Having considered in our previous article for Arktos Journal the esoteric meaning of Minne as ‘loving remembrance’ in the Cathar esotericism of medieval Provence, we stopped at the fact that one of the important aspects of this spiritual teaching is a meritocratic striving upwards, accessible to few, and that on this path a person needs a guiding light and an example. In this essay, referring to Otto Rahn’s work Lucifer’s Court (1937), we will reveal Rahn’s interpretation of the divine, and what symbolic representation of it he offers. Discussing the crusaders’ siege of Montségur, one of the key fortresses of Provence, during the crusade against the Albigenses, Otto Rahn writes:
A sharp, multicolored picture representing Jesus Christ on the Mount of Olives was hanging on the wall of my room until now. It depicted a winged angel, emerging halfway out from a cloud and holding out to the faithful a monstrous cup. I have removed the picture and replaced it with a sheet of my best writing paper, upon which I wrote, as carefully and beautifully as I could, some verses of Wolfram von Eschenbach:
The authentic tale
With the conclusion to the Romance
Has been sent to us
In German lands from Provence;
When Lucifer made his descent to hell
With his following, humans developed.
Consider what Lucifer and his comrades achieved!
They were innocent and pure.
I prefer to believe that Satan’s, not Lucifer’s, armies stood before the walls of Montségur to steal the Grail, which had fallen from the Light Bringer, from Lucifer’s crown, and was kept by the pure ones. These were the Cathars, not those clerics and adventurers who, cross on chest, wanted to prepare the Languedoc for a new caste — their own.
This fragment forces us to return to the idea expressed in the first article of this series — that the Grail, according to Rahn’s interpretation, is not the chalice of Jesus of Nazareth, but the stone that fell from Lucifer’s crown, which brings immortality to those beholding it. In Rahn’s interpretation, the true servants of the devil are Christians who committed genocide against the Provençal people and their refined spirituality, and not Albigenses at all. Thus, the image of Lucifer, whom the Christian tradition portrays as a fallen angel who rebelled against God, has a completely different meaning from the conventional one in the work of the German medievalist. In the book, Otto Rahn recalls a conversation he had with a lady from a heretical family during a trip to the Toulouse region. She told him:
The great Esclarmonde was my bloodline. I am proud to see her in spirit on the platform of the keep of Montségur, gazing into the stars. The heretics loved the stars. They believed that after death, a soul wandered from star to star until it approached the stages of divinization of the spirit. In the morning, the heretics prayed to the rising sun. In the evening, they turned devoutly about-face at its departure. At night, they turned to the silvery moon or the north, because the north was holy to them. They regarded the south as the dwelling place of Satan. Satan is not Lucifer, because Lucifer means “light bringer”! The Cathars had another name for him: Lucibel. He was not the devil.
In other words, in Rahn’s narrative, Lucifer appears as a deity, which can be displayed as a constellation, as well as the sun and moon, in fact, a personification of the abstract splendor of nature and life itself. The brightest, most dazzling expression of this splendor is the Sun. The German medievalist calls the depiction of this entity as an ‘anti-god’ a substitution carried out by Christians. Moreover, continuing his explanation, he comes to the following identification, which may seem paradoxical at first glance:
The Old Testament and the New Testament do not speak of different or opposing Gods. For me, the Gods in both are one and the same. The Old Testament curses the “beautiful morning star”; yet the New Testament reveals in the Apocalypse of John a “king and angel of the abyss”, who has “in Greek the name Apollyon”. Apollyon (Απολλυων), the angel of the abyss and prince of this world, is none other than Apollo (Ἀπόλλων), the light bearer. My belief that the “morning star” of the Old Testament and the figure Apollyon, who appears in the New Testament, are one and the same is based on the fact that in Greek, the morning star, or Phosphoros (Φωσφόρος; this name also means “light bringer”), is the constant companion, messenger, and representative of the sun god Apollo, as the supreme Light Bringer was then called. Further, the beautiful “star of the morning” is a reference to the sun…
The Greeks celebrated the day of the spring equinox as their holiest festival. Apollo was the rising sun — a majestic and unalterable light. Times set for the sun god when Helios, who was initially admired as the main god only on the Isle of Rhodes in the seas off Asia Minor, assumed Apollo’s place or both became one with him.
