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The controversy of the occult reich
THE CONTROVERSY OF THE OCCULT REICH
By John Roemer
This article is transcribed from an issue of Gnosis Magazine. One hundred
years after Adolf Hitler's birth near Linz in Austria on April 20 1889, and
decades after his malign empire metastasized in Bavaria in Bavaria, the Hitler
phenomenon remains to mainstream historians largely inexplicable, or at least
unexplained. The man and his awful work seem to stand outside history looking
in. Perhaps our human fear of the irrational is so great that we
instinctively hold Hitler at a great remove in order that we need not admit
him to our company.
In light of this it isn't very surprising that an extensive literature
exists seeking an occult rationale for the otherwise baffling catastrophe
Hitler represents. As Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier point out in the
MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS (1960), the Nazi era simply defies conventional
analysis:
A self taught madman, surrounded by a handful of megalomaniacs,rejects
Descartes, spurns the whole humanist culture, tramples on reason, invokes
Lucifer, conquers Europe, and nearly conquers the world... The historian
begins to feel anxious and to wonder whether his art is viable.1
Pauwels and Bergier were among the first postwar proponents of a black
magical explanation for the Third Reich.1a About a quarter of their book is
devoted to a region they call "The Absolute Elsewhere," a neverland where Nazi
pseudosciences and occult methodology held official sway. They quote a
Hitlerian pronouncement to demonstrate that the Fuhrer's intellectual
development was on a level wholly different from that understood by the
Western tradition: "there is a Nordic and National Socialist science which is
opposed to Jewish-Liberal science".2 Reality was defined by politics.
Nazi "science" has brought hoots of derision from those who hold to the
Cartesian model. In place of psychology there was an occult frappe composed of
the mysticism of Gurdijeff, the theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and the
archetypes of Nordic mythology.3 In place of Newtonian physics stood the
cosmic force called vril, the bizarre geology known as the hollow earth
theory, and the frigid cosmology of Hans Horbiger's Welteislehre, the doctrine
of eternal ice.
Nazi thought excluded psychoanalysis, which has in fact been not very
helpful in explaining the etiology of great evil, although Robert G.L. Waite's
effort, quoted above and published in 1977 by Basic Books, is good on several
provocative subjects: Hitler's sadomasochistic sex life; the possibility he
had a Jewish grandfather; and his Viennese mentors, who are described at
greater length by the authors about to be mentioned.
Nazism officially rejected the theory of relativity as "Jewish science".
Not only Freud but EInstein too was forced to flee Hitler's Europe. He and
other physicists eventually were able to ensure that atomic secrets remained
in the hands of the allies until they could be used spectacularly to climax
the Pacific war.
THE CONTROVERSY OF THE OCCULT REICH
Horbiger's physics derived from an intuitive flash he experienced late in
the nineteenth century. "... As a young engineer," he wrote, "I was watching
one day some molten steel poured on wet ground covered with snow: the ground
exploded after some delay and with great violence."4
This conflict of opposites, of fire and ice, is a theme that inspired
Horbiger and resonated for German nationalists because it recurs in the
Icelandic Eddas, the sourcebooks of Teutonic mythology. It all makes good
sense in Iceland, since that island's peculiar geology feature numerous
volcanic rifts in the permafrost; fire and ice are commonly juxtaposed all
over the landscape. As grounds for a cosmology- the word implies universality-
it is at best dubious. It would be a hard sell in Hawaii.
Nevertheless, Nazi science was influential out of all proportion to its
objective validity. Hoerbiger was immensely influential in the Third Reich.
