Accessory to War
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34. Polls taken in 1978, 1985, 1990, 2005, and 2012. Shoshana Feher, “Who Looks to the Stars? Astrology and Its Constituency,” J. Scientific Study of Religion 31:1 (Mar. 1992), 88; Stephanie Rosenbloom, “Today’s Horoscope: Now Unsure,” New York Times, Aug. 28, 2005; Pew Research Center, “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths,” Dec. 9, 2009, www.pewforum.org/2009/12/09/many-americans-mix-multiple-faiths/ (accessed Aug. 3, 2017); National Science Foundation, “Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Understanding,” Science and Engineering Indicators 2014, www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind14/index.cfm/chapter-7/c7h.htm (accessed Apr. 5, 2017); Joan Quigley, “What Does Joan Say?” My Seven Years as White House Astrologer to Nancy and Ronald Reagan (New York: Pinnacle, 1991), 9–14, 19; Snopes.com, “Urban Legends Reference Pages: Rumors of War (False Prophecy),” www.snopes.com/rumors/predict.htm (accessed Dec. 3, 2006); Brooks Hays, “Majority of Young Adults Think Astrology Is a Science,” UPI, Feb. 12, 2014, www.upi.com/Science_News/2014/02/11/Majority-of-young-adults-think-astrology-is-a-science/5201392135954/ (accessed Apr. 5, 2017).
35. Khushwant Singh, The Collected Novels: Train to Pakistan (New Delhi: Penguin, 1999), 64; Maseeh Rahman, “Wedding Frenzy Hits India as Every Sphere of Life Comes under Influence of Planets,” Guardian, Nov. 29, 2003; Agence France Presse–English, “Indian Couples Rush to Marry on Luckiest Day of Wedding Season,” Nov. 26, 2005; Press Trust of India, “30,000 Couples Tie Knot in Delhi,” Nov. 27, 2005; Indo-Asian News Service, “Flower Business Soars with Delhi’s Marriage Season,” Dec. 2, 2005; Amrit Dhillon, “Down the Aisle,” South China Morning Post, Nov. 7, 2006. Quotation re satellites from “India’s Space Science,” Statesman (India), Dec. 31, 2005. See also “A Havan Kund in the Laboratory?” The Hindu, May 22, 2001; “Master of Business Astrology,” Economist, May 1, 2004; “India’s Supreme Court Approves University Instruction in Astrology,” Agence France Presse–English, May 5, 2004.
36. Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 547.
37. Brian Diemert, “The Trials of Astrology in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: A Gloss on Lines 57–59,” J. Modern Literature 22:1 (Fall 1998), 178.
38. Joanne Kaufman, “Profiting from the Positions of Planets,” New York Times, Nov. 3, 1985; N. R. Kleinfield, “Seeing Dollar Signs in Searching the Stars,” New York Times, May 15, 1988; Gary Weiss, “When Scorpio Rises, Stocks Will Fall,” Business Week, June 14, 1993, 106; Anne Matthews, “Markets Rise and Fall, but He’s Always Looking Up,” New York Times, Mar. 12, 1995; Reid Kanaley, “Astrological Web Sites Predict Market Movements,” Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 15, 1999; “Investrend Co-Sponsors Astrologers Fund Triple Gold Investment Conference February 1,” Financial Times Information, Jan. 30, 2006; David Roeder, “Some Large-cap Deals Hide in Plain Sight,” Chicago Sun Times, Apr. 30, 2006.
39. Ilia D. Dichev and Troy D. Janes, “Lunar Cycle Effects in Stock Returns,” Social Science Research Network, Aug. 2001, 3–4, papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=281665 (accessed Apr. 5, 2017).
40. Theodore White, “The Challenging Transits of Autumn 2007: How to Survive & Prosper,” posted Aug. 2007, www.internationalastrologers.com/astro_meteorologist.htm; “Transits and the Economy,” Sept. 20, 2007, www.internationalastrologers.com/transits_and_the_economy.htm. Also see “Theo’s 2009–2010 World Economic Astrological Report: How to Survive the 2010s in a New Global Structure,” Nov. 20, 2008, skyscript.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3962&sid=d4b80774bb6e39ca2d48a16faa7d7aa8 (accessed Feb. 7, 2009).
41. For Howe’s wartime activities as a forger, see Herbert A. Friedman, “Conversations with a Master Forger,” Scott’s Monthly Stamp Journal, Jan. 1980, www.psywar.org/forger.php (accessed Apr. 5, 2017).
