"Nazis have long been associated with the occult, explaining the monstrous acts committed by the party by putting them in a supernatural context. Dark Horse’s new graphic novel, Aleister & Adolf, by writer Douglas Rushkoff and artist Michael Avon Oeming, delves into the connection between Nazis and magick by bringing together notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley and Adolf Hitler. But the scope of the story goes beyond World War II.
“It started with the thought, ‘What if Aleister Crowley had been enlisted in an occult war against Hitler at the end of WWII?’,” Rushkoff told The A.V. Club via e-mail. “And as I began to research, I learned that Crowley was responsible for Churchill’s ‘V is for Victory’ salute, falsifying star charts for Hitler’s astrologers, and a bunch of other stuff. It’s really about two kinds of magick—the sigil magick that we might charge with meditation or sex, and the sort of black magick with which the Nazis were involved—that required the deaths of millions to charge it.[...]"