Through the Wardrobe

Could it be true? Could the magic be real? Does evil stalk our world in much the same way it stalks the worlds of fiction? Have men and women lived through a real-life war of Light and Darkness? I’ve delved into some of history’s gloomiest corners to show that C. S. Lewis may have themed his work on a magical conflict he actually experienced.

The Chronicles of Narnia is a seven-book tale of good versus evil—the age-old war of Light and Darkness. It’s a story you’ll also find in the Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series, and many other fantasy novels—a heady brew of myth and magic, brave heroes, dark villains, mystic artifacts, and occult powers.

The author of the Narnia chronicles, Clive Staples Lewis, fought in the First World War. He joined the British Army in 1917, and was commissioned an officer in the third Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry. He fought at the Somme and was subsequently wounded during the Battle of Arras.

He was forty years old when the Second World War broke out, a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. Just four years after the war ended, he began writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first of his Narnia Chronicles. Was the book inspired, at least in part, by the war he’d just lived through?

Conventional historians dismiss the notion. They see it as a conflict arising out of political, social, and economic issues. Your school history books will typically lay emphasis on the Treaty of Versailles (which ended World War I with humiliating terms for Germany), on the doctrine of lebensraum (living space) which fuelled Hitler’s expansionist policies, on secret Nazi rearmament, on the Allied policy of appeasement that encouraged Nazi ambitions.

But while all these factors were unquestionably relevant, there were deeper, darker forces at play, still largely unsuspected more than sixty years later, yet perhaps sensed by the finely tuned instincts of an author who lived at the time. Let’s examine the evidence for those forces now.

In October 1907, an eighteen-year-old Austrian schoolboy applied for admission to the Viennese Academy of Art and was turned down because his test drawings were poor. Instead of returning to his home at Linz, he stayed in Vienna. Even after his money ran out in 1907, he hung on, living like a tramp, for six more years.

According to Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, who was confidential adviser to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during WWII, Hitler developed an interest in Medieval magic and made a profound study of Oriental mysticism, astrology, yoga, and hypnosis. One of the places where he followed these interests (claims the U.K. historian Trevor Ravenscroft) was the secondhand bookshop of a man named Ernst Pretzsche.

Pretzsche was a baddie to match the worst villains of Narnia—a fat, sinister, toad-like hunchback with warts. He had something of a reputation for encouraging students along the troubled road of occult practice. When he saw the sort of books Hitler looked at, he took an interest at once. Before long, Pretzsche had become the young man’s teacher of the dark arts.

As a sorcerer’s apprentice, Hitler quietly abandoned any leanings he might have had toward mysticism and yoga and turned instead to what’s called the Western Esoteric tradition, a body of magical lore passed down the centuries by European wizards. He embarked on a daily routine of graded meditations and visualization exercises based on secret symbolism Pretzsche claimed to have discovered in the Grail Cycle—the ancient body of stories told in Medieval times about King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

The training took years and may well have been the thing that kept Hitler in Vienna long after any sensible young man would have gone home. But the day eventually came when Pretzsche told Hitler he was ready for initiation into the deeper mysteries of magic. And at this point their relationship took a distinctly sinister turn.

Pretzsche’s father was a botanical chemist who had spent much of his career in Mexico studying the peyote cactus. Pretzsche himself lived for many years in South America and, upon his father’s death, brought back specimens of the cactus to Europe, where it was completely unknown at the time. He still had these specimens when he met up with Hitler.

Peyote is a hallucinogenic plant that, today, is seen as part of the world’s “recreational” drug problem. Pretzsche used it for a very different purpose. During a ritual ceremony of initiation, he fed it to Hitler as a religious sacrament. To an unsuspecting youth from a culture that knew nothing whatsoever about psychedelic drugs, the effect must have been devastating, whirling him out of ordinary consciousness into a vision of his destiny that would later plunge the whole world into war.

The experience changed Hitler profoundly. August Kubizek, a young man who occasionally shared rooms with him, remarked, “I was struck by something strange which I had never noticed before . . . it was as if another being spoke out of his body and moved him as much as it did me.”

Hitler left Vienna in 1913. When WWI broke out the following year, he enlisted in the First Company of the 16^th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. A fellow volunteer was Rudolf Hess, a young German with occult contacts about whom we’ll hear a little later.

Hitler acted as a motorcycle courier throughout most of the war, and was twice wounded and once decorated for bravery. Shortly after the conflict ended he met up with Dietrich Eckart, a central figure in the Thule-Gesellschaft, one of Germany’s most powerful secret societies.

