Review – Kurlander’s Hitler’s Monsters

We’ve seen a great number of books written about the influence of the occult upon the Third Reich.  Of particular interest are such works as Goodwin-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism and Staudenmeier’s Between Occultism and Nazism, which deal with the roles Ariosophy and Anthroposophy, respectively, played in Nazi Germany.  The latest offering, Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, is written by Eric Kurlander of Stetson University and published by Yale University Press.

The word “supernatural” is key to understanding Kurlander’s objective.  Althoughprevious authors have attempted to deal with different aspects of Nazi occultism, Kurlander seeks to survey the influence of the “supernatural” on the Third Reich, with that term remaining largely undefined save to map it in some respects to the German idea of “border science,” which in itself seems rather vague.  This allows him to cover racial pseudo-science, astrology, dowsing, folklore, mythology, runes, werewolves, vampires, the Grail, the Tibet Expedition, Wewelsburg Castle, World Ice Theory, anti-gravity, and all sorts of other topics about which you, having read this far, probably want to learn more.  On the other hand, the specificity of his definition makes his insistence that Nazi Germany was considerably different from other countries at the time, with regard to similar beliefs, difficult to prove.

Nonetheless, this book is a fascinating work.  Kurlander is rarely able to delve into any topic at length, but what he provides is a useful survey of the scholarship on many different matters coupled with illuminating archival research.  Previous works have often emphasized the eccentric and sometimes horrible intellects who proposed many of the unusual beliefs that became part of Weimar German culture.  Kurlander does acknowledge them, but he sets out to describe specifically what Hitler, Himmler, Hess, and other prominent members of the Nazi party believed and were willing to support with the Reich’s resources.  The goal here is to establish what was of import to the leadership and what has been romanticized, although the latter is usually dealt with by omission than discussion.

Considerable debate has surrounded the Nazi leadership’s interest in the occult.  Was it the heart of their dark designs? Or were German occultists victims of an ideology that eventually turned their countrymen against them, especially after Rudolf Hess fled for Great Britain?  This is not a simple answer, Kurlander tells us.  Some beliefs were largely outside the Nazis’ ingenuity to assimilate into their system; little is said of ritual magic in this book, for instance.  Nonetheless, proponents of many of these beliefs who followed party orthodoxy – or gained the sponsorship of high-ranking members – survived and even throve in Nazi Germany, even if some elements of the government were keen on silencing them.

I feel that this review has come across as more negative than I desired.  I had hoped for a more comprehensive perspective on these issues – but if nothing else, it has convinced me that a work would have to be colossal to accomplish that task.  Hitler’s Monsters is a necessity for anyone who wishes to know the role of the supernatural in the Third Reich, and who wishes to put aside much of the dross that has accumulated on that subject.

 

 

Brief Notes

I’ve been spending a good amount of time researching Elizabethan and Jacobean England for the next book.  This means I’ve been finding other areas to keep my mind active.  Here’s a few:

• One recent item on my reading list has been An Introduction to Yokai Culture.  It’s got some great chapters on kappa, tengu, and other phenomena and beings at the edge of Japanese culture.  It does focus on the folklore studies of these beings, so there’s a good deal of discussion of theory as put forth in books that likely will never be translated into English, but it’s quite fascinating.
• I’ve appreciated the offerings in Clavis Journal Volume 4, particularly the article by Eytzinger, “Curse the Eyes of the Thief.” I don’t think anyone’s put it together, but the operations he’s describing are Scandanavian versions of the “Eye of Abraham” ritual for uncovering a thief that is mentioned elsewhere (sorry, no online PDF).
• I’ve been enjoying reading some classic Runequest works, thanks to Chaosium. I’ve particularly enjoyed Pavis and Big Rubble, a campaign setting filled with history, weird cults, and danger.  I don’t know if I’d run the system – I enjoy old-school games, but it’s even more deadly than Cthulhu, with many more dismemberments.
• And, just to make matters even more bizarre, I’ve also been listening to the Bulgarian History Podcast.  Treachery, religion, war, and Byzantine (in both senses of the word) intrigue, pulled from historical literature to which most people will never have access.  I recommend it highly.

Forthcoming – Touch Me Not!

Fulgur Books is taking pre-orders for Touch Me Not!, a book of ritual magic held at the Wellcome Institute with some stunning illustrations.  You can view the manuscript here in all its glory.

