Raiders of the Lost Novel - Part 1

The Dial of Digression

For many years during my wasted and misspent youth, I dreamed of writing a novel. The novel was inspired by the most influential movie of my childhood, and favorite movie of all time, Raiders of the Lost Ark. I've lost count of how many times I've seen it, but I still watch it on the big screen whenever I get the chance, and even got to hear John Williams' score performed live during a showing of the film by the MSO (which was incredible).

Many years later I had sort of given up on that dream and wrote a very long, seven-part (I think) series of blog posts detailing the plot of the abandoned novel and much of the research that went into it. For a long time I was secretive about the plot, but after so long I felt that it would be fun to put it all down in writing and give readers an insight into what was for me, an all-consuming project for much of my life. If someone else ended up using it, I thought, well, so much the better. But I also wanted to test if there was perhaps some interest in the story, indicating that maybe I should give it another try. I shouldn't worry about story theft—after all, nobody reads what I write anyway :-/

However, that series of posts was lost when my laptop was damaged while I was traveling around Europe many years ago. I was devastated, and simply unable to even think about rewriting such a massive, in-depth series of posts again.

Now, many years later, and with the release of the newest—and presumably final—Indiana Jones movie in theaters, and with my life at a crossroads, perhaps its a sign for me to give it another shot. I don't think I can ever truly rewrite that series of posts—they're gone forever—but I can put down enough of it from memory to hopefully be entertaining, especially if, like me, you are a Raiders or Indiana Jones fan.

So, dust off your hat and bullwhip, and strap yourself in, because it's going to be a bumpy ride.

I. The Nazis and the Occult

First, let's set up a little background information. For many years I studied the connections between the Nazis and the occult. There are a lot of books out there about this topic, some legitimate and some completely fabricated nonsense, and I think I've read just about all of them at some point (one of my former roommates even wrote his thesis on the topic).

The best scholarly information about this are books by the British scholar Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. Among these are The Occult Roots of Nazism and Black Sun. These are legitimate, well-researched books if you want to learn the genuine history of the connections between Nazism and the occult. The book Unholy Alliance by Peter Levenda is also pretty good. There are many others, too numerous to list here (Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival is a particularly colorful one).

In the original movie, as you will recall, Hitler is obsessed with the occult, specifically the Ark of the Covenant. As far as I can tell, this was not really true. Hitler may have had some unconventional beliefs, and certainly believed a lot of racist pseudoscience, but for the most part he didn't display any particular interest in occult topics and was outwardly a self-professed Catholic. Rather, the more exotic occult beliefs were held by others in the Nazi inner circle, especially the chief of the Schutzstaffel, Heinrich Himmler.

The various right-wing movements in post-World War One Germany that eventually coalesced into National Socialism had long been associated with fringe occult movements and beliefs going all the way back to the late nineteenth century. Perhaps the most prominent of these movements was so-called Ariosophy, developed by characters like Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels (the latter, incidentally, was fascinated by stories of the Holy Grail).

The name Ariosophy is, of course, derived from Theosophy, a series of spiritual ideas and practices was developed by a very colorful character by the name of Helena P. Blavatsky. Blavatsky spun her ideas into a global quasi-religious movement which found remarkable favor with the world’s intelligentsia. Theosophy is sort of patient-zero of the modern New Age/spirituality movement, and essential if you want to understand some of the more fringe theories floating around Europe and America at the time (as well as our story.)¹ Blavatsky ‘s book, The Secret Doctrine, was a curious blend of Eastern philosophy with creative fiction and became a global phenomenon.

All over Europe, and in India itself, theosophy became a cult. Its disciples were not the hungry masses who pouted into spiritualist meetings and séances desperately seeking solace; they were intellectuals, diplomats, philosophers and even scientists. United under the Tibetan symbol of the swastika, they infested the salons and laboratories of Europe. (Himmler’s Crusade, pp. 29-30)

The Ario- prefix was derived from Aryan because Von List was attempting to merge Theosophical ideas and German race science to discover the "primordial wisdom" of the “Aryan” people. These underground secret societies became fever swamps for racist and right-wing agitators in Germany in the aftermath of Germany's chaotic defeat in World War One.

The concept of “Aryans” entered the European imagination with the discovery that the languages of Iran, Pakistan and northern India were related to European languages such as Latin, Greek and German (the name 'Iran' actually derives from this word). This connection, which was discovered by English lawyer Sir William Jones and described in 1786, not only turbocharged the new field of linguistics, but also led to some rather odd and dubious ideas. Eventually, Aryans became portrayed as kind of an ancient race of blond, blue-eyed super-warriors conquering everything in their path.

