A HERETIC’S JOURNEY IN SEARCH of the Light Bringers
A HERETIC’S JOURNEY IN SEARCH of the Light Bringers
Otto Rahn
LUCIFER'S COURT
A heretic’s Journey in Search of the Light Bringers
Otto Rahn
Translated by Christopher Jones
Inner Traditions Rochester, Vermont
Inner Traditions
One Park Street
Rochester, Vermont 05767
Copyright © 2004 by Verlag Zeitenwende
English translation copyright © 2008 by Inner Traditions International
Originally published in German under the title Luzifers Hofgesind by
Schwarzhaupterverlag
First U.S. edition published in 2008 by Inner Traditions
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rahn, Otto, 1904-1939.
[Luzifers Hofgesind. English]
Lucifer’s court: a heretic’s journey in search of the light bringers I Otto Rahn ; translated by Christopher Jones.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59477-197-2 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 1-59477-197-9
1. Folklore. 2. Mythology. I. Title.
BL313.R2513 2008
201'.3094—dc22
2007046262
Printed and bound in the United States by Lake Book Manufacturing
10 987654321
Text design and layout by Carol Ruzicka
This book was typeset in Sabon, with Charlemagne used as a display typeface.
ONTENTS
|
Verona |
101 |
|
Meran |
105 |
|
Bolzano Rose Garden |
110 |
|
On the Freienbiihl above Brixen |
116 |
|
Brixen |
117 |
|
Gossensass |
121 |
|
Geneva |
126 |
|
On a Southern German Roadside |
134 |
|
Worms |
139 |
|
Michelstadt in the Odenwald |
142 |
|
Amorsbriinn |
145 |
|
Amorbach |
147 |
PART THREE
|
With Relatives in Hesse |
154 |
|
Mellnau in the Burgwald |
158 |
|
Marburg am Lahn |
160 |
|
Giessen |
166 |
|
Siegen |
169 |
|
Runkel am Lahn |
176 |
|
Cologne |
180 |
|
Heisterbach Monastery Ruins |
187 |
|
Bonn |
189 |
|
Asbach in the Westerwald |
190 |
|
Goslar |
194 |
|
Halberstadt |
199 |
|
Berlin |
201 |
|
Warnemimde-Gj edser |
206 |
|
Edinburgh |
207 |
|
In the Pentland Sea |
211 |
|
In the North Atlantic |
219 |
|
Reykjavik |
223 |
|
Laugarvatn |
226 |
|
Reykholt |
228 |
|
Back Home |
238 |
|
Bibliography |
240 |
Do you know why I have so patiently translated Poe?
Because he resembled me. The first time I opened one of his books, I saw with terror and rapture subjects dreamed by me and described by him, twenty years earlier.
Charles Baudelaire
Translator's Foreword
Prolegomenon
I'i ie German philosopher Walter Benjamin held an almost mystical belief in the “mission” of the translator. In The Translator’s Task, he wrote that all books “lose something” when they are translated into another language; yet this loss is the price to be paid for a gain, because the translator’s task is “to let the seed of pure language ripen in a translation.”1
Though the patron of all translators is St. Jerome (AD 347-420), the man who translated the Bible and other religious texts word for word, l he most celebrated literary translator of all remains the Roman statesman and orator Cicero (106-43 BC). As a translator of Greek texts into I .atin, he elaborated a theory that greatly influenced his successors: No longer was it necessary to give the reader the same number of words as in the original text. As an alternative method, he decided to give the same weight to words by privileging their sense, and so achieve a better adaptation. In this way, the “real meaning” of a work would survive the transformation of the text. As a rule, modern literary translators are instructed to become totally invisible in the texts they transform. Yet in the case of my translations of Otto Rahn’s Crusade Against the Grail and Lucifer’s Court, I was presented with the odd temptation to abandon my phantomlike anonymity and assume the author’s identity— a bit like wearing a devil mask in Carnival. The French Belle Epoque writer Raymond Roussel (dubbed the Black Sun—soleil noir—by Andre Breton) was the first to describe this magical state, which became a trap for the central character in his first novel in verse, La doublure (The Understudy, 1897). Curiously, the word translation, which comes from the Latin verb traducere, actually means to “to ferry across.” Only after my initial passage word for word through Rahn’s text did I learn a second meaning for that word. In an odd coincidence, it denotes the Cathar belief that the spirit or soul is passed on to or reincarnated in a newborn after the death of another—a process that is known better as metempsychosis.
In the medieval world, so rich in spirituality and yet so meager in material pleasures, this traducianism could be avoided only through a spiritual baptism that the Cathars called the Consolamentum. According to the French scholar Jean Duvernoy, this “would allow the spirit (or soul) to return to the heavens and resume its place in the firmament before its ‘fall.’” In other words, this was a return to the morning star: Lucifer! In 1937, the recently established Schwarzhaupterverlag in Leipzig published Otto Rahn’s Lucifer’s Court, one of the most misunderstood and maligned books ever released. Although the author announced on several occasions that he intended to write the story of the German inquisitor Konrad von Marburg as a sequel to Crusade Against the Grail, Lucifer’s Court was his second and last published work before his suicide on the Wilderkaiser in March 1939.
