The Magic Circle (67 page)

The Inn is one of four rivers that rise near each other at a place high in the Swiss Alps, rivers that form a cross spreading over the map of Europe and flow into four seas. The Inn is the last tributary to the Danube as it leaves Germany to cross Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria, emptying at last into the Black Sea. The northern arm of the cross, the Rhein, passes through Germany and Holland, spilling into the North Sea. The Rhône flows west and south through France to the Mediterranean. The Ticino joins the Po in Italy and empties into the Adriatic. Four rivers, four directions.

The division of a space into four quarters, like the four rivers of Eden, or making two lines cross and the four ends terminate in right angles, was also an ancient symbol of enormous power called the Cross of the Magi. In Sanskrit, the name was
svastika
, one of the oldest symbols of mankind. It describes four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—and a fifth hidden at the center, the polar axis, the hinge upon which the world turns and around which the celestial bears revolve.

At the place where these four rivers rise is the Little Saint Bernard Pass, known to the Romans as Alpis Graia, the Greek alp, believed to be the path of Hercules on his return to Greece, and Hannibal’s route into Italy. A temple to Jupiter existed here before the time of Caesar, and at the end of the last century, a utopian community of some importance to my story. The most important axis of the German peoples, connected geomantically to this very spot, was the Irminsul, which stood in the sacred grove at Externsteine, a stone outcropping high in the Teutoburg Forest of Westphalia. It marked the hallowed place where the Teutonic tribes drove back the Romans in
A.D
. 9, forcing Rome to abandon her northern province of Germania.

When Charlemagne defeated the Saxons in 772, the first thing he did was to destroy this famous pillar along with its sacred grove, for he understood the Irminsul marked far more than an important date in Teutonic history: ancient lore told that a pillar had stood at this spot since the dawn of time.

Irmins Säule
, the path of Hermann, was the bond connecting heaven and earth. The Norse god Hermann—variously Ir, Tyr, Tiu, or Ziu—was none other than the warlike sky god Zeus. His stone, the Irminsul, was carved in the shape of the
Tyr
rune, the oldest northern form of the swastika:

Guido von List, the same Viennese occultist who at the turn of this century, during a bout of blindness, had rediscovered the lost meaning of the runes, had also twenty years earlier founded the Iduna Society, an esoteric group named for the Teutonic goddess Idun, who carries the magic apples of immortality. Like the Roman Idas, for whom the ides or turning point of a month were named, Idun was the goddess of the Eternal Return. The Sanskrit root was also one of the two great forces, Ida and Pingala, forming the serpent path of transformation.

At the height of World War I, Guido von List revealed his last and most powerful prophecy, inspired by the
Eddas
, the famous Icelandic sagas that tell of the world’s final battle in the Last Days. In the legend, each warrior who dies on the Plain of Ida—“shining renewal”—is instantly reborn as soon as he’s slain. List foresaw that those who died on the battlefield for the ideals contained in the runes would participate in the Eternal Return: that those slain in the First World War, the War to End All Wars, would instantly reincarnate like those on the mythological Plain of Ida. The newly reborn would then coalesce into a force that would attain its full power when most of them turned eighteen. This force would awaken the sleeping spirit of
der Starke von Oben
—the Strong One from On High—who would invoke the ancient Teutonic gods and change the world. Astrological examination revealed that this spirit would manifest itself around the end of 1932, unleashing the power of the runes that had been sleeping for two thousand years since the time of the Roman conquest.

When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, at once he ordered the rebuilding and consecration of the Irminsul destroyed by Charlemagne. At nearby Paderborn, Himmler remodeled the castle of Wewelsburg for his unholy Order of Teutonic Knights. When Hitler instructed his architect Albert Speer to copy the design of the temple of Zeus at Pergamon on the Turkish coast for the Nürnberg rally grounds, the German College of Dowsers didn’t just dowse the field to locate major earth forces. They determined from architectural renderings that the 1300-foot temple structure where Hitler’s podium was to be placed would not be situated correctly to harness full geomantic powers. So the building site was relocated several hundred feet to the west—requiring a lake to be drained and a railroad to be rerouted.

Over the stadium Hitler ordered an enormous eagle with outstretched wings in the shape of the
Tyr
rune, symbolizing both the
Weibaarin
, female-eagle consort of Zeus, and the
Weberin
, the weaver or spinner of the world’s fate in the last days. Hitler told Speer this image was revealed to him in a dream he’d had after being blinded, rather like List, by mustard gas while serving on the western front in World War I. These two elements—eagle and spider, soaring and weaving, the forces of sky and cave—were combined in a single heraldic spirit that would one day serve as sun and moon, guiding his Holy Order.

On November 9, 1918, when Lucky learned that Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated and the new socialist government had sued for peace, it triggered a second prophetic dream—that Wotan had come to guide him and Germany to greatness. He wrote this poem:

I often go on bitter nights to Wotan’s oak in the quiet glade

Invoking dark powers to weave a union
—
those runic powers

the moon creates with its sorcerer’s spell; And all who are brazen by daylight are defeated by their magic formula.…

Hitler often said he regarded Berlin as head of his new religious order, and Munich as its heart. But that night, in the darkness of his mind, he saw that even from ancient times Nürnberg had been the spiritual center, soul of the German people, the mountain where the god Wotan slept. Albert Speer named his creation at the Nürnberg parade ground the Cathedral of Light, fitting for one who wished to portray himself symbolically as
der Starke von Oben
—the axis between heaven and earth, the door connecting past and future.

