Introduction

This is a very personal post. It is also a post that has some rather disturbing content. Not in images, but in words. I am offering reflections on the difficult topic of attempting to understand an aggressor; much more remains to be said about standing with their victims of course. I have to apologise especially to all my Jewish friends for returning to this open wound. If I do so, it is in the spirit of never allowing myself or my people to forget. It is also in the spirit of making the poison of our past, an antivenom of the present.

We are experiencing a moment where a surprising number of people seem to take great pride in calling someone else their enemy. We are also experiencing a time when incredibly little effort seems to be made to understand the motives’s of one’s enemy. Today, the aphorism Seeking to understand before seeking to be understood. is likely to be interpreted by many as a weakness or worse as a flaw of character.

I want to make a case against that. In fact, as magicians especially, we should know a thing or two about the understanding of otherness as well as the knowledge of evil.

In the kabbalistic system of the Etz Chaim and the ten Sephira, the qlippothic demon of the 11th pseudo-Sephira Da’ath (traditionally translated as Knowledge) is called Belial.

One translation of this ancient name is The Worthless Ones. Thus, Belial represents the demonic force that turns knowledge to nothing, that evaporates meaning – or applied more personally, that denies someone value. Everything Belial touches becomes worthless, it turns into nothing. 

Knowledge (or Da’ath), born from genuine understanding, thus is the ultimate antivenom or shield against Belial. The more we understand, the more we generate value. 

Becoming a seeker of understanding is a mission in creating value in this world. It’s a mission in making this world valuable. By understanding things we tear the shadow from them. Even things that were deemed worthless a moment ago, by turning them over carefully in our mind, we begin to see them in a new light: We might begin to see how they came to be, and what they once were intended to be. Nothing is ever worthless in this cosmos, but a lot of things can be harmful. The true art of becoming a seeker of understanding, therefore, is to create proximity without creating affinity or likeness. To step up close to Belial, without allowing the demon to touch us.

It is through this kabbalistic lens, of working with these demonic forces in real life, that I am sharing the following story. It is not an easy story for me to share. But such is the nature of understanding Belial.

LVX,
Frater Acher
May the serpent bite its tail.

Going into the enemy camp.

I am an offspring of Nazis. I am also an offspring of nature, of crystal rocks, mountain rivers, of snake and ibex. But there is no beating around the bushes, I am an offspring of Nazis. 

I am a German. When we delve into our not-so-distant past, pure evil is always around the corner: Old neighbours, who once helped us built figures from toothpicks and chestnuts, decades later over coffee and tea in a casual comment reveal traces of their past as concentration camp guards. Grandfathers had sailed through our youth as a passionate nature-lovers, as biologists and chemists, who had been able to avoid the terrors of war because their research had been deemed critical. And on an Easter brunch their daughters, now in their seventies themselves, drop an incidental remark that less Jews had been killed, had father not helped invent the chemical formula for Zyklon B. 

Myriad of stories cloak themselves in the veil of the everyday. They are never uttered with horror, but dropped casually into the cracks of the most mundane situations: An aunt who tips off the police and, by a happy coincidence, can move into a large vacated flat next door a few days later. A half-brother of the parents, whose mother never appears in the family stories. Until a letter in the tangled estate of one’s dad reveals her to be Jewish and deliberately left behind during the sudden escape from Silesia. 

You see, for us, fellow Germans these are not stories. They are voices in our blood. Well-hidden voices, murmuring voices, never sleeping, dangerous voices. And yet, voices we partake in. And that we are invited to bring to the foreground, so they can be understood. 

For me personally, the constant presence of these sinister, gag-reflex-triggering voices has helped me a lot on my magical path. I had learned early on, that the deeper I dive into what I should consider my ‘self’ the more foreign, the more archaic and other the things I might find. I had learned early on that there is no safe space, no guilt-free retreat, no ablution that will ever wash away the voices swarming in my blood. 

The presence of these voices also led me onto a journey of understanding. Specifically, of a journey into understanding what overtly seems entirely incomprehensible.

