The plan was named Operation Cone of Power. Sounds militaristic. Possibly some kind of intelligence operation. Certainly had to be official. It was the summer of 1940 and Britain was bracing itself for a full-on invasion from German forces. A team of witches came together, lead by the Father of Witchcraft, Gerald Gardner, and worked their magick to push back against the Nazis. And as history documented, the Nazis never were able to invade Britain. Some may say it was the Luftwaffe's failure to defeat the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain that kept the Germans from taking Britain, but one really has to wonder, was it the witches? And what in the world did James Bond creator Ian Fleming have to do with all of this? Join us for this fascinating journey into a little known piece of World War II history!
Listeners are probably pretty familiar with the fact that the Nazis, especially the core group that surrounded Adolph Hitler, were believers and practitioners of the esoteric. Robert Somerlott wrote in his 1971 book, Here, Mr. Splitfoot, An Informal Exploration into Modern Occultism, "From the beginning the whole Nazi system was overlaid with mysticism and mythology, and when the tide of war turned against Germany, the esoteric beliefs of its leaders became ever more apparent. Diaries, captured documents and the transcript of the Nuremberg trials abound with references to peculiar creeds and techniques; yet we are now seeing only the top of the iceberg, and we can only guess the magnitude of what lay below the surface." At the same time that Germany was fighting its way to world domination, it was also collecting sacred artifacts and seeking secret and ancient knowledge. An example of this is the Altar of Zeus, which had been excavated by German archaeologist Carl Humann (Hoo mahn) and brought to Berlin from Pergamon, Turkey and reassembled in the Pergamon Museum in 1930. This was also called the Seat of Satan and the chief architect of the Nazi party, Albert Speer, would draw great inspiration from the altar as he designed the parade grounds in Nuremberg. Hitler himself carried a copy of Ernst Schertel's book "Magic: History, Theory and Practice." There had been several assassination attempts against Hitler that were unsuccessful and he saw this as an indication that he had providence behind him and so he would fail at nothing. One of his top officers was Heinrich Himmler and Himmler was fascinated with the esoteric and witchcraft. Himmler was one of the most powerful Nazis and he was the architect of what the Nazis called "The Final Solution." He grew the SS and looked at it as being way more than a military order. This was part of an ancient Germanic clan practicing pagan rituals and such. He founded his own pseudo-teutonic cult at Webelsburg Castle. Rudolf Hess was a big believer in astrology and he would use it to help him choose the day he would make a mysterious flight to Scotland we'll talk about later.
Now, this certainly isn't to say that the Nazis were driven primarily by occult beliefs and goals and practices. That would not only be an oversimplification, but also gives a distorted view of occultism. But we think it adds an interesting angle when analyzing Operation Cone of Power. With the Nazis embracing bits of the esoteric, it only made sense to fight fire with fire. If the Nazis were trying to use magick to win, then magick needed to be used to fight them.
Let's set the scene for where we are during World War II. In May of 1940, the French seaport of Dunkirk was evacuated of the British Expeditionary Force and Allied troops. The evacuation via naval vessels and hundreds of civilian boats continued through June 4th. The Blitzkrieg against France by the Nazis was about to come to an end with the Fall of France. Paris was captured on June 14, 1940. Shortly after that, Germany set its sights on Britain. The Luftwaffe (looft vaa fuh) began its barrage from the air in July with the Battle of Britain. Hitler had named this Operation Sea Lion. Their goal was to soften British forces and open it up for invasion by the German Army. That army was in control of the French ports that were just across the English Channel. The situation was dire and Hermann Goring had told Hitler that the Luftwaffe would smash the British air defenses in four days. (Side note: For listeners who hadn't heard about this on a previous episode, Diane has an ancestor named Kurt Student who was the second in command of the Luftwaffe and he created the Fallschirmjäger (Fall shirm yaegar), which were German paratroopers.)
