Kreuzzug Gegen den Gral: Die Geschichte der Albigenser

by Otto Rahn

Croisade contre le Graal est un livre qui mérite doublement d’être lu. Tout d’abord pour ce qu’il nous conte : la lutte acharnée de l’Église catholique contre l’hérésie cathare qui dura de 1209 à 1255 et qui ravagea le Languedoc et le comté de Toulouse. Ensuite, pour l’étrange personnalité de son auteur, Otto Rahn, dont on sait qu’il a inspiré à Steven Spielberg le personnage d’Indiana Jones. Rahn mena plusieurs expéditions en Ariège, où il pensait prouver la véracité historique de la légende du Parzifal de Wolfram von Eschenbach et ainsi trouver le Graal qu’il considérait être un symbole païen. Cet individu fut pour le moins hors du commun puisque ce spécialiste des Cathares, des troubadours et de la littérature romane du Moyen Âge fut aussi membre de la SS à partir de 1935, où, en tant qu’archéologue, il poursuivit ses recherches sur le Catharisme et le Graal. Incorporé à l’état-major de Himmler, il y rencontre Karl Wolff et entretient des relations avec le mystérieux Karl Maria Wiligut, surnommé le « Raspoutine de Himmler ». En 1939, il démissionne de l’organisation après que son homosexualité ait été dénoncée. Son destin s’achève le 13 mars 1939, sur le glacier de l’Empereur sauvage, en Autriche, où il est retrouvé mort de froid, à la manière de l’Endura cathare. Il y a là tous les éléments pour faire de Croisade contre le Graal un ouvrage sulfureux et maudit à ne pas mettre entre toutes les mains...

Genres: History, Religion, Nonfiction, Occult, Esoterica, Christianity, Medieval History

309 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1933

About the author

Otto Wilhelm Rahn was a German medievalist and a Obersturmführer (First Lieutenant) of the SS.
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.
In 1931 he traveled to the Pyrenees region of southern France where he conducted most of his research. Aided by the French mystic and historian Antonin Gadal, Rahn argued that there was a direct link between Wolfram Von Eschenbach's Parzival and the Cathar Grail mystery. He believed that the Cathars held the answer to this sacred mystery and that the keys to their secrets lay somewhere beneath the mountain pog where the fortress of Montségur remains, the last Cathar fortress to fall during the Albigensian Crusade.
Rahn believed it was possible to trace the Cathars, who guarded the Holy Grail in their castle at Montsegur, back to Druids who converted to Gnostic Manichaeism. The Druids in Britain were forerunners of the Celtic Christian Church. He saw that the culture of the medieval Cathar stronghold of Languedoc bore a strong resemblance to the ancient Druids. Their priests were akin to the Cathar Parfaits. The Cathar secret wisdom being preserved by the later Troubadours, the travelling poets and singers of the medieval courts of France-M. Sabeheddin.
Rahn wrote two books linking Montségur and Cathars with the Holy Grail: Kreuzzug gegen den Gral (Crusade Against the Grail) in 1933 and Luzifers Hofgesind (Lucifer's Court) in 1937. After the publication of his first book, Rahn's work came to the attention of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, who was fascinated by the occult and had already initiated research in the south of France.
Rahn joined his staff as a junior non-commissioned officer and became a full member of the SS in 1936. Journeys for his second book led Rahn to places in Germany, France, Italy, and Iceland.
Openly homosexual, he was assigned guard duty at the Dachau concentration camp in 1937 as punishment for a drunken homosexual scrape. He resigned from the SS in 1939.
On March 13, 1939 nearly on the anniversary of the fall of Montségur, Rahn was found frozen to death on a mountainside near Söll (Kufstein, Tyrol) in Austria. His death was officially ruled a suicide.

Reviews

[Karolinde (Kari) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Otto Rahn is listed as one of the possible influences for Indiana Jones. This fact is what drew me to search out his works. I was intrigued to know more about the man and his work that drew the attention of the Nazi mystics.

