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UNHOLY ALLIANCE: A HISTORY OF NAZI INVOLVEMENT WITH THE OCCULT |
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4. The Order of the Temple of the East: Sex, Spies, and Secret Societies
The Silly Season The British sometimes call periods of chaos in which the unpredictable always seems to happen the "silly season." Certainly, the years between the two world wars constituted a Silly Season for Europe. In 1920, Aleister Crowley started his ill-fated occult commune in Cefalu, Sicily, at the same time that D.H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love was published. In October, 1922, as Hitler "marched" on Coburg, Mussolini and his black-shirted Fascists marched on Rome. (One of their first official acts will be to ban occult orders and secret societies.) On December 16, 1922, the partners in archaeology Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon officially opened King Tut's tomb, thus instigating a worldwide fad of everything Egyptian and simultaneously giving birth to the legend of the Mummy's Curse. That same year, the Necronomicon made its sinister debut in the pages of Weird Tales magazine. A year later -- inspired by Mussolini's success in Italy -- Hitler will attempt his own putsch in Munich, and fail. By the end of 1923, Hitler was stewing in Landsberg Prison, writing Mein Kampf with the help of his good friends Rudolf Hess and Fr. Bernhard Stempfle, and enjoying a little geopolitical input from Professor Karl Haushofer. The Entourage We will discuss Father Stempfle in more detail in Chapter Five, and Rudolf Hess's flight to England (and its occult ramifications) will be analyzed fully in Chapter Nine. But a few words about both Hess and Haushofer and their relationship to the Fuhrer will do well here. Rudolf Hess was an early confidant and friend of Hitler, one of his few coconspirators arrested after the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Hess acted as Hitler's secretary while they both served prison terms. It was Hess who transcribed Hitler's dreary memoir Mein Kampf From all accounts, Hess was something of a puppy dog around men like Hitler and Haushofer: blindly loyal, eager for any scrap of attention or affection, and fanatically devoted to these personalities (to a greater degree than to the ideas they represented). But he adopted their ideologies as his own, and ran with them as far as he could. Hess was the type of man that Hitler seemed to enjoy most, for Hess would never disagree with him; rather, he lived for every word that fell from the Fuhrer's mouth. Once the Nazis gained power in Germany -- nine years after the Putsch -- Hess became Hitler's right-hand man, ahead of all other Nazis and next in line in succession to the Fuhrer's throne. He was one of the signers of the infamous Nuremberg Laws, which deprived Jews of their German citizenship and which paved the way for the Holocaust. Naive, credulous, and always ready for a new faith to believe in -- as long as it didn't interfere with his love affair with the Fuhrer -- Hess was easily influenced by a wide variety of astrologers and occultists and read avidly anything having to do with Eastern mysteries and the power of the mind. He had been an intimate of the Thule Society along with Eckart and Rosenberg, and his wife was as mystically inclined as he was. But in 1933 Hess found himself in a position of great power in Germany; his easy access to Hitler made him very popular with the wheelers and dealers in the Party, men with their own (usually hidden) agendas. Among the latter could be counted Professor Karl Haushofer and his son, Albrecht. Hess had studied under Haushofer at the University of Munich and had brought the geopolitician to Hitler's attention while they were both serving time in Landsberg. Although there is still a great deal of controversy over just who influenced whom with regard to the Hess Affair, it is likely that the Haushofers had something to do with Hess's flight to England and that astrological advice (as well as what was essentially a conspiracy against the Fuhrer) also played an important role. Hess had been a keen student of Haushofer (1869-1946), the inventor of Lebensraum, at the University of Munich. Professor Haushofer, a general in the Kaiser's army who had spent considerable time in the Far East as military attache for the German government and who could speak and write Japanese fluently, was believed to have been initiated into some secret society or other in Asia. This story of Haushofer's occult initiation has appeared several times, most notably in Le matin des magiciens by Pauwels and Bergier, [2] and his surviving son Heinz has denied it vigorously. However, some evidence does exist that Haushofer had an abiding interest in astrology and even claimed a certain degree of clairvoyance. It is certain that Haushofer eventually came to wield considerable power in the Third Reich, through both his Deutsche Akademie and the Institut fur Geopolitik at the University of Munich -- a kind of think tank-cum-intelligence agency -- of which he was director. His early associations with influential Japanese businessmen and statesmen were crucial in forming the German-Japanese alliance of World War II. He was also the first high-ranking Nazi to form important relationships with South American governments in anticipation of military and political action against the United States, relationships that would eventually be exploited by war criminals -- and Nazi cultists -- fleeing the reach of the Nuremberg prosecutors. In Hess he found an adoring, fawning student and true believer (for whom he actually had rather little respect) and Hess wasted no time in bringing the professor to the attention of Hitler at Landsberg Prison, where the three of them discussed Haushofer's Lebensraum concept and other ideas concerning global politics. Haushofer deserves an entire book to himself and, indeed, the amount of available documentation on his life and work is considerable, so we shall not go into it here. It is enough for our purposes to say that, until he dropped out of favor, Haushofer was Hitler's most valuable political and military adviser, responsible for many foreign policy coups. His Deutsche Akademie had branches all over the world -- including the United States -- where information on local geography, economics, politics, military preparedness, food supplies, industrial capability, cultural affairs, media influence, etc. was collected and analyzed by teams of well-paid professional scholars, engineers, meteorologists, historians, psychologists, agricultural specialists, and advisers in virtually every aspect of human life. Blended with all of this otherwise scientific information gathering was a heavy dose of astrology, mysticism, and occultism which caused Haushofer, geopolitics, and the German Academy to be ridiculed in the world press ... even as many governments were trying to set up geopolitical institutes of their own. But it is the Lebensraum policy for which Haushofer is generally known in the short histories of the war that can be found in any library. Lebensraum -- literally "living room" -- is the doctrine that gave Hitler the "right" to seek to expand the Reich as far as possible into neighboring countries, seizing the land and deporting (or exterminating) the local residents and replacing them with Germans. It was a doctrine that was adopted enthusiastically by the Japanese, who were Haushofer's close friends, and which gave them the ideological basis for their invasion of China, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia. Lebensraum was the simple statement of policy which said that a sovereign nation, to ensure the survival of its people, had a right to annex the territory of other sovereign nations to feed and house itself. Japan was certainly a nation that could appreciate this idea, crowded as it is on a set of rather small islands that is poor in natural resources and which has to import nearly everything it needs to survive. The Lebensraum concept was crucial to Haushofer's general theory of "geopolitics" and was embraced by Hitler in those early days in Landsberg Prison. After all, if an esteemed professor at the University of Munich, and a former statesman and military theoretician for the Kaiser at that, said Germany would be justified in expanding its national boundaries at the expense of other nations, it was tantamount to a seal of approval from the intelligentsia for Hitler's wilder ambitions. If the patient reader remembers what was broached in Chapter One concerning the ideas of Michel Foucault, it may be perceived that Haushofer's concept of Lebensraum is a manifestation of the "sexuality" impulse as an implement of national policy. While wars of conquest were conducted in the old days for religious reasons, or for sheer glory, or to avenge an insult real or imagined, Haushofer put forward the idea of "living room" as a kind of natural law that transcended sovereign boundaries and national agendas: the necessary expansion of a human population into whatever space could be found to feed and house it. Lebensraum was not presented as a plan of mass murder or as a weapon of the will of an individual despot, but as the natural expression of the need of a people for "living room": i.e., for the survival of an entire nation or race. In that sense, Lebensraum was the twentieth-century "sexual" (to use Foucault's term) extension of Hitler's nineteenth-century "sanguine" Messiah-complex entailing human sacrifice. The twentieth century thus became the battleground of the "blood" versus "sex" ideologies, and when no means of accommodation could be found between the two impulses it was only natural that Haushofer -- whose Lebensraum theory was a twisted version of the sex impulse -- should later come to doubt Hitler and to actively plan to destroy him. [?] After the flight of Hess to England, Haushofer came under attack from the Fuhrer. Blamed for a baleful