Apollo and Lucifer
‘When Apollo appeared, the earth was said to have laughed. Did she know that she would be granted a merry science?’ asks Otto Rahn, mentioning the allegorical name of the poetic art of the Provençal troubadours (gai saber — merry science, or gay science). He consistently analyzes the symbolism of Pythia and her prophecies, noting that it is in Delphi that the ‘Castalian source of the muses and the source of the necessary Catharsis (κάθαρσις) — purification for conversation with God’ originates; then he writes on Artemis, Demeter, and comes to the following statement:
In the heyday of Catharism, a famous hermit named Joachim de Flora lived in Sicily. He was considered the best commentator on the Apocalypse of John. When the ninth chapter of Revelation speaks of grasshoppers, Joachim believed it referred to the Cathars: “Some with the strength of scorpions will come out from the bottomless depths of the abyss.” Joachim lamented that these Cathars were the personification of the Antichrist. He believed their power would grow and their king was already selected. In Greek, this king’s name is Apollyon.
Apollo cannot be any other than Lucifer, who was called Lucibel by the Provençal heretics. They believed that an injustice was done to Lucifer. The Cathars interpreted Lucifer’s fall as “the illegitimate usurpation of the firstborn son of God — Lucifer — by the Nazarene”.
Thus, for the German writer, the ancient Greek image of the solar god Apollo and the reconstructed Cathar image of Lucifer, a guide to the Pure Spirit, merge into one. Before continuing to follow Rahn’s line of thought, let us turn to the important explanations regarding the mythological image of Apollo, which are given by his countryman and contemporary Friedrich Georg Jünger (1898–1977) in his work Greek Myths (1947):
The area ruled by this god is wide and bright. It is radiant, like Apollo himself, from whom nothing is hidden, neither the present nor the future. As Aeschylus tells us, Apollo serves as the prophet of his father Zeus, declaring his will at the sanctuary of Dodona. Gifted with foresight inherited from Zeus, Apollo, as the god of prophecy, also presides over the oracle at Delphi.
He gives this gift to Hermes. Light emanates from Apollo, dispersing the darkness and thereby creating order. In this order, not only do all things take on concrete outlines, so that they become quite distinct and sharply differ from each other; in this light, boundaries also appear and a measure is established. It is not the light of Helios that circulates above the earth, disappears and reappears; it is the light that pours out from God and lays down laws. He does not accept the vague, obscure and confusing, and he opposes everything indefinite, ambiguous and wavering as the god of a definite decision. He has a measure of knowledge. His power abolishes the burden of inert and heavy confrontation; the ordering he performs simultaneously appears as the identification of more difficult and oppressive relationships that press people. This god communicates to his favorites his own lightness and confidence, the soaring power of his feet called to dance.
Friedrich Jünger draws our attention to the fact that Apollo, first of all, symbolizes clarity, determination, concreteness, confidence, but at the same time the lightness which he bestows on musicians and poets. Apollo is a calm and bright constancy; he is an image of the incarnate divine perfection, which, at the same time, is a boundary and a measure. Apollo is the ‘infinite present’, the god of the moment, who opposes delusions, the key of which is time itself. His harmony is synonymous with all that is beautiful, the expression of which, in turn, is art. Jünger adds to this:
Apollo gives his favorites his own ordering clarity, the crystal light of the formative spirit and the vividness that is peculiar to them. He opens his eyes. In the kingdom of Apollo of Lycia there is nothing dead and stagnant, everything here is full of life, every life has consciousness and every consciousness rises to joyful knowledge. There is no opposition of nature to the spirit here, since the flowering and filling of various forms is itself spiritual; the knower feels his oneness with growth which fills him with bliss…
He is the god of youth, the most beautiful god of youth. His image is the prototype of the beautiful, and the sculptors who owe so much to him compete with each other in an attempt to capture his beauty. They do not depict him sitting or lying down: the most beautiful thing is a standing, naked god, who best shows all the perfection of his figure.