The German far-right eventually came to believe that the Germans basically were the Aryans—or at least the most pure manifestation of them. Keep in mind, Germany only became a nation in 1871, and the parvenu country was still trying to forge a national identity beyond the many petty duchies and principalities which had formed the Holy Roman Empire. This effort led to the collection of German folk tales by the Brothers Grimm, for example², but it also to some, well, rather darker places.

The Aryan version of history blitzkrieged through German culture. In philosophy, folklore, geography, and philology the Aryans made a triumphant entry, stomping down from the Himalayas and civilizing the world. They were the common ancestor of Indians, Persians, Greeks, Italians, Slavs, Scandinavians, Anglo-Saxons, and especially Germans. Aryans were soon being called Indo-Germans and given the status of Wagnerian heroes: they were youthful, tall, blond, generous, brave and creative.

As in The Secret Doctrine itself, science and occultism lay happily side by side in a fetid embrace. The German Theosophical Society had been founded in 1896 and soon had thriving centres in Leipzig and Berlin. Its success helped invigorate a rash of occultist societies that were fascinated by runes and swastikas, hated Jews and sought a new Pan German culture…According to these fantasists, the origin of Aryan man was somewhere in northern India, perhaps behind the icy bastions of the Himalayas. In 1933 Germany was overwhelmed by a political despotism whose leaders had absorbed many of the pseudoscientific ideas planted by their nineteenth-century forebears. Now they had the power to find the source of their culture and blood. (Himmler’s Crusade, pp. 28, 30)

II. The Morning of the Magicians

Some of the most colorful and, well, fantastic, accounts of supposed Nazi connections with the occult come from the eccentric tome The Morning of the Magicians, published by a pair of French journalists, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, in 1960—only 15 years after the fall of the Nazi regime.

The book defies easy summation or categorization. It's pretty much a mélange of strange, offbeat, wacky and unusual topics for around 400+ dense pages. Just about every cryptic and pseudoscientific theory from the past sixty years shows up somewhere in this meandering text, from the hollow earth, to the ascended masters, to secret moon bases, to alchemy, to visitors from other planets and dimensions. The book was heavily influenced by the writings of Charles Fort and H.P. Lovecraft. To give you an idea of just how bonkers this book is, here's a sample chapter summary from the table of contents:

II. A hundred thousand books that no one reads—Wanted: a scientific expedition to the land of the alchemists—The inventors—Madness from mercury—A code language—Was there another atomic civilization?—The electric batteries of the museum of Baghdad—Newton and the great Initiates—Helvetius and Spinoza and the philosopher's stone—Alchemy and modern physics—A hydrogen bomb on an oven—Transformation of matter, men and spirits

So that might give you some idea of what it’s like to read this thing.

Although not exclusively about Nazism, the second part of the book features all sorts of unusual and esoteric Nazi doctrines and conspiracies, perhaps based on some real snippets of information but mostly made up. One of the strangest ones, and one which will actually play a subsequent role later on, is the “World Ice Theory,” or Welteislehre, developed by an Austrian engineer named Hans Hörbiger. Hörbiger's theory actually found a receptive audience among many high-ranking Nazis including, allegedly, Hitler himself. According to Pauwels and Begier:

The whole theory was based on the idea of a perpetual struggle, in infinite space, between ice and fire, and between the forces of repulsion and attraction. This struggle, this changing tension between opposing principles, the eternal war in the skies, which is the law of the planets, also governs the Earth and all living matter, and determines human destiny. Horbiger claimed that he could reveal the remotest past and the most distant future of the globe, and put forward the most fantastic theories concerning the evolution of living species. He shattered all our habitual notions about the history of civilizations and the apparition and development of man and society. In this context, he did not envisage a continuous upward movement, but a series of rises and falls. Demi-gods, giants and fabulous civilizations preceded us on this Earth hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years ago. What the ancestors of our race were before us, we shall perhaps turn into ourselves, after a succession of extraordinary cataclysms and mutations in the course of a history which, both on Earth and in the Cosmos, will proceed in cycles. For the laws of Heaven are the same as the laws on Earth, and the whole Universe is involved in the same movement and is a living organism in which everything reacts on everything else. Man's adventure is linked with that of the stars; and what happens in the Cosmos happens on the Earth, and vice versa… (228)