Enter, the Father of Witchcraft, Gerald Gardner. Gardner was born into a wealthy timber magnate family in 1884 in Lancashire. He was a sickly child who grew up in Madeira (Mah Deer Ah) as it was hoped that the climate there would help with his asthma. Education was hard to come by, so he taught himself to read. In 1911, he moved to Malaya, which was part of Singapore that was under British rule, to work as a civil servant. While there, he learned of the native people's magical practices and he studied them. He joined the Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship in 1936 and through them met a group of pagan witches that practiced in the New Forest in Southern England. This was the New Forest Coven and he took parts of their practices to work out his own tradition, which he named for himself, Gardnerian Wicca. This would be the earliest created tradition of Wicca.
When Gardner was initiated into the New Forest Coven, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was still in force and this made it illegal to conjure spirits, cast spells or claim to predict the future. So it was a criminal offense to be part of a coven and everything had to be done in secrecy. Gardner was really excited about all that he was learning, but he was warned that if he wrote about any of this, he was in danger of being jailed and his High Priestess forbade him from doing that. Gardner wrote of this, "Anyhow, I soon found myself in the circle and took the usual oaths of secrecy which bound me not to reveal any secrets of the cult. But, as it is a dying cult, I thought it was a pity that all the knowledge should be lost, so in the end I was permitted to write, as fiction, something of what a witch believes in the novel High Magic's Aid."
Gardner had served Britain as a civil servant and he was very loyal to his country. When the Nazis began to threaten his homeland, he knew he needed to do something or soon he and the other members of his coven would fall under Nazi domination. The 55-year-old Gardner became an air raid warden and offered his home as a headquarters for Air Raid Precautions. He also had a large collection of firearms that he gave to locals and he taught himself and a group of friends how to make Molotov cocktails and they set out to make dozens of them. But Gardner believed that there something else that could be done that had nothing to do with arms. Gardner believed they could use magick to cast a spell that wouldn't just stop the Nazis, but actually target Adolph Hitler personally.
Gerald Gardner wrote about the ritual that his coven conducted on August 1, 1940 in his 1954 book Witchcraft Today. This was on the eve of Lammas Day or Lughnasadh (Loo Nah Saw), which is one of the Greater Sabbats in Wicca and is a pagan harvest festival. The ritual took place just outside of the town of Highcliffe-on-Sea on England’s southern coast in a clearing near a former hanging tree called the Wilverley Oak that is nicknamed the Naked Man. Today, that is just a ravaged stump said to be haunted by highwaymen and smugglers who had been hanged from it, but the pagans believed the area would give their spells more power. Now, the coven had to be careful because generally, a ritual involved a bonfire. But if they lit up a huge bonfire, the enemy would see them. And they also didn't want to get the attention of the Air Raid Wardens. So they improvised and used a lantern that they shuttered. They stripped off all their clothes to get skyclad (naked) and prepared to move around the lantern in a spiraling pattern to get themselves into an ecstatic state.
Operation Cone of Power was about to be underway. This was named for the actual ritual, which was "Raising the Cone of Power." That cone of power was to be generated from cosmic energy and then focused into a pin point against something. And that something was going to be Adolph Hitler. Gardner wrote, "[The] witches did cast spells, to stop Hitler landing after France fell. They met, raised the great cone of power and directed the thought at Hitler’s brain: 'You cannot cross the sea,' 'You cannot cross the sea,' 'Not able to come,' 'Not able to come.' Just as their great-grandfathers had done to Boney and their remoter forefathers had done to the Spanish Armada with the words: 'Go on,' 'Go on,' 'Not able to land,' 'Not able to land.'
