The 'New Age' and the Continental far-right

On RFK Jr., Peter Fitzek, and Calin Georgescu

Hence it will be our charge… to follow systematically… to the present hour of the detonation of the atom, the long process of the Opening of the Eye of European man to a state that is no state but a becoming: and the vanishment thereby of all the earlier masks of God, which are now known to have been of developing man himself.

Some, perhaps, will desire to still bow to a mask, out of fear of nature. But if there is no divinity in nature, the nature that God created, how should there be in the idea of God, which the nature of man created.

“By my love and hope I conjure thee,” called Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “cast not away the hero in thy soul!”

—Comparative theology scholar Joseph Campbell’s conclusion to Occidental Theology (1969)

‘New Age’ is a term used to refer to an eclectic set of spiritual practices and beliefs, shared by a large number of disparate groups — almost all of whom reject the term ‘New Age’ — that emerged in the West, especially in Britain and America, around the end of the ’60s and beginning of the ’70s. Traditionally, it has been strongly associated with the counterculture — ageing ex-hippies. So how is it that ‘New Age’ beliefs have begun to have a small, but significant and growing influence upon the far-right, especially in Germany and Romania? Is it just a matter of crystal mummies with strong views about vaccines choosing to align themselves with a new kind of ‘anti-establishment’ movement, as some have claimed? Or is it something more than that?

The sheer eclecticism of the New Age means that it is hard to define, and even harder to trace the influences of. The most commonly cited early influences are the polymath Emanuel Swedenborg, who sought to marry theology and science, and claimed to be able to communicate with angels, demons, and spirits, and Franz Mesmer, a German physician (and hypnotist) with an interest in astronomy. However, from a fairly early date, we can also see the strong influence of the study of comparative religion; indeed, so much so that we could even say that the New Age is the direct product of the study of comparative religion. Consider, for instance, the occultist Theosophical Society, which originated in the mid-nineteenth-century and drew from such diverse influences as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Neoplatonism in order to help its members attain spiritual enlightenment. Other, much later, works of comparative religion that influenced the New Age include that of James George Frazer’s Golden Bough, and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey and The Masks of God.

This all seems politically safe enough, if a little weird. But others with an interest in comparative religion, with a less stated but certainly very real influence on the movement, should set alarm bells ringing as to the potential for the New Age to have a rather different political meaning to that implied by the movement’s strong association with ex-hippies. Think, for instance, of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, or later, of Karl Jung and Mircea Eliade. Or think of the fact that many of the earlier scholars interested in ‘Eastern religions’ were interested because of the (at the time) ‘theory’ of the Indo-Europeans — an idea which now has rather obvious political associations to anyone who has used the internet for long enough. Indeed, even the more conventionally listed influences, such as Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God (as the quote provided above suggests), contained much of the same ‘right-wing’ potential explored far more explicitly elsewhere.

Outwardly, the superficial ‘lessons’ of this kind of comparative theology seem to be almost Woke: that every religious tradition contains elements of truth within it, and that rather than being bigoted and small-minded, we should try to learn from them all in order to attain spiritual enlightenment. This scholarship also collided with religious authorities, and was (correctly) considered subversive; as an anti-conservative influence upon society.

But ‘anti-conservative’, as any regular reader of Pimlico Journal need not be reminded, is hardly equivalent to ‘left-wing’. The single idea most associated with the New Age is unification of mind, body, and spirit. While this idea can be taken in many directions, it can explain the movement’s intense interest in not just spiritual health, but also both positive and negative influences on one’s physical health — exercise and diet and, more subversively, medicine (including vaccines). As we shall see later, this idea also has many other subversive, and in particular inegalitarian, implications.

To this day, the New Age’s influence upon the Anglo-American Right is limited, even though Britain and America were the movement’s original centre. Perhaps this is because the movement’s prominence in these places meant that it was more obviously coded as politically ‘left-wing’. This means that even where we can catch glimpses of ‘wellness’ on the Anglo-American Right, it typically lacks certain dimensions — in particular, the concept of spirit-mind-body unity, which is critical — that would allow us to identify it as genuinely ‘New Age’. For instance, anti-vax activists will typically protest that their rights and freedoms are being violated, a standard complaint made on liberal grounds, or that they are being used as ‘guinea pigs’, a complaint about scientific procedure. Even those who complain about ‘poisons’ in medicine and food are only making the most basic critique — that these things harm the body — rather than anything that could truly be identified as distinctively ‘New Age’. Even the furthest reaches of the Anglo-American Right will typically engage in a directly political struggle, rather than focusing too much on the ‘meta-political’ that is of so much interest to the New Age.