His followers numbered in the tens of thousands. There were scores of
Horbigerian books, hundreds of Welteislehre pamphlets, and a monthly magazine
called THE KEY TO WORLD EVENTS. As one tract put it,
Our Nordic ancestors grew strong amidst the ice and snow, and this is
why a belief in a world of ice is the natural heritage of Nordic men. It
was Austrian, Hitler, who drove out the Jewish politicians, and another
Austrian, Horbiger, (who) will drive out the Jewish scientists. By his own
example Hitler has shown that an amateur to give us a thorough
understanding of the Universe.5
Hitler's fatal confidence in the success of his troops on the Russian front
during the 1941 - 2 winter is generally believed to have been a result of his
misplaced faith in Horbiger's weather forecasts. Despite such setbacks, the
Welteislehre managed to thrive even after the war. The popular speculations of
Immanuel Velikovsky derive in part from Horbiger. In 1953 a survey conducted
by Martin Gardner showed that more than a million people in Germany, England,
and the U.S. believed that Horbiger was right6.
The Horbigerian cosmology posited an early epoch, some fifteen million years
ago, during which a hugh moon moved across the sky very near the earth. Its
gravitational attraction gave rise to a race of our ancestors, the giants.
These giants, which appear in the ancient Norse and Icelandic sagas, sleep,
yet they are alive. To the Nazis, they were Supermen. In one set of myths,
contained in the Nibelungenlied, they lived beneath Teutonic mountains. In
another they were prototype Aryans from the East, inhabiting vast Tibetan
caverns.
Three other books that investigate hidden influences on Gerald Suster's
HITLER: THE OCCULT MESSIAH; Jean-Michel Angebert's THE OCCULT AND THE THIRD
REICH; and Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's THE OCCULT ROOTS OF NAZISM7.
Suster's book largely rehashes Pauwels and Bergier. Angebert
THE CONTROVERSY OF THE OCCULT REICH
(actually a pen name for two French writers) interestingly links Hitler to an
ancient dualist tradition he traces from Manichaenism in Persia through the
Essenes, Jesus's Palestinian forebears, to the Cathars in the south of France
in the Middle Ages. It's philosophy in which, in its Nazi incarnation, solar
forces of light represented by blond, fair-skinned Aryans strive against the
evil forces of darkness, who are of course dark skinned Semites.
Both books, but especially Suster's are written in prose that stops just
this side of tabloid journalese. This is too bad for two reasons. One, the
authors diminish some important material by this kind of presentation. Two,
the lessons we have to learn about mass psychopathology and about the history
of fascism are too important to be trivalized in this way.
Goodrick-Clark's is a serious and compelling historical look at ariosophy, a
dangerous amalgam of Aryan racism, pan-German nationalism, and occultism that
flourished in Austria and Germany from around 1890 well into the era when
Himmler's Death's Head SS was organized. Himmler is said by Pauwels and
Bergier to have taken the Jesuits for his model, and to have installed a
regular hierarchy ranging from lay brothers to father superior, and to have
used this Black Order in horrific rites.8
THE OCCULT ROOTS OF NAZISM identifies wide circle of proto-Nazi
philosophers, previously almost unknown, who saw in the chaos that beset
Germany after the Treaty of Versailles the working out of ancient Aryan
prophecies. Among them was Rudolf John Gorsleben, who interesting career
Goodrick-Clarke sums up in a sentence: "on the basis of the runes, occultism,
and the Edda, Gorsleben created an original racist mystery-religion which
illuminated the priceless magical heritage of the Aryans and justified their
spiritual and political world-supremacy."9
Gorsleben was active in right-wing politics in Bavaria in the years Hitler
was forming his political convictions there, and he lectured to the Thule
Society, a Munich club thought to have greatly influenced Nazism in its
infancy (see below). He also edited a weekly newspaper called German Freedom;
in 1927 he changed the name to Aryan Freedom.