What he is referencing there are two events that happened previously where magick was used to defeat an enemy. The first happened in 1588, when the Spanish Armada numbering 130 ships was sent by King Philip II of Spain to invade England. It was said that the English Navy and bad weather caused the armada to be scattered, but witches claimed that a ritual they performed turned the weather. And one of the people that was part of the ritual was the vice-admiral of the English fleet, Sir Francis Drake. He joined the coven on a headland called Devil’s Point near Plymouth to perform the ritual. And interestingly, the Protestants claimed it was a Protestant Wind that defeated the Spanish. Legends actually claim that on foggy days at Devil’s Point, the disembodied chants of Drake and the witches can still be heard. So perhaps it actually did do something. Then in 1805, Napoleon called off his planned invasion of England. Historians claim it was continental threats and the more dominant Royal Navy that were the actual reason. But Gardner was sure that magick had been successful and it was going to work again.
Now maybe magick had nothing to do with it, but Operation Sealion never came to fruition. Gardner wrote, "I am not saying that they stopped Hitler. All I say is that I saw a very interesting ceremony performed with the intention of putting a certain idea into his mind...and though all the invasion barges were ready, the fact was that Hitler never even tried to come." And we have to take Gardner at his word because there are no other sources that documented this event. People trusted this account until this weird character came forward in the 1970s with grandiose claims. His name was Amado Crowley and he claimed to be the son of British Occultist Aleister Crowley.
Aleister Crowley is probably one of the most famous occultists if not THE most famous occultists in all the world. Regardless of one's opinion, Crowley was definitely very influential when it came to the occult and magick. He lived an incredibly decadent lifestyle and even referred to himself as the Beast666. He was born in England in 1875 and despite being raised by an evangelical pastor, he had an aversion to Christianity. He took on the name Aleister early in his life and after inheriting a huge sum of money from his father, quit school and began to travel the world and try his hand at mountaineering. Crowley eventually attempted climbs on both K2 and Kanchenjunga. He joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1898and began practicing magick and going into trance states. During some of these states, he met with an entity that called itself Aiwass and this being dictated The Book of the Law to Crowley in 1904. He founded a new religion on this that he called Thelema, with one of its main premises being "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." And Thelema actually means "will" in Greek. Crowley was also involved with the Ordo Templi Orientis, which was a German mystical group. By the end of World War I, Crowley was dubbed by the British press as the "wickedest man in the world." The money ran out for him and in 1947, he died penniless and living in obscurity.
Aleister had relationships with several women and fathered five children. None of them had the name Amado. And Aleister kept incredibly detailed journals about his life and work and nowhere did he mention having a son named Amado and he never mentioned what Amado was about to claim. Amado claimed to be the spiritual successor of his "father" and he said that Gardner didn't conduct any kind of ritual like this Operation Cone of Power. He said that it was actually his father who had conducted a ritual and Gardner had based his narrative off of that.
This event, Amado claimed, took place in May 1941 and it was performed in Ashdown Forest, Sussex. And there wasn't a bunch of naked witches dancing around a lantern, this ritual involved Canadian soldiers and was an actual intelligence operation. And this wasn't being done to put forward some kind of mystical assault on Hitler's brain and cloud his judgement and such, this was a plan to lure Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, to Britain. A detachment of Canadian soldiers were dressed in robes and they had this dummy that they dressed in a Nazi uniform and put on a throne and then they made this model plane and moved it down a wire between a church and a tree. And indeed, on May 10, 1941, Hess took off from Germany in a Bf-110 fighter aircraft heading towards Scotland. The plane became lost and ran out of fuel and Hess found himself in trouble. His only option was to bail from the plane, but then he would be behind enemy lines. He grabbed a parachute and ended up in South Lanarkshire and British authorities captured him. Hess claimed he was flying for a meeting to negotiate a peace treaty, but nobody believed that and to this day, no one really knows what he was up to. We do know where he ended up. He spent the rest of his life in Berlin's Spandau Prison after his conviction on war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials. Amado said that it was his father's ritual that brought about this outcome.