Hitler and Horbiger, the "two greatest Austrians," met several times. The Nazi leader listened respectfully to this visionary prophet. Horbiger could not tolerate any interruption when he was speaking and used to tell Hitler to "Shut up!" He carried to extremes Hitler's conviction that the German people, in its Messianic mission, was being poisoned by Western science, which was narrow, enfeebling and divorced from both the flesh and the spirit. Recent developments, such as psychoanalysis, serology, and relativity, were weapons directed against the spirit of Parsifal. The doctrine of eternal ice would provide the necessary antidote. This doctrine destroyed conventional astronomy; the rest of the edifice would then collapse of itself—and it was essential that it should collapse to ensure the re-birth of magic, the only sure, dynamic value. The advocates of National-Socialism and of eternal ice, Rosenberg and Horbiger, used to meet in conference, surrounded by their best disciples. (226)

A common theme in many of these occult/esoteric Nazism books is that Hitler was under the influence of some sort of demonic forces which gave him magical powers, including the ability to mesmerize the German people. Or else that the Nazis were outwardly just another political regime, but in actuality were an occult power secretly manipulated by (or manipulating) otherworldly forces which are still around in some form. Perhaps that's easier to accept than the alternative reality of basic human evil.

Unlike Goodrick-Clarke's books, it's all nonsense, but it is tremendously entertaining if you don't take it too seriously. (Of course, this was all a lot more fun before, thanks to the internet, everyone's political beliefs seemingly became shaped by one or another fringe conspiracy theory like those described in the book³.)

The Morning of the Magicians is perhaps one of the earliest examples of we might call "non-fiction fiction": books which are ostensibly non-fiction, but are really mostly made-up speculation and conjecture.

(One of the most famous in this genre was another book I read for the project called Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which was first published in 1982. Imagine my surprise when, years later, a little-known writer named Dan Brown reworked Holy Blood, Holy Grail's ideas into a novel called The DaVinci Code in 2003. In fact, the authors even brought a lawsuit against Brown for plagiarism—and lost.

Oh, and a lot of Holy Blood, Holy Grail's theories center around the Albigensian Crusade and the 13th-century Gnostic sect known as the Cathars, which will pop up again in just a bit. The book also popularized the "mystery" of Rennes-le-Château for English speaking audiences.)

But there was another "non-fiction fiction" book which may have been even more influential on Raiders' development.

III. The Spear of Destiny

The idea that Hitler himself was obsessed with the occult probably came from a curious book written by a former British commando named Trevor Ravenscroft, called The Spear of Destiny. Ravenscroft was a follower of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, to bring yet another obscure spiritual movement into the mix⁴.

The Spear of Destiny argued that Hitler as a young man had become obsessed with the Spear of Destiny relic which was part of the Hofburg regalia in Vienna. The Spear of Destiny (aka Spear of Longinus, the Holy Lance, et. al.) was allegedly the spear which pierced Christ's side on the cross. Supposedly whoever possessed the spear would become the "Master of the World." According to Ravenscroft, Hitler as a young homeless drifter would visit the relic in the Hofburg museum every day and dreamed of possessing the Lance. He became obsessed with it. Later, once he attained power, Hitler's obsession with the Lance led him to annex Austria to seize control of it, and the Spear's occult powers drove his subsequent attempts to conquer the world. Ravenscroft claimed that the Spear was found by the Americans at the exact moment Hitler died, and that the Spear was given to General Patton and taken back to America (the one currently in the Hofburg Schatzkammer is actually a replica.) Here’s a more in-depth summary of the book⁵:

“The Spear of Destiny”: Hitler, the Hapsburgs and the Holy Grail (Bad Archaeology)

So, yeah, it's all pretty crazy. But the book became a huge hit worldwide when it was published in 1972 (about nine years before Raiders was released).

According to what I can piece together, Lucas's first collaborator on the Raiders project, writer/director Philip Kaufman (who directed Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being among other films), had read The Spear of Destiny at some point which gave him the idea that Lucas's newly-minted archaeologist hero, Indiana Smith (as he was then called) could battle the Nazis to retrieve the ancient relic. But he wisely changed the relic from the Spear of Destiny to the Ark of the Covenant.

