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Debunking Hollywood Satanism
The book "The Spear Of Destiny" by Trevor Ravenscroft when one reads this book and researches its principal claims it turns out to be an obvious work of fantasy written by a British Theosophist in the tradition of another obvious Theosophist and British author, Dennis Wheatley. This book often will appear by other authors in the esoteric realm to attack National Socialism and its Thule Society origins and spiritual tradition which is steeped in the deep and ancient Germanic Pagan culture.
Ravenscroft's book is pure Hollywood Satanism which is were Wheatley's book's such as "The Devil Rides Out" also appear in Hollywood movies. Ravenscroft's book has nothing of any value this is why actual scholars on the subject such as Peter Levenda openly denounce this work as nonsense when interviewed on the subject.
http://www.hiddenmysteries.org/themagazine/vol10/articles/hitlerhis2.shtml
The book "The Spear Of Destiny" by Trevor Ravenscroft when one reads this book and researches its principal claims it turns out to be an obvious work of fantasy written by a British Theosophist in the tradition of another obvious Theosophist and British author, Dennis Wheatley. This book often will appear by other authors in the esoteric realm to attack National Socialism and its Thule Society origins and spiritual tradition which is steeped in the deep and ancient Germanic Pagan culture.
Ravenscroft's book is pure Hollywood Satanism which is were Wheatley's book's such as "The Devil Rides Out" also appear in Hollywood movies. Ravenscroft's book has nothing of any value this is why actual scholars on the subject such as Peter Levenda openly denounce this work as nonsense when interviewed on the subject.
http://www.hiddenmysteries.org/themagazine/vol10/articles/hitlerhis2.shtml
Trevor Ravenscroft's The Spear of Destiny was published by that famous British house of occultism, the aptly named Neville Spearman Ltd,.in 1972, and has since gone through many edition.
Two challenges to Ravenscroft's facts, discussed below, have led some readers to conclude his book is more nearly a novel than strict history. Nonetheless, its provocative premise and fluent synthesis of black magical thematic will keep it on occult booklists until a better effort at explaining Hitler comes along.
The Spear of Destiny focuses first on Hitler's lost years in Vienna from 1909 to 1913. During that time, Ravenscroft writes, Dr. Stein was pursuing his occult researches as a student at the University of Vienna and getting to know Hitler, then a dropout living in a flophouse.
The problem lies with Ravenscroft's primary source, Dr. Walter Johannes Stein. And the problem with Dr.Stein is really two problems: one his method of historical research: and two, the fact that he is dead and unable to speak for himself.
Given his method, of course, this second problem should not be insurmountable. Had we the technique, Dr. Stein could presumably verify each of Ravenscroft's assertion for us from beyond the grave. For Dr. Stein is alleged to have studied history not in the libraries and archives that are the usual haunt of the historian but in an arena called the Cosmic Chronicle where, according to Ravenscroft, past present and future were united in a higher dimension of time.
What's more Ravenscroft reveals in his introduction, Dr.Stein taught the same techniques to him.
It is, however, undeniably difficult, if not unprecedented, to footnote clairvoyance. We have to take on faith that the The Spear of Destiny is what Dr.Stein told Ravenscroft. This is not to say that all of his information came from the Cosmic Chronicle; Dr. Stein as we have seen is purported to have been present in Vienna during Hitler's lost years there. Nor did their close association end in Austria. Ravenscroft says Dr. Stein "watched at close quarters" the founding of the Nazi party and Hitler's association with Eckart and other sinister mentors.
When Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler ordered Dr.Stein's arrest in Stuttgart in 1933 in order to press him into service with the SS Occult Bureau, he escaped from Germany and brought with him to Britain the most authoritative knowledge of the occultism of the Nazi Party.
Nowhere does Ravenscroft made it clear whether he's talking about eyewitness knowledge on Dr.Stein's part or about the sort of information to be gleaned from the Cosmic Chronicle. But two critics of the The Spear of Destiny do cast doubt on several of the factual assertions upon the factual assertions upon which Ravenscroft's argument is built.
One is Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, whose book on the occult roots of Nazism is quoted above. In an appendix called The Modern Mythology of Nazi Occultism, Goodrick-Clarke takes Ravenscroft to task for the story about Hitler's relations with the occult bookseller in Vienna and for his claim that Guido Von List was forced to flee from outraged Viennese Catholics in 1909 after the sexual rites of his blood brotherhood were exposed. he writes flatly,
There is not a shred of evidence for such rituals. List was never obliged to leave Vienna and he enjoyed the patronage of prominent Vienna figures...The fictional nature of the whole episode surrounding the annotated copy of copy of Parzival is suggested by the similarity of Pretzsche's obscure bookshop to the one described by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton in Zanoni, (1842), which probably served Ravenscroft as a literary model.