But Amado wasn't done there. He claimed that British intelligence was involved in the plan and that it was called Operation Mistletoe. And it gets even crazier with Amado claiming that the architect of the plan was none other than Ian Fleming. Yes, THAT Ian Fleming that created James Bond. Amado claimed that Aleister was the one who convinced the British Intelligence that the Nazis were superstitious enough, that those beliefs could
be exploited. He wrote to the Director of Naval Intelligence in 1941, "If it is true that Herr Hess is much influenced by astrology and
Magick, my services might be of use to the Department in case he should
not be willing to do what you wish."
Ian Fleming was, indeed, a member of Naval Intelligence for Britain. Was Operation Mistletoe a real thing? It's hard to get to the bottom of that because these plans were secret and involving the occult in military plans certainly would not be something they would really want out there. Fleming hired Astrologer Frau Nagenast to meet with Hess and provide him with astrology charts. Several of these charts pointed to May 10th being a perfect day for Hess to make his trip to Scotland. This would help intelligence to lay a trap for him. So that clearly all seems to be non-esoteric. And yet, the elements were in favor of Fleming and his crew and Hess DID become lost. You can't plan that. Then Fleming and Crowley planned that occult ritual in Ashdown Forest and they invited two German SS officers, codenamed 'Kestrel' and 'Sea Eagle' to join them. The invite came through the Romanian Mission in London. The officers agreed to come and as they watched the ritual, they decided that this group definitely were members of the Order of the Golden Dawn. They told Hess that the group had told them they wanted to take over Britain after peace was established with Germany. So now it makes sense that Hess would be willing to travel to Scotland for peace talks and he probably thought he could even get support in fighting Soviet Russia. To seal the deal, British Secret Service agents made up fake links in the banking and commercial world between some of the members of Flemings' group and people Hitler and Hess would trust. This would help Hess believe that the Duke of Hamilton really did have a Peace Party in Britain. Rickatson Hatt was the Press Secretary of the Bank of England and he probably was the one who passed false information about the Duke having this Peace Party to someone close to Hess and this really sealed the deal for Hess. He had been convinced that the RAF in Scotland would not fire on him and would allow him to land safely. Hess probably chuckled to himself as he boarded his plane that Churchill would soon be ousted from power.
This really is fascinating to see how an elaborate plan was combined with the occult to rope Hess into a trap and possibly even convince the Nazis that they could be attacked by British witchcraft. But...just as we pointed out that Aleister Crowley's journals didn't mention a son named Amado, they also don't mention any wartime rituals or that Crowley worked for Intelligence. Crowley did indeed offer his services to the Naval Intelligence Division in September 1939, but apparently was turned down. Or that's what they say - wink, wink. And we imagine those classified documents will never be declassified.
It makes sense that Gerald Gardner would want to make claims that a group of occultists did their patriotic duty to help the homeland because at the time, neopaganism was getting a bad name and being associated with Satanism. There were claims that a couple participants even died after the ritual due to exposure and exhaustion. Professor Sabina Magliocco, an anthropologist and folklorist at California State University, Northridge wrote of this," It tells us something about what [those] witches wanted to be true. It’s about the power of witches to do something that is nearly impossible. It is also about the patriotism of these witches, and it also talks about the power of witchcraft to channel the energies of the earth, of nature, through their bodies, to create this Cone of Power."
Author Mary Norton wrote "The Magic Bed-Knob" in 1943 and "Bonfires and Broomsticks" in 1947. The childrens' books are set in World War II Britain and feature three children who are evacuated from London and sent to live with a woman named Miss Eglantine Price, who also happens to be a witch. Her goal is to find a powerful spell called the "Substitutiary Locomotion" that she thinks will aid the British war effort against the Nazis. Those books became the 1971 Disney movie "Bedknobs and Broomsticks." It seems pretty obvious that Mary Norton was inspired by something. Was it occult rituals conducted in Britain to help defeat the Nazis? Did Operation Cone of Power and Operation Mistletoe actually take place? That is for you to decide!