After the concentration camp visits of my childhood, and my personal visit to Auschwitz in my twenties, it was entirely clear to me: I had to understand how the mind of a Nazi looked from the inside. Running away from evil was a terrible strategy, when it was already in your blood. The only way was through. And to get through, I needed to do the unthinkable: I needed to grant my Nazi ancestors the right to be human as well. Perverted, of course, but human nevertheless. Only by looking at them as someone essentially like me, but who had made different experiences, I could hope to begin to understand the source, the make-up, and way of working of the evil they embodied.

Seek to understand before you seek to be understood. But how do you seek to understand what embodies pure evil to you?

Above the beautiful city of Berchtesgaden, surrounded by steep mountains, there are the ruins of what once was Hitler’s infamous Eagle’s Nest. High on top the mountain peak the Kehlsteinhaus still remains, with its golden elevator up through the mountain. It still breathes the Nazi charm of utter desolation of the soul. Below it, on the mountain slope, there once stood a large farmhouse, the Berghof at the Obersalzberg. History books about the Third Reich have much to say about it; this is where Hitler spent a lot of time during the war, befuddled by drug intoxication and painkillers, a few hours a day open only to visitors, and most of the time in bed dazed and exhausted. Clearly, to unleash utter evil into the world, one didn’t need a twelve-hour work day. Submissive subservience and anticipatory obedience did most of the job by themselves.[2]

Today, none of the remains of the Berghof can be seen. Instead the place is now taken by a small museum. If you walk up its stairs and step close to the glass-facade of its back wall, you’ll discover an audio-station. Several tapes are playing in endless loops, a bench invites to sitting and listening to them.

One day, I sat on one of these benches, headphones on, and heard the voice of Heinrich Himmler. He was giving a secret speech to hundreds of SS Leaders in 1943.[3] During this speech, Himmler arrives at the bottom of the human abyss. His words are so frightening, I have never heard anything come close to it. Essentially, in a few sentences, he opens a direct line of sight into how all these men and women had managed to lose their souls, their humanness. 

Note: I must warn against the terrible things said in the following quote. To become a seeker of understanding, we must look evil in the face, not judge it from a distance. If you are not prepared to become physically sick or cry, or both, I suggest you skip the following quote of a key passage of this speech. 

On 4th of October 1943 Heinrich Himmler said:

I also want to mention a very difficult chapter here before you in all candour. Among us, it should be expressed quite openly for once, and yet we will never talk about it in public. Just as little as we hesitated on June 30, 1934, to do our commanded duty and to put comrades who had missed the mark against the wall and shoot them, just as little have we ever spoken about it and will we ever speak about it. It was a matter of course, a matter of tactfulness, thank God, that we never talked about it among ourselves, never spoke about it. Everyone shuddered and yet everyone was clear that they would do it again the next time it was ordered and when it was necessary. I mean now the evacuation of Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that is easily said. “The Jewish people will be exterminated,” says every party comrade, “quite clearly, it's in our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, let's do it.” And then they all arrive, the good 80 million Germans, and everyone has their decent Jew. It's clear, the others are pigs, but this one is a swell Jew. Of all who talk like this, none have witnessed, none have endured it. Most of you will know what it means when 100 corpses lie together, when 500 lie there or when 1000 lie there. To have endured this, and to have remained, apart from exceptions of human weaknesses - to have remained decent, that has made us tougher. This is a never written and never to be written glory of our history […]. On the whole […] we can say that we have accomplished this most difficult task with love for our people. And we have not taken any damage in our inner being, in our soul, in our character.

Well. I learned so much from listening to Heinrich Himmler. Despite the revulsion, the anger and sadness.

Not a week has gone by over the last twenty years since I first heard him speak these words, that I did not think of Himmler and what he said there. 

I have taken his words deep into my blood. I have made them meet the voices of my grandparents and great-grandparents who whispers were already assembled there. And Himmler’s words - in a homeopathic way - have become an antivenom to all the voices of my past. For suddenly I could see the essence of the poison again that had befallen so many of my ancestors: 

This poison is the idea that we can no longer trust our own nature. That man has to force life out and beyond its organic, meandering pathways. That standing on a heap of 500 corpses and not be traumatised, is what is means to be human. The idea that the quiet, gentle instincts of our soul are a weakness. 