In this book, structured as a travel journal, Rahn begins his quest for the Gral (Grail), a stone that supposedly fell to earth in the French Pyranees from Lucifer’s crown. As he traces the story of this symbol, Rahn discovers a brilliant wisdom of celestial origin that stands in opposition to Yahweh, the demiurge of the Old Testament and God of the R’nm Tcropl
Kahn’s pursuit of the Primordial Tradition takes him from the land ol I he Cathars to pagan Europe’s sacred spots: In Italy he discusses the legend of Tannhauser and uncovers King Laurin’s enchanted garden of roses, Der Rosengarten or Catinaccio in the Tyrol. At the Externsteine m Germany he recalls the legend of Irminsul, a holy ash tree that was venerated as the Tree of the World by the ancient Germans; and finally, in Iceland, he undertakes a pilgrimage to the birthplace of skald Snorri Sturlusson, the Nordic Homer who was the author of the Younger (I'rose) Edda.
According to Rahn, the roots of Catharism can be traced to the legends of the ancient Greeks, Goths, and Germanic pagans, all sworn enemies of the Roman Empire and its successor, the Catholic Church. I ike Rahn, they did not see Satan, Beelzebub, or the devil in Lucifer:2 In the Pyrenees, he was Abellio; among the Norsemen, he was Baldr; and the ancient Greeks celebrated him as Apollo. This Luciferianism, which is rooted in the esoteric literature of Hermeticism, sees Yahweh .is the manifestation of a satanic material realm, whereas Lucifer is the keeper of the highest spiritual ideals and has nothing at all to do with Satanism.
The Latin name Lucifer originally designated the brilliance of the planet Venus and literally means “light bringer.” According to Roman legend, as the son of Aurora, Lucifer was the harbinger of the dawn who rode across the skies on a white charger—but he was also the evening star (Venus) who rode a dark steed. The Vulgate employs the word for “the light of the morning” (Job 11:17), “the signs of the zodiac” (Job 38:32), and “the aurora” (Psalm 109:3). Not surprisingly, it was St. Jerome who, in Isaiah 1:14, gave the name Lucifer to the devil, who must lament the loss of his original glory, when he was as bright as the morning star.
Any rejection of monotheism is generally confused with anti-Semitism, probably because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all originated in the Middle East. Simone Weil, a French philosopher of Jewish origin, was also moved by the Cathar rejection of Yahweh, whom she also saw as a God of unforgiving cruelty. Like the Bonshommes, as the Cathar perfecti were called, she was convinced that Yahweh was incompatible with the God of the New Testament. Weil also saw the Romans and their child, the Catholic Church, as the original source of European totalitarianism, which was so brutally employed by the Inquisition.
The main points of Otto Rahn’s biography are well known: A modern Grail knight, he committed suicide by taking sleeping pills on the snows of the Wilderkaiser in 1939, after he was denounced for possible homosexual behavior and Jewish heritage. After its publication in 1933, his first work, Crusade Against the Grail, attracted the attention of Karl Maria Wiligut, better known as Weisthor, Heinrich Himmler’s esoteric “lord” of runology. On Weisthor’s recommendation, Himmler offered Rahn employment as a civilian in 1934. Eventually, Rahn formally entered the SS (in 1936) and was attached to Weisthor’s department.
Few realize that Lucifer’s Court owes its journalistic style and tone to another man: Albert von Haller, Rahn’s editor and publisher at Schwarzhaupterverlag. In all likelihood, it was Henry Benrath (the George Buchner prizewinner whose real name was Albert H. Rausch), who introduced Haller to Rahn. Before he founded Schwarzhaupter, Haller had been Benrath’s editor at the DEVA publishing house and was on the lookout for upcoming authors such as Rahn and Kurt Eggers for his new venture.
In 1936, Rahn finished the book in a house in Homberg/Ohm that belonged to relatives. Haller visited him there, and together they worked on the manuscript over ten days. Apparently Luzifers Hofgesind was Haller’s title.3 His influence on the text is easy to spot: In what today would be called an exercise in marketing, he added a chapter from The Birth of the Millennium (Die Geburt des Jahrtausends) by Kurt Eggers, which was the first book published by Schwarzhaupter in 1936.
Haller was also responsible for inserting an anti-Semitic statement by Arthur Schopenhauer (“We should also hope, therefore, that Europe will be cleaned of all Jewish mythology”)4 which has appeared in all printed versions of the book. Although it is presented as proof positive ol Rahn’s adherence to the racist principles of National Socialism, it docs not appear in the original typewritten manuscript by Otto Rahn.
There is a strange epilogue to the book’s disturbing history: Four years after Rahn’s death, Himmler ordered a special leather-bound edition of the book, and five thousand copies were printed. Apparently the Rcichsfiihrer-SS himself had retouched the text, but the entire edition was incinerated during a firebombing in the latter half of the war. Curiously, the manuscript that survived contains no chapters or even paragraphs. Some pages appear in boldface, which may indicate that they were added Liter. Many years later, when the unattributed Schopenhauer quote was read to Rahn’s old friend Paul Ladame, Paul said, “Otto Rahn would never have written that.” He was right.
