Cathars
Catharism (from Greek: καθαρὀς, katharos, pure), a name of Christian religion in the Languedoc region of France and other parts of Europe in the XI-XIII centuries. The Paulicians of Armenia and the Bogomils of Bulgaria can be also called Cathars. Self-identification term Good Men (Bons Hommes) or Good Christians. Also known as Albigensians.
Roscoe's solution (Part thereof)
In Geography Strabo (64 B.C-23 A.D.) tells of a massive 300 tons of gold and silver bullion that was recovered by the Romans from the Celtic temples at Narbonne. This is near the mouth of the Aude river on the French Mediterranean coast. A further eighty kilometres up the Aude is Rennes-le-Chateau. Strabo attributes the bullion as either an accumulation of Celtic sacred offerings, or else the Celts' loot from the Greek treasuries at Delphi, sacked in 278 B.C. The Romans somehow lost the bullion near Narbonne during Caesar's Gallic Wars and it was never recovered.
The gold was taken from a votive lake by a Roman proconsul by the name of Cæpion. He took 80 tons of gold and money and immediately re-melted this into ingots. This apparently disappeared during its transport towards the port of Narbonne following an attack from Volkes tectosages upset by this profanation of their sacred offerings. They would have then withdrawn to the high valley of the Aude and would have hidden the treasure in this area which is easy to police.
Otto Rahn: To Rennes or not to Rennes?
Claims
“The Emerald Cup-Ark of Gold: the Quest of SS Lt Otto Rahn of the Third Reich”, Colonel Howard Buechner claimed that Otto Rahn visited the Corbières in 1937. This visit is not substantiated. However, there is little doubt in my mind that there is a strong connection between Rahn and Rennes-le-Château. I found these connecting links:
- Rahn’s link to the Cathars whom he loved with great passion;
- The war waged against the Cathars by the Church and the French King, a war of such ferocity that it brings into question the true nature of the cause for which the crusade against Albigensian and Cathar was really launched;
- Rennes-le-Château is seated in the Cathar heartland; Saunière discovering something linked to the “real” story of Catholic geopolitical involvement in the West over the centuries;
- The Vatican not speaking out against the Nazis until close to the end of WWII. What was the Church afraid of?
- Jules Massenet and his librettist Henri Cain for the opera: Don Quichotte and the metaphysical concepts of the necklace image and of the Island of Dreams;
Otto Rahn in Wikipedia
Otto Wilhelm Rahn (February 18, 1904—March 13, 1939) was a German medievalist and a Obersturmführer (First Lieutenant) of the SS, born in Michelstadt, Germany.
Speculation still swirls around Otto Rahn and his research. From an early age, he became interested in the legends of Parsifal, Holy Grail, Lohengrin, and the Nibelungenlied. While attending the University of Giessen he was inspired by his professor, the Baron von Gall, to study the Albigensian (Catharism) movement, and the massacre that occurred at Montségur. Rahn is quoted as saying that "It was a subject that completely captivated me''".
Work
A review of Otto Rahn’s Lucifer’s Court by John J. Reilly
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.
A review of Otto Rahn’s study of Grail lore by John J. Reilly
Anyone who undertakes the study of the intellectual underpinnings of Nazi Germany (1933-1945) will soon notice that at least some members of the regime were doing things that are not covered by the typical survey course in political theory. Researchers who attempt to investigate these anomalies will dig through a swamp of popular and crank literature about the Third Reich’s connection to the occult underground, some of it coincident with conspiracy theory and some of it (often the most coherent works) purely fictional. Nonetheless, a sober study of primary sources will reveal that not all the fantastic rumors were made up out of whole cloth.
The original Indiana Jones: Otto Rahn and the temple of doom
As Indiana Jones returns to our screens, John Preston looks at the Nazi archaeologist who inspired Spielberg's hero, and finds a story more bizarre than anything the director could have dreamt of
Very little is certain in the short life of Otto Rahn. But one of the few things one can with any confidence say about him is that he looked nothing like Harrison Ford. Yet Rahn, small and weasel-faced, with a hesitant, toothy smile and hair like a neatly contoured oil slick, undoubtedly served as inspiration for Ford's most famous role, Indiana Jones.
Like Jones, Rahn was an archaeologist, like him he fell foul of the Nazis and like him he was obsessed with finding the Holy Grail - the cup reputedly used to catch Christ's blood when he was crucified. But whereas Jones rode the Grail-train to box-office glory, Rahn's obsession ended up costing him his life.
Otto Rahn Bio
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 that had glued together the 19th century, few individuals were more colorful or conspicuous than a febrile dark-haired, green-eyed young man called Otto Wilhelm Rahn.
Rahn was welcomed in the cafes and nightclubs of 1930’s Berlin because he was a hyper-intense intellectual – a brilliant talker with a great deal to say but he was also a conspicuous outsider in that he was unfashionably dismissive of the emergent modernism that so excited his peers. Moreover, he had even less empathy with the cynicism and decadence that colored there lifestyle. Rather, like that of most Germans outside of Berlin, Rahn’s sensibility had been molded by influences wholly incompatible with the café society avante-garde.
English translator's foreword to Crusade Against the Grail
WHEN URBAN VERLAG IN FREIBURG published the first edition of Crusade Against the Grail [Kreuzzug gegen den Gral] in 1933, the book was not an immediate bestseller. But its eloquence deeply moved those who read it. One so moved was Albert H. Rausch, the 1933 Georg Biichner prizewinner who published under the pseudonym Henry Benrath. Rausch wrote an introduction for the book called Kreuz und Gral [Cross and Grail], which eventually appeared in the Baseler Nachrichten later in the year.
Editorial Reviews to First English Translation of Crusade Against the Grail: The Struggle between the Cathars, the Templars, and the Church of Rome
Book Description
The first English translation of the book that reveals the Cathar stronghold at Montségur to be the repository of the Holy Grail<
• Presents the history of the Papal persecution of the Cathars that lies hidden in the medieval epic Parzival and in the poetry of the troubadours
• Provides new insights into the life and death of this gifted and controversial author
The Wanderings of the Grail: The Cathars, the Search for the Grail And the Discovery of Egyptian Relics in the French Pyrenees
by André Douzet
Adventures Unlimited Press, 2006 - History - 95 pages
In the 13th century, the Church came down against the Cathars, who had settled in the French Pyrenees. The Cathars practiced a belief in which “perfects” acted as priests that educated their followers in a specific system of believes and who aided the believers in “dying consciously”, which was also at heart of ancient Egyptian belief systems. Both the Egyptians and the Cathars felt they had to “cheat” the cycle of reincarnation (the cycle of evil), and “ascend” to the world of light.
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