Accessory to War

Home > Science > Accessory to War > Page 7
Accessory to War Page 7

by Neil DeGrasse Tyson


  Astrologers were no doubt heartened by the findings of two business-school professors, to the effect that across the full history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S & P 500, the NYSE, and the NASDAQ, stock returns have been as much as 8 percent higher (about double) for the fifteen days around the new Moon than for the fifteen days around the full Moon. Elsewhere the “lunar cycle effect” has been even more pronounced: for the final three decades of the twentieth century, in stock exchanges around the world, the returns were as much as 10 percent higher.39 Meanwhile, the half month surrounding the new Moon generates, on average, the same gravity and the same tidal forces as the half month that surrounds the full Moon.

  One “classical scientific astrologer” and financial commentator has stressed planetary transits and oppositions rather than the phases of the Moon. Posting his analyses in the late summer of 2007 amid the deepening credit crunch, the flood of home foreclosures and bank failures, and the ubiquitous (though widely ignored) signs of imminent global economic meltdown, Theodore White warned of the bursting housing bubble, contending that Jupiter helped inflate values and that Saturn had begun to deflate them. “Saturn’s long transit of Virgo (26 months) and another four months by retrograde in the year 2010, takes place in a sign ruled by Mercury,” he wrote. “This transit will have a devastating, nearly depressing, effect on those severely affected by the downturn in the housing market nationwide.” In addition, Saturn would be “rising in sunrise diurnal charts, and will be Lord of the months of October & November, with continuing strong influences into December 2007.” The latter’s transit near the South Lunar Node pointed to the subprime mortgage crisis “crystalliz[ing] into a major call for regulation throughout the economic climate of the United States.”40

  After-the-fact revelations are easy to come by when you consult the nearly limitless number of cyclic phenomena. It’s not hard to find one that matches your needs or expectations. There’s the eleven-year sunspot cycle, the twenty-six-month cycle of Earth and Mars in space, the 18.6-year cycle of lunar eclipses. There’s also the yearly cycle of months: in 1907, 1929, 1987, and 2008, the stock market sustained huge hits in October. Other Octobers saw pullbacks. Does that mean the “October effect” is a real thing? No. But if significant numbers of buyers and sellers believe that cosmic forces will bring down the market, a sell-off will follow, thereby fulfilling their prediction. Plus, keep in mind all the failed predictions.

  The prosecution of war is at least as durable and hard-nosed a pursuit as the acquisition of a fortune, and certain real-life warriors have been as interested in astrology as were the rulers of Mesopotamia and ancient China. Nazi Germany offers a stunning case study, chronicled in detail by Ellic Howe, a writer, historian, and expert forger who during World War II worked for a British agency called the Political Warfare Executive.41

  Interest in astrology rose rapidly in defeated, inflated Germany following World War I, writes Howe—more rapidly than in the rest of Europe. A graphologist-journalist named Elsbeth Ebertin was fast becoming a well-paid, widely read professional astrologer, and in the spring of 1923 a follower of Adolf Hitler’s, hoping to learn about his leader’s horoscope, sent Ebertin the rising politician’s date of birth (though not the exact hour, a crucial detail). Ebertin decided to publish the horoscope in the 1924 edition of her annual almanac, A Glance into the Future. She did not name Hitler, but she didn’t have to:

  A man of action born on 20 April 1889, with Sun in 29° Aries at the time of his birth, can expose himself to personal danger by excessively uncautious action and could very likely trigger off an uncontrollable crisis. His constellations show that this man is to be taken very seriously indeed; he is destined to play a “Führer-role” in future battles. It seems that the man I have in mind, with this strong Aries influence, is destined to sacrifice himself for the German nation, also to face up to all circumstances with audacity and courage, even when it is a matter of life and death, and to give an impulse, which will burst forth quite suddenly, to a German Freedom Movement. But I will not anticipate destiny.42