42. Howe, Astrology and Psychological Warfare, 27–28.
43. Howe, Astrology and Psychological Warfare, 29–30, 36, 66, 197. The astronomer was H. H. Kritzinger, who wrote a book titled Mysteries of the Sun and Soul, in which he interpreted a quatrain of Nostradamus’s as foretelling a crisis in 1939 between Britain and Poland; see Geoffrey Ashe, Encyclopedia of Prophecy (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2001), 126. After the war, books with names such as The Stars of War and Peace, by Louis de Wohl (1952), and Zodiac and Swastika, by Wilhelm Wulff (1968), appeared. See also Goodrick-Clarke, Occult Roots of Nazism.
44. Howe, Astrology and Psychological Warfare, chap. 3. Nothing in which people are interested can be completely silenced. On p. 49, n. 1, Howe quotes a passage from the autobiography of Hans Blüher, a founder of the Wandervögel youth movement, who in 1934 asked an astrologer friend to tell him about Hitler’s horoscope: “My friend . . . leaned towards me and whispered into my ear through a cupped hand: ‘He’s a homicidal maniac!’ ”
45. Howe, Astrology and Psychological Warfare, 145–46; Jo Fox, “Propaganda and the Flight of Rudolf Hess, 1941–45,” J. Modern History 83:1 (Mar. 2011), 78–110; James Edgar, “Rudolf Hess Plane Wreckage Hidden by Scottish Farmers, Letter Reveals,” Telegraph, May 30, 2014. Numerous British political, military, and medical persons interrogated Hess over the course of days and weeks, but “[t]he interrogations revealed that Hess was so infused with the spirit of working toward the Führer that he had undertaken his mission in order to please him, not to undermine him. During his interviews, he insisted that Britain was a spent force, that capitulation was inevitable, and that a negotiated peace was the only way to save British cities from the havoc wreaked on Rotterdam or Warsaw” (Fox, “Propaganda and the Flight,” 87).
46. The Propaganda Ministry found two adjacent quatrains in Nostradamus especially suitable for the French psy-ops campaign: “Brabant, Flanders, Ghent, Bruges and Boulogne / are temporarily united with the great Germany. / But when the passage of arms is finished / the great Prince of Armenia will declare war. / Now begins an era of humanity of divine origin, / the age of peace is founded by unity, / war, now captive, sits on half the world, / and peace will be preserved for a long time.” As one attendee reported, Goebbels discussed the matter as follows: “This is a thing we can exploit for a long time. [T]hese forecasts by Monsieur Nostradamus . . . must be disseminated only by handbills, hand-written, or at most typed, secretly. . . . The thing must have an air of being forbidden. . . . Interpretation: Introduction of the new order in Europe by Greater Germany, occupation of France only temporary, Greater Germany ushers in the thousand years’ Reich and a thousand years’ peace. Naturally, all this silly rubbish must also go out to France over the [secret] transmitters.” Quoted in The Secret Conferences of Dr. Goebbels: The Nazi Propaganda War 1939–43, ed. Willi A. Boelcke (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), 6. The topic of how best to spread the news according to Nostradamus recurred throughout 1940. Also see Howe, Astrology and Psychological Warfare, chap. 10, “Nostradamus and Psychological Warfare,” 133–44.
47. Besides a selection of relevant passages, this commission yielded 299 copies of a facsimile of the posthumous 1568 compilation Les Prophéties de M. Michel Nostradamus, with a thirty-two-page commentary by Krafft tucked inside its front cover. As Howe writes, “There was never any question of the book being freely available in the bookshops. A widespread public interest in Nostradamus and his prophecies was the last thing that the authorities desired, for they realised that no author was a better source for potential rumours, and if there were to be any rumours at all, then they would prefer to invent their own.” Krafft died in 1945 while being moved from the Oranienburg concentration camp to Buchenwald. Howe, Astrology and Psychological Warfare, 190–91; Ashe, Encyclopedia of Prophecy, 125–27.
48. Howe, Astrology and Psychological Warfare, 197–99, 177–91.
49. According to Howe, Astrology and Psychological Warfare, 158, a report that circulated among Nazi Party officials in the summer of 1944 referred to security operatives having seen a “considerable increase in all possible forms of prophecy about the future course of the war.” Another slant on this appears in Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present
(New York: Viking, 1983), 131: “As the war draws to a close, [l]ight entertainment is introduced, in Goebbels’s words, ‘to unobtrusively take the mind off the working day.’ The schmaltzy music, the chats with crystal-gazers, astrologers, and palmists, are all signs of despair.” A general corroboration appears in Ernst Kris and Hans Speier, German Radio Propaganda: Report on Home Broadcasts During the War (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), 103, n. 1: “Astrologers are more likely to be consulted during war than in peacetime. In the London press, astrological advertisements have increased since the beginning of the war, despite the fact that the size of newspapers has generally diminished.”