influence over Hess that contributed to Hitler losing his right-hand man and close companion from the old days -- his dear little Hesserl -- Haushofer and his eldest son and colleague, Albrecht, rapidly fell out of favor with the Reich. The Hess flight was seen as a debacle for Nazi Germany, causing all sorts of political problems for Hitler. He did not want Russia or Italy to think he was making a separate peace with England, and his secret plan for the Russian invasion (code-named Barbarossa) was known to Hess. If Barbarossa should be revealed to the English, all would be lost, for Hitler was double-dealing, but with the Soviet Union and not with England. Hitler quickly issued statements characterizing Hess as a sick individual with a history of mental problems; a strategy that was not entirely successful, for the man in the street wondered why Hess had remained the second most powerful man in Germany for so long if he was insane? Hitler also ordered the suppression of all fortune-telling practices and establishments, including astrology, palm-and tea-reading, seances, and the like on the assumption that occultists had brainwashed Hess into committing this treasonous act. Everyone knew that Hess took astrology and the occult arts very seriously, so this seemed to be a logical step to take. This "occult conspiracy" angle would be thoughtfully examined by elements of British Intelligence, which would consider using Aleister Crowley as a tool in an occult counteroffensive. (See Chapter Nine.) Many historians have pointed to this general ban on occultism as evidence that Hitler did not believe in the black arts. They also cite references against the volkisch secret societies in a few of his speeches as further proof that the Fuhrer was -- even if somewhat insane -- not as crazy as the stargazers or demon-summoners. However, as anyone who has had anything at all to do with occult societies knows very well, the internecine warfare that takes place among occultists at every level of sophistication is furious, spiteful, and altogether nasty. The stories about Crowley's own "magical war" with his mentor, MacGregor Mathers, are well known, as are many of the fights that took place between various French lodges of the nineteenth century (which can be consulted in Richard Cavendish's thoroughly enjoyable The Black Arts). [3] Occultists in general have no difficulty distancing themselves -- with appropriate invective and astral curses -- from other occultists with whom they disagree on philosophical grounds; and virtually every "serious occultist" that the author has ever encountered has had nothing but disdain for tea-leaf readers, palmists, and cut-rate astrologers. Thus, in light of the foregoing, the author finds no contradiction at all in Hitler's fascination with occultism on the one hand and his order to ban "popular" occult practices on the other. While Professor Karl Haushofer was not arrested or otherwise physically abused, his son Albrecht Haushofer was arrested and taken to Gestapo Headquarters at 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse, an address with a reputation as dire and forbidding to the Germans as Dzerzhinsky Square and the Lubyanka are to the Russians. There he was interrogated for days about his relationship to Hess and about how much advance knowledge he had concerning the flight. Albrecht survived this interrogation more or less intact, and was released. What Hitler and the Gestapo did not discover, however, was that Albrecht and his father had developed connections to the German Resistance movement against Hitler. This would all be tragically revealed a few years later when, after the failed July 1944 assassination plot against Hitler in which Albrecht was a coconspirator, Professor Haushofer himself was sent to Dachau, the concentration camp conveniently close (nine miles) to Munich where the Ahnenerbe-SS had some unusual interests. Son Albrecht was sent to prison, and later executed at the last minute on the streets of Berlin as the city was falling to the Red Army. Upon the collapse of the Reich, Karl Haushofer was questioned by Allied investigators working for the Nuremberg Tribunal eager to learn of his relationship with Hess, a relationship to which Haushofer -- mourning the execution of his eldest son -- freely confessed. Before he could testify in open court against his old student and comrade, however, he committed suicide by taking arsenic. The rest of Hitler's entourage included, of course, the pagan ideologue Alfred Rosenberg (whom Hitler made head of the Nazi Party pro tem during his residence in Landsberg). Rosenberg -- a native Balt with an abiding hatred of Soviets, Jews, and Freemasons -- had appeared one day at Dietrich Eckart's apartment in Munich and offered him his services as a "fighter against Judah." The two soon became inseparable and it is believed that it was Rosenberg who introduced Eckart to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Rosenberg agitated for the creation of a state religion based on Odinic paganism and Teutonic magic, and could be relied upon to appear at the meetings of every major Nordic, Teutonic, and Aryan society in Germany both before and after the Nazis' seizure of power. It was Rosenberg who ordered that Freemason temples in the Occupied Territories be looted by Einsatz commandos and their contents shipped back to him in Berlin, an order cheerfully carried out by Franz Six and Otto Ohlendorf, both men known for their abiding interest in cult activity. Rosenberg's close associate and fellow pagan, Richard Walther Darre -- a native of Argentina -- was made Agriculture Minister of the Third Reich but Darre's interest was less in animal husbandry and crop rotation than it was in the mystical doctrines of the runes and the Blood and Soil. We have covered runic mysticism already; the Blood and Soil doctrine is too tedious to examine thoroughly here but the reader can immediately grasp its essentials if it is understood that, if it had been left up to Darre, pure-blooded German peasants would have reverted to fornicating in the fields on Walpurgisnacht to ensure fertility of the crops. The team of Rosenberg and Darre picked up in Nazi Germany where the team of Rosenberg and Eckart left off in Weimar. Rosenberg, with his impeccable credentials dating back to the early days of the formation of the Nazi Party and its baptism of blood in the Beer Hall Putsch, was a high-profile Reichsleiter with a blatantly pagan and anti- Christian philosophy, a philosophy which received wide coverage in the German press. Darre was there to support this platform and, if possible, to do him one better on occasion. Together, they ran around the nation drumming up support for an official state religion based on the worship of the Old Gods, a religion that included purifying the Aryan race of elements that were in the process of polluting it and diluting the strength of its Blood. To these True Believers, sex was at once fascinating and repellent; the danger of the Jews to the Aryan man and woman was their sensuality, their ability to seduce the purebloods away from their duty to procreate only blue-eyed Teutons. The Jew was the Serpent in the pagan Garden of Eden. One pagan and occultist who was not bothered with sexuality, however, and who made it a cornerstone of his philosophy was the English magician and tabloid-crowned "Wickedest Man in the World" (this, in the age of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin!): Aleister Crowley. Crowley -- whose life has been well and thoroughly discussed by a wide variety of authors, including himself -- provides us some entree into the German occult scene of the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, at one point Crowley was actually roughed up by a roving Nazi SA gang in what is arguably the single documented instance of a good deed in the entire history of the Nazi Party: the Storm Troopers stopped Crowley from beating his girlfriend! Crowley will take us to such important German sex cultists as Theodor Reuss, Karl Germer, Eugene Grosche, Heinrich Tranker, and Marthe Kuntzel, not to forget the British Army officer Maj. Gen. C.F. Fuller, who was once a guest of Hitler himself at the latter's Berchtesgaden retreat to celebrate the Fuhrer's fiftieth birthday on April 20, 1939; Fuller -- an anti-Semite and contributor to Oswald Moseley's Fascist Quarterly, a devoted Thelemite (that is to say, follower of Crowley's own religion) and an intimate of Crowley -- was said to be the "only Englishman that Hitler actually liked." [4] Crowley will take us on a tour of Leipzig, Munich, and the province of Thuringia, where a secret convocation of German occultists was held in 1925 to determine the future leadership of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the German sex-magic occult lodge that would eventually be suppressed by the Nazis, its members thrown into the camps. So, in order to understand what the "subversive" German sex cults were doing, and why, we must start with Aleister Crowley and what he was up to in Germany in 1912. The Great Beast Crowley was born on October 12, 1875, in England, not far from the town of Stratford-on-Avon where Shakespeare was born and only a few weeks before Baron Sebottendorff's own birth near Dresden that November. Raised in an oppressively fundamentalist Christian environment, he came early on to regard himself as the Beast of the Apocalypse, the one branded with a 666 and with the Whore of Babylon for aid and comfort. He became an initiate of the Golden Dawn -- that fabulously complex jewel of European occultism -- on November 18, 1898. The Golden Dawn had been created ten years earlier by the team of Mathers, Westcott, and Woodman. As we have seen, the official story had it that the Golden Dawn was a branch of an order that existed in Germany, and that a charter from the parent lodge had been granted to the Englishmen from a Fraulein Anna Sprengel of Stuttgart. At the time that Crowley was initiated into