Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Extract from The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.
The Usual Suspects (1995) dir. Bryan Singer
Here’s the audio version of this essay:
Leaving the oasis of the last essay behind, we face the desert of the world once more. The stirrings of hope have not dissipated; in just the last fortnight the Syrian revolution has shown tentative signs of reigniting.
Yet heaviness has returned to my heart too. Much looks bleak, from the messianic fervour surrounding Donald Trump’s possible comeback to the burning winter of the southern hemisphere, devastating the baby chicks of Emperor penguins.
Indeed, it is horror that has touched me most acutely during the course of writing this. Human Rights Watch reported that Saudi border guards are slaughtering refugees trying to reach the Kingdom, even using mortars against columns of unarmed men, women and children. It’s a story that means a lot to me as I traced this exodus in a documentary over a decade ago (you can watch it here).
I still remember the dignity of those Ethiopians and Somalis I met who had endured such extraordinary hardship on their flight from the Horn of Africa, across the Gulf of Aden, only then to face the long walk across the desert to cross the mountains between Yemen and Saudi Arabia.
The idea that the Saudi regime is busy funnelling tens of millions to already overpaid sports stars in the West while machine-gunning some of the poorest people on earth at the last stage of an already pitiless journey defies belief. Yet paradoxically it is also too easy to believe; it seems to encapsulate the spirit of our times: the cruelty; the inhumanity; the insanity.
It is here that the mission of these Fragments, and all other efforts to gain a postsecular perspective, becomes urgent and essential. For I have an inkling that these atrocities cannot solely be blamed on “bad people” or a “bad regime”, as much as those things do play a part.
Instead, something deeper is at work, something that may lie behind all the barbarity that is increasingly manifesting across our planet, from the Ukrainian steppe to the slopes of the Sarawut mountains. I believe the roots of these horrors lie in the spiritual or sacred dimension of reality.
Of course, even to the spiritually minded this could seem far-fetched. Yet if we look at our own history, in the light of these Fragments, we can see it has happened before.
Indeed the historical example is so glaring and obvious, it is testament to our determined secular blindness that we fail to see it. Yet in doing so, by failing to identify the forces of the spiritual realm that drove this historical catastrophe, we fail to heed the true warning of the past.
I am of course talking about Hitler and the Nazis.
Spare me the eye rolls. It is another of our civilization’s blind spots that this most devastating epoch of humanity’s history is now fit for nothing but comic book portrayals like Jojo Rabbit or sensationalist late night TV junk like Nazi Megastructures. It feels that the book of scholarship has closed on the Nazi regime; what more could there be to say? Well, seen through a postsecular lens, a hell of a lot.
We believe that the disaster of Nazism arose because of a specific set of rationally identifiable historical factors, unique to their time and place. As long as these do not repeat again, we believe we are safe. What we fail to see is that the deeper forces that lay behind those events have not gone away, have not changed their nature and are in fact, constantly seeking new paths to manifestation that would bring about similar bloodshed today.
The spiritual trappings of Nazism are of course impossible to ignore: the swastika itself was once a eastern holy symbol. In his book Black Sun, the pre-eminent historian of the influence of mystical ideas under the Nazis, Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke wrote:
The religious and mythic elements of German National Socialism often made the Third Reich resemble a cult in power… huge congregations, banners, sacred flames, a style of popular and radical preaching, prayers-and-responses, were all essential props for the cult of race and nation. The messianic figure of Adolf Hitler, the saviour of Germany, towered over the whole project.
Goodrich-Clarke recognises that after the war, it was easy to look at this regime and its atrocities “outside of a purely secular frame of reference. Nazism was felt to be the embodiment of evil in a modern twentieth-century regime.” In particular, “the destructiveness of Nazism and the macabre irrationality of the Holocaust begged a religious interpretation involving a dualistic war in heaven, satanic inspiration and the use of dark forces.”
Goodrich-Clarke dismisses these ideas as “fanciful demonisation”. And they have indeed led to all sorts of lurid stories and films about Nazi Satanism and Hitler and his generals’ pursuit of occult artefacts or secret Tibetan texts, most of which is obviously bunkum. Other writers make the valid point that “to blame Nazism on otherworldly forces is to exonerate the prosaic causes that brought Hitler to power in the first place.”
