Otto Rahn - collection thread

[Thulean Inquisitor]

This is a Otto Rahn collection thread. Here I will collect all good info I can find about the very interesting person that Otto Rahn was. He was one of the best, if not the best Grail researcher of the last century. Heinrich Himmler was very impressed with his books. Otto Rahn was a member of the SS for some time and was a friend of Karl Maria Willigut.

[Thulean Inquisitor]

Otto Rahn

b. February 18, 1904; Michelstadt, Germany.
d. March 13, 1939; Tyrolean Mts.

Poet, mystic, and Nazi researcher. Rahn was obsessed with two ideas--the Holy Grail and the Cathars, medieval French heretics; while in college, he had intended to write a dissertation on the hypothetical Kyot, the supposed troubador who gave Wolfram von Eschenbach the story of Parzival.

In 1929, he made a special trip to the Languedoc region of Southern France, a hotbed of Catharist activities in the thirteenth century. He began excavating at Montsegur, the last Cathar stronghold to fall to the Inquisition. Legend had it that the Cathars had a great treasure which was never found, but hidden deep in the mountainside. Rahn was convinced that this treasure was the Holy Grail, and he intended to find it.

Rahn's research resulted in a book called Kreuzzug gegen den Gral ("Crusade Against the Grail"), published in 1933. Rahn believed that the Cathars were in fact descended of druids who converted to Manichaeism, and that is why they were guardians of the grail--both as descendants of a Celtic priesthood, and pure followers of Lucifer, the angel who brought knowledge to mankind and exposed the Demiurge--all very gnostic. He then proceeded to identify Montsegur with Parzival's "Munsalvaesche" (Mountain of Salvation, Wagner's "Monsalvat"), and tied the Cathars with those other famous heretics, the Knights Templar, who were said to guard the grail in Parzival. (As for Eschenbach's heretical influences in his work, that is for another node.)

All of which brought him to the attention of occult-nut Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. Himmler was obsessed with the occult, and had a particular interest in the grail. His castle at Wewelsburg was intended as an SS Camelot/Avalon, where the honorable deads' ashes would sit in twelve urns on stone pillars around a center, where the grail would sit. He also had a Round Table commissioned. Himmler invited Rahn to join the Ahnenerbe--the heritage buearu--as a civilian; Rahn latter joined officially in 1936, with the rank of SS-Unterscharfuhrer. In 1937, he wrote a second book--Luzifers Hofgesind ("Lucifer's Courtiers"), based upon his Catharist research, and a trip made to Iceland to study the Eddas.

However, in 1937 he fell into disgrace, possibly for disciplinary reasons, though it is not clear. He was sent on duty at an SS camp in Dachau; in 1938, he requested dismissal from the SS. According to personal papers, he was against the coming war, and spoke opennly against it; this may have been the reason for his relocation to Dachau in the first place. More likely, though, were rumors of homosexuality, which of course was verboten.

Not long afterwards, Rahn was found dead, frozen on a mountainside. It is generally thought to have been a suicide, though conspiracy theorists believe he was murdered by the SS in order to silence him about the secrets of the grail.

As a side note, there is a rumor that Rahn found the grail and brought it to Wewelsburg, where it stayed until the end of the war. Others say that no grail made it, but that a large quartz crystal was found instead. It is worth pointing out that Parzival describes the grail not as a cup, but as a stone, though in this case an emerald.

