ON JULY 2, 1936, A COTERIE OF HIGH-RANKING NAZIS, INCLUDING the national Labor Front leader Robert Ley and Deputy Führer Martin Bormann, descended on the central German city of Quedlinburg as guests of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. They found the streets newly swept and houses freshly painted. Nazi banners hung from the rooftops, and walls along the major thoroughfares were decked with garlands.
The group was greeted by the local chapter of Hitler Youth ranked three abreast with flags hanging from long poles. Accompanying them with lively marching tunes was an SS band. Ranks of steel-helmeted, black-uniformed SS troopers lined their route as Himmler himself led the party through winding cobbled streets to the city’s Castle Hill.1 The occasion was the one thousandth anniversary of the death of Heinrich the Fowler (876–936 CE), the medieval king who founded the Ottonian dynasty and pushed the Slavic tribes across the River Elbe to establish new boundaries for his budding empire. To the Nazis, he was the most Germanic of all the ancient German kings. For Himmler, there was a more personal interest.
The Reichsführer and his party stopped briefly to admire the city’s magnificent castle, then moved on to their ultimate destination, the medieval Quedlinburg Cathedral. There, in the colonnaded crypt beneath the nave, Himmler laid a wreath on the empty tomb of King Heinrich, praised his courage, and vowed to continue his mission in the east.
To historians, the ceremony at Quedlinburg reflected Himmler’s passion for history and hopes to rebuild Germany in an heroic image,2 but there seems to have been more to it than that. A year after the wreath-laying, he had the bones of King Heinrich carried into the cathedral in solemn procession to be reinterred in the original tomb. This was, he announced, a sacred site to which Germans might now make pilgrimage. Another year later, he ordered the cathedral shut to Christian worship and proceeded to turn it into a sort of SS shrine. Himmler was known for his desire to replace Christianity with a more thoroughbred Aryan religion, reviving old German gods like Wotan. Quedlinburg seems to have been the focus for this ambition. From 1938 to the arrival of American troops in 1945, the cathedral functioned as a mystical Teutonic sanctuary where Christian ritual was abandoned in favor of torch-lit SS ceremonials. In at least one of these, so author Lynn Nicholas assures us, spectators were treated to the apparently magical appearance of the Reichsführer-SS himself … through a secret compartment specially built in the church floor.3
From a twenty-first-century viewpoint, it all seems rather silly, but in 1972, while researching my own book on the esoteric beliefs and practices of Nazi Germany,4 I stumbled on an arresting suggestion that changed the whole complexion of these curious antics. Himmler, it seemed, had not confined himself to conjuring tricks. There were intimations that he had held midnight séances in the cathedral crypt designed to put him in contact with the spirit of Heinrich the Fowler, from whom he sought political advice.
I found this revelation chilling. Himmler was not only Reichsführer of the SS but head of the Gestapo—Nazi Germany’s infamous secret police—and the official ultimately responsible for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem,” a program of industrialized murder that resulted in some six million deaths. Was it possible that such a man had based his decisions on the whisperings of a spirit? What struck me as the horror of the situation was its mind-numbing irrationality. This was not a question of whether spirits existed but of Himmler’s perception of them. Had millions died because one silly little man believed he could talk to ghosts?
At first, I could find little reliable confirmation of the claims about midnight séances. All sorts of rumors were current—then and now—about Himmler’s activities at Quedlinburg, but popular opinion does not constitute proof. Indeed, several reliable historians have mentioned Himmler’s conviction that he was the reincarnation of Heinrich the Fowler, a belief that would surely rule out contacting the king as an independent spirit. But despite the problems, there eventually proved to be evidence.
Throughout much of his adult life, Himmler suffered grievously from stomach cramps, possibly nervous in origin. As Reichsführer, he found they often interfered with his work, but the efforts of Nazi doctors brought him little relief. Then, in 1942, a colleague recommended a Finnish masseur named Felix Kersten. Kersten held a degree in “scientific massage” awarded in Helsinki but had gone on to study a Tibetan system of bodywork under a Chinese practitioner named Dr. Ko. To Himmler’s surprise, Kersten’s ministrations dissolved his pain completely and while it returned when he was under pressure, Kersten’s magic hands could be relied upon to give him relief. After a few treatment sessions, Himmler issued an invitation for Kersten to become his personal masseur. Kersten, fearful of his life if he refused, moved to Berlin and took up his new post.
At first, Himmler remained firmly in charge, but gradually the balance of their relationship changed. Kersten discovered he could manipulate Himmler, particularly when the Reichsführer was in pain, and eventually used this ability to save Jewish lives. At the same time, Himmler came to trust Kersten implicitly and, while on the massage couch, would share confidences he was unlikely to reveal to many other people. Among these was the claim that he could call up spirits.
