Spear of Destiny

The Spear of Destiny — a ceremonial iron lance-head held in the Hofburg Imperial Treasury in Vienna and traditionally identified as the Holy Lance of Longinus, the Roman soldier said to have pierced the side of Jesus on the cross — is described by the author Trevor Ravenscroft, on the authority of his mentor Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, as a functioning occult instrument capable of channeling a non-human entity into a person standing near it, and as the object Adolf Hitler pursued in the belief that "whoever possesses the Heilige Lance, or Holy Spear, controls the destiny of the world." The historian Peter Levenda, who has physically tracked the object's wartime custody and appeared on the History Channel documentary examining it, says the metal binding wire on the lance-head has been tested and dated to no earlier than the medieval period, that the point itself has never been tested, and that he does "not use Ravenscroft as a source" for the channeling claim.

Whichever reading holds, the object's twentieth-century custody is well documented: Heinrich Himmler removed it from Vienna after the 1938 Anschluss and secured it in a vault at Nuremberg, keeping an exact replica on his own desk, and its 1945 fate — whether the item recovered by the Allies at Nuremberg is the original or Himmler's replica, and what became of whichever piece went missing — remains unresolved even to researchers who reject the occult reading outright.

Description and traditional identity

The lance-head is a ceremonial iron spearhead bound with silver and gold wire, exhibited in the Hofburg's Imperial Treasury in Vienna before the Second World War and again since 1945. Tradition names the soldier who wielded it Longinus — a name not given in the gospels but attached to the episode later — and holds that the lance was recovered in the Middle East around the 3rd or 4th century and brought to Europe after the time of Constantine. A rival provenance claim, developed at Knights Templar (ET context), holds instead that the Knights Templar recovered the lance from beneath the Temple Mount during their early occupation of Jerusalem around 1119 — a claim Jim Marrs frames as speculative rather than documented and does not attempt to reconcile with the Hofburg lance's separate, better-attested medieval European custody. Levenda describes the relic as having functioned historically as "a kind of holy relic that was used as a source of power, an instrument of power," whoever held it having "access to a kind of occult energy" said to reside in it — a characterization he offers as the tradition's own claim rather than his personal conclusion.

The Hitler legend and the channeling claim

Ravenscroft's 1973 book The Spear of Destiny attributes to Hitler a fixation on the lance dating to his youth in Vienna between 1909 and 1913, when Ernst Pretzsche, a Viennese bookseller and occultist, is said to have introduced him to "the secrets hidden behind the astrological and alchemical symbolism of the search for the Grail" alongside the hallucinogen peyote. Ravenscroft's source for the central claim was his own mentor, the Viennese scientist and philosopher Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, who knew Hitler in Vienna before fleeing to England; Stein told Ravenscroft that Hitler had entered a trance in the lance's presence and channeled a non-human entity, because "Hitler's soul life was not mature enough at that moment to maintain an awareness of himself and his surroundings when this alien entity entered him." An audience member at one of Hitler's speeches independently described a comparable trance-like state — "he just spoke and spoke, like a record running in a groove... and there was no in-between" — a detail Ravenscroft's account treats as corroborating Stein's report of possession rather than mere oratory technique. Hitler himself told associates that an "inner voice" guided him and that he followed "my course with the precision and security of a sleepwalker," a remark Ravenscroft's account reads as the dictator's own acknowledgment of the possession.

Levenda, who interviewed on the subject for a History Channel documentary on the lance, rejects Ravenscroft's most extreme extrapolation — that the CIA took possession of the spear after the war and that its power explains America's postwar ascendancy — calling it something he thinks Ravenscroft's admirers "wish" were true rather than a documented finding, and states plainly that he does not treat Ravenscroft as a reliable source for the object's alleged powers.

Wartime custody and Himmler's relics portfolio

Following the March 1938 Anschluss, the treasures of the Vienna museum housing the lance — including the whole of the Habsburg crown jewels — were removed from Vienna and transported to Nuremberg, a city Himmler regarded as a "holy place" for the Germans analogous to Jerusalem. Himmler, who as head of the SS controlled access to the vault, had an exact replica made and kept it on his own desk — a photograph of which survives in a published book — rather than keeping the genuine lance in his personal possession, on the reasoning that even he was not immune to theft. The lance was one item in a wider Ahnenerbe-connected relics portfolio: in 1944 Wolfram Sievers personally catalogued a separate cache of alleged relics — including objects tentatively identified as the Ark of the Covenant and the Grail cup — recovered from Montségur and moved under armed guard toward the same Nuremberg–Berchtesgaden axis.

Relationship to other Ahnenerbe-linked relics

The lance sits beside two co-equal relics said to have passed through the same 1944 Ahnenerbe custody chain — the Ark of the Covenant and the Grail cup — and beside the broader claim, developed at Concealment of exotic artifacts by religious and esoteric institutions, that religious and initiatory institutions independently hold and conceal exotic hardware outside state or military channels.

Authenticity, disappearance, and postwar fate

Levenda holds two separate authenticity questions open rather than resolved. First, whether the lance now displayed in Vienna is the genuine article the Habsburgs held or a substitute — testing of the binding wire places its manufacture no earlier than the medieval period, consistent with either an authentic medieval-mounted relic or an outright fabrication, while the iron point itself has, to his knowledge, never been tested at all. Second, whether the piece recovered by the Allies in 1945 is the same object Himmler secured in the Nuremberg vault or the replica that had sat on his desk — "we've never found Himmler's replica. And that was a very important object for Himmler. So what happened to it? Where did it go? We simply don't know." Levenda situates the uncertainty within the much larger, better-documented category of Nazi-looted material — gold, artworks, and manuscripts — that vanished during the war's final months and has never resurfaced, allowing, in his own words, for "an Indiana Jones story" in which the true lance sits uncatalogued in an American government warehouse. A rival popular tradition, which Levenda does not credit, holds instead that the genuine lance escaped Germany entirely — by submarine, to South America or Antarctica — to await a future claimant.

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