Things, it should be noted, are quickly changing. With Robert F Kennedy Jr in Trump’s Cabinet, the traditional Republican contempt for ‘hippies’ complaining about ‘chemicals’ in industrially-produced food has been upended, something that has clearly been accelerated by COVID vaccinations. Within Reform UK, Richard Tice has led the charge, though Rupert Lowe has also been active in attacking Bovaer. Meanwhile, on X, figures like Raw Egg Nationalist and (even closer to the New Age ‘ideal type’) Sol Brah have won a large, overwhelmingly right-wing audience by combining lifestyle with the political, an approach endorsed by Bronze Age Pervert himself.

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In Continental Europe, however — which is certainly not the movement’s original home — things are rather different when it comes to the political meaning of the New Age. In fact, in 2024, in some respects the New Age has a wider influence over there than in Britain or America.

For instance, in Continental Europe, one’s entitlement to (or coerced usage of) medicine as a means to make one’s life easier is often not just a question of freedom or unfreedom, or efficacy and inefficacy, but of morality and personal virtue. Where does this idea come from? Seemingly, the New Age. Due to the influence of New Age ideas, medicine (as opposed to various ‘natural’, rather than ‘chemical’, supplements) is seen by many as borderline immoral: it’s not just that we should be suspicious of who is producing it and their motives, but also that taking it is ‘cheating’. It shows that we are unmeritorious; unworthy, because we are not capable of making use of the inner resources we all — so long as we are not ‘degenerate’ — have at our disposal. These inner resources can be harnessed so long as we are properly in tune with Nature (which is why supplements, which are ‘natural’, are okay) — the source of life itself. If you become ill… well, have you considered that it might be your own fault for not harnessing the powers within, your mind and spirit, in order to protect your body?

In their most contemporary form, many of these ideas on the connection between merit (the mind), inner resources (the spirit), and health (the body) can be sourced from the German self-help guru Eckhart Tolle. While Tolle, most famous for his book The Power of Now (1997), is also read in the United States, there he is often seen as a kind of ‘prosperity gospel’ preacher without the Christianity — nothing too subversive.

By contrast, in Central and Eastern Europe — where he is very popular — his reception has been rather different. Consciously or not, it has been deeply influenced by the continued popularity of the aforementioned philosophers — Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and (especially in Romania) Eliade — all three of whom are correctly understood as philosophers of the Right (and all three of whom almost certainly influenced Tolle himself).

This is combined with a continued fascination with the subcontinent and, from this, the Indo-Europeans (something that is shared by Schopenhauer and Eliade, though less so Nietzsche). The idea is that the modern Europeans are the descendants of a conquering steppe people from the East, but have been defanged by the Abrahamic (or, for those so inclined, ‘Semitic’) tendencies of Christianity. The solution? Ex oriente lux. A drive towards not just the remnants of European paganism, but also a fascination with Hinduism and Buddhism — within which we can, it is argued, find genuine spiritual truth preserved despite the destruction of European paganism by Christianity.

It is interesting that in countries like Germany, where people are conventionally understood to be law-abiding, conformist, and not particularly impulsive, we can find amongst the strongest resistance in Europe (even if this is only a minority resistance) to measures to prevent the spread of COVID or mandatory vaccinations. This is in no small part due to the continued importance of the ‘natural’ in certain German subcultures. This can be found in the country’s especial zeal for not just vegetarianism and recycling — which can be justified on ethical grounds more appealing to Anglo-Americans — but also older, weirder, and more subversive practices like homeopathy, anthroposophy, and nudism.

In Romania, a country located in the East of Europe but, for historical reasons, substantially influenced by similar philosophers to Germany — when visiting the Transylvanian town of Brasov, I saw Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil Schopenhauer’s Essays and Aphorisms in a train station book vending machine, and Hesse’s Siddhartha is read by every osteopath in the country — one finds a population which only really started backing a right-wing populist party (namely AUR, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians) in sizeable numbers upon the arrival of COVID restrictions and vaccine mandates, which AUR were vociferous critics of.

