Young men and women strike ritualistic poses on Stonehenge, Silbury Hill, the White Horse of Uffington and the Long Man of Wilmington: stark figures wearing strange, hieratic clothes in the elemental landscape. Taken in 1929, there is something disquieting about these black and white photographs. You feel as though you have intruded on the rites of a secret society that may or may not be benign, that indeed intends to be ambiguous and unsettling.

In one image, a young woman in long belted coat and cap is captured raising her arm by a standing stone. It’s an echo of the salute that would sweep Germany only a few years later, and it jars the viewer back into a time between the wars: a continent destroyed, and a desperate search for new solutions that often took curious forms.

Annebella Pollen’s The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift is a revelation. This scholarly book explores England’s most fascinating and forgotten youth movement. Through a detailed examination of the highways and byways of esoteric thought and alternative politics in the early 20th century, as well as plentiful photographs (many taken by a young Angus McBean, an active kinsman in the late 1920s), it reconstructs a radical moment lost to history, a future that never happened.

Formed by John Hargrave in 1920, the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift were an extraordinary mixture of the archaic and the hypermodern. A back-to-the-land movement that used the techniques of contemporary advertising, it offered a holistic, dazzling vision. As Hargrave wrote in 1924: “The method of the Kibbo Kift is based upon a direct appeal to the senses by means of colour, shape, sound and movement, that is, by every form of symbolism.”

Born in 1894, Hargrave had long been fascinated by the outdoor life. Joining Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts in 1909, he rose quickly through the hierarchy, but after the first world war (in which he served for two years as a stretcher-bearer) he rebelled against the movement’s militarism and what he saw as betrayal of its founding woodcraft principles. He correctly saw the Great War as a total rupture. As he wrote in 1919: “Nothing – no social reform, no philosophic preaching, no religious revival, no educational experiment – could ever have achieved the result which this war has wrought in the lives and minds of the people.”

The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift – deliberately designed around the “magical” letter K and using a kind of Anglo-Saxon esperanto – was formed in 1920. It was thus part of the great turmoil that happened after the war: with so many millions of adolescents slaughtered, youth was at a premium, and it was beginning to develop its own self-consciousness as a separate social grouping, as well as making its first attempts to build an ideology. “Civilisation was about to die,” thought the youthful kinsman Leslie Paul, “and the future belonged only to us, the young, who were going to build a better one.”

Hargrave held that the postwar reconstruction was doomed “because the rulers have not the courage to abandon the mechanical civilised slavery which by an unseen course brought about the war”. His solution was to build up an elite group that, taking the woodcraft elements from the Scouts, was designed to be a complete fusion of aesthetics, politics and spirituality that would use the visual “as a form of magical persuasion”.

Kibbo Kift was very much created in Hargrave’s image. Everything was styled: from the costumes – which totally exploded conventional 1920s body shapes with hooded jerkins and massive, multicoloured tabards – to the staffs and totem carvings that each member was encouraged to make. Many of these are pictured in Pollen’s book, depicting archetypal symbols like skulls, blue falcons, sea otters, eagles and grey wolves, which are picked out in vibrant colours and modernist abstract shapes, like a sort of prehistoric deco.

As part of this makeover – the world remade – each member had his or her own name. These were inspired by the Native Americans, a constant presence in early 20th-century boys’ literature. So there were Eagles, Sea Otters, Old Mole and a whole pack of Wolves. As leader, Hargrave took the name White Fox, his authority emphasised by a very impressive standard and totem carving. In one haunting image, he stands legs apart, with a tight sweater and a huge white fox’s head: it could be a still from a DW Griffith Babylonian epic, or a horror film.

In this way, the Kindred proclaimed themselves as the future, but one achieved by a systematic raiding of the past. Their odd appearance was deliberate, a kind of magical imprint: the idea, as Pollen writes, was to “implant the image in the psyche or to otherwise internalise it”. Just as their spiritual beliefs and rituals took from a grab bag of late-19th and early 20th-century occult and gnostic thought, so their aesthetic took from Anglo-Saxon, Spartan, Celtic, Egyptian, Indian and native English mythology.

Each member was an artwork: living propaganda. None of their paraphernalia was shop-bought. The handicrafts aspect of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift (kinsmen and kinswomen were supposed to make their own clothes, their own staffs, and their own tents) went hand in hand with the determination to shun many aspects of the modern civilisation that Hargrave called “civil death”. Victorian capitalism had been smashed on the fields of Flanders. Attempts to revive it would only “destroy the human race outright”.

