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Close Encounters with the Ancient World

In a distant land, unreachable by your strides, a castle

by the name of Mont Salvat exists.

Wolfram von Eschenbach

I first came to the remote Pyrenean settlement of Montségur and scaled the mountain overlooking the village in the dog days of the summer of ’92. Britain’s Channel Four television had recently broadcast a hit show entitled The Real Jurassic Park, concerning efforts to extract dinosaur DNA from amber and were looking at a potential follow-up, provisionally entitled The Real Raiders of the Lost Ark, for a similar child-friendly, early evening slot. They say the devil makes work for idle hands and when the religion department offered me a healthy advance to research the story I jumped at the chance, being shy of a few pence at the time.

My initial companions on this ill-advised venture were a young researcher and occasional contributor to Britain’s leading paranormal journal The Fortean Times, Mike Dee, and my then partner, artist, and designer Cat Knightly.

Given the European war had been over for forty-seven years and I had no great faith in the stories that Adolf Hitler was secretly alive and living in Argentina or Antarctica, I had no reason to believe I might be putting Cat in danger by bringing her with me. None of us had the slightest inkling of the rabbit hole we were about to fall into or just how deep that hole would be, a black hole in consensus reality lined with jagged, inconvenient data that would tear apart everything I thought I knew about modern Europe and give me an unwanted insight into the dark forces that brood over our fragile civilization. Certainly the meridional sun shone brightly enough and the day was warm as we steered our rental car up the winding road, threading its way ever deeper into the mountainous heart of the Ariège, a region described by the Guardian newspaper as "western Europe’s last great wilderness area" but they do say that about the Pyrenees, "warm in the sunshine and cold in the shadows."

The Hitler survival myth and the so-called Nazi mysteries began to take root in the popular psyche shortly after the last round of the war was spent and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party officially ceased to exist as a political entity, setting in motion a determined effort to define an esoteric aspect to National Socialism and reposition Mein Kampf as a mystical or quasi-religious text. Thousands of SS men and ordinary Wehrmacht confined to detention camps or facing ruin in postwar Germany sought an ideal they could cling to that was beyond the reach of the conquering Allies and unsullied by the criminal actions of their vanquished leadership. Some retreated into denial, while others found reassurance in viewing defeat as an inevitable phase in a millennial struggle that would eventually see their errant beliefs exonerated and the greater Aryan race triumph over its imaginary oppressors.

The earliest accounts of these Nazi mysteries surface in Pauwels and Bergier’s rambling occult exegesis The Dawn of Magic, also published as The Morning of the Magicians (