That was a brilliant move in my opinion, since the Ark of the Covenant is an actual object that the Hebrew Bible clearly describes as being infused with supernatural power and has indeed been sought after ever since it mysteriously vanished from history (Graham Hancock's first book was about this). Based on the Biblical description, the army that carried the Ark before it would indeed be invincible, giving the quest a sense of urgency lacking from other installments. (Pedants will point out that this isn't entirely true—the Israelites were defeated at one point by the Philistines and the Ark captured—but, hey, it works for drama!)

(Incidentally, for a long time I wondered if the surname of Indy's mentor and his romantic interest—Ravenwood—was intended as a subtle reference to Ravenscroft. It turns out that it wasn't: “Raven” and “Wood” just happened to be the names of two streets near screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan's L.A. home. It's a pretty interesting coincidence, though.)

By the way, The Lance of Longinus finally makes its long-awaited appearance in The Dial of Destiny (unless you count the 1995 comic book), although it's an afterthought compared to the titular artifact which drives the story. However, unlike the Ark of the Covenant, there is no such thing as the Archimedes Dial, and the real Antikythera Mechanism does not allow its user to travel though time (or, at least, that's what they want us to believe!)

IV. The Ahnenerbe

As mentioned earlier, the most enthusiastic adherent of these occult beliefs in the German high command was the SS chief Heinrich Himmler. Himmler was a proponent of a lot of strange ideas, including believing that he was a reincarnation of Henry the Fowler, who had founded the “First Reich.” He was a true believer in the whole “Aryan” mythology, and even carried a copy of the Bhagavad Gita around with him which he claimed to be an ancient source of “Aryan wisdom.”

Himmler wanted to form a secret society of Aryan super-knights based on the Knights Templar. The SS castle at Wewelsburg was a testament to this vision. Wewelsburg was intended to be the headquarters of this new Aryan knighthood, complete with an inner sanctum where the elites would gather around a round table inspired by the one from the tales of King Arthur. Christopher Hale in the book Himmler's Crusade (which we will return to later) describes just how crazy some of Himmler's ideas were (my emphasis):

As he was driven through the fog-shrouded Teutoberger Forest in 1932, Himmler was in high spirits. after the Nazi electoral success, he looked forward to real power and he was incubating a vision of the SS. He would make it a noble order of warriors 'sworn to the Fuhrer' and modeled on the Jesuits—with himself as Ignatius Loyola—and the Knights Templar. When he saw the North Tower of Wewelsburg Castle, Himmler knew he had found the perfect fortress of the SS, a Camelot where he could mold the hearts and minds of his officers.

In 1935, Himmler set about realizing his vision. Architectural plans were drawn up and models constructed. They reveal a vaunting, paranoiac ambition, intent on transforming not only the old castle but also the village of Wewelsburg, turning it into an SS city—according to Himmler, the centre of the world. Local villagers would be moved to a new 'model village' several kilometers away...Wewelsburg would be a pagan Vatican City where the SS elite would receive spiritual and weltanschauliches ('world view') training. Libraries would be assembled, astronomical observatories constructed, appropriate works of art acquired, special furniture made and decorated with arcane symbols and runes. Archaeological artifacts would be given pride of place...

At Wewelsburg, pagan festivals were celebrated at the summer and winter solstices, and SS wives were admitted to the Sippengemeinschaft ('kinship') of Himmler's order. These ceremonies dispensed with the 'false alter trappings' of Christianity. The bride was forbidden to wear a veil and myrtle crown since these were 'oriental' customs. Instead, there were 'Sig runes' and swastikas, fir sprigs, holly and ivy. Ordination rites like these bound Himmler's officers and their families into a community dedicated to obedience and 'hardness'. According to Himmler, 'these inner feelings of the heart, of honour and of a feeling for the most real and profound world view are ultimately the things that give us strength...' (pp. 76-77)

(I believe this was also the inspiration for the computer game Castle Wolfenstein, but I'm not a gamer so I'm not as familiar with this. Fun fact: George Lucas wanted the first Raiders sequel to be set in a haunted Scottish castle. A little bit of this found its way into The Last Crusade. Dial of Destiny also features scenes in a castle which looks very similar, although it’s never named.)

Himmler was also a devotee of one Karl Maria Wiligut, a.k.a. “Weisthor”, a former army officer who claimed to have an "ancestral memory" of the Germanic tribes going back hundreds of thousands of years when there were three suns in the sky and giants and dwarves roamed the earth. Willigut claimed that this memory allowed him to recall that in 9600 BC "a struggle began between the Irmist religion and the Wotanists, resulting in a long period of exile for Irminists in Asia, where they were persecuted by Jews and Freemasons." (Himmler's Crusade, p. 87). It should be no surprise that Willigut eventually ended up in an insane asylum.