A verdict wisely spoken.

Why am I telling this story here? A lot of shame, guilt and tears still well up, just directing my gaze to these places that will always be pitch-black, no matter how much light we shine on them.

I am telling this story, to invite for a culture of hard debate, as well as the seeking to understand. Not acceptance or approval, but deep human-to-human understanding.

This seems critical to stress: Understanding is nothing soft, nothing evasive or unmanly. Quite the opposite: Going into the enemy camp to become a seeker of understanding, to me at least, is a sign of great courage. It’s a sign of your conviction in your own resilience or antifragility. It’s also the beginning of healing. For a witch burnt on the stake, is a human not understood. As much as it might violate some people’s superficial ideas of entitlement and common sense, the same is true for modern images of enmity[4]: A homophobe, a white supremacist, a fascist burnt on the stake, is a human not understood. Once more: understanding, is not the same as tolerating.

I am aware of the problem: Becoming a seeker of understanding comes with the risk of being poisoned yourself. Of lessening your rage, of watering down your verdict, once you begin to see the outlines of a fellow human behind the mask you hate. 

But maybe we can take this as an invitation to show the world our true strength: Let’s take the mask off our enemy, see their human face, their skin that speaks ‘brother or sister’ - and then still speak our verdict. We can make it as harsh as we think it deserves to be, but first we make the effort to understand. Otherwise we are no better than Belial.

A verdict wisely spoken is a verdict free of ego. 

Hearing Himmler speak like this, made me wonder: Under which circumstances could I have become like him? He and I, we both started out in the same virgin, pure way as newborns. If I no longer consider myself immune to the experiences Himmler went through, to become the human monster he turned out to be, what kind of biography would have turned me alike? 

My ego wants me to avoid these kinds of questions. It loves the illusion of superiority and defiance. But my heart tells me, deep inside, Himmler and I once were alike: We both were born as humans. And what really scares the shit out of me, keeps me awake at night, and infuses a Lovecraftian kind of horror under my skin, is to consider someone like Heinrich Himmler a fellow in species. A human like me. 

If this was true, all my defences are suddenly down. I am standing here naked and vulnerable to the core. For I know Himmler did not plunge out of being-human suddenly. Rather, he slowly, measuredly walked out of it. One experience at a time. – In light of that, my own next step today, my next judgement tomorrow, could be the beginning of my own path out of humanness?

A verdict wisely spoken sees the enemy within ourselves. It has put in the enormous effort of dismantling the mask of the monster and of discovering the distorted fellow specimen, as bitter, as frightening as this realisation is. We are all vulnerable to evil. It’s only some of us who were led to actualise their evil. Understanding the unique reasons that led to this actualisation, is the foundation for acquiring truthful knowledge (Da’ath).

Again, understanding evil does not have to lessen the sharpness of our verdict over it. However, it ensures our verdict flows from a place of genuine knowledge. From a place of seeing Otherness as something inherently coherent, logic, possibly even ethicallyaccording to its own terms. For that is what true evil and true horror are made of: The realisation that seen from the inside they are not madness, but mostly clear logic, in the absence of a wise heart.

Calling someone mad, dumb, uneducated, primitive, etc. are all just excuses for not having gone deep enough into the enemy’s camp. As a basic rule, we all make sense according to our own terms. Even the most distorted and monstrous of us. Making the effort to understand their terms does not make us alike. But it holds the beginning of making us immune. 

[1]          For further details see my free online essay on the kabbalistic Qlippoth: https://theomagica.com/on-the-nature-of-the-qlippoth

[2]          Peter Longerich; Der ungeschriebene Befehl. Hitler und der Weg zur „Endlösung“, München: Piper, 2001, ISBN 3-492-04295-3

[3]          Himmler’s infamous Posen speeches, in German: Rede des Reichsführers SS bei der SS-Gruppenführertagung in Posen am 4. Oktober 1943. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posen_speeches

[4]          Ones which I personally share.