the Golden Dawn, that would have been accepted as truth and Crowley would probably have believed that he was indeed being initiated into what was the British section of a German secret society. Since then, the German origins of the Golden Dawn have been more or less demonstrated to be a hoax. It is quite likely that the entire ritual and initiatory structure of the Dawn was nothing less than the brilliant invention of Mathers himself, an invention for which, sadly, he could never claim credit since a major element in the attraction of occult societies rests on their having a long and distinguished -- if covert and underground -- pedigree. Interestingly enough, the degree structure of the Golden Dawn was based on the famous Tree of Life symbol: a complex diagram of ten spheres connected by a total of twenty-two paths (each path representing a letter of the Hebrew alphabet) that can be consulted in any one of a variety of books on qabalism and Western occultism. This same Tree of Life diagram was used by the old Wotanist Guido von List to represent the hierarchical grace structure in his own ideal Ario-Germanic society and, like the Golden Dawn, he reserved the top three degrees as being inaccessible to the average human being. (Crowley, of course, would eventually assume all three after leaving the Golden Dawn and forming his own organization, the A...A....) It is entirely possible that List -- writing about these ideas in 1911 -- had adopted this degree system from the Golden Dawn, which had put it to use as early as 1888 based on "Anna Sprengel's" instructions. If so, the only way in which List could have discovered this degree system was either through initiation into the Golden Dawn or from another initiate who (breaking his oath of secrecy) described it to him. That the unregenerate anti-Semite and godfather of the Nazi Party, Guido von List, might have been a Golden Dawn initiate is an amusing if unsettling proposition but, thankfully, there is no evidence for this. However, there was much communication taking place at this time between England and Germany involving such occult celebrities as Golden Dawn initiate Dr. R.W. Felkin (who was actually looking for Fraulein Sprengel in Germany), Dr. Hubbe-Schleiden (whom we met in Chapter One as the first president of the German branch of the Theosophical Society) and Dr. Rudolf Steiner (who was involved at this time with Franz Hartmann's Masonic lodges as well as with the OTO). Felkin, intent on forging links with legitimate Rosicrucian lodges and acting under mediumistic supervision of a discarnate Arab entity by the name of Ara Ben Shemesh, was desperately seeking Sprengel and hoped that either Hubbe-Schleiden or Rudolf Steiner could assist in that regard. Needless to say, the search came to naught, but the fact of these three occultists communicating and exchanging information on cult activities is provocative. [5]
Historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke opines that List got the idea of a
Tree of Life initiatory system from the inescapable Dr. Hartmann, who
possibly heard of it from the energetic Dr. Westcott. If so, we have the
leaders of the Armanenschaft (List's name for his own secret society),
the Golden Dawn, and the OTO exchanging details on their secret
initiations. That List would have based his hierarchy on the patently
Jewish Tree of Life and borrowed the concept from the Golden Dawn
-- by way
of the OTO -- would seem merely ironic to a layperson but positively
frightening to an occultist, for what it implies about the relationship
between the anti-Semitic List organizations and the ostensibly
apolitical Golden Dawn and OTO lodges. In any event, List amended the qabalistic correspondences to suit himself and essentially
developed his own -- Aryan -- version of the Golden Dawn initiatory
system. [6]
Another element of the Golden Dawn which is relevant to our case is that
the structure of many of its rituals, the peculiar language in which its
invocations are made, and the odd designs of many of the magic seals and
insignia are all based on a system of occult correspondences
known as Enochian, and codified within the writings of Elizabethan
mathematician, philosopher, and spy, Dr. John Dee.
Crowley would become so conversant with the "Enochian" language that he would translate medieval spirit conjurations into that tongue for use by his own cult members. Having its own alphabet and its own rules of grammar, its very existence is a technical impossibility: an artificially created language developed by one (or at most two) men in the sixteenth century, John Dee and his assistant Edward Kelley. According to their story, it was given to them by an angel who communicated the language, the alphabet, and all the magic squares, invocations, etc. by means of a laborious process that took months of "scrying" in the equivalent of a crystal ball. The massive amount of manuscript that resulted from these bizarre efforts has been largely ignored by historians of the Elizabethan period, or cited as evidence of Dee's emotional instability. In fact, the existence of these writings was used for many years to discredit Dee's genius altogether. (This is a pattern of thought that exists to this day: occult practices are evidence of either insanity, emotional instability, or simple credulousness.) However, recent research into the Elizabethan period and particularly concerning Dee's relationship to Sir Francis Walsingham (1530?-1590), Queen Elizabeth's secretary of state, suggests that Dee was on a secret mission for the British government at the time of the angelic revelations (which took place in Prague). Further, as the pseudonymous historian Richard Deacon has pointed out, [7] the Angelic language itself may have been devised as a particularly effective code -- based on the work of famed German cryptographer Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516) -- for communication between Dee in Prague and Walsingham in England. In other words, the entire basis of the famous occult order known as the Golden Dawn may well have had its origins in espionage work, from the coded language of Elizabethan spy and mystic John Dee to the "Cypher manuscript" of a nonexistent [???] German lodge. Some years later, following his various and several initiations into the Golden Dawn, Crowley found himself in position to help a lodge brother, Gerald Kelly. Kelly, a distinguished member and president of the Royal Academy, had a sister by the name of Rose, who was engaged to someone she did not wish to marry. Crowley rushed to the aid of Rose Kelly, and proposed that -- in order to thwart the fiance -- she elope with Crowley himself. It was to be purely a marriage of convenience, of course, whose only purpose was to ensure that she would not have to marry the unfortunate gentleman who was pursuing her. She agreed. They eloped. Fell madly in love. Consummated the union. And went on a honeymoon. This, much to the consternation of her brother Gerald. The honeymoon took the blissful couple to Cairo in 1904, where the event was to take place that would change Crowley's life -- and the lives of thousands of his followers down the years -- forever, for Rose, who had never before evinced any signs of mediumistic powers, suddenly began to "channel" an alien entity who demanded to speak directly to Crowley. To be exact, she began receiving impressions that the Gods wanted to speak with Crowley on an urgent matter and, for verification, she led Crowley to an exhibit at the Cairo Museum which bore the fateful number, 666. Rose, not aware of her husband's personal identification with that number and the Great Beast it represents, was obviously in contact with divine forces, and Crowley took her impressions seriously. For three days in April, 1904, Aleister Crowley communed with a spirit called Aiwaz, an entity that Crowley had claimed at times to have been the Devil -- Shaitan -- itself. Aiwaz communicated a scripture to Crowley in the voice of three Egyptian gods -- Nuit, Hadit, and Ra-Hoor-Khuit -- that became known as The Book of the Law: the gospel of the New Age, the Aeon of Horus. Crowley himself has written that the book initially repelled him; [8] that he put it away and actually lost track of the manuscript for five years until one day he found it in an attic and reread it for the first time since 1904. At that point, he suddenly realized he was holding the key scripture of the next Aeon (a magickal age of two thousand years). While Hitler would eventually proclaim a Thousand Year Reich, Crowley was doing him a thousand years better. The Book of the Law attacks most modern religions, from Judaism to Christianity to Islam to Buddhism, and thus would have been an interesting document to the inner circle of the Reich. It also proclaims -- in a book written in 1904 -- "I am the Warrior Lord of the Forties," [9] an eerily prescient prediction of the greatest military conflagration ever to hit the planet. Crowley's occult career did not end with The Book of the Law. In due course he penned many hundreds of tracts, pamphlets, articles, and books, all on the theme of "Magick": spelled with a "k" to differentiate it from all other types. When it came to Magick, Crowley was a genius. His command of mythology, religion, philosophy, the arts, and foreign languages was (and remains) legendary. He was the English version of a Guido von List with at least one important distinction: Crowley had a sense of humor, and it is through this sense of humor that the full range of his intellectual brilliance shines. Whatever one thinks of Crowley as a human being or of Thelema -- the cult he founded on the basis of The Book of the Law -- one thing is certain: Crowley was an inspired and engaging author on the whole field of occultism. Sex Magick
Crowley accepted initiations into a variety of occult lodges and
societies
in his time, and eventually picked up an initiation into something
called the Ordo Templi Orientis, or the Order of the Eastern Temple.