It becomes painfully clear in Lucifer’s Court that Otto Rahn had mistaken his enemies for his friends; like many others, he completely misunderstood the nature of the Nazi regime he had committed himself lo serve. Its slogan Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhr er (One People, One Reich, One Fiihrer), which clearly highlighted the singular, revealed a latent monotheism. French philosopher Alain de Benoist has written in Jesus et ses freres (Jesus and His Brothers), “Born in Bavaria (a Catholic land par-excellence), the Nazi Party, although less monolithic than generally thought (the Fiihrerstaat was more of an oligarchy), simply secularized the Catholic concept of the institution. It presented itself as a church led by an infallible pope (the Fiihrer), with his clergy (the party officials), a Jesuit elite (the SS), its dogmatic truths, excommunications, and the persecutions of heretics ...”
I would go even further: Quite clearly the racism of the biblical concept of the “chosen people” had metamorphosed into the master race, or Herrenvolk. In his book Les iconoclastes (The Iconoclasts), Jean-Joseph Goux remarked: “[T]he practical theology of [NJazism was entirely ordered by a [JJudeophobic obsession that pushed Hitler to set the German people as a rival ‘chosen people’ to the Jews.”
In this context, although there were three well-known pagans among the Nazi elite (Himmler, Bormann, and Rosenberg) it is amazing that Lucifer’s Court was ever published. In a statement on October 14,1941, that debunks the fable of Nazi paganism, Adolf Hitler said in the presence of I limmler. “To mv eves, nothine would be more stunid than to reestablish the cult of Wotan. Our old mythology lost its value when Christianity took root in Germany. ... A movement like ours should not get sidetracked with metaphysical digressions. It should hold to the spirit of exact science!”
Hitler’s statement was diametrically opposed to the spirit of Lucifer’s Court. Otto Rahn believed that the old pagan religions, based on the veneration of ancestors and nature, maintained the cohesiveness of society against the forces of intolerance. In contrast National Socialism appears as “a millenary religion of salvation.” As Alain de Benoist has written, it was
a secularized religion, of course, but perfectly recognizable as such, which aimed to achieve, through a bewitching mass liturgy, by spectacularly playing on the hopes and fears of the populace, and through the cult of a leader presented as a providential savior, the promise of collective salvation based on a total transformation of life, the absolute domination of the earth, and the initiation of a “reign” of one thousand years.
The nineteenth-century German philosopher Eduard von Hartmann explained:
What is historical or “suprahistorical” passes little by little into history. But legends do not concentrate on recounting recent events as a historian would. To put this into perspective, we have to speak of fantastical deformation and the poetic. But this “poetry” is perhaps more true than modern historic descriptions, because legend is the veritable soul of a people which explains the decisive forces that have determined its past. Its role is to conjure images and not to describe absolute events but the fateful pressures that produced them.
This first English-language edition of Lucifer’s Court would have been impossible without the help of many friends and colleagues. In France, Alain de Benoist, Guy Rachet, and Andre Douzet always did their best to steer me in the right direction; in Spain, Jose Maria Martorell, ..ootzM-inrr <->£ dip ninth-rpntiirv castle of Ouermanco. where the most Cathar Perfectus Guilhem Belibaste was held prisoner, and the well-known historian Ramon Hervas deserve special thanks for their encouragement and support. I would like to thank Rahn’s German biog-i ipher, Hans-Jurgen Lange, for his help in reconstructing the history of the book, and Miriam Zoeller of Marixverlag in Wiesbaden, who provided me with her reedition of Jakob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie. (>1 course, I must also thank Jon Graham at Inner Traditions and Sven I lenkler at Zeitenwendeverlag in Dresden for their support, and my editor at Inner Traditions, Mindy Branstetter, who deserves special thanks lor her patient work. Most important of all, the help and support of my wife, Eva Maria, was crucial to my task. Her advice was absolutely vital to my efforts to convey all the color of Rahn’s work for my readers.
Finally, a last translation: The German word for a “double” or the mirror image of a person is Dopplegdnger—a person who literally follows in the footsteps of another. (In German, gehen means “to go,” but on foot.) To open the gates of Lucifer’s kingdom, as Rahn once wrote, “You must equip yourself with a Dietrich [skeleton key].” So, nearly sixty-seven years after his death in the snow, I decided to search for a key that would open the gates to a lost world full of magic and fear. But readers should beware—as the count of Lautreamont wrote in Les chants de Maldoror: “Unless [the reader] applies a meticulous logic during his reading and spiritual rigor equal at least to his distrust, the deadly emanations of this book will absorb his soul like water absorbs sugar.”
Christopher Jones
< h ristopher Jones was educated in France at the prestigious Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques. He is a contributing scholar in history to Scribner’s Encyclopedia <>/ Europe, the editor of White Star publications’ Adventure Classics 2006 reedition of William Bligh’s Bounty, and author of Vers la decroissance.
He is the translator and editor of the English version of Robert Descharnes’ monumental work about Salvador Dali’s sculptures, and translated Mr. Descharnes’ memoir (about Dali) as well. He is also the translator of the 2006 English publication of Otto Rahn’s Crusade Against the Grail.
Who loves his homeland, must understand it;
Who wants to understand it, must search earnestly in its history. Jakob Grimm
Prologue
£ HE JOURNEY BEGINS
Lucifer’s Court is based on travel diaries begun in Germany, continued in the south, and completed in Iceland. I had to finish this diary in advance because the events I experienced in the Land of the Midnight Sun closed the full circle in which my thoughts and observations had moved within today’s scheme of things.
Like an artist working on a mosaic who piles up small stones of a particular color to arrange them later in a preconceived plan, I collected ideas and knowledge under foreign skies and in lands far from home. The sum total has produced this pageant.