He derived the word 'race' from rata, an Old Norse term meaning 'root', in
order to conclude that God and race were identical.... He maintained that
racial mixing was always detrimental for the racially superior partner, since
his purity was debased in the progeny, and he repeated the common volkisch
[folkish] conviction that woman could be 'impregnated' by intercourse, even
when no conception occurred, so that her subsequent offspring bore the
characteristics of her first lover. Given these overwhelming pressures
towards the increasing bastardization of the German descendants of the Aryan
race, only the strict practice of segregation and eugenics could guarantee the
reversal of racial contamination in the world.10
Another book which hold that Hitler learned many of his occult lesson from
avatars in Vienna and Munich may well be the best known
THE CONTROVERSY OF THE OCCULT REICH
black magical explanation of Nazism to have been put forth so far. Trevor
Ravenscroft's THE SPEAR OF DESTINY was published by that famous British house
of occultism, the aptly named Neville Spearman Ltd,.in 1972, and has since
gone through many edition.11
Ravenscroft is intriguing because instead of reporting historical influences
on Hitler, he presents secret history in a narrative form that purports to be
factual and that-if true maybe even if only poetically "true"-goes a long way
toward finding a convincing occult explanation for the Nazi phenomenon.
Two challenges to Ravenscroft's facts, discussed below, have led some
readers to conclude his book is more nearly a novel than strict history.
Nonetheless, its provocative premise and fluent synthesis of black magical
thematics will keep it on occult booklists until a better effort at explaining
Hitler comes along.
Ravenscroft, a British journalist, historian, and World War II commando
officer, spent four years in Nazi prison camps after he was captured
attempting to assassinate General Erwin Rommel in North Africa in 1941. His
personal perspective on the Hitler era is based on material he says he got in
a state of transcendent consciousness while imprisoned. He introduces his
methodology by speaking of
my own experience of higher levels of consciousness whilst in a Nazi
Concentration Camp during the war, and how the nature of this
transcendent experience had guided me to a study of the Spear of
Longinus and the legend of world destiny which had grown up around
it.12
Later, in London, his intuitive suspicions about certain grail relics and
their importance in occult Hitlerian history were confirmed by a Viennese
exile called Dr. Walter Johannes Stein who died in 1957.
Dr. Stein spent much of the war as a British secret agent, but before that
time he was a scholar who employed white magical means to clairvoyantly
investigate historical events. It was his book on the grail mythos published
in Stuttgart in 1928 and titled THE NINTH CENTURY: WORLD HISTORY IN THE LIGHT
OF THE HOLY GRAIL13 that attracted Ravenscroft to him.
THE SPEAR OF DESTINY focuses first on Hitler's lost years in Vienna from
1909 to 1913. During that time, Ravenscroft writes, Dr. Stein was pursuing
his occult researches as a student at the University of Vienna and getting to
know Hitler, then a dropout living in a flophouse.
Vienna was during Hitler's years there a vortex of modern thinking. Freud
was in practice at Berggasse 19; Ludwig Wittgenstein was in residence
pondering avant garde philosophy and metaphysics; Gustav Mahler had returned
home to die and to name his protege, Arnold Schonberg. In contrast there
persisted the deep anti-Semitic currents that had caused Mahler to convert to
Catholicism, that forced Freud eventually to flee to London and that informed
the ancient pan-German folkoric nostalgia espoused by Guido von List.
THE CONTROVERSY OF THE OCCULT REICH
This old black magician, whose occult lodge Ravenscroft says substituted
the swastika for the cross in perversion and the practice of medieval
thaumaturgy, looked like a wizard in floppy cap and long white beard. His link
to Hitler was allegedly through an occult bookseller, Ernst Pretzche, in whose
shop the future Fuhrer found a second home.
In the shop Dr. Stein found a copy of Wolfram von Eschenbach's PARZIVAL, the
medieval grail romance that Dr. Stein was himself researching for his work on
the ninth century. In the book's margins were handwritten annotations; looking
them over Dr.Stein was fascinated and repelled:
This was no ordinary commentary but the work of somebody who had
achieved more than a working knowledge of the black arts! The
unknown commentator had found the key to unveiling many of the
deepest secrets of the Grail, yet obviously spurned the Christian
ideals of the Knights and delighted in the devious machinations
of the Anti-Christ. It suddenly dawned on him that he was
reading the footnotes of Satan!14
The footnotes, of course, proved to have been Hitler's.