On one hand, I was not disappointed. I am never disappointed when I learn something new or discover an area that I would like to learn more about. I was not familiar with the Cathars or the poetry and culture of southern France. Having said that, the work itself is rambling and hard to follow. Rahn jumps from topic to topic and place to place with very little to connect them or to give them real substance. He also assumes a lot of previous knowledge of his reader, which his intended audience may have possessed, that makes it hard to follow some details. Rahn also makes assertions about the Cathars with little evidence to back it up. He will state that almost all literature and documentation about them and their beliefs has been destroyed, then tell you what they believed. More often than not, he does not take the time to give examples. He also makes huge jumps in logic between myths and peoples that I find very hard to swallow such as linking the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece to the Cathars and their Grail, literally, not figuratively.

In the end, while Rahn tells the reader much about the world of the Cathars in Southern France, he tells us more about his world and himself. He romanticizes their world and ideals of chivalry to the point that it becomes obvious that it is something he finds lacking in his own. He is unable to find any fault in their world and his bias is glaring throughout. While I agree that the Inquisition is evil, I have a hard time seeing the Cathars as a pure, perfect people in the way Rahn presents them. What he presents in the long run, is the ideal they may have aspired to and the ideal he wished for.

[Stephen Durrant · Rating 2 out of 5]

What can one say about a book like this? Sometimes our enthusiasm and the desire to believe overwhelm us. Everything we see, everything we read seems to point in the same direction. But as we strive to communicate our vision to others, it shatters into fragments so that no one can quite comprehend what it is we are trying to say and why we are so convinced what we believe makes sense. The author of this book, is such a person. What the maybe-or-maybe-not Nazi Otto Rahn tries to show in “Crusade Against the Grail” is that a whole bunch of evidence from a whole bunch of sources points to the conclusion that the Holy Grail, not so much an object as a glorious idea, was with the Cathars at Montsegur and that when the fortress fell in 1244, it was hidden away in the spulga (fortified caves) of Ornolac! Okay, fine. If you already believe this, or want to believe, Rahn’s book will add fuel to your fire (an unhappy metaphor when speaking of Cathar!), but if you are inclined to skepticism, as this reader surely is, you might enjoy some of Rahn’s flights of fancy, but you will likely leave his account unconvinced and confused by the undisciplined way in which he presents “evidence.” Oh well, Rahn, who spent exploring caves in the Pyrenees looking for the grail, was supposedly the inspiration for Indiana Jones, so that alone is something of a cultural contribution.

[Phil Berdecio · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I enjoyed Rahn's speculations—reminiscent, methodologically speaking, of Robert Graves' mythopoetic discourses—about possible Greek, Phocian, and Phoenician influences on the grail legends of Occitania, his account of the familiar story of the Albigensian Crusades was incredibly tedious, and offered little to distinguish it beyond an ill-informed notion of the troubadours as celibate ascetics and a curious enthusiasm for Catharism as a belief system. One can easily sympathize with the plight of the Cathars, and admire their steadfastness, but it's difficult to find much of value in their very medieval doctrine, aside from its pacifism and tolerance. It was much more severe, and much more disdainful of the physical world, than that of the medieval Church. His strange enthusiasms aside, Rahn's tendency to offer example after tenuously-relevant example to illustrate points of relatively minor importance to the book's subject give it a meandering and capricious quality. There are exquisite gems of insight here and there, but they're generally embedded in massive boulders of specious malarkey that hide their luster.

[Joe Zabinski · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was like watching a History Channel documentary in book form. It is a history of the Cathar crusade that never misses the opportunity for one more exclamation point, but also describes Occitania and troubadour culture at a level of detail that I have never seen anywhere else. You won't ever look at Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parsifal in the same way again; the same might be said for the Catholic Church, if you happened to be a fan prior to reading the book.

I have seen reviews tending to look down on the book because Otto Rahn was a Nazi: I didn't see any trace of antisemitism in this edition.

[AttackGirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Terrible just terrible but if you like to hear about what men are really capable of and how they have tortured women, children in the name of religion or even cut up the already murdered well this book is for you. For me I do not need a reminder or wake up call to know all men are capable of and I could have gone without the graphics.

