The Magic Circle by John William Waterhouse (public domain image).
Reposted from Gods & Radicals, July 27, 2015:
A Puzzling Question of History
It’s a strange footnote of history. Something happened in World War II that doesn’t really make any sense, and nobody really seems to give a lot of thought as to why it happened outside of military academies. Germany never invaded Britain. It seems crazy, considering the scope of the German war machine, and considering that Britain was the primary foe who stood in the way of the nightmare of Capitalism and Fascism that was the National Socialist Party. It can be reasonably argued that without Britain to oppose them, world domination would have been within Hitler’s grasp. I would not be writing this because my grandmother would have been gassed when Hitler’s minions got to Canada. What stopped them? The general consensus among military historians seems to be that in order for an invasion to be successful, Germany would have had to gain air superiority in the English channel; a goal that was denied them by the determined and beleaguered pilots of the RAF who fought the Germans to a standstill in the Battle of Britain. But it’s not that simple. Further examination of the situation reveals that Hitler made two significant strategic mistakes. The first is that he chose to focus his Air Force on the Blitz as opposed to the Battle of Britain, and the second is that fear of the Royal Navy kept the Wehrmacht and Kriegsmarine commanders at home. Says J. Gunnar Grey, author of the WWII military analysis Deal with the Devil:
But during wartime analyses, it became obvious to both sides that the Kriegsmarine never commanded sufficient numbers of surface ships nor U-boats to clear the Home Fleet from the English Channel. Worse, the LST hadn’t been invented yet, so the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (general staff) faced the dilemma of how to transport their 9th and 16th Armies across the Channel from occupied France. Sure, they could airlift infantry, but what about tanks and artillery? It was the Panzer Corps that made the Wehrmacht so mighty, and any attempt to conquer Britain without them was practical idiocy. The attempted solution? Rhine river barges, flat-bottomed and clumsy. Of the 1,200 barges assembled for training exercises, only a quarter were self-powered. The rest had to be towed. None carried serious weaponry. All of them floundered in any sea rougher than State 2. Note that a destroyer’s wake qualified as State 4, meaning all the Home Fleet had to do was drive past the German invasion flotilla to swamp or sink a hefty percentage. And how many of the soldiers who survived to reach the shore wouldn’t be seasick? These barges weren’t equipped with cranes. So when (if) a barge reached the English shoreline, how were the soldiers supposed to unload the tanks? The serious suggestion was, fire the cannon and blow out the end of the barge. So, um, how was the second wave supposed to cross? The invasion plan, Operation Sealion, stank. No other word for it. When reality sank in, OKW shuffled it off into a file cabinet and pretended it didn’t exist. Hitler turned his gunsights on Russia, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Thus the much-dreaded Operation Sea Lion, which was the German invasion plan, sank, and Germany contented itself with a slow policy of strangulation and trade embargo. Which brought suffering to England, it’s true; but it also bought England enough time that Japan finally dragged the United States into the war effort; the fronts were reinforced and new supplies were brought; and D-Day was the end result. Some have postulated that if Germany had persisted in engaging the RAF pilots, eventually the British would have simply become exhausted. It’s a historically-recognized fact that the RAF recruited pilots vigorously from the Allied or neutral nations because of the rate of attrition (which is military jargon for “the amount of people getting slaughtered”). Countless Commonwealth pilots took up the task, some even before their nations officially went to war, and they would wash the blood off the recovered Spitfires to put someone else in the seat. They can’t have kept it up forever. But they did keep it up for long enough. I’m fascinated by this period of history, and I am inspired by the “rugged determination” that history’s narrative gives us for these brave pilots. Maybe the narrative is even true, and not just wartime propaganda. But what’s more interesting is the “want of a shoe” going on here. If the RAF had kept it up for a few days less; if less pilots from outside of Britain had volunteered; if Hitler had figured out a way to transport tanks (how much effort would it have taken the highly-industrialized Germans to put cranes on the boats?); if the Luftwaffe had persisted against the RAF. . . History is a series of “what ifs,” and sometimes those branching paths depend upon a single moment of choice.