Soon afterward, Dr.Stein and Hitler saw the Reich's lance together in the
Imperial Museum at the Hofburg. Dr. Stein had been there before and had never
failed to be moved by the sight of the old relic, supposed to have been moved
by the original spear with which the Roman centurion, Longinus, pierced the
side of Christ during the crucifixation. Longinus was a German, and his "spear
of destiny" was fated to play a magical role in the careers of German leaders
like Charlemagne, Otto the Great, and Frederick Barbarossa. Dr. Stein said
the spear inspired in him the emotion expressed in the motto of the knights of
the holy grail: Durch Mitleid wissen, "through compassion to self knowledge."
Then he glanced at Hitler:
Walter Stein found he was not the only one moved by the sight of this
historic spearhead. Adolf Hitler stood beside him, like a man in a trance, a
man over whom some dreadful magic spell had been cast... The very space around
him seemed enlivened with some subtle irradiation, a kind of ghostly
ectoplasmic light. His whole physiognomy and stance appeared transformed as if
some might Spirit now inhabited his very soul, creating within and around him
a kind of evil transfiguration of its own nature and power.15 ] Latter Hitler
took Dr. Stein up the Danube to visit his mystic teacher, a rustic woodcutter
and herbalist named Hans Lodz "who retained in his peasant's blood the last
traces of the atavistic clairvoyance of the ancient Germanic tribes" and who
"resembled a mischievous yet malevolent dwarf from the pages of Grimm's Fairy
Tales or an illustration from a book on ancient Germanic folklore".16 The men
took a swim in the river at which Dr. Stein noticed that Hitler had only one
testicle.
THE CONTROVERSY OF THE OCCULT REICH
It was Lodz, Dr.Stein learned, who had prepared for Hitler a peyote
concoction that afforded him psychedelic insight into his past lives. The
peyote itself had come from Pretzche, who had lived for a time in the German
colony in Mexico. Hitler had hoped that his former existences, viewed in his
drug trance, would include an early incarnation as a powerful Teutonic ruler,
but it was not to be.
Instead his psychedelic perception revealed non Eschenbach's Parzival to
have been prophetic of events that would take place a thousand years after it
was written, i.e. in the present. And it showed Hitler to have been the
historical personage behind the evil sorcerer Klingsor, the very spirit of the
anti-Christ and the villain of Parzival.
According to Dr. Stein's work Klingsor was in fact Landulf II of Capua, the
traitorous confidant of the Holy Roman Emperor who betrayed Christianity to
the Moslem invaders of Italy and Spain.
Armed with the knowledge of his black spiritual ancestry, Ravenscroft
writes, Hitler moved to Germany, joined the Bavarian Army, survived the
hellish trench warfare on the western front, won the Iron Cross, second class,
and got discharged in Munich where he encountered the men who were to invent
National Socialism.
Virtually every study of Hitler's time in Munich mentions the Thule Society
as superficially a kind of Elk's Club of German mythology which met often and
openly at a fancy metropolitan hotel and for a time counted Hitler as a
member. Behind the scenes, however the society seems to have been considerably
more sinister.
Robert Payne whose excellent Hitler biography contains no occult
explanations, describes the Thule Society as the center of the right wing
opposition to the brief Bavarian postwar socialist coup under the Jewish
intellectual Kurt Eisner.
