Repression of the occult
It’s been suggested that Hitler and other high ranking Nazis were obsessed with the occult, or `black magic’, and that they were even `black magicians.’
But if this is true, why were occult writings and practices so rigorously repressed when the Nazis rose to power?
In 1934 the first move was made when the Berlin police issued a ban on all forms of fortune-telling, from fairground palmists to society astrologers. That the orders came from central headquarters is certain, for the police officers who carried out the orders were extremely confused as to the intention behind them. They both impounded ‘innocent’ books and let go books of magic spells and similar works.
Next came a general suppression of all occult groups, even to the dismay and surprise of members of the `German Order’ and the `Thule Society’. Many Nazis were members of these organizations, but even they were not exempt.
For instance, Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, whose writings inspired much of the German racial mystique, and who boasted that by introducing Hitler to occult groups he had been his ‘guru’, was told that he must not publish occult works in future.
With the sole exceptions of ‘inner party members’, such as some of Himmler’s personal SS aides, occultists of all kinds had been destroyed or driven underground in German-occupied countries by 1940.
If the Nazis really were occultists, or magicians, why would they want to repress occultism? Surely they would want to encourage it instead?
The answer to this has been pointed out by such writers as Francis King and J. H. Brennan.
They argue that in regimes that in some ways were similar to the Nazi regime — Mao’s China, for instance, and Stalin’s Russia — there was no such systematic repression of occultists. True, Stalin repressed freemasons, cabalists, and the like, but only because they were ’secret societies’ per se, not because of their ‘magical’ activities.
In China, even after the Cultural Revolution, seers and astrologers were condemned as `superstitious, but no action was taken against them. They were ridiculed rather than persecuted. So in general authoritarian regimes don’t seem to fear magical practices, or the occult.
But Nazi Germany had to repress ‘freelance’ occultists, because in effect they were its own rivals — in much the same way that the Trotskyites were repressed by Stalin because they were his rivals.
In the German Third Reich only one brand of the occult was allowed, and it was at the heart of the regime. It was controlled by Adolf Hitler and his `disciple’ Heinrich Himmler - and according to the `Nazi magic’ theory they were both powerful black magicians.
Early `reliable’ report
Probably the earliest reliable report of spontaneous human combustion was reported in Verona, Italy, in the 18th. century.
According to a statement by Bianchini, a prebendary (clergyman) of Verona, dated 4 April 1731, the 62-year-old Countess Cornelia Bandi had been put to bed after supper, and fell asleep after several hours’ conversation with her maid.
In the morning the maid returned to wake her and found a grisly scene. The `Gentlemen’s Magazine’ reported: ‘The floor of the chamber was thick-smear’d with a gluish moisture, not easily got off . . . and from the lower part of the window trickl’d down a greasy, loathsome, yellowish liquor with an unusual stink.’
Specks of soot hung in the air and covered all the surfaces in the room, and the smell had penetrated adjoining rooms. The bed was undamaged, the sheets turned back, indicating the Countess had got out of bed.
Four feet [1 .3 metres] from the bed was a heap of ashes, two legs untouch’d, stockings on, ‘between which lay the head, the brains, half of the back-part of the skull and the whole chin burn’d to ashes, among which were found three fingers blacken’d.
All the rest was ashes which had this quality - that they left in the hand a greasy and stinking moisture.
In photo: an unidentified spontaneous human combustion victim
fly attack man dies!
A man has died after swallowing a fly which laid maggots in his stomach that gruesomely ate him when he was still alive!
This true story is reminiscent of the old Burl Ives (an American folk 
singer) song `I know an old lady’, which starts with the lyrics: `I know an old lady who swallowed a fly, I don’t know why she swallowed the fly, I guess she’ll die.’
I have to confess to using a little bit of tabloid journalism here, to being a little bit sensationalist. The maggots didn’t gruesomely eat him when he was still alive, they quite naturally ate him when he was still alive; this is what maggots do. But heck, most people think that maggots are gruesome and `gruesome’ it makes the story more appealling, makes it more appetising, so to speak.
Anyway, here’s the story
`The medical world of Vienna has been much occupied in the consideration of an extraordinary case. It is, states the Standard correspondent, that of a young man of means, who, after six months’ painful illness, which puzzled all the doctors consulted, including specialists from Germany, died a few days ago from the consequences of having swallowed a living bluebottle fly, which laid its eggs in his intestines, the eggs developing into maggots, ate their way through.
When the cause of the patient’s ailment became known, he was too weak from malnutrition and loss of blood for an operation to be risked. No such case hat occurred before in Vienna. but one or two are mentioned in medical literature.’
First published in a British newspaper on 15th. December 1882
A newspaper stand during the American civil war or War Between the States
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