nivek
As Above So Below
That Time Witches Fought the Nazis
World War II has had more than its fair share of strange stories and conspiracies, with numerous reports of the odd coming from these bloody battlefields. In particular there seems to be no way to mention the Germans and their leader Hitler without opening a whole can of worms of oddness, strange schemes, and the occult.
One very odd story that originates in the mayhem of the war is that of a coven of witches who according to some reports allegedly came together to use their arcane powers to stop the Germans in their tracks.
The summer of 1940 was a frightening time to be in southern England. The unstoppable German war machine was on the move, with Hitler’s forces inexorably pushing northward after the British military had been sent scattering during the fighting at Dunkirk, where some 325,000 men were rescued from the churning maw of the fierce German juggernaut.
Despite various failed Allied efforts to stop the incoming onslaught, the German advance was swift and ferocious, and citizens along England’s south coast began to erect sandbags and makeshift barbed wire fences as the buzz of planes could be heard droning in the skies above and they watched the roiling gray seas for signs of death’s head looming over the horizon.
It was a tense time for these people, hunkered down and with the coming German invasion seemingly imminent, and one of these people who watched the seas and skies at the village of Highcliffe-on-Sea was a retired British civil servant and occultist named Gerald Gardner, who had something else in mind for the enemy.
Gardner was a bit of an enigmatic individual to say the least. He claimed to have joined an occult organization known as the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship in the 1930s, which he had eventually become dissatisfied with and fallen out of.
In 1939 he said that he had been initiated into a coven of witches from the area of the New Forest in southern England, not far from Highcliffe, where he studied their ancient rituals and practices and would go on to use these as the foundation of Gardnerian Wicca, which is the origin of most other forms of modern Wiccan traditions and which would earn him the reputation as the father of modern Wicca.
Gardner believed that through Wiccan magical rituals the coming of the Nazis could be turned back, and indeed he pointed out that such a thing had successfully been done at several times throughout history.
Gerald Gardner
According to Gardner, in 1588 a massive Spanish armada had been turned back by fierce storms conjured up by witches, and that in 1805 Napoleon’s advancing invasion force had also suddenly stopped their march forward, again due to witchcraft.
He reasoned that there was every chance that this could be achieved again, and to this end he claims that there gathered a group of witches to meet at midnight within the New Forest on the eve of the Wiccan harvest day Lammas, August 1, 1940, in order to carry out a powerful Wiccan ritual in what would come to be known as Operation Cone of Power.
There, in a clearing of a woodland called Ferny Knapp Inclosure, Gardner and his fellow witches allegedly created a vast “witches circle” as they danced about naked and sang and chanted in an effort to invoke their ancient magic.
According to Gardner, who would later write of the ritual and his coven in his 1954 book Witchcraft Today and his 1959 book The Meaning of Witchcraft, the object of the ritual was to send a potent message directly into Hitler’s mind that would weaken his resolve and willpower to deter him from going through with his invasion plans.
It was a potent spell that would apparently take the lives of some of the older and frailer members of the coven after they had contracted pneumonia from cavorting about naked in the cold. Interestingly, Hitler did indeed stop his assault on England for unclear reasons, indeed they would never cross the English Channel, and Gardner would claim that his coven’s ritual had perhaps had a hand in it.
Although he was very secretive about what the ritual actually entailed or his actual role in it all, Gardner would cryptically write in Witchcraft Today:
The tale of Gardner and what has come to be known as the New Forest coven has gone on to become practically legend, and it has been widely debated as to how true any of it really is. One very vocal critic of the whole oddball story was a researcher and writer named Amado Crowley, who claimed to actually be the son of the famed occultist Aleister Crowley.
In the 1970s Crowley came forward to denounce Gardner’s claims as a fiction that had been based on another ritual that had been carried out by his supposed father Aleister Crowley in 1941. Amado claimed than when he was a boy he had seen this very ritual, which had been called Operation Mistletoe and which had involved Canadian soldiers dressed in witches robes conjuring magic against an effigy of a Nazi sitting within a throne within the the Ashdown Forest in Sussex.