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Romania has recently proved it is capable of producing a figure almost as ‘quirky’ as Germany’s Peter Fitzek. But first: who is Fitzek? Fitzek is a former chef, esoteric bookshop owner, and self-proclaimed martial arts champion, who, as well as being anti-vax and into spiritual self-empowerment, homeopathy, and cosmic harmony, has since 2012 been a political activist who has a troubled relationship with the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany.

As you might have guessed, Fitzek is a supporter of the Reichsbürger movement, which rejects the idea that the Federal Republic legally succeeded the German Reich (as the Reich was not formally dissolved), rendering it illegitimate and unable to coerce German citizens. But rather than restricting himself to mostly isolated ‘sovereign citizen’-type activities, like most Reichsbürgers, Fitzek has declared himself ‘Peter I, King of Germany’, and began operating an unlicensed bank, issuing his own currency, and declaring that his subjects (and companies ‘registered’ in his ‘Kingdom’) don’t need to pay any taxes to the Federal Republic. In Fitzek, we have the perfect illustration of the New Age-inspired far-right in Continental Europe, blending what in Britain would often be called ‘wellness’ — something that is usually seen as vaguely left-wing, by virtue of being hippyish, or at the very least apolitical — with a more ideologically suspect ‘vitalism’, and a more openly far-right and anti-system politics.

Romania’s very own Fitzek is, however, far more popular than Fitzek will ever be: Calin Georgescu, winner of the first round of the recently-cancelled Romanian Presidential Election. Unlike Fitzek, Georgescu is highly educated: he was a PhD agronomist, and worked for a number of international institutions before going into politics. His father, Scarlat, was even responsible for the country’s first consolidated land register.

But while there are differences, there are also many similarities. Georgescu, like Fitzek, is a keen martial artist, filming himself practicing judo (far-right X account Daily Romania claims that he is a black belt, though I have been unable to verify this). And as for ‘spiritual self-empowerment, homeopathy, and cosmic harmony’, Georgescu has filmed himself swimming in an ice lake in order to campaign against COVID vaccines. This is because, according to Georgescu, anyone with a strong body and mind — and one way to train this is, apparently, swimming in an ice lake — should easily be able to defeat a mere flu. He has claimed that water is not H₂O, but that it is ‘knowledge’ — meaning that we must not drink from plastic bottles, as it means we cannot access this ‘knowledge’. He has condemned caesarean sections, on the grounds that it ruptures the spiritual bond between the mother and child (despite his own wife giving birth this way, twice). On the more ‘conspiratorial’ side, in an old English-language interview, Georgescu claimed that ‘millions’ of children were going missing every year, implying they were being sold off — with the apparent consent of the United Nations — for unknown (presumably paedophilic) purposes. He’s also claimed that he has met aliens.

Georgescu’s relationship with the Orthodox Church is also not as straightforward as one might expect for a ‘far-right’ politician in Romania, but it makes more sense when you consider him as an adhering to ‘New Age’ beliefs and ideas. He is in hot water with the Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church for claiming that he had the Church’s endorsement when he did not. On television channel Antena 3, a theologian publicly claimed that Georgescu’s use of Christianity in his campaign is blasphemous as he is purposely twisting gospel passages to fit his message. Usually, despite his formal, even vehement adherence to Christianity (which he claims to be defending from subversive, liberal forces), his speeches are vaguely spiritual, but not specifically Christian in their message — a very much New Age tendency (remember the influence of the ‘lessons’ of comparative theology). Moreover, Georgescu has also made overtures to Pentecostal churches, which in Romania are known for their many Romani gypsy attendees (and, to the surprise of many, Georgescu has many gypsy supporters), even coming up to the pulpit to do a reading and carry out a sermon on one occasion.

Georgescu’s wife Cristela, a former Vice President at Citibank Romania, seems to have gone even deeper down the New Age rabbit hole than Calin, leaving her well-renumerated job to become a homeschooling guru, selling books and courses online. That Georgescu’s wife is apparently supportive of his activities suggests that his beliefs — if not the way in which he seeks to spread them, which clearly operates on the assumption that many people are stupid — are sincere, rather than being adopted purely for cynical, political purposes.

