Original Magic: The Rituals and Initiations of the Persian Magi - Michael M. Hughes 2018
Hexing Hitler
Witches and Occultists versus Kings and Nazis
In 1941, Richard W. Tupper, a young American worker at a naval factory, sent a letter to author and occultist William Seabrook, author of Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today, inquiring about how to hex Hitler. “Some mumbo jumbo and doll magic might help pass the longer winter evenings,” Tupper wrote. “And the movement might grow to tremendous proportions and end up successfully, if Hitler learns that thousands of people are hexing him.” 19
The delighted Seabrook sent complete instructions on how to christen a doll as Hitler, sing “vicious, repetitive, singsong doggerel” incantations, and stick it with needles, nails, and pins.20 He also suggested copious consumption of alcohol (Seabrook was a notorious alcoholic).
Seabrook explained that it didn’t matter if people took it seriously. The key was to have as many people perform the ritual, and to make Hitler aware that they were doing it.
Tupper began holding weekly hexing sessions, gathering with twenty of his friends after dinner and cursing Hitler until midnight. The girls, he said, made the best witches.
The group, which included Birdseye frozen food heiress Florence Birdseye and a number of government employees, sent an invitation for Seabrook to join them at a Maryland cabin. Seabrook was never one to turn down a good party, so on a wet January evening he joined the group at a cabin in the woods to perform the curse. A LIFE magazine reporter and photographer came along to document the evening and to make sure Hitler found out about it.
Inside the cabin the scene was surreal. A dressmaker’s dummy was clothed in a Nazi uniform, its face painted with a Hitler mustache. Nearby were log seats (a nod to Haitian customs), boxes of nails, axes, rattles, and many bottles of Jamaican rum. Tom-tom drums had been borrowed from the Department of the Interior. Several of the participants dressed up in robes as the rum was passed around for an hour before the ritual began.
Finally, the dressing dummy was baptized. “You are Hitler; Hitler is you!” the group chanted. Then “Chief Hexer” Ted Caldwell, dressed in an animal-skin, intoned the ritual Seabrook had written: “The woes that come to you, let them come to him. The death that comes to you, let it come to him!” 21
The other participants then took turns hammering spikes into Hitler’s heart. The Chief Hexer then led the group in a call-and-response chant: “Hitler, you are the enemy of man and the world .… We curse you by every tear and drop of blood you have caused to flow. We curse you with the curses of all who have cursed you.” The crowd responded: “We curse you!” 22
At the ritual’s climax, the Great Death Ouanga (Haitian Creole word for a charm), the participants invoked the dark god Istan, asking him to send cats to claw out Hitler’s heart and dogs to eat it. With each repetition of the curse, they drove more nails and needles into Hitler.
Finally, Hitler was decapitated by Tupper (his honor as the party organizer) and buried by the drunk, exhausted hexers in the woods. LIFE captured the entire party and published photos and a cheeky account on February 10, 1941. Seabrook had asked the reporter to publish the detailed ritual description and photos so that readers could hold their own Hitler hexing parties at home. They didn’t need a life-sized dummy, he explained. Any small, inexpensive doll would work.
The United States joined the war less than a year later, and Hitler wasn’t dead until 1945. The Hex Hitler party was largely forgotten. I didn’t even know about it when I created the Trump binding spell in 2017, and I was shocked at the parallels when I discovered it in my research.
William Seabrook committed suicide in 1945 (as did Hitler), but I have to think somewhere he is enjoying the rise of resistance magic over seventy-five years after his unforgettable party in the Maryland woods.