Re: UNHOLY ALLIANCE: A HISTORY OF NAZI INVOLVEMENT WITH THE
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PART 1 OF 3
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.
4. The Order of the Temple of the East: Sex, Spies, and Secret Societies
Heydrich was informed about the smallest detail of Hitler's private life. He saw every diagnosis made by Hitler's doctors and knew of all his strange and abnormal pathological inclinations.... They showed that Hitler was so ruled by the daemonic forces driving him that he ceased to have thoughts of normal cohabitation with a woman. The ecstasies of power in every form were sufficient for him. [1]
-- SCHELLENBERG
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]
In contrast to the new, growing, Anglo-Saxon race, look, for instance, at the Sephardim, the so-called "Spanish Jews"; here we find how a genuine race can by purity keep itself noble for centuries and tens of centuries, but at the same time how very necessary it is to distinguish between the nobly reared portions of a nation and the rest. In England, Holland and Italy there are still genuine Sephardim but very few, since they can scarcely any longer avoid crossing with the Ashkenazim (the so-called "German Jews"). Thus, for example, the Montefiores of the present generation have all without exception married German Jewesses. But every one who has travelled in the East of Europe, where the genuine Sephardim still as far as possible avoid all intercourse with German Jews, for whom they have an almost comical repugnance, will agree with me when I say that it is only when one sees these men and has intercourse with them that one begins to comprehend the significance of Judaism in the history of the word. This is nobility in the fullest sense of the word, genuine nobility of race! Beautiful figures, noble heads, dignity in speech and bearing. The type is Semitic in the same sense as that of certain noble Syrians and Arabs. That out of the midst of such people Prophets and Psalmists could arise -- that I understood at the first glance, which I honestly confess that I had never succeeded in doing when I gazed, however carefully, on the many hundred young Jews -- "Bochers " -- of the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. When we study the Sacred Books of the Jews we see further that the conversion of this monopolytheistic people to the ever sublime (though according to our Ideas mechanical and materialistic) conception of a true cosmic monotheism was not the work of the community, but of a mere fraction of the people; indeed this minority had to wage a continuous warfare against the majority, and was compelled to enforce the acceptance of its more exalted view of life by means of the highest Power to which man is heir, the might of personality. As for the rest of the people, unless the Prophets were guilty of gross exaggeration, they convey the impression of a singularly vulgar crowd, devoid of every higher aim, the rich hard and unbelieving, the poor fickle and ever possessed by the longing to throw themselves into the arms of the wretchedest and filthiest idolatry. The course of Jewish history has provided for a peculiar artificial selection of the morally higher section: by banishments, by continual withdrawals to the Diaspora -- a result of the poverty and oppressed condition of the land -- only the most faithful (of the better classes) remained behind, and these abhorred every marriage contract -- even with Jews! -- in which both parties could not show an absolutely pure descent from one of the tribes of Israel and prove their strict orthodoxy beyond all doubt.
-- The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, by Houston Stewart Chamberlain
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.
ENOCH
The living channels of the Secret Tradition in Israel -- otherwise the successive mouthpieces -- according to the Tradition itself, are Enoch, Abraham, Moses, Solomon, and then -- after long ages -- one born far after due time, Rabbi Simeon ben Yochai at the beginning of the Christian Dispensation, a Greater Exile for Jewry. The romance-writers -- who passed as historians of Masonry before and after the formation of the UNITED GRAND LODGE -- knew nothing whatever of the last, for Kabalism was reflected into their reveries at second and third hand. But they knew -- confusedly and vaguely -- that there was a Secret Tradition in Israel, and some gleams concerning it were splintered on their glass of vision from people not themselves, and not of the Masonic Brotherhood, who derived certain rumours at a distance from yet others, being those who had dipped into Picus de Mirandula, Reuchlin, Archangelus de Burgo Nuovo and Baron Knorr von Rosenroth. The manner in which it was reflected revealed to them Masonry everywhere, or if any of the goods and chattels in which they and their authorities dealt could not be called Masonry by any stretch of a Georgian cum William IV imagination, it was then a debased substitute. Of Enoch who walked with God till he was not for God took him there are strange theosophical reminiscences in the SEPHER HA ZOHAH and its adjuncts; there are also Talmudic stories. Their final reflection into the annals of Masonry was summarised as follows in the year 1764.
"Enoch, the fifth from Seth, who prophesied of the deluge and conflagration, lest arts and sciences should slip out of the knowledge of men, raised two columns, one of brick, the other of stone, and inscribed their inventions upon them, that, if the pillar of brick happened to be overthrown by the Flood, that of stone might remain; which Josephus tells us was to be seen, in his time, in the land of Siriad."
-- The Ancient and Primitive Rite of Memphis and Misraim, Extracts from "A New Encyclopaedia of Freemasonry," by Arthur Edward Waite
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.