He who does not have demonic seeds within him will never give birth to a new world.
Dr. Ernst Schertel
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Such was an annotation found in Adolf Hitler’s copy of Schertel’s book, Magic: History-Theory-Practice. It seems that Hitler had no problem with “demonic seeds.” And he wanted to “give birth to a new worldâ â as did Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.
Hitler annotated another passage from Schertel, which bears on the Nazi leaderâs cynicism. The will of the magician in relation to his âdemon,â says Schertel, creates power which âis completely left to his [the magicianâs] discretion.â Hitlerâs annotation continues:
The âpeopleâ he might gather around himself … represent an enlargement of his I-sphere. But it already has happened that a magician abandoned, shattered, or castigated his own people, if they did not seem reactive anymore.
Recall, if you will, pictures of Berlin and other German cities from May 1945. One sees an endless moonscape of bombed-out buildings. Such was the cost to Germany of enlarging the magicianâs I-sphere.
As it turned out, Hitlerâs demonic seeds were potent, sprouting into a world war, accompanied by the persecution, incarceration, and death of innocent millions. One might likewise say that Leninâs demonic seeds also sprouted into the killing and incarceration of millions by Stalin â who joined with Hitler to invade Poland in August 1939. This is what triggered World War II.
President Vladimir Putin is now attempting to deny Moscowâs responsibility for the invasion of Poland, justifying Stalinâs aggression in humanitarian terms. According to Putin, the West is to blame for Hitler. Neville Chamberlainâs policy of appeasement, said Putin, was the real cause of the war. As for Polandâs innocence, Putin called Polandâs 1939 foreign minister, Col. JĂłzef Beck, âan anti-Semitic pig.â
Here is yet another sprinkling of demon seeds to bring about a ânew world.â For that is the magical dream which Putin shares with Stalin and Hitler. Here again, the magician has no real concern for his own people. He is a revolutionary who seeks to overturn the existing order.
There is a quotation about revolutionaries which Eric Voegelin favored, from a book titled The Demons, by Heimito von Doderer. Here Doderer says a revolutionary is “someone who wants to change the general situation because of the impossibility of his own position….” Doderer also stated: “A person who has been unable to endure himself becomes a revolutionary, then it is others who have to endure him.”
In some sense, wrote Doderer, the revolutionary abandons the “highly concrete task of his own life.” The need then arises to falsify the past. From this, says Voegelin, there follows the need of all revolutionaries to systematically falsify history. If society succumbs to this falsification, then society itself “perpetuates the highest betrayal” imaginable. And there is a corollary to this betrayal. The false reality thereby established cannot accept anyone who talks truthfully about the past or present. Such persons are then labeled as traitors.
In Schertelâs book on magic Hitler has underscored a passage which denies the existence of objective truth. He calls the âobjective worldâ a âjugglery of fantasy.â The idea behind magic is to âchange the world according to our will.â Then one can âcreate reality where no reality is.â
And that reality? â a smoking ruin where once a city stood.