  Ebertin’s prognosis, calculated on the assumption of a noonday birth, appeared in July 1923. In November, Hitler participated in what could easily qualify as an “excessively uncautious action”: the Beer Hall Putsch. By the time he landed in jail for his part in the putsch, Ebertin had learned that he’d been born at 6:30 PM. No matter. Astrology’s star was rising in Germany, aglow with swiftly multiplying societies, publishers, manuals, conferences, and adherents of every sort. More than a hundred Herren Doktoren—philosophers, paleontologists, physicians, even an astronomer who worked on ballistics problems and possibly the dreaded V-2 rocket—publicly joined their ranks. As Howe put it, “In Germany between the two wars there were more astrologers per square mile than anywhere else in the world.”43 Popular as it was, astrology also spawned powerful opponents.

  With Hitler’s appointment as chancellor of the Third Reich on January 30, 1933, his horoscope became a matter of wider interest. Aiming to justify various characterizations of the Führer, some astrologers even “corrected” the hour of his birth, putting the Sun in Taurus rather than in Aries and, in a few cases, questioning his capacities. The authorities saw that as a line in the sand. In the spring of 1934 the Berlin police banned most forms of astrological activity, and by the end of the year the Reich Ministry for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, headed by Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, had silenced public astrological speculation concerning the fortunes of the Third Reich and the horoscopes of prominent Nazis. Astrological literature, both popular and abstruse, was confiscated from publishers and booksellers. Homes were searched, persons arrested. The last major annual astrological conference took place in 1936. One after another, periodicals ceased publication during 1937 and 1938.44

  Late in the afternoon on May 10, 1941—coincidentally, a few hours before the most horrific night of the London Blitz—the mentally unstable Rudolf Hess, occupant of the third highest leadership position in the Third Reich and, like so many of his countrymen, something of an aficionado of astrology, climbed into a Messerschmitt-110 fighter plane and headed for Scotland. He had secretly decided to embark on a peculiar, unvetted mission of peace: trying to convince British high officials to accept German supremacy in Europe and thereby save their country from further devastation. Practicalities soon intervened: the plane’s fuel supply wasn’t sufficient for the trip, so he had to bail out, leaving the plane to crash onto a farmer’s field near Glasgow while he himself parachuted down, breaking his ankle and ending up in a British military hospital. Reich officials, needing to produce an explanation for the surprise flight that would somehow satisfy not only the German people but also the rest of the world, decided to blame a combination of insanity and astrology. Rumors flew around Europe; the London Times posited that Hess was Hitler’s secret personal astrologer. Propagandists on both sides went into overdrive.45 Within a couple of days the Gestapo arrested and questioned several astrologers; within the month they arrested hundreds more, primarily those who belonged to astrological societies and who had published their analyses, along with many more people involved in activities tinged with the occult. On June 24 public lectures and performances involving astrology, clairvoyance, telepathy, and other esoteric practices were thenceforth forbidden. On October 3 the ban was extended to the print media. Some astrologers ended up in concentration camps.

  Yet despite the considerable censorship, astrology and the occult flourished behind both closed and open doors, supported in part by Goebbels. On November 22, 1939, at one of his almost-daily ministerial conferences (convened for the attendees to assent, not confer), he decreed that a psy-ops leaflet based on Nostradamus’s prophesying of the far future be swiftly prepared for dissemination in France.46 In 1940 the Propaganda Ministry hired Karl Ernst Krafft, a fervent, statistics-minded Swiss astrologer, to annotate selections from Nostradamus.47 In 1942–43, chastened by a few months of incarceration following the Hess affair, Krafft and another not
able, though more pragmatic, astrologer named F. G. Goerner were conscripted to spend their days excerpting Nostradamus and preparing the horoscopes of Allied generals. Other recently arrested astrologers, along with astronomers, mathematicians, and psychics, were recruited for the Pendulum Institute, where, during the spring of 1942, under the directorship of a captain of the German navy, the professional staff assiduously swung pendulums over maps of the Atlantic Ocean, searching for the positions of enemy ships.48