These dismissals are all underpinned by the same central assumption: such forces cannot and do not exist. Therefore any suggestion of Hitler’s connection to them is logically false. If one adopts a different assumption, the one that underpins these Fragments – that something is there, even if we do not know what it is – things look very different.
In the endless analysis that has been done about Hitler’s regime, historians always face two significant analytical “leaps” that do not lend themselves easily to rational explanation. The first is how a man who was a lowly, down-and-out artist before the First World War could, in the space of three decades, rise to become unassailable dictator of one of the most powerful countries in Europe – the sort of fantastic transformation that belongs more to myth rather than history.
The second is the difference often noted by contemporaries between the Hitler of ordinary life and that of the frenzied orator and Führer of the masses. Those not under his spell encountered, often to their surprise, a small, pallid, almost comical figure, one who in private often seemed boorish, inconsistent and petty, who had little interest in detail and spent hours lazing about, lost in fantasies or even asleep. They simply could not reconcile this mediocre person with the catastrophic magnitude of his influence and his power over a population of millions.
Facing the first of these mysteries, rational historians ascribe Hitler’s rise to various influences that are beyond dispute: the harsh treatment of Germany in the Treaty of Versailles, the Weimar hyperinflation crisis or the economic devastation engendered by the Great Crash of 1929. In so doing, as I have said, they root their explanations in specific conditions of time and place. Yet Albert Speer, who has long been regarded as one of the sanest members of the Nazi leader’s inner circle, rebuts such explanations:
The whole demonic figure of the man can never be explained simply as the product of these events [WWI and the aftermath for Germany]. They could just as easily have found expression in a national leader of mediocre stature. For Hitler was one of those inexplicable historical phenomena which emerge at rare intervals among mankind. His person determined the fate of the nation…The nation was spellbound by him as a people has rarely been in the whole of history.
For Speer therefore the first mystery is only explicable through the second: Hitler’s unique nature. Yet here rational historians are at more of a loss to explain how such a personally underwhelming human being could have commanded such power. So you will often see references to Hitler’s “charisma”, as if that single word explained it all. Yet one would expect “charisma” in the modern sense of the word to be an engrained personal trait, as alive round the dinner table as in the auditorium. That definitely does not seem to be true in Hitler’s case.
The word “charisma” itself may hold a clue. For it has a second definition beyond the commonplace modern usage. It can refer to “divinely conferred power or talent”. Long before Hitler, famed German sociologist Max Weber defined it as “the quality of a personality held to be out of the ordinary (and originally thought to have magical sources) on account of which the person is evaluated as being gifted with supernatural or superhuman powers not accessible to everybody.”
Inadvertently therefore, even a rationalist’s use of the “charisma” explanation may point to otherworldly roots of Hitler’s influence and power. Indeed, many of Hitler’s contemporaries found themselves turning to the language of magic and mysticism in order to convey the impression he made.
One of the finest of many examples of this comes from the pioneer of modern psychology Carl Jung. In an interview with an American journalist in 1938, he said:
With Hitler you do not feel that you are with a man. You are with a medicine man, a form of spiritual vessel, a demi-deity, or even better, a myth. With Hitler you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man; because there is nobody there. He is not an individual, but a whole nation. I take it to be literally true that he has no personal friend. How can you talk intimately with a nation?
In another article, written in 1936, Jung wrote that the ancient spiritual force he believed was being channelled through Hitler was the old Germanic God Wotan:
An ancient god of storm and frenzy has awoken, like an extinct volcano, to new activity in a civilized country that had long been supposed to have outgrown the Middle Ages… Perhaps we may sum up this general phenomenon as Ergriffenheit – a state of being seized or possessed. The term postulates not only an Ergriffener (one who is seized) but, also, an Ergreifer (one who seizes). Wotan is an Ergreifer of men, and, unless one wishes to deify Hitler – which has indeed actually happened – [Wotan] is really the only explanation.