This was the brainchild of one Karl Kellner, a wealthy German Freemason
of high rank in a rather distaff branch of Freemasonry (the
Rite of
Memphis and Mizraim of John Yarker), who claimed that he was instructed
in the techniques of sex-magic by a Hindu adept and two Arab magi during
his travels in the East. He introduced this concept to his associates,
Theodor Reuss, Heinrich Klein, and the ubiquitous Dr. Franz Hartmann,
all of whom were also high-ranking Masons in
Yarker's sect.
"Sex-magic" is a loaded term with all sorts of connotations, and it is perhaps best that we discuss what Kellner -- and later OTO initiates -- meant by it. It is, quite simply, a method of sublimating sexual energy to the will of the magician in a variety of rituals, for a variety of purposes, using the sexual practice appropriate to the desired end. Thus, everything from the missionary position to sodomy to masturbation has a magical analogue and refers to a different quality of occult power. The choice of partner is also a matter for some concern, and the practice of sex-magic has become so refined by later initiates of the Order that even the specific days of a woman's menstrual cycle (for instance) each has its own occult correspondence. While this concept may seem somewhat scandalous to the casual reader, one should remember that a core doctrine of all occultism -- from the highest qabala to the meanest sympathetic magic -- is that of correspondences. In this doctrine, everything that exists in the "real" world has a counterpart in the astral world. Thus an object made of gold can be used to represent the sun, which is itself representative of a host of ideas (vitality, warmth, the Male principle, action, ego, etc.). On this is magic based. Following that line of reasoning through, every conceivable sort of sex act must also have its analogue in the astral domain, where magic works its mysterious wonders. Obviously, this dimension was hard to find in the generally available teachings of the Golden Dawn, the Freemasons, and other like organizations with their heavy emphasis on formal ritual alone. The sex magicians also used a great deal of ritual -- much of it familiar to magicians of other disciplines -- but with some version of the sex act as the central feature. Magic is, after all, about power; about directing energy and will to a given end. Sex is the natural companion to this doctrine of power, for it is arguably the most potent of all human experiences. Wed sex to magic and theoretically one would obtain a dynamo of vast occult potential. In India, this combination was already well-known as a form of worship called "tantra": a Hindu religious practice in which members of both sexes would participate in various rituals (not all of them overtly sexual by any means) designed to invoke the gods and to imitate the union of the two forms of polar power in the universe, the male and female energies referred to in China as Yang and Yin, respectively, and in India as Shiva and Shakti. Traditionally, there are two forms of tantric ritual: right-hand and left-hand. Right-hand tantric ritual is that which takes place when the female participant sits at the right hand of the male. In this instance, actual physical contact between the partners will not take place. It is left-hand tantra that gets all the attention, however, because of the mistaken notion that it is somehow "evil." The term "left-hand path" has become synonymous in the West with black magic and with evil sorcerers who have sold their souls to the Devil: a manifestation of the superstition that left-handedness itself is a sign of aberration. [??!!!] However, "left-hand" tantric ritual is simply that in which the female participant sits at the left hand of the male in the ritual. In this case, physical contact takes place between the two partners but this in no way mandates sexual intercourse every time, in every rite. Certainly, among some practitioners in the East, the left-hand tantric circle has become a sexual one and there is a small library of techniques, rituals, invocations, chants, etc. appropriate to this type of magic. But the point to be made here is that all tantra is inherently sexual in nature as it is concerned with the activities of both the male and female gods and goddesses and their relationship to each other in the eternal play of creation. Whether or not actual sexual intercourse takes place on the physical plane or not is a matter for tantric "engineers" to decide, depending on the path chosen and the means agreed to by all parties. In all cases, the sexual act is considered subordinate to the ultimate goal of spiritual liberation. It is a means to an end, and nothing more.
As we have seen, Hitler was (probably unconsciously) putting this same
knowledge to good use. As Schellenberg pointed out in the quotation
that begins this chapter, Hitler had so sublimated his sexual urges that
he found relief in the rabid speeches he made to the assembled,
adoring masses and had long ceased to be interested in normal sexual
intercourse with women. On the other side, his speeches were so
mesmerizing that even foreigners who spoke no German at all were
captivated by Hitler's oratory. In other words, the magical, tantric
technique worked. Hitler wanted power more than anything else and was
willing to sacrifice friends and lovers to that end. He transformed his
sexual desire into a tool for obtaining power ... and became the leader
of Germany (a country he wasn't even born in).
Schellenberg -- who
is no fool -- even credits the stories about Hitler's "powers of intuition
and personal magnetism," [10] in effect giving credence to what a medieval
audience would have called Hitler's abilities as a sorcerer. A modern,
twentieth-century occult audience would call Hitler a sex magician.
But to return to Crowley, in post-Victorian England this was racy stuff.
Sex magic was certainly far and away from anything the Golden Dawn was
teaching, and Crowley became intrigued by it all when Theodor Reuss -- the
Outer Head of the Order (OHO) of the OTO -- visited Crowley in London in
1912 (during the height of a flurry of occult activity in Germany
involving everything from the death of Theosophist eminence grise Franz
Hartmann, warring Theosophical
societies vying for members and recognition, and the creation,
by Rudolf Steiner, of his Anthroposophical Society that same year, not
to mention the founding of the Germanenorden that May) and accused him
of revealing the core secret of the Order in a publication
of Crowley's called the Book of Lies. Crowley, taken rather aback,
replied that he could not reveal the secret of the OTO since he had not
attained the appropriate degree in the Order and had therefore
never been told what the secret was. When Reuss pointed out a revealing
phrase having to do with a "Magick Rood" and a
"Mystic Rose," (elements
which, in a Freudian sense, could be understood as representing
the male and female genitals, respectively) Crowley had a flash of satori and the two men came to a mutual understanding. Crowley visited Berlin later in 1912 to obtain a charter making him the head of the OTO for Great Britain and all of the English-speaking peoples of the world, in the process choosing as his magickal name the title of that infamous Templar statue: Baphomet.