Anyway, enjoy...

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

A more difficult read than I expected. My eyes tended to glaze over during the clearly non-cathar chapters. Recommend reading with a smart phone or computer nearby to research anything you may not know...

[Shirin · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a really odd book. Most of its thesis is that the Arthurian tales of Percival and the Quest for the Holy Grail was based on the unfortunate Raimon Rogièr Trencavel. His basis for this, so far as I can tell, is that Trencavel kind of looks like Percival.... and that's it.

If you're thinking that's a really flimsy basis on which to hang a theory, you're not wrong and the rest of Rahn's book is filled with weird errors. In regards to medieval history, he asserts that Nur ad-Din and Saladin were both Seljuk sultans and somehow replaces that their actual shared wife, Ismat ad-Din Khatun, with a fictitious "India of Toulouse" and claims that Richard I of England was excommunicated (maybe Rahn was confusing Richard with his brother, John Lackland or his nephew, Otto of Brunswick?)

His handling of ancient history isn't much better. He claims that the Argonautica was the Greeks' oldest epic (try the Iliad) and has repeated trouble telling the difference between Mesopotamians and Persians, at least twice claiming that Zoroastrian gods and mythological places are Babylonian. As pretty standard for books of this type, he asserts a lot of things about the beliefs of the ancient Druids, when what we actually know of them and their beliefs would fit on a 3x5 index card, probably due to a combination of their insistence that their teachings would only be transmitted orally and their suppression by the Julio-Claudian Roman emperors. The most puzzling part of his errors about antiquity is his attempt to link the Greek goddess Artemis with the Phoenician goddess, Astarte, when the most obvious parallel is to Aphrodite, as Aphrodite was almost certainly a Hellenized take on Astarte.

Despite these obvious problems, though, Rahn's work apparently captivated Heinrich Himmler, who funded Rahn's pseudo-archeological digs in southern France. Nothing appears to come from them and Rahn later lost the support of the Nazis and turned up dead on a mountainside in Tyrol in 1939, though whether he committed suicide or was murdered by the Gestapo is unknown.

[Román]

Libro extraordinario. Un análisis deslumbrante de la civilización occitana, el nacimiento del amor cortés y el movimiento trovadoresco, Los cátaros y la Corte de amor y sus damas como Esclarmonde de Foix y el Parsifal de Wolfram von Schembach que había recibido la cultura occitana a través de "Guyot de Provins" que influyó sobre Wagner y que anteriormente cómo todo ello representa un precedente del renacimiento casi dos siglos antes. Un libro de cabecera que releo de continuo

[Marcus Follin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautifully written book. It contains certain epic and inspiring passages. However, it is not necessarily the most historically correct account available.

Read my full review here: https://thegoldenone.se/2021/05/02/cr...

[Signor Mambrino · Rating 1 out of 5]

I gave up with only 50 pages to go. So, so, so boring.

[Peyman HAGH · Rating 5 out of 5]

Define Book Summary:

A summary provides a concise, objective overview of a book's main points, themes, and characters, allowing readers to grasp its essence without having to read the entire book.

Book Description:

Book Title: Crusade Against the Grail
Author: Otto Rahn
Publisher: Inner Traditions
Date Published: 2006
Copyright: 2006 by Verlag Zeitenwendre
Copyright translation: 2006 by Inner Tradition International
Number of Pages: 229

**Who Was Otto Rahn?**

Otto Rahn was born on February 18, 1904, to Karl and Clara (née Hamburger) in Michelstadt, located in the Hesse region of the German Empire. From a young age, his mother introduced him to stories and legends about the Holy Grail, including *Parzival*, *Lohengrin*, and the *Nibelungenlied*. While attending the University of Giessen, he was inspired by his professor, Baron von Gall, to study the Albigensian movement (Catharism) and the massacre that took place at Montségur. In 1924, he obtained a degree in philology, specializing in the literary history of the language and romances of France.

