The Magic Circle (50 page)

Despite this supposed Nordic superiority, the runic alphabet was a late development—around 300 B.C.—possibly borrowed by the Teutons from the Celts or another group. As with previous cultures, however, the skill of writing and the runes themselves were invested with magical, even divine, significance.

The
Hagalrune
is the ninth letter of the runic alphabet. Nine is a very powerful Nordic number: the
Havamal
, part of the famous Icelandic epic the
Edda
, tells us that the Norse god Wotan had to hang on the World Tree for nine days and nights in order to become initiated into the power and mystery of the runes.

Nine was the most important number to Hitler: the date November 9 carried mystical meaning for him: as he said, “The ninth of November 1923 was the most important day of my life.” That was the day of the Munich
putsch
that sent him to jail, where he wrote
Mein Kampf
. But November 9 is an important date in the history of our part of the world. As well, it is the date of Napoleon’s coup ending the French Revolution, the death of Charles de Gaulle, the German revolution resulting in the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm at the end of World War I, the abdication of Ludwig III of Bavaria who founded the Second Reich, and also
Kristallnacht
, that night in 1938 when riots of broken glass against the Jews took place all over Austria and Germany.

But the
Hagal
rune has other meanings of importance. It stands for the sound equal to our alphabetical letter
h
—a letter that does not exist in the Greek alphabet. This is, by no coincidence, the letter beginning the last names of both Adolf
Hitler
and Kaspar
Hauser
. That the rune was a magical talisman for Hitler is borne out by the curious fact that many of his inner circle also had names that began with
H
.

Heinrich
Himmler
the occultist, head of the widely feared
Schutzstaffel
, or SS. “Putzi”
Hanfstaengl
, head of the Nazi foreign press department. Reinhard
Heydrich
, the butcher of Prague, head of the SD, whose assassination during the war led to the Nazi massacre of an entire Czechoslovakian village. And the Führer’s closest friend, Rudolf
Hess
, who helped draft
Mein Kampf
and later rose to be second in command to Hitler. Hess was born and raised in Egypt, where he absorbed many occult teachings, too. Hess introduced Hitler to his former professor Karl
Haushofer
, founder of German geopolitics and the Nazis’ favorite theorist. Then there was the Nazi philosopher Martin
Heidegger
. And Hitler’s personal photographer Heinrich
Hoffmann
, who was instrumental in his rise and who introduced the Führer to his assistant, the woman Hitler would marry just before his death, Eva Braun. And in the nuclear field, the chemist Otto
Hahn
, who, with Lise Meitner, conducted the first successful fission experiment; and Werner
Heisenberg
, who was in charge of Hitler’s atomic bomb project.

There were many who shared Hitler’s early interests, such as Hans
Horbiger
, father of the
Welteislehre
or Theory of World Ice—the idea that ice ages were caused by planetary collisions and, before each age, fabled cities like Atlantis, Hyperborea, and Ultima Thule sank or vanished beneath the ground along with their people. During such cataclysms, great seas became deserts like the Gobi, where underground kingdoms still exist and thrive today, like Dacian’s lost cities of Solomon. Horbiger maintained that the Lord of the World would rise at the dawn of the coming aeon—a theory so popular that the Nazis legitimized its study into an official science.

Another contact of Hitler associated with the
Hagal
rune was noted astrologer and psychic Erik Jan
Hanussen
, who cast Hitler’s horoscope on Christmas of 1932. He and Hitler had met as early as 1926, at the home of a wealthy Berlin socialite, and Hanussen had given him advice ever since—especially in speaking and body techniques for maximum hypnotic effect upon large crowds. In the year-end horoscope Hanussen predicted success, but only if “adverse forces” currently opposing Hitler—and there were many—were overcome. Hitler could prevail by eating a mandrake root dug by the light of a full moon from a garden at his birthplace, Braunau-am-Inn. Hanussen himself traveled there, dug the root, and on New Year’s Day delivered it to Hitler where he was staying at his leased cottage in the Obersalzburg.