Thule-Gesellschaft was a society with some very weird practices. Members involved themselves in ritualistic séances—special meetings, the purpose of which is to make contact with the dead—using a Russian peasant woman as a spirit medium. Past members of the Thule Group, returning from beyond the grave, were called up during these nightmarish rituals and delivered messages through the medium. One such spirit was the Comtesse von Westarp, a former secretary of the Group who had been murdered by the Communists. Her ghost announced the coming of a new Messiah, a leader preparing to take charge of the Thule, and, indeed, the whole German nation.

Dietrich Eckart searched diligently for the new Messiah and soon decided he had found him in Adolf Hitler. The willing pupil was swiftly initiated, taught the secret doctrines of humanity’s ancient history, and instructed in the techniques of modern sorcery.

With his mystical background, his training at the hands of Pretzsche, his drug-induced contact with spirit worlds, and his steely conviction of his personal destiny, Hitler proved an apt choice. Before long, the Thule Group was searching for a political front that would enable them to seize power over the entire nation. They found it in the German Workers’ Party, a tiny right-wing group Hitler had investigated in his post-war work with the German government in 1919.

Toward the end of the First World War, Hitler fell victim to a British gas attack in France. Temporarily blinded and in a state of collapse, he was removed to a hospital where he eventually learned of the German surrender on November 11, 1918.

After his discharge from hospital, he remained in the army for a short time, drawing army rations and wearing an army uniform. He volunteered for guard duty at a prisoner-of-war camp, but by the end of January 1919 the camp was closed. He returned to Munich and drifted into a job as Instruction Officer with the army’s Seventh District Command. It was as much a political as military post—he was required to indoctrinate the troops against socialist, pacifist, and democratic ideas.

Part of his job was to investigate some of the small political parties that were mushrooming in Germany at the time, largely with a view toward finding out which of them was Communist inspired. One that caught his attention was the suspiciously named German Workers’ Party.

The Party was not, however, Communist or otherwise leftist in its views. If anything, it stood as far right as Hitler himself. It was tiny and poor (at the time of Hitler’s investigation, the treasury stood at less than eight marks), but it exercised sufficient fascination for him to join within weeks.

With Thule Group backing, the German Workers’ Party grew dramatically. By 1920 it had changed its name to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—or, as it is better known today, the Nazi Party. By 1921, Hitler was its undisputed leader.

In November 1923, as head of a private army of several thousand storm troopers, Hitler attempted to take over the government of Germany by force—his famous but completely unsuccessful Kapp Putsch. The fiasco might well have ended National Socialism for good, except that Hitler used his remarkable powers of oratory to turn his subsequent treason trial into a propaganda victory of international proportions. He constantly harped on the idea that only strong leadership by someone like himself could solve Germany’s current economic and political problems. As a result, he received no more than a short jail sentence and won the support of large numbers of his fellow countrymen.

Ominously, the Thule Group’s Dietrich Eckart remarked on his deathbed just one month later, “Follow Hitler. He will dance, but it is I who have called the tune. I have initiated him into the secret doctrine, opened his centres of vision and given him the means to communicate with the Powers. Do not mourn for me: I shall have influenced history more than any other German.”

Hitler emerged from jail in 1925 to find his National Socialist Party in such a mess that he practically had to rebuild it. From 1926 onward, it showed a small, steady growth, slowed by laws that put severe limits on its activities. Then, toward the end of 1930, an economic storm broke over Germany. Unemployment skyrocketed and social structures began to crumble. The development was to prove good news for Hitler. Frightened people swarmed to his cause. Soon he began to attract a type of mass following he had never achieved before.

On January 30, 1933, following one of the most turbulent political periods of German history, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the German State. From doss house to Chancellery . . . It was a rags-to-riches story of epic proportions, and all the more unlikely when one considers its central character—small in height, unimpressive in appearance, narrow-minded, lazy, and ill-educated. It almost seemed—as the Thule Group certainly believed—that some dark force was working through him.

Haushofer was a professor at the University of Munich and a former teacher of Rudolf Hess, who introduced Hitler to him. Haushofer, who also belonged to an organization called the Vril Society, was an initiate of a Japanese secret society and a man well experienced in practical magical work.

Haushofer was a Bavarian born in 1869. For most of his working life he was an outstanding professional soldier. He received an early appointment to the Staff Corps, worked for the German Federal Intelligence Service in India and Japan, spoke several Oriental languages fluently, mastered Sanskrit, and became something of an authority on Oriental mysticism.