He then descended upon the rituals of the OTO with relish, rewriting
them to make them more overtly sexual and incorporating his own newly
minted religious ideas -- which he called Thelema after the Greek word for
"Will" (shades of Leni Riefenstahl!) -- into the liturgy. It was as if a
whole new world was opened up to him, for now he could make his favorite
pastime -- sex -- not only compatible with magick but central to it. He began
to see that the whole universe of magick -- the rituals, techniques,
specialized language -- was merely a means of presenting sexual information
in a coded form. With this sudden illumination came a profusion of small
articles on sex-magick that were translated into German by Reuss's
people and published there for the first time. Until relatively
recently, in fact, they had not been available in English at all. [11]
These treatises discuss the occult methods to be employed during
autoerotic, heterosexual, and homosexual
sex acts, and concern everything from uniting with one's god or goddess
through masturbation or intercourse, to making talismans for various
purposes, and even using sex to achieve enlightenment. These few
booklets can stand as the West's answer to, and interpretation
of, Hindu tantrism, particularly of the Kaula Shastra variety, with a
little distaff Sufism thrown in for good measure. Quite simply, we are
dealing with the subordination of the sex act to the Great Work by the
magician and mystic of every age.
The Christian eremites who suffered intense sexual fantasies in the desert as they strove to transform their desire for sex into a desire for God would have recognized the singular purpose in these Crowleyan tracts while at the same time abhorring the practices described. Crowley maintains that every sex act of an Adept is a sacred act and should not be the result of a lascivious appetite; the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae is in essential agreement on this. Yet, while Crowley -- and the members of the German occult lodges who were following this regimen -- believed that every sexual act was a magickal expression of the Will and had to be performed with procreation in sight, it is not the type of procreation the Church has in mind. Crowley's ideal children were magickal children, such as described in his entertaining and revealing novel, Moonchild [12] Every magickal act -- and this includes sex -- has a purpose that must be established beforehand. With Crowley -- as with the Pope -- there is (officially) no sex for pleasure only. This attitude of Crowley's has been underrepresented in the many books and articles written about him. Most authors view Crowley's description of his sexual antics as "magickal rites" with a huge amount of derision; yet, his diaries are full of just such occult annotations as he meticulously recorded hundreds of sexual acts that he performed along with a careful description of their occult purposes: whether they were to consecrate talismans, obtain information through divination, commune with a spirit or a god, or whatever. Crowley was at great pains to find a way to indulge a tremendous sexual appetite in a manner that was free of any hint of the "baser" nature of sex. In this, he may have been searching for a way to satisfy subconscious elements of his psyche that were linked to his fundamentalist Christian upbringing: a way of having one's cake of light and eating it, too. Whatever the purpose, and however successful or not he may have been, Crowley's initiation into the Ordo Templi Orientis is the source of much of the literature by and about Crowley today. The discovery of the existence of a sexual occultism was all the fuse this brilliant if eccentric Englishman needed to detonate the volatile compound of his great intelligence mixed with a sincere -- if outlandish -- spirituality.
That there existed a higher form of sex, perhaps the application of the
sex act, sexual positions, sexual fluids, and even sexual pleasure to
spiritual goals like illumination and unity with Godhead, appealed to
Crowley immensely for it made of sex a magickal laboratory wherein any
experiment was justified if not actually demanded by the rigors of
scientific method.
The occultists of the OTO had applied "the art of German engineering" to the sex act, taking it, in effect, out of the bedroom and into the lab. (One is irresistibly reminded of Tim Curry as Dr. Frankenfurter in the Rocky Horror Picture Show.) Of course, the use of sex in rituals was nothing new to Europe. The use of sexual rites to insure fertility of the crops was known thousands of years before the word "tantra" became a commonplace on European tongues; and the witches were accused by the Holy Inquisition of conducting sex orgies on the top of Mount Brocken. The Rites of Eleusis were almost certainly sexual in nature, and sex in general formed part of many ancient mystery religions in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia (to wit: the voluminous evidence available in Frazier's The Golden Bough). It could be argued that the advent of Christianity changed all that with its bachelor God, its virgin Mother, its celibate priests and nuns, and its general hostility to sex of any kind. It is probably for this reason that we find no discussion of "sexual secrets" in Freemasonry, for example, and the sexual discussions around Rosicrucianism are almost always hidden behind the heavily veiled symbolic shorthand of the alchemists.
In short, the mystification of sex has always been with us; so has the
mystification of eating and drinking (in the Mass, in various pagan
festivals of harvest time) and the mystification of respiration (in the pranic exercises of the yogis, in the meditations of the Eastern
Orthodox
"Jesus Prayer," etc.); in other words, all the senses and most physical
functions have been the subject of magical or mystical practices at one
time or another and sex is no exception. In the modern Western world,
however, with the sexual act pushed into the background by a fastidious
Christianity and not discussed in polite company, it was inevitable that
only the most outrageous occult societies would have fixated on sex as
the key to all other magical rites and powers. Thus, the popular image
of the satanic altar in the Black Mass as being a nude virgin or
prostitute is apt: to be anti-Christian was to be pro sex.
The Politics of Sex But how does one maintain an anti-Christian stance in an environment unremittingly pro- Christian? Either by going underground -- as the occultists did and still do -- or by going overboard. The German lodges -- such as the OTO and the Brotherhood of Saturn -- opted for the former, but the Nazis chose the "left-hand path." Let us read the words of SS officer Otto Rahn, the reluctant Nazi and enthusiastic Grail- seeker, who defines the problem for us towards the end of his Luzifers Hofgesind:
(It should be noted that this view -- in a book by an SS officer published in Germany with, it must be assumed, Nazi imprimatur -- anticipated the controversial 1967 article by Lynn White in Science magazine, [14] which blamed Christianity for the world's ecological crisis by calling our "arrogance towards nature" the result of "Christian dogma.") So, there we have the "overboard" solution. Simply claim that you are more pious, more "religious," and more "Christian" than the Church. Claim you have penetrated to the deepest mysteries of Christianity and that, in your opposition to the organized Church, you are only doing what Christ did to the money-changers in the Temple and would do today had he been around and was the one with the whip. For this is what Hitler believed, and what Himmler carried out. For example, the Lebensborn organization of the SS -- which every SS officer was obligated to join -- put some of this into practice. It was inevitable that someone like Hitler, who had grown up reading the pornographic occult newsletters of von Liebenfels and, later, of Julius Streicher, would have agreed to the institution of a cult brothel for the propagation of the Aryan race. In this organization, women selected for their racial purity and adherence to the Teutonic ideal of womanhood in physical appearance as well as in spiritual composition were maintained for their impregnation by equally Aryan SS men. [15] The Lebensborn communities were, in a sense, farms where Aryan babies were bred like blue-eyed cattle. There was even a plan to do away with the whole idea of matrimony as it placed an undue burden on the Aryan race, whose mission was to colonize the entire world with perfect racial specimens. There were, after all, many more non-Aryans in the world than Aryans, and it would take time and manpower to exterminate them all. Besides, healthy Aryan stock was needed to cultivate the fields appropriated during the drive to the East mandated by Haushofer's Lebensraum policy. Although the Lebensborn concept was never openly discussed as an anti-Christian policy -- and anyway the Nazis in general and the SS in particular were the repository of the real secrets of Christianity and were on the verge of obtaining the Holy Grail itself -- it was generally understood that the Catholic Church would not approve. The christening or baptismal ceremonies which took place in the Lebensborn communities were pagan rites devised by Nazi occultists to replace those familiar to these husbandless Lutheran and Catholic mothers; thus there could be no doubt among even this, the most militarily uninvolved segment of Nazi Germany, that Nazism was paganism, and that Christianity was to be eventually replaced as surely as Judaism was on the list for immediate extinction. In this, however, the Nazis were close to their sometime brothers in arms, the anti-religious Socialists, for does not the Communist Manifesto describe the desirability of putting an end to marriage and the nuclear family? [16] And if this goal were to be reached, what role does sexuality play in the new society?
