by J H Brennan
Copyright
This edition first published in hardcover in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2013 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
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Copyright © 2013 by J. H. Brennan
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ISBN: 978-1-46830-869-3
For a lost friend, Nick, and his dear wife, Clare, with thanks for their hospitality, their help, and, most of all, their inspiration.
Portions of this book originally formed part of my master’s dissertation on Spirit Communication: An Examination of a Key Phenomenon within Western Esotericism at the University of Exeter, England. I would like to thank my professor, the late and much missed Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, for the extraordinary range of reading he suggested, and my supervisor, Dr. Christopher McIntosh, for some interesting comments on the finished work.
CONTENTS
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Introduction
PART I: GODS AND MEN
1. First Contact
2. Communion with the Gods
3. The Egyptian Experience
4. Mysteries of Ancient Greece and Rome
5. Spirits of the Orient
6. Dark Age Conjurations
7. Roots of Islam
PART II: WORLD CHANGERS
8. The Voices and the Maid
9. The Evocations of Nostradamus
10. The Queen’s Conjurer
11. Enlightenment Spirits
12. Revolutionary Sorcerer
13. History Repeats
14. Direct Guidance
15. An American Experience
PART III: SPIRITS IN THE MODERN WORLD
16. Is Everybody There?
17. The Spirits Go to War
18. The Spirits and the Führer
19. A Museum of Spirit Contact
PART IV: CONTACT—THEORETICAL AND PERSONAL
20. Close Encounters of the Spirit Kind
21. Three Conjurations
22. Spirit Transfers, Spirit Powers
23. A Skeptical Inquiry
24. The Bicameral Theory
25. Spirits of the Deep Mind
26. Personal Encounters
27. The Geist That Polters
28. The Boggle Threshold
29. A Scientific Foundation
Conclusion
Bibliography
Notes
Index
About the Author
PREFACE
IS IT POSSIBLE THAT YOUR PRESENT SECURITY AND FUTURE WELL-BEING MAY be controlled by spirits … even though you don’t believe in them? Is it possible that political decisions about peace and war, the food you eat, the welfare of your friends and family, your religious faith and moral foundations have sprung from discarnate voices whispering in the ears of popes and prophets, politicians and prime ministers, dictators and kings?
It seems incredible, yet there is overwhelming evidence not just that such whisperings are possible but that they have occurred, again and again, from prehistoric times to the present day, subtly directing the course of human history.
This is a phenomenon entirely ignored by historians and scientists, although they are fully aware that it exists. But with academic reputations (not to mention funding) at stake, few are in a hurry to investigate such a disreputable field as spirits. As a result, no one, to this day, can say with any certainty what “spirits” actually are or what they represent. They may be what they (variously) present themselves to be: the souls of the dead, ghosts, gods, discarnate entities, evolved minds, hidden masters, or aliens from outer space. But they may equally well be aspects of the unconscious mind. Or they may also be something else entirely.
Since the past generates the future, it is no exaggeration to say that the life you live today has come about, at least in part, through the hidden urgings of spirit voices. In such circumstances, it would surely make sense to undertake a full and open examination of the phenomenon … and try to discover who or what these shadowy advisers really are.
Fifty years ago, conventional scientific opinion held that “spirit communication” was essentially a question of the medium talking to himself. Unconscious contents erupted into consciousness to deliver messages, visions, and the occasional hallucination. The mechanism by which these gifts became personified as pseudospirits was not clearly understood, but psychologists, by and large, were convinced about the origins.
Today, some scientists are not so sure. Carl Jung, one of the founding fathers of modern psychology, observed that spirits sometimes knew more than the medium who channeled them. How, one might ask, could an unconscious projection contain more information than the mind that projected it? Clearly, if there is a purely psychological explanation of spirits, it must be a good deal more complex than the early idea that they simply represent fantasies of the subconscious mind. For many, of course, there is no mystery at all. To them, spirits are exactly what they claim to be: disembodied intelligences capable of communicating with humanity.
Throughout my research of the spirit world, I found myself increasingly dissatisfied with all of the current theories. It was a little like the wave-particle duality of quantum physics. Sometimes spirits behaved like bodiless intelligences communicating from the Beyond, sometimes like the contents of a medium’s mind. To confuse matters still further, I discovered that it was possible to create a spirit, a purely artificial entity that would manifest in exactly the same way natural spirits have been reported to do throughout the centuries. Worse, artificial spirits proved capable of action and intent outside the control of their creators.
Discoveries like this, personal friendships with spirit mediums, and a lifelong interest in scientific psychical research eventually led to the writing of the present book. In it, I have aimed to present a history of spirit contacts throughout the ages in an attempt to show how prevalent the influence of spirits really was and is, and to investigate the nature of spirits without preconception or prejudice.
It proved to be a journey with an unexpected ending.
—J. H. (HERBIE) BRENNAN, Ireland, 2013
INTRODUCTION
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 t
ribes 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 interm
ediary 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.
