The Magic Circle Katherine Neville (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📖

into, in order to increase his own powers. If you watch those old films of Hitler, you’ll see what I describe. He’ll be standing in his open car as it moves along the street, with the throngs cheering around him, but before the car completely comes to rest, it backs up and goes forward, adjusting until it settles on exactly the right spot.

“You see, Hitler’s dowsers went first to measure the forces, to locate the most propitious spot to stop the car—and find the right building or window or balcony for him to give a speech. These forces protected him against sabotage, and also increased his own energy. You know how many assassination attempts failed—even bombs planted beside him in an enclosed room—because of the power grid shielding him. And it was known from ancient times that there was nothing stronger than the forces that Adolf Hitler later tried to harness, there at Nürnberg.”

“Whatever Dacian may believe, you can’t imagine that Hitler actually survived multiple assassination attempts because of some weird force like a ‘hail rune’?” I said.

“I’m saying what he believed—and I’ve plenty of evidence to support it,” he assured me. And he began as we drove toward Melk.

THE HAIL RUNE

Even at so late a date as the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the upbringing in a cage of an abandoned boy like Kaspar Hauser was not unheard of. Many situations were known of children who’d been raised by wild beasts. But until Kaspar Hauser’s case, few had prompted scientific study.

A ritual was commonly practiced by many fraternal orders or secret groups, involving the spilling of royal blood. Three kinds of death were delivered at once, to propitiate the gods of three realms: fire, air, and water. These were symbolized by blows to the head, the chest, and the genitals. We only know that the first two of these blows were practiced on Kaspar Hauser.

It was widely believed after his death that the boy was descended from nobility or royalty, that he’d been kidnapped at birth and raised by peasants in bizarre conditions, confined in a space so low that he could not even stand up, and fed on a diet of barley bread and water—interestingly enough, the food anciently given an animal being prepared as a sacrifice. In other words, Kaspar Hauser was very likely the victim of an unexplained pagan ritual that suddenly surfaced in Nürnberg at the beginning of the modern era. One hundred years later, Adolf Hitler would be completely fascinated by the implications of this story.

Toward the end of the last century, around the time Hitler was born in 1889, there was a movement resurgent throughout Germany to delve into the völkisch roots of the Germanic people, the common folk or peasants, as they were pictured in Norse legends and German fairy tales—to renew traditional values and customs believed to comprise the very core of the Teutonic soul and bring back a golden age.

At the time, it was widely believed by German-speaking peoples that for thousands of years there had been a secret plot against them, rooted in a desire by the tribes of Mediterranean stock—for example, the Romans during the Empire, the Moors in medieval Spain—to conquer all the northern peoples, those of so-called Aryan blood, and perpetrate cultural genocide against them. It was also held that these Teutonic ancestors had a higher culture than those of the Mediterranean, and kept their blood purer and unsullied by any hybrid contact with other groups—much like today’s Brahman caste in India.

Despite this supposed Nordic superiority, the runic alphabet was a late development—around 300 B.C.—possibly borrowed by the Teutons from the Celts or another group. As with previous cultures, however, the skill of writing and the runes themselves were invested with magical, even divine, significance.

The Hagalrune is the ninth letter of the runic alphabet. Nine is a very powerful Nordic number: the Havamal, part of the famous Icelandic epic the Edda, tells us that the Norse god Wotan had to hang on the World Tree for nine days and nights in order to become initiated into the power and mystery of the runes.

Nine was the most important number to Hitler: the date November 9 carried mystical meaning for him: as he said, “The ninth of November 1923 was the most important day of my life.” That was the day of the Munich putsch that sent him to jail, where he wrote Mein Kampf. But November 9 is an important date in the history of our part of the world. As well, it is the date of Napoleon’s coup ending the French Revolution, the death of Charles de Gaulle, the German revolution resulting in the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm at the end of World War I, the abdication of Ludwig III of Bavaria who founded the Second Reich, and also Kristallnacht, that night in 1938 when riots of broken glass against the Jews took place all over Austria and Germany.

But the Hagal rune has other meanings of importance. It stands for the sound equal to our alphabetical letter h—a letter that does not exist in the Greek alphabet. This is, by no coincidence, the letter beginning the last names of both Adolf Hitler and Kaspar Hauser. That the rune was a magical talisman for Hitler is borne out by the curious fact that many of his inner circle also had names that began with H.

Heinrich Himmler the occultist, head of the widely feared Schutzstaffel, or SS. “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, head of the Nazi foreign press department. Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher of Prague, head of the SD, whose assassination during the war led to the Nazi massacre of an entire Czechoslovakian village. And the Führer’s closest friend, Rudolf Hess, who helped draft Mein Kampf and later rose to be second in command to Hitler. Hess was born and raised in Egypt, where he absorbed many occult teachings, too. Hess introduced Hitler to his former professor Karl Haushofer, founder of German geopolitics and the Nazis’ favorite theorist. Then there