[CTRL] THE JEW OF LINZ-3

[J Taylor]

SEVEN Magic, Sorcery and Hitler (Picture of hitler weaving a spell) The Magus of Bayer To many, Cambridge and Oxford universities come paired with images of something distinctively and gloriously English: dreaming spires and reflective civilization. To others come thoughts of triumphant intellectual progress: the great scientific discoveries in physics and biology, the philosophical work of Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, or the economic theo-ries of Keynes. At various times over the century past, however, a number of Oxbridge no-ownership academics and students concerned themselves inot with the humanities or the sciences, but with the hermetic mysteries of magic and the occult. In this they followed the same path as the Alexandrine neo-Platonists, who also moved from a theory of a single soul with Plotinus to ritual magic with lamblichus.’ Some of these no-ownership theorists studied magic as object, and produced very clever philosophical anthropological observations on its role and mode of operation. In this category I include Collingwood and Wittgenstein. Some, however, devoted themselves to the practice of magic. Into this category come Aleister Crowley, Walter Duranty and a number of others. One aspect of this hermetic involvement of interest for our purposes is its repercussions, for via Crowley, Dennis Wheatley and Maxwell Knight, it was to penetrate the British security agencies. Those in positions of authority were not religious men and so did not view Crowley’s advice askance. They used this advice to their own purpose, to help engineer, for example, the Hess defection.’ It appears that some of them even apprenticed themselves to Crowley, though this astonishing fact and its consequences are properly the concern of another book. Our prime concern here is not to demonstrate the existence of a coven within the British secu-rity agencies, but rather in how magic - which Schopenhauer called ‘practical metaphysics’ - connects to the no-ownership theory of mind. We shall also be looking at Hitler’s beliefs about magic and how they influenced his life. Schopenhauer remarked upon occult phenomena in various works and in two he discussed them in depth. These two are the chapter ‘Animal Magnetism and Magic’ in Ott the Will in Nuture and the essay ‘On Spirit Seeing’ in Pareuga and Paualipometta.3 Modern expositors of Schopen-hauer’s thought omit these essays entirely, as something of a scandal, much as historians neglected the alchemical writings of Sir Isaac Newton. They quite overlook their historical importance, and present Schopenhauer as a rationalist philosopher in the same mould as Kant. Schopenhauer, however, developed his own theory of occult phenomena, intrinsically tied to his own account of the Will. It was Schopenhauer’s ideas here that were to resonate in the musical mind of Richard Wagner. Wagner, for example, writes approvingly of Schopenhauer that he ‘has also given us the best of guides through his profound hypothesis concerning the physiologic phenomenon of clairvoyance. . . ."There is little doubt that Hitler had read the relevant sections of both Wagner and Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer had no doubt that the reported phenomena really occurred, but thought their standard magical explanation in terms of spirits to be so much claptrap. He offered an account of the nature of magic that was original with him and that has not, so far as I am aware, been presented elsewhere, although a variant that might be Schopenhauer’s is discernible in Crowley’s writings on magic, with their emphasis on the Will. I do not 142 propose to investigate Crowley’s writings here, nor do I commend them to the reader. Reading Crowley is like dipping one’s hand into a bag full of lice and leeches. To approach Schopenhauer’s theory, we must consider first the question of the efficacy of magic. Readers of a rationalist persuasion will take it for granted that magic is not casually efficacious; but on the question of whether magical phenomena really occur, the assumption of. what follows is that some of them really do. Australian and South African readers are notably less sceptical than English and european readers in this regard. 1 well remember newspaper articles from my youth in Western Australia, recording cases of tribal aborigines brought to Perth hospitals following malevolent tribal sorcery. In some cases the victims died. Rather than document what I say here, I refer the doubtful reader to the anthropological literature. Analogues of ‘pointing the bone’ or ‘singing to death’ ceremonies exist in many human groups, but the Australian aboriginal practice is as well documented as any - as is the fact that there are deaths to its account. Skeptics dismiss such cases by saying that the victims simply died of fright and that the magical means employed were not efficacious as magic, but worked their effect through other means - perhaps via a pre-disposing fear. The point, however, is that whatever these other means are, we are ignorant of them: I cannot kill an aborigine by pointing a bone or by ‘singing him to death’, nor, I believe, can any Western psychologist or anthropologist; yet for all that, the tribal sorcery worked. It is therefore no explanation of the death by sorcery cases to say that the poor victims ‘died of fright’ since the truth is that we have not even the beginnings of a comprehensive theory that might account for deaths of this nature. Indeed, I understand that the aboriginal sorcery victims typically did not appear afraid at all, but instead accepted the inevitability of their fate with resignation. The normal rationalist response, therefore, is simply too quick. Sorcery - like hypnosis, which is itself a quasi-magical technique at least historically-quite certainly does work sometimes. How it works we simply do not yet know. On this dismissive, ‘rationalist response’, I can do no better than quote Collingwood’s criticism of Sir James Frazer’s account in The Golden Bough of another magical phenomenon concerning nail-clippings: the theory does not fit the facts it was devised to explain The observed fact is that the ‘savage’ destroys his own nail-clippings. The theory is that he believes in a ‘mystical’ connexion (to use the French adjective) between these nail-clippings and his own body, such that their destruction is 143 injurious to himself. But, if he believed this, he would regard his own destruction of his nail-clippings as suicide. He does not so regard it; therefore he does not believe in the alleged ‘mystical’ connexion and the grounds on which he has been credited with a ‘primitive mentality’ disappear. Simple though it is, the blunder is not innocent. It masks a half-conscious conspiracy to bring into ridicule and contempt civilizations different from our own; and, in particular, civilizations in which magic is openly recognized. Anthropologists would of course indignantly deny this; but under cross-examination their denials would break down. The theory from which we started was that a ‘savage’ destroys his nail-clippings to prevent an enemy from destroying them with certain magical ceremonies. The anthropologist next says to himself: ‘My informant tells me he is afraid of some one’s doing two things simultaneously: destroying these nail-clippings, and performing certain ceremonies. Now he must know as well as I do that the ceremonies are mere hocus-pocus. There is nothing to be afraid of there. Consequently he must be afraid of the destruction of the nail-clippings.’ Some such work as this must have been going on in the anthropologist’s mind; for if it had not, he would not have based his theory on a pseudo fact (fear of the destruction of nail-clippings as such) instead of basing on the genuine fact which he had correctly observed (fear of that destruction when, and only when, accompanied by magical ceremonies). The motive power behind this substitution is the anthropologisr’s conviction that the ceremonies which would accompany the destruction of the nail-clip-pings are ‘mere hocus-pocus’ and could not possibly hurt anyone. But these ceremonies are the one and only magical part of the whole business. The alleged theory of magic has been constructed by manipulating the facts so that all magical elements are left out of them. In other words, the theory is a thinly disguised refusal to study magic at all.’ Collingwood had no doubt that magic was efficacious, but his account of its efficacy-as one would expect from an Oxford philosopher/historian - was not a supernatural one. He saw magic as resting essentially upon little-known facts of human psychology and suggested that our difficulties in theorizing about it derive, not from these facts, but rather from deep-seated fear, from the fact that we are so terrified of magic that we simply dare not think straight about it. ‘Let us note here that the occult in general is a staple of Hollywood horror films. The reason it features in such popular films is not because of its comic effects, but because the occult really is profoundly frightening. So what Collingwood suggests about our ‘very strong disincli-nation to think about the subject in a cool and logical manner’ might very well be true, though his own theory of ‘What Magic Is’ is not in itself particularly frightening. In stating it, he emphasizes the representative role of magic, exactly as did Wittgenstein in his Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough. Schopenhauer had asked, ‘How can the Will act magically?’ The question Wittgenstein and Collingwood raised was the non-causal one, ‘How can Magic serve to represent - or give expression to - the desires of its practitioners?’ These are not totally unrelated ways of investigating the matter. Here, first, is Collingwood on magic in the abstract: The only profitable way of theorizing about magic is to approach it from the side of art. The similarities between magic and applied science, on which the Tylor-Frazer theory rests, are very slight, and the dissimilarities are great. The magician as such is not a scientist; and if WE admit this, and call him a bad scientist, we are merely finding a term of abuse for the characteristics that differentiate him liom a scientist, without troubling to analyst those characteristics . . the similarities between magic and art are both strong and intimate. Magical practices invariably contain, not as peripheral elements but as central elements, artistic activities like dances, songs, drawing, or modeling. Moreover these elements have a function which in two ways resembles the function of amusement. (i) They are means to a preconceived end, and are therefore not art proper but craft. (ii) This end is the arousing of emotion. (i)That magic is essentially means to a preconceived end is, I think, obvious; I and equally obvious that what is thus used as means is always something artistic, or rather (since, being used as means to an end, it cannot be art proper) quasi-artistic. I (ii) That the end of magic is always and solely arousing of certain emotions is less obvious; but every one will admit that this is at least sometimes and partially its end. The use of the bull-roarer in Australian initiation-ceremonies is intended, partly at least, to arouse certain emotions in the candidates for initiation and certain others in uninitiated persons who may happen to overhear it. A tribe which dances a war-dance before going to fight its neighbours is working up its warlike emotions. The warriors are dancing themselves into a conviction of their own invincibility. The various and complicated magic which surrounds and accompanies the agriculture of a peasant society expresses that society’s emotions towards its flocks and herds, its crops and the instruments of its labour; or rather, evokes in its members at each critical point in the calendar that emotion, from among all these, which is appropriate to the corresponding phase of its annual work. But although magic arouses emotion, it does this in quite another way than amusement. Emotions aroused by magical acts are not discharged by those acts. It is important for the practical life of the people concerned that this should not happen; and magical practices are magical precisely because they have been so designed that it shall not happen. The contrary is what happens: these emotions are focused and crystallized, consolidated into effective agents in practical life. The process is the exact opposite of a catharsis. There the emotion is discharged so that it shall not interfere with practical life; here it is canalized and directed upon practical lifc.7 Collingwood defends no supernatural account of such alleged phenomena as levitation or materialization. And what he says might indeed work as an outline account of the effect of spells or curses, etc. He is sketching how magic can have an effect upon someone, but he denies that magic can work directly upon inanimate objects. Thus we read further: I am suggesting that these emotional effects, partly on the performers themselves, partly on others favourably or unfavourably affected by the performance, are the only effects which magic can produce, and the only ones which, when intelligently performed, it is meant to produce. The primary function of all magical acts, I am suggesting, is to generate in the agent or agents certain emotions that are considered necessary or useful for the work of living; their secondary function is to generate in others, friends or enemies of the agent, emotions useful or detrimental to lives of these others. To any one with sufficient psychological knowledge to understand the effect which our emotions have on the success or failure of our enterprises, and in the production or cure of diseases, it will be clear that this theory of magic amply accounts for its ordinary everyday employment in connexion with the ordinary everyday activities of the people who believe in it. Such a person thinks, for example, that a war undertaken without the proper dances would end in defeat; or that if he took his axe to the forest without doing the proper magic first, he would not succeed in cutting down a tree. But this belief does not imply that the enemy is defeated or the tree felled by the power of the magic distinct from the labour of the ‘savage’. It means that warfare or wooderaft, nothing can be done without morale; and the function of magic is to develop and conserve morale; or to damage it. For example, if an enemy spied upon our war-dance and saw how magnificently we did it, might he not slink away and beg his friends to submit without a battle? Where the purpose of magic is to screw our courage up to the point of attacking, not a rock or a tree, but a human enemy, the enemy’s will to encounter us may be fatally weakened by the magic alone. How far this negative emotional effect might produce diseases of various kinds or even death is a question about which no student of medical psychology will wish to dogmatize. Collingwood, then, saw magical techniques as essentially designed to work upon morale, for good or ill, but he was also quite open about how far the power of these techniques might extend. Even today, of course, we are still profoundly ignorant. And what Collingwood is saying here might be worth rephrasing as we bear in mind the terrible events of the 1930s. We read in Collingwood that ‘the enemy’s will to encounter us may be fatally weakened by the magic alone’. If we substitute the word ‘propaganda’ for ‘magic’ here, we recognize an exact description of Hitler’s policies in the thirties: gatherings at night in Nuremberg and mass affirmation of the will to win in the midst of occult symbols from pre-Christian Germanic mythology. What Collingwood wrote, apparently only of savage tribes, has an obvious twentieth-century application to the effects of the Nuremberg Rallies. Foreign observers did see them and justifiably went away afraid to their very bowels. There is perhaps a resistance to applying a word like ‘magic’ to activities such as these. We are more accustomed to bundle them under the labels ‘morale-building’ or ‘propaganda’. It certainly sounds more objective, more scientific. But this resistance to calling it ‘magic’ seems to me to do nothing but cloud clear perception of what Hitler was doing. More importantly, as we shall see, it clouds clear perecption of what Hitler thought he was doing. It is not that I am advising the reader to simply substitute the word ‘magic’ for ‘mass political propaganda’. It is rather that if we insist upon calling what are clearly magical activities ‘mass political propaganda’ we will fail to understand what was really going on. What Hitler managed to bring about with these rallies perfectly fits Collingwood’s description of magical effects. And if we are open-minded, we can discern in the rallies an exact twentieth-century counterpart of what Collingwood is describing as magic amongst savages. Should the reader still reject the ‘magic’ label here for the various Nazi mass phenomena, it is obviously of relevance that their originator saw them as involving hypnosis and magic. We have a number of records of Hitler describing the psychology of the mass rallies in terms of the suggestions implanted under hypnosis - that is, a quasi-magical technique.8 And Hitler’s description raises a further feature of coming together in groups that Collingwood passed over; the idea of the group mind, the shared mind, the unowned mind: ‘My success in initiating the greatest people’s movement of all time is due to my never having done anything in violation of the vital laws and the feelings of the mass. These feelings may be primitive, but they have the resistance and indestructibility of natural qualities. . . It is only because I take their vital laws into consideration that I can rule them. . . .’ He had made the masses fanatic, he explained, in order to fashion them into the instruments of his policy. He had awakened the masses. He had lifted them out of themselves, and given them meaning and a function. He had been reproached with appealing to their lowest instincts. Actually, he was doing something quite different. If he were to go to the masses with reasonable deliberations, they would not understand him. But if he awakened corresponding feelings in them, they followed the simple slogans he presented to them. ‘At a mass meeting,’ he cried, ‘thought is eliminated. And because this is the state of mind I require, because it secures to me the best sounding-board for my speeches, I order everyone to attend the meetings, where they become part of 147 the mass whether they like it or not, "intellectuals" and bourgeois as well as workers. I mingle the people. I speak to them only as the mass.’ He paused to reflect for a moment. Then he resumed with increased eagerness: ‘I am conscious that I have no equal in the art of swaying the masses, not even Goebbels. Everything that can be learnt with the intelligence, everything that can be achieved by the aid of clever ideas, Goebbels can do, but real leadership of the masses cannot be learnt. And remember this: the bigger the crowd, the more easily is it swayed. Also, the more you mingle the classes - peasants, workers, black-coated workers - the more surely will you achieve the typical mass character. Don’t waste time over "intellectual" meetings and groups drawn together by mutual interests. Anything you may achieve with such folk today by means of reasonable explanation may be erased to-morrow by an oppo-site explanation. But what you tell the people in the mass, in a receptive state of fanatic devotion, will remain like words received under an hypnotic influence, ineradicable, and impervious to every reasonable explanation. .’ Hitler then began to discuss the use of propaganda to defeat opponents - a problem, he strongly emphasised, that was quite distinct from the previous one. The two must on no account be confused. He had been discussing the mastery of the masses, but propaganda meant the defeat of opponents. The two had one thing in common: both must eschew all discussion of reasons, all refutation of opinions - in short, there must be no debating or doubting. But apart from this, the aim of a propaganda battle with one’s opponents was quite a different one. ‘Mastery always means the transmission of a stronger will to a weaker one. How shall I press my will upon my opponent? By first splitting and paralysing his will, putting him at loggerheads with himself, throwing him into confusion.’ He conceived the transmission of the will, he said, as something in the nature of a physical and biological process. Foreign bodies penetrated the circulation of the enemy, gained a foothold, and gave rise to disease and infirmity till he was ready to surrender. The instrument of terrorism was indispensable, less for its direct effects than for its undermining of the opposing will. Sceptics about magic will insist that there is no warrant in any of this to support the view that Hitler was consciously using magic and that the effect of the rallies is better understood via disciplines such as psychology or mass marketing. Ignoring the point that to some extent these disciplines have simply relabelled magical concepts to sound scientific (‘spell’ = ‘post-hypnotic suggestion’), such sceptics are quite overlooking the intellectual background from which Hitler was proceeding. What, for example, was the importance of achieving a state in which thought was eliminated? Where did Hitler get the idea from in the first place? Did he have intellectual precursors? Hitler’s pioneer predecessors of this idea were Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner, both of whom were emphatic that suspension of thought was a precondition for action by the unowned, universal Will. Wagner consciously strove to bring this state about by his music and produced lengthy prose accounts describing what then ensued.’ It was the very point of his music. Schopenhauer we shall consider in a moment. Rauschning recorded a further conversation he had with Hitler in which Hitler outlined his intellectual forebears, stating that besides Lenin, Trotsky and the infamous anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, he had ‘got illumination and ideas from the Catholic Church, and from the Freemasons, that I could never have obtained from other sources’. When queried by Rauschning what he had learned from the Freemasons, Hitler replied: ‘That’s simple. Needless to say, I don’t seriously believe in the abysmal evilness and noxiousness of these people. . .But there is one dangerous element, and that is the element I have copied from them. They form a sort of priestly nobility. They have developed an esoteric doctrine, not merely formulated, but imparted through the medium of symbols and mysterious rites in degrees of initiation. The hierarchical organisation and the initiation through symbolic rites, that is to say without bothering the brains but by working on the imagination through magic and the symbols of a cult - all this is the dangerous element and the element that I have taken over. Don’t you see that our party must be of this character?’ He banged the table. ‘An Order, that is what it has to be - an Order, the hierarchical Order of asecular priesthood.’ If Rauschning is an accurate reporter - and he claims to have written down each conversation soon after having it - then Hitler deliberately worked upon the imagination through magic. To those who doubt the causal efficacy of magic altogether, even on the Collingwood model, the enterprise on which we have embarked is still not something to be dismissed as unimportant or misguided. It might be that magical practice explains at the very least what Hitler thought he was doing, whether or not it actually explains what he actually brought to pass. In similar fashion, no historian can pretend to understand the Crusades in ignorance of the religious beliefs of the Crusaders. The historian might deny that divine help brought about the capture of Jerusalem, while granting that belief in divine help had an effect upon Crusader morale that made the capture possible. Equally, an historian might deny that magic is efficacious, while granting that the techniques Hitler developed on the basis of his belief that magic is efficacious, did indeed work. Now whatever 148 ‘the scoffing of the sceptics about magic - and about whether what I am characterizing as magic is legitimately so characterized - the technique, as Hitler applied it, did work. Hitler’s successes from 1920 to 1940 have a claim to rank amongst the most astounding by any individual in the history of the world. A lone, gas-affected war veteran - an Austrian foreigner -arose from nothing to leadership of a great nation. He created millions of jobs and rescued the country from destitution. Nation after nation fell to him bloodlessly. And when it did come to blood, France fell within a matter of weeks to a militarily inferior opponent. Hitler’s own career, then, is the experimental evidence that magic - as character&d by Collingwood -really is causally efficacious after all. In the phenomenon of Nazism, it was subjected to sustained experimental testing and it worked." What then of the alleged supernatural effects of magic, those that concern not morale, but allegedly violate the laws of nature? Unlike Schopenhauer, Collingwood denied this possibility. He restricted himself to a sphere of efficacious magic concerned with human morale and contrasted this with a sphere of bogus magic, of alleged effects in violation of the laws of nature, which he did not believe were possible. The distinc-tion is necessary if we are to take Collingwood, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein seriously. And this now brings us to focus upon the question of how this efficacious magic produces its effects. Here we come to the essence of the problem and the connection between what Collingwood has to say on the matter and what Wittgenstein wrote, (We shall see later that Schopenhauer’s account of the means by which magic works is rather different.) If we ask how magic products these emotional effects, the answer is easy. It is done by representation. A situation is created (the warriors brandish their spears, the peasant gets out his plough, and so forth, when no battle is being fought and no seed is being sown) representing the practical situation upon which emotion is to be directed. It is essential to the magical efficacy of the act that the agent shall be conscious of this relation, and shall recognize what he is doing as a war-dance, a plough-ritual, or the like. This is why, on first approaching the ritual, he must have it explained to him, either by word of mouth (which may take the form of initiatory instruction, or of an explanatory speech or song forming part of the ritual itself) or by such close mimicry that mistake is impossible. Magic is a representation wherc the emotion evoked is an emotion valued on account of its function in practical life, evoked in order that it may discharge that function, and fed by the generative or focusing magical activity into the practical life that needs it. Magical activity is a kind of dynamo supplying the mechanism of practical life with the emotional current that drives it. Hence 150 magic is a necessity for every sort and condition of man, and is actually found in every healthy society. A society which thinks, as our own thinks, that it has outlived the need for magic, is either mistaken in that opinion, or else it is a dying society, perishing for lack of interest in its own maintenance." Collingwood’s account of magic, while dismissive of the rationalist Frazier account (which Wittgenstein also criticized), is also one to which no rationalist will take exception, for it is a naturalistic account of magic. For Collingwood, a successful magical spell is in no way different from a collcge basketball team being sufficiently inspired by its supporters chanting ‘Rah! Rah! Rah!’ to go on and win the game. A spell is effective just as this chant can be effective." Collingwood’s point is that we know very little either about how magic works or about its possible ramifications within the psyche, and that this ignorance ought not to be used dismissively to dispose of a human practice that really is efficacious after all. Collingwood’s is clearly a possible account of magic, in the sense that there are no obvious flaws of logic in its presentation. I have called it a no-ownership account because Collingwood was a,no-ownership theorist, but he did not tie his presentation of magical phenomena explicitly to his no-ownership theory of the mind. (The reader must suspect that as a salaried Oxford professor, Collingwood was unduly constrained in publicly expressing just how radical his ideas really were.) His theory of magic might even be defended by critics of the no-ownership philosophy. Collingwood’s philosophy of magic, however, is our entrke into the subject and I hope that its presentation has convinced the reader that the question of the efficacy of magic is not something to be dismissed as an atavism, and that there might indeed be some point to considering Nazism as a magical phenomenon based upon the no-ownership theory of mind. From Collingwood’s account of magic - essentially as morale-building or morale-destroying - we now turn to consider another no-ownership theory of magic. Unlike Collingwood, Schopenhauer explicitly presents the technique whereby magical effects are to be induced. Before presenting it, let me focus upon why we are bothering to investigate the Nazi phenomenon from this perspective. i To my sensibilities - and I am far from the first to suffer this impression - Nazism positively reeks of the occult. Hitler’s public performances and gestures; his flashing eyes and rough, guttural, at times incomprehensible voice, the background use of colours, runes and the death’s head symbols on the guards close to him, call to mind nothing so much as a sorcerer acting in full and conscious cooperation with whatever powers are using his human form as vehicle. The Hoffmann photographs of Hitler rehearsing a 151 speech might have served equally to represent a warlock in full-flight magical invocation. If this idea is not just fanciful, then we should expect Hitler to have exhibited some of the powers popularly attributed to mediums. Do we have any evidence that he did? In fact there is a great deal of evidence that he did, from reporters with no obvious axe to grind. Perhaps they were simply gullible, but we must surely consider what they had to say first, without prematurely dismissing the whole matter as simply a priori impossible. First, Hitler is alleged to have had premonitory powers, and, if his photographer is to be believed, avoided several assassination attempts solely by that means. Here, for example, is Heinrich Hoffmann’s by no means slavishly devoted account of his time with Hitler, published after the war was over and Hitler was dead. Hoffmann was a long-time Hitler associate. His employee, Eva Braun, was to marry Hitler and his daughter was the wife of Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Hitler Youth. We read first of Hitler’s attitude towards the supernatural: Often, when he was hesitant over some decision, he would take a coin and toss for it; and though he would laugh at his own stupidity in appealing thus to Fate, he was always obviously delighted when the toss fell the way he hoped it would. He believed firmly in the chronological repetition and faithful reproduction of certain historical events. For him November was the Month of Revolution; May was a propitious month for any undertaking, even when eventual success followed but later. In 1922 he read a prophecy in an astrological calendar which exactly fitted the events of the putsch of November, 1923, and for years afterwards he used to talk about it. Even though he would never admit it, this prophecy undoubtedly made a lasting and profound impression on him. During the course of our twenty-five years of association I had numberless opportunities of seeing how prone he was to premonitions. Quite suddenly and for no reason which he could explain, he would become uneasy. On the occasion of the Burgerbraukeller attempt, too, he had this mysterious, impelling feeling that there was something in the air, that something was wrong, and he altered all his plans, without really having the least idea why he did so. . . .13 I shall never forget the disconcerted expression on Hitler’s face when he was laying the foundation stone of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich in 1933. At the symbolic stroke, the silver hammer in his hand broke in two. Very few people noticed it, and Hitler immediately ordered that no public mention was to be made of the untoward incident. ‘The people are superstitious,’ he declared, ‘and might well see in this ridiculous little misfortune an omen of evil.’ But looking at him, I realised how taken aback he was; it was not of the people, but of himself that he was thinking! Such little incidents invariably left an unpleasant impression on him. We never mentioned them again, for fear of depressing him. Once - after Hitler had come to power - someone in our intimate circle started to talk about the centuries, the prophecies of the famous astrologer, Nostradamus. Hitler was very interested, and told one of his officials to get the books for him from the State Library, but on no account to say for whom he was getting them. As it was, a deposit of three thousand marks had to be put down before the Library would give him the books. In the prophecies mention is made of a mighty mountain, over which a great eagle is sweeping, and Hitler compared the mountain to Germany and the eagle to himself. He went through the prophecics sentence by sentence, and said that although he could not claim that they all had direct bearing on himself, he did feel that they constituted an inexplicable phenomenon; and in this connection, he quoted Hamlet: ‘There are more things in Heaven and earth. .‘I4 Hoffmann continues his narrative by describing a number of incidents he witnessed in which Hitler’s premonitory sense enabled him to avert assassination attempts and accidents. In one, involving Hitler’s train, twenty-two people died. In another, Hitler escaped an assassin who fired three shots. It is difficult, sixty years onwards, to determine to what extent Hoffmann might have embellished the details of these events, but he himself clearly believed in Hitler’s premonitory powers. His testimony sounds neither contrived nor slavishly worshipful; it is even mildly disap-proving in its record of Hitler’s superstition when the silver hammer broke. Whatever one thinks of this, there is the well-attested matter of Hitler’s compelling personal magnetism to take into account. References to it are not confined to the fringe literature. One cannot read any substantial biography of Hitler or of the events of 1933-45 without coming across refer-ences to it. Albert Speer, the German generals and many, many others experienced a mesmeric power in Hitler’s presence so compelling as to be almost palpable. With Germany facing utter ruin, front-line officers who entered Hitler’s presence determined to tell him that the military situation was hopeless, emerged from the bunker with complete confidence in ulti-mate victory. Even Winston Churchill recognized it, as early as 1932. After the war, he recalled his German trip of 1932 and of a discussion he had had with Hitler’s then secretary, Ernst Hanfstaengl, in order to arrange a meeting with Hitler. Churchill gave Hitler’s mesmeric powers as the reason for not proceeding with it. He wrote: ‘There is no doubt that Hitler had a power of fascinating men, and the sense of force and authority is apt to assert itself unduly upon the tourist."’ If one so perspicacious and eminent as Winston Churchill recognized what we in any case have a vast number of reports concerning, then we are justified in pursuing our line of inquiry rather further than we otherwise might have inclined. To an extraordinary degree, Hitler did have a power to fascinate and hypnotize. When, where and how did he acquire this power? The question is obvi-ously of fundamental importance in explaining his dominance over other NSDAP officials and his rise to leadership. It is foolishness in the extreme to think Hitler was passively carried along by events. Without an under-standing of how he did it, the possibility must be open that someone else might rediscover whatever it was and precipitate something similarly dreadful again. There appears to be no comprehensive study of it, however, and what information we have exists only in snippets. Lord Bullock’s biog-raphy of Hitler notes of his Vienna days that He spent much time in the public library, but his reading was indiscriminate and unsystematic. Ancient Rome, the Eastern Religions, Yoga, Occultism, Hypnotism, Astrology, Protestantism, each in turn excited his interest for a moment." Lord Bullock’s judgement that Hitler’s reading ‘was indiscriminate and unsystematic’ is clearly quite unsupported. It seems to me very likely that there was some connecting theme here that has not yet been divined. It is a universal failing of writers on Hitler to assume that there is nothing mysterious or difficult to understand about him. Yet if we ignore the moral dimension of what he wrought - its overwhelming wickedness - then it seems to me that Hitler has a claim to rank as the most extraordinary man i the continent of Europe has ever produced. What did he discover that’s allowed him to do what he did? The truth is that no one has any idea, but he certainly discovered something and used it to manipulate first the NSDAP and then Germany. It is obviously difficult to see, for no one, thank God, has even come close to duplicating what he did.i The working hypothesis of this work is that the ultimate secret of Hitler’s powers, and perhaps the unifying theme behind the books he chose to read, was an applied philosophy. It was this philosophy - a racially restricted Aryan version of Wittgenstein’s no-ownership theory - that determined which books he chose to read. Like Wittgenstein, with his compelling personal power, Hitler’s mana derived from the very same philosophy of how the Mind works and how Language represents. Its ulti-mate source, I believe, was Schopenhauer via the young Wittgenstein. Let us venture into deeper waters. The great point Schopenhauer thought he had established with his philosophy was that the Will lies outside the causal order of the natural world. In fact he claimed further that the world is simply the Will as perceived by the senses. This Will ‘objectifies’ itself in the various objects 154 that we see, touch, hear, smell and taste - each object representing a ‘grade’ of the will. The granite hills we see are the visible form of the will to perma nence; the sport of the ephemeral clouds the will to impermanence and so on. This is what they - and the Will - are, in their essence. We can touch the Will as it disports itself for us, for it has created the world, not as a remote and transcendent cause, but as something profoundly immanent. The cliffs, the clouds, these are the visible, object form of what we know in another way within ourselves as subject. That is, the self-same will which has come to expression in the body of the reader also has presented itself visibly in the appearance of objects in the world. What Schopenhauer further outlined on the basis of his theory of’ the will was a realm of metaphysical causality, whose particular feature is that it is not subject to the categories of space and time, but, rather outside the natural causal order altogether. The Will acts, as it were, directly. Now as we have recognized the mill to be this thing-in-itself, this enables us to suppose that perhaps such a will underlies both spirit and bodily phenomena. All previous explanations of spirit phenomena have been spiritualistic; precisely as such, they are the subject of Kant’s criticism in the first part of his ‘Trrt’ume ekes Geistersehers. Here I am attempting an idealistic explanation.17 It must come as no surprise that the explanation of spirit phenomena Schopenhauer invoked was the no-ownership theory of the common will. Here is his outline of how he saw magic as operating: . .one is astonished at the steadfastness with which humanity everywhere and at all times, in spite of so many failures, has pursued the idea of magic, and from this we shall conclude that it must have a deep foundation, at least in the nature of human beings, if not of things generally, and that it cannot be an arbitrarily devised notion. Although the writers on the subject differ in the definition of mugic, the fundamental idea is everywhere unmistakable. Namely, at all times and in all countries the opinion has been held that besides the regular way of producing changes in the world by means of the causal nexus of bodies, there must be another quite different way that does not rest on the causal nexus at all. Hence, too, its means obviously appeared to be absurd when they were viewed in the light of that first way, in that the unsuitability of the applied cause to the intended effcct was obvious, and the causal nexus between the two was impossible. But the presupposition was made in this case that besides the external connection establishing the nerusphysicus between the phenomena of this world there must be another passing through the essence-in-itself of all things, a subterranean connection, so to speak, in virtue of which an immediate effect was possible from one point of the appearance to every other, through a Ilexus metaph.ysicus. Accordingly, it was thought that an effect must be possible on 155 things from within instead of the usual one from without, an effect of phenomenon on phenomenon, by virtue of the essence-in-itself which is one and the same in all appearances; that, just as we act causally as natura nafuruta [created nature], we could probably also be capable of acting as natura naturuns [creating nature], and