Unfamiliar Subjects 4

With this being my last blog I’ll write about something wacky, even wackier than the last blogs I’ve written. In my research of Gerald B. Gardner’s, the one who made Wicca popular and is seen as the founder of its modern practices, books I’ve learned much about the philosophy of Witches. As I’ve written before, Power is energy stored in all living things that allow Witches to do ‘Magic’ when accessing it, and according to Gardner there is scientific proof, “Nowadays, however, many scientific men believe that living tissues emanate their own radiations in conformity with cellular structure.”(Gardner 1954). Besides the religious rituals to extract this power in order to cast a spell, science tries to access it in something called Radiesthesia, “the supernatural capacity to locate objects with rods and pendulums”(Martin 2017), commonly known as dowsing. There have been many stories of people walking around the desert with two metal rods in their hands, searching for water, oil, or something else, when the two rods drifted apart the dowser would know to then dig down from where he stood. Gardner gives examples of dowsing being used in the medical field, “Elementary Radiesthesia by F. A. Archdale, p. 29: ‘The basis of Medical Radiesthesia is that the pendulum held over a healthy organ gives one reaction, which over an unhealthy one it gives the opposite reaction… others use samples, such as urine, blood, saliva, etc., taken from the patient, thereby enabling them to carry out their diagnosis at home.’”(Gardner 1954), he also writes that cures can be applied to similar “samples” and heal the whole of the patient, he recalls his personal experience on such an occurrence. Interestingly enough, I have found another place in my research that discusses Radiesthesia earlier than Gardner did, who wrote the book I quoted in 1954.

In Nazi Germany, superstition and occult belief is not absent in the literature. Think back to blockbusters that depict the Nazis as villains, such as Indiana Jones and Captain America: The First Avenger, in both the Nazis are after something fantastical be it biblical artifacts or a super-soldier serum. These works of fiction were not brought forward from the void of creativity, they had real-world inspirations.

I have two examples of dowsing being used governmentally within Nazi Germany. One is Hitler hiring dowsers to check Reich Chancellory, the year after he became chancellor, for “‘death rays’ that might damage staff in the building.”(Martin 2017). Another example is so bizarre that I’ll just display it first, “a U-boat captain by the name of Hans Roeder became convinced that the Allies must be using dowsing, or ‘radiesthesia’, to locate and sink German submarines… Roeder was handed a substantial budget to set up the Pendulum Institute in Berlin. A large map of the Atlantic was spread out on a table, and a toy battleship placed on it. Then ‘a pendulum, consisting of a cube of metal about one cubic centimetre and a short string, was swung above the battleship. If the pendulum reacted, it proved the presence of a true battleship at that location.’ Dowsers continued to operate throughout World War II. In 1943, Himmler was still employing pendulum-swingers to search rivers for the mythical Rheingold.”(Martin 2017) this instance is very reminiscent of the psychic arms race, Project Stargate, that I wrote about in a previous blog. Or since this happened before Stargate, it’d be more appropriate to say that Stargate reminds me of this. Either way, this is the second time a government has used supernatural abilities to gain intelligence for its military. If I had a nickel for every time that I know this happened, I’d have two nickels which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice. This discovery gave me another question. For those that know of Operation Paperclip, when the U.S. government brought Nazi scientists to America for their services and many went to NASA, you’d understand if I wondered what kind of specialists our government was interested in. Did my government bring Nazi magicians into the country?

Similar to the psychic survey, from another blog, I won’t be able to answer those questions right now. However, if a student is interested in answering them do not hesitate to contact me.

I would like to thank Mr. Hirsch, my AP Research teacher for not discouraging me in my research this year despite what I told you I found. This was a lot of fun.

Gerald B. Gardner- Witchcraft Today, 1954

Martin, Tim. “Hitler’s Obsession with the Occult.” Independent, 28 July 2017, www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/book-reviews/hitlers-obsession-with-the-occult-35975075.html.