For the occult lodges, this was not a problem. Marriage was, indeed, a
bit petit bourgeois and destined for the junk heap of history but, in
the meantime, sexuality was still a powerful occult tool, the
manifestation
in the visible world of the flow of energy in the unseen dimensions.
Magicians had "magickal children" on those planes, and could even create
familiars and homonculi -- artificial humans -- using these techniques,
thereby rendering the institution of marriage as a means of ensuring the
future of the race rather outre. Magicians already lived in the world
the Nazis were trying to create. It was a vast one, with a multiplicity
of dimensions in endless space, and to their credit they did not require
the use of crematoria or mobile gas vans to pursue their particular Lebensraum.
[?!]
We have taken all this space to discuss the official Nazi attitude to
sex and marriage since it can be seen as an indirect result of ideas
current in Germany for many years before Hitler came to power: ideas
concerning sexuality that were ostensibly alien to pious, anti-Semitic
Germany and its organized religion and which had to come from somewhere.
Hitler, with his hit-and-miss street education in the pages
of Ostara and at the feet of men like Eckart and Hanussen, took a very
broad-minded view of sex. Indeed, he is said to have known about SA
Leader Ernst Rohm's homosexuality for years and tolerated it ... a
rather astounding generosity for that man in that time and place. In
fact, a great many SA men were homosexuals, which should give the
nervous nellies in the Pentagon pause: for the Brownshirts -- the dreaded
Storm Troopers; the brawling, two-fisted beer hall fighters; the
drunken, angry mob of volunteer militiamen who defeated Communism
in Germany and who propelled Hitler to power -- were the epitome of
military machismo ... and Rohm, their leader and queen, was the ultimate
fighting man.
Crowley went to America during World War I after being rejected for military service by his own government (or so he claimed), and when Hitler was fighting the Allies as an enlisted man in the trenches of France and Belgium, writing Wotanist poetry full of magical symbolism, Crowley was writing pro-German propaganda for The Fatherland, a journal published in New York by one George Viereck, who had known Crowley slightly from years before. [17] Crowley needed a job, and agreed to take over as editor of The Fatherland. He claimed to be Irish, which would have made him a natural enemy of the English if true (which it wasn't). He even went so far as to row out to the Statue of Liberty one day and mime burning his British passport, an event that was duly recorded by no less an astute observer than the New York Times. [18] Later, when confronted by all of this, he would claim that he was really working for the British cause since he had turned The Fatherland into something of a joke. Reductio ad absurdum was the technique he employed: in other words, his articles were so outlandish that the journal was reduced to absurdity, a caricature of serious political discussion, which would help the British cause much more than harm it. In one such article, for instance, he compared Kaiser Wilhelm II to Parsifal in search of the Grail, and claimed that the Celts were descended from the same race as Osiris and Isis. [19] In another, an article dated November, 1917, for a sister publication of The Fatherland called The International, he wrote that the world's press was responsible for the war and that the aftermath of the conflict could only bring about "bankruptcy, revolution, and famine," which was certainly true but did not require the special skills of a master magician to foresee. [20] Incidentally, the above topics were quite in keeping with Listian sentiments and would have been familiar to any volkisch audience. George Viereck himself is something of a minor legend. He is probably the same Viereck whom Freud mentions as a "journalist, politician, writer, quite a handsome fellow" who supplied him with some food during the terrible shortages in Vienna at the end of 1919. [21] The same George Sylvester Viereck interviewed Freud years later, in 1926, on the subject of anti-Semitism and included the interview in a collection entitled Glimpses of the Great, that was published in 1930. [22] And it was certainly the same George Sylvester Viereck who was implicated in one of America's most famous spy cases of the Second World War. Viereck -- who was the illegitimate grandson of the Kaiser -- became an enthusiastic admirer of the Third Reich and essentially its chief publicist in America from his posh apartment on Manhattan's Riverside Drive. The Kaiser had a son in the Gestapo, and Viereck used this connection to get close to Himmler, whom he saw as a kindred spirit: a royalist who admired the old Teutonic kings and who wished for nothing so much as a restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy. Himmler, with his mystical worship at the shrine of King Henry I, with whom he identified, seemed simpatico; a door into the corridors of power for the scheming journalist. Crowley's German Case Officer During the First World War, Viereck became implicated in a plot to sabotage American factories as early as 1915 (in other words, two years before America entered the war). This would have been about the time he encouraged Crowley to take over as editor of The Fatherland. A briefcase full of plans for espionage, sabotage, and the invasion of the United States had been left, forgotten, by one of Viereck's agents on the Sixth Avenue El in Manhattan in plain sight of an American secret agent who had been sent to follow them. He picked up the briefcase and blew the story wide open. Oddly, Viereck never spent a day in jail for his role in the elaborate plotting against his adopted country. With the start of the Third Reich, Viereck oversaw an extensive pro-Hitler propaganda campaign and was central to Nazi efforts to generate support among German-Americans for the Hitler regime. Through his "Board of Trade for German-American Commerce" he was also able to provide an underground railroad for German agents fleeing South America when they became unmasked. But by far the most sensational aspect of Viereck's career was the revelation that a United States Senator, Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota, was in his employ. On August 31, 1940 --- one step ahead of an FBI arrest -- Lundeen took a flight from Washington, D.C. to his home state, ostensibly to confess all to his wife. He never made it. Lundeen, an FBI agent sent to tail him wherever he went, and eighteen other passengers died when their plane went down in a severe storm amid suspicions of Nazi sabotage. Two days later, and Lundeen's wife Norma was in Washington, demanding possession of the "Viereck files." These files revealed the full extent of Lundeen's complicity in Viereck's massive propaganda campaign, even to the extent of using the senator's franking privileges to send Nazi literature through the mail without ever paying postage. Money is always a problem in espionage campaigns, and Viereck's was no different. Although he was being handsomely paid for his services by the Nazi government, the expense of importing propaganda materials past the censors was daunting. It is reported that Viereck received additional funds from the fascist and pro-Nazi dictator Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. But, eventually, Viereck brought off the brilliant plan of using the government of the United States to do his propagandizing for him. He paid Senator Lundeen thousands of dollars at a time for the privilege of writing his speeches for him, speeches which were delivered in the Senate and printed in the Congressional Record. Eventually, Viereck was arrested, tried, and convicted, and managed to serve only about a year or so in prison before having his sentence reduced; but his effectiveness as a Nazi agent was thereby diminished. [23] What is not known is the extent to which Crowley would have been able to provide information on Viereck to British Intelligence, or if he could have been used to infiltrate Viereck's circle in New York City. Quite possibly Crowley's cover had been "blown" by this time: that is, perhaps he really was working for American and British intelligence services during the Great War, as he claimed. In a written defense of his actions, published in 1929, Crowley insisted that as soon as America entered the war in 1917, the U.S. Department of Justice employed him as an agent-in-place at his Fatherland and International editorial offices. [24] The author has so far been unable to verify this, but other -- unbiased -- researchers claim that Crowley was, indeed, telling the truth (see Chapter Nine). To British Intelligence, however, Crowley was officially just "a small-time traitor" [25] who had no connection with any British Government intelligence or counterintelligence operation taking place in America. Or anywhere else. But the fact that they even had an