Either through revisions, adding details, or underscoring—not to mention rearranging—I have prepared those chosen pages from my diary in such a way that others may scrutinize, understand, and love them. My hand shall be a lucky one!
I wrote these lines in a small town in Upper Hesse. As I looked out I torn my desk, spreading out before me was a countryside that is very precious—so much so that as my curiosity pushed me through difficult places in foreign lands, I was often homesick. My father is from a town that sits on a densely wooded peak that closes off the district to the south and where, as far back as anyone can recall, men and their womenfolk have cultivated the land, stood before the anvil, milled grain to
flour, and sat in front of the spinning wheel in low-ceilinged rooms. Their homeland is stony and the sky is often filled with clouds. Only a few of them became wealthy.
My mother’s family hailed from the Odenwald, where they had it much easier. The sun and the climate are milder there, and the earth means well for those who love it.
The ruined walls of a castle dominate the Upper Hessian town where I now live, and where I wrote this book. Not far from the castle door (the castle that still stands) is a very old linden tree where St. Boniface first preached Roman Christianity to the Chatten.5 When I stood under it and looked north, my eyes fell upon an amazing basalt mass. There on its summit, the “Apostle of the Germans” constructed a cloister-fortress: the Amoneburg. My ancestors did not love St. Boniface, who preached the gospel of love. In a letter he sent to the pope in AD 742, he described these ancestors as “idiotic.”
A few hours separate my hometown from Marburg-am-Lahn. A son of this town, the “fright of Germany,” also preached for Rome. The magister and inquisitor Konrad von Marburg crisscrossed his homeland on the back of a donkey, collecting Rosenwunder6 for the beatification of his enlightened confessor, Countess Elizabeth of Thuringia—and collecting heretics for execution. He had them burned at a place in his hometown which is still called Ketzerbach or “heretic ditch.” My ancestors were pagans and my forebears were heretics.
For God, there isn’t any devil, but for us
He is a very useful figment
Novalis
Part one
Until the start of the the world war, I spent eight years of my childhood in this small town on the Rhine. Now, after a long absence, I am back again—for one day. The rented house where we used to live no longer exists; I am told it became dilapidated, so it was torn down. Also, the fields where I romped and played as a child have disappeared. Houses now stand there. Only the vineyards behind our garden have remained. Soon there will be a rich harvest. It is autumn.
At roughly the same time tomorrow, I will be traveling south to France on an extended journey to the lands between the Alps and the Pyrenees, maybe even to Italy and the south Tyrol as well. Many say that our homeland has more to offer than any foreign land, than countries that have so often been our curse. While this may be true, I am still going abroad to look for the ghosts of the pagans and heretics who were my ancestors. I am well aware that conventional understanding says that the future will be more tender with us than we are with the past. Although these long-gone times that I am investigating are certainly in the past, the wounds have never healed. Today, many still speak of pagans and heretics.
In this town where I am beginning my travels, a foolish woman from Griineberg in the region of the Upper Hesse betrayed the relatives of her husband to Grand Inquisitor Konrad von Marburg, who promptly had them all burned at the stake. Shortly, I will be visiting the mother of all cloisters for Inquisitors: the abbey Notre-Dame-de-Prouille near Toulouse. The custom of praying with a rosary spread from there across Europe. The history of that Dominican cloister, which was personally established by St. Dominic, is forever linked to the destiny of the most famous heresy of the Middle Ages: that of the Albigenses, who were also called Cathars. Although the word Cathar means “pure” (Greek: katharoi}, it became synonymous with our derogatory term in German, Ketzer (“heretic”; also “quarrelsome”). I am traveling to southern France because the heresy is said to have arrived in Germany from there.
I have read everything written about the Cathars, who were “so numerous, like sand on the sea, and had adherents in thousands of cities.”7 '[Caesarius von Heisterbach from Rahn’s introduction to Crusade Against the Grail. —Trans.]
()ddly, they were called Albigenses only in southern France, in the lands of Provence, the Languedoc, and Gascony. In Germany, for example, i hey were called Runkeler or Gottesfreunde (Friends of God). They must have been very influential in Lombardy. A priest and poet of proverbs named Wernher, who lived around the year 1180 in Augsburg, wrote, “Lamparten gliiet in Ketzerheit.”2
Catholic and Protestant theologians agree happily that the Cathars had to be exterminated wherever they were found, because if they were not, European spiritual life would have been disrupted and sidetracked along un-European paths. Yet they have argued and continue to argue over how to explain the heresy’s origins and from where it came. Some see in it a perversion of Manichaeism, the famous heretical doctrine from I he Persian skies, and cite numerous experts and writings to back up their diesis. Others, who have remained in the minority, regard the heresy of the Cathars as an odd leftover of the beliefs of the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, and Langobards: Under the domination of the Visigoths, Arianism became entrenched in southern France, a land that was formerly known as Gothien. Who is right? Even contemporary sources contradict each other, and it is extremely difficult to find our way through their writings. It is significant that an Inquisitor took the origins of Catharism down from old books that described pre-Christian heresies.
