Black Magic, Mad Science, and Super-Nazis

The lurid lore beneath Grant Morrison’s Zenith

On a London soundstage in 1987, a British pop star is filming a music video when he is interrupted by a visitor who has what he considers an insane request:

You’re asking me to help you because Nazis from another dimension are trying to take over the world and only you can stop them? I’ll tell you the kind of help you need…

That is how pioneering comic book writer Grant Morrison began episode 4 (publication date: September 12, 1987) of his breakthrough series Zenith, published in the British comics anthology magazine 2000 AD. This story can be found in the Zenith: Phase One collected edition, which the publisher’s web shop now has on sale for only $6.49: 75% lower than the regular price. My thanks to friend, fellow libertarian writer, and fellow Zenith fan Iain Murray for notifying me of this great bargain. For any reader who would like to get up to speed with Zenith’s story and background up to this point, I have also published essays here in Superhero Studies about the prologue and episodes 1, 2, and 3.

Our baffled Britpop celebrity is Robert McDowell, stage name “Zenith,” who we met in episode 1. He is “the world’s only active superhuman,” but has zero interest in emulating Superman’s “never-ending battle” for truth, justice, and other ideals. The party-addicted pop star regards his super-gifts as nothing but advantages to exploit for fame, wealth, and pleasure. Contrary to what Uncle Ben taught Spider-Man, great power and great irresponsibility are perfectly compatible in Zenith’s opinion.

The visitor who is worried about extradimensional Nazis is Ruby Fox, a.k.a “Voltage,” who, along with Zenith’s parents, was once a member of “Cloud 9,” a group of British superhumans who were also cultural icons of the “swinging ‘60’s.”

When her petition is brusquely brushed off, Fox burns out Zenith’s audio equipment, revealing that (as we saw in the last episode) she has regained the electrical powers she lost in 1971. Duly shocked by this revelation, Zenith reluctantly agrees to hear her out.

Secret History

So Fox proceeds to deliver, both to Zenith and the reader, some revisionist “History Lessons,” which is the title of the story. As Morrison wrote in his autobiographical 2011 book Supergods:

The elaborate alternate history of Zenith was constructed around the idea that the Americans had dropped the first atom bomb on Berlin, not Hiroshima, in order to kill a fascist superhuman engineered and empowered by the Nazis as a living weapon to win the war against the Allies. This backstory, with its grubby roots in popular Nazi occult lore, eugenics, and the CIA’s clandestine LSD research program, had Lovecraftian monsters teaching the Nazis how to turn humans into superhuman vessels—ostensibly supersoldiers but in reality to be used as bodies for higher-dimensional entities whose mere presence caused fatal hypertension and hemorrhaging in ordinary flesh-and-blood men and women.

Morrison has Fox begin the story in 1923, when:

…the poet and mystic, Dietrich Eckardt, initiated a German army corporal into an occult group called the Cult of the Black Sun. That corporal’s name was Adolf Hitler.

The accompanying illustration depicts Eckardt in a pagan goat mask and black robe—attire that makes him look like a devil-worshipper from the Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut—performing a mystic ritual over Adolf Hitler. We see smoking lamps similar to the one in episode 2 that the entity “Iok Sotot, Eater of Souls” used to manifest on the earthly plane.

The next panel cuts forward in time to after Hitler’s subsequent rise to power. At a Nazi rally, the freshly-anointed Führer delivers one of his signature rants over a human sea of sieg heil salutes. Fox continues:

Seventeen years later, that insignificant little Austrian stood poised to change the face of the earth. And all because Eckardt, Haushofer and the others, recognising his potential as a medium, had put Hitler in touch with certain entities…

We will revisit both Eckardt and “Haushofer” later.

On the next page, two of those entities (the “Lovecraftian monsters” Morrison mentioned above) manifest as giant faces looming over the earth.

These beings, known variously as the Great Old Ones, the Dark Gods or the Many-Angled Ones, occupy dimensional spaces above our own. And they want our planet.

The term “Great Old Ones” comes straight from Lovecraft himself. As the H.P. Lovecraft Wiki informs us (emphasis in original):

The Great Old Ones are a group of unique, malignant beings of great power in the fictional cosmology of the Cthulhu Mythos. Cthulhu, H. P. Lovecraft's famous creation, is described as a Great Old One. They reside in various locations on Earth, and once presided over the planet as gods and rulers.

In Zenith, Morrison adds a scifi supervillain spin to this mythos. As Fox relates:

The thing is, [the Great Old Ones] need physical bodies and human anatomy is too frail to contain them. That’s why the ‘master-race’ experiments had only one true purpose — the creation of super-human physical vehicles for the Dark Gods.