  As the Reich’s fortunes wavered, the drafting of prophecies and the private study of horoscopes mounted.49 Publicly, prediction became the general order of the day—at least while it remained useful—and radio was the propagandists’ preferred medium. From September 1942 through March 1943, the second winter of the campaign in Russia, nearly one in every eight items in the German news bulletins was an explicit prediction.50 Refugee German intellectuals described the Nazis’ approach to prediction and prophecy:

  Belligerent governments invariably predict victory. The stakes are high, and the public is naturally anxious. Not to predict is to encourage suspicion and to destroy confidence. To predict ultimate failure is morally to surrender. Thus propagandists predict victory, for it is the only thing they can do. . . . Above all, the Leader is forced to prophesy to demonstrate his charismatic gift. . . .

  Reassurance was given by initial victories. As time went on, however, the propagandist . . . found it convenient to deal with the increased tension of the German people, by an increased use of predictions. [There is a greater] need to predict in times of distress rather than in times of comfort. For a long time predictions took the place of good news. [But w]hen . . . Russia’s force remained unbroken, the policy was suddenly changed, and prediction became rare. It was at this time that Goebbels began telling the German people in so many words that this was a world in which one could not predict and that the war was simply “the riddle of riddles.[”]51

  The specifically astrological form of prediction, however, retained its appeal. From the late 1930s onward, rumors about a Hitler–astrology connection multiplied. One astrologically sophisticated writer—Louis de Wohl, a part-Jewish Berliner who got himself out of Germany in 1935 and wished to survive in style in London and New York—found astrology a convenient way to facilitate his survival, and so he let it be known that Krafft was Hitler’s personal astrologer. The president of Columbia University soon announced that Hitler had a team of five astrologers. The London Evening Standard named Elsbeth Ebertin the Führer’s favorite astrologer.52

  In fact, neither Hitler nor most of his closest Nazi colleagues53 turned to astrologers for advice on what to do when, even though the Nazis’ angry nationalism and ardent racism put them on the same side of the fence as many people who embraced not only the political mission of a racially pure, redemptive Aryan future but also the fairytale vision of a golden Aryan past, full of spiritualism, folk identity, cosmic mysteries, and astrological constructs. Nevertheless, as Goebbels put it, “crazy times call for crazy measures,” and the Third Reich’s waning weeks must have been intensely crazy, not least because its leaders had not yet grasped that their nanosecond of supremacy had already come and gone.54 And those were the weeks when Hitler turned to prophecy.

  From the April 1945 diary of Hitler’s minister of finance, Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk (a former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford), we learn that around midmonth, Goebbels and Hitler decided that the time had come to examine two horoscopes: that of the Führer himself, which had been cast in 1933, and that of Greater Germany, cast in 1918. The revelations must have been thrilling. As the diarist writes,

  Both horoscopes had unanimously predicted the outbreak of war in 1939, the victories till 1941, and then the series of defeats culminating in the worst disasters in the early months of 1945, especially the first half of April. Then there was to be an overwhelming victory for us in the second half of April, stagnation till August, and in August peace. After the peace there would be a difficult time for Germany for three years; but from 1948 she would rise to greatness again. . . . [N]ow I am eagerly awaiting the second half of April.55

  Early on Friday the thirteenth of April 1945, the Reich’s state secretary rang up the finance minister to announce that President Roosevelt had died the previous day. “We felt the wings of the Angel of History rustle through the room,” Schwerin von Krosigk records. “Could this be the long-desired change of fortune?” Goebbels thought so. When a reporter told him the news, he called for a bottle of the best champagne and telephoned Hitler to say that just such a turning point had been “written in the stars.” Goebbels was ecstatic.56

  Less than four weeks later, the Nazis surrendered.

