Michael's Reviews > The Spear of Destiny

Trevor Ravenscroft’s book remains one of the most popular sources for “occult” version of the history of the Third Reich. I can’t really see any reason why. Perhaps it is simply because Weiser printed lots and lots of copies, and they are still unloading them on the public. It certainly isn’t because of making a persuasive argument based on compelling evidence, nor in having a wide appeal in terms of confirming majority views.

Ravenscroft is an anthroposophist, which is to say a follower of Rudolf Steiner, one of the wackier occult leaders to come out of Central Europe, and the founder of the “Waldorf” system of schools. He is aggressively anthroposophical, in fact, and denigrates pretty much all other occult traditions as forms of “black magic.” This includes Theosophy, the Golden Dawn, Thelema, and Heathenry, which would seem to be most of his prospective audience. Almost the only New Religion that escapes his wrath is Wicca. Yet, for some reason, the book still turns up on the shelves of practitioners of all of these traditions.

His approach to history is appropriately dogmatic, and based on “clairvoyant” visions of Steiner and other anthroposophists, predominantly one Walter Johanes Stein, whom Ravenscroft claims was a friend of Hitler in Vienna, during the period in Hitler’s life about which academic historians know the least. Stein supposedly was among the first Hitler discussed his occult discoveries with, and he is used as a source for some of the most unlikely passages of the book. Ravenscroft’s central thesis is that Hitler discovered the Spear of Longinus in the Vienna art museum, and had a mystical experience which led him to realize that possessing the spear would give him super powers to conquer the world. Hitler, and just about everyone else in the book, turns out to be a reincarnation of a figure from the original Grail mythos, and the Spear is the true Grail.

If you can swallow all of that, you’ll have no problem with his distortion of the history of actual groups like the Thule Gesellschaft, or his invention of phony ones like Vril. He goes on and on for page after endless page about anthroposophical dogma, and tries to integrate poorly-remembered history into the whole. At one point, he confuses Baldur von Schirach with Constantine von Neurath. At another, he seems to forget the name of Adolf Eichmann. And he insists on using Rudolf von Sebottendorff’s birth name, Adam Glauer, even though his name-change was endorsed by the Sebottendorff family.

For a far more useful and accurate look at the same subject matter, see Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult History of Nazism. Read this for entertainment only.