and some journalists even forwarded articles expressing the opinion that Germany had lost the war due to the fact that it was not more firmly rooted to its Teutonic origins. In other words, the Thule Society were mesmerized by the idea of an heroic past, where their forebears lived and died heroic lives. Romantic? Yes. But this is what far right groups of that period tended towards – a sublime vision of mountains and forests that injected into the populace an inner strength; one which could not be defeated.
    It was a winning formula. By late 1918 Sebottendorff boasted that the Thule Society had over 200 members. By the autumn of that same year he claimed the number had swelled to over 1,500 in Bavaria alone. Yet it wasn’t all plain sailing, for after Kurt Eisner’s assassination and the setting up of a Soviet Republic in Bavaria, civil unrest broke out. This was helped along by the Freikorps, private armies of disillusioned veterans organized by the far right, who clashed with the communists and fought them tooth and nail. Naturally, the Thule Society sided with the Freikorps, as a consequence of which their head office was raided and several Thule Society members were taken away and executed. Unperturbed by this bloody turn of events, Sebottendorff hailed his fallen men as martyrs, true Germans who were not afraid to stand up for their beliefs.
    As Thule group membership grew and