  To proponents of National Socialism, the discovery of icy little Pluto in 1930 seemed pregnant with implications. Astrologers swiftly integrated Pluto into their horoscopes, and in 1935, two years after Hitler became chancellor of the Third Reich, a German astrologer, Fritz Brunhübner, published a brief but detailed book on the newcomer, Der neue Planet Pluto. According to Brunhübner, Pluto is “the end of the old world and the ascent of a new spiritual epoch.” It is “a malefic in the greatest form,” “the planet bringing death,” “the instigator of the turn in world events.” Its “destiny is to clean up the old and to march before the new era in a new form.”57

  But the creepiest connection he makes between Pluto and Hitler’s Germany is the following:

  Moreover, I believe Pluto to be the planet of National Socialism and the Third Reich. Adolf Hitler and almost all of the leading men now in the government, also the Nazi Party, and the horoscope of the Third Reich (January 30, 1933, the day of Potsdam, the Reichstag elections of March 5th and November 12th, 1933) show—besides a very dominant Uranus—a strong Pluto.

  It has to be like this. Pluto is the planet of the turning-point. The National Socialistic movement, in the horoscope of which Pluto is elevated above all other planets, brought about, according to the laws of Pluto, a reversal in German history. And what tells the horoscope of Adolf Hitler? At that moment, when Reich President Hindenburg handed Adolf Hitler the fate of the German people, transiting Pluto stood in the Zenith, tied to the most important places of the radix horoscope . . . a trial of strength, a seizure of power, a turning-point, a crisis.58

  “Turning-points” keep turning. At the war’s end, the Allies dissolved and banned the National Socialist German Workers Party, and Germany itself now deems the performance of the Nazi salute a criminal offense. In the decades following the war, astronomers found that Pluto is smaller than not only our own Moon but six other moons in our solar system as well, and the International Astronomical Union no longer classifies Pluto as a true planet. The search for sources of sky power, conquest, and “new eras” must turn elsewhere.

  3

  SEA POWER

  An expanded, ethnically purified Germany—Grossdeutschland—was the vision that drove the Nazis. The lands they intended to conquer had long since been explored, settled, and fought over, their latitudes and longitudes established, their terrain mapped, their rivers traced, their inhabitants identified and named. No such vision impelled the first courageous, curious, or desperate peoples who walked up the Rift Valley, rowed and sailed into uncharted tracts of the Pacific Ocean, or rode horses through unknown wastes of the Taklimakan Desert. They had no idea what they were in for.

  Yet by forty thousand years ago, bands of anatomically modern humans had trekked as far as Sri Lanka and the east coast of China and transported themselves across the sea from Africa to somewhere in Southeast Asia to the then-continent of Sahul, a fusion of Australia and New Guinea.1 Early explorers, gatherers, exiles, sea drifters, traders, and raiders had neither compasses nor maps. Geography and navigation were nascent practices. On land, travelers could follow a river, a mountain pass, or an animal path; on the sea they could try to stay within sight of land but had to avoid the subsurface, rocky perils of hugging the shore.

  Oceangoing wayfinders catalogued and memorized landmar
ks. They consulted clouds, winds, and sounds for additional clues. They became familiar with swells and currents, phosphorescence, tides, the implications of floating palm fronds and coconut husks, the plants and fishes that dwelled at different depths, variations in the color of the water and in the smell and taste of samples drawn from sediment below the boat.

  The flight of a bird could reliably indicate land beyond the horizon. A mariner might carry a caged “shore-sighting” raven, booby, or frigate bird on board, freeing it periodically to see whether it would return to the dry safety of the boat or head off toward the preferable safety of land. Genesis 8:11 tells us that Noah sent forth a dove, which returned with an olive sprig in its beak. Ancient Polynesians, seeing the long-tailed cuckoo migrate southwestward each year, would have realized it was heading for unseen terra firma, because the cuckoo is a landlubber. Taking their cue from the cuckoo and steering southwestward in their twin-hulled voyaging canoes, the Polynesians came upon New Zealand. Medieval Irish monks saw vast, honking flocks of geese head northward every spring from the Shannon estuary and return every autumn; sailing north in their curraghs, they came upon Iceland. Columbus, sighting pelicans en route to what he expected would be the Indies, noted in his log that this bird does not venture more than twenty leagues from land.2

 

‹ Prev