of making the microcosm assert itself for a moment as the macrocosm; that solid as the partitions of individuation and separation may be, they might occasionally permit a communication, behind the scenes as it were, or like a secret game under the table; and that, just as in somnambulist clairvoyance, there is an annulment of the individual isolation of knowledge, there can be also one of the individual isolation of the IV///. Such an idea cannot have arisen empirically, nor can it be the confirmation through experience that has preserver it through all ages and in all countries, for in most cases experience was bound to prove entirely opposed to it. I am therefore of the opinion that we must seek at a very great depth the origin of this idea that is so universal with the whole of humanity and is ineradicable in spite of so much experience to the contrary and of ordinary common sense. Namely, we must seek it in the inner feeling of the omnipotence of the will-in-itself, of that will which is the inner being of human beings and at the same time of the whole of nature and in the connected presupposition that that omnipotence might well make itself felt for once, in some way or the other, even as issuing out from the individual. One was not capable of investigating and separating what might be possible to that will as thing-in-itself, on the one hand, and its individual manifestation on the other. No, it was simply assumed that in certain circumstances the will was able to break through the barrier of individuation." Schopenhauer’s conception of magic, then, is of a causality acting ‘under the table’, which becomes actualizable when the will is ‘able to break through the barrier of individuation’."That is, the will can act magically when it is seen in its true nature; not as ‘my will’ or ‘your will’ but as the unitary will behind all phenomena. This is an extraordinary doctrine, and rather difficult to test empirically, for it is not clear how one can act, as an individual, to bring it about that the universal will magically achieves a certain result. And if a scientific test of magic fails, the magician can always retort, ‘No, I wasn’t able to act as a vehicle of the will; I was sadly only acting inefficaciously with my paltry individual will.‘20 Schopenhauer, in fact, does suggest a means by which the universal will can, in full consciousness of its nature, act through an individual; but this is to antici-pate what Hitler discovered, and we still have considerable ground to cover before we approach it. Here is Schopenhauer’s account of the phenomenon described as ‘communication with the souls of the dead’: Finally, when explaining spirit apparitions, we might still refer to the fact that the difference between those who were formerly alive and those now alive is not absolute, but that one and the same will-to-live appears in both. In this way, a living man, going back far enough, might bring to light reminiscences that appear as the communications of one who is dead." This passage-together with what we know of, say, Himmler’s occult activities - should alert us to how the no-ownership theory lends itself to a doctrine of communication with what might seem to be disembodied entities. For on the no-ownership account, of course, these reminiscences do not merely appear as being communications of the dead; they are the very mental processes of the dead, the activities of the self-same Mind that is past, passing and yet to come, abiding in eternity, outside the timc-stream altogether. The very conscious thinking of long-dead Pythagoras expresses itself totally unchanged both through Pythagoras’s body and through the body of the geometrically inclined reader. History, as Collingwood put it, in the title of his essay, is just the recollection of past experience; the thoughts of the deceased personages recorded in history come to life in us. Hence Hitler’s discovery of the meaning of history and hence his reverence for such figures as Frederick the Great and Frederick Barbarossa. The occult starts when these timeless thoughts are seen, not as unowned, but as belonging to other, perhaps disembodied, entities. Schopenhauer’s account of the nature of intercourse with demons is of great interest, for he saw the essence of all of the means of bringing about occult effects as a fixation of the Will and nothing else: According to the fundamental idea just presented, we find that in all attempts at magic the physical means employed was always taken to be merely the vehicle of something metaphysical, in that otherwise it could obviously have no relation to the intended effect. Such were foreign words, symbolic actions, drawn figures, images in wax, and so on. And according to that original feeling, we see that what was borne by such a vehicle was ultimately always an act of the will that one connected with it. The very natural inducement to do this was the fact that in the movements of one’s own body one became aware every moment of a wholly inexplicable and hence evidently metaphysical influence of the will. Ought it not to be possible, one thought, for such an influence to be extended to other bodies as well? To discover the way of eliminating the isolation in which the will finds itself in every individual, and to gain an increase in the immediate sphere of the will beyond the body of the person who wills - that was the task of magic. Yet this fundamental idea from which magic really seems to have sprung, was far from passing at once into distinct consciousness and from being known in abstructo; and magic was a long way from understanding itself. Only in a few reflecting and scholarly authors of earlier centuries, as I shall show in a moment from quotations, do we find the distinct idea that magic power lies in the will . 156 157 itself, and that the extravagant signs and acts, together with the senseless words accompanying them, which passed for the means of exorcising and binding the demons, are merely vehicles and means-for-fixing of the will. In this way the act of will, which is to operate magically, ceases to be a mere wish and becomes the deed; it receives a corpus (as Paracelsus says), and to a certain extent the indi-vidual will proclaims that it is now asserting itself as general will, as will-in-itself. The ‘general will’ or ‘will-in-itself’ that Schopenhauer is referring to here, of course, is the will as conceived by the no-ownership theory. On this theory, what Schopenhauer describes as the goal of magic in fact happens all the time, but unknowingly. The unitary will to perform any particular act expresses itself through my body and the bodies of countless others simultaneously, throughout space and time. But how, for Schopenhauer, does this will come to act knowingly, so that an individual can, as an individual, act to bring about magical effects? What was his account of the mechanism of magic? reality; and so, as a rule, it is indispensable. With the remaining authors of those times, in keeping with that fundamental idea of magic, nothing is established but the aims arbitrarily to exert absolute mastery over nature. Yet they could not rise to the idea that such a mastery must be immediate, but conceived it as being ahogether vzediute. For the religions of all countries had put nature under the dominion of gods and demons. So it was the endeavour of the magician to direct these in accordance with his will, to induce, indeed to compel them to serve him. He ascribed to them anything in which he was successful, jtist as Mesmer to begin with attributed the success of his magnetizing to the bar magnets he held in his hands, instead of to his will, which was the real agent. , First, he was emphatic that the trappings of magic - wax images, amulets, etc - did not function of themselves. And he thought that poly-theism was particularly suited to magical practices because the-polytheistic gods are personifications of natural forces. What had caused the problems for magical practice - what had forced it underground - was Judaism and the religions deriver from it. From the time of Moses, Jews were barred from practising any form of divination or magic: These gods and demons of the polytheistic peoples were, for Schopenhauer (just as for Wagner), representations of metaphysical principles. How do they affect people? It is striking that Schopenhauer mentions hypnosis in support of what he claims. He was writing when the hypnotic phenomena that Mesmer demonstrated were seen as but little removed from magic and when it was considered possible that a science might emerge from magic as chemistry had emerged from -and developed the techniques of- alchemy. Schopenhauer saw his own contribution as explaining how magical concepts might have been not mere superstition, but really have had application. We read of gods and demons, for example, that There shall not be found among you any one . . who practises divination, a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a medium, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For whoever does these things is an abomination. .22 But what was the practice that Yahweh forbade? What did these diviners, soothsayers, augurers, sorcerers, mediums, wizards and necromancers actu-ally do in order to qualify as abominable? According to Schopenhauer, in the light of his metaphysics, they used means whose nature they misunderstood to focus the universal will and thereby attain absolute mastery over nature. They mistakenly attributed the cause of magical effects not to the unowned almighty will, but to the means by which they focused the will, that is, by using wax images and dolls, or by invoking the aid of supernatural beings - angels, cherubim, demons, personifications of elemental forces and so on. But these external actions are not really what is essential, but the vehicle, that whereby the will, the only real agent, obtains its direction and fixation in the material world, and goes over into Schopenhauer is accounting for magical activity as a function solely of the will of the magical practitioner, with the invocation of gods or demons being the means by which this will is brought to representation. The magician thus invokes Poseidon in dealing with horses, earthquakes or the sea, where a common form is recognized in the god’s domain.23 ----- demons and gods of every kind are always hypostases, by means of which the faithful of every colour and sect make understandable to themselves the metaphysical, that which lies Behind nature, that which gives it existence and stability and