In 1931, Rahn travelled to the Pyrenees region of southern France to conduct research. With the assistance of the French mystic and historian Antonin Gadal, Rahn argued that there was a direct connection between Wolfram von Eschenbach's *Parzival* and the Cathars. He further believed that the Cathars were linked to the Holy Grail and that the keys to this mystery lay beneath the mountain where the fortress of Montségur stood—the last Cathar fortress to fall during the Albigensian Crusade.

The concept of the Nazis, particularly Adolf Hitler, launching a "Crusade Against the Grail" is essentially a creation of popular fiction, most notably the film *Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade*. In reality, Nazi leaders, especially Heinrich Himmler, were obsessed with finding the Holy Grail and other mythical artifacts. However, they sought these relics for their perceived supernatural powers, propaganda value, and as a means to validate their pseudoscientific racial ideology, not to crusade "against" it.

**The Real Nazi Interest in the Grail**

Several factors drove the genuine interest the Nazis had in the Grail:

1. **Occult Beliefs:** Himmler, the head of the SS, had a deep fascination with mysticism, astrology, and the occult. He believed that locating mythical relics would grant the Third Reich supernatural abilities and a tactical advantage in warfare.

2. **A New Aryan Religion:** The Nazis aimed to replace traditional Judeo-Christian morality with a new pseudo-religion based on ancient Germanic pagan myths and symbolism. They appropriated and distorted Christian narratives, claiming, for example, that Jesus was an Aryan who opposed Jewish materialism.

3. **The Ahnenerbe:** Himmler established the Ahnenerbe ("Ancestral Heritage"), a Nazi institute that functioned as an archaeological propaganda machine. Its objective was to find historical "evidence" of an ancient, superior Aryan race to support Nazi claims of racial superiority.

4. **Mythological Inspiration:** Himmler specifically explored Montserrat Abbey in Catalonia because it was believed to be the real-life "Montsalvat," the location of the Grail in Richard Wagner's opera *Parsifal*, which was a favourite of Hitler.

5. **Eternal Life/Invincibility:** In legends, the Holy Grail is often described as the cup from the Last Supper, possessing miraculous powers that grant eternal life or heal wounds. Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis were interested in obtaining such benefits for themselves and their regime.

**In Popular Culture (e.g., *Indiana Jones*)**

In the film *Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade*, the Nazis—specifically the character Donovan and his SS associates—sought the Grail to achieve immortality for Hitler and to create an invincible army that would enable Germany to "conquer the world." The film's narrative drew inspiration from real-life accounts of Nazi expeditions searching for such artifacts.

In summary, the Nazis did not want a "Crusade Against the Grail"; instead, they aimed to possess it, believing its legendary power would help them win the war and establish a "thousand-year Reich."

On pages 15-16, the author states, "the Third Crusade was preaching. Saladin had reconquered Jerusalem and replaced the cross in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with the Star and Crescent. He offered the Christians of Jerusalem a choice: either remain within the walls of the Holy City without being disturbed, or withdraw to the coastal cities of Tyre, Tripoli, or Akkon. Quite possibly, Princess India of Toulouse contributed to Saladin's generosity. After Nur ad-Din's death, Saladin married her and became the lord over the Seljuq Empire. Whatever the cause, the fact remains that Saladin did not drench the Holy Land in blood as the crusaders had eighty-six years earlier during the First Crusade, when, as Torcuato Tasso wrote, they "filled the city and the temple with corpses." Saladin's victory sowed fury and panic throughout the Western world. Rome preached another crusade. The harps of the troubadours accompanied the clergy's sermons. The most renowned poets, such as Bertran de Born, Peire Vidal, Guiraut de Bornelh, and Peire Cardina, called on the faithful to take part in the holy war. What really motivated the troubadours was not nostalgia for the holy places of Palestine, rather the desire to visit foreign lands and sing about their adventures in ballads and quatrains before ladies, desolate at having been left at home. How many feminine tears must have flowed when rhymers and knights departed their native lands with the cross on the armour and shields!"