The reaction set in swiftly, as the extreme right gathered its
forces. The headquarters of the reaction was the Hotel
Vierjahreszeiten, where several floors were given over to the Thule
Society, ostensibly a literary club devoted to the study of Nordic
culture but in fact a secret political organization devoted to violent
anti-Semitism and rule by an aristocratic elite. The name of the
organization derived from ultima Thule, the unknown northern land
believed to be the original home of the German race... The symbol of
the Thule Society was a swastika with a dagger enclosed in laurel
leaves.17
Most of the occult historians of the era believe the Thule Society operated
on a deeper level still, a level headed by a mysterious figure called Dietrich
Eckart. Goodrick-Clarke calls Eckart Hitler's mentor in the early days of the
Nazi Party, along with Rudolf Hess and Alfred Rosenberg.18
According to Ravenscroft, Eckart, like Hitler, first achieved transcendence
through psychedelic drugs. Research on peyote by the German pharmacologist
Ludwig Lewin had been published in 1886, leading to widespread popular
experimentation. Later a heroin
THE CONTROVERSY OF THE OCCULT REICH
addict, in earlier days Eckart used peyote in the practice on neo- pagan magic
in Berlin. He came to believe that he, too was the reincarnation of ninth
century character. In his case it was Bernard of Barcelona, a notorious
betrayer of Christianity to the Arabs and a black magician who used
thaumaturgy to hold off Carolingian armies in Spain.
Eckart assertedly organized Kurt EIsner's assassination and personally chose
Hitler-by then a battle-scarred veteran of the horrors of trench warfare and a
fervent critic of the armistice-to lead the Aryan race back to supremacy.
Ravenscroft writes that Hitler had been prepared for satanic initiation by
his experiences in Vienna with peyote and with the spear and by his mustard
gassing in 1918, which left him blind and in a state of enforced trance for
several days.
He also says that the techniques Dietrich Eckart used were in part derived
from the sexual magic of Aleister Crowley. In 1912 this famed British magician
was named IX British head of a secret Berlin lodge called Ordo Templi Orientis
which practiced various forms of sexual magic.19
Ravenscroft writes "there can be little doubt" that both Crowley and Eckart
conducted deep studies of the Arabian astrological magic performed by
Klingsor's real life counterpart, Landulf II. It was to Sicily-then a Moslem
stronghold-that Landulf fled after his traitorous links to Islam were
disclosed. And it was in a dark tower in the mountains of the southwest corner
of that island that his evil soul festered with additional bitterness over his
castration by the relatives of a noblewoman he had raped. There he practiced
sadistic satanism of a nature that foreshadowed the horrors of Nazi
concentration camps.
If the legends that have come down from these dark centuries of
European history are true, these rituals carried out at Kalot Enbolot
included terrible tortures such as the slitting open of the stomach of
sacrificial victims and the slow drawing open of the stomach of
sacrificial victims and the slow drawing of their entrails, the driving
of stakes through the orifices of their bodies before disembowelling
them, and the invoking of Spirits of Darkness (incubi) to rape young
virgins kidnapped from their families.20
It was from his studies of the power available to practitioners of such
perversities that Eckart devised the rituals he used when he "opened the
centers of Adolf Hitler to give him a vision of and a means of communication
with the Powers." Ravenscroft concludes, though he declines to furnish the
full details: "Suffice it to say that they were indescribably sadistic and
ghastly." 21
Having done his worst, Eckart soon died, proudly advising those around
him:
Follow Hitler! he will dance, but it is I who have called the tune!
- 8 -
THE CONTROVERSY OF THE OCCULT REICH
I have initiated him into the "Secret Doctrine", opened his centers
of vision and given him the means to communicate with the Powers. Do
not mourn for me: I shall have influenced history more than any other
German.22
Not unnaturally the question rises whether any of THE SPEAR OF DESTINY is
true. It's certainly a great story, one which Ravenscroft elaborates with a
lengthy investigation of Hitler's sex life, in which he makes a case for
associating the reports of the Fuehrer's missing testis to the perversities
resulting from Landulf's castration.
The problem lies with Ravenscroft's primary source, Dr. Walter Johannes
Stein. And the problem with Dr.Stein is really two problems: one his method of
historical research: and two, the fact that he is dead and unable to speak for
himself.