Otto Rahn has become a rallying point with certain occultists, neo-Cathars, and mystics, particularly those who follow the Holy Blood, Holy Grail/Priory of Sion hoax. None of his works have been translated into English, unfortunately, but they did have an influence on Trever Ravenscroft and his book Spear of Destiny.

http://www.maryjones.us/jce/rahn.html

[Thulean Inquisitor]

Otto Rahn

and the Quest for the Holy Grail

Otto Rahn (1904-1938), described as a gifted young author and historian, was one of this century's truly fascinating figures. Prior to his mysterious death, at age 35, he wrote two books about the Cathars of southern France: *Kreuzzug gegen den Gral* ("Crusade Against the Grail") and *Luzifers Hofgesinf* ("Lucifer's Court"). Legends continue to surround both his life and tragic death. While his books influenced such authors as Trevor Ravenscroft and Jean-Michel Angebert, they were never translated into English. In the 1982 best selling book *Holy Blood, Holy Grail*, Otto Rahn's name appears in a small but intriguing footnote. Otto Rahn believed that he had found the location of the Holy Grail Mountain, the Montsalvat of legend, in the Cathar mountain fortress of Montsegur in the French Pyrenees. He was, says Prof. Joscelyn Godwin, "largely responsible for the mythological complex that associated the Cathars and Montsegur with the Holy Grail and its Castle."

Norma Lorre Goodrich in her own highly acclaimed work *The Holy Grail* pays tribute to Otto Rahn's "Crusade Against the Grail" describing it as "a wonderful book, a monument to this German idealist author, who died mysteriously during a descent in the Alps."

According to his French translator, Otto Rahn believed with absolute conviction that (1) the Cathars were the last owners of the Holy Grail, and (2) the Holy Grail "perished" when they died at the hands of the "pope and the King of France" at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

The war of the Roman Catholic church against the Cathars is variously described as a war where *Roma and *Amor stood opposite each other, in which the catholic ('common') idea triumphed with flame and sword over the catharic ('pure') idea.

The medieval Cathars believed in the existence of an eternal war between the principles of Light and Darkness on whose meetings and encounters everything in the universe was based. Darkness was for them dark matter, the unperfected, the transient. They identified all clerical and secular rulers, principally the Catholic Church as the personification of the Darkness. In their mythology the sun symbolised the primordial Light from which all life emerged. Miguel Serrano coined their doctrine: *Solar Kristianity. For Otto Rahn, Montsegur was the "Lighthouse of Catharism."



Rahn's Grail Quest



Otto Rahn was born on February 18th, 1904 in Michelstadt in southern Germany. In secondary school he developed a fascination with the history of the medieval Cathars, their faith and revolt against king and pope. From 1922 to 1926 he studied jurisprudence, German philosophy and history. Rahn intended to write a dissertation on Guyot, the Provencal Troubadour on whose lost Grail poem Wolfram von Eschenbach claimed to have based his *Parzival. The medieval Germanic tale of *Parzival, revived in the 1800s by Wagnar's popular mystical operas, fired Otto Rahn's modern quest for the Holy Grail. He soon pieced together a series of clues gleaned from a study of the history of the Cathars and the poem of Wolfram von Eschenbach, a Knight Templar of the thirteenth century.

Driven by his deep interest in the Cathars and Grail legends, from 1928 to 1932 Rahn researched and travelled widely in France, Spain, Italy and Switzerland.

Early in the summer of 1929 Otto Rahn made his first appearance in the Languedoc region of southern France. He quickly settled in the village of Lavelanet and over the next three months systematically explored the ruined Cathar temple-fortress on Montsegur as well as the surrounding mountain grottoes.

It was in Languedoc that the city of Carcassonne, the holy mountain of the Cathars (Montsegur) and the church of Rennes-le-Chateau were located. All of these places were steeped in Cathar lore and it was here that all legends of the Holy Grail seemed to converge.

At Montsegur, writes Nigel Pennick, "in 1244 the heretical Cathars had made their last heroic stand against a Catholic crusade which finally triumphed in their destruction. Here, tradition affirms that on the night before the final assault, three Cathars carrying the sacred relics of the faith slipped unnoticed over the wall. They carried away the magical regalia of the Merovingian King Dagobert II and a cup reputed to be the Holy Grail.

