The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

were named, Idun was the goddess of the Eternal Return. The Sanskrit root was also one of the two great forces, Ida and Pingala, forming the serpent path of transformation.

At the height of World War I, Guido von List revealed his last and most powerful prophecy, inspired by the Eddas, the famous Icelandic sagas that tell of the world’s final battle in the Last Days. In the legend, each warrior who dies on the Plain of Ida—“shining renewal”—is instantly reborn as soon as he’s slain. List foresaw that those who died on the battlefield for the ideals contained in the runes would participate in the Eternal Return: that those slain in the First World War, the War to End All Wars, would instantly reincarnate like those on the mythological Plain of Ida. The newly reborn would then coalesce into a force that would attain its full power when most of them turned eighteen. This force would awaken the sleeping spirit of der Starke von Oben—the Strong One from On High—who would invoke the ancient Teutonic gods and change the world. Astrological examination revealed that this spirit would manifest itself around the end of 1932, unleashing the power of the runes that had been sleeping for two thousand years since the time of the Roman conquest.

When Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, at once he ordered the rebuilding and consecration of the Irminsul destroyed by Charlemagne. At nearby Paderborn, Himmler remodeled the castle of Wewelsburg for his unholy Order of Teutonic Knights. When Hitler instructed his architect Albert Speer to copy the design of the temple of Zeus at Pergamon on the Turkish coast for the Nürnberg rally grounds, the German College of Dowsers didn’t just dowse the field to locate major earth forces. They determined from architectural renderings that the 1300-foot temple structure where Hitler’s podium was to be placed would not be situated correctly to harness full geomantic powers. So the building site was relocated several hundred feet to the west—requiring a lake to be drained and a railroad to be rerouted.

Over the stadium Hitler ordered an enormous eagle with outstretched wings in the shape of the Tyr rune, symbolizing both the Weibaarin, female-eagle consort of Zeus, and the Weberin, the weaver or spinner of the world’s fate in the last days. Hitler told Speer this image was revealed to him in a dream he’d had after being blinded, rather like List, by mustard gas while serving on the western front in World War I. These two elements—eagle and spider, soaring and weaving, the forces of sky and cave—were combined in a single heraldic spirit that would one day serve as sun and moon, guiding his Holy Order.

On November 9, 1918, when Lucky learned that Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated and the new socialist government had sued for peace, it triggered a second prophetic dream—that Wotan had come to guide him and Germany to greatness. He wrote this poem:

I often go on bitter nights to Wotan’s oak in the quiet glade

Invoking dark powers to weave a union

—

those runic powers

the moon creates with its sorcerer’s spell; And all who are brazen by daylight are defeated by their magic formula.…

Hitler often said he regarded Berlin as head of his new religious order, and Munich as its heart. But that night, in the darkness of his mind, he saw that even from ancient times Nürnberg had been the spiritual center, soul of the German people, the mountain where the god Wotan slept. Albert Speer named his creation at the Nürnberg parade ground the Cathedral of Light, fitting for one who wished to portray himself symbolically as der Starke von Oben—the axis between heaven and earth, the door connecting past and future.

The operant word in the National Socialist Party’s name was “nationalist.” The Nazis were interested in finding the roots of Aryan genealogy, geomantics, mysteries, and the occult. They searched wells and springs and ancient burial sites, documenting the legacy preserved on standing stones throughout Europe. They sent secret expeditions high into the Pamir Mountains and the Pyrenees, rifling ancient caves to search for lost documents sealed within clay jars for thousands of years, which might reveal the truth of their sacred lineage and lost wisdom.

It was believed much information was secretly encoded in national epics of the northern lands, and these they set about deciphering. Many clues pointed to the history of the Trojan War. In the famous thirteenth-century Icelandic sagas the Prose Eddas and the Heimskringla, Odin was the king of ancient Tyrland, named after the Norse god Tyr, a kingdom also known as Troy. The saga Rajnarok, the Twilight of the Gods, on which Richard Wagner based his opera Die Götterdämmerung, is thought to be a description of that long and devastating conflict, with Odin himself as King Priam.

Through Odin’s marriage to the Trojan Sibyl, he obtained for himself the gift of prophecy, and thereby foresaw the coming destruction of Troy—and saw too that a glorious future awaited him after it, in the North. With his family and many Trojans and numerous valuable treasures, Odin began peregrinations through northern lands. Wherever they tarried in this migration, the local inhabitants looked upon them more as gods than as men; Odin and his sons were given as much land as they wanted, for they brought the gift of abundant harvests and, it was believed, they controlled the weather.

Odin settled his first three sons as kings in Saxony, Franconia, and Westphalia; in Jutland (Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark) he made a fourth son king, and in Sviythiod (Sweden) a fifth; a sixth became king of Norway. At each spot they settled, they buried one of the sacred treasures they’d brought with them from Troy—the sword of Hercules, the spear of Achilles, and such—as a foundation to protect their kingdoms, and to form a geomantic axis connecting them: the six-pointed star of the Hagal rune.

A sorcerer of enormous powers and wisdom equal to Solomon’s, Odin would later be deified as the god