This is hugely significant for anyone who arrives from a postsecular perspective and takes the existence of such forces seriously. For it finally offers an explanation to bridge the gap between the apparently mediocre man and the magnitude of the force that he commanded. As Jung puts it:
Hitler is like a man who listens intently to a stream of suggestions in a whispered voice from a mysterious source and then acts upon them. In our case, even if occasionally our unconscious does reach us through dreams, we have too much rationality, too much cerebrum to obey it – but Hitler listens and obeys. The true leader is always led. We can see it work in him. He himself has referred to his Voice… Hitler’s power is not political – it is magic.
Jung has a significant corroborating witness for his conclusions: Hitler himself.
Throughout his life, Hitler was explicit about the power and presence of this inner “Voice”. He credited it with saving his life in the trenches of the First World War, when the Voice told him to move away from where his comrades were eating, all of whom were killed when a mortar landed on their position seconds later. Moments like this convinced Hitler he was being protected by a divine source that he named Providence, which was not only preserving him for a special destiny but granting him extraordinary powers.
He talked about this presence openly in hundreds of speeches and official state communiqués. For example, during an open air speech before a massive audience at Würzburg in 1937, Hitler declared:
However weak each single man finally is in his being and actions before almighty Providence and Its will, he will become immeasurably strong the moment he acts in accordance with this Providence. Then a force pours down into him, which is the hallmark of all great personalities the world has known. And when I look back on the five years we have behind us, then I think that I may say: ‘This was not the work of men alone!’
A psychological profile of Hitler carried out by the CIA in 1943 also came to the conclusion that, in order to understand the Hitler phenomenon, one had to take into account his profound faith in his divine powers:
A survey of all the evidence forces us to conclude that Hitler believes himself destined to become an Immortal Hitler, chosen by God to be the New Deliverer of Germany and the Founder of a new social order for the world. He firmly believes this and is certain that in spite of all the trials and tribulations through which he must pass he will finally attain that goal. The one condition is that he follow the dictates of the inner voice that have guided and protected him in the past.
Even military figures, who might be expected to be more sober in their assessments, repeatedly echoed the same feeling. SS-General Walter Schellenberg wrote in his memoirs: “Hitler was ruled by the demonic forces driving him…” Ulrich de Maizière, a General Staff Officer, testified: “A difficult to describe demonic power emanated from Hitler, and few were able not to fall under his spell. It was an influence which affected all soldiers in the same way and which is difficult to understand if one has not experienced it oneself.”
Another fascinating if controversial contemporary account was written by Hermann Rauschning, a high-ranking member of the German nobility, who wrote even before the outbreak of war that:
Hitler was abandoning himself to forces which were carrying him away – forces of dark and destructive violence. He imagined that he still had freedom of choice but he had long been in bondage to a magic which might have been described, not only in metaphor but in literal fact – as that of evil spirits.
For decades, in our materialist culture, no-one would take such an assertion seriously. Yet a postsecular view suggests that such impressions are within the bounds of possibility: that they may be real. The understanding offered by such a perspective takes us back to the intuitions of our ancestors: that such a man may have become possessed or acting as a channel for an immaterial being. In this case, one characterised by savagery and violence.
Further disturbing evidence came to light in a study carried out in 2003 of the books that Hitler had in his library. He owned more than 130 books on religious and spiritual subjects, in many of which he had highlighted sections of significance to him. One of the most heavily-marked was a mysterious volume by Dr. Ernst Schertel called “Magic: History, Theory, and Practice.”
Hitler’s annotations here are deeply revealing. The book harkened back to a time before institutional Christianity had decreed a universal morality to when the “rule of life was given by the will of the tribal God.” The god or his channel could govern in an “utterly autocratic fashion” and demand “blood and destruction”. In another place Hitler had underscored “all men of genius possessed the ability to harness demonic forces”. The book went on to articulate ways in which such forces could be contacted and harnessed.
There is far more evidence available; this essay can only provide a snapshot. I have listed works by historians brave enough to pursue this analysis at the end of this essay.