opinion to express indicates that someone in British Intelligence was keeping an eye on Crowley, as indeed they were. In 1916, apprised of his pro-German propaganda effort in New York, agents of the London Police raided OTO headquarters and confiscated Temple paraphernalia. Whether this was for the purpose of conducting an actual investigation into possible criminal activity or simply as a means of retaliation against Crowley, is not known. But this would not be the last time Crowley would come to the attention of the Intelligence services. Appropriately enough, during his tenure as editor of both The Fatherland and The International Crowley's romantic interests revolved around several German women in New York. Perhaps the most famous to Crowley enthusiasts was the ghostly Leah Hirsig, the younger sister of the Swiss-German Alma Hirsig, who had attended one of Crowley's lectures on occultism in 1918 (and who would later become involved with Pierre Bernard, the founder of the Oom the Omnipotent love-cult). She eventually moved in with Crowley in his Greenwich Village studio and became his "Scarlet Woman" (a reference to the consort of the Great Beast of the Apocalypse and a title Crowley used for many of his female lovers). Leah eventually became pregnant and bore a child -- Anne Leah -- in February of 1920. Shortly thereafter, Crowley decided to set up an occult community in Italy, on the island of Sicily and near the village of Cefalu. This was to become the famous Abbey of Thelema, the object of so much attention by the world press and, eventually, by the government of Benito Mussolini. The Occult Spies While Crowley was writing German propaganda in New York, some of his colleagues in the German and British OTO lodges and the Golden Dawn were employed in actual military work. His former brother-in-law and fellow Golden Dawn initiate, Gerald Kelly, was working as a British secret agent in Spain. [26] Karl Germer (whom we will meet at the great convocation of occult leaders in Thuringia in 1925) was probably a spy for the German secret service during the Great War, and was awarded the Iron Cross, First and Second class [27] (as was, it will be remembered, Adolf Hitler, except that Germer entered the army as an officer while Hitler was an enlisted man). Was Crowley, therefore, supplying information on Germer's activities to the British and American intelligence agencies? If so, that would seem to exonerate him of any claims of treason by his government, but it would also seem to make him a traitor to his own Order. Did Germer ever discover the extent to which Crowley might have been spying on him for the British? Or was there a "gentleman's agreement" between the two magicians that enabled them to act as "double agents" against each other without anyone doing the other any real harm? Theodor Reuss -- Kellner's successor as head of the Order when the latter died in 1905 "in mysterious circumstances" -- was also a member of the German secret service, but not during World War I. During the height of that war he can be found living at the Ascona vegetarian community at Monte Verita in the Ticino province of Switzerland (where we found Franz Hartmann almost thirty years earlier), and which then became the headquarters of the OTO for a while. Years previously, however, Reuss had infiltrated the fledgling Socialist movement in England, where he spied on the family of Karl Marx for German Intelligence. [28] He did this in the guise of an admirer of Marxism, and most of his intended victims were actually emigre Germans living in London. This would have been in the years immediately preceding the founding of the OTO by Kellner, which was supposed to have taken place in 1895. By that time, Mathers -- cofounder of the Golden Dawn -- had already moved to Paris with his wife, Mina Bergson, sister of the famous philosopher and onetime president of the Society for Psychical Research, Henry Bergson (1859-1941). From about this time until Mathers's death in 1918, there is a lot of speculation about the involvement of the Golden Dawn with everything weird and Continental from the Edelweiss Society (an anti- Semitic front group operating out of Sweden) to an occult group supposedly organized around Karl Haushofer and called variously (by various authors) the Lumen Club or Lumen Lodge or Luminous Lodge of either Berlin or Vienna (possibly confused with the Lumenclub of Vienna, an organization founded by a follower of Liebenfels which promoted Nazi ideology in pre-Anschluss Austria). While the Golden Dawn certainly had the English-speaking world covered -- with lodges from England to America to New Zealand -- there is very little evidence for genuine Golden Dawn activity taking place anywhere else, with the exception of whatever Mathers was up to in Paris. After Mathers's death he would have been unable to continue strategizing with German and Scandinavian occult groups, at least on the physical plane. The Edelweiss Society was at its heyday in the 1920s, and the existence of something called the Luminous Lodge is debatable. While it would have been physically possible for Haushofer to have met Mathers when both were living on the Continent at the same time, there would have been no earthly reason to do so. Mathers was an impoverished occultist living in France; Haushofer, a respected professor of geopolitics at the University of Munich. The likelihood of their having met on common ground is virtually nil. While there is evidence that Haushofer was interested in astrology and related forms of mysticism, Mathers was not selling horoscopes or doing the medium circuit, unlike people such as Hanussen. If there was any connection at all between Mathers and the Golden Dawn on one side and German occult lodges on the other, it would have been through either Hartmann or Crowley and there we have the two, verifiable links. However, once the Nazis began to crack down on the occult groups operating in Germany and the occupied territories, the Golden Dawn -- under the German version of its name, Hermetische Orden der Goldene Diimmerung -- was included on the list, along with Crowley's A...A... and Reuss's OTO. [29] The Nazis were nothing if not thorough; thorough ... and paranoid. The list of banned societies was probably compiled by one Dr. Gregor Schwartz-Bostunitsch, a self-proclaimed authority on occult societies who entertained a consuming hatred for Freemasonry, Theosophy, and Anthroposophy, and who once counted a youthful Adolf Eichmann among his pupils. The Weida Conference
Established at the Abbey of Thelema at Cefalu, Sicily, after the war in
the spring of 1920, Crowley found himself chronically short of funds
and made several trips to Paris and London in an attempt to raise money
and gather disciples for his commune. One of these disciples was the
unfortunate Raoul Loveday, whose botching of an occult ritual
(it is said) resulted in his tragic death. It was this incident
involving Loveday -- an Oxford undergrad, who arrived at Cefalu accompanied
by his friend Betty May -- that eventually closed down the abbey. Ms. May,
appalled at the degenerate goings-on and general squalor of the abbey
and distressed at the death of her friend, returned to England after the
occult funeral and told some rather hair-raising stories to the London
papers. The resulting furore in England (human sacrifice, cannibalism,
satanic rites, etc.) soon spread to Italy, and the Fascists decided to
deport Crowley. [30] He left Cefalu in May, 1923, never to return. (His
followers stayed behind for a while, but they eventually abandoned the
abbey and it fell into general oblivion until a visit one day by
filmmaker Kenneth Anger many years later.)
Crowley wound up in North Africa with Leah, wondering what to do next. Their daughter had died shortly after their arrival in Cefalu in 1920, the second of Crowley's children (both daughters) to have died young. In the summer of 1925 the acting head of the OTO -- one Heinrich Tranker -- invited Crowley to Germany to decide the fate of the Order; that is, Tranker (who had initially opposed Reuss's decision to have Crowley succeed him as OHO) had had a vision in which he saw Crowley as the new head of the Order. [31] Most of the German initiates had opposed Crowley on at least two grounds: the imposition of his personality and personal religion on the rituals and general philosophy of the Order, and the fact that he was an Englishman and not a German like themselves. While there is no evidence to suggest that the OTO was a volkisch or Pan-German or neo-Teutonic society, [?!] this was still Germany, after all, and Germany in the grip of a political fever with Hitler out of jail and Mein Kampf on the best-seller lists. Yet, OTO initiate Karl Germer ("Frater Uranus") was prevailed upon to provide the funds necessary to transport Crowley to Germany from France, where he had been staying with a small group of disciples, and the Great Beast himself arrived in Thuringia in June of 1925 for the conference that would decide the fate of the Order.