Touch Me Not! is an Austrian manuscript compendium of the black magical arts, completed c.1795. Unique and otherworldly, it evokes a realm of visceral dark magic. As the co-editor Hereward Tilton notes, the manuscript ‘appears at first sight to be a ‘grimoire’ or magician’s manual intended for noviciates of black magic. Psychedelic drug use, animal sacrifice, sigillary body art, masturbation fantasy and the necromantic manipulation of gallows-corpses count among the transgressive procedures it depicts…

Hidden for decades within the Wellcome Library collection, Touch Me Not is published here as a full colour facsimile for the first time. We have commissioned a translation of the German and Latin texts from Hereward Tilton and Merlin Cox, scholars who have explored the sources for the various elements and provided copious references. There is also an introduction from Hereward that lays out the context for this extraordinary survival.

Some of the promised material sounds intriguing, although I do wonder how much of the colorful language is reflected in the manuscript.  They offer a limited edition hardback and a paperback edition, which currently has a pre-order price.  The latter offsets the price of overseas shipping slightly – but that’s unavoidable these days, right?

 

 

The Price of Occult Books, Part 4 – The Collector’s Perspective

In our past three segments, we’ve dealt with causes of high book prices, some examples of particularly high prices, and the impact of the library market.  At this point, I’d like to turn to the impact of these prices on collectors – including myself.  This part will be more free-form, as I’m still working through my thoughts on the matter.

I purchase a good number of books in this field, as anyone who reads this blog is aware.  These are from a wide variety of different publishers – small and large presses, popular and academic ones, creators of artisanal works and mass-market paperbacks, and even reproductions of manuscripts from various libraries. I also make good use of the libraries at my workplace and those in the area, as well as the growing collection of digitized works in Google Books, the Internet Archive, and Gallica.

The focus of my collection is primary source texts of ritual magic, in various formats, along with historical works putting them into their context in one way or another. The number of such texts have certainly increased in recent years.  Previously, I could expand my purchases into other areas, but I’ve cut down on these considerably – especially for roleplaying games. Yet even now, there are more great books to read, and as we discussed last time, many of them are not making it into libraries.

Further, this is a market in which you can often see unexpected and quick price increases.  It’s true that some of these are due to vendors and bots who inflate prices unduly, but there are often spectacular rises in the amounts for particular books once they go out of print.  Since many of these come from small presses with limited print runs, this means that it’s hard to delay purchases for later.

This is, of course, compounded by the issues regarding libraries that we already identified.  It is likely that any particular academic work will be picked up, perhaps after a few months, by some library in the country from which it might be obtained. The same cannot be said for many of the small – or even medium – press books. For example, The Book of Oberon has done well in terms of sales, but only seventeen WorldCat libraries in the US hold it. That often means that the only way to access a book is to purchase it.

The effect of all this has been to create a market in which books, expensive or not, must often be purchased quickly and through specialized channels if one wishes to obtain them. When there is not an opportunity to do so, the desired book might not be available anywhere in an affordable format.

A fair question is how much any of this literature is necessary for a particular reader.  Given the large amount of material that is available online, it is hard to say that there is a great “need” for materials on the topic in general.  Depending upon one’s particular area of research or spiritual practice, though, certain works may not be available.  I think it is fair to say that the advancement of knowledge makes it important that such works be available to people within reason.  I’m not sure what should be considered “reasonable,” and it’s likely readers will differ greatly on this front, but I think it’s a good principle.

Of course, I’m not just a purchaser of books.  I also write and edit them – and my next entry will deal with that.

 

 

 

 

The Newberry Library’s Book of Magical Charms: A Transcription Opportunity

Could you decipher the text of an early modern magical manuscript?  You have your chance at the website of Chicago’s Newberry Library, which has posted a seventeenth-century work with various sorts of spells and remedies.  Each page has a window at the bottom where you can attempt a transcription or translation, as part of an effort at a crowdsourced translation.  I’m not sure what the result will be, but I’ve already contributed one page, and I hope to add more.

Review: Petit Albert, Ouroboros Press Edition

Ouroboros Press has released its latest work, an English language translation of the Petit Albert, the famous French grimoire and book of remedies.  As with many other Ouroboros releases, this has been put out as a small book, attractively bound in black.

