Magick and Warfare: Dr.John Dee, James Bond and Aleister Crowley...

Metaphysics and matters of national security enjoyed a close affinity during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.  Dr. John Dee was more than her astrologer, he was also an accomplished codebreaker and spy, working for Francis Walsingham, her spymaster.  Some four hundred years before James Bond was first created, Dee worked under the codename of 007 - the zeroes were meant to represent eyes, and he often headed encoded notes to his monarch with the opening line 'For Your Eyes Only…'

 Somehow it isn't surprising to see magic and diplomacy so intimately linked in a more superstitious age. 

Finding out a much more recent link defies logic, yet it appears to have happened.

On the 10th of May 1941, on the eve of Germany going to war against the Russians, Rudolph Hess, the third most powerful man in Germany after Hitler and Goering,  carried out his disastrous ‘peace mission’ and landed by plane in Scotland. 

 

He was immediately arrested by the Home Guard, and handed over to the Army. He had chosen a Scottish landing site near the ancestral home of the Duke of Hamilton and he demanded to see the aristocrat. This was because he had been told that the duke was one of the secret members of the imaginary Link organisation and also a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn.

Hess also said he wanted to be taken to London to see the king.  Hess told his amazed interrogators that occultists had influenced or hypnotised Churchill to take a negative attitude towards Germany. He also said that the German High Command believed that key British political figures had been ‘mesmerised by ‘evil forces’. Allegedly these same forces were trying to kill Hess because he was one of the few people who knew about their ‘secret psychic powers’. (The Daily Telegraph 7th April 2012).

Naturally the British authorities concluded that the deputy-fuehrer was raving mad. In fact one exasperated Army officer involved in his interrogation said that Hess should be taken out and shot like a rabid dog.

Commander Ian Fleming, (author of the James Bond books, which are full of occult symbolism - see above), was keen that Aleister Crowley should be allowed to interview Hess in captivity. This seems to have been suggested to Fleming in a letter from Crowley dated four days after the Nazi was captured.

In it the Great Beast says:’ If it is true that Herr Hess is much influenced by astrology an magick, my services might be useful to the [Naval Intelligence] department in case he should not be willing to do as you wish’ (Pearson 1966).

Although SIS asserted that Crowley never met Hess, it has been claimed that MI5 did arrange an interview between the two men at one of their interrogation centres. This was allegedly at Latchmore House on Ham Common in London used by MI5 for questioning German prisoners-of-war and secret agents they wanted to turn. (Spence 2008:249).

The Nazi Party’s reaction to Hess’ ‘peace mission’ was to disown the deputy-fuehrer and his actions. It was claimed he was mentally deranged and had been falsely and disastrously influenced by astrologers and occultists. A report in The Times newspaper on May 14th 1941, however, claimed that Hess had secretly been offering astrological advice to Hitler. A few months before his ill-fated trip to Scotland the deputy-fuehrer had allegedly convinced himself from astrological calculations that, despite recent German victories, Hitler was doomed.

Therefore Hess saw it as his patriotic duty to try and make peace with the British government before Germany was defeated. Despite its unofficial interest, the Third Reich had always had an ambiguous official approach to occultism and secret societies. A few weeks after the failed mission an operation called ‘Aktion Hess’ was launched by the Gestapo. This included banning performances or lectures on the occult, astrology, telepathy, clairvoyance and Spiritualism and many of their publicly known practitioners were arrested and ended up in concentration camps (Howe 1967: 192-193).