Unfortunately, Crowley had sent a copy of
The Book of the Law ahead of
him for the chiefs to digest. It was quickly translated into German by
one Max Schneider and all was more or less acceptable
until the infamous third chapter, which contains the diatribe against
Christianity, Judaism, etc. aforementioned. At this point, there was a
flap among the chiefs and even Herr Tranker of the mystical vision
demurred.
Heinrich Tranker was a Leipzig bookseller specializing in occult works, who had his own occult imprint in the pre-World War I days, [32] Also attending the conference were two Theosophists, Otto Gebhardi and the elderly Marthe Kuntzel, as well as Germer, Eugene Grosche, two others (members of Crowley's entourage), and Crowley himself. It was held in the small town of Weida, near Gera, which was then evidently the headquarters of the OTO with Tranker as its acting head, or OHO. After several days of politicking, although Tranker came around to seeing The Book of the Law in a slightly more favorable light, he still wound up opposing Crowley's stewardship of the Order. Eugene Grosche ("Frater Saturnus"), accepted Crowley as an important occult teacher but not as the OHO. It was left to Karl Germer to accept Crowley completely and unconditionally, and thereby the OTO split into three warring factions: the largely German, anti-Crowley group under Tranker, the new Brotherhood of Saturn under Eugene Grosche, and the OTO under Crowley, with Germer as his financial sponsor and devoted disciple. Tranker's OTO was concerned with working the sex-magic degrees as created and refined by Kellner and Reuss without, however, having to accept either the Law of Thelema or Aleister Crowley as the occult messiah. Crowley, it should be emphasized, was the perfectly legitimate head of the OTO for Great Britain and the English-speaking peoples, anointed as such by Reuss. The question of whether or not Crowley was actually the head of the entire Order is a debatable one, since Crowley claims that Reuss appointed him as his successor. If that were true, however, why then the conference in Thuringia? It seems there was at least some room to debate Crowley's position as international OHO, and Tranker -- who had the vision that Crowley should be the head -- reneged and removed his support during the conference. As Tranker was acting head of the Order, it can be assumed that he held such position legally and with the approval -- not only of the other members -- but of Crowley himself, if only up until the Weida Conference when the OTO began to splinter in typical occult fashion. Although Crowley, for all practical intents and purposes, lost the bulk of his German constituency, he left Thuringia with some new friends, among them Karl Germer, who would become OHO upon Crowley's death, and Marthe Kuntzel who accepted the Law of Thelema and its Bible, The Book of the Law. It would be Ms. Kuntzel who would wind up caring for some of the fallout from Crowley's rituals, in the persons of Leah Hirsig and her new companion Norman Mudd, at Kuntzel's residence in Germany, until Leah returned to the States and Mudd committed suicide in the waters of the English Channel in June, 1934, coincidentally at the time of the Rohm Purge taking place in Germany. [33] And it would be Ms. Kuntzel who, full of approval not only for Crowley but for another occult messiah, would claim that Adolf Hitler's views were virtually identical with those found in the The Book of the Law; Kuntzel, interrogated by the Gestapo because of her connections to Theosophists, Thelemites, and Freemasons galore, remained a devoted Nazi and a devoted follower of Crowley to her dying day. It is interesting that she found no conflict of interest between the two. Karl Germer would even claim that the Fuhrer was, quite probably, Crowley's Magickal Son. [34] Of the third group to leave Thuringia that summer, we may say a little more than has been mentioned elsewhere, for Eugene Grosche's Brotherhood of Saturn also managed to survive the war and to continue its own version of the sex-magic that was taught in the secret councils of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Grosche's system took the rather Masonic outlines of the OTO a step further and created a whole system of sex-magic based on astrology. This was not a horoscope magazine approach to selecting one's spouse based on sun signs, but rather a complex method of determining sexual positions and partners according to the purpose of the ritual and the actual location of the planets as determined by reference to a common ephemeris and table of houses. For the curious, the most important astrological aspect (according to this cult) is the square; that is, when two planets are ninety degrees apart on the ecliptic as viewed from the earth. This is supposedly an aspect of great tension between the planets, and those planets specifically related to sexuality (Venus, Mars, Neptune, and the Moon according to the Brotherhood) are particularly powerful for this type of working. All heterosexual and homosexual couplings have been accounted for in this system, as well as the specific positions to be used according to either the natal horoscopes of the individuals involved or actual transits, or both. Conjunctions of the planets were also considered appropriate, but the squares seemed to dominate the sex-magic practices of this group. While it would take too much space to discuss the theory behind all of this and would perhaps bore the reader not willing to wade through some of the rather surreal jargon of the modern occult movement, suffice it to say that the square aspect was believed to represent a gate, open into the hidden dimensions. In general Western astrology, a square is often considered an unlucky or "hard" aspect: one that represents obstacles to success or illness, accidents, losses of various types. The magicians of the Brotherhood of Saturn saw it, therefore, as a gate opening upon this world from the domain of daemons; and daemons were thought to be nothing more than powerful forces which -- to the uninitiated -- appeared fearsome and evil but which the initiate (with proper training and discipline) could tame to more productive ends. [35] This mystification of the sex act among the German occult lodges was perfectly consistent with later Nazi fashions regarding sex and power. As Susan Sontag points out in her essay, "Fascinating Fascism":
While no one would accuse Crowley of repressing his sexual impulses, the transformation of sexual energy into a spiritual force was -- and remains -- the goal of the Ordo Templi Orientis and the other German sex-magic lodges, as it was a personal practice of Hitler himself. The vital force was worshiped as tantamount to magical power and -- with the precise instructions of Eugene Grosche and others for the timing of the moment of orgasm to coincide with the passage of some star or planet over a hypothetical point in space -- we can say that this vital force was restricted in its flow, subject to the conscious direction (the will) of the magician. Like the Nazi art that Sontag brilliantly describes, the German art of sex-magic is also "both prurient and idealizing." [37] While the Office of the Holy Inquisition used guilt by association to equate sexuality with the practice of witchcraft and devil worship (because sexuality was already considered base and animalistic by the Church) and thereby confirmed the evil of lust as a creature of Satan, the German lodges acknowledged this relationship of sex with darkness, sex with demonic forces, but cynically manipulated it toward various personal ends. One might reasonably agree that the Nazi ideal was to sublimate the sexual urge for the "benefit of the community" as Sontag has pointed out; but the German sex magicians were not concerned with the community at all. Their goal was their own benefit, the entirely personal one of spiritual enlightenment and individual power. Sex and spies. And secret societies. The great sex magicians -- Crowley, Germer, and Reuss -- were enthusiastically involved in all three pursuits at various times of their lives. All had worked for Germany's benefit, even though Crowley insisted that he worked as a spy for the U.S. Department of Justice and would later work for MI5. All were leaders of the Ordo Templi Orientis, a German sex-magick occult lodge. And when, in 1922, Theodor Reuss suffered a stroke and had to step down as OHO of the Order, it was Crowley -- fellow spy and sex magician -- who rushed in to fill the space. And when Crowley died, it was Germer (veteran secret agent) who took over as OHO. Crowley has claimed that Reuss appointed him his successor as OHO of the Order, but that ignores the tremendous flap that took place when a German translation of The Book of the Law was made available to lodge members in Germany. It can honestly be said that most OTO members in Germany at that time disapproved of Crowley's taking over the OTO. They objected to the way he rewrote their rituals to deify himself and to enshrine his new religion of Thelema in their lodge work. Many initiates defected ... or, it can be said, the Crowley faction defected from the original OTO organization. In the late 1970s, the author received a communication from a traditional (that is to say, non-Crowleyan) OTO lodge operating out of Frankfurt; evidence, if slim, that an OTO continued to function that had not accepted Thelema and was still working the original grades. In Germany.
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