Catholics have assembled a long list of diabolical accusations against i he Cathars, which includes: riding to nightly orgies on the backs of large crabs, kissing the rear end of a black cat, and reducing murdered children to a powdery form in order to cannibalize them more easily. They allegedly abstained from physical reproduction to prevent more souls from falling under the sway of Lucifer, the creator of all earthly things .1 nd human life, which contradicts the accusation that the Cathars venerated Lucifer. This accusation stems from the sworn testimony of twelfthcentury German heretics, who recognized and greeted each other with i lie salute, “Luzifer der Unrecht geschah, Griisst dich!”3
At this time tomorrow, I will be traveling southward to clear the darkness. May I be a worthy light bringer! 8 7
Shown to me were reproductions of two paintings by the Spanish master Pedro Berruguete depicting scenes from the life and works of St. Dominic. The originals hang in the Prado in Madrid.9 In one, heretics are being burned. The pyres are beginning to catch fire; the victims are bound to stakes so that they cannot escape, and soon they will be living torches. The second picture shows St. Dominic busy burning books; already the parchments are smoldering. One book, however, rises high in the air: Having found the favor of the God of Rome, it was spared.
I bought Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible in the rue de la Seine because I wanted to read the Book of Isaiah again. In it, he explains how Lucifer fell from heaven and was damned by Yahweh:
How have you fallen from the heavens, O glowing morning star; been cut down to the ground O conqueror of nations?
For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.
Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.
But thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch, and as the Raiment of those that are slain, thrust through with a sword, that goes down to the stones of the pit; as a carcass trodden under feet.
Thou shalt not be joined with them in burial, because thou hast destroyed thy land, and slain thy people: the seed of evildoers shall never be renowned.
Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers; that they do not rise, nor possess the land, nor fill the face of the world with cities.
The LORD of hosts hath sworn, saying, Surely as I have i bought, so shall it come to pass; and as I have purposed, so shall It stand:
This is the purpose that is purposed upon the whole earth: and
I Ins is the hand that is stretched out upon all the nations.
For the LORD of hosts hath purposed, and who shall disannul it? and his hand is stretched out, and who shall turn it back? I mi the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me:
That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else.
1 form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil. Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker! Let the potsherd st rive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that lashioneth it, What makest thou? or thy work, He hath no hands?
Woe unto him that saith unto his father, What begettest thou?
or to the woman, What hast thou brought forth?s
While Martin Luther’s German-language translation of the Bible i< h is to God as “Herr Zebaoth” or “Yahweh Zebaoth,” the King |.tines Bible translates the term into English as “Lord of the Hosts.” 'cbaoth or Lord of the Hosts comes from the Hebrew YHVH Tzva’ot, ' hu h is a clear reference to sovereignty and military power. Curiously, ilie term never appears in the Torah, although it is used in the prophetic books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, .is well as many times in the Psalms and in the Apocalypse. There is some confusion: Does it indicate the Lord of Israel, or some other cosmological demiurge? In the Gnostic scriptures of the Nag Hammadi text, Zebaoth is the son of Yaltabaoth. Perhaps this is explained by the I .itini/.ed spelling of Sabaoth, which led to him being confused with t he god Sabazius.
All afternoon, I wandered along the banks of the Seine where bouqui-niers (book dealers; there must be about five hundred of them, one next to the other) offer rare and antique books for sale. The times are over, or
|ls.iinh 14.—Tra«s. | so I have been told, when real treasures—either a precious first edition or some singular work—could be found there. Nevertheless, in one of the wooden boxes attached to the wall of the quay (as these bookstores appear), I managed to find Aurora by the German mystic Jakob Bohme.10 As I turned the pages, I saw this passage:
Look, I will tell you a secret: The time has come for the groom to crown his bride; guess where the crown lies? Toward midnight, because the light is clear in the darkness. But from where comes the groom? From midday, when the heat gives birth to and travels toward midnight, because the light is clear there. What did they do toward midday? They fell asleep in the heat, but stormy weather will awaken them, and under it, many will be scared to death.
Jakob Bohme was a Protestant cobbler from Gorlitz. A contemporary of Kepler and Galileo Galilei, he died during the Thirty Years’ War. I bought the book for a laughably low price. Now it is in front of me on the table—next to the Bible.
I came from the north and I will travel southward. My journey has hardly begun, but I am looking north again—toward midnight, toward a “mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north,” and a crown should be there.
I left Paris in the afternoon during a heavy October rainstorm. Tired h, a n i he hectic life of the big city, I quickly fell asleep. When I woke up, i lirough the window of my compartment I was welcomed by the blue id .1 southern sky, the stunning late summer colors of the trees, and the l ‘ irk ling water of a river spanned by a high and long medieval bridge.
After nearly ten hours, I have seen all of what a traveler must see to I" able to say that he has been in Toulouse. At the end of my sightsee-iiig, I visited the cathedral of St. Sernin, a superb, Romanesque redbrick uncinre that reminds me in no small way of the Gothic churches of 1 ti cilswald and Stralsund, or Wismar and Chorin in northern Germany. \ I approached it from the city’s center, the golden rays of the afternoon mi, hidden by high town houses, illuminated the cathedral. It looked ilmost as if a fire was burning inside the house of God, which made i In- stones glow, or that the church was drenched in blood. A great deal u| blood has flowed in Toulouse: the blood of the Goths and, later, the blood of the Albigenses.