Although this New Age-inspired far-right is clearly (in a sense) ‘irrational’, it can hardly be said to be a direct product of a lack of education or downright idiocy, let alone of a lack of ‘modernity’. As we have mentioned, the Reichsbürgers use rather complex legal arguments to undermine the legitimacy of the Federal Republic. And while Georgescu — unlike Fitzek — has not attempted to find any legal basis on which to attack the legitimacy of the Romanian Constitutional Court since it chose to cancel the election, he has found some esoteric political principles of his own to bolster his cause. But rather than law, the former Club of Rome President and UN Executive Director derives his principles from a wider international ‘intellectual’ community that includes figures such as Robert F Kennedy Jr (Georgescu wrote the foreword to the Romanian edition of Kennedy’s book) and Ovidiu Hurduzeu, a Stanford-educated social critic and right-wing political activist who has become notorious for defending the Unabomber.

It’s also not quite right to say that the New Age-inspired far-right is ‘anti-science’, in the sense of returning to pre-modern superstitions: rather, it seeks to promote a parallel science. This is a ‘science’ that cannot countenance the validity of a life lived entirely with the assistance of the levelling, even egalitarian force of ‘hard medicine’, which in its efficacy does not discriminate between the truly weak and strong. It is also a science that seeks a place for the spiritual, rather than just the physical.

Georgescu has co-authored a book with Hurduzeu called The Great Rebirth: Truth, Liberty, and Sovereignty, which gives a central political role not to conventional issues — economic growth, social development, national defence, and so on — but to anti-vax and ‘natural’ food. This book is about the so-called ‘Great Reset’, and incorporates Klaus Schwab’s ‘future historic stages’. Georgescu, an agronomist by profession, believes that all financial institutions will eventually collapse, forcing us all to resort to cannibalism once Bill Gates poisons our plants. This means that the people with the best soil — hopefully, if Georgescu is in charge, this will be Romania — are on top. Similarly, when Georgescu said that ‘water is not H₂O’, but rather is ‘knowledge’, what he may (reading generously) have meant is that water is knowledge, and knowledge is power. This makes sense when we remember that he has previously claimed that if Romania built a giant water pipe, monopolising all water, it could rule the world.

Very few people (save for a YouTuber who calls himself ‘piticigratis’) have ever cited (or are even aware of the existence of) this book, which seems to explain many of Georgescu’s more bizarre comments, and locate him better ideologically than most Western European, and even Romanian, media has. Merely calling him ‘pro-Russian’ or ‘far-right’ (especially given his rather left-wing economic policies) doesn’t really cut it. No: Georgescu’s geopolitics are not a mere product of third-worldist theories about ‘Western imperialism’, or even just about Russophilia per se. There are, of course, elements of this: certainly, the Ukraine War is at the forefront of many people’s minds. In Romania, there is lots of anger towards ‘ungrateful’ Ukrainian refugees, discontent about the treatment of ethnic Romanians in that country, and a worry that Romania could be sucked into a wider war. Additionally, Georgescu’s sketchy campaign financing is a topic of real interest. But neither of these things exhaust the meaning of his politics. There’s much more to him, good or bad, than that.

For Georgescu himself, we can almost sense that geopolitics is mostly meaningless, despite his Russophilia and scepticism towards NATO and other Western international institutions. These things are not the priority. After all, not only is he predicting a cataclysm in the next few decades, but a lot of his ideas are so individualistic, so orientated towards maximising the health of one’s own spirit, mind, and body, that it can’t help but be a form of politics that struggles to conceptualise the world beyond the nation’s borders — indeed, it can even struggle to conceptualise the world beyond the individual. It’s a politics in which it seems beyond question that the elimination of toxins (whether GMOs or vaccines) in our body and a return to the more ascetic traditions of our ancestors trumps such trivial matters as ‘international trade’ and ‘national defence’.

Perhaps it is time for us to retire the ‘Balkan medicine is rakija’ or ‘Balkan medicine is babushka’s superstitions’ if we are to understand what is going on in contemporary Romania — and perhaps, soon, elsewhere too. The ‘evil eye’, but for 2024 it is not. We do, after all, know that the biggest supporters of Georgescu were youth with low levels of education, and not the elderly, who are much more loyal to the traditional parties and, owing to their experiences under Ceausescu’s ‘national communism’ and the disappointments of the sovereigntist ’90s under Iliescu, are often more sceptical of figures like Georgescu anyway. The New Age is a distinctly ‘modern’ idea, and the new far-right politics on the Continent that seems to be inspired by it is also ‘modern’.

That the two countries I am analysing in this article, Germany and Romania, are also two countries that will be having elections in the coming months is a nice coincidence. Hopefully, I have given a unique perspective on the genealogy of certain aspects ‘anti-system’ (in the broadest sense) social and political movements in the two countries.