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

was the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger. And Hitler’s personal photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, who was instrumental in his rise and who introduced the Führer to his assistant, the woman Hitler would marry just before his death, Eva Braun. And in the nuclear field, the chemist Otto Hahn, who, with Lise Meitner, conducted the first successful fission experiment; and Werner Heisenberg, who was in charge of Hitler’s atomic bomb project.

There were many who shared Hitler’s early interests, such as Hans Horbiger, father of the Welteislehre or Theory of World Ice—the idea that ice ages were caused by planetary collisions and, before each age, fabled cities like Atlantis, Hyperborea, and Ultima Thule sank or vanished beneath the ground along with their people. During such cataclysms, great seas became deserts like the Gobi, where underground kingdoms still exist and thrive today, like Dacian’s lost cities of Solomon. Horbiger maintained that the Lord of the World would rise at the dawn of the coming aeon—a theory so popular that the Nazis legitimized its study into an official science.

Another contact of Hitler associated with the Hagal rune was noted astrologer and psychic Erik Jan Hanussen, who cast Hitler’s horoscope on Christmas of 1932. He and Hitler had met as early as 1926, at the home of a wealthy Berlin socialite, and Hanussen had given him advice ever since—especially in speaking and body techniques for maximum hypnotic effect upon large crowds. In the year-end horoscope Hanussen predicted success, but only if “adverse forces” currently opposing Hitler—and there were many—were overcome. Hitler could prevail by eating a mandrake root dug by the light of a full moon from a garden at his birthplace, Braunau-am-Inn. Hanussen himself traveled there, dug the root, and on New Year’s Day delivered it to Hitler where he was staying at his leased cottage in the Obersalzburg.

The very night he received his horoscope and ate the mandrake root, Adolf Hitler went with Eva Braun, Putzi Hanfstaengl, and some other friends to see a performance of Richard Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. As it was later reported in Hanfstaengl’s diary, after the opera Hitler gave a lengthy commentary—for it is known he had committed all of Wagner’s works to memory—about the hidden meaning Wagner had incorporated in his libretto. When Hitler left the supper at the Hanfstaengls’ that night, he signed their guest book and made a point of remarking the date: January 1, 1933.

He told his friend Putzi: “This year belongs to us.”

From that moment onward, Hitler’s fortunes indeed changed. In the first month of 1933 Adolf Hitler went from being the widely caricatured hysterical buffoon who headed up a divided and unpopular political party to being sworn in, on the thirtieth of January, as chancellor of Germany. It was one hundred years since the soil of Germany was consecrated, in 1833, with the spilling of the “royal blood” of Kaspar Hauser.

When Wolfgang finished this story, we were headed up the long road that passed through the rolling hills and high open meadow toward the white-and-gold-walled monastery of Melk at the top, overlooking the broad, fertile Danube river valley. We pulled onto a broad gravel apron. Wolfgang switched off the engine and turned to me.

“There is one more H who was tied to the power of the Hagal rune, one that may well be the most significant,” he told me. “During the period the young Adolf Hitler lived as a struggling artist in Vienna, the famous father of Germanic paganism, Guido von List, was living there too. List had had a mystical experience in the year 1902, while in his fifties. Recovering from cataract surgery, he went blind for eleven months. During this time he believed he had rediscovered, through occult insight, the long-lost meanings, origins, and powers of the runes. He also claimed he’d received information about an elite order of priests of Wotan existing in Germany in ancient times, and he soon established a modern-day order of that priesthood.

“In the first century, the historian Tacitus had divided the Germans into three tribes. List maintained that these ‘tribes’ had really been castes: that the outer circle, the Ingaevones, were farmers, and the next, the Istaevones, were military, but the inner circle, the Hermiones, were sacred priest-kings who guarded the secret of the runes.

“So profound did many regard these concepts that by 1908 the List Society for Preservation of Germanic Heritage was created, numbering among its members some of the wealthiest, most prominent people in the German-speaking world. Its fervent following was almost like a new religion. Later it grew into a moving force in the zealous nationalistic movement that led to the First World War. In 1911 List formed a select inner circle within the Society, based on the pagan priesthood. To lend the name a more German-sounding ring, he called it the Armanenschaft. Only the members of this new priesthood itself were fully aware that the Hagal rune was the secret, unspoken power contained within this name.…”

Wolfgang paused and looked at me, as if expecting some reply.

“You mean, the name Hermione?” I said carefully.

I had, of course, observed the resemblance of this turn-of-the-century Teutonic Armanenschaft priesthood to the name of an ancestress in my own family, Hermione. And I also saw, with an uneasy twinge, that until now the former Dutch orphan and boat person had remained a sketchy figure who seemed to have done little with her reputedly haunting beauty except marry twice, inherit money, and die young.

“An interesting name, don’t you think?” he said, smiling strangely. “In myth, she was the daughter of Helen of Troy, abandoned at age nine when Helen eloped with Paris and the Trojan War began. In Greek the word herm means pillar—the real meaning of the name of those ancient tribes at the absolute geographical center of Germany, and of course the name of the runic priesthood, too: the pillars. So you see, if Hermione means Pillar Queen, it’s the woman around whom everything revolves. The one who, herself, must be the Axis.”