As I crossed the square in front of the entry, I remembered the story "I (he Italian philosopher Lucilio Vanini, a Roman priest whose tongue is cut out to stop him from talking to people.7 Finally, on February 19, I <> 19, he was burned alive in Toulouse, because (now unable to speak) In- had begun to write his ideas. Inside the church, I noticed a sloppily tolled umbrella propped against a pillar and, close by, a peasant woman with her back pressed against another column and her arms stretched mu behind her. With trancelike eyes, she stared at the crucifix before In i, ignoring me and the people who filed past her. Likewise, she didn’t register the clinking of coins as they dropped now and then into the literal box at the foot of the crucified figure. I withdrew and returned to the city.
Set in what is left of Toulouse’s old city wall, a marble plaque records the place where Simon de Montfort, the northern French knight who was appointed generalissimo of the crusade against the Albigenses by
’|l.ucilio Vanini (AD 1585-1619), Italian philosopher. Vanini believed that Jesus Christ was a philosopher and a politician and that he was a strong advocate of Epicurianism anil materialism. —Trans. I
the pope and the king of France, was killed on the day of St. John in 1216 by a stone thrown from the steady hand of a heroic Toulousaine. Even today, some Toulouse and Provencal folk spit on this spot; they haven’t forgotten what Simon de Montfort did to their homeland.
I came here because of the Albigenses. Like my forebears, they made a pact with the devil. In 1275, when a large group of heretics was burned alive in Toulouse, a fifty-six-year-old woman named Angela de Labaretha was among them. The ecclesiastical authorities had extracted a very special confession from her. In the torture chamber, Angela admitted that she had enjoyed carnal relations with the Evil One and that the fruit of her womb was born a monster—apparently, it had the head of a wolf and a serpent’s tail. The Evil One then forced her to steal small children in the night in order to feed them to her hideous offspring. The woman confessed to all this—under torture. By the way, Angela means “angel.”
In a bookstore I met a young Toulousain who claims that the climate of this small town is very unhealthy. The most promising female acquaintances, he confided, are made in St. Sernin’s cathedral in Toulouse at around eleven o’clock, and even femmes legeres (women of dubious reputation) are easily found there. Finally, he advised me not to stay in Pamiers because I would die of boredom. When I told him that I was planning to continue my journey onto Foix and then to Montsegur to spend several months in the high Pyrenees, he stared at me in amazement. Suddenly, a smile spread across his face—a smile that was both polite and full of pity. “Are you also searching for the treasure of the Albigenses?” he asked. When I wondered what this had to do with it, I learned of a tale of treasure that was buried seven hundred years ago in the castle of Montsegur during the crusade that Rome and Paris undertook against the Albigenses, and apparently, it still lies there. Currently, an engineer from Bordeaux is looking for it with the help of dynamite, a divining rod, and other similar methods.
Surrounded by hills that block out any view of the peaks of the Pyrenees, the ancient walls of Pamiers are reflected in the crystal-clear waters of the Ariege River, which descends from the snow-covered mountains of Andorra. Among the throngs of people that crowd the old town’s tiny streets, I saw many Senegalese and Arabs in uniform. I decided not to stay too long.
In the year 1207, the following events unfolded here: In response to an invitation by the countess of Foix (whose beautiful name was Esclarmonde) Roman Catholic priests, theological doctors, and monks from the cities and monasteries of southern France and the Vatican made their way to Pamiers to discuss Christian belief with the Albigensian heretics. Esclarmonde, who was herself a heretic, was worried about her homeland. She knew that the pope in Rome and the French king had already decided upon its destruction. Blood had flowed. On the orders of Pope Alexander III, Henri de Clairveaux, an abbot who had been named cardinal-bishop of Albano at the Lateran Council in 1179, had preached a crusade against the Albigenses and had assembled a horde of singing pilgrims to impose Rome’s teachings by force—in other words, through bloody murder. In 1207, the infamous Innocent HI mounted St. Peter’s throne. He swore to crush the head of the Albigensian dragon and prepare the heretical land for a new generation.
At the Casteliar de Pamiers, Esclamonde’s home during her widowhood, a theological confrontation was organized to decide who was a better Christian—a Roman Catholic or an Albigensian Cathar. Esclarmonde herself intervened in the heated debate. When she used the crusade preached by the cardinal-bishop of Albano as a charge against Rome, an infuriated priest shouted to her: “Madame, stay with your spinning wheel! You have nothing to say here!”
Although nobody truly knows anything about her, Esclarmonde de Foix was one of the great female personalities of the Middle Ages. Cursed by the pope and hated by the French king, she struggled until her last breath for one goal: the political and religious independence of her Occitan homeland. She was revered when she died—but where she is buried nobody knows. Perhaps she rests in one of the caves she had reconstructed beneath the castle at Montsegur as an impregnable stronghold. One fact, however, is certain: She did not live to see the tragic end of her country. Without any doubt, those closest to her returned Esclarmonde to the land from where she came. Esclarmonde de Foix was an archheretic. Today, modern Christians would call her neo-pagan because she rejected the Old Testament, deemed that the God called Yahweh was a manifestation of Satan, and refused to believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross—hence she rejected the first possible redemption of mankind.
In 1204, Esclarmonde took her solemn vows to Cathar heresy in Fanjeaux, which is not very far from Pamiers. The patriarch of the heretical church, Guilhabert de Castres, who was a knight from the Cathar elite known as the Sons of Belissena, accepted her Haereticatio, as the Inquisitors called the heretical vow. From then on, Esclarmonde belonged to the society of Cathars.