"Possession of the Grail has always been the dream of chivalric orders. The Knights of King Arthur's Round Table, the Templars, even the Teutonic Knights have sought the mystic vessel. But Otto Rahn believed that he could triumph where centuries of questing had failed. He had studied the sacred geometry of Montsegur, its sunrise orientations and its relationship with other sacred places, and had discovered secret underground passages, where he felt the treasure must be concealed" (*Hitler's Secret Sciences*).

Otto Rahn's knowledge of 'sacred geography', Nigel Pennick suggests, can be traced back to the Druids and Templars. The Cathars were also said to be familiar with this tradition.

In many meetings with the local people (he is said to have spoken the local Provencal language fluently) Otto Rahn gathered everything concerning the Cathars and the Grail.

These formed the basis of Rahn's thrilling accounts of his exploration of the caverns of Sabarthes south of Montsegur and especially the Lombrives caverns called "the Cathedral" by the local people. He described this magnificant cavern as follows:

"In time out of mind, in an epoch whose remoteness has been barely touched by modern historical science, it was used as a temple consecrated to the Iberian God Illhomber, God of the Sun. Between two monoliths one which had crumbled, the steep path leads into the giant vestibule of the cathedral of Lombrives. Between the stalagmites of white limestone, between walls of a deep brown colour and the brilliant rock crystal, the path leads down into the bowels of the mountain. A hall 260 feet in height served as a cathedral for the heretics."

Rahn tells how, "Deeply stirred I walked through the crystal halls and marble crypts. My hands put aside the bones of fallen pure ones and knights..."

An old Languedoc shepard's tale recorded by Otto Rahn and incorporated into his first book displays profound mystical symbolism:

"During the time when the walls of Montsegur were still standing, the Cathars kept the Holy Grail there. Montsegur was in danger. The armies of Lucifer had besieged it. They wanted the Grail, to restore it to their Prince's diadem from which it had fallen during the fall of his angels. Then, at the most critical moment, there came down from heaven a white dove, which, with its beak, split Tabor [Montsegur] in two. Esclarmonde, who was keeper of the Grail, threw the sacred jewel into the depths of the mountain. The mountain closed up again, and in this manner was the Grail saved. When the devils entered the fortress, they were too late. Enraged, they put to death by fire all of the Pures, not far from the rock on which the castle stands in the Field of the Stake. All of the Pures perished on the pyre except Esclarmonde de Foix. When she knew the Grail to be safe, she climbed to the summit of Mount Tabor, changed into a white dove and flew off toward the mountains of Asia."

Both "Crusade Against the Grail" and "Lucifer's Court" are full of remarkable insights and revelations of important historical links.

Deep within the grottoes of Sabarthez Rahn found chambers in which the walls were covered with symbols characteristic of the Knights Templar, side by side with emblems of the Cathars. This finding confirmed the notion, fostered by mystical historians, that the Knights Templar and the Cathars were at one time closely associated. One intriguing image which had been carved into the stone wall of a grotto was clearly a drawing of a lance. This depiction immediately suggests the bleeding lance which appears over and over again in the Arthurian legends.

The legend of the Grail, explains Miguel Serrano, "reappears forcibly Christianised in the Middle Ages. The Templars disseminated it. It is centred on the legend of the court of King Arthur (who is the King of the Grail and is also called Amfortas). It is interesting to point out that Arthur is Arthos, Bear, that is to say Arctic. By which the exact geographical position of the lost continent of the first Solar Age is pinpointed: Hyperborea, seat of the Grail. In the Middle Ages, it became a cup, when the myth was Christianised, the one from which Christ was said to have drunk at the Last Supper, or else the one in which Joseph of Arimathea received the blood of Christ as it spurted from his side as he hung on the cross."

The Cathars who guarded the Holy Grail in their castle at Montsegur, Otto Rahn believed, could be traced back to Druids who converted to Manichaeism. The Druids in Britain were forerunners of the Celtic Christian Church. He saw in the culture of the mediaeval Cathar stronghold of Languedoc strong resemblances to the Druids. Their priests akin to the Cathar Parfaits. The Cathar secret wisdom being preserved by the later Troubadours, the travelling poets and singers of the medieval courts of France.

