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

More attuned was Josef Goebbels, who had six beautiful blond children. An interesting number, six. Their names were Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedde, and Heidi.” She looked at me intently, then asked, “Perhaps you don’t know what happened to these little blond Goebbels children whose names all began with H? They too were sacrificed on Walpurgisnacht: poisoned with cyanide in Hitler’s Berlin bunker by their parents, who killed the pet dog Blondi in the same fashion and then took their own lives too.”

“Sacrificed? What on earth do you mean?” I exclaimed.

“May Eve is the night of sacrifice and purgation,” Zoe explained. “The next day, May first, was once called Beltaine, Bel’s or Baal’s fires, the sixth station of the Celtic calendar and the pivotal midpoint of the pagan year. The prior night, when Hitler committed suicide, April 30, was in ancient times called the Night of the Dead. The only pagan holy day never converted to the Christian calendar, it still possesses its original, undiluted primal power.”

“You can’t mean the people who died in Hitler’s bunker sacrificed their own children in some kind of … pagan rite?” I asked in horror.

Zoe did not answer directly. “The most important event of that night was the first: a marriage that took place between two people who knew they would soon be dead,” Zoe said. “Adolf Hitler of course was the bridegroom. But who was the bride in this oddly timed wedding? An insignificant woman who filled a significant role—and who interestingly was named Eve, like the first woman in the Bible, the mother of us all. Her last name describes the color of the earth, the prima materia that provides the basis of all alchemical transmutations. She was Eva Braun.”

And with that observation, Zoe began her tale.…

MR. BROWN

-And there is a certain man, a man whose real name is unknown to us, who is working in the dark to his own ends.… Who is he? We do not know. He is always spoken of by the unassuming title of ‘Mr. Brown.’ But one thing is certain, he is the master criminal of this age. He controls a marvellous organization. Most of the Peace propaganda during the war was originated and financed by him. His spies are everywhere.…

-Can you describe him at all?

-I really didn’t notice. He was quite ordinary

—

just like anyone else

.

—Agatha Christie, The Secret Adversary (1922)

He was born at Braunau-am-Inn, a town whose name also reflects the word “brown.” The storm troopers who brought him to power were called brownshirts; the offices of the National Socialist Party were located at Brown House in Munich. And then, there was Dr. Wernher von Braun, whose secret rocket fabrication was performed by slaves in underground caves in the Harz Mountains, quite near the Brocken. The Führer himself named the place Dora, meaning, like Pandora, the gift.

Names and words were important to Lucky. Words such as “providence” and “fate” and “destiny” appear dozens of times throughout Mein Kampf, as in “Today it seems providential that Fate should have chosen Braunau-am-Inn as my birthplace.”

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