A few years back, I found myself reading Kimberly Cornish's historically questionable but highly entertaining The Jew of Linz, and, by turns, got thinking about Nazi magick.
Now, I'm aware that the issue of Hitler's interest in occult forces and practical magick is not a settled question; for every reputable historian who claims Der Fuhrer thought it was bosh, there are ten (or ten thousand) fringe cranks who have enough fascinating tidbits to keep the debate unsettled. However, it is indisputable that there were elements within National Socialism who thought magick and ritual were effacacious, and those elements were highly influential throughout the Party's history.
So then I got thinking about the 1936 Olympics, and their most distinguishing feature: the first really large scale television broadcast. It occurred to me that for an enterprising willworker, this broadcast represented an incomparable opportunity. Not only would it be viewed by a large number of people (pretty much anyone who owned a television at the time), but it would continue to be viewed regardless of its content because of its seminal status.
Now, for anyone who doesn't know, television is a fascinating little technology. Not only does it keep us in stitches with the laughtrack-dubbed, hackneyed marital antics of nuclear families, but it lulls us into an artificial, unnaturally prolonged state of low brain activity while it does so. It is, essentially, a Hypno-Box. For example, there's a great old experiment where they wired kids up with EEGs and told them to attentively focus on their favourite shows for as long as they could. They figured letting the kids choose their favourite shows would maximise this duration. The twist on the experiment was that the TVs were rigged to turn off the moment the children's brainwave frequency dropped below the level associated with 'conscious and critical attention'. I don't recall the average amount of time a kid lasted, but it was measured in seconds.
The insidious applications of this to advertising (read: brainwashing) are obvious. In fact, I recommend to everyone who hasn't read it to pick up a copy of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television as an excellent primer for why the sales of Ritalin are so good.
However, what about the explicit use of this medium as magick? We've thought of it since, sure...but might some dark visionary have trigged to it 70 years ago? I've never seen the 1936 footage beyond a few mustachioed Heils. Is there, say, sigil content beyond the ubiquitous swastika? Elements that might be decoded as tailored for the first television hypersigil? |