The choice of words is important. A spiritualist séance is a passive affair. In essence a medium will sit quietly and wait for spirits to make contact. In more primitive cultures, a shaman communicates by means of trance journeys to the spirit worlds. But calling up spirits implies a conjuration, some form of magical rite that places the necromancer in a position of power. Did Himmler, who was master of so much in Nazi Germany, believe himself to be the master of spirits as well? According to Heinz Höhne, this is exactly what Himmler believed.
Höhne, who died in 2010, was a respected German historian specializing in the Nazi period. Among several other works, he produced a definitive history of the SS.5 In it, he had this to say:
Himmler was continually entering into contact with the great men of the past. He believed he had the power to call up spirits and hold regular meetings with them, though only … with the spirits of men who had been dead for hundreds of years. When he was half asleep, Himmler used to say, the spirit of King Heinrich would appear and give him valuable advice.6
Almost certainly, the term half asleep refers to the hypnogogic state between sleeping and waking, which is the closest most of us get to full-blown trance. If so, it marks Himmler as a medium as well as a necromancer, for psychical research has shown the hypnogogic state is a gateway to peculiar experiences, including visions of spirit entities. Furthermore, writing specifically about Quedlinburg and Heinrich the Fowler, Höhne states:
On each anniversary of the King’s death, at the stroke of midnight in the cold crypt of the cathedral, Himmler would commune silently with his namesake.7
Of course, even among the Nazi hierarchy, Himmler was an unusual, eccentric, sometimes diabolical figure. General Friedrich Hossbach, Hitler’s onetime military assistant, called him “Hitler’s evil spirit.” General Heinz Guderian, who in 1944 became acting chief of staff, thought of him as “a man from another planet.” Carl Burckhardt, high commissioner of the League of Nations, found him “sinister … inhuman” and with “a touch of the robot” about him. Armaments Minister Albert Speer thought he was “half schoolmaster, half crank.”
Evidence of the crankish aspect is not difficult to find. In 1935, Himmler founded an elite research organization called the Ahnenerbe. Encouraged (and funded) by the Reichsführer, the Ahnenerbe’s multiple institutes investigated such pressing matters as the magical properties of the bells in Oxford cathedrals (which had clearly protected the city from Luftwaffe attack), the strength of the Rosicrucian fraternity, the esoteric significance of the top hat at Eton and whether Hitler shared the same Aryan ancestry as Guatama Buddha.8 Even his crowning achievement, the establishment of the sinister SS, involved an extreme irony—incredible though it sounds, the organization was structurally based on the Jesuit Order.9Against such a background, belief in spirits and claims to command them are not entirely surprising, and might easily be dismissed as the delusions of a lone fanatic. But when I investigated further, I discovered a whole historical mythology suggesting Himmler was not the only Nazi listening to spirit voices. I also discovered that spirit advice was not confined to Germany.
Many people use the term spirit to mean only a soul of the dead, but this is a limited definition. Every major world religion has its tradition of angels and demons. Folklore is crammed with tales of elves, fauns, fairies, sylphs, undines, and other elemental creatures. All are associated with spirit worlds of one sort or another. Even Almighty God is, for most believers, a spirit. Consequently, academics have now largely adopted the expression “intermediary beings” to describe the type of phenomena that arose in Nazi Germany. The use of the word spirit or spirits should be taken to mean one or other of the intermediary beings of contemporary academic study, with its precise interpretation drawn from the context.
Historical examination shows that this is a reasonable definition. Although a spirit may seem a long way from an angel or a demon, recorded belief in such intermediaries emerged mainly from a combination of Jewish and Greek ideas about noncorporeal entities (i.e., spirits) capable of influencing human life. A gradual metamorphosis is clear in the development of such beliefs. Interestingly, demons were not at first seen as evil. The Greek word daimōn was originally used to mean a god or divine power, and later extended to denote the sort of influence on human affairs that we would translate as “fate.” In the sixth century BCE, the Greek poet Hesiod characterized the people of the Golden Age as “pure demons, dwelling on the earth … delivering from harm and guardians of mortal men”—that is to say, entirely benevolent creatures. Soon it seemed that mortal men themselves became demons after death, still without negative connotations. The Greek philosopher Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE) was famously advised by a daimon, whose inward voice spoke to him only when he was about to make a mistake. Nor was he unique. There was a widespread belief in personal daimons as tutelary spirits. In his Meditations, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius remarked that “Zeus has given a particle of himself as leader and guide to everybody.”
But daimons did not remain benevolent, although the process of transformation was gradual. One of the earliest signs of things to come were the teachings of the third-century BCE philosopher Chrysippus, who claimed the gods punished the unrighteous through the use of evil demons. An ancient hermetic text, Asclepius, tentatively dated to the first century CE, contains the intriguing information that the statues of the gods seen in temples might prove harmful if certain demons were conjured into them. This was not to suggest that all demons were wicked, but it certainly pointed to the fact that some were now believed to be.