As it happens, another English-language translation of this work appeared not so long ago, Hadean Press’s unfortunately-named The Spellbook of Marie Laveau, which I’ve already reviewed.  The same comments as I’ve given there may apply to the overall value of an English translation of the book.  Yet how do the two measure up?

The Ouroboros Press edition does not have much beyond a short introduction, and the Hadean Press edition does the same.  Neither work possesses an index or an extensive critical apparatus.  A question might be asked, then, as to the quality of the two.  I would not consider myself an expert at either French or translation, but I have made a few notes, based on some dictionary work, on some matters I find to be interesting.

Let’s take the formula for the Hand of Glory.   The 1752 French text from Google Books gives the ingredients to be placed with the hand as “du zimat, du salpêtre , du sel & du poivre long.”  The Ouroboros edition translates this as “vinegar, saltpeter, salt, and black pepper,” the Hadean as “some green vitriol, saltpeter, salt, and long pepper.” I can’t find “zimat,” but it does appear that “poivre long” is long pepper, which is different from black pepper.

What else? We have an experiment to make a “bâton” for travelers.  Hadean has “staff,” and Ouroboros has “stick.” (Both are technically correct, but I prefer the first.)  The elder wood for this must be picked “le lendemain de la Toussaints,” which Ouroboros renders as “the day after Halloween” and Hadean as “the day after All Saints’ Day,” which is  correct.  On the other hand, if you want the magic stones that help you to tame a horse, you’ll need to go to Mount “Sénis.” The Ouroboros edition turns this into “Cenis,” a mountain in France near the Italian border, while the Hadean transforms this into “Säntis,” a prominence in northeast Switzerland.

I’d be very interested to hear what people more proficient with French, especially those who have read more of the book than what I have examined, would have to say about these works.

Which one should you get?  It depends.  If price is a concern, the Hadean Press edition is half the price of the Ouroboros.  If you’d like a well-bound book, the Ouroboros edition is probably the best for your money.  Either one will provide an interesting collection of remedies and folk magic that should enrich anyone’s knowledge of folk magic.

The Price of Occult Books, Part 3 – The Role of Libraries

In previous posts, we’ve talked about factors that drive up the price of occult books, and books that are high-priced despite this.  I only have part of the story here, and I’d encourage people to comment on what they know.

Are libraries the solution to these problems?

They would seem to be, at first.  You’ve got a large number of institutions which have entire budgets dedicated to acquiring material for its users, defined in terms of a particular community of scholars or practitioners, or the public at large.  They have immense databases that provide information from thousands (I’m being very conservative here) of different publishers.  What’s more, these libraries often lend their books and articles to other libraries, thereby maximizing the ability of even small town centers to access works from around the world. Wouldn’t this be a great boon for the occult community?

Libraries are a great boon, but this does not mean that they do not come with their problems.  One of these is the greatest explosion of information that the world has ever seen, most of which comes with a price tag that’s often substantial.  At the same time, library budgets have not increased.   This ProQuest whitepaper from last year shows that four-fifths of the academic library respondents have reduced their purchasing power for monographs, either due to budget reductions or because their flat budgets give them less purchasing power.  And the United States is much better off than the UK, where libraries are being closed and staff being slashed in favor of volunteers, as part of an austerity-based governance philosophy.  Thus, as the amount of information rises, the ability to process and provide that information to the public shrinks.

Most of the cost associated with this is driven by large publishers interested in short-term payoffs to shareholders rather than providing information to the public.  This has led to an emphasis on books priced at a point where libraries are the intended purchasers.  I don’t know the publishing end, but my uninformed guess is that publisher marketing is one part detailed analysis, trend-watching, and number-crunching, and one part pawing through goat entrails in the woods on a dark night.

Thus, you end up with a situation where publishers decide they’re going to sell to libraries, but libraries are buying less.  Thus, they need to drive up the prices to meet the new margins, which makes the books more expensive, while libraries are buying less… The net effect is to lower the number of books that can be purchased, at a time when more books than ever are appearing.  This situation is likely to become more messy as the years go by, and the end result may not be beneficial to scholarship.

