On December 25, 1907 Liebenfels founded the Order of the New Templars (Ordo Novi Templi, or ONT) (see right), a mystical association, with its headquarters at Burg Werfenstein (see left), a castle in Upper Austria overlooking the river Danube.
Its declared aim was to harmonize science, art and religion on a basis of racial consciousness.
Rituals were designed to beautify life in accordance with Aryan aesthetics, and to express the Order's theological system.
The Order was the first to use the swastika (in addition to the Templar Cross) in an "Aryan" meaning, displaying on its flag the device of a red swastika facing right, on a yellow-orange field (see right).
The ONT declined from the mid-1930s, and was suppressed by the Gestapo in 1942, on Adolf Hitler's orders.By this time it had established seven utopian communities in Austria, Germany and Hungary.Though suspending its activities in the Greater German Reich, the ONT survived in Hungary until around the end of World War II.It went underground in Vienna after 1945, but was contacted in 1958 by a former Waffen-SS lieutenant, Rudolf Mund, who became Prior of the Order in 1979.Mund also wrote biographies of Lanz and Wiligut.
After Hitler's rise to prominence in the 1920s, Lanz tried to be recognized as one of his ideological precursors.
In the preface of issue one in the 3. series of 'Ostara', c. 1927, he wrote:
“One shall remember that the swastika and fascist movements are basically offspring of Ostara.”
After Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, Lanz hoped for Hitler's patronage, but Hitler, embarrassed by this early connection, banned him from publishing his writings.
Most notably copies of 'Ostara' were removed from circulation.
After the war, Lanz accused Hitler of having not stolen and corrupted his idea.
Ostara marks the first true day of spring.It is the vernal equinox. It is believed that the name Ostara comes from the Germanic Goddess Oestara.Oestara is the Goddess of Fertility.Ostara is the time when there is a celebration of the balance of the seasons and the passage of nigh into day.The Goddess blankets the Earth with fertility, bursting forth from her sleep, as the God stretches and grows to maturity.He walks the greening fields and delights in the abundance of Nature.On Ostara the hours of day and night are equal.Light is overtaking darkness. This is a time for beginnings, of action.As spring reaches its midpoint, night and day stand in perfect balance, with light on the increase.The young Sun God, symbolised by the swastikas, now celebrates a hierogamy (sacred marriage) with the young Maiden Goddess, who conceives.In nine months, she will again become the Great Mother.It is a time of great fertility, new growth, and newborn animals.The next full moon (a time of increased births) is called the Ostara and is sacred to Eostre the Saxon Lunar Goddess of fertility (from whence we get the word estrogen, whose two symbols were the egg and the rabbit.Although Ostara is a festival of fertility, however, unlike Beltaine, it is not a festival of human and animal fertility, but of the fertility of the earth.
https://ostaragodess.blogspot.com/2017/01/copyright-peter-crawford-2017-lanz-von.html