The author on page 18 states that "God wishes that Philip of France and Richard of England fall into Saladin's hands. His greatest happiness would have come if the King of Aragon had also taken the cross and all three never returned. Frederick Barbarossa, together with his forces, was the first to leave his German homeland. En route, he had to break the resistance of the distrustful Greek emperor Issac Angelos. Only the occupation of Adrianopolis allowed him to continue his march and sail to Asia Minor. One year later, King Philip of France embarked from Marseille and Richard the Lionheart from Genoa. They had agreed that their fleets would gather in Messina, where they would wait until the spring. At that moment, a famous hermit named Joachim of Flora, who possessed the gift of prophecy, lived in Sicily. Following the model of the monasteries of Mount Athos, Lebanon, and the Sinai, he established convents in the mountains of Calabria, along the straits of Messina...Richard the Lionheart went to visit the illustrious monk and beseeched him to explain chapter twelve of the Apocalypse. The woman dressed as the sun, with a moon under her feet, and a crown of twelve stars on her head, is the church, said the hermit. The large red snake with seven heads and seven diadems is the devil."

On page 19, the author says, "The Crusade was a disaster. Frederick Barbarossa drowned in the Saleph, the same river where Alexander the Great was almost killed." Philip and Richard the Lionheart captured Akkon in July 1191 after two years of siege. The two rulers clashed over war spoils. The king of France left for Europe, and the military diminished; the counterforce prevailed against Richard the Lionheart's forces. Richard became aware that Philip was trying to annex Normandy and Anjou, and his brother wanted to take the crown of England from him. Consequently, Richard began to engage in diplomacy with Saladin rather than war. They agreed that Richard's sister, Joan, would marry Malek-Adel, and the two leaders would rule Jerusalem to end the three-year war.

On page 23, the author says that Richard the Lionheart passed away without a proper religious ceremony. The King of England, Ireland, Anjou, Arles, and Cyprus remained excluded from the Catholic Church.

On page 25, the author says, "A singular fact: Raimondo of Toulouse never wanted to go to the Holy Land, not even to visit Toulouse's Tripoli. He was the only one among the greatest Christian princes of the twelfth century who did not participate in the overseas crusade...He remained estranged from Occitan Catharism. It proposed a "Pure Doctrine" that the rest of the Christian world called a heresy. And yet the "Gospel of the Consoling Paracelete" needed his support."

Part Two:

On page 45, the author says, "Adam and Eve were two fallen angels, condemned to wander from star to star with Lucifer before their Earthly exile. Eve enjoys the same rights as Adam in Heaven as on Earth. she is not the "female" of Adam; rather, she is his domina, because, like ehri ancestors the Iberians and Celts, the Occitanians saw in womankind something prophetic and divine. The Jewish Eve is placed beneath man: she must first bear her father's name and later her husband's, and can never have her own. The most ancient families of Languedoc, especially in the Pyrenees, where the Celtic-Iberian traditions had achieved their highest degree of purity, always bore the names of their female ancestors. It was said, the Sons of Belissena da Impria, de Oliliveiria. These ladies' tools were not the spindle and the cradle; they preferred the pen and the sceptre."

The author, from pages 45 to 46, says that "Occitania, whose inhabitants very well appreciated the gifts of poetry and prophecy, qualities today as intuition and inspiration. The prayers of the Cathra-the errant troubadours-were nothing other than stanzas of the hymn to the luminous divinity that they received day to day in the symphony of tones and colours of their homeland. They were truly poets."

The author on page 50 says, "We humans-the fallen angels-must adapt ourselves to these two principles that have determined who we are. The spiritual man, the soul, is the work of the divine Word: material man, the body, isLucifer's creation. Our soul is holy, eternal. Our body is non-divine, perishable. The soul, created by God, is Spirit. Banished to the Earth for having rebelled against the Spirit, it has to remain in the body until it has recognized the vanity of earthly life and wishes to return to the Spirit. A person should begin to redivinize himself now on Earth in preparation for his return. In this case, souls, as they wander from star to star, must dematerialize themselves until the doors of their real home open for them."

