The Spear Of Destiny

Trevor Ravenscroft

Hundreds of books have been written on Hitler's rise to power, but I'm sure that The Spear Of Destiny takes a very different almost approach to all of them. Author Trevor Ravenscroft claims to have constructed it from the notes of one Dr. Johannes Stein, an Austrian, who, in turn, claimed he was Winston Churchill's guide on Hitler's occult obsessions.

Stein, was supposed to have been part of a group of esoteric Christians, concerned primarily with pursuing the meditational path to find the Holy Grail, not a physical cup but a state of spiritual enlightenment. Stein apparently claimed that Hitler...was possessed by demons! Not metaphoric ones, real ones! 

As you can see, this is pretty far out stuff. Ravenscroft writes, at times, with the skill of a novelist and at others with the manipulative pressure of a direct marketing salesman and Hitler's demons are just some of the weird and wonderful paranormal concepts offered, such as:

• a tapestry of Historical figures from 1,000 years ago, reincarnated in the 20th Century as major players in both The First and Second World War.
• a considerable digression into stories about the races from Atlantis, including the Aryan race and how they tie in with Nordic & German mythology, apparently  taken very seriously by the Nazis.  
• that Hitler saw himself as the reincarnation of a powerful black magician, Klingsor, one of the characters from Parsifal, an opera by Wagner, his favorite composer 

• The Nazis racial experiments now no longer seem bizarre
• The Holocaust. The problem for me has always been that the camps seemed to have been initially set up for the utter humiliation & degradation of the Jews and then the disposal of their corpses when their spirit was extinguished. The Final Solution, the wholesale killing of the Jews after they had been worked to death seems to have only been instigated when the Germans thought they might lose the war. The Spear Of Destiny gives the reason why
• Now I can see Hitler's speeches as vehicles for possession by a dark spirit, first of Hitler and then of his audience in raptures and when Ravenscroft writes about Elemental forces, it's as valid an explanation to me as the many historians who've written about Nazi crowd hysteria as something tangible and terrifying
• That possession explains very clearly the well-documented possession that many people felt in Hitler's presence, including Albert Speer &
• Now I can see the Nuremberg rallies as pagan Germanic rituals, organised, and highly planned ceremonies with the massed swastika, created by individual flame-holders, being the key to releasing powerful psychic forces that tapped deep into the hopes, dreams and myths of the German psyche

It wasn't only me who puzzled over The Spear Of Destiny. It was undoubtedly the inspiration behind the first and third Indiana Jones movies and indirectly, I believe, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum.

So, the chances are that Lucas, Spielberg & possibly Eco agree with me that The Spear Of Destiny, seems to have provided some answers about Hitler, however implausible, answers that sensible, horrified people don't have access to. For that I'm grateful.

I believe that The Mark Of The Beast is Ravenscroft's follow-up although I haven't read it myself...