After his appointment to the University of Munich, Haushofer’s ideas spread rapidly throughout Germany. It was he who taught the doctrine of lebensraum, which held that the German people (as a master race) were entitled to expand their country eastward, and laced it with an overlay of racialism and mysticism.

While his interest in the occult was not particularly well-known during his lifetime, he did build up a reputation as a psychic during WWI. When he was introduced to Hitler in the early 1920s, he may have recognized the dark-eyed young fanatic as a fellow spirit. Certainly Haushofer, like Ekhart, became convinced that, in Hitler, he had found a channel for occult forces. He visited Hitler often during his imprisonment and was still his confidant and teacher after Hitler came to power in 1933. During that time, he initiated Hitler into deeper and darker occult secrets, culminating in the doctrine of the superman, which claimed that pure-blood Germans were far superior to just about anybody else on the planet.

Haushofer’s son, Albrecht, was completely different from his father. As a Staff Major in the German Army, he was involved in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 and sentenced to death because of it. He had no sympathy with the dark forces he believed to be playing around the Führer. Nor had he the slightest illusions about his father’s part in the esoteric drama. In his condemned cell he wrote a poem that was found in his pocket after he had been machine-gunned to death by the SS. Three lines of the work sum up the influence of the master magician Haushofer on his Satanic Führer:

My father broke the seal
He sensed not the breath of the Evil One
But set him free to roam the world

Nazi obsession with the occult did not end when the conspirators came to power and found themselves facing the massive problems of running what was then a shattered country. If anything, it flowered, for Hitler and his new Deputy Führer Hess were not the only senior Nazis with an interest in dark arts.

The overweight airman Herman Goering, given the responsibility of building up the Luftwaffe (German Air Force), was a Thule Group member who graduated from mind-expanding drugs to heroin. He had been “cured” once of narcotic addiction in Langbro Asylum, but the appetite remained. Now he felt his magical powers were great enough to allow him to hold the drug in check. But he was to find, in the bitterness of a few short years, that they were not.

The plump, robotic little civil servant Heinrich Himmler translated his own occult dreams into a black-uniformed reality when he established the SS, an elite militia organized on the pattern of the Jesuit Order. This grim, inverted “Society of Jesus” was headed by a thirteen-strong inner sanctum of generals. They met secretly in a castle in Westphalia to perform esoteric rituals designed to attune them to the heroes of Germany’s ancient past. Himmler himself was fascinated by these towering figures of history and believed himself guided by them. He performed a solitary séance once a year in the crypt of Quedlinburg Cathedral to contact the spirit of his Saxon namesake, Heinrich the Fowler, and seek advice on matters of state. (Himmler believed himself to be the reincarnation of King Heinrich, though oddly enough failed to see the contradiction involved in calling up his own ghost.)

Esoteric ideas went far beyond the actions of individuals. They quickly came to influence Nazi policy as a whole. This was nowhere more evident than in the notorious “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” To top-level Nazis, Jews were the remnant of those subhuman races which were spoken of in their weird version of occult prehistory. Jews became the target of deliberate and increasing persecution, culminating in an all-out effort to wipe them out completely—an attempt at genocide that cost 6,000,000 lives.

The Nazi Propaganda Minister, Dr. Josef Goebbels, invented reasons for this policy (the Jews were “too rich,” “too powerful,” or “owed no allegiance to the German nation”), but the real motive was occult. No one bothered to invent reasons for the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Romani nation, but tens of thousands of gypsies also died in accordance with the doctrine that, as subhumans, they were a biological barrier to the course of esoteric evolution.

The Christian churches, visible symbols of the Forces of Light, became a further target for persecution. Freed from all restraint, the maniac Lord of Thule, Alfred Rosenberg (who became the foremost philosopher of Nazism and an influential force in the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945), attempted to establish a Nazi Anti-Church, with the Bible replaced by Hitler’s turgid autobiography Mein Kampf and an iron sword beside the altar.

The odious Dr. Theodor Morell, whose membership in the Thule Group supposedly gave him lunatic insights into healing unavailable to lesser mortals, became the Führer’s personal doctor, and proceeded to wreck Hitler’s health with quack pills and potions and nonsensical injections.

Despite an early wave of persecution of occultists—or at least those occultists who were not involved with Thule or Vril—top Nazis continued to consult astrologers and mediums in the hope of obtaining supernatural guidance in their aspirations.

When Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, one of his first actions was to order the seizure of a mystic artifact—the Lancea Longini, or Spear of Destiny. This ancient weapon, purported to be the spear that pierced the side of Christ while he was dying on the cross, formed part of the Hapsburg dynasty’s imperial regalia stored in Vienna. Hitler seems to have been convinced the spear had magical powers. (The spear stayed in Germany until the American general George S. Patton—himself a man of esoteric convictions—arranged for its return to Austria in 1945.)

The lunatic dance continued as the world plunged into war. Hitler made tactical decisions based on psychic impressions and intuition. Haushofer successfully urged that military strategy be based on esoteric considerations and harnessed to esoteric goals. A Pendulum Institute was established in Berlin so that the location of Britain’s Atlantic convoys might be determined by dowsers (people with a psychic ability to find water and minerals) operating divining rods over maps. Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland to make peace with Britain on the basis of a vivid dream and astrological advice. (The author Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond and himself involved in the British Secret Intelligence Service, suggested that the British magician Aleister Crowley be hired to interview him.)

Esoteric considerations halted work for months on Hitler’s advanced rocket weapons. A team of top scientists—and some of the latest defense equipment—was diverted to a Baltic island in an attempt to find out whether the Earth was really a bubble within a universe of infinite rock (an occult theory going around Nazi circles at the time).

Himmler tried to communicate with his beloved Führer by telepathy. An entire section of the SS was permanently devoted to time-wasting studies like the occult properties of the bells at Oxford or the esoteric significance of the top hat at Eton school. Expeditions were mounted to Tibet, which was believed to be the magical capital of the planet. The war was conducted under guidance from the Beyond, with lines of communication established at secret Thule Group meetings by means of a type of tarot pack and, oddly enough, a short-wave radio. (Members believed they were talking to the “King of Terror,” a superhuman being living somewhere in the Himalayas.) Blood sacrifice became the order of the day, on a scale never before experienced by suffering humanity.

And in 1945 it all collapsed, as the occult supermen of Nazi Germany were finally defeated by soldiers who, by and large, saw themselves as no more than ordinary men and women with a job to do, but might, from another, more romantic (but equally real) perspective, be described as warriors in the service of the Light.

The Chronicles of Narnia are not, of course, an allegory of WWII. C. S. Lewis would have been well equipped to recognize strange undercurrents in the conflict that raged around him; although by the time WWII broke out Lewis was again a committed Christian, he had temporarily lost his faith in 1911 and taken an interest in mythology and the occult. But even apart from the central theme of Light versus Darkness, there are elements within the whole sorry Nazi story that may have proven inspirational to C. S. Lewis.

The boy Edmund’s betrayal of his family to the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was precisely what happened again and again in Germany throughout the 1930s. Children who fell under the spell of Nazi authority, just as Edmund fell under the spell of the Witch, were encouraged to report any transgressions of their parents or their siblings. Many of those who did saw family members dragged off to the concentration camps or gas chambers.

The rise of the White Witch herself parallels that of Hitler. Like Hitler, she appeared benign on the surface but quickly proved to be a tyrant who usurped power over her native land. She even placed a ban on Christmas, a move that echoed the ideas of Hitler’s closest henchman, Heinrich Himmler, who tried to abolish Christmas, replacing the celebration with an old pagan festival “for the sake of the children.”

But the oddest parallel of all is the icy landscape of the White Witch’s perpetual winter. Perhaps the strangest of all the occult influences on Adolf Hitler was that of Hans Hörbiger, a German engineer who developed a cosmology based on falling moons and the eternal conflict of Fire and Ice.

Like the Witch, Hitler believed himself to have control over the weather—a lunatic idea that played a major part in his downfall. Historians agree that the turning point of WWII came when a previously victorious Germany invaded Russia. Hitler was strongly advised against the timing of his move. More than a century earlier, Napoleon had attempted a similar invasion and been defeated by the brutal Russian winter. But Hitler was convinced he had formed a magical alliance with the Powers of Ice and did not bother to equip his troops properly for the approaching snows. They died by the thousands and the tide of war turned.

Herbie Brennan has a well-established career writing for the children’s market—from picture books to teenage fiction, from game books to school curriculum non-fiction. He has produced more than 100 books, many of them international bestsellers, including his GrailQuest series and the teen novel Faerie Wars, which was a New York Times bestseller along with achieving bestseller status in more than twenty overseas editions.