thus controls it. And so when it is said that magic acts through the help of demons, the meaning at bottom is always that it is an acting not on a physical but on a metaphysical path, not natural but supernatural. But if now in the few facts that speak in favour of the reality of magic, namely, animal magnetism and sympathetic cures, we recognize nothing but an immediate working of the will, which here manifests its direct power without, as it otherwise does only within, the individual that wills, and if we see, as I shall document by decisive, unequivocal quotations, that those more deeply initiated in ancient magic derive all its effects solely from the will, of the person who practices it, then this is indeed a strong empirical instance of my doctrine that the metaphysical in general, that which alone still exists outside the representation, the thing-in-itself of theworld, is nothing but what we recognize in ourselves as will. 158 I59 Schopenhauer then attributed the apparent need of these gods, demons, images, etc in magical practice to ‘false notions of the intellect’ which are not the sovereign agent, though they give the illusion that they are. He emphasises, however, their role as akin to the placebo effect, to ‘the medicine, often quite useless, given to many gullible patients’. That is, the will works as the sovereign magical agent despite the magical paraphernalia Now if those magicians conceived of the direct authority that the will may occasionally exercise over nature as merely indirect through the help of demons, this could not prevent its acting, whenever and wherever such may have taken place. For just because in things of this kind the will-in-itself is active in its original nature and is therefore separated from the representation, false notions of the intellect cannot frustrate its action, but theory and practice are very far apart here: the falseness of the former does not stand in the way of the latter, and the correct theory does not qualify for practice. . I knew a landowner whose peas-ants had long been accustomed to have their attacks of fever dispelled by their master’s magic words. Although he considered himself to be fully convinced of the impossibility of all such things, out of good nature he did the peasants’ will in the traditional manner, and often with a favorable result. He attributed this to their firm conlidence, without considering that this must also render effective the medicine, often quite useless, given to many gullible patients.- The emphasis here is that it is not the bar magnets that induce hypnosis, just as it is not the wax images that bring about the magical effects. Nonetheless, by the practitioner using them as a corpus, the effect is brought about. Schopenhauer attributes the lack of knowledge about the true means of bringing about magical effects via the focused will to hostile authorities, who have been the filter through which has had to pass those of the ancient Hermetic books we possess. Thus Now if theurgy and demonomagic, as previously described, were the mere interpretation and expression of the matter, the mere husk beyond which however most people did not go, still there was no lack of those who, looking inward, well recognized that what was acting in occasional magical influences was nothing but the will. However, we must not look for these people of deeper insight among those who approached magic as strangers or even enemies, and it is precisely by such people that most of the books on the subject have been written. They know magic merely from law courts and the examination of witnesses, and hence describe only its exterior. Indeed, they cautiously pass over in silence the actual proceedings where such have perhaps come to their knowledge through confessions, in order not to spread the terrible vice of sorcery. It is here that Schopenhauer begins his presentation of his researches in the Hermetic literature in support of his claim that his own theory of the will explained what magicians had been doing all along. He quotes Roger Bacon, Paracelsus and Vanini and emphasizes that for magical effects to occur, the will needs a corpus. That is, it is not enough to merely wish for something to happen; magical effects require that the will attains to representation. The unitary form ofthe desired event must be present also in the magical working. One thinks of pins pushed into dolls to magically repre-sent harm being done to someone, or of Mesmer using magnets in passes to induce hypnosis. In all these casts, Schopenhauer thought, what was really going on was one-pointed lisalion of the intent will ancl Ihal llie role 01’ magical representing was so to ‘focus’ the will that action followed. Schopenhauer first tried to demonstrate from the ancient European Hermetica that authorities had already suggested his own account. Thus he’ writes: it is the philosophers and investigators of nature who lived in those times of the prevailing superstition that WE have to ask for information concerning the real essence of the matter. From their statements it appears most clearly that in magic, precisely as in animal magnetism, the agent proper is nothing but the will. To document this I must give a few quotations. Thus Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century said: ‘When an evil-minded man resolutely thinks conjuring another, when he passionately desires this and intends to do so with determination, and is firmly convinced that he can injure him, then there is no doubt that nature will obey the intentions of his will.’ (Opus Majus, London, 1733, p 252). But it is Theophrastus Paracclsus in particular who gives more information about the inner nature of magic than I think anyone else, and who is even not afraid to give an. exact description of its processes, occurring especially in Volume I, pages 91,353 seqq., and 789; Volume II, pages 362 and 496 (according to the Strassburg edition of his works in two folio volumes, 1903). In the first volume he says: Observe the following concerning images of wax; if in my will I bear hostility to another, this must be carried out through a medians, i.e., a corpus. Thus it is possible for my spirit, without the help of my body using a sword, to stab or wound another through my ardent desire. Thus it is also possible for me to bring my opponent’s spirit into the image by my will, and then to bend or paralyse it as I please. You should know that the effect of the mill is a great point in medicine. For if a man grudges another everything good and hates him, it is possible that, if he curses him, the curse may come about." Now the effect of the will quite certainly is a great point in medicine. What its full extent or limits are, we still don’t know. Paracelsus was simply stating what twentieth-century research has demonstrated to be the case 160 161 with sophisticated statistical analysis. Patients who believe they are being treated with medicine - even if it is only sugar - recover faster than do members of a control group taking sugar alone. This is the famous ‘placebo effect’. Given the known validity of the placebo effect, it seems not impos-sible that it might exist in negative form. That is, that just as a man can be cured by the belief that he is receiving medicine, even when he is not receiving medicine, so a man might sicken from the belief that he is being poisoned, even when he is not being poisoned. And further, he might sicken if he believes the harm being done to him comes not from material poison but from an immaterial, magical attack. That is; a curse might well function to,cause someone to sicken or perhaps die. l’he mechanism by which the curse worked would be quite opaque to a mechanist, just as the mechanism involved in the placebo effect is still opaque even to biochemists. For all that, the placebo effect is real and so, I am suggesting, are magical techniques when used by those versed in the art. They certainly worked amongst Australian aborigines. Besides the corpus that is required to focus the will and the necessary belief that the magic will be effective, however, Schopenhauer identified in the occult literature a further element necessary for the will to act magically. By means of this element, rational thought is overcome and the mind is able to act according to its instincts. This element is the ‘violent and immoderate excitement of the soul itself’. Thus Schopenhauer quotes from the first book of De occulta Philosophia by Agrippa v. Nettesheim that ‘All that is dictated by the spirit of one who feels intense hatred has the effect of damaging and destroying; and it is much the same with everything that the spirit does and dictates by means of written characters, figures, words (conversations), gestures, and the like, all this supports the desire of the soul and obtains certain extraordinary powers. . . .’ He also quotes Vanini saying that ‘a vivid imagination, obeyed by blood and spirit, can really affect a thing that is conceived in the mind not only inwardly but also outwardly’." Schopenhauer’s concluding summary on his survey of the Hermetic writings runs: The agreement of all these authors not only with one another but with the convictions to which animal magnetism has led in recent times, and finally too with what might be inferred in this respect from my speculative teaching, is truly a phenomenon to be carefully considered. This much is certain, that an anticipation of my metaphysics underlies all attempts at magic that have ever been made, whether successful or unsuccessful: in them the consciousness was expressed that the law of causality is merely the bond of appearances, but the essence-in-itself of things remains independent of it, and that if, from this 162 essence and hence from within, an immediate effect on nature were possible, that effect could be brought about only through the will itself. But if we wished to set up magic as practical metaphysics in accordance with Bacon’s classification, then it is certain that the theoretical metaphysics correctly related to it could be no other than my resolution of the world into will and representation. What is to be concluded from Schopenhauer’s reading of the Hermetic tradition? Perhaps we should simply shake our heads with the sceptics at this monument to centuries of human gullibility. On the other hand, perhaps it is a clue to something of extraordinary significance. We know that Hitler believer in the efficacy of magic. we know that he convinced some people that he possessed premonitory powers and he quite definitely had