At much the same time, the idea arose that demons living in the air played an important role in the fate of human souls. It was believed that after death a chief demon would act as a judge to decide whether the individual merited punishment or reward. It is easy to see how this notion foreshadowed more developed religious ideas of God’s postmortem judgment separating saints from sinners, with the latter condemned to eternal punishment at the hands of the chief demon himself, Satan. By the second century CE, the Chaldean Oracles show the modern distinction between good and bad daimons, with the former now usually called “angels” and the latter “demons.”
A developing Judaism began by accepting that other peoples were entitled to their own gods but then insisted any other god (not to mention several classes of mythological beings) must be subservient to JHVH in his royal court. And even this grudging acceptance eventually collapsed when it was decided that foreign gods must actually be evil. “All the gods of the heathen are devils,” sang the psalmist.10 Christianity, and later Islam, adopted these ideas wholesale, populating their own anti-pantheons with hellish hosts. But however wicked they became, demons remained essentially spirits. They inhabited an otherworld and could be visited or summoned.
The development of angels followed a somewhat similar and equally convoluted path. At first, the distinction between good and evil seemed largely arbitrary, even where the entity was perceived to be on God’s side. The Destroying Angel who slaughtered the firstborn of Egypt11 was working under JHVH’s orders, as was the case when he returned to murder selected Israelites following David’s census.12 Satan himself underwent a gradual metamorphosis from simple messenger of God13 (the Greek angelos means “messenger”) to the dislikable Accuser of Job at the heavenly court14 to the archenemy not only of humanity as a whole but of God himself. The Fall of Satan seems to mark the clearest demarcation point between angels and demons, although his followers were still at times called “fallen angels.” The situation was neatly rationalized in the Qumran community where it was believed that God created two important entities, the Spirit of Truth, aka the Prince of Light, and the Spirit of Lies, often called the Prince of Darkness. As a consequence, two classes of beings appeared—the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. Inevitably, they went to war.
Early Christians were quick to adopt and combine the various forms of Greek and Jewish demonology/angelology that existed in their day. In the Gospels, Jesus frequently confronts demons of one sort or another, from his temptation by Satan in the wilderness15 to his banishment of evil spirits into swine.16 New Testament references to angels are equally frequent, and in the Annunciation we find an angel in its archetypal role of messenger. As mentioned above, the original Greek of “angel” translates as “messenger,” but the entities were, of course, believed to be much more than that. The Christian theologian, Clement of Alexandria, quotes an Orphic hymn that refers to angels surrounding the throne of God and caring for humanity. In the Near East, the old pagan gods, including Zeus and Jupiter, sometimes attracted the term angelos, and in the dark, crypt-like adyton under the temple of Apollo at Clarus, the gods themselves delivered an oracle in which they claimed to be “only a small part of [the Supreme] God … his angels.” Their statement is preserved to this day on a wall in the Lycian city of Oinoanda, now in southwestern Turkey.
Neoplatonism brought a further refinement to humanity’s ideas about angels by expanding the term to mean the various levels of being between heaven and earth, thus allowing for paradoxical concepts like angelic demons. It had all become very convoluted, but the complications arose from human interpretations, not from the entities themselves. The same held true for less well-known intermediary beings. The inhabitants of folklore were reported in a multitude of differing forms, from elves to elementals, but could reasonably be classified as spirits in their essence. Thus, daimons remained daimons and, as we shall see, daimon spirits were everywhere. Nor is any of this an academic exercise. As spirits changed their form of manifestation down the centuries, one thing remained constant: the flow of reports that claimed humans could and did communicate with these Whisperers.
This is a hugely important and overlooked aspect in most histories. We talk about the influence of religion and various belief systems on politics and society, but the supernatural is still mostly taboo. Yet my studies—and, indeed, personal experience in the field—all indicate that the supernatural, real or not, has had a profound effect on certain individuals, and through them on society as a whole … often in astounding ways. Thus the same basic question returns to haunt us: to what extent has contact with a “spirit world”—whether one believes in such a thing or not—influenced the course of human history?
For conventional historians, the answer seems to be not at all. But this conclusion is reached by ignoring the evidence rather than examining it. Spirit contact lies at the heart of shamanism, the prehistoric belief system that guides, to this day, tribal communities throughout the world. It lies at the heart of almost every ancient religion, including those of the classical civilizations that laid down the intellectual and political foundations of our twenty-first-century world. It appears in the visions of prophets and psychics whose doctrines are accepted by men and women in positions of power. It arises, often heavily disguised, in systems of modern psychology and the experiences of individuals moved to experiment with mind-altering drugs or mystical techniques.
In examining these factors, and more, this book aims to correct the record by investigating a recurring theme that most historians elect to ignore. The results are just as chilling, but far more wide-ranging, than Himmler’s antics in the crypt of Quedlinburg Cathedral, for it has become clear that, whether we realize it or not, your life and mine have been profoundly influenced by voices from the Beyond.