The very night he received his horoscope and ate the mandrake root, Adolf Hitler went with Eva Braun, Putzi Hanfstaengl, and some other friends to see a performance of Richard Wagner’s opera
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
. As it was later reported in Hanfstaengl’s diary, after the opera Hitler gave a lengthy commentary—for it is known he had committed all of Wagner’s works to memory—about the hidden meaning Wagner had incorporated in his libretto. When Hitler left the supper at the Hanfstaengls’ that night, he signed their guest book and made a point of remarking the date: January 1, 1933.

He told his friend Putzi: “This year belongs to us.”

From that moment onward, Hitler’s fortunes indeed changed. In the first month of 1933 Adolf Hitler went from being the widely caricatured hysterical buffoon who headed up a divided and unpopular political party to being sworn in, on the thirtieth of January, as chancellor of Germany. It was one hundred years since the soil of Germany was consecrated, in 1833, with the spilling of the “royal blood” of Kaspar Hauser.

When Wolfgang finished this story, we were headed up the long road that passed through the rolling hills and high open meadow toward the white-and-gold-walled monastery of Melk at the top, overlooking the broad, fertile Danube river valley. We pulled onto a broad gravel apron. Wolfgang switched off the engine and turned to me.

“There is one more
H
who was tied to the power of the
Hagal
rune, one that may well be the most significant,” he told me. “During the period the young Adolf Hitler lived as a struggling artist in Vienna, the famous father of Germanic paganism, Guido von List, was living there too. List had had a mystical experience in the year 1902, while in his fifties. Recovering from cataract surgery, he went blind for eleven months. During this time he believed he had rediscovered, through occult insight, the long-lost meanings, origins, and powers of the runes. He also claimed he’d received information about an elite order of priests of Wotan existing in Germany in ancient times, and he soon established a modern-day order of that priesthood.

“In the first century, the historian Tacitus had divided the Germans into three tribes. List maintained that these ‘tribes’ had really been castes: that the outer circle, the Ingaevones, were farmers, and the next, the Istaevones, were military, but the inner circle, the Hermiones, were sacred priest-kings who guarded the secret of the runes.

“So profound did many regard these concepts that by 1908 the List Society for Preservation of Germanic Heritage was created, numbering among its members some of the wealthiest, most prominent people in the German-speaking world. Its fervent following was almost like a new religion. Later it grew into a moving force in the zealous nationalistic movement that led to the First World War. In 1911 List formed a select inner circle within the Society, based on the pagan priesthood. To lend the name a more German-sounding ring, he called it the
Armanenschaft
. Only the members of this new priesthood itself were fully aware that the
Hagal
rune was the secret, unspoken power contained within this name.…”

Wolfgang paused and looked at me, as if expecting some reply.

“You mean, the name Hermione?” I said carefully.

I had, of course, observed the resemblance of this turn-of-the-century Teutonic
Armanenschaft
priesthood to the name of an ancestress in my own family, Hermione. And I also saw, with an uneasy twinge, that until now the former Dutch orphan and boat person had remained a sketchy figure who seemed to have done little with her reputedly haunting beauty except marry twice, inherit money, and die young.

“An interesting name, don’t you think?” he said, smiling strangely. “In myth, she was the daughter of Helen of Troy, abandoned at age nine when Helen eloped with Paris and the Trojan War began. In Greek the word
herm
means pillar—the real meaning of the name of those ancient tribes at the absolute geographical center of Germany, and of course the name of the runic priesthood, too: the pillars. So you see, if Hermione means Pillar Queen, it’s the woman around whom everything revolves. The one who, herself, must be the Axis.”

THE MOTHERS

MEPHISTOPHELES:

A great mystery I’ll now unfold
.

There are goddesses enthroned in solitude, sublime
,

Beyond place, beyond time
.

Only to think of them makes my blood run cold
.

They are the Mothers!