Given his method, of course, this second problem should not be
insurmountable. Had we the technique, Dr. Stein could presumably verify each
of Ravenscroft's assertion for us from beyond the grave. For Dr. Stein is
alleged to have studied history not in the libraries and archives that are the
usual haunt of the historian but in an arena called the Cosmic Chronicle
where, according to Ravenscroft, past present and future were united in a
higher dimension of time.
What's more Ravenscroft reveals in his introduction, Dr.Stein
taught the same techniques to him.
It is, however, undeniably difficult, if not unprecedented, to footnote
clairvoyance. We have to take on faith that the SPEAR OF DESTINY is what
Dr.Stein told Ravenscroft. This is not to say that all of his information came
from the Cosmic Chronicle; Dr. Stein as we have seen is purported to have been
present in Vienna during Hitler's lost years there. Nor did their close
association end in Austria. Ravenscroft says Dr. Stein "watched at close
quarters" the founding of the Nazi party and Hitler's association with Eckart
and other sinister mentors.
When Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler ordered Dr.Stein's arrest in
Stuttgart in 1933 in order to press him into service with the SS Occult
Bureau, he escaped from Germany and brought with him to Britain the
most authoritative knowledge of the occultism of the Nazi Party.23
Nowhere does Ravenscroft made it clear whether he's talking about
eyewitness knowledge on Dr.Stein's part or about the sort of information to be
gleaned from the Cosmic Chronicle. But two critics of the SPEAR OF DESTINY do
cast doubt on several of the factual assertions upon the factual assertions
upon which Ravenscroft's argument is built.
One is Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, whose book on the occult roots of Nazism
is quoted above. In an appendix called "THE MODERN MYTHOLOGY OF NAZI
OCCULTISM", Goodrick-Clarke takes Ravenscroft to task for the story about
Hitler's relations with the occult
THE CONTROVERSY OF THE OCCULT REICH
bookseller in Vienna and for his claim that Guido Von List was forced to flee
from outraged Viennese Catholics in 1909 after the sexual rites of his blood
brotherhood were exposed. he writes flatly,
There is not a shred of evidence for such rituals. List was never
obliged to leave Vienna and he enjoyed the patronage of prominent
Vienna figures...The fictional nature of the whole episode surrounding
the annotated copy of copy of Parzival is suggested by the similarity
of Pretzsche's obscure bookshop to the one described by Sir Edward
Bulwer-Lytton in ZANONI (1842), which probably served Ravenscroft as a
literary model.24
Goodrick-Clarke also criticizes Jean Michael Angebert's book, THE OCCULT AND
THE THIRD REICH, cited above. He brands as imaginary Angebert's account of the
young Hitler's association with Lanz von Lebenfels.
As noted earlier, Goodrick-Clarke's book is an important and serious piece
of research on Guido von List and Lanz von Lievenfels. But the author seems a
little over-sensitive toward other writers who invoke his two subjects.
Nevertheless, his critique of Angebert and Ravenscroft, though brief, does
offer a glimpse of the misgivings that professional historians feel regarding
such material.
More extensive criticisms have been offered by Christoph Lindenberg in his
review of THE SPEAR OF DESTINY in the German journal Die Drie. Lindenberg has
done some effective digging at the Vienna Records office. Ravenscroft has
Hitler sitting high up in the cheap seats of the Vienna Opera House in the
winter of 1910 - 1 watching Wagner's Parzifal and sympathizing with Klingsor.
This proves to have been impossible, because Lindenberg learned that the first
performance of Wagner's opera took place three years later, on January
14,1914.
