WWII & HP

[Vivienne O'Regan]

No: HPFGUIDX 1148

On Wed. 6th September Penny <linsenma at hic.net> wrote:

>Hi everyone --

>A friend of mine (who lurks on this list & is on vacation right now in
>any case) was asking me about something she remembered reading in the
>Archives about the witches & wizards of Britain "casting spells"
against
>Hitler during WWII.  She mentioned this to her daughter, and now her
>daughter's social studies teacher is interested in her doing more
>research on this topic.  Given our recent discussions, my curiosity was

>piqued.  I started searching our new Archives and didn't find anything.

>Since my friend & I also belong to hpanonymous, I searched those
>Archives.  Bingo.

>31 July 1940 is allegedly the date that the witches & wizards of
Britain
>raised a "cone of power" that "stopped" Hitler's planned invasion of
>England.

Possibly the original recount of this appeared in Illustrated Magazine
in an article entitled 'Witchcraft in Britain' (27 September 1952) by 
Cecil Williamson, who set up and ran the Museum of Magic and
Witchcraft Museum on the Isle of Man.

His report was that 17 witches (male & female) had gathered on Lammas
Eve to raise a 'cone of power' to prevent Hitler crossing the Channel. 
Basically to raise bad weather. It is also said that one or more of the
elderly participants died from exposure following this ritual.

Katherine's 'Lammas Night' was fiction but drew on this as well as on
other sources (including oral) about the way in which the magical
community 'did its bit' for the war effort. Another recently 
published source is 'The Magical Battle for Britain', 1993, based on 
the letters of Dion Fortune to the scattered membership of her Order: 
the Fraternity of the Inner Light which co-ordinated magical work from 
1939 onward  They accessed the deeply powerful Arthurian and Grail 
traditions, the positive side of the forces that Hitler and his people 
were also seeking to access.

Writing in October 1941:

"There are two schools of thought in the entourage of the Fuehrer -
those who believe in the invincibility of physical force and rely on
mundane  =plan organization to achieve their ends; and the relatively
small and apparently obscure group of those who realize that there are 
subtle forces that can be enlisted to serve their ends. Hitler himself 
uses both as his instruments. It is difficult to see how far he has an 
accurate knowledge of technical occultism and how far, as in military 
matters, he avails himself of experts. In any case, he himself is a 
natural occultist'.
p.60

Perhaps in citing Dumbledore as having defeated the dark wizard
Grindelwald in 1945, Rowling is accessing some of this lore, which
does find its way into popular writings on the occult, about the idea
battles between subtle forces as well as those upon the mundane plane.



Vivienne