FAUST:

The Mothers, the Mothers! It has a wonderful sound!…

How do I reach them?

MEPHISTOPHELES:

There’s no path to the unreachable, no map to the unmappable
.

There are no locks, no bolts, no barriers there
.

Can you envision emptiness everywhere?
…

Here, take this key to sniff out the true path from all the others
,

Follow it down. It will take you to the Mothers
.

—Johann Wolfgang Goethe,
Faust

Who dares [to love] misery

and embrace the form of Death
,

To dance in destruction’s dance
—

to
him, the Mother comes
.

—Vivekananda

My grandmother Pandora might have set things in motion by scattering the contents of that box among members of my family, but it now looked like she wasn’t the only contender in this game. It was hammered home to me that there were
two
mothers—Pandora and Hermione—who’d spawned all those other recipients of my grandmother’s bequest. Like the nails hammered into the
Stock-im-Eisen
, I felt this new axis, Hermione the pillar queen, might help tap into something too.

When it came right down to it, what did I really know about Hermione Behn, the mother of Zoe, Earnest, and Lafcadio? It mattered little whether any or all the stories I’d heard of her were true—whether, as Laf claimed, she’d been a poor Dutch orphan and later a rich South African widow or, as Wolfgang said, she was the namesake of a secret Wotanist-runic-Aryan priesthood, the
Armanenschaft
. So far everything about her from alpha to omega was Greek to me.

But of course, that was the one clue I’d fished from all the opinions, myths, and maybe out-and-out fictions I’d been fed these past few days—the very clue Hitler himself might have been hunting for here at the monastery of Melk. If Hermione connoted ‘axis’ in Greek, and if there was really some geographical connection to mythology as everyone seemed to think, then the important Hermione—the Hermione I should be looking for—wasn’t likely to be found in a phone book, a family album, or a history of early Germanic tribes. It had to be found on a map.

When Wolfgang and I came into the library’s entrance hall, I saw it at once: On the far wall, beneath a slab of glass, was a hand-tinted antique map of Europe written in medieval Germanic script. With Wolfgang, I went over and stood before it. Had it been here seventy-five years ago when the young Adolf Hitler walked through these doors?

The typed legend on the wall said, in German, French, and English, that it was from the ninth century, the time of Charlemagne, and depicted important religious sites throughout Europe—churches, shrines, and sanctuaries established since the beginning of the Christian era. Since a Greek name like Hermione seemed to point to a Greek location, it took only a quick scan to find it.

Hermione was a seaport on the southeast coast of the Peloponnesus. On this map, a Christian church was marked there with a tiny cross and a first-century date. Interestingly, it was surrounded by four other marked sites that were identified with the sun god Apollo. So what had clearly been an important pagan site may have been converted, as Dacian Bassarides described yesterday, from worship of a prior aeon’s gods to those of a new one. If his idea was right, holy sites of the age of Aries would now be replaced with sites of the new age that had just been dawning two thousand years ago: Pisces, fisher of men, and his mother Virgo, the celestial Virgin.

If Hermione represented an axis on the world grid even before Christianity, it should be connected with earlier pagan sites bearing symbols like Aries the ram and Taurus the bull. Hermione was situated facing Crete, where an earlier culture, the Minoan, coexistent with Egypt, had once flourished. I traced a line from Hermione to Crete, where Zeus, father of the gods, was nursed on Mount Ida by the she-goat Amaltheia—a goat whose image Zeus later fondly set among the stars as another constellation: Capricorn. But I knew there was another god whose worship in the form of a bull had been equally influential on Crete, the very god Uncle Laf had assured me I’d know when to call on in time of need: Dionysus.

Given all this, when I traced the Crete-Hermione axis toward the northwest, as Wolfgang looked on, I found it more than interesting that it ran smack into the heart of the most powerful religious site of ancient times, a site shared by two great gods: Apollo in summer and Dionysus during the long, dark winter months until the sun made its return from the land of the dead. That site, of course, was Delphi.