Articles
Richard Stanley
Richard Stanley is the award-winning South African-born filmmaker, who made a name of himself with his first feature film, the scifi-movie Hardware. A low budjet movie about a mad-dog android loose in an apartment was released in 1990. Critics slammed it as a Terminator rip-off, yet the film became a financial success. The 1,5 million dollar budjet was paid back quite handsomely and continuation was imminent.
In 1992, Stanley followed Hardware with Dust Devil, a story based on the myth of a Namibian serial killer. A fallout with the distributors led to the recutting of the US version, while the bankruptcy of the British-based production company Palace Pictures temporarily shut the postproduction down in Europe and the film remained mauled or unfinished, depending how you look at it. Finally Stanley himself managed to finance a new, restored print from the original negative, which has later gained a cult following similar to Hardware.
Еhe church's war on the cathars
During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the region known as the Languedoc, spreading approximately southward from the Loire to the Pyrenees down into Arragon and eastward to the Rhone, became the most highly civilized area of Western Europe. Its fertile soil and pleasant climate provided the means for a leisurely life. The Rhone and the Garonne were notable routes of communication and the passage of many Crusaders on their way to the East gave an immense stimulus to trade. Above all the Moslem conquest of Spain had brought the influence of Arabic culture. The larger cities had schools of medicine, mathematics and astrology where Arabian scholarship was imparted. Jews were not debarred from public life and were highly respected as doctors and teachers. The Catholic Church no longer held the monopoly of knowledge; and were gradually losing their power hold in the Languedoc.
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.
Thule, the Priory of Sion, and Otto Rahn
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.
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."
Newspaper coverage of a speech by Otto Rahn
(Westfalia Landeszeitung, January 9, 1938)
Otto Rahn Reads in Dortmund Evening Lecture at the Dietrich Eckart Haus
Otto Rahn, the young poet and researcher read and lectured Friday evening at the Dietrich Eckart Verein (club) in front of a rather large and very captivated audience. After a few introductory words by the person in charge of cultural events for the Dietrich Eckart Verein, Kurt Eggers, who greeted Rahn as a comrade and briefly outlined the Lucifer-Problem which Rahn would talk about. Next Rahn created an image of Lucifer in such emphatic and compelling language that it could not be thought out in a more moving and explicit manner. Rahn read from his newest work, "Luzifers Hofgesind" (Lucifer's Court Servants), which tells about his travels and findings in Southern France where he followed the traces of the Grail and the Albigenses (Cathars), the pure and true heretics, and from new viewpoints, he drew a prolific picture of this anti-Roman movement which also spread in Germany at that time. The lecture covered difficult material and required extreme discipline and alertness. It was a good sign for the symbioses of lecturer and audience that no word was lost and that the image of Lucifer, which Rahn celebrated with the Albigenses as the Bringer of Light, was most effective.
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.
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.
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