the power to fascinate. According to Hermann Rauschning, he believed that his own advance was attributable to magical insights. Rauschning was a confidant of sorts, before Hitler and he fell out, and his record of conversations with Hitler in the thirties is particularly engrossing for what it reveals about Hitler’s thought processes. He recounts one particular talk: WE had come to a turning-point in world history - that was his constant theme. We uninstructed persons, it was clear, had no conception of the scale of the revolution that was to take place in all life. At these times Hitler spoke as a seer, as one of the initiated. His inspired pronouncements were based on a biological mysticism - or shall we call it a mystical biology? The pursuit of the ‘random path of the intelligence’, we learned, was the real defection of man from his divine mission. To have ‘magic insight’ was apparently Hitler’s idea of the goal of human progress. He himself felt that he already had the rudiments of this gift. He attributed to it his successes and his future eminence. . . . He saw his own remarkable career as a confirmation of hidden powers. He saw himself as chosen for superhuman tasks, as the prophet of the rebirth of man in a new form. Humanity, he proclaimed, was in the throes of a vast metamorphosis. A process of change that had lasted literally for thousands of years was approaching its completion. Man’s solar period was coming to its end. The coming age was revealing itself in the first great human figures of a new type. Just as, according to the imperishable prophecies of the old Nordic peoples, the world has continually to renew itself, the old order perishing with its gods, just as the Nordic peoples took the sun’s passing of the solstices as a figure of the rhythm of life, which proceeds not in a straight line of eternal progress but in a spiral, so must man now, apparently, turn back in order to attain a higher stage. . . . He is capable of entertaining the most incompatible ideas in association with one another. One thing is certain-Hitler has the spirit of the prophet. He is not content to be a mere politician. 163 In our talks he put these ideas before me in a rather more materialistic form. ‘Creation is not yet at an end,’ he said. ‘At all events, not so far as the creature Man is concerned. Biologically regarded, man has clearly arrived at a turning-point. A new variety of man is beginning to separate out. A mutation, precisely in the scientific sense. The existing type of man is passing, in consequence, inescapably into the biological stage of atrophy. The old type of man will have but a stunted existence. All creative energy will be concentrated in the new one. The two types will rapidly diverge from one another. One will sink to a sub-human race and the other rise far above the man of to-day. I might call the two varieties the god-man and the mass-animal. That, I commented, was very reminiscent of Nietzsche and his superman. But I had always tahen all this as metaphorical. ‘Yes,’ Hitler continued, ‘man has to be passed and surpassed. Nietzsche did, it is true, realise something of this, in his way. He went so far as to recognize the superman as a new biological variety. But he was not too sure of it. Man is becoming God - that is the simple fact. Man is God in the making. Man has eternally to strain at his limitations. The moment he relaxes and contents himself with them, he decays and falls below the human level. He becomes a quasi-beast. Gods and beasts, that is what our world is made of. ‘And how simple, how elementary it all becomes! It is constantly the same decision that has to be made, whether I am faced with new political decisions to be made or with problems of the reordering of our social system..All those who cut themselves off from our movement, who cling to the old order, die away and are doomed. But those who listen to the immemorial message of man, who devote themselves to our eternal movement, are called to a new humanity. Do you now appreciate the depth of our National Socialist movement? Can there be anything greater and more all-comprehending? Those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it. It is more even than a religion: it is the will to create mankind anew. . ‘The new man is among us! He is here!’ exclaimed Hitler triumphantly. ‘Now are you satisfied? I will tell you a secret. I have seen the vision of the new man - fearless and formidable. I shrank from him!‘*" If Rauschning’s report is trustworthy, then Hitler appears to have had as his goal the conscious breeding of magically sensitive individuals -mediums - presumably either prone to suffer the same vision from which he shrank, or else themselves the object of this fearful vision taken flesh. That this was the case is supported by some writings of Georg Lanz von Liebenfels, the Austrian from whose anti-Semitic journal Ostura Hitler purloined many of his ideas. Von Liebenfels saw the production of a race in tune with magic as the very raison d'être of the racial breeding programme. It is now generally accepted that the ‘anti-Semitic pamphlets’ that Hitler read in Vienna, and which Mein Kamp tells us informed him on 164 the Jewish question, were from this very journal. Werner Maser’s summary of the ideas in Ostaru is very interesting when read in tandem with the extracts from Rauschning’s book that we have just considered: No. 29 (autumn 1908), after calling attention to statements of policy in previous issues, goes on to define the publication’s task as follows: ‘The Ostara is the first and only periodical devoted to investigating and cultivating heroic racial characteristics and the law of man in such a way that, by actually applying the discoveries of ethnology, we may through systematic eugenics preserve the heroic and noble race from destruction by socialist and feminist revolutionaries.’ This extract speaks for itself. III 1905 Lanz von Liebenfels founded the ‘Order of the New Temple’ whose membership was restricted to fair-haired, blue-eyed men, all of whom were pledged to marry fair-haired, blue-eyed women. In 1908 Liebenfels, an uncommonly prolific journalist, produced his nlagnurtr opus, which was reprinted in the Ostara between 1928 and 1930, in the form of a pamphlet entitled Theozoology or the Science of Sodom’s Apelings and the Divine Electron. An Introduction to the Earliest and Most Recent World Vieul and a Vindication of Royalty and the Nobiliry. ‘Sodom’s apelings’ were the dark-skinned, ‘inferior races’ whom Liebenfels described as the ‘bungled handiwork’ of demons in contrast to the blue-eyed, fair-haired ‘Aryo-heroes’, the masterpiece of the gods. These latter beings were equipped with electric bodily organs and built in electric transmitting and power stations. They were the archetypes of the human species and the human race. By means of ‘purifying eugenics’ he proposed to awaken the gods who, he alleged, continued to slumber in the ‘fleshy coffins of men’s bodies’. At the same time he proposed to help the new human race, about to emerge out of the Aryo-heroic race, to regain their former divine ‘electro-magnetic-radiological’ organs and, thus equipped, to become ‘all-knowing, all-wise and all-powerful’ as in the primeval era of the gods.*’ This was the goal of the Nazi breeding programmes that Hitler set in train. The key to understanding it all is magic - a theurgy to awaken the gods by selective breeding. How was this to be brought about? In the work of a philosopher from whom Hitler acknowledged he had learnt a lot, and from whom he could quote by the page, he would have found a detailed survey of the Hermetic literature including instructions on the means by which magical effects could be brought about. These instructions fundamentally presuppose the no-ownership theory of the mind, a uniting of the individual will with something supra-personal that can identically unite with other personal wills. Now Hitler’s cultured, Schopenhauer-reading school-fellow of Ludwig Wittgenstein - adhered to a generalized no-ownership theory as far back as we have recorded information and stated that his very first philosophy was ‘a Schopenhaurean Idealism’. This school-fellow, as we have deduced, was the most likely target of the young Hitler’s very first recorded anti-Semitic epithet, ‘Sau&d!’ Hitler hated this school=fellow for his perceived Jewishness. And hatred was the key. Magical effects can be brought about, quotes Schopenhauer from the Hermetica, by ‘violent and immoderate excitation of the emotions’. Hitler excited his emotions - presumably to the immod-crate dcgree required-by continual cultivation ofJcw-hatred. Kauschning tells us that ‘The extent to which he was obsessed by his hatred of the Jews was shown by the way he could scarcely speak without bringing in sooner or later at least one scathing reference to them.‘2x Here is a report of a conversation with Hitler from the early twenties, made by Josef Hell, the editor of the Munich weekly magazine Der Gerade Weg: While up until now Hitler had spoken comparatively calmly and moderately, his nature now changed completely. He no longer looked at me, rather above and beyond me into the distance and made his following statements with rising vocal effort, so that he fell into a kind of paroxysm and finally screamed at me as if I were an entire nationalist gathering: ‘When I really am in power, then the annihilation of the Jews will be my first and most important task. As soon as I have the power to do it I shall, for example, have erected in the Marienplatz in Munich gallows and more gallows, as many as can be fitted in without stopping the traffic. Then the Jews will be hanged, one after another, and they will stay hanging, until they stink. They will hang as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been taken down, the next ones will be strung up, and this will continue until the last Jew in Munich is destroyed. The same thing will happen in the other cities until Germany is cleansed of the last Jews."’ This certainly must count as ‘immoderate’. And in hating Jews, he was hating a people whose religion forbade the practice of magic and which implicitly rejected the no-ownership theory of the Will as a great impiety. I am suggesting that the secret of Hitler’s success was a profound knowledge of magical causes occasioned by his reading of Schopenhauer’s account of the European Hermetic literature; and the intellectual attraction of Schopenhauer was the no-ownership theory which he had already acquired from the young Wittgenstein. His anti-Semitism was directed at the race of the apostate Jew who introduced him to the no-ownership theory and it was the anti-Semitism-the hate-that made possible magical means of action against that race. He used it to win power over Germans through the incantations of his voice. Anti-Semitism was not incidental to Hitler’s rise to power. It was the very essence of it - that is, there was an internal connection between Hitler’s Jew-hatred and his success There is one final connection between Hitler’s anti-Semitism, the occult and the Wittgensteins in particular to which I draw to the reader’s attention. Here is Rauschning’s account of Hitler’s final words to him on ‘the Jew’: ‘But we have been speaking,’ said Hitler, ‘of the Jew only as [he ruler of the economic world empire. We have been speaking of him as our political opponent. Where dots he stand in the deeper struggle for the new world order? I confessed that I had no notion. There cannot he two chosen people. We are God’s people. Does not that fully answer the question? ‘That is to be understood symbolically?’ Again he banged the table. ‘Symbolically? No! It’s the sheer simple undiluted truth. Two worlds face one another - the men of God and the men of Satan! The Jew is the anti-man, the creature of another god. He must have come from another root of the human race. 1 set the Aryan and the Jew over against each other; and if I call one of them a human being I must call the other something else. The two are as widely separated as man and beast. Not that I would call the Jew a beast. He is much further from the beasts than we Aryans. He is a creature outside nature and alien to nature.’ Hitler seemed to have more to say. But words failed him amid the onrush of his surging thoughts. His fact was distorted and working. He snapped his fingers in his excitement. ‘It’s an endless subject,’ he spluttered."" To anyone who has wasted his or her time becoming familiar with the occult literature, talk of ‘another root of the human race’ strikes a very familiar chord. The doctrine of ‘Root Races’ is associated with the Theosophical Society and its founder, the nineteenth-century occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine, which appeared in 1888, sketched out an occult theory of the evolution of Man. Aryans formed ‘the Fifth Root Race’. Jews, on the other hand, were an abnormal and unnatural link between the Fourth and Fifth Root Races. The ‘Fourth Root Race’ had lived in Atlantis and been ruled by black magicians. Writers interested in establishing that Hitler knew Blavatsky’s race doctrines have focused upon his days in Vienna or in Munich and upon the apostate German Theosophist Rudolf Steiner.3’ But there is a possible link of very much greater significance for our purposes, because it goes back considerably earlier and might even have been communicated to Hitler while at the Realschule. Consider this striking passage from Peter Washington’s book Madame 166 167 Blavatsky’s Baboon concerning the alleged sexual life of Madame Blavatsky: She may or may not have had lovers, including the German baron Meyendorf, the Polish Prince Wittgenstein and a Hungarian opera singer, Agardi Metrovitch. All these names were linked to hers, though she sometimes denied the liaisons and sometimes hinted that they were true.32 If ‘the Polish Prince Wittgenstein’ were indeed Madame Blavatsky’s lover, or close family acquaintance, then it would be no surprise to find that Madame Blavatsky’s ideas (which took firm root in London, New York, Sydney and India) were also particularly well known in the Wittgenstein family. It seems clear, from Madame Blavatsky’s own words, that Prince Wittgenstein was indeed a close acquaintance. Thus Marion Meade, in her now standard Blavatsky biography, writes of the attack on Madame Blavatsky in the New York Sun of 20 July 1890: Not only did the Sun name names, it accused her of having been a member of the Paris demimonde during 1857-1858, and of having had ‘a liaison with the Prince Emile de Wittgenstein. . . .’ Helena immediately instructed Judge to file suit for libel against the Sun. . . . Ignoring all of the charges, she dismissed the demimonde accusation as ‘so ridiculous as to rouse laughter’ and concentrated on the aspersion against Prince Wittgenstein ‘now dead . an old friend of my family whom I saw for the last time when I was 18 years old . . He was a cousin of the late Empress of Russia and little thought that upon his grave would be thrown the filth of a modern New York newspaper. The insult to him and to me I am bound by all the dictates of my duty to reply."3 Meade’s biography demonstrates that Madame Blavatsky was undoubtedly a liar about many things, but on this crucial matter about a long-standing family link to the Wittgensteins, she appears to have been telling the truth. Marion Meade believes that Wittgenstein had probably not been her lover, but there was a link, and it involved not just a family friendship, but rather a sharing of the very same occult interests as Madame Blavatsky. The historian of the Theosophical Society writes that in 1873 the ‘British National Association of Spiritualists’ was formed, amongst whose Honorary or Corresponding members was Prince Emile de Sayn-Wittgenstein.3’ Prince Wittgenstein wrote a letter to The Spiritualist in 1878, describing how he was shielded from danger during the war with Turkey by one of the ‘leading Brethren of the Society’, whom Madame Blavatsky explained in The Theosophict of March 1883 was the Master 168 Morya, one of the gurus of the Theosophical Society, to whom she alone appears to have had communicatory access.3s Josephine Ransom, the Theosophical Society historian, names Prince Wittgenstein as a Fellow of the Theosophical Society, and continues: Another student of Spiritualism in Russia, and an old friend of H.P.B.‘s family, was Prince Emile de Sayn Wittgenstein (F.T.S.), cousin of the Empress and aide-de-camp to the Emperor, whose confidence he enjoyed. He assisted the I~mperor to acquire a most complete library of Spiritualist books.‘" So Madame Blavatsky - the font of a doctrine according to which Jews were, as Hitler said, ‘from another root of the human race’ - had connections to the Wittgenstein family and had been born near the Wittgenstein estate in the Ukraine.37 Emile Wittgenstein was the brother of the man whom Franz Liszt cuckolded; the brother-in-law of Princess Carolyne Wittgenstein whom Cosima Wagner hated for her Jewishness. Madame Blavatsky would therefore have known something of the events concerning the great and newsworthy Wittgenstein elopement3* Hitler’s reference to the Jew as ‘from another root of the human race’ is thus particularly striking in the context of our own investigation. It is clearly possible that Madame Blavatsky’s pernicious influence was working in the mind of Hitler in 1904, nearly a decade earlier than anyone has dreamed possible. I am not claiming here that there definitely was a Blavatsky connection (via Ludwig through Blavatsky’s Prince Emile Wittgenstein), but the mere fact that this suggestion cannot now be just dismissed out of hand must open up yet a further new road for research into the Holocaust. Madame Blavatsky gives a potted history of the Jews. They are a tribe descended from the Chandalas of India, the outcasts, many of them ex-Brahmins, who sought refuge in Chaldaea, in Scinde, and Aria (Iran), and were truly born from their father A-Bram (No-Brahman) some 8,000 years B.C."’ Her etymology of ‘Abraham’, while linguistically simply silly, fits strangely well with the results of our investigation into the common mind of Aryan mysticism - that is, Brahman - and its rejection by Judaism. We have considered Collingwood, Schopenhauer, Madame Blavatsky and Hitler. But what were Wittgenstein’s views on magic? Many students of Wittgenstein still associate him with the Vienna scientific positivists. They take him to have been an opponent of magical modes of thinking. It is now well known, from his Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, that quite to the contrary, he defended an account of magic and thought it to reflect 169 something very deep in human beings connected with the nature of representation. And exactly as did Hitler, he also dismissed attempts to explain the practice in terms of anything other than itself. Talking of the killing of the priest-king at Nemi - the case which concerned Frazer - he wrote ‘Even the idea of trying to explain the practice-say the killing of the priest-king - seems to me wrong-headed.’ Wittgenstein’s thoughts on the nature of magic, however, went considerably beyond this. What is not appreciated by readers of Wittgenstein is that he saw his own activity as essentially a magical practice. We read, for example (the italics are in the original): I now believe that it would be right to begin my book with remarks about metaphysics as a kind of magic. But in doing this I must not make a case for magic nor may I make fun of it. The depth of magic should be preserved. Indeed, here the elimination of magic has itself the character of magic. For, back then, when I began talking about the ‘world’ (and not about this tree or table), what else did I want but to keep something higher spellbound in my words? We can deduce further from these remarks that Wittgenstein recognized some identity between the ideas behind magic and those that inspired the philosophy he presented in the Tructatus. In exorcizing the grip of meta-physics upon the mind of the aspirant philosopher, he was engaging in just that: an exorcism, leaving behind only silent, inexpressible insight from the realm of the Mystical - the unified whole seen sub specie aeternitatis which is what is left when the everyday mind goes. His own words - the staccato aphorisms of the Tructatus - were the invocation of ‘something higher’, the attempt, as he described it, to keep it spellbound by logical means. The Tractatus was the spell. Modern interpretations of Wittgenstein’s work treat him simply as a logician with a mystical bent. It is clearly time to see him rather differently. The ultimate goal of his philosophy was Mystical illumination; to be obtained by transformation of the soul of the aspirant into the Universal Soul. In the Notebooks, he referred to his metaphysical ‘I’ as the ‘Godhead’." And we have seen his own words describing how the role of the Tractatus was nothing less than to be the spell, understanding of which would bind this Godhead; and bring it forth in the mind of the enlightened philosopher. 170