In celebration of the increasingly inaccurately named Indiana Jones trilogy coming to its ignominious conclusion, I have decided to look at some films people have actually heard of. This is also reparations for the admittedly punitive choices I have sometimes made in terms of Patreon requests. So, Carrie, this one’s for you. Astoundingly, I now have twelve requests for 2024, but if you are the patient type, keep ‘em coming!
Believe it or not, there is a history of movies before the Oppenarbie D-Day of July 21, 2023 (I do not defer to YOUR portmanteaus). For example, a mere week before that global catastrophe, there was a new Mission: Impossible movie. It was very good, and—even though I am preaching to the choir here—not enough people saw it and now the very idea of cinema is in peril.
Not that cinema was showing many vital signs before that. Consider this summer. There was a DreamWorks thing. A Pixar thing. A Transformers thing. An MCU thing. A Disney remake thing. And another thing: A decades-later Indiana Jones sequel that no one wanted or asked for. At least, to the credit of filmgoers, it flatlined at the box office. After pouring untold millions into the project, Disney stumped for it so hard that the casual filmgoers I spoke to were not even aware of its existence. Of the people who did see the movie, the ongoing argument is whether this one or its immediate (immediate=fifteen years earlier) predecessor is worse.
The fans, at least, agree on one point. The original trilogy is pretty solid stuff. Now, they cannot agree which of the three is the best (it’s Raiders, you fools), but that’s a good argument to be having. The 80s films are an embarras de richesses. They also—unlike their successors—have religious artifacts as their MacGuffins. In Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indy and company are searching for the… lost Ark. In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), it’s the Sankara Stones, fictional artifacts based on real-world Shiva lingams. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), they are after yet another biblical relic with ties to the occult, the Holy Grail.
Nominally, all three relics are connected to different religions, but they also have an underlying common denominator. The pillaging of Jewish culture, the amateur interest in Indo-Aryan civilization, and an obsession with the occult—all three things were central to a certain mid-century organization more nefarious than most Internet fandoms.
Nazis! I hate those guys! And yet, they keep popping up in the movies, including three of the five Indiana Jones pictures. By this point in history, more actors have worn Nazi uniforms than actual Nazis. And with Movie Nazis come filmmakers’ fascination with the real Nazis’ fascination with the occult, a motif that crops up with regularity, whether it’s Hellboy…
…or Captain America: The First Avenger…
…or Elves.
Nazi ideology was, in fact, based on occult ideas, and some of the more colorful party members were actively searching for historical proof of a prehistoric Aryan race of god-men. Somehow, the Christo-Celtic symbol of the Holy Grail got swept up into all this.
Separating fact from fiction is a major hurdle in this area. Since the 1960s, there has been a rash of crypto-histories about Nazis using magical powers to conquer the world. The history of nonsense is still history, and now we have two streams of it: The secret history of the Aryan race AND the secret history of Nazi magic. Both tributaries flow into the pop entertainment basin of the Indiana Jones movies.
Sects!
The underpinnings of Nazi occultism are primarily derived from the writings of two men, Guido von List (1848–1919) and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (1874–1954). List founded a romantic movement called Armanism, named after one of the German tribes mentioned in the works of the Roman historian Tacitus. List was a personal devotee of the ancient Germanic high god Wotan (Odin) and believed that a nobility of ancient sun-worshiping priest-kings had been eradicated by semiticizing Christian missionaries. List was dedicated to finding evidence of this ancient cult wherever he could find it, which included decoding unrelated symbols in heraldry and inventing runes. He attempted to reconstruct the ancient “Aryo-German” language, the equivalent of what normal people would call proto-Indo-European. This linguistic interest naturally led him back to India, where he imbibed some of the theosophical teachings of the cosmopolitan kook Madame Blavatsky. He predicted that World War I would be a decisive turning point in world history. He was right, but not in the way he wanted, and promptly died after Germany’s defeat.
Liebenfels was cut from the same cloth. He founded at least two related movements, Ariosophy, a kissing cousin of List’s Armanism, and “Theozoology,” a concept he introduced in writings such as “The Biblical Man-Animal” and “Theozoology, or the Science of the Sodomite Apelings and the Divine Electron.” He believed, like List, that the ancient Aryans were godlike humans with supernatural powers who were eventually undone by interbreeding with lower “man-animals,” a concept found in other esoteric religions.
Unlike List, Liebenfels had a more positive evaluation of Christianity (he was a former Cistercian monk) and believed that the secret teachings of the ancient Aryans were preserved by groups such as the Knights Templar. He even founded his own Templar revival secret society, the Ordo Novi Templi. Take a gander at their flag.
