Gravity's Rainbow is actually not _such_ a bad place to be getting your history as long as you take it with a huge grain of salt. The Brits were really big on spiritualism, culturally. Henry Sedgewick, the late 19th c utilitarian philosopher, author of the tediously exact classic The Methods of Ethics, was fascinated by spiritualism; he wanted to know about life after death so he could do correct utility calculations for different courses of conduct. Nor was he a crank by British standards. For a fictional prewar depiction of the "seances" in Dorothy Sayers' Unnatural Death. Alistair Crowley, admittedly a bit of the mainstream, was a Brit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley
MI5 invested in psychic research during the WWII to oppose Nazi military occult research, see, e.g.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Ernst_Krafft
though, insofar as one can talk in these terms, without the mystical overtones the Germans brought to the occult. There is talk of psychic divisions in MI5, but the sources are not reliable. I have the rather vague impression that both the US and USSR did some psychic research during the Cold War.
--- Jim Straub <rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Admittedly, Gravity's Rainbow is a bad place for me
> to be getting my
> history, but regadless I do have the impression that
> the early British
> intelligence services during ww2 had more than a few
> occult practitioners of
> various types enlisted on the payroll, just hedging
> bets to avoid even
> potentially losing any arms races to the nazis
> perhaps...
>
>
> Or maybe that the Nazis would pick up the D-Day date
>
> > from her, using _their_ dark forces. (Hitler used
> an
> > astrologer.) If their theory was what you suggest,
> > she'd have been liable for espionage and treason,
> and
> > subject to capital punishment, as under the old
> > Witchcraft Act. Hey, I don't write the law, I'm
> just
> > telling you what it says.
> >
> >
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