The Magus of Hay(41)

She was still sporadically smiling, in an appallingly stupid, trembly, girly way, when she was sitting at the computer, clicking on links to Peter Rector, and the word Nazi came up.





19

Small obsession


HERE WAS A man who wanted to be in the Rolling Stones: long black hair with a few grey tufts, clean-shaven, generous Jaggeresque lips in a loose, amiable smile. A face deeply scored by experience but lit up by big, brown owl-like eyes – the eyes of somebody who was either preternaturally wise or doing a lot of drugs.

But this was the 1970s and Peter Rector must have been twenty years too old to be in the Stones, and there seemed to be no more recent images anywhere.

The biographical detail was scant, his age nowhere apparent. He appeared on several occult sites. His books were not available on Amazon but Abebooks had links to a few second-hand copies, mainly at eye-watering prices.

Notably A Negative Sun, a dense study of the mysticism at the core of Nazi Germany, published in 1969.

Which had changed his life, she learned as the phone rang.

Huw said it was about Himmler and the SS and the occult roots of the Aryan dream. Explained as never before… at the time.

‘As a young lad, Rector were in the war. Captured by the Germans at Tobruk. When he wound up in a prison camp in Poland, the camp security happened to seize a book on ritual magic that one of Rector’s girlfriends had posted to him from Cambridge.’

‘So his interest in this stuff goes back a long way,’ Merrily said.



‘Almost lifelong,’ Huw said. ‘Parents were Cambridge professors, father a theologian. Peter Rector grew up in a house full of religious tomes, and the ones that interested him most tended to be on the occult fringe.’

‘Where did you learn that?’

‘He wrote occasional articles for magazines. Some of them are reproduced on the Internet. He said he was very keen to serve in the Middle East to get into Egypt… investigate the pyramids and the Sphinx and the birthplace of Hermetic Magic. Hadn’t counted on winding up in a German POW camp, but that were a blessing in disguise. The deputy commandant, one Kurt Scheffler, had SS links, strong esoteric leanings and nobody amongst his fellow officers genned up enough to hold a meaningful discussion with. So he has Lieutenant Rector brought in for questioning.’

Thus, Huw explained, had begun a friendship that was to transcend the armistice and lead, after Scheffler’s death, to Peter Rector’s seminal exploration of Nazi sorcery.

‘You had a lot of time on your hands in a prison camp. They’d sit up half the night, him and Scheffler, discussing the magical symbolism of King Arthur’s Camelot, Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophist movement. Most of it starts wi’ the Nazi interpretation of Blavatsky’s bonkers evolution theories suggesting fair-haired Aryans were the purest strain of humanity. Arising in the last days of Atlantis.’

‘I know. I think. All the rest of us came from polluted strains caused by, erm…?’

‘Having sex wi’ monkeys, aye. Scheffler had academic and SS contacts in Berlin, and he’d obtain books and documents which he showed to Rector. Who was jotting it all down from memory. If Berlin had found out, Scheffler would’ve been pulled out of Poland and shot before you could say Heil Hitler, but they got away with it. Happen Scheffler thought he were making a convert.’

‘Was he?’



‘Who knows?’

Merrily was remembering a TV documentary she and Jane had watched about Heinrich Himmler’s SS stronghold, the dramatic castle at Wewelsburg, organized around his Aryan take on Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table, the quest for the Holy Grail.

‘Rector spoke German?’

‘He did by the time the war ended.’

‘You wouldn’t think mixing with the enemy would go down all that well with his fellow prisoners.’

‘Oh, I think it would, lass. Nights drinking schnapps in the German officers’ quarters would give him a lot of useful details to pass on to the escape committee. Anyroad, end of the war, Rector emerges with a goldmine of incredible history and a stack of useful contacts. Moves back to Cambridge where it takes him twenty years, on and off, to turn it into a book. Widely acclaimed as a seminal work on magic and the Master Race. Wasn’t written in a sensational way and it wasn’t full of strident condemnation. Which was what caused some confusion later.’

‘So you’ve read it?’

‘Years ago. Gives you a vivid understanding of how occult theories came to justify the mass extermination of Jews – small hairy men, inferior species polluting the gene pool, all this. You can even understand why they saw Hitler as an avatar, a god incarnate with a mission to guide mankind into the next phase of the golden age or some such crap.’