50. Kris and Speier, German Radio Propaganda, 107 (fig. III), 109.
51. Kris and Speier, German Radio Propaganda, 103–10.
52. Howe, Astrology and Psychological Warfare, 191–96.
53. Perhaps the most important exception to this was Heinrich Himmler, rather than Rudolf Hess. See, e.g., Goodrick-Clarke, Occult Roots of Nazism, 5–6, 192, and Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, 6th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 71–74, 127–31. Trevor-Roper’s statement “It is true that his personal court contained some strange figures; . . . that (like Hitler and Wallenstein) he was unduly influenced by his astrologer, Wulf” is, however, implictly negated by Howe.
54. Goodrick-Clarke, Occult Roots of Nazism; Howe, Astrology and Psychological Warfare; Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler, 143.
55. Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler, 138–44; Howe, Astrology and Psychological Warfare, 200–204.
56. From the account of a secretary who worked in the same room as Goebbels’s secretary, quoted in Trevor-Roper, Last Days of Hitler, 142–43.
57. Fritz Brunhübner, Pluto, trans. Julie Baum (Washington, DC: American Federation of Astrologers, n.d. [preface dated December 1934]). We thank Louise S. Sherby and the Archives & Special Collections of the Hunter College Libraries for making available Hunter’s copy of the manuscript. See pp. 16, 67, 81, and passim for numerous additional astrological evocations of Pluto’s characteristics.
58. Brunhübner, Pluto, 75.
3. SEA POWER
1. Modern human remains 40,000 years old have been found in Tianyuan Cave near Beijing; remains from Fa Hien and Batadomba Lena caves in Sri Lanka are 35,000 years old. Some archaeologists contend that modern humans, equipped with new technology, began to emigrate from Africa along coastlines and reached southern Asia some 65,000 years ago. DNA evidence, for example the prevalence of high proportions of unusual mutations among New Guineans, Australians, and Andaman Islanders, supports this contention. See Dan Jones, “Going Global,” New Scientist, Oct. 27, 2007, 36–41. See also Heather Pringle, “Follow That Kelp,” New Scientist Aug. 11, 2007, 41; J. F. O’Connell and J. Allen, “Dating the Colonization of Sahul (Pleistocene Australia–New Guinea): A Review of Recent Research,” J. Archaeological Science 31:6 (June 2004), abstract at doi:10.1016/j.jas.2003.11.005. Citing the work of Jon Erlandson, Pringle says that modern humans had arrived in the Willandra Lakes region “some 50,000 years ago.” O’Connell and Allen “conclude that while the continent was probably occupied by 42–45,000 BP, earlier arrival dates are not well-supported.” Archaic humans trekked far from Africa as well: almost 40,000-year-old bones of archaic hominids (possibly Neanderthals) have been found as far east as southern Siberia. See, e.g., Roxanne Khamsi, “Neanderthals Roamed as Far as Siberia,” New Scientist, Sept. 30, 2007.
2. David Lewis, We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific, ed. Derek Oulton, 2nd ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 205ff., 21; E. G. R. Taylor, The Haven-Finding Art: A History of Navigation from Odysseus to Captain Cook (London: Hollis & Carter, 1956), 72–78; Barry Cunliffe, The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (New York: Walker, 2002), 120–21. Lewis points out that boobies and frigate birds avoid alighting on the sea because their feathers become waterlogged. Cunliffe relates another tale from the Icelandic saga of Flóki, who released three ravens in the course of his westward journey from Norway. The first flew east, back to land; the second circled the ship; the third headed straight westward, to Iceland. Cunliffe also mentions the starring role of land birds in the Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvares Cabral’s encounter with the unknown land of Brazil in 1500: while sailing very wide of the West African coast on a journey intended to reach India, Cabral saw the birds, followed them, and ended up in the harbor now known as Porto Seguro. Pelican sightings on Sept. 19 and 20, 1492: “Saw a pelican coming from W. N. W. and flying to the S. W; an evidence of land to the westward, as these birds sleep on shore, and go to sea in the morning in search of food, never proceeding twenty leagues from the land.” Christopher Columbus, Personal Narrative of the First Voyage of Columbus to America: From a Manuscript Recently Discovered in Spain, trans. Samuel Kettell (Boston: T. B. Wait, 1827), archive.org/details/personalnarrativ00colu (accessed Apr. 6, 2017).