Ravenscroft's second mistake was to name the Viennese bookseller who
introduced Hitler to drugs. "No better name occurred to him than Pretsche,
popular among English writers of fiction for German malefactors," Lindenberg
writes scornfully before revealing that extensive checks of Vienna city and
business directories and police records for the years 1892 through 1920 were
negative for the name in question.25
Next, Lindenberg takes issue with Ravenscroft's description of the Danube
trip Hitler and Dr. Stein took in May 1913, to visit the mystic woodcutter,
Hands Lodz:
We can overlook Ravenscroft's mistake of speaking of "Wachau" as a place
and not of the region which really it is. But the details do not fit: the
snow melting in May, the steamer running in spite of the floods, bathing in
the river- it makes no sense. Certainly wrong is the statement that Hitler had
only one testicle... all this has been completely refuted by [Werner] Maser.26
THE CONTROVERSY OF THE OCCULT REICH
Ravenscroft's account of Hitler's circumstances in Vienna also come in for
some heavy criticism. Dr. Stein reportedly sat in a window seat in Demel's
Cafe, reading the anonymous marginalia in the copy of Parzival he'd found and
concluding they were "the footnotes of Satan" when he looked through the
glass and beheld "the most arrogant face and demonical eyes he had ever seen".
This was of course the future Fuehrer in his legendary guise as an
impoverished pavement artist, selling homemade postcards, dressed in a big
black "sleazy" coat, his toes visible through the cracks in his shoes. When in
August, 1912, he sought Hitler out at the "flophouse" he lived in , in
Meldemannstrasse, he was told Hitler was away at Spittal-an-der-Drau
collecting a legacy left him by an aunt. Thereafter, Hitler dressed well.27
Hitler did receive a legacy from his aunt, Johanna Poelzl, Lindenberg
reports. But this happens in March, 1911, and the aunt lived in
Spital-with-one-t, not on the Drau but in southern Austria. Furthermore,
At no time of life did Hitler live in impoverished conditions,
rather he had always sufficient money. In the Meldenmannstrasse, a kind
of large hotel, Hitler paid a rent of 15 Kronen a month. So he could
afford a fairly expensive room and had no need to sell his pictures,
which in any case were no postcards. So this scene too, that
impoverished Hitler dressed in an oversized black coat selling water
colors in front of the Cafe Dehmel does not agree with the facts either
(cf. the two works by Werner Maser who with incredible care collected
all ascertained facts of Hitler's youth).28
In his discussion of the holy lance's power to evoke transcendent
experience, Ravenscroft has a scene in which the chief of the German general
staff, Helmut von Moltke, visited the relic in the company of Conrad von
Hoetzendorf, an Austrian general, shortly before the outbreak of World War I.
The spear's presence led von Moltke to have a trance vision of himself
incarnated as Pope Nicolas I, a ninth century pontiff concerned, like von
Moltke, with the balance of geopolitical power between east and west.29
Untrue protests Lindenberg. "For Moltke visited Vienna neither in 1913 nor
in 1914. Conrad and Moltke met on May 12, 1914 at Karlsbad, from September 7 -
10, 1913, in Silesia, and at Leipzig on October 18 at the Centenary of the
Battle of Leipzig. They had no other meeting."30
Lindenberg has several other criticisms to make, such as the assertion that
"A number of people who intimately knew Walter Johannes Stein in the last
years of his life state that Stein never met Hitler." Unfortunately
Ravenscroft's aversion to footnotes has also afflicted his critic, and
Lindenberg nowhere names these people nor does he document his other
assertions.
Lindenberg doesn't like Ravenscroft's book; he calls it " a pollution of
our spiritual environment." And it is manifestly
THE CONTROVERSY OF THE OCCULT REICH
difficult for him or anyone to rebut research done on the cosmic level.
What, in the end, was Hitler all about? Perhaps no better explanation can be
found than W.H. Auden's suggestions, made in his poem "September 1,1939" and
printed as an epigram to Robert G.L. Waite's book. The date is the beginning
of Hitler's Blitzkrieg against Poland:
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
FOOTNOTES
1. Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, THE MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS,
translated from the French LE MAT DES MAGICIENS by Rollo Myers, Paris, 1960,
New York: Avon Books, 1968; pp 192 - 3
1a. Lewis Spence, THE OCCULT CAUSES OF THE PRESENT WAR, first broached this
explanation in 1944.
