British Secret Service and the occult

Mike Howard of the Pagan magazine The Cauldron recently wrote an article for New Dawn on the British Secret Service and their employment of occult investigators titled “The British Occult Secret Service: The Untold Story“, available online.

In March I posted about the release of documents that MI5 used astrologers to cast horoscopes to predict Hitler’s next moves, but this article looks further back to Elizabethan times, specifically Dr John Dee, and Sir Francis Walsingham.

Howard notes that:

It is not really surprising that historically occultism and espionage have often been strange bedfellows. The black art of espionage is about obtaining secret information and witches, psychics and astrologers have always claimed to be able to predict the future and know about things hidden from ordinary people.

Tables turn in the eighteenth century when the Secret Service became concerned founder Sir Francis Dashwood’s Hellfire Club, though Dashwood was “later the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a close friend and political adviser of King George III”.

More recently we have James Bond creator Lt. Commander Ian Fleming, who was “interested in astrology and numerology and he was a friend of the notorious magician Aleister Crowley, who had worked for MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service) during World War I and in the 1920s and 1930s spying on Germans with occult interests”

An interesting article for occult and military buffs alike. Check it out at New Dawn Magazine.

Via Technoccult.

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