3. This phrase dates back to Elizabethan times; see Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, xii.
4. Excerpt from Michiel Coignet, Instruction nouvelle des poincts plus excellents & necessaires, touchant l’art de naviguer (1581), quoted in J. H. Parry, The Age of Reconnaissance (London: Phoenix Press, 1963), 83.
5. Charles H. Cotter, A History of Nautical Astronomy (New York: American Elsevier, 1968), 1. This hydrographer gave lessons in “gunnery,” navigation, and several branches of mathematics and ran a map shop in London. See, e.g., “John Seller [ca. 1630–1697], New York Public Library, www.nypl.org/research/chss/epo/mapexhib/seller.html (accessed Apr. 6, 2017).
6. The text of Shangshu, an anonymous Zhou Dynasty work, is as follows: “It shows up from the east at sea level in the Sixth Month, / Arises up half way from the zenith in the Seventh Month, / Reaches the zenith in the Eighth Month, / Declines to the west half way to the sea level in the Ninth Month, / Drops to sea level in the Tenth Month.” Gang Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities and Socioeconomic Development, c. 2100 B.C.–1900 A.D.: Contributions in Economics and Economic History 188 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 36. For Kitab al-Fawa’id, see G. R. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean Before the Coming of the Portuguese (London: The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1971), 130–31. This work includes both a translation of Kitab al-Fawa’id and a detailed discussion of Arab navigation.
7. For Homer and 1955, see Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, 9–13; for 1492, see J. E. D. Williams, From Sails to Satellites: The Origin and Development of Navigational Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 32. Taylor says “more than 12 degrees away from the pole” for Homer’s day but includes a chart comparing Polaris at 1000 BC (showing it at 72/73 degrees N) and at 1955 (showing it at 90 degrees N). Williams is referring to the “true celestial pole.” For the position of Polaris in AD 15,000 (declination 44° 27'), see Starry Night Pro, Simulation Curriculum Corp., v. 6.4.3.
8. Ursa Major is also called the Plough. In Haven-Finding Art, Taylor points out that the Greek name for the constellation, Arctos, “Bear,” was also the word for “north” and that the Latin name, Septentrio, “north,” derives from septem triones, seven plough-oxen (9). William B. Gibbon, in “Asiatic Parallels in North American Star Lore: Ursa Major,” J. Amer. Folklore 77:305 (July–Sept. 1964), 236, points out that many pre-Columbian peoples of the United States and Canada also called Ursa Major the Bear, while some called it the Seven Brothers. The dipper imagery was also widespread: slaves fleeing the American South were told to “follow the drinking gourd” to make their way north. In the Arab world, the stars in the handle of the Plough were seen as having the form of a boat, and ibn Mājid proposes that Noah was inspired by the form of the Bear/Plough to build a ship and become the first navigator (Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, 69).
9. Homer, Odyssey, V.278–80, trans. A. T. Murray, at www.theoi.com/Text/HomerOdyssey5.html (accessed Apr. 6, 2017); Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, 9, 40, 43. Taylor uses the translation quoted here, while the Murray translation reads: “the Bear, which m
en also call the Wain, which ever circles where it is and watches Orion, and alone has no part in the baths of Ocean.”
10. The Vikings’ difficulty resulted from the obliquity of their course in relation to the horizon, as well as the drastic seasonal changes in the duration of day and night. See Taylor, Haven-Finding Art, chap. 4, “The Irish and the Norsemen,” 65–85. For the Pacific Islanders, see Lewis, We, the Navigators.
11. Images dating to ca. 3100 BC of boats with sails have been found in Egypt, also a model dated to ca. 3400 BC in Mesopotamia. Lionel Casson, The Ancient Mariners: Seafarers and Sea Fighters of the Mediterranean in Ancient Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 4.
12. Casson, Ancient Mariners, 30–32.
13. Casson, Ancient Mariners, 6–21, 170–73; Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities, 113; Andrew Lawler, “Indus Script: Write or Wrong,” Science 306:5704 (Dec. 17, 2004), 2027; The Indian Ocean: Explorations in History, Commerce, and Politics, ed. Satish Chandra (New Delhi: Sage, 1987), 30–31, 153–57; Lionel Casson, Travel in the Ancient World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 369. Grain, olive oil, and wine are the top three items found in amphoras from shipwrecks in the Mediterranean.