National mysticism

National mysticism (German Nationalmystik) or mystical nationalism is a form of nationalism which raises the nation to the status of numen or divinity. Its best known instance is Germanic mysticism, which gave rise to occultism under the Third Reich. The idea of the nation as a divine entity was presented by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. National mysticism is closely related to Romantic nationalism, but goes beyond the expounding of romantic sentiment, to a mystical veneration of the nation as a transcendent truth. It often intersects with ethnic nationalism by pseudohistorical assertions about the origins of a given ethnicity.

National mysticism is encountered in many nationalisms other than Germanic or Nazi mysticism and expresses itself in the use of occult, pseudoscientific, or pseudohistorical beliefs to back up nationalistic claims, often involving unrealistic notions of the antiquity of a nation (antiquity frenzy) or any national myth defended as "true" by pseudo-scholarly means.

Notable examples

 * State Shinto in Japan prior to the forced secularization following World War II.
 * The Sun Language Theory and Turkish History Thesis in Pan-Turkism and Turkish nationalism
 * Kurdish nationalists often make the claim that they are the descendants of the Medes
 * Polish Sarmatism and later Christ of Europe concept
 * Greek Epsilonism
 * Indonesian nationalism
 * Some branches of revisionist history theories of Bulgarians and Bulgaria (i.e. "Thracomania") and Macedonian nationalist history theories
 * Narratives on the origin of the Albanians in Albanian nationalism
 * The Croat Illyrian movement
 * Romanian protochronism and Dacianism
 * Philippine Destiny
 * The Kosovo Myth in Serbian nationalism
 * American Manifest Destiny
 * The Indigenous Aryans hypothesis in Hindu nationalism
 * Currents of Tamil nationalism (as in Devaneya Pavanar)
 * Claims of interplanetary travel, possible existence of in-vitro fertilization and genetic engineering by ancient Indians (102nd Indian Science Congress)
 * Some currents of Armenian nationalism (see Armenia, Subartu and Sumer)
 * Currents of Russian nationalism
 * Kabbalistic currents in religious Zionism
 * Swedish Gothicism
 * Hungarian Holy Crown Doctrine
 * The Spain destiny in Falangism
 * Juche in North Korea and Ilminism in South Korea
 * In a 2004 article, David Gelernter described Ronald Reagan as a "mystic nationalist"
 * Irish author George William Russell has been described as a "prophet of mystic nationalism"
 * Jews as the chosen people in Judaism
 * Belgians (and even Benelux) descended from the Kingdom of the Franks
 * British Israelism
 * Hoteps among African-Americans
 * Mormon belief of Israelite descent for Native Americans