Also, in this regard let us recall that the Italian traditionalist Julius Evola (1898–1974), discussing the North and the South in his work Revolt Against the Modern World (1934), indicates that ‘the Hyperborean stage may be characterized as that in which the luminous principle presents the characteristics of immutability and of centralism, which are, so to speak, typically “Olympian”. These are the same characteristics proper to the Hyperborean god Apollo, who unlike Helios, does not represent the sun following its patterns of ascent and of descent over the horizon, but is rather the sun itself, the dominating and unchanging source of light.’ In Evola’s traditionalist interpretation the sun appears as ‘pure light’ and ‘disembodied courage’, with which heroic myths are associated. The sun is also ‘a symbol of the supreme nature, triumphant every morning over darkness’, and a symbol of royal dignity. The Italian thinker quotes an ancient Egyptian source: ‘I have decreed that you must eternally rise as king of the North and of the South on the seat of Horus, like the sun’, and also notes that Mithra was called particeps siderum and ‘Lord of peace, salvation of mankind, eternal man, winner who rises in company of the sun’.
The linking of the ancient Greek mythological image of the radiant and beautiful Apollo, personifying the sun, and the Cathar Lucifer, ‘who suffered injustice’, undertaken by Otto Rahn, may at first surprise us. At the same time, this bold and seemingly unexpected move hides a solid and consistent spiritual position, which Rahn deduces on the basis of his life-long study of Cathar metaphysics and consistently expounds in Lucifer’s Court:
The cornerstone of Christianity is the belief in the personification of God through Jesus, the son of God who became a human being. The Cathars cryptically stood in contradiction to this concept. They said: We heretics are not theologians, but philosophers who seek only wisdom and truth. We have already recognized that God is Light and Spirit and Strength. Even if the earth is material, it exists in a relationship with God — through Light and Spirit and Strength. How could we and this world live together if the sun did not give us life? How could we think and recognize if we had no minds? How could we recognize truth and wisdom, which are so difficult to find, to seek, and, despite all obstacles, seek again and again, if we had no strength? God is Light and Spirit and Strength. He works within us…
We are not saying that the sun or another star is God. They are divine messengers and only bring him closer to us. The Cathars said: Divinity is multifaceted, but there are not several Gods, as we are often accused of believing. With our senses we can grasp only one part: nature. This is composed of ourselves, because we are perishable material; the thousandfold faulty world in which we have to live our lives; and the starry sky, days, and nights. Nature is not God the Father, who is absolute Light, Spirit, and Strength. She governs herself according to the laws given by God the Father…
Nature is not God, but she is divine. She is not absolute light, but is the bringer of light. She is not absolute strength, but is strength’s distributor. She is not absolute spirit, but from our birth she obtains an effective spirit in the law of realization that leads to God. This is the only real redemption. Our supreme light bringer is the sun. The leaders of the heavenly host, which some call angels, are nothing other than the stars. They are all subject as well to earthly laws. Thus, we can recognize humans if we search and observe the sky carefully, for the laws that reign up there and arrange our lives in such a way that we do not break divine law, but fulfill it. We must be children of the Light Bringer’s sun!