So this was the kind of stuff the SS was up to. And it’s all true!!!

Anyway, Himmler was the driving force behind the establishment of the Nazi "think tank" known as the Ahnenerbe (the Ancestral Research Division). The Ahnenerbe had been founded by a guy called Hermann Wirth, who believed that Nordic people had originated in a vanished frozen “Atlantis” known as Thule. Prior to its incorporation into the SS, it studied more benign topics like “the nutritional value of various forms of honey, the occult symbolism of the Etonian top hat and the mystical significance of the suppression of the Celtic harp in Northern Ireland.” (The Nazis and the Occult by Paul Roland, p. 161) The Ahnenerbe was placed under the control of SS colonel Wolfram Sievers, who dispatched all sorts of missions to seek out antiquities and undertake scientific expeditions all over the world.

I'm not aware of any actual attempts by the Ahnenerbe to find the lost Ark of the Covenant. But one of the expeditions the Ahhnenerbe did undertake was an attempt to find the Holy Grail.

This was based on the rather unconventional ideas of an SS officer named Otto Rahn. Rahn’s research led him to a small French town called Ussat-les-Bains, which he managed to link—with the help of a French Grail enthusiast named Antonin Gadal—to the Cathars and their supposed hidden treasure (see, I told you it would make a comeback!). According to the Wikipedia article about him, "Journeys for his second book led Rahn to places in Nazi Germany, France, Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Iceland." Part of me wishes some of this stuff was incorporated into The Last Crusade (Indiana Jones in Iceland?). Much as Ravenscroft would later do, Rahn connected the Grail with all sort of other occult topics.

In reality, the Holy Grail is probably sitting in a cathedral in the Spanish city of Valencia. See:

Or perhaps it’s really the Chalice of Doña Urraca at the Basilica of San Isidoro in León: Spanish historians claim to have found Holy Grail (The Irish Times).

(Indy and his dad could have just rolled into Spain, which would have made their work a whole lot easier. No boat chase through the canals of Venice, though, but I'm sure a chase through Spain could have been just as exciting. "It belongs in a museum church!")

But the expedition we're particularly interested in was to Tibet—perhaps the most mysterious country anywhere on earth at the time. Only a handful of Westerners had ever set foot in Tibet (or Thibet), given that the country was still a hermit theocracy completely closed off to foreigners. As a result, Tibetan culture and religion loomed large the imagination of Europeans throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, enhanced by its connection to popular occult doctrines such as Theosophy. It was a “white spot” on the map and, as a result, all sort of fantastic and magical claims were made about it. What sort of exotic treasures lay there, just waiting to be discovered? And what sort of powers could be gained by finding them?

That's where we'll pick up next time.

Postscript: One of the more intriguing ideas Graham Hancock had in The Sign and the Seal was the idea that the Holy Grail actually *was* the Ark of the Covenant. That is, stores about the Grail were actually coded language describing the Ark of the Covenant.

It's often claimed that the Knights Templar undertook archaeological excavations under Temple Mount in Jerusalem (where their headquarters were). They subsequently became the richest and most powerful order in Europe, and no one is quite sure why. Did they find the lost Ark of the Covenant? Did they bring it back to France? Was that the alleged "secret treasure" of the Cathars? Is that the reason why both the Templars and the Cathars were stamped out by religious and secular powers? And did it eventually come to be hidden at Rennes-le-Château? Probably not, but these ideas have inspired a whole library's worth of fiction and non-fiction books and movies.

Or, maybe Hancock's right, and the Ark is in the Chapel of the Tablet at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Ethiopia. Maybe the power of the Ark is what allowed the Ethiopians to defeat the Italians at the Battle of Adwa. Or maybe it's sitting on a shelf in Africa after all. It's all so mysterious!

Next: The Lamasery of Doom.

1. If you want to know more, the Behind the Bastards podcast covered her last year:

2. Jacob Grimm was also a significant in the field of linguistics, for example, formulating Grimm’s Law.

3. I'm sure there is a Discord (or whatever the popular thing is now) somewhere out there with true believers in the World Ice Theory.

4. As was the founder of Waldorf schools.

5. Ravenscroft was more successful than the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail in suing those who appropriated his work, successfully suing James Herbert over his 1978 novel, The Spear.