In the next panel, a Many-Angled One possesses a test subject as Nazi scientists watch through a one-way window and take notes.

Aided by extradimensional technology, Nazi scientists developed the Übermensch… What Lord Haw-Haw, in his propaganda broadcasts, called Masterman… the Aryan ‘New Man.’

Here, we see the Nazi super-soldier Masterman demonstrate his super-human strength by mangling a steel beam with his bare hands under observation by military officers and scientists.

And as you know, defecting German experts helped the British to produce Maximan, our response to their Masterman. At the same time, the Americans had just completed work on a superweapon of their own… And I think we all know how that turned out.

Here, we again see the mushroom cloud over Berlin from when, in the prologue, the Americans dropped the first atom bomb on Berlin to kill Masterman, also incurring the incidental incineration of the defeated Maximan (and presumably of most everyone else in the German capital) as collateral damage.

The only thing everyone forgot, was that the Nazis were fond of using twins in their experiments. And now a second Masterman is awake, here, in London! Two nights ago, he attacked me! He destroyed my flat…

Morrison’s mad genius for world-building constructed an alternate timeline in which, as is tightly conveyed in only nine panels across two pages, all parties to the 20th-century global “arms race” for superweapons sought, not only inanimate WMDs like nukes and nerve agents, but the technology to spawn supersoldiers: superhuman “living weapons” that would be unbeatable on the field, whether in overt or covert operations.

Characteristic of Morrison’s storytelling in general, this shiny high-tech sci-fi saga is rooted in and blended with a dark fantasy epic steeped in mythology, magic, and the occult. It is amazing that any writer could spin such a yarn, especially at the tender age of 27 as Morrison did.

Rotten Roots

What makes it even more remarkable is how much study, research, and “culture” Morrison evidently put into it: not only from literary influences like Lovecraft, but from history, both “standard” and speculative/revisionist. Many of the above names were the names of real people. And many of the above events are evidently fantasized versions of historical episodes that actually happened.

There really was a man named Dietrich Eckardt who was a “poet and mystic,” as well as a playwright, journalist, publicist, and political activist. He co-founded the German Workers' Party (the precursor to the Nazi Party), contributed to the early ideological foundations of Nazism, and really did mentor and influence Adolf Hitler.

Even the occult connection is extensively rooted in historical fact. As Michael Fitzgerald related in his 2021 book The Nazis and the Supernatural: The Occult Secrets of Hitler’s Evil Empire:

Eckart believed that Hitler could be moulded into the future saviour of Germany with sufficient training by himself and others who shared his own view of the world. Eckart nurtured Hitler carefully and initiated him into a range of occult ideas and practices. He introduced him to three magical orders: the Thule Group, the Armanen Order and the Vril Society. From them Hitler learned the techniques of occult concentration, of visualization and of developing the power to direct his will to influence events and other people. Eckart firmly believed that he was in contact with the ‘Secret Chiefs’, mysterious beings who were variously thought to live in the air, in the mountain fastnesses of Tibet or in the very centre of the earth. He thought he had the power to summon them and set them to work on behalf of Germany and that Hitler was the earthly instrument for channelling their power.

Morrison likely based his “Cult of the Black Sun” on the above “three magical orders,” which Fitzgerald further discussed as follows:

The very beginnings of Nazism were steeped in occultism. The Nazi Party began life as the political arm of the Thule Group. This was founded in 1910 by Felix Niedner who also translated the Eddas from Old Norse into German. (The Eddas were the sacred books of Scandinavian paganism.) In 1918 a Munich branch was founded and became involved in political activity.

The Thule Group was formed on the ancient myths of Hyperborea and Thule. Hyperborea was supposed to be a land in the far north that was destroyed by ice. The ice split it into two islands, one of which became known as Thule. The Thule Group members were convinced that their descendants were the ancestors of the Aryan race.

The group was one of the most important formative influences on Nazi thinking. Only the Vril Society had an equally decisive impact on the Party’s leadership.

The Vril Society was founded by Karl Haushofer, another name dropped by Fox in her “history lesson.” According to Fitzgerald, Haushofer was, along with Eckart, one of the most influential members of the Vril Society’s council of leaders and “one of Hitler’s principal mentors,” adding that:

In spite of the small number of members who belonged to the Vril Society, its impact was out of all proportion to its size. It played a decisive part in the ascent of Hitler and the Nazis to supreme power within Germany.

