This comprehensive popular history of the occult background and roots of the Nazi movement shows how the ideas of a vast international network of late 19th- and early 20th century occult groups influenced Nazi ideology, from Madame Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley to the Thule Gesellschaft, the Order of the Golden Dawn, the Order of the Eastern Temple, and the pseudoscientific expeditions to Iceland and Tibet of the Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society. Nazi appropriation of the occult was a weird farrago of astrology, Freemasonry, racism rooted in occultism and popular European folklore (the Cathars, the Holy Grail, the Knights Templar, the Arthurian legends). It also traces the Nazi movements as they continued their activities after the war (the Nazi ratlines to South America, the Colony of Righteousness in Chile) or "morphed" into neo-Nazi, skinhead and satanic groups such as the Christian Identity and White Aryan Resistance movements.