Dion Fortune's Guild

I started reading The Magical Battle of Britain: The War Letters of Dion Fortune tonight and came across something interesting.  Basically, during World War II, Dion Fortune started a sort of occult/mystical interest group to do group meditations on various topics.  Interestingly, the topics had very little to do with the war itself.  They weren't trying to hex German pilots or psychically attack Hitler or anything.  In today's language, they were trying to put a sort of "good vibes" out into the atmosphere to help their fellow Britons.

Anyway, I was reading how she got this group together and they started progressing along.  And then Gareth Knight, who edited the book (as it is a series of letters from Dion Fortune to her group), talked about how, as the work went on, they found they couldn't take newcomers in as well as they did at the start (when they took in anyone).  Dion Fortune herself wrote:

Outsiders who came in at the beginning grew with the work, but once the work had developed in the way it did, it was no longer possible to take in outsiders.

When I read this, the image that popped into my mind was nothing less than a World of Warcraft guild!  It sounds like how so many guilds in WoW start.  They take anyone and everyone at first, but, if the guild is successful and stays together for long, the people who joined at the beginning have leveled up to 80 (or more now) and have awesome legendary equipment.  After a while, joining such successful guilds is by invitation only.  Seriously though, as Ms. Fortune says here, its the only way they can really do it.  Taking on a newbie would take too long getting them up to speed to be of much use (and seriously, not be much fun for the guildies or the noobie).  

Anyway, that's just the thought I had.  I wish I could have joined Dion Fortune's magical guild to defend Britain.  :-)

Book Review: The Occult Reich by J.H. Brennan

The Charles Berlitz of World War II

To preface this review, I have read Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's books on the Nazis and the Occult as well as Dusty Skylar's "The Nazis and the Occult." Goodrick-Clarke comes from the point of view that, of course, the occult is just a bunch of hokum but certain Nazis believed it and acted on some of the weird and twisted beliefs they found there. Goodrick-Clarke is very skeptical, as other Historians are, that Hitler took the occult truly seriously other than the effect it had to bolster his own claims to power.

Skylar takes a middle road and writes that the Nazis exploited the occult and maybe there is something in it. However, Skylar is quite clear that if there is "something in it", it is psychological magic instead of paranormal magick. Indeed, Skylar compares Hitler's movement and persona to recent evil cult leaders and the mesmeric effect they had on their followers.

Brennen, a prolific writer on occult matters, is far to the other side. For Brennen, Hitler was an experienced Satanist who focused his magical energies for his own evil ends. Himmler was not the master occultist of the Third Reich, it was Hitler. And to Brennen, this occult stuff is very, very real. His book, small and short and looking like one of the Charles Berlitz books about the Bermuda Triangle is written in a fantastical tabloid style with long digressions to show where Hitler may have got his evil satanic teachings. Crowley and Gurdjieff are mentioned although not directly linked to Hitler. As, in Brennen's world view, Crowley and Gurdjieff were mages with genuine powers, they are just compared to how Hitler himself had powers of precognition and reality bending with his will.

While this book expects the reader to approach from the point of view that all occult and paranormal phenomena are real, it is very well written. It is actually quite an enjoyable read. Written in 1974, it is quite dated but is often still quoted to this day by other authors. I even saw Brennen himself interviewed in a documentary on Hitler and the Occult (alongside Skylar and Goodrick-Clarke).

I recommend this book (if you can get a copy) more for the entertainment value. Its written well and is a fascinating read. Making Hitler into a Voldemort superman is, in my opinion, much more credit than the little twerp deserves, but who knows? (insert twilight zone musical cue here :-)

Book Review: Unholy Alliance: A History of Nazi Involvement with the Occult by Peter Levenda

More like "The Occult's Involvement with the Nazis"

This is an interesting book but it must be said that the cover and the title are a little misleading. Levenda does talk quite a bit about the Nazis and their occult movement. However, great swaths of the book recount general occult societies' history through the 20th century. Levenda lavishes chapters on Aleister Crowley (who Lavenda seems to think influenced almost every event in the first part of the century).

One further thing must be said about this book. Levenda approaches his subject from a number of assumptions. Assumptions that many people would call conspiracy theories. For instance, to Levenda, Martin Boremann's survival and escape to South America is not a theory but a fact. Levenda reminds the reader on several occasions that Boremann escaped to South America in the guise of a Catholic priest and with the help of the Catholic church. The fact that DNA testing in the early 1990s has pretty much overwhelmingly proved that Boremann died in Berlin in 1945 never comes into play.

The Catholic church does not come off well with Lavenda and he adds the fact that they were allied to the Nazis from the start (another "fact" Levanda accepts as gospel) to the many recent charges against them. Another "fact" is that Crowley was a British MI5 agent from WW1 and through WW2, actively working with the British government. These and other "facts", some just not well documented to others which are pretty much the territory of Conspiracy Theorists, really increase the "grain of salt" factor of the book.

Levenda, not a historian but some manner of journalist who spend most of his life investigating the occult, really knows his stuff though. Much of the text are obscure and phantasmagorical occult references to societies and personalities long forgotten and dead. Charles Manson gets a good airing as does LeVay, founder of Satanism. He does try to tie it all back to Nazi Germany in the first part of the book. Helena Blavatsky is fingered as one of the founding influences for Naziism, which she probably was.

Even for all the wild VonDaniken-esque ramblings and heapings of "facts", this book is a really good read. Lavenda's story of how he tried to penetrate a secret "Nazi" compound in Chile (which indeed is there and in which the Chilean dictatorship of the time did carry out very gruesome acts) is very gripping. Whether or not Martin Boreman and every other unaccounted for Nazi was hiding there at the time is really up for debate though. Its also good if you are up on your occult knowledge to know some of what Levenda is talking about. I recommend this book but go into it as a book written by an occultist with an axe to grind, not as a history written by an academic.