Christopher Jones

Ed Jajko says:_I would be most interested if Christopher Jones could cite his authorities for the Cathar Christology he presents us. What little I have read suggests that the Cathars had different, not entirely coherent views on Jesus Christ, but that they were not quite in consonance with what Mr. Jones has stated. Reference to a couple of scholarly sources would be much appreciated.

RH: Yes, a few precise sources.

Ed Jajko asked Christopher Jones to give sources for his statements about the Cathars. Christopher replies:
The sources for my comments on the Cathari are all from Cruzada contra el Grial [original German, Kreuzzug gegen dem Gral] by Otto Rahn. This particular translation was done by Fernando Acha and published by Hiperión in Madrid. To the best of my knowledge and a fact that was reconfirmed to me by the current copyright holder in Germany, Rahn's book was never translated into English although Spanish, French and Italian versions exist. The book was first published in 1933.

This book and its companion volume, Crusade against the Grail, are about as close as we can get to an “authoritative” statement of the esoteric dimension of the Nazi regime in Germany. The publication of the Crusade book in 1933 persuaded SS leader Heinrich Himmler to invite its author, Otto Rahn (1904-1939), to work for the SS as a folklorist. As the book under review here also does in part, that work developed the thesis that the doctrines of the medieval Cathars of Provence were encoded into Parzival, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s 13th-century version of the Grail legend. Rahn later became a member of the Ahnenerbe (“ancestral heritage”) bureau of the SS, in whose employ he finished Lucifer’s Court.