Only a credens, or believer, could become one of the Cathars. They swore the following final oath: “I swear to respect God and his true gospel, never to lie, never to swear, never to touch a woman [in the case of a female heretic, this was changed to ‘a man’], never to kill an animal, not to eat meat, and to live only from fruit. And I swear never to betray my belief, no matter what kind of death threatens me.” After this vow, a Cathar was then a “pure one” or perfectus—a perfect one.11 The new member was then dressed in a hand-woven tunic that was sometimes called a dress. By contrast, female heretics wore a sort of diadem. In the Provencal language, this ceremony was called the Consolamentum: “consolation.” It was not obligatory for a simple heretical believer, or credens, to take this oath; he could live in much the same way as anybody else: He could have a wife and children, work, hunt, eat meat, and drink wine. A cave or a clearing in the woods served as the house of God. Their pastors were the Cathars, who were also called Bonshommes—the “good men”—as a compliment. St. Bernard of Clairveaux recounted that in southern France, all knights were fere omnes milites, or Cathars.
When Esclarmonde de Foix took her heretical vow, she was a widow of advanced age and a mother of six sons who were all in their manhood. Did heretical asceticism represent a conclusive passage in her life? I can hardly believe that all knights led a monklike existence.
- Foix-
I like this small Pyrenean town. Set in well-kept, green surroundings and surrounded by commanding mountains, Foix is dominated by a picturesque castle and an attractive church. Its small but exceptionally clean streets and roads wind hither and thither. Curiously, I have seen a lot of tall, blond people here. Could they be of Germanic stock? For a long time, the Goths and the Franks were at home in Foix—as rival brothers.
The town church recalls this fraternal struggle. It is dedicated to Volusian, a relatively obscure holy man about whom the following is known: Around AD 500, the Roman Catholic bishops of southern Gaul, which was under Visigoth dominance, became increasingly unhappy with the Arian—and consequently heretical—king of the Goths, and appealed directly to Clovis, the king of the Franks, to intervene. One of the bishops—Volusian by name—opened the doors of the city of Tours to the approaching Franks. Now a renegade, the bishop was forced to flee. The embittered Goths pursued him to the Pyrenees, where he was captured and slain. After the battle of Voille, an encounter that cost the Gothic king Alaric II his life and allowed the Franks to conquer the south, Clovis had what was left of Volusian’s body gathered and declared holy. The Frankish clergy then proclaimed the cleric a martyr, and a monastery was established at Volusian’s grave. A small town developed nearby over the ruins of an ancient settlement, which was reconstructed by the Frankish king Charles as a major fortified town. This became today’s Foix.12
All the same, Foix has to thank the Phoceans for its name. In the sixth century BC, these Hellenes from Asia Minor left Phocea, their home city, because the Persian tyrant Harpagus threatened them with destruction. They settled on Gaul’s southern coast. Massilia (today’s Marseille), Portus Veneris (Port Vendres), and other southern French towns came into being this way. Foix is another one of them, a Phocea, or Phokis, in the European west.
During the era of the crusade against the Albigenses, seven hundred years ago, the land, town, and castle of Foix witnessed some dreadful events. In the name of the pope and in accordance with the desires of the French king, three hundred thousand true believers, together with the scum from all God-fearing countries, assembled in Lyon in 1209, under the command of the archabbot Arnaud de Citeaux and, shortly thereafter, Simon de Montfort. The mission of the pope, the king, and these commanders was to crush that blessed land between the Alps and the Pyrenees, Provence and the Languedoc, for three reasons: First, Roman Catholicism should reign unchallenged as Christianity’s sole faith. Second, France’s preeminence in the south must be firmly established. Finally, those returning from the Crusade in Palestine must be offered another opportunity to plunder, and the masses, who were accustomed to slaughtering nonbelievers, must be given the prospect of practicing their skills again. The king of France promised them rich booty. Likewise, the pope’s contribution did not fail its purpose: After forty days, eternal salvation was extended to all those who took part in the war against the Albigenses and absolution was granted for all sins committed during the Albigensian crusade.
Under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, the hordes swarmed over the boundaries of Provence, accompanied by a psalm-singing and heavily armed legion of archbishops, bishops, abbots, priests, and monks. In an encyclical of September 1, 1883, Pope Leo XIII, one of the many Germany-haters who have sat on St. Peter’s throne, declared that the Albigenses had tried to overthrow the (liurch with force of arms. According to the Holy Father, thanks to a Dominican invention, the heretics were thwarted with the prayers of I lie holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Either this pope was misinformed or he willingly tried to misinform. There can be no doubt: Rome and Paris started the war.
The uncrowned king of southern France, Raimundo, the count of I on louse, made one Roman pilgrimage after another to spare his land complete annihilation—all in vain. Even as he crawled before the cross, l lie first cities, towns, and people were ablaze.
Eventually, the crusaders besieged Foix. Sometime before, at the Third Council of Lateran, its lord, Raimon Drut, who was one of the count of Toulouse’s most loyal vassals, had accused God’s vicar on earth, the pope, of watching the entire Provencal population being butchered without any regard for their belief. Already five hundred thousand had fallen victim to the murderous crusaders. The “difficult” count was then dismissed with a farewell benediction and a smug, diplomatic smile. Defying all description was what the county of Foix then suffered in horrors, confiscation of property, and persecution at the hands of the pilgrims and their successors during the purge of Albigensian beliefs (read the extermination of the Albigenses) and the presence of the Dominicans (read Inquisitors).