As Fitzgerald detailed:

The name ‘vril’ came from a novel written in 1871 by the English writer Lord Lytton. In addition to being a popular novelist, Lytton was also a Freemason, a Rosicrucian and a dabbler in magic and the occult. Lytton’s novel The Coming Race was set in a world where an advanced species lived beneath the earth in large caverns. They had developed the use of an energy form called vril which enabled them to be not just simply human but equal to the gods themselves. One day, Lytton told his readers, they would emerge from the bowels of the earth and rule the planet. (…)

Lytton’s novel proved particularly influential among German occult groups. The Vril Society was named in honour of his book and its members believed that the semi-divine beings that lived under the earth could make contact with humans and emerge on to the surface of the planet through various ‘openings’. These ‘underground Masters’ as the Society referred to them possessed higher levels of knowledge and wisdom than ordinary humans. Some members of the Vril Society believed that they had established contact with these Masters and had acquired knowledge that could be used by them to dominate the human world. Eckart and Haushofer wanted to use vril power for political ends.

The Vril Society associated these “underground Masters” with the “Secret Chiefs” who, again, Eckart believed Hitler was uniquely able to contact. He attributed Hitler’s ascent to his fated role as Führer to the madman’s special “power to summon” these demonic entities as a medium—as “the earthly instrument for channelling their power”—and to “set them to work on behalf of Germany.”

So, Morrison’s “Many-Angled Ones” are probably an amalgam of these “underground Masters”/“Secret Chiefs” from Nazi occult lore with Lovecraft’s extradimensional “Great Old Ones” who similarly “reside in various locations on Earth, and once presided over the planet as gods and rulers.”

And just as in the Zenith backstory, Nazi eugenic doctrines related to “the Master Race,” “the Übermensch,” and “the Aryan ‘New Man’” really did, as Fitzgerald attested, have roots in the occult beliefs and practices of magical orders like the Thule Group and the Vril Society.

Then there are the “defecting German experts” recruited to aid the Allied cause through the covert development of superweapons and brainwashed operatives. This too has deep, rotten roots in 20th-century history. Except in this case, the Allied forces are implicated in dark deeds: historical facts that ill-fit the pro-war narrative of World War II and the Cold War as “good wars” waged by western “good-guy” military-intelligence establishments against their uniquely evil “bad-guy” opposites.

During the Cold War, America’s “Operation Paperclip” and Britain’s similar “Operation Surgeon” recruited Nazi scientists and engineers to help the west advance in rocket science, aeronautics, nuclear research, and biological warfare. For example, both programs tapped Wernher von Braun, a key figure in the development of Germany’s V-2 rocket (the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile). Braun played a major role in America’s space and missile programs.

In Zenith, Germany’s “Masterman” program was the basis for both the British “Maximan” project and the American “Cloud 9” operation. In the prelude, Ruby Fox characterized the young superhumans of Cloud 9 as “victims of an experimental drug which had given us extraordinary abilities” and which turned the youngsters into brainwashed operatives and unwitting mass influencers of the counterculture. As anyone who has read Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties will notice, that is almost exactly what was done by MK-Ultra, the CIA’s clandestine LSD research and assassination program. Operations like MK-Ultra also had connections extending back to Nazi eugenic labs, torture chambers, and death camps. The scientist Dr. Kurt Blome, for example, one of Nazi Germany’s worst human rights abusers, was recruited by America to work on MK-Ultra, as well as on chemical weapons.

Eternal Vigilance

This is sinister and unsettling stuff. And it does make me wonder if one of my favorite storytellers dabbles too much in the dark side. Morrison is obviously anti-Nazi, but his practice of “chaos magic” and his fascination with Alistair Crowley and the occult worries me. He should be very careful about the forces he chooses to traffic with.

Satanic panic has often been overblown. Trump Derangement Syndrome has in recent years whipped up mass paranoia leading otherwise decent and reasonable people to hallucinate Nazis under every bed and at every Republican rally. And TDS has turned that hysteria into a carte-blanche excuse for despicaple deeds.

At the same time, there are actual Satanists, actual Nazis, and, I believe, actual demons (whatever their metaphysical makeup) abroad in the world. Christians especially must be vigilant against such evil and an essential part of that is to not shy away from learning about what, throughout history, its devotees have believed, said, and done. To overcome one’s Enemy, one must know thy Enemy. To be a force for good, we must remember that Jesus said:

Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. (Matthew 10:16)

Back to War

Zenith initially refuses to get involved in any way whatsoever. He is far too busy with his music career and social life to let a little thing like saving the world from super-Nazi Satanists cramp his style. But Fox gets through to him with a quid pro quo. If he helps her, she’ll tell him “what really happened” to his parents.

In a brief, chilling epilogue, Masterman exacts vengeance on a World War II veteran he finds living on the streets of London. The “Dark Lord” uses heat vision to burn the flesh clean off the old man’s bones, demonstrating that the war isn’t over, but “has only just begun.”