What about interlibrary loan?  This does do a great deal to mitigate this situation, but it only helps so much. All of the lending libraries are under the same financial constraints as the others, which often means that books have to be borrowed from farther away, with increases in shipping and time.  Libraries are often unwilling to lend newly-released books they’ve purchased for their own patrons, and some charge fees or place other restrictions on the service.  Further, I’m just discussing U. S. libraries here – I get the impression that ILL services are fairly good in Europe, and I’m not sure about the rest of the world.

Having set the stage, let’s turn to books on the occult.  We face special challenges here. First, libraries typically seek purchases in particular fields that meet the needs of their patrons.  In academic libraries, these are largely based upon the traditional divisions of the disciplines.  Items that do not fit neatly within these divisions, such as esoteric books, may not be purchased simply because it doesn’t fit the model.

Also, occult books bring with them a set of preconceived notions about the topics within that affects their treatment.  I would love to believe that librarians would not exclude such books simply because of their subject matter – and I believe the vast majority would not do so – but some would.  On the other hand, we also have communities in which such books are looked upon with suspicion, and where patrons might be less likely to ask for them – or to steal them to avoid the judgment of anyone.  The theft of occult books from libraries would make for a fascinating study, but anecdotal evidence indicates it’s a real problem for many libraries. And even the impression that it’s a problem might cause librarians to divert their funds elsewhere.

Also, let’s not forget that many occult works these days are being released by small presses, outside the regular distribution chains.  If you were able to buy a book from Amazon, or a similar one from a small press that required a special invoice and that required you to check to make sure you’d received the item after payment, which one would you choose?  Most of us would choose the former – and that’s a risk we’d be taking with our own funds, let alone those of an employer.  Thus, a great number of the books released these days on occultism are not likely to be purchased by a library anywhere.

This brings us to purchasers and collectors, who will be the topic of my next post.

 

The Price of Occult Books, Part 2

In our first part, I looked at some factors that I think may drive up the price of the book in justifiable manners.  On the other hand, there are some practices that I think are less excusable, and I’d like to talk about them here.

When thinking about this post, however, I realized that an emphasis on small presses might seem unfair.  Fortunately, the large ones provide much better examples.  Let’s take a look at a few, which I’ve picked largely because they’re free of the potential cost-increasing factors mentioned in the first part.

Let’s take the Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West.  This is the best historical summary of the course of Western magic that I have ever read.  The authors of the chapters are top-notch, it uses appropriate but sparse black and white illustrations, and it’s a hardback without any fancy binding.

It’s also $165 retail, which I consider to be completely unacceptable.  Even the Kindle edition is over $100.  This is well over the amount I want to invest in a non-primary text, and I only own it due to the generosity of my parents at Christmas.  (It fell out of a broken bag into a drift of dirty snow a few days later, of course.)  It’s a shame that such a useful, informative, educational work should be so expensive that only collectors and larger libraries can possibly purchase it.

Then we have Brill.  Oh, what can we say about Brill?  We have this great edition of Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia in the original Latin, with footnotes covering the influences, an in-depth introduction, and other goodies.  This is $150 – although I suppose you have to make up the losses in sale for publishing a book in Latin somehow.  Past offerings have sometimes been over $200.

If you scroll through their catalog online running a search on “magic,” you’ll see – hey, some of these prices have dropped considerably.  Sure, if you want the Corpus of Mesopotamian Anti-Witchcraft Rituals, there’s a substantial cost, and I’m sure many readers will still find a $60 paperback outrageous, but it appears they’ve slashed their prices effectively in half from some of those I’ve seen in the past and included a paperback edition here or there.  So, slight kudos there.

I was also going to cite the Ashgate Research Companion to Medieval Magic, another work from reputable scholars in the field at a price point around $150, if I remember correctly.  It appears that the book has been transferred to Routledge, so we’ll have to keep an eye on it.  We should bear in mind, however, that the Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult is now available only as an $120 ebook – and, for the record, contains very little about the “occult.”

This leads us to another exacerbating factor – large publishers’ use of buzzwords in titles to drive sales.  Small presses, in my experience, are very up front in their descriptions of their works. If they say that a work is an exploration of some “current,” for example, I know I can safely ignore it.  (That’s my preference, and yours may differ.)  If an academic book has “magic” or “occult” in the title, it might be a work dealing with those topics exclusively, or someone might have thrown in a chapter on those topics at the last minute so they could make it more salable.  Thus, not only are you buying an expensive book, it could be a practically useless one.