The disciples of List and Liebenfels founded several other secret societies, the most infamous being the Thule Society, which combined political action with occult investigations into the ancient Aryan civilizations of Atlantis and Ultima Thule. Their extracurricular activities got one of their co-founders executed for treason. The other co-founder established the German Socialist Party, which was eventually absorbed by its more popular rival, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazis for short. Naturally, I first learned about the Thule Society from the movies, although even today they have managed to escape detection from YouTube’s closed-captioning algorithm.
Hitler was never a part of the Thule Society, but several prominent Nazis were. Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Führer, was a true believer, and his occult beliefs directly informed the decisive moment of his life. When Hitler was planning a land war in Asia, Hess, fearing that the Führer was falling victim to one of the classic blunders, consulted his personal astrologer. He left Hess with the impression that it would be a good idea to make a solo flight to the United Kingdom to broker a peace treaty. Hess crash-landed in Scotland and spent the second half of his miserable life rotting in prison before finally committing suicide at the age of 93.
The nuttiest person in Hitler’s inner circle, however, was Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and one of the primary architects of the Holocaust. In addition to all that stuff, Himmler ran a research institute, the Ahnenerbe (“Ancestral Heritage”), whose primary goal was to prove by any means necessary the Ariosophical theories of List and Liebenfels. To this end, Himmler employed people like the medievalist Otto Rahn, who searched for the Holy Grail in the mountains of France, and zoologist Ernst Schäfer, who led an expedition to Tibet in 1938–1939, just before the outbreak of war. Both men have been called “the real Indiana Jones.”
The well goes much, much, MUCH deeper than this, but I think this is enough to establish the point: There is a close connection between Indiana Jones and Nazi occultism. If you want bullshit-free information on Nazis and the occult, consider the sources I consulted (and their ample bibliographies): Eric Kurlander’s Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism, and Heather Pringle’s The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust.
Lies!
Indiana Jones. Archaeologist. Adventurer. High school teacher. But did you know that he was also a specialist of the occult? At the very beginning of the first movie, after a rote and frankly forgettable opening sequence, we dive straight into a scene of scintillating exposition, where academic Marcus Brody visits Indy’s high school to alert him about a visit from military brass. They proceed to tell Dr. Jones all about himself, in case he had forgotten who he was.
Dr. Jones, in turn, explains to them recondite academic concepts such as “staff.”
In fact, the military has intercepted a Nazi cable about secret excavations in the Egyptian desert as part of an effort to uncover objects of ritual power.
As explained above, Hitler was not a nut. Not on this subject, at least. And while some Nazis did expend energy looking for lost objects, the Ark of the Covenant was not one of them. This has only a little to do with Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish policies. Ariosophists had inconsistent views on the Hebrew Bible. Liebenfels had even made it a cornerstone of his racist theories and included Moses (somehow) among the Aryan nobility. The Ark—and the Temple in which it was housed—have a great deal of occultic lore attached to them, but they do not fit into broader Ariosophic mythology, which was focused primarily on Europe and parts of Asia.
Steven Spielberg, of course, chose the Ark for its symbolic importance within Judaism, establishing the Indiana Jones tradition of the villains being hoisted by their own petard. The history of the Ark, as placed in the mouth of Dr. Jones, is strangely garbled. According to biblical history, the Israelites constructed the Ark in the desert following the Exodus. It housed the Ten Commandments (the second set, not, per this film, the first set Moses destroyed), the staff of Aaron (a staff is kind of like a long stick), and the manna. It was intended as the footstool of God and was the centerpiece of the desert tabernacle and its less portable successor, the Jerusalem Temple. It was lost when the Babylonians destroyed that Temple in 587 BCE. The legend is that the prophet Jeremiah hid the Ark sometime before his deportation to the Egyptian city of Tahpanhes, where he died.
According to Raiders, the Ark was lost much earlier than that. The Bible mentions that Pharaoh Shishak sacked Jerusalem in the tenth century BCE and took some of the Temple vessels. Indy claims that the Ark was one of the stolen objects, meaning that the Ark was lost almost immediately after it arrived at its final resting place. In this telling, the Ark ends up at the Egyptian city of Tanis—not Tahpanhes—a real city that had been excavated since the nineteenth century and definitely was not covered up in a yearlong sandstorm. I am not quite sure why the movie plays around with the history of the Ark. Why didn’t they just say Jeremiah took it to Egypt?
The movie also makes hay about the Ark being a battle standard for the ancient Israelites, rendering them invincible in combat. This worked, at least, for the conquest of Canaan.