Goodrick-Clarke also criticizes Jean Michael Angebert's book, The Occult and the Third Reich, cited above. He brands as imaginary Angebert's account of the young Hitler's association with Lanz von Lebenfels.
As noted earlier, Goodrick-Clarke's book is an important and serious piece of research on Guido von List and Lanz von Lievenfels. But the author seems a little over-sensitive toward other writers who invoke his two subjects. Nevertheless, his critique of Angebert and Ravenscroft, though brief, does offer a glimpse of the misgivings that professional historians feel regarding such material.
More extensive criticisms have been offered by Christoph Lindenberg in his review of The Spear of Destiny in the German journal Die Drie. Lindenberg has done some effective digging at the Vienna Records office. Ravenscroft has Hitler sitting high up in the cheap seats of the Vienna Opera House in the winter of 1910 - 1 watching Wagner's Parzifal and sympathizing with Klingsor. This proves to have been impossible, because Lindenberg learned that the first performance of Wagner's opera took place three years later, on January 14,1914.
Ravenscroft's second mistake was to name the Viennese bookseller who introduced Hitler to drugs. "No better name occurred to him than Pretsche, popular among English writers of fiction for German malefactors," Lindenberg writes scornfully before revealing that extensive checks of Vienna city and business directories and police records for the years 1892 through 1920 were negative for the name in question.
Next, Lindenberg takes issue with Ravenscroft's description of the Danube trip Hitler and Dr. Stein took in May 1913, to visit the mystic woodcutter, Hands Lodz:
We can overlook Ravenscroft's mistake of speaking of "Wachau" as a place and not of the region which really it is. But the details do not fit: the snow melting in May, the steamer running in spite of the floods, bathing in the river- it makes no sense. Certainly wrong is the statement that Hitler had only one testicle... all this has been completely refuted by Werner Maser.
Ravenscroft's account of Hitler's circumstances in Vienna also come in for some heavy criticism. Dr. Stein reportedly sat in a window seat in Demel's Cafe, reading the anonymous marginalia in the copy of Parzival he'd found and concluding they were "the footnotes of Satan" when he looked through the glass and beheld "the most arrogant face and demonical eyes he had ever seen". This was of course the future Fuehrer in his legendary guise as an impoverished pavement artist, selling homemade postcards, dressed in a big black "sleazy" coat, his toes visible through the cracks in his shoes. When in August, 1912, he sought Hitler out at the "flophouse" he lived in , in Meldemannstrasse, he was told Hitler was away at Spittal-an-der-Drau collecting a legacy left him by an aunt. Thereafter, Hitler dressed well.
Hitler did receive a legacy from his aunt, Johanna Poelzl, Lindenberg reports. But this happens in March, 1911, and the aunt lived in Spital-with-one-t, not on the Drau but in southern Austria. Furthermore,
At no time of life did Hitler live in impoverished conditions, rather he had always sufficient money. In the Meldenmannstrasse, a kind of large hotel, Hitler paid a rent of 15 Kronen a month. So he could afford a fairly expensive room and had no need to sell his pictures, which in any case were no postcards. So this scene too, that impoverished Hitler dressed in an oversized black coat selling water colors in front of the Cafe Dehmel does not agree with the facts either (cf. the two works by Werner Maser who with incredible care collected all ascertained facts of Hitler's youth).
In his discussion of the holy lance's power to evoke transcendent experience, Ravenscroft has a scene in which the chief of the German general staff, Helmut von Moltke, visited the relic in the company of Conrad von Hoetzendorf, an Austrian general, shortly before the outbreak of World War I. The spear's presence led von Moltke to have a trance vision of himself incarnated as Pope Nicolas I, a ninth century pontiff concerned, like von Moltke, with the balance of geopolitical power between east and west.
Untrue protests Lindenberg. "For Moltke visited Vienna neither in 1913 nor in 1914. Conrad and Moltke met on May 12, 1914 at Karlsbad, from September 7 - 10, 1913, in Silesia, and at Leipzig on October 18 at the Centenary of the Battle of Leipzig. They had no other meeting."
Lindenberg has several other criticisms to make, such as the assertion that "A number of people who intimately knew Walter Johannes Stein in the last years of his life state that Stein never met Hitler." Unfortunately Ravenscroft's aversion to footnotes has also afflicted his critic, and Lindenberg nowhere names these people nor does he document his other assertions.
Lindenberg doesn't like Ravenscroft's book; he calls it " a pollution of our spiritual environment." And it is manifestly difficult for him or anyone to rebut research done on the cosmic level.