Amado claimed that this ritual had led to the Nazi leader Rudolph Hess embarking on a harebrained plan to fly solo over to England to try and convince the British to surrender, which would result in him running out of fuel, crashing into the English Channel, and being captured to languish in prison until his death in 1987.
It is unclear whether Amado Crowley’s claims are true, as no evidence of such a ritual has ever been found within Aleister Crowley’s meticulously detailed diaries, nor any evidence of actually ever having had a son at all. In short, Amado Crowley could be just as much of a sham as he claims Gardner to be.
Another who is skeptical of the reality the ritual of Operation Cone of Power is British historian Ronald Hutton, who thinks that it was a story devised to illustrate that pagans could be patriotic in a time when the Wiccan movement was looked at with suspicious eyes, soaked in imagery of animal sacrifice and dark magic. Hutton would say of the whole affair:
If it didn’t happen, then it was a wonderful way of trying to get people to regard Wiccans as being patriotic and fellow citizens, instead of being some kind of enemies of society. Gerald [Gardner] produced the story of Operation Cone of Power after he’d coped with a great deal of barracking from the media about witches being inherently evil and perverted people. So this was one very good way of explaining that they weren’t.
Other historians think that the ritual did in fact happen, and that it reflected the crushing helplessness many of these people felt on the face of the oncoming destruction. In this case, the people, including the witches, did the only thing they knew how to do with the power they had at hand.
British author and Wiccan Philip Heselton has said that such a coven likely did exist to some extent, and has said of Gardner’s claims:
In the end there is little evidence to suggest that this Cone of Power ritual ever took place outside of Gardner’s own accounts. Indeed the exact location of where the whole thing took place is poorly understood, and it largely remains a historical oddity with scant proof.
The New Forest Coven and its wartime efforts remains shrouded in mystery, despite the efforts of researchers and historians, and their supposed deeds have become legendary, still debated to this day. What is known is that Hitler did stop his foray across the English Channel for unclear reasons, and England was never invaded by the Germans.
Why this is may never be fully known, but there will perhaps always be that suspicion that perhaps a coven of witches had something to do with it.
World War II has had more than its fair share of strange stories and conspiracies, with numerous reports of the odd coming from these bloody battlefields. In particular there seems to be no way to mention the Germans and their leader Hitler without opening a whole can of worms of oddness, strange schemes, and the occult.
One very odd story that originates in the mayhem of the war is that of a coven of witches who according to some reports allegedly came together to use their arcane powers to stop the Germans in their tracks.
The summer of 1940 was a frightening time to be in southern England. The unstoppable German war machine was on the move, with Hitler’s forces inexorably pushing northward after the British military had been sent scattering during the fighting at Dunkirk, where some 325,000 men were rescued from the churning maw of the fierce German juggernaut.
Despite various failed Allied efforts to stop the incoming onslaught, the German advance was swift and ferocious, and citizens along England’s south coast began to erect sandbags and makeshift barbed wire fences as the buzz of planes could be heard droning in the skies above and they watched the roiling gray seas for signs of death’s head looming over the horizon.
It was a tense time for these people, hunkered down and with the coming German invasion seemingly imminent, and one of these people who watched the seas and skies at the village of Highcliffe-on-Sea was a retired British civil servant and occultist named Gerald Gardner, who had something else in mind for the enemy.
Gardner was a bit of an enigmatic individual to say the least. He claimed to have joined an occult organization known as the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship in the 1930s, which he had eventually become dissatisfied with and fallen out of.
In 1939 he said that he had been initiated into a coven of witches from the area of the New Forest in southern England, not far from Highcliffe, where he studied their ancient rituals and practices and would go on to use these as the foundation of Gardnerian Wicca, which is the origin of most other forms of modern Wiccan traditions and which would earn him the reputation as the father of modern Wicca.
Gardner believed that through Wiccan magical rituals the coming of the Nazis could be turned back, and indeed he pointed out that such a thing had successfully been done at several times throughout history.
Gerald Gardner
According to Gardner, in 1588 a massive Spanish armada had been turned back by fierce storms conjured up by witches, and that in 1805 Napoleon’s advancing invasion force had also suddenly stopped their march forward, again due to witchcraft.
