Through the Wardrobe

by Herbie Brennan

  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.

  But Hitler’s magical education did not end with the Thule Group. Within that organization was an even stranger figure than the alcoholic Eckart: Karl Haushofer.

  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.

  It was truly a War of Light and Darkness.

  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.

  When you finished your first Narnia book with that feeling of profound satisfaction, you may have believed it was due to the author’s masterful characters, his intricate story, his soaring imagination, his marvellously descriptive writing. Diane Duane knows differently. It was the food.

  Eating in Narnia

  Or, Don’t Bother Bringing the Sandwiches

  DIANE DUANE

  One thing a traveler among universes quickly discovers is that, in many of them, the food’s terrible.

  This is at least partly a situational problem—a matter of perception. Normally, when people from Earth pass through other fictional universes, they’re not there for a pleasure cruise. Normally there’s a quest involved, so that they usually wind up running away from something (Orcs, unfriendly armies, assassins, eldritch monsters), hiding from something (ditto), or otherwise getting too preoccupied with local events to care much about the catering. While this is entirely understandable, it’s still unfortunate. Unless a given universe’s creator is kind to you, you will never have a chance to sit down and appreciate the local cuisine. Among the less kind (or lazier) creators, you’re likely to wind up eating nothing but the fantasy version of fast food: waybread. No matter what kind of valuable life lessons you might learn from such a place, the one that’s most likely to stick with you after you get back to earth is straightforward: Don’t go back to that world again without a packed lunch.

  It’s a relief, then, for those of us who wander among literary universes, to know that when you need a really good lunch, or a dinner that will stand out in your mind, Narnia is the place to be. It’s not that there aren’t other universes where food is very important. But even among them, Narnia stands out. Narnia is one of the few universes around from which you’d want to bring home a doggie bag.

  There are many reasons for this. The simplest one is that the characters there like their food. It’s an important part of their lives, and they’re not embarrassed about it. It’s a fair bet that this is because C. S. Lewis wasn’t embarrassed about it either. Anybody could tell this just by looking at a picture of the man as he was in the 1940s and 1950s, when he was writing the Narnia books. All these portraits are—to put it kindly—beefy: images that suggest someone who likes a good meal. But we also know that Lewis’s attitudes toward food were enthusiastic because he tells us as much in print.

  In his essay “On Three Ways of Writing for Children,” Lewis describes two ways of writing for children that he considers really bad. One, he says, is trying to figure out what your target market wants, and then setting out purposely to give it to them. He illustrates this point by mentioning someone who thought that, because Lewis realized he couldn’t put sex in his books for young readers, he put food in them instead as a substitute. You can just hear Lewis’s gentle scorn in the essay as he says, “I myself like eating and drinking. I put in what I liked to read as a child and what I still like reading now that I am in my fifties.”

  The exact kind of liking for food, though, and what it might be based on, is interesting to look at. Lewis’s general attitude toward food in the Narnian world seems to be in broad agreement with that of another now-famous writer for younger readers, J. K. Rowling. This may be because, while Rowling was writing her first work and Lewis was writing the whole Narnia series, they shared a problem: there wasn’t a lot of food around. The single mother on income support, writing in cafés to keep warm, also had to economize on her own meals to keep her baby fed. So it’s not surprising to see the communal dinner tables at Hogwarts groaning under the weight of all the goodies that world’s creator craved and couldn’t (initially) afford. But Lewis’s food problems were not so unique to him, or so personal. They were shared by everyone in Britain during the period when every book of the Chronicles of Narnia was written. Because Great Britain was at war with Germany.

  England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, as parts of the British “island nation,” routinely imported huge amounts of food—particularly things they couldn’t grow themselves because of their climate or lack of suitable farmland. In the 1930s and 1940s more than half of Britain’s meat, more than three-quarters of its cheese, sugar, and fruit, and at least ninety percent of its grain and fat were imported by ship from Europe, North America, and many other parts of the world. So when war broke out, one of the biggest parts of the Axis Powers’ plan to conquer Britain was to cut off its food supply—thereby starving the English, Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish into surrender. Before cheap air freight, almost all food arrived by ship, so the German navy targeted the merchant ships bringing in this food, sinking as many of them as it c
ould. Only ships traveling in convoys protected by armed naval vessels made it through. And not all of those. Submarines stalked the convoys to pick off inadequately protected ships.

  In this desperate situation, the British government had no choice but to start severely limiting, or “rationing,” the amount of food its citizens could buy at any one time, so that even with the much-reduced imports of wartime, there was enough to go around for everybody . . . if only just enough. Every man, woman, and child was sent a ration book with coupons that had to be taken to the butcher’s or grocer’s when shopping for food. Each coupon represented a week’s ration of something—butter, meat, milk, vegetables, canned goods—and had to be turned in when the purchase was made. Once you’d used up that week’s coupons, that was all the food of that kind you could get until the next week. And although a week’s ration did make sure that each person had the basic amount of protein, carbohydrates, and vitamins necessary to stay minimally healthy, most everybody was hungry most of the time. This rationing started in 1940 and lasted, in one form or another, straight through until 1954.

  So maybe it’s no surprise that the first sense you get in Narnia about Lewis’s attitude toward food is an air of profound nostalgia for the lost paradise of a varied, ample diet, and a willingness to wallow in the nostalgia somewhat. The very first meal any human experiences in Narnia, the high tea which Mr. Tumnus serves Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, is a perfect evocation of a turn-of-the-century British tea. Nor is this the hotel-based “high tea” concept, with tinkly china and multiple fancy pastries, but the middle-class tea you would properly have in someone’s home, a meal rather than a snack, long on protein, carbs, and comfort. For Lucy, briefly escaped from the middle of the war, and for Lewis, who was as hungry as anyone else in Britain and (some of his letters reveal) as bored by the limitations and substitutions of wartime food, this meal would have smacked of Heaven. It would be years yet before any Oxford don or little English girl could sit down to the delights of a meal that featured fresh eggs and real sardines, a meal in which there was butter for the toast, and actual honey, and cakes with sugar on them. Among Lewis’s letters are a number of lyrical thank-you notes to friends or fans who sent him “care packages” of meat and other delicacies from the U.S. and elsewhere. So we can hardly blame him for indulging his longings a little in the world he was starting to invent.