In connection with Rahn’s interpretations, let us note that both Friedrich Jünger and Julius Evola noted ‘solar permanence’ and ‘stability of light’ as the most important aspects of Apollo. Otto Rahn places the Sun at the center of his neo-Cathar spiritual system. At the same time, the Sun itself is also a part of Nature. Decisively deifying Nature (‘Nature is divine’), the German thinker makes another move towards pantheism. From the point of view of academic philosophy, in the ontology expounded by Rahn, we can see references both to ancient Greek pantheistic monism and to some forms closer to us in time (such as those formulated by Bruno and Spinoza). At the same time, we are again forced to return to the idea that the spiritual and philosophical source closest to Rahn (to which he occasionally refers in his works) is Meister Eckhart and his doctrine of the divine, which is manifested even in the arguments of the German medievalist about the trinity of the divine, which in Rahn’s model looks like ‘Light, Spirit and Strength’.
Ruins of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi
Next, Rahn links his pantheistic idea of the ‘children of the sun’ with the symbolism of Minne, ‘loving remembrance’, which we wrote about in our last article. He draws attention to the fact that ‘the Minnesingers abruptly rejected all Catholic theological concepts, terms, teachings, and legends. They sang not to Jehovah or Jesus of Nazareth, but to their hero Heracles or the god Amor. And this god was deeply hated by the vain Roman Church, which was rejected by the Cathars as “Satan’s synagogue” and a “basilica of the devil”.’ Elsewhere in the book, he notes: ‘God-Amor is the god of springtime, and Apollo is this god. Therefore, both Amor and Apollo are the god of the spring. He who restores the sunlight of the spring to earth is therefore a light bringer — a Lucifer.’
Here again, we should emphasize that according to Rahn and his interpretation of the Cathar faith, the true divine is not revealed to everyone. As we have already noted in previous articles, this openness requires a certain level of existential correspondence, which in the teachings of the German thinker is identified with ‘purity’ and ‘strength’. Then a genuine guide appears on the path of a person who will show him the ‘Rose Path’, or the way to the Light. Rahn writes in Lucifer’s Court:
The famous troubadour Peire Cardinal believed that God-Amor can be experienced by a strong spirit whose eyes have been cleared by faith. So sang the no less famous Peire Vidal, but he added that God appears only in springtime, and to catch a glimpse of him, we must go farther into his house, which is newly blossomed nature. This God looks like a knight: He has blond hair and rides on a light horse that is black like the night on one half and dazzling white on the other. A garnet on the reins shines like the sun. In this knight’s attendance is a paladin whose name is Loyalty (Treue).
Rahn’s metaphor ‘God looks like a knight’ is a topic for a separate discussion. For now, it is enough for us to note that the image of a blond knight-God on a horse, which is half black and half white, completes our discussion of the symbolic manifestations of the divine according to Otto Rahn. We should conclude this part of our story on Rahn’s spiritual system with the following quote from Lucifer’s Court which describes a vision that he experienced in Geneva:
Midday magic…
Lucifer came from the German forest into my room. I cannot see him, but I can feel his presence. It can only be Lucifer who lifts the pierce of temple frieze from my desk. Columns grow under it and the other rubble conforms to it as a roof. Apollo’s Delphi stands suddenly in virginal beauty before me, and, through the sacred darkness of the olive trees and laurel bushes, I gaze at the sentence: “Know thyself!”.
The phrase ‘know thyself’, or ‘γνῶθι σεαυτόν’ (gnothi seauton), is a reference to the famous inscription on the wall of the Delphic temple of Apollo; according to Plato, this is the ‘testament of the seven great sages’, or ‘commandment of the Delphic oracle’. This passage brings us back to one of Rahn’s most important thoughts — that the Cathars were ‘not theologians, but philosophers’. Ultimately, the pursuit of self-knowledge is one of the most important virtues available to us, and without awareness of ourselves, our goals and objectives in the world, it is extremely difficult to take steps towards a productive and conscious life, as hinted at by the German writer and his solar guide.
Having completed the explanation of what exactly the German scientist deduces under the image of ‘Cathar Lucifer’, in the final part of our story about Otto Rahn’s spiritual quest, we’ll move to the systematic presentation of his vision of the principles of medieval Provençal metaphysics.