And yet, the most famous story of the Ark being carried into battle is a military defeat. In the time between the settlement of Canaan and the first Israelite kings, the Philistines captured the Ark. The Ark then proceeded to wreak supernatural havoc on the Philistines until they decided to send it back. This event presages the conclusion of Raiders.
Raiders’ ending combines two other major biblical concepts. As God’s footstool, the Ark embodies the presence of God in a particular way. Looking at God is, traditionally, hazardous to your health. My own Hebrew Bible professor memorably described the Ark as akin to a nuclear reactor. You have to follow the proper instructions in order to harness its energy correctly. If you don’t, well…
I said there were two biblical concepts at work. The other one is the high priest, who ministered before the Ark on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur). He, and only he, could enter the Ark’s chamber, and ONLY on this day. Therefore, Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, was fraught with peril. René Belloq, Indy’s rival and the main antagonist in Raiders, is wearing the high priest’s vestments and performing some unspecified “Jewish ritual” at the film’s climax.
Temple of Doom is not quite as religiously literate as its predecessor. It has attracted a lot of critique for its orientalist stereotypes, including its portrayal of Shaivism, the form of Hinduism on display. The “good Hindus” are Shiva-worshippers and venerate a Shiva lingam, an aniconic representation of the deity that devotees will deny is a phallus but looks, for all the world, exactly like a phallus.
Opposed to the “good” Shaivism is Mola Ram and his army of Kali-worshiping Thuggees. The movie namedrops “Mother Kali” but does not stop for a moment to explain who or what Kali is. She is a goddess of death and the alter-ego of Durga, the consort of Shiva (who is, after all, the Destroyer). Her veneration is normative in Hinduism. She is not as popular as her husband, but that does not mean her worshipers are sectarians or cultists. The British colonizers, especially during the Victorian era, had a second opinion. Kali is also a Tantric deity, so the pearl-clutchers saw her as a symbol of both anti-colonial uprisings and weird sex stuff.
The relation of the Thuggees to Kali is complicated. First, the Thuggees were not a secret society with a network of cells but isolated groups of bandits. If some of them worshiped Kali—and many did—it is because they were also practicing Hindus. But not all of them. Many of the Thuggees targeted by the British were Muslim. The idea that the murders they committed were sacrifices is an ex post facto justification for their activities. Their modus operandi was, in any case, entirely different from the cod devil worship on display in Temple of Doom. They accosted travelers on the road and strangled them. The word “Thuggee” does not have a religious connotation beyond that found in the derivative English word “thug.”
Temple has always been the outlier in the original trilogy, and one might reasonably ask what is has to do with Nazi occultism, since Nazis don’t even appear in the movie. Northern India, where the film takes place, was the home of the ancient Indo-Aryans. Now, this has always confused me, since the Nazi conception of “Aryan” signifies people who look like Taylor Swift or Sydney Sweeney, while actual Aryans looked more like Borat.
Nevertheless, Ariosophists and “race scientists” like H. K. Günther posited that, after the fall of Atlantis, certain Aryans took refuge in northern India and seeded the region with the ruling caste, the Brahmins. Buddha was also an Aryan prince. When Schäfer mounted the Nazi expedition to Tibet, he intended to measure the faces of the monks to detect Aryan features. Since Mola Ram—incidentally, named after a real Indian painter whose work was featured in my last column—announces a program of racial and religious purity, Indy is, in essence, fighting against a different manifestation of the Nazi ideal, a muddled form of Indo-Aryan religion.
The Indiana Jones movie with the closest connection to Nazi occultism is actually The Last Crusade since Otto Rahn, the “real Indiana Jones,” was on the hunt for the Holy Grail. In the movie, the Grail is Jesus’ chalice from the Last Supper, which Joseph of Arimathea used to catch Christ’s blood after he was pierced by the Lance of Longinus (about which more anon). This is the shape the Grail takes in Arthurian romance, including the appropriately-titled Lancelot-Grail cycle and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.
Unlike the lance, mentioned in the Gospel of John, the Grail is not an explicitly biblical artifact. Its origins are mysterious, and its true ancestry—like many Arthurian legends—might lie in Celtic mythology, where it was a magic dish that could not only heal wounds but bring back the dead. In truth, the spear and the chalice could come from any culture that produced objects in the form of human genitalia (i.e., all of them).