The Nature of Magick
Magick-workers know that magick is all about influencing probabilities. Magick can’t make fireballs fly out of your fingers. What it does is to influence situations which have yet to be fixed in stone so that they are more likely to manifest in a way that you consider favourable to your purpose. It works by the principle of chaos theory; slight alterations of direction can have huge consequences. String theory tells us that every decision that is made takes us into one possible reality out of several options. Magick aims the rocket that will take us there. Whether or not this happens because we are actually exerting our Wills to change reality, or whether this happens because magick focuses intent and makes us more likely to be make some targeted decisions than others, isn’t relevant. The effect is relevant. It’s the moment of choice that matters.
Magick and Complex Systems
Magick becomes especially challenging when dealing with complex systems. This is why money magick rarely works. As Kadmus pointed out in his article “Capitalist Leveling and the Problem of Pagan Values,” money is already a magical concept by definition; most of our species has agreed collectively that we will use a rough unit of measure to represent a perceived value in order to facilitate exchange. Aside from the many (quite reasonable) arguments that this system is flawed on its face, what it means is that absolutely everybody in the world who is trying to utilize money is exerting their magickal wills on the economy by definition! So you’re not trying to “tap” a system slightly in one direction or another; you’re fighting for supremacy in a piranha- filled cesspool. Coins give us a tangible connection to value, but bills are less useful for this, and the credits clicking away from your chip card are even less tangible still; all of which is part of the design. It’s hard to connect to that sort of energy. So maybe we should be applying a different approach.
A Magician’s Call to Arms
Immediately following Britain’s declaration of war in 1939, Dion Fortune began a series of regular letters to members of her magical order, the Fraternity of the Inner Light, who were unable to hold meetings due to wartime travel restrictions. With enemy planes rumbling overhead, she organised a series of visualisations to formulate “seed ideas in the group mind of the race”, archetypal visions to invoke angelic protection and uphold British morale under fire. “The war has to be fought and won on the physical plane,” she wrote, “before physical manifestation can be given to the archetypal ideals. What was sown will grow and bear seed.” As the war developed, this was consolidated with further work for the renewal of national and international accord. For the first time the Fraternity’s doors were opened to anyone who wanted to join in and learn the previously secret methods of esoteric mind-working. With unswerving optimism she guided her fraternity through the dark days of the London Blitz, continuing her weekly letters even when the bombs came through her own roof. – from the introduction to The Magical Battle of Britain, from the letters of Dion Fortune, edited by Gareth Knight
Dion Fortune organized an extraordinary act of magick to stop the Nazis from touching British soil. She engaged the aid of several prominent magicians of the time, including Aleister Crowley, Dennis Wheatley, and James Bond’s creator, writer and British Intelligence operative Ian Fleming. She invoked the ancient spirits pledged to Britain’s protection, including King Arthur, Merlin, St. Michael and St. George. And according to some reports, the night that Operation Sea Lion was due to launch, a cabal of magicians gathered in the New Forest and possibly, it is said, at the cliffs of Dover, to perform a ritual to stop the Nazi invasion, including Aleister Crowley and one Gerald Gardner, among others. It’s said that the magicians of that cabal paid a very high price; most of them suffered from chronic health problems thereafter; two locals who may have been part of the New Forest Coven contracted pneumonia and died that year; and Crowley was dead within two years of the war’s end. But it worked. The British resolve under fire was iron-clad. They never lost faith that they could win the war, no matter how badly the odds seemed stacked against them. The Nazi fear of the British Navy so overwhelmed them on the eve of the invasion that they changed their minds and stayed home. Was Dion Fortune’s vast “thought experiment” the reason? And if so, was it the British belief in the war propaganda that, obviously, was being spread by intelligence operatives who were also occultists — or was it something