The operant word in the National Socialist Party’s name was “nationalist.” The Nazis were interested in finding the roots of Aryan genealogy, geomantics, mysteries, and the occult. They searched wells and springs and ancient burial sites, documenting the legacy preserved on standing stones throughout Europe. They sent secret expeditions high into the Pamir Mountains and the Pyrenees, rifling ancient caves to search for lost documents sealed within clay jars for thousands of years, which might reveal the truth of their sacred lineage and lost wisdom.

It was believed much information was secretly encoded in national epics of the northern lands, and these they set about deciphering. Many clues pointed to the history of the Trojan War. In the famous thirteenth-century Icelandic sagas the Prose Eddas and the Heimskringla, Odin was the king of ancient Tyrland, named after the Norse god Tyr, a kingdom also known as Troy. The saga
Rajnarok
, the Twilight of the Gods, on which Richard Wagner based his opera
Die Götterdämmerung
, is thought to be a description of that long and devastating conflict, with Odin himself as King Priam.

Through Odin’s marriage to the Trojan Sibyl, he obtained for himself the gift of prophecy, and thereby foresaw the coming destruction of Troy—and saw too that a glorious future awaited him after it, in the North. With his family and many Trojans and numerous valuable treasures, Odin began peregrinations through northern lands. Wherever they tarried in this migration, the local inhabitants looked upon them more as gods than as men; Odin and his sons were given as much land as they wanted, for they brought the gift of abundant harvests and, it was believed, they controlled the weather.

Odin settled his first three sons as kings in Saxony, Franconia, and Westphalia; in Jutland (Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark) he made a fourth son king, and in Sviythiod (Sweden) a fifth; a sixth became king of Norway. At each spot they settled, they buried one of the sacred treasures they’d brought with them from Troy—the sword of Hercules, the spear of Achilles, and such—as a foundation to protect their kingdoms, and to form a geomantic axis connecting them: the six-pointed star of the
Hagal
rune.

A sorcerer of enormous powers and wisdom equal to Solomon’s, Odin would later be deified as the god Wotan. Odin’s wife, the Sibyl, a prophetess from Marpessos at the foot of Mount Ida in modern Turkey, was one of a long line of women who recorded the history of the Trojan kings and prophesied the future of their descendants: their writings were also called the Sibylline Oracles.

After the Trojan War, two copies of these Sibylline Oracles were made and carried for safety to the Greek colony of Erythraea on the Turkish coast and to the Cumaean caves just north of Naples. The Cumaean books were later brought to Rome, in 600 B.C., by the last descendant of the Trojan sibyls, and offered to the Roman king Tarquin, who guarded them in closely held fastness, as they were still maintained down into imperial times. For these were of great value not only to the Teutonic descendants of Wotan but also to the Romans: Remus and his twin Romulus, who founded Rome, themselves were descendants of Aeneas, the Trojan hero of Virgil’s epic poem the
Aeneid
. When Virgil died, the emperor Augustus placed his grave along the road from Naples to Cumae, where Aeneas likewise had descended into the underworld.

The Roman culture enjoyed a “Thousand-Year Reich” from its founding in 753 B.C. until its conversion to Christianity under Constantine, who in
A.D
. 330 moved the imperial capital back to the region of Troy. A second phase lasted until the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, one thousand years after the fall of the western Roman Empire to the Germans. So these two cultures, the Teutonic and the Roman, can be seen mythologically as two branches of the same vine, both descended from Troy.

The Germans regarded themselves as the “rightfully chosen” sons whose ancestor Wotan was not only a hero like Aeneas but a king of royal blood and a divinity. They loathed the imputation that civilized culture had been brought to the pagan North only latterly by Charlemagne and the Carolingian Franks, usurpers who’d crawled to Rome to kiss the pontifical ring and have themselves crowned Holy
Roman
Emperors.

When Zoe’s eclectic romp through two millennia ended, she told us how these Thousand-Year Reichs were woven together.

“Hitler, from an early age, attended boys’ school at the Benedictine monastery at Lambach. As a choirboy there he claimed he’d ‘intoxicated himself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant church festivals’—and aspired to become a Black Monk, as the Benedictines were called.”

This recalled Virgilio’s comments on Saint Bernard, patron of the Templars, who’d single-handedly made the flagging Benedictine Order the most powerful in Europe.

According to Zoe, Benedict—a contemporary of King Arthur and Attila the Hun—built thirteen monasteries, all located at or near important pagan religious sites. Twelve were outside Rome, at Subiaco, within spitting distance of the ruins of the emperor Nero’s palace facing the
Sacro Speco
, a famous oracular cave where Benedict himself spent several years as a hermit. When some monks of neighboring orders tried to poison the meddlesome Benedict, who was bent upon “purifying” them, he broke camp and relocated to the site of the ancient city of Casinum between Rome and Naples, where he built his now legendary thirteenth monastery: Monte Cassino.

At the height of World War II, when the Allies landed at Naples just after the fall of the Mussolini government, the Germans spent six months defending Monte Cassino in one of the longest pitched battles of the war. Allied bombing raids reduced the mountain to rubble. Yet the German army—though they’d removed the monastery’s many treasures and archives to safety—fought on amid the broken stones, in a desperate attempt to hold the mountain.