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Concentration Camp in which Otto Rahn served three months for "disciplinary reasons" (Sep-Dec 1937)
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Invisible Eagle and NS Occult History, by Alan Baker

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.

Отто Ран и поиски Святого Грааля

Отто Ран (1904-1938 гг.), о котором говорили как о талантливом молодом литераторе и историке, был одной из действительно ярких личностей этого века. До своей загадочной смерти в возрасте 35 лет он успел написать две книги о катарах южной Франции: "Крестовый поход против Грааля" ("Kreuzzug gegen den Gral") и "Двор Люцифера" ("Luzifers Hofgesind"). О его жизни и трагической смерти ходят легенды. Хотя его книги оказали влияние на таких известных русскому читателю авторов как Тревор Равенскрофт (Trevor Ravenscroft) и Жан-Мишель Анжебер (Jean-Michel Angebert), на русский язык они никогда не переводились. В бестселлере 1982 года "Святая кровь, святой Грааль" (Holy Blood, Holy Grail - в русском переводе "Священная загадка") имя Отто Рана упоминается в небольшом, но интригующем примечании.

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."

About The Secret Glory film

The Secret Glory< has been released as a part of Subversive Cinema's Dust Devil box-set.
The Secret Glory tells the story of Otto Rahn (1904-1939), who worked in Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage Society), a Schutz-Staffel division in the Nazi Germany. Rahn was convinced he knew where to find the Holy Grail and after being nominated an SS officer, he finally had the resources to pursue it.
"What [Rahn] discovered remains as mysterious as the stories surrounding his untimely death in 1939, but with rare archival footage, old letters and photographs Stanley manages to conjure up the vision of a grand quest, which began in the 13th century and hasn't lost its alluring power until today." [Taken from the Oldenburg Film Festival website.]

Otto Rahn in Jones' Celtic Encyclopedia

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.

Baudino Mario - IL MITO CHE UCCIDE. Dai catari al nazismo: l'avventura di Otto Rahn l'uomo che cercava il Graal e incontro Hitler

Alla fine degli anni Venti un giovane e brillante storico tedesco, Otto Rahn, giunge per la prima volta in Provenza, sulle tracce del Santo Graal, la mitica reliquia la cui storia è strettamente connessa con quella dell'eresia e della persecuzione dei càtari durante il Medioevo. Attraverso i meandri di questa vicenda, avvolta tra realtà e leggenda, l'autore ripercorre con ampio respiro narrativo una delle pagine più fosche della storia europea. Rahn finirà per essere cooptato dai dirigenti nazisti che intendono rilanciare il mito "ariano" del Graal, promuovendo vere e proprie spedizioni di ricerca anche dopo la misteriosa morte del giovane studioso, avvenuta nel 1938, a soli trentaquattro anni.

 

Dati 2004, 256 p., rilegato
Editore Longanesi

Intervista a Mario Baudino: Otto Rahn, il cacciatore del Graal perduto

Cercava il Graal, trovò il nazismo. Mario Baudino ha ricostruito nel Mito che uccide la storia di Otto Rahn, l'intellettuale tedesco largamente responsabile non solo del moderno successo turistico della Linguadoca, il ”Paese Cataro“, ma soprattutto della mitologia secondo cui i catari, gli antichi eretici del Midi francese, possedevano il Sacro Graal. La vita, breve, di questo misterioso e contraddittorio personaggio, morto suicida nel 1939 poco prima che scoppiasse la Seconda Guerra mondiale, ha lasciato dietro di sé un cumulo di leggende, trasformandolo in un eroe dell'occultismo. La verità storica, raccontata con piglio romanzesco in una ”inchiesta sul passato“ dove nulla è inventato, frutto di attente ricerche in Francia e in Germania, è invece diversa, anche più affascinante. Rahn incarna la figura dell'intellettuale novecentesco che stringe col potere totalitario un patto col diavolo, da cui viene stritolato. E nello stesso tempo è il maggior architetto di una favola destinata a sopravvivergli, ancor oggi molto popolare il tutto il mondo, che associa la mistica coppa cercata dai cavalieri di Artù all'eresia del XII e XIII secolo, ai templari, e infine ai nazisti.

Raiders of the Lost Grail

Berlin between the wars was a city known throughout Europe for its bohemian subculture of young intellectuals. Amongst the personalities who hotly debated the many modernist “isms” that were fracturing the old ideological certainties which had glued together the 19th century, few individuals were more colourful than a dark-haired, green-eyed young man named Otto Wilhelm Rahn. His gaunt figure, swathed in characteristic black coat and fedora, casts a long shadow out of those twilight years, a ‘great silhouette’ around which the most extravagant myths accrued. He was variously said to be a Mason, a Rosicrucian, a Luciferian, an agent of the Thule Gesellschaft, an initiated Cathar and even the leader of an obscure, international secret society. As author Philip Kerr puts it, Rahn’s contemporaries might not have been surprised to see “the Scarlet Woman and the Great Beast come flying out of the front door” of his apartment on Tiergartenstrasse. One of his Nazi peers in Heinrich Himmler’s Black Order remarked in an internal memo that he “half suspected Rahn of being in league with the little people”. To this day, it is widely believed that this enigmatic young man knew the whereabouts of one of the most sacred relics in all Christendom – the Most High Holy Grail. But the truth is stranger still…