J. F. C. Fuller

The name "Fuller" is of English occupational origin, referring to someone who fulled cloth, a process of thickening and cleaning wool. The surname dates back to medieval times.

Major-General John Frederick Charles "Boney" Fuller (1 September 1878 – 10 February 1966) was a senior British Army officer, a military historian and strategist, a fascist, and an occultist. During World War I, Fuller became a staff officer in the Tank Corps and helped plan the tank attack during the Battle of Cambrai. His Plan 1919 for a fully mechanised offensive against the German army was not implemented, due to the end of the war. As a military theorist, Fuller was highly prolific and his...

John Frederick Charles Fuller presents a fascinating, if at times disquieting, study in the convergence of the practical and the profound. His military career, marked by innovative thinking in armored warfare, is juxtaposed with a deep immersion in occultism and esoteric philosophy. This is not merely a dilettante’s dabbling; for Fuller, the mechanistic logic of the battlefield and the symbolic language of traditions like Hermeticism offered parallel, and perhaps even complementary, pathways to understanding the underlying currents of human affairs.

Mircea Eliade, in his seminal works on the history of religions, often highlighted how ancient peoples perceived the sacred interwoven with the profane, seeing ritual and myth as essential frameworks for ordering the chaotic flux of existence. Fuller, in his own way, seems to have sought a similar ordering principle, not in the traditional religious sense, but within the very engines of modern conflict and societal transformation. His fascination with the tank, a machine of immense destructive power, can be seen as an engagement with a potent, almost archetypal, force in the modern psyche.

The occultist’s quest, as understood by figures like Carl Jung, often involves confronting the shadow aspects of both the individual and the collective. Fuller’s exploration of military strategy through an esoteric lens might be interpreted as an attempt to grapple with the destructive potential unleashed by technological progress, seeking to imbue it with a deeper, perhaps even redemptive, meaning. His writings, therefore, are not just historical accounts or strategic analyses, but rather attempts to read the symbolic language of a world increasingly dominated by machines and ideologies, finding echoes of ancient wisdom in the roar of engines and the dust of battle. The question remains whether such esoteric frameworks can truly contain or transmute the raw, often brutal, energies that Fuller so keenly observed.