He reasoned that there was every chance that this could be achieved again, and to this end he claims that there gathered a group of witches to meet at midnight within the New Forest on the eve of the Wiccan harvest day Lammas, August 1, 1940, in order to carry out a powerful Wiccan ritual in what would come to be known as Operation Cone of Power.
There, in a clearing of a woodland called Ferny Knapp Inclosure, Gardner and his fellow witches allegedly created a vast “witches circle” as they danced about naked and sang and chanted in an effort to invoke their ancient magic.
According to Gardner, who would later write of the ritual and his coven in his 1954 book Witchcraft Today and his 1959 book The Meaning of Witchcraft, the object of the ritual was to send a potent message directly into Hitler’s mind that would weaken his resolve and willpower to deter him from going through with his invasion plans.
It was a potent spell that would apparently take the lives of some of the older and frailer members of the coven after they had contracted pneumonia from cavorting about naked in the cold. Interestingly, Hitler did indeed stop his assault on England for unclear reasons, indeed they would never cross the English Channel, and Gardner would claim that his coven’s ritual had perhaps had a hand in it.
Although he was very secretive about what the ritual actually entailed or his actual role in it all, Gardner would cryptically write in Witchcraft Today:
The tale of Gardner and what has come to be known as the New Forest coven has gone on to become practically legend, and it has been widely debated as to how true any of it really is. One very vocal critic of the whole oddball story was a researcher and writer named Amado Crowley, who claimed to actually be the son of the famed occultist Aleister Crowley.
In the 1970s Crowley came forward to denounce Gardner’s claims as a fiction that had been based on another ritual that had been carried out by his supposed father Aleister Crowley in 1941. Amado claimed than when he was a boy he had seen this very ritual, which had been called Operation Mistletoe and which had involved Canadian soldiers dressed in witches robes conjuring magic against an effigy of a Nazi sitting within a throne within the the Ashdown Forest in Sussex.
Amado claimed that this ritual had led to the Nazi leader Rudolph Hess embarking on a harebrained plan to fly solo over to England to try and convince the British to surrender, which would result in him running out of fuel, crashing into the English Channel, and being captured to languish in prison until his death in 1987.
It is unclear whether Amado Crowley’s claims are true, as no evidence of such a ritual has ever been found within Aleister Crowley’s meticulously detailed diaries, nor any evidence of actually ever having had a son at all. In short, Amado Crowley could be just as much of a sham as he claims Gardner to be.
Another who is skeptical of the reality the ritual of Operation Cone of Power is British historian Ronald Hutton, who thinks that it was a story devised to illustrate that pagans could be patriotic in a time when the Wiccan movement was looked at with suspicious eyes, soaked in imagery of animal sacrifice and dark magic. Hutton would say of the whole affair:
If it didn’t happen, then it was a wonderful way of trying to get people to regard Wiccans as being patriotic and fellow citizens, instead of being some kind of enemies of society. Gerald [Gardner] produced the story of Operation Cone of Power after he’d coped with a great deal of barracking from the media about witches being inherently evil and perverted people. So this was one very good way of explaining that they weren’t.
Other historians think that the ritual did in fact happen, and that it reflected the crushing helplessness many of these people felt on the face of the oncoming destruction. In this case, the people, including the witches, did the only thing they knew how to do with the power they had at hand.
British author and Wiccan Philip Heselton has said that such a coven likely did exist to some extent, and has said of Gardner’s claims:
In the end there is little evidence to suggest that this Cone of Power ritual ever took place outside of Gardner’s own accounts. Indeed the exact location of where the whole thing took place is poorly understood, and it largely remains a historical oddity with scant proof.
The New Forest Coven and its wartime efforts remains shrouded in mystery, despite the efforts of researchers and historians, and their supposed deeds have become legendary, still debated to this day. What is known is that Hitler did stop his foray across the English Channel for unclear reasons, and England was never invaded by the Germans.
Why this is may never be fully known, but there will perhaps always be that suspicion that perhaps a coven of witches had something to do with it.