The author on page 51 says, "The Earth, another creation of Lucifer, furnished the Cathars with their most precious home, where they could ponder the beauty created by the great artist beyond the stars. So they would not be forgotten, a heretical hand drew the sun and the silver disc of the moon-the only revelations of God who is love and light-on the marbled wall of the cave. As the water falls to the ground drop by drop from an arched ceiling lost in eternal night, it never changes its rhythm. Its stalactites are still from church benches for all those who wish to contemplate this wonderland for a moment."

The author, on page 54, says that "Latin authors believed the first inhabitants of Spain were Persians who migrated from the Caucasus. Greek historian Dion Cassius wrote that the Bebryces were the first inhabitants of the eastern Pyrenees. According to the Byzantine historian Zonaras, the Greek grammarian Stephanus of Byzantium distinguished two different Bebrice peoples: one that lived on the coast of the Black Sea and another that was settled in the Pyrenees, not far from the "Bebrice Sea," a primitive name for the Gulf of Leon."

The author, on page 55, says that "Originally, every God who was believed to inhabit a specific place where he exercised his power, and therefore was of local importance in contrast with other gods, was called Baal. In this way, there was Baal-Lebanon, a Baal-Chermon, etc. Little by little, Baal-Melkart of Tyre became the "God-Lord" of Phoenicia and Canaan, the "All-Mighty," the masculine generator, personified in the solar disc. His complement ("wife" as she was called in mythology) was Astarte, the feminine principle, receptive, enlightened, and personified by the moon. An inscription uncovered in Malta gives Hercules the title of proto-guide. It is well known that the cult of ancestors and mythology almost always has the same starting point."

The author, on page 56, says, "The Philosopher's Stone, or what others called the Golden Fleece! What was Parsifal seeking in Wolfram's poem that was referred to as 'the Grail'? A stone! The Lapsis exillis (Lapsis ex coelis)-Desire for Paradise!"

The author, on page 59, say, "Druidism was more a philosophc doctrine than a religion, and comprisd theology, astronomy, natural science, medicine, and law. What Caesar called "the discipline" of the Druids was nothing other than a dogmatic synthesis of these branches of knowledge, a synthesis that offered surprising affinites with Pythagorean philosophy and Hindu and Babylonian theogonic philosophies."

The author, on page 64, says, "According to Iranian Mazdaist doctrine, there have been two conflicting principles since the beginning of time: one is life-fertility, and the other death-destruction. The first is symbolized by the sun. The effusion of spiritual light, truth, and generosity was venerated in Ahura Mazda, the omniscient God. The second, symbolized by the darkness of night, contains error, evil, and lies, and finds its incarnation in Ahriman, the Devastator. Ahura Mazda created the sky and the Earth. His creation survived, but remained incomplete due to Ahriman's intervention. Humanity has the moral obligation to fight in favour of the "good" against "evil." In nature, it has to destroy all dangerous plants and animals-above allothers the serpent, "the enemy of God"-and promote the growth and development of useful creatures."

The author, on page 65, says, "This is why Voltaire said of the Zendavesta (the ' Sacred Writing' of Mazdaism) that he could not read 'two pages of his brew, attributed to the horrible Zarathustra, without feeling compassion for human nature."

Part Three:

The author, on page 115, says, " The doctors of the Catholic Church and their inquisitors considered Catharism a neo-Manichaeism because of its dualist theories. In reality, like the heresy of Manes (A.D. 216-276/77), it was a Manichaeism adapted to a Western mentality. The Mani, the symbol of Buddhist faith, found its faithful Cathar transcription in the Holy Spirit."

Part Four:

The author, on page 163, says, "If the heretical 'believes' allowed themselves to be converted, and renounced the heresy while promising to tell all the truth and denouncing their accomplices, the punishment that awaited them was relatively light: flagellation, pilgrimages, or a fine.

The author, from page 168 to page 169, says, "A statistic on the activities undertaken by the Toulouse Inquisitor Bernard Gui between 1308 and 1322 helps us understand how the persecution of the heretic could absorb such large sums of money:

Handed over to the secular arm and burned: 40 people
Remains exhumed and burned: 67 people
Jailed: 300 people
Exhumation of the rest of the persons who were previously jailed: 21 people
Condemned to wear crosses: 138 people
Condemned to pilgrimages: 16 people
Banished to the Holy Land: 1 person
At large: 36 people
Total: 619 people

[Novall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please add a reference to the German to English translator, Christopher Jones.
https://otto-rahn.com/fr/tags/christo...