Yet accepting this explanation for Hitler’s power is challenging even to those who accept the reality of a spiritual dimension to life. Modern spirituality has a tendency to see all spiritual forces as inherently good, only twisted or maligned by human abuse or neglect. This is the viewpoint portrayed in the film Moana, which I discussed last time.
Surprisingly, some ancient religions echo this perspective. The wrath of the God of the Old Testament, for example, is usually provoked by the arrogance of humanity, who have neglected to worship and honour him. Greek literature and myth too is replete with stories of the devastating anger of the Gods. Yet it is always in response to defiance or neglect by humans who have become enamoured with their own power and forgotten their rightful, humble place. Our modern word “hubris” is in fact the ancient Greek term for this state of prideful being.
Yet I am not convinced that this perspective accounts for the force that moved through Hitler. One might, at a stretch, accept how the sacred presence, slighted and ignored, might visit us with disasters, even floods or fires, to remind us of its power. But would it really resort to the sort of cruelty we saw perpetrated by the Nazis? The impossible industrial barbarity of the Holocaust or the sadism of the experiments on human prisoners? In my heart, I feel something else must be at work.
This is the feeling Yeats encountered and captured in his poem “The Second Coming”, which is perhaps quoted more often than any other to encapsulate our times. Yet it is interesting that the famous lines of the first verse are what modern writers tend to focus on: “things fall apart”, “the centre cannot hold” or “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” I have deliberately left this verse out above to highlight the often overlooked second verse.
It is this part of the poem that connects with what I am tentatively proposing: that in the spirit realm, there are things – entities, presences, forces, their exact nature will always be unknowable – that are, in plain fact, evil. That now, in a reversal of the Christian vision of a Second Coming, we are instead witnessing the coming into the world of an infernal presence, one whose birth is bringing about a new era of brutality and devastation.
Next time, in the fourth and final essay of this series, I will attempt to highlight the evidence that I believe shows such a force may be present in our midst. Of course, these assertions will strike many of you as absurd. Yet it is useful always to remember that few people recognised the true nature of the Hitler regime until right after the end of the war when the horror of the Holocaust was revealed.
One of the few who did pinpoint the essence of Nazism early on was the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth who wrote in his diary in 1933:
People have not yet understood, not even today, that National Socialism is not a political but an infernal movement. It cannot change its intentions because from the first only one intention was instilled into it according to the unfathomable will of the Eternal: the intention to destroy. The man [i.e. Hitler] is one of the hundred thousand tails of Satan, the scourges of God. Every word from his mouth is spoken by the tongue of Lucifer personally.
Roth died just before the Second World War began and therefore did not live to see how his intuitions over Nazism would be proved right. Yet as early as 1934 he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel whose warnings may be useful to us today. It was called “The Antichrist” (though he was Jewish) and sought to show that:
The Antichrist has come: so disguised that we who have been expecting him for years cannot recognise him. Already he lives in our midst, among us… Long has he been pouring poison into the innocent souls of our children. But we do not notice! For we have been struck with blindness, with the blindness that it is written will befall us at the end of time. In fact, for a long time now we have not been able to recognise the name and face of things that we encounter… So we who have been blinded make ourselves believe that the Antichrist is not in the world, that we are not burning in the fire of his eyes, that we are not standing in the shadow of his wings.
Perhaps Roth and Yeats are right. Perhaps there are things on the move, things whose names we have forgotten or do not take seriously any more. They are recorded in stories we tell to our children before we tuck them into bed, yet when we close the covers and put the book away, we are confident that those presences remain on the shelf, not out here in our adult world of mortgages and emails and glasses of white wine.
Perhaps we are wrong. Perhaps the stories speak of something that will not stay confined between the leaves of the book. A presence seeping from our nightmares into the real world.
In the next essay, I will show you why I think that may be the case: to offer some of the evidence that I believe shows that presence in the shadows; to try to cure us of the blindness that Roth spoke of, before it is too late.
Further reading:
- Kurlander, Eric. Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (2017)
- Redles, David. Hitler’s Millennial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation (2005)
- Sickinger, Raymond. Hitler and the Occult: The Magical Thinking of Adolf Hitler (2004) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.0022-3840.2000.3402_107.x