Rahn, being an Ariosophist, had correspondingly crazy ideas about the Grail. It is not obviously Aryan or even part of German folklore. Nevertheless, the German knight Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote an Arthurian romance, Parzival, that Rahn believed was a code to the secret history of a medieval esoteric group, the Cathars (who will be the subject of this column before year’s end), and it was in their old haunts where Rahn tried to find the Grail. The Cathars, of course, were protectors of the Aryan lineage, etc., just like the Templars and all those other secret societies. There is a direct line of descent from Rahn’s conspiracy theories to stuff like The Da Vinci Code.
Now that I’ve brought up The Da Vinci Code, let’s turn to movies that are just as good or worse.
Videotape!
I’m not going to waste my breath discussing the merits of the first three films. They’re great. A little racist maybe, but otherwise great. No, let’s talk about the red-headed stepchildren, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and this past summer’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
What went wrong? Crystal Skull, which saw Spielberg returning to the director’s chair, is aping the original trilogy’s playbook pretty closely. It’s even a little bit racist. But something is not right, and I think it’s the re-skinning of the villains and the supernatural elements.
Harrison Ford is older, so Indy is older, and the Nazis are gone. The Soviets were natural successors. But they are not the same. I am firmly convinced that Nazis are such great movie villains not only from the enormity of their atrocities but also from their unflagging sense of style. I hate to say it, but they look cool. Cooler than the Soviets, in any case. Even cooler than Cate Blanchett, who looks like she’s about ready to tell us not to be fooled by love songs and lonely hearts.
As for the supernatural elements… The occult and black magic are out. Aliens and psychic powers are in. That’s what we get in Crystal Skull (oh, spoiler). In that one instant, Indiana Jones seems to cross the threshold from historical fantasy to science fiction. A natural progression? Yes. Something that feels thematically out-of-step with its predecessors, despite being stylistically identical? Also yes. The MacGuffin is supposed to be irrelevant to a movie’s plot, but I would have liked Indy 4 more if they had simply chosen a better MacGuffin. And not set so much of the film (all of it) in the New World.
By contrast, Dial of Destiny is very deliberately trying to recapture the feel of the first three (well, the first and the third) in the opening sequence. After Schindler’s List, Spielberg decided to avoid being flip about Nazis, so that task fell to Disney and new director James Mangold, who were eager to re-deploy Indy’s only repeat adversaries. But, again, something is off—and not just the funky de-aging technology.
In the opening, Indy is hunting for the Lance of Longinus (there it is), the lance that pierced the side of Christ at the crucifixion. It is a Grail-adjacent object and part of the mythology surrounding the Nazis—but the wrong part of that mythology. The Grail is part and parcel of the Nazis’ own occult beliefs. The lance—or the “Spear of Destiny,” as one popular crypto-history calls it—is part of the tissue of beliefs that modern-day occultists have about the Nazis. That is, Hitler wanted the lance so he could be unconquerable in battle or shoot lasers out of it or some shit like that. It’s not much different from how the Ark functions in Raiders.
But—this lance is a fake! And what is that even supposed to mean? The actual Lance of Longinus was part of the imperial treasury of the Holy Roman Empire, aka the First Reich. So, in a sense, the German search for the Lance would have been as pointless as a French expedition for the Grail: They’ve already got one. It is, of course, not the same lance that pierced the side of Christ. In Raiders, however, Belloq observed that even a worthless object, after a thousand years, accrues value. The imperial lance has been around for something like 1200 years. Possessing it signifies the continuity of empire and a patina of cultural legitimacy. So, is it a fake or not?
Dial of Destiny quickly moves from the lance to its real MacGuffin, the Antikythera mechanism, named after the Greek island where it was found. It is impossibly advanced for its age, allowing the screenwriters to connect it to the patron saint of STEM, Archimedes. On the one hand, the movie ends with a staging of the Roman siege of Syracuse, a dramatic event taken straight out of everyone’s favorite ancient historian, Polybius of Megalopolis. On the other hand, we are seriously supposed to believe that Indiana Jones’ greatest desire is to meet a man who would have suppressed the archeology chair at Indy’s high school to better fund the DoD’s catapult budget.
Add to that all the showboating by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She’s not remotely the worst of Indy’s female sidekicks, but she is the only one to have taken a wrecking ball to Harrison Ford’s legacy not once, but twice. Get working on that Blade Runner threequel, Phoebs!
Gavin McDowell is a Hoosier by birth and French by adoption. He received his doctorate in “Languages, History, and Literature of the Ancient World from the Beginning until Late Antiquity” and is currently investigating Aramaic translations of the Bible. He is supremely unqualified to talk about film. For more of his unprovoked movie opinions, see his Letterboxd account.