The rambling, camping and pilgrimages were designed, as Hargrave wrote in The Confession of the Kibbo Kift, as “a way of life and a method of self-training. It is a necessary breakaway, a ritualistic exodus, from metropolitan standards of civilisation, from pavements, sky-signs, shops, noise, glitter, smoke”. He held that the regimen of healthy, spartan living was “a preparation for active service in the world; a drawing apart for a time to allow body, mind and spirit to regain equipoise”.

In its elitism and insistence on healthy living, Kibbo Kift drew from genetic theory. This is now badly discredited, due to what occurred in Nazi Germany, and mostly incomprehensible. Basically, Hargrave believed in not only building up the stock of the race – decimated in the conflict – by the breeding of the finest and the fittest (hence all the hiking and open-air living), but also in American psychologist Stanley Hall’s theory of recapitulation, which asserted that young men “should be encouraged to re-enact ‘earlier’ stages of cultural evolution in order to become fully rounded and advanced modern citizens”.

All the symbolism and outdoor activities were intended to toughen up members, and prepare them for a life as the future elite, the samurai of the coming global consciousness. For, at the same time as they held to bizarre genetic theories, the Kibbo Kift had progressive attitudes about world religions (namely that they all had the same root, so why fight between themselves?) and the ways to stop any future wars – that is world unity, an ideal of world peace and a world government that was anti-imperialist and internationalist.

These ambitious ideas, a global solution no less, were also held by other competing movements in the 1920s. The apparent collapse of capitalism had left a void filled by the emerging doctrines of communism and fascism. The rough equivalent of the Kindred in Germany, the various and myriad Wandervogel groups – which had once been a broad church ranging from proto-hippies to extreme nationalists – were beginning to split along these lines: indeed, much of the style and the youth-centric aspects of the Hitler Youth in the 1930s would be taken from the Wandervogel.

Unlike most Wandervogel and scouting groups, however, the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift welcomed both men and women, including many former suffragettes. Even so, it was a male-dominated organisation: kinswomen rarely rose to any positions of power. What the Kibbo Kift was not, as Orwell and other scornful critics alleged, was a collection of “sex maniacs”: promiscuity was definitely frowned upon, and the atmosphere, despite the gender mixing, puritan. Having discovered his homosexuality in the late 1920s, Angus McBean had to keep it hidden while he was a member.

Reversing into tomorrow, the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift attempted to steer a course through the whirlpools of postwar politics. Hargrave was quite slippery, and his group avoided being tarred with either extremist brush. However, problems arose because of his autocratic leadership. It was not a large movement – with around 1,000 members in total and a few hundred at any given time – and things got intense: in 1924, a number of members, including Leslie Paul, were expelled for challenging the unquestioning obedience demanded by the White Fox.

In his 1951 memoir, Angry Young Man, Paul was scathing about the occult dabblings and totemic symbolism of the Kibbo Kift: “Perhaps it owed its presence to the many theosophists who were associated with its birth, but I felt then the absurdity of this servant girl stuff in a rugged, open-air movement.” With other rejects, he formed the Woodcraft Folk, set up along the original socialist and utopian ideals that Kibbo Kift professed: social reconstruction, communal responsibility and spiritual regeneration allied with the teaching of practical woodcraft skills. The group still flourishes today.

Indeed, by the mid 1920s the Kibbo Kift were moving away from their original tenets and pursuing a more material course: fascinated by economics, Hargrave became an adherent of the idea of social credit, which posited a National Dividend, “payable to each and every citizen”, to rebalance the disparity between wages and prices. It also, as Pollen writes, held that “control of finance should be wrested from the bankers who profited unfairly from the current arrangements”.

McBean’s magical photos were thus taken near the end of the Kibbo Kift’s prime. Two years later, after the 1929 crash, Hargrave ditched all the costumes and archaic terminology: the group was restyled for a harsher decade with berets, green shirts and grey trousers. Soon to be called the Green Shirts, the members who stayed demonstrated in favour of the National Dividend, joining the throng of young men and women in uniform on the streets of England. In the 1930s, peace had become militancy. As Andrew Marr has written: “The rambling stopped and the marching began.”

Over eight decades on, the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift remain ambiguous. There were, as Leslie Paul noted, some silly aspects. And it’s hard to unpick the youth movements of the 1920s from the disaster of the Hitler Youth: it’s as though all the phenomena of that period pull inexorably forward to Fascist enslavement. But they didn’t: a careful unpicking of the Kibbo Kift contains much that is applicable to the present crisis – especially aspects of their economic theory. Freeze-framed in McBean’s pictures, the hooded figures move through time to stake their claim to the present and the future.

• The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians, by Annebella Pollen, is published by Donlon Books, £35. Intellectual Barbarians is at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 13 March 2016. Jon Savage is the author of Teenage: The Creation of Youth, 1875-1945, available from bookshop.theguardian.com