Thursday, February 08, 2007
OTTO RAHN AND THE HOLY GRAIL
If you can get past the fact that it appears in a UFO E-zine, the story of Otto Rahn is told briefly in Volume 8, Number 24 of UFO Roundup, July 2, 2003, by Joseph Trainor. It reads in part:
Ussat-les-Bains became a kind of "Roswell of the Cathars." Among the occultists who made the pilgrimage there was a young German named Otto Rahn.
Rahn arrived in 1931 and made friends with Gadal. While working part-time at a local hotel, Rahn frequented Gadal's museum and took voluminous notes on the Holy Grail. But when the worldwide Depression worsened in 1932, Rahn lost his job and drifted back home to Germany.
During a fruitless search for work in the Fatherland, Rahn wrote a book of his own, Kreuzzug gegen den Graal (German for Crusade Against the Grail --J.T.) It was as big a hit as the Peladan book a quarter-century earlier. Gadal's friend, Rene Nelli, translated Rahn's book into French, and Croisade contre le Graal soon found a global audience.
Unfortunately for Rahn, his book caught the eye of a fellow German with a pronounced interest in the occult. This was Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsfuhrer-SS and Adolf Hitler's confidant and secret police chief. Himmler "personally invited the author (Rahn) to meet him at his Prinz Albrechtstrasse headquarters in Berlin. There he offered Rahn a commission in the SS and virtually unlimited resources for which Himmler expected Rahn to continue his research into the Grail legends, the Cathars and related subjects of Aryan interest."
Weeks later, a liberal friend was horrified when he saw Rahn in the black garb of an SS Sturmbannfuhrer. "Otto! What are you doing in that uniform!?"
"My dear fellow," Rahn replied, a bit sheepish, "A man has to eat. Himmler himself offered me this job. What was I supposed to do--turn him down?"
So Rahn continued his Holy Grail research and in 1935 became one of the founders of the SS-Ahnenerbe (German acronym for Ancestral Heritage and Research Teaching Society--J.T.).
The SS-Ahnenerbe turned up persistent rumors that the Holy Grail had been hidden by the Cathars after the fall of Montsegur. Trouble was, it was rumored to be in a number of different locations throughout Europe--including the Crimea.
More details of the Otto Rahn/Nazi connection with the Holy Grail and Cathars are given at the greyfalcon.us website. There you can read:
Otto Rahn, historian and philologer, became inextricably involved with the hierarchy of the Nazi party, meeting with Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg and Wolfram Sievers. He possibly did not realise that Adolf Hitler had been an avid student of the occult since his young days, and that the Fuhrer's obsession would engulf his quest.
After joining the SS, Rahn's rise through the ranks was swift and spectacular. He was made Sargent without ever having been a corporal. His second book, LUCIFER'S COURTIERS, became the bible of the National Socialist Party according to the website. Ultimately he fell out of favor and was offered the options of death by suicide or death by execution, after which he simply disappeared according to one source. Another source claims his suicide was faked, his features altered by plastic surgery, his name changed to Rudolf Rahn. In his disguise he was sent to Iraq as ambassador, and later served as ambassador to Italy.
Hitler's New Order was to be based on Cathar principles. What are they? Prominent among them was a rejection of clergy and hierarchy. The following principles were embraced by the Cathars according to Antonin Gadal:
1. God is the infinite light, the one and the whole, worshipped as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
2. God has a Son, consubstantial, co-eternal and necessarily unique but subordinated, because He is the Son. ‘He was not born of a woman. He came through the Golden Door of Heaven.’
In the Eastern Church before the Council of Nicea, the mother of Christ was not human but celestial! She was not called Mary, but ‘Mani’, ‘Mens’, ‘Manas’, which means ‘Thought’, Spirit.
3. The birth in Bethlehem was a magnificent terrestrial symbol, not a historic and scientific reality. The Cathar church is the "real" Virgin Mary, the personification of the divine Wisdom.
4. The star of Bethlehem is Christ, Mary and the Three Wise Men. Five branches: it is the pentagram of transformation, the image of man made perfect.
5. Lucibel is the most famous and glorious of all angels. The highest of God’s creatures. He fell through arbitrary will and rebellion; disproportionate ambition; immoderate desires. He is less guilty than unfortunate; the chief of the exiled souls who willingly accompanied him in his ruin. He built our world over which he serves as monarch.
6. All spirits will be saved and return to Heaven after a journey through the six planets.
7. Evil is independent from God. It is non-being established in time, outside of the divine creation. (Here is an argument that has turned up in Catholic discussions, promoted by a poster to a Catholic message board who called herself a hermit. - ct)
The Earth is purgatory. Man has an inner eye to contemplate truth. The Paraclete is the Consoler promised by Christ, founder of the Church of the Spirit.
8. John is the Patriarch in the Church of the Paraclete.
9. Cathar pioneers include Druids, the mystery schools of Egypt and Greece, Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, Origen, Lysis, Hermes Trismegistus, the Seven Churches of Asia, Gregory of Nazianzus, Synesius, Origen, Tertullianus, the Magi of the Euphrates and the Brahmans of India.