The book brings to light an overlooked episode of French and Papal history, as well as the successful research completed by the author, the historian and SS officer Otto Rahn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Rahn

I have not yet read the English translation here, however the original German edition offers worthwhile insight into the scientific venture of a plausible connection between a mediaeval inquisition and folklore based on tales derived from the New Testament.

The issues with the text of this book and its narrative may be the manner in which the original German is rendered into English?

[Roland · Rating 5 out of 5]

outstanding!!!

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was an excellent and interesting read. Reading other reviews, people seem to accuse the book of having some historical inaccuracies, which may be true. However, this book should be taken as a theoretical piece, attempting to glue together different mythology and figures to create a potential physical path to find the Gral. This has always been a normal path for researchers of mythology to take, and I believe the book does it perfectly.

You shouldn't be taking this book as gospel, but rather using it to further your own ideas and beliefs on Grail, and to a further extent, Cathar, stories and history. You definitely have to read his followup, "Lucifer's Court," for this to be appreciated the most. As of writing this review, I'm only 50 odd pages into Lucifer's Court, and I can see how they should really be the same book, rather than separate entities.

[vhatos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Дуже старий твір про переслідування катарів, ймовірну історію Святого Грааля. Автор аналізує і цитує твори раннього середньовіччя. Цікаво для тих, хто у цій темі.

[Paolo Spaggiari · Rating 3 out of 5]

Importante dal punto di vista della storia della letteratura, con particolare riferimento agli studi sul Graal, ma in quanto a contenuti il saggio di Rahn è molto fantasioso e ben poco storico.

[Bobby Daugherty · Rating 3 out of 5]

An account of the Cathars and the persecution they endured by the Catholic Church. Rahn had always had an interest in the Grail mythos and was fortunate enough to come to the attention of Heinrich Himmler to gain the support to perform his research.

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is primarily a history of the Cathars and the Troubadour movement (but not the Templars, despite the subtitle of this version), as well as the Occitan civilisation, and detailing the Cathar beliefs, and their destruction in the Albigensian Crusade (as well as some choice comments on the Inquisition - Rahn was apparently strongly anti-Catholic). Apparently, it was one of the first commonly available histories of the subject when it came out in the 30s, and the translation is reasonably well written.

However, Rahn also speculates that they are the keepers of the/a Grail (maybe a collection of knowledge?), and that Montségur, their final stronghold, was the Grail castle described in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival.

Infinitely more worthwhile to read than the Graddon biography of the author!

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Otto Rahn was a good scholar for his time. I think many of his conclusions came from what he wanted to find and the pressure he was getting from his sponsors (Himmler's SS). This book is Rahn's research into the Holy Grail mythos. It is a great work for the grail scholar, but his conclusions are jaded. I would recommend it as a great source for grail material, just be sure to do your own analysis.

[Roy Peters · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall I enjoyed this book and found it interesting. Despite the title mentioning the Templars in the title, there was little about the Templars in the book. I expected the author to tie them in more. There is a lot of speculation, and much of the reading is tedious. Many people and places that are hard to keep track off. Unless you are familiar with the places, the troubadours, etc. I have started to read it a second time. Still, it is a worthwhile read.

[Warren Moeckel]

I was reading this book as filler while my then-girlfriend got her boob job reworked.
There is a lot of in-depth Medieval history going on in the book, and it is tiresome.
'Nuff said. The boobs turned out well, I just didn't ever get to see them much.

Thumbs up for historical perspective on the Cathari, though!

[Lisa Eirene]

Had to return to library before I was done reading it.

[Jorge · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quitando ciertas inexactitudes históricas sobre celtíberos y demás pueblos, es un libro muy interesante sobre los cataros y la cruzada albigense

[Gabriel Camiro · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not much about the Templars despite the title.