At the Lateran Council, used against the count was the uncomfortable fact that the sister of the count of Foix, Esclarmonde, was an archheretic who resolutely protected all Albigenses. The count considered that his sister’s actions were not his affair because his sister could do what she wanted on her own property and could take care of her subjects as she thought best. Concerning her beliefs, he deemed that he had even less right to assert any and no way to force her to change. Whatever the case, he was of the unshakable conviction that every person should be free to choose his or her own faith.
When the Latin Mass was finally sung throughout the land and upstarts had confiscated the castles of the land, when the conquered territory was subjugated by France’s Crown and the language of the victors—French—began to replace Provencal, the Cathar faith remained free at Montsegur, protected in the highlands of Foix by the Pyrenees Mountains, where the citadel reached skyward, free until 1244, some thirty-five years after the beginning of the war. After the failure of the conference of Pamiers, Countess Esclarmonde had the foresight to instruct the best military architect of that time, Bertran de Baccalauria, to rebuild Montsegur (which had formed part of her widow’s inheritance) in such a way as to render it virtually unconquerable by humans. In this way, high up and so close to the clouds, a small group of loyal knights, devout heretics, and brave farmers were able to withstand the siege of an overwhelming and determined enemy.
Esclarmonde’s sister Cecilia was also a heretic. She belonged, however, to the Waldenses, those followers of the Lyon merchant Peter Waldo, who, in a clear protest against Rome’s arrogance and decay and ever faithful to biblical scripture, led a strictly apostolic life as a moral descendant of Christ. Even if only a few Provengal knights or burghers belonged to their faith, the Vatican had sworn to destroy the Waldenses: During the crusade against the Albigenses, it had thousands upon thousands of them killed. Yet the archheretics remained, the even-more-hated Cathars, to whom Esclarmonde’s father and brother belonged. The brother was a renowned troubadour—a Minnesinger—and his castle was open to all traveling minstrels. In his last hours, he took the vow of the Consolamentum.
|/,u tiiche du traducteur, Walter Benjamin, Oeuvres I (Paris: Gallimard, 2000). A friend of I lermann I Iesse and Hannah Arendt, Benjamin died under mysterious circumstances in Portbou on the Franco-Spanish border in 1940. —Trans. |
•'| Rahn evokes rhe story of the Cagots, a minority, discriminated against, who may have been the missing link between the Cathars and the Goths. Long believed to be descendants of the (ioths, in a letter to Pope Leo X in 1513, the Cagots identified themselves as the last surviving Albiuenses. —Trans.]
TLuzifers Hofgesind translates as Lucifer’s Courtiers, but it is dialectic; in fact, the title should read Luzifers Hodgesindl. I have chosen the middle way by naming the book Lucifer’s Court, which is as it appears in other languages, such as French and Spanish. —Trans.]
[“Wir diirfen hoffen, dal? einst auch Europa von jiidischen Mythologien gereinigt sein ' J” /C_l----PnrnlihnLyiPtJ/1 II Bd._ 115 Elldcll
'[The Chatten was a Germanic tribe that lived in and around the Hessian region. —Trans.]
[Rahn is referring to St. Elizabeth of Hungary (who was Landgravine Elizabeth of Thuringia). She was known for the miraculous transformation of bread into roses. Konrad was her confessor. In German, Rosenwunder are also sea roses, Rosa rugosa. —Trans.]
| “I lail Lucifer, who was wronged! Greetings to you!” —Trans.]
|Meaning “Lombardy glows in heresy.” Lamparten is the name the Langobards gave to the northern Italian region of Lombardy. —Trans.]
[Pedro Berruguete (AD 1450-1504) was a transitional painter from Spanish Gothic to the Renaissance. He was celebrated for his depiction of St. Dominic busily burning heretics at the stake. Spain’s grand inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada (a Dominican), commissioned several works from him. The painter’s son Alonso Berruguete (AD 1488-1561) became a distinguished sculptor, painter, and architect under Michelangelo. —Trans.]
[Jakob Bohme (AD 1575-1625). After an initial mystical experience, Bohme embarked on a remarkable career as a philosopher. Although he continued to practice his profession as a cobbler, Bohme became known as the Philosophus Teutonicus. Strongly influenced by Paracelsus, he produced twenty-nine works, including his celebrated Aurora oder Morgenrote im Aufgang, das ist die Wurzel oder Mutter der Philosophic, Astrologie, und Theologie aus rechtem Grunde oder Beschreibung der Natur wie alles gewesen und alles geworden ist (Aurora or the Rosy Dawn’s Rays That Are the Root or Mother of Philosophy, Astrology, and Theology from Good Sources or the Description of Nature as Everything Has Been or Should Have Been), an important example of the doctrine of Apokatastasis (in Latin, Restitutio in pristinum statum) or the universal salvation of all free creatures—including Lucifer. English followers of Bohme were known as Behmenists. —Trans. |
"| Curiously, the priests of ancient Egypt were also called “pure ones,” or oueb. —Trans.]
’[St. Volusian of Tours (b. ?-AD 496) was bishop of that city. His death at the hands of the Goths is disputed. Strangely, Rahn does not mention that Volusian is remembered for his early marriage to a violent woman. —Trans.]