My most expensive purchase in this regard was Karl Bell’s The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England, 1780-1914.  Given that I regularly write about nineteenth-century magicians such as George Graham and Frederick Hockley, I thought it might be a good purchase.  What did not find, however, was the index online, which I believe has been posted since the book appeared.  If you scroll down to the entries on “magic,” you can see why I was disappointed – and out over $100.

I’m sure that many readers will have thought by now, “But these books are priced for library purchase, not for private individuals!” Next time, I’ll deal with that question, while also turning the focus back to smaller presses.

 

 

The Price of Occult Books, Part 1

As promised – comments on the high price of occult books!

Let’s set some ground rules here.  I am not a publisher, and I don’t have any deep insight into sales figures, distribution, or any of those other topics.  I’m an author who has written and had published a few occult books and articles for occult books, published at different price points, from several publishers.  I’m also a reader of occult works who both appreciates a good book, and who has a limited budget for them – probably less limited than many readers, I think, but there are limits.  I’d like to discuss the prices from those two perspectives.

First, let’s acknowledge that there are some elements that are necessary in a book, based upon the nature of the material.  These might include the following:

Illustrations:  If you’ve got a document with a lot of diagrams or symbols, a good illustrator can be essential.  As I’m writing this, Eldred Wormwood just sent me a link to this nice review of Oberon.  I asked him to make one correction – adding James Clark’s name to the credits.  James was absolutely indispensable to Oberon, and we might not have been able to publish without his involvement.   Good illustrators are important, and they cost money.

Permissions:  I’ve worked with a number of different libraries over the years.  When it comes to manuscripts and the like, the permissions for publishing a transcribed text have been cheap as free.  Most librarians seem happy that people are making use of the collections and giving them exposure.  This is not always the case, however, especially when it comes to…

Photographs:  This is where dealing with manuscripts from institutions can become really expensive.  There’s a reason why you don’t see any sort of reproductions of Folger V.b.26 in Oberon – it’s simply too expensive to reproduce illustrations, let alone full-color ones, let alone if you want to use one for a cover, let alone reproducing a book entirely in color.  The same was true for the Experimentum and other Caduceus works – full-color reproductions can really drive the price of a work up.  But they can often be necessary.  I purchased the special edition of the Veritable Key, having it shipped all the way from Malaysia (I think) because I wanted the talismans in full color.

If the book is from a private collection, that might be a different story.  I haven’t tried to get such a work published, but I know they’ve been a staple of Teitan Press.  There’s probably a good outlay in terms of photographic equipment and image enhancing software.

Translations:  Professional translation is quite expensive.  Once again, Oberon wouldn’t have happened without Joe’s kind offer to make the translations.  The same is true of e Mus. 173, on which I’m working on the Latin translations myself.  These are tough tasks, even if you’ve been studying the language for years, even if you can read the handwriting or script, even if you have familiarity with this sort of text.

Binding:  This is one item on which I’m ambivalent.  I do love a beautiful book, but I also know that high-class bindings can drive up the price substantially.  I also know there are often talismanic aspects to such works that are important to the publishers and purchasers.

Spiritual Requirements that Someone Spend Vast Amounts of Money on a Book as a Test of Their Faith:  Yeah.  I suppose some people believe that.

(Bobby D. has pointed out to me that “market” is a key factor.  He’s right; I just haven’t had time to deal with it here.  I’ll talk about it in a future post.)

Yet are there overpriced books out there?  Next time, I give some examples.

 

 

 

 

Just Released – Peterson’s True Black Magic

I used to think that comics books for Batman and Wolverine were ridiculous. Not for the premises, which I was willing to accept, but that they were in half a dozen books having completely different adventures all at once.  How could that be possible?

Joseph Peterson has made me believe in Batman again, with his indefatigable effort and ability to work on multiple projects at once.  His latest is a long-awaited translation of La Véritable Magie Noire, or True Black Magic, as made famous by Waite’s Book of Ceremonial Magic.  As with other works condemned by Waite as “Rituals of Black Magic,” it is a variant edition of the Key of Solomon with material no worse than what Mathers excised from his own Key.  The edition is on Amazon, it’s cheap, and I’m enjoying it so far, with a review to follow.  (It’s a purchased copy, and the usual caveats about co-authors apply.)

I hope to post something on the cost of occult books very soon.  Sooner if you pay me.  (I’m kidding.)