2. THE MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS, pg 228, The quote rings true, it sounds like
Hitler, but it is a maddening flaw in this otherwise fascinating book that it
was published-at least in translation- with few footnotes and no index.
3. Ibid.,pg 220. The book goes deeply into the occult background of the Nazi
ethos, but concludes: "We are not suggesting that the reader should study an
affiliation Rosy Cross-Bulwer-Lytton [Wentworth] Little [founder of the Golden
Dawn]- [Aleister] Crowley-Hitler, or any similar association which include
also Mme. Blavatsky and Gurdijeff. Looking for affiliations is a game, like
looking for 'influences' in literature; when the game is over, the problem is
till there. In literature it's a question of genius; in history, of power."
4. Ibid., pg 229- 30.
5. Ibid., pg 226.
6. Ibid., pg 247.
7. Gerald Suster, HITLER: THE OCCULT MESSIAH, New York: St. Martin's Press,
1981. Jean-Michel Angebert [pseudonym for Michel Bertrand and Jean Angelini],
THE OCCULT AND THE THIRD REICH, translated from the French HITLER ET LA
TRADITION CATHARE by Lewis A.M. Sumberg, Paris, 1971, New York: Macmillian,
1974. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, THE OCCULT ROOTS OF NAZISM, Wellingborough
(England): THE Aquarian Press, 1985.
8. THE MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS, pg 284 - 298.
9. THE OCCULT ROOTS OF NAZISM, pg 155.
10.Ibid., pg 156 - 7
11.The book's subtitle is "The occult power behind the spear which pierced the
side of Christ." I am using the Corgi paperback edition published in 1974.
12.THE SPEAR OF DESTINY, pg xviii
13.The publisher is Orient-Occident Verlag; the book is, naturally in German.
It is very long. I have been told that an English translation exists, in a
single typescript copy. at Rudolf Steiner House in London.
14.THE SPEAR OF DESTINY, pg 58 - 9. For a great deal more on this little known
but important figure, including a wonderful photograph, see Goodrick-Clarke's
book.
15.Ibid., pg 64.
16.Ibid., pg 79- 80; 171
17.Robert Payne, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER, New York: Praeger
Publishers, 1973, pg 125
18.THE OCCULT ROOTS OF NAZISM, pg 46,149
19.THE SPEAR OF DESTINY, pg 165 - 6. In one of his very rare footnotes.
Ravenscroft puts the source of this information in Francis King's RITUAL MAGIC
IN ENGLAND, London: Neville Spearman, 1970.
20.Ibid., pg 167.
21.Ibid., pg 169.
22.Ibid., pg 91.
23.Ibid., pg xxi.
24.THE OCCULT ROOTS OF NAZISM, pg 224.
25.Christoph Lindenberg, "THE SPEAR OF DESTINY", in DIE DREI, December 1974.
26.Ibid. The number of testicles Hitler possessed has been the subject of
controversy for decades. Werner Maser argued in a 1973 book that a Russian
autopsy of Hitler's body reporting one testicle was flawed by the fact that
the Russians had the wrong body. But Norbert Bromberg and Verna Volz Small in
their 1983 book HITLER'S PSYCHOPATHOLOGY think the evidence does point to
Hitler's having had the condition known as monorchidism. What it may mean is
subject to a good deal of psychological dispute; see Waite's THE PSYCHOPATHIC
GOD, pg 182 - 202. Many people so afflicted insist they are "magical persons".
27. THE SPEAR OF DESTINY, pg 53 - 61
28. Lindenberg,ibid.
29. THE SPEAR OF DESTINY, pg 127 - 36.
30. Lindenberg, ibid.
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