Most Troubadours, according to Rahn, were secret Cathars. Their apparent yearning and longing songs only seldom dedicated to a special woman, their feminine symbolism referred to the Cathar community, the Sophia, the Wisdom of the Gnostics. Julius Evola explains in *Le Mystere du Graal*: "To make this doctrine inaccessible to the profane, it is hidden in an *erotic symbolism, similar to the Grail cycle where it is represented by a *heroic symbolism."

When Otto Rahn first studied Wolfram von Eschenbach's *Parzival he noticed remarkable similarities with names and places in southern France, and he suspected that *Parzival's Grail castle *Munsalvaesche (Richard Wagnar called it Montsalvat) was non-other than the Cathar solar-fortress Montsegur. In Eschenbach's work he discerned the influence of Cathar poetry. The probably incorrect assumption that the persecuted Cathars had retreated under the earth and celebrated their mysteries in subterranean churches was adopted by Otto Rahn from the researcher of Cathar enthusiast Antonin Gabal. Gabal gave Rahn the freedom of his library and private museum. In letters Rahn called him his "Trevrizent" (the uncle of Parsifal in Eschenbach's work) and developed the propositions laid out in Gabal's *Au Chemin du Saint Graal*.

The tale that Otto Rahn actually found the Grail and that it was kept until the end of World War II in the Wewelsburg, the SS castle near Paderborn, can easily be disproved. There was a Grail in Wewelsburg but it was just a huge rock crystal. Rene Nelli, an important scholar of Catharism, maintains that the Grail is not mentioned in any of the still existing Cathar texts, while Julius Evola did not think much of the Cathar Grail thesis.

Return to Germany

After 1933 Rahn lived in Berlin, devoting himself to further studies of the Grail. His quest for a secret primordial religious tradition - the Religion of Light - came to the attention of Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler who sought Rahn's collaboration in SS-sponsored research. After first joining the SS heritage bureau, the *Ahnenerbe*, as a civilian, his talents were soon recognised by his superiors. Pursuaded to formally join the SS in 1936, within a matter of weeks Otto Rahn was promoted to SS-Unterscharfuhrer.

By September 1935 Rahn was writing excitedly to the chief of the *Ahnenerbe about the places he visited in his hunt for Grail traditions in Germany, requesting complete confidence in the matter with the exception of Himmler.

Otto Rahn is even rumored to have founded a neo-Catharist circle within the SS. In the summer of 1936 he undertook, by order of the SS, an expedition to Iceland. Highlights of this journey formed part of some chapters in his second and final book "Lucifer's Courtiers", published in 1937. Rahn makes no mention of the SS and the ship that sailed for Iceland flew a flag with a blue swastika on white background (in sharp contrast to the official standard of the Third Reich).

We know that Otto Rahn fell into disgrace with the Nazi hierarchy in 1937 and for disciplinary reasons was assigned a tour of duty at the SS run Dachau concentration camp. In the winter of 1938/39 he wrote to the SS Reichsfuhrer requesting immediate dismissal from the SS. A few months later he was dead.

Rumours abound concerning Otto Rahn's departure from the Nazi SS. Some claim that he was a homosexual or of Jewish descent, but evidence is lacking. In a conversation Rahn claimed that he had been betrayed and that his life was in danger. In a letter to a friend he openly expressed his concern about the Third Reich:

"I have much sorrow in my country. Fourteen days ago I was in Munich. Two days later I preferred to go into my mountains. Impossible for a tolerant, liberal man like me to live in the nation that my native country has become."

Col. Howard Buechner, the author of the *Emerald Cup, says that Rahn "let it be known that he opposed the war for which Germany was obviously preparing in 1938. In place of war, he believed that Germany and then Europe, should be transformed into a community of 'Pure Ones' or Cathars. In other words, Rahn's long association with the history of the Cathars and their unjust persecution by the church and the throne of France, had led to his conversion to the Cathar faith. He was also proposing a 'New Order' in which the states of Europe, and perhaps all other nations, would adopt the Cathar beliefs in the interest of world peace."

On 13 March 1939 - almost on the anniversary of the fall of Montsegur - Otto Rahn died in the snow on the Tyrolean mountains. "In the manner of the Cathar heretics," says Nigel Pennick, "Rahn voluntarily left a world he saw disintegrating." A few years earlier Otto Rahn had written in "Crusade Against the Grail":

"Their doctrine allowed suicide but demanded that one did not put an end to his life because of disgust, fear or pain, but in a perfect dissolution from matter. This kind of Endura was allowed when it took place in a moment of mystical sight of divine beauty and kindness...It is only one step from fasting to suicide. To fast requires courage but the final act of definitive ascesis requires heroism. The consequence is not as cruel as it may look."

The story of the enigmatic life and work of Otto Rahn, symbolising as it does a Great Mystery, will always fascinate both students of the Holy Grail and seekers of the Cathar tradition. This Mystery can be discerned in the following quote from Miguel Serrano's *Nos: Book of the Resurrection*:

"When we talk about the religion of love of the troubadours, of the initiated knights of the Grail, of the true Rosicrucians, we must try to discover what lies behind their language. In those days, love did not mean the same thing as it does in our day. The word *Amor (Love) was a cipher, it was a code word. Amor spelt backwards is Roma. That is, the word indicated, in the way in which it was written, the opposite to Roma, to all that Rome represented. Also *Amor broke down into 'a' and 'mor', meaning *Without-Death. That is, to become immortal, eternal, thanks to the way of initiation of A-Mor. A way of initiation totally opposed to the way of Rome. An esoteric, solar Kristianity. The Gnostic Kristianity of Meister Eckhart. And mine. Because I have tried to teach western man to resurrect Kristos in his soul. Because Kristos is the Self for western man.

"This is why *Roma destroyed *Amor, the Cathars, the Templars, the Lords of the Grail, the *Minnesanger, everything which may have originated in the 'Hyperborean Blood Memory' and which may have had a polar, solar origin.

"The love talked and written about so much in novels, poetry and magazines, the love of one's neighbour, the universal love of the churches, love of humanity, has nothing whatsoever to do with 'loveless love' (A-Mor, Without-Death), which is a harsh discipline, as cold as ice, as cutting as a sword, and which aspires to overcome the human condition in order to reach the Kingdom of the Immortals, Ultima Thule."

This remains a fitting tribute to Otto Rahn.

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/6824/otto.htm

[Thulean Inquisitor]

Thule, the Priory of Sion, and Otto Rahn


Oct 24, 2004
Author: John M.

Conspiracy buffs have long been interested in the Nazis for their occult connections, and in recent years the south of France has garnered interest for a quite different supposed occult conspiracy, yet the two are rarely connected.

In an interview with Peter Levenda, Dagobert’s Revenge Magazine hit on the figure of Otto Rahn, grail researcher, who, after having completed a book on the grail mysteries of south France for the Nazis mysteriously died in the Pyrenees. It was also pointed out that around the time that Otto Rahn, who was a skilled mountain climber, was in all probability killed by the Nazis, a figure by the name of Karl Maria-Wilgut, known as Weisthor, who was a mystic employed by the SS, was relieved of his duties and gradually retired from public life.

In the article, the story was left as one of the many mysterious deaths surrounding whatever lies around Rennes-la-Chateau, but the truth of the matter can indeed be reconstructed, and gives some good insight into the forces at work in these two realms.

To start with, I¹ll declare in advance that I basically believe the account of what the Priory of Sion is all about that Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince put forward in The Templar Revelation. Recapping the book, their basic contention is that John the Baptist and Jesus were both missionaries from Egypt who were trying to introduce of mystical religion into Judea, possibly building on the presence of a matriarchal past which Judaism shows traces of. Mary Magdalene functioned as a sort of Tantric partner for Jesus within the Egyptian mysteries. She escaped after Jesus’ death to the South of France where the Romans had an outpost, the area which would thereafter be known as Provence - the Province. After inculcating her belief system to the natives they carried on the tradition, going underground when Christianity came into the picture. During the Middle Ages the Knights Templar were founded to go to the holy land and bring back any shards of knowledge relating to the teachings of the Magdalene. They were successful and made contact with surviving Johannite groups as well as, in all probability, heretical Muslim mystics. The synthesis that followed formed the basis for the Priory’s belief system, which found practical expression in an initiatory system similar to Masonry and in a sense stemming from it. That’s the Priory of Sion.

Now that this large pill has been swallowed, let’s fast forward to the early part of the twentieth century. Now according to Levenda and to Nicholas Clarke-Goodrich (author of The Occult Roots of Nazism), what the Ariosophists of the time came up with was strikingly similar to what was going on in the South of France, only for them all of it was based in a Germanic past and in Northern mysteries, instead of in Egyptian and Greek mysteries. Lanz von Liebenfels believed that the original Christianity was Odinist in character, and that this Christ figure was much more life-positive, if you will, but that the true Odinist character of Christianity had been distorted by the Jews after the fact, giving rise to the semi-Germanic faith which he believed contemporary Christianity was. With Christianity reconciled to Germanic Paganism, Liebenfels had no problem in adopting the Templars as examples to be imitated by the Aryan volk and, correspondingly, formed the Order of the New Templars, which reinterpreted the grail myths in a Germanic tone. Liebenfels also believed, among other things, that the original home of the Germans was a lost isle called Ultima-Thule, and that the Germans were the products of a union between the gods and primitive man, whereas the Jews and others were purely the products of primitive man. He called this belief Theo-Zoology. About the same time as Liebenfels (who counted Hitler among his admirers) was going into all of this a man by the name of Guido von List was combining Germanic paganism with Theosophy to create a whole system of occult practices based on Theosophical interpretation of the Runes, which became the Armanen system. He gained the insight into the runes at the same time that he started having visions indicating a pre-Christian Germanic past. In this version, Germans were actually the original inhabitants of Europe, and had been ruled by a powerful theocratic government formed around the Germanic mysteries, which he termed the “Armanen brotherhood.”

Now List, through mixing Theosophy with German paganism, was able to create what can only be described as a sort of German Buddhism, with Rune Yoga, Rune mantras, and Rune mudras even (hand signs to use while meditating), along with an initiatory system via his revived Armanen brotherhood which, combining these elements, could be said to resemble a sort of esoteric Masonry.

So far the parallels are quite interesting: the Priory of Sion claims that the official account of early Christianity given by the Church is wrong, and associates itself with Johannite groups that claim that the real teaching was a Gnostic esotericism with it¹s origin in Egypt; the Ariosophists also claimed that the official account of Jesus was wrong, and that the real Jesus was more life positive, we shall say, with his real teachings rooted in a non-Judaic paganism. Both groups were involved with orders of knights, and for a similar reason it would seem: to present through the knights and the grail quest an alternative set of values and beliefs from that of Christianity. The only difference is that the Priory of Sion focuses its study on Middle Eastern, Egyptian, and indigenous Frankish paganism (as a sort of accompanying theme.)

It gets much more interesting though when the figure of Baron von Sebbetendorf, the founder of the Thule Society, is added to the mix. The Baron was the link between the small groups that von Liebenfels and List founded and the Nazi party; in fact the Nazi party was founded as the workers’ section of the Thule Society - during a concerted effort to reach out to workers from what was essentially an aristocratic affair, according to Levenda. The Baron distinguished himself by the fact that, unlike the other two, he actually had contact with living esoteric traditions and incorporated them into his system. We can actually know quite a bit about what the Baron was after, because he made it known that the teachings he had originally came from Bektashi dervishes that he encountered while serving on at a diplomatic post in Turkey.

He believed that the Islamic mysteries of the Bektashis were actually German mysteries that were somehow scrambled and dispersed. Actually, this isn’t that unlikely a possibility: the Bektashi order of dervishes were actually secret Shiite Muslims acting within an officially Sunni society. And where did Shi¹ia esotericism start? In Iran. In fact, Shi’ite Islam incorporates a substantial amount of Zoroastrian and Gnostic thought within its official beliefs, not to mention it¹s esotericism and any secret brotherhoods, although it’s all been Islamicized. And, to make a comparison, the sort of intellectual ferment that created the Bektashis, compared in terms of content with the Egyptian mysteries, although they weren’t the same thing. Bektashi beliefs and practices are actually not secret, as some careful scholars have compiled books detailing Bektashi belief and, in one case, a Bektashi Catechism, although you’d probably only find these studies in university and college libraries. A glance through the Bektashi catechism in the book I saw revealed that they believe in a graded system of worlds patterned on the spheres of the planets and that the goal was, in part, to ascend through the spheres through mystical practice, in addition to more Islamic features.

So this is what Sebbetendorf brought back with him from Turkey: a system of thought which was both mystical and rooted in Indo-European concepts, things which had been long known about in Iran since the middle of the 19th century. He then combined it with the Germanic Christianity of Liebenfels and possibly the Germanic Theosophy of List to create the Thule society and its secret inner order, the Germanen Orden. Then Hitler got involved, and the rest is history. Sebbetendorf actually returned to Germany after Hitler had won power and composed a book on the origin of the Nazi ideology, but, after the Nazis refused to give him any credit for his work, he returned to Turkey and committed suicide.

Which brings us up to Otto Rahn and Karl-Maria Wilgut. Rahn was probably a straightforward Grail researcher, but Karl-Maria Wilgut takes some explaining. Like Sebbetendorf, Wilgut was part of the second wave of Ariosophists. In his case, Wilgut relied on a combination of List’s theories of Germanic origins in Europe and Liebenfel¹s Germanic Christianity in order to construct a fantastic history of a supposed line of Secret Kings of the Germans, which had continued the Odinist Christianity in secret all through the ages.....ending with Karl Maria-Wilgut as the current Secret King. Himmler, according to Levenda, took Wilgut very seriously and in all probability thought that he had found the actual secret king of the world. Wilgut was given an SS rank and his occult ideas were incorporated into the SS¹s ceremonial jewelry and rituals. He was then set out to do research on the secret Germanic past of Europe. This only stopped when the already
gullible Abwehr people in charge of this research refused to take what he was sending them seriously.

How does this relate to Otto Rahn? Well, before going to that it’s useful to compare Wilgut’s theory of Secret Kingship with the Royal Line that the Priory of Sion is supposedly tending to and protecting. Again, you have the pattern of something which was independently thought up by Germanophiles matching the actual belief of an institution really existing in southern France, which conceives the idea, however, in radically different terms having nothing to do with Germans.

Now put into the mix Otto Rahn, a Grail researcher with financing from the Nazis, hired to find Grail-related information which confirmed Nazi occult ideas. Rahn, who is reporting to people thoroughly familiar with the Ariosophists, is down in Southern France poking around the area in which the Priory of Sion actually exists. Suddenly this expert mountaineer is found dead on an easy mountain pass, and the person claiming to be the Secret King of the Germans is quietly relieved of his duties.

Could it be that what Otto Rahn found was the actual truth of the Grail, but
that when it was found not to have anything to do with German supremacy, the Nazis killed Rahn to keep him from talking, and relieved Wiligut out of embarrassment?

My personal opinion is: yes.


http://www.dragonkeypress.com/articl...0_24_3147.html

[Thulean Inquisitor]

While in Berlin, [Karl Maria] Weisthor worked with the author and historian Otto Rahn (1904-1939), who had a profound interest in medieval Grail legends and the Cathar heresy. In 1933, Rahn published a romantic historical work entitled Kreuzzug gegen den Gral (Crusade Against the Grail), which was a study of the Albigensian Crusade, a war between the Roman Catholic church and the Cathars (or Albigensians), an ascetic religious sect that flourished in southern France in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. The Cathars believed that the teachings of Christ had been corrupted by the Church -and, indeed, that Christ was exclusively a being of spirit who had never been incarnated
in human form. This belief arose from their conviction that all matter was the creation of an evil deity opposed to God. Thus they claimed that the dead would not be physically resurrected (since the body was made of matter and hence evil) and that procreation itself was evil, since it
increased the amount of matter in the Universe and trapped souls in physicality. (13) The Cathars were eventually destroyed by Catholic armies on the orders of Pope Innocent III in the
first decade of the thirteenth century.

As Levenda notes, Catharism held a particular fascination and attraction for Himmler and other leading Nazis. ‘After all, the very word “Cathar” means “pure,” and purity -particularly of the blood as the physical embodiment of spiritual “goodness” - was an issue of prime importance to
the SS.’ (14) Just as the Cathars had despised the materialism of the Catholic Church, so the Nazis despised Capitalism, which they equated with the ‘excesses of the Jewish financiers that - they said - had brought the nation to ruin during the First World War and the depression that
followed’. (15) The Cathar belief that the evil god who had created the material Universe was none other than Jehovah provided additional common ground with Nazi anti-Semitism. Ritual suicide was also practised by the Cathars. Known as the endura, it involved either starving
oneself to death, self-poisoning or strangulation by one’s fellow Cathars. Levenda makes anotherinteresting point about the Nazi fascination with Catharism:

[T]he Cathars were fanatics, willing to die for their cause; sacrificing themselves to the Church’s onslaught they enjoyed the always-enviable aura of spiritual underdogs. There was something madly beautiful in the way they were immolated on the stakes of the Inquisition, professing their
faith and their hatred of Rome until the very end. The Nazis could identify with the Cathars: with their overall fanaticism, with their contempt for the way vital spiritual matters were commercialized (polluted) by the Establishment, and with their passion for ‘purity’. It is perhaps
inevitable that the Cathars should have made a sacrament out of suicide, for they must have known that their Quest was doomed to failure from the start. They must have wished for death as a release from a corrupt and insensitive world; and it’s entirely possible that, at the root of
Nazism, lay a similar death wish. Hitler was surrounded by the suicides of his mistresses and contemplated it himself on at least one occasion before he actually pulled the trigger in Berlin in 1945. Himmler and other captured Nazi leaders killed themselves rather than permit the Allies to
do the honors for them. ... [L]ike the Cathars whom they admired, the Nazis saw in suicide that consolation and release from the world of Satanic matter promised by this most cynical of Cathar
sacraments. (16)

The thesis of Rahn’s book was that the Cathar heresy and Grail legends constituted an ancient Gothic Gnostic religion that had been suppressed by the Catholic Church, beginning with the persecution of the Cathars and ending with the destruction of the Knights Templar a century later. From 1933, Rahn lived in Berlin and his book and his continued researches into Germanic history came to the attention of Himmler. In May 1935, Rahn joined Weisthor’s staff, joining the SS less than a year later. In April 1936, he was promoted to the rank of SS-Unterscharfuhrer (NCO).

His second book, Luzifers Hofgesinde (Lucifer’s Servants), which was an account of his research trip to Iceland for the SS, was published in 1937. This was followed by four months of military service with the SS-Death’s Head Division ‘Oberbayern’ at Dachau concentration camp, after
which he was allowed to pursue his writing and research full time. In February 1939, Rahn resigned from the SS for unknown reasons, and subsequently died from exposure the following month while walking on the mountains near Kufstein.

Taken from: Invisible Eagle by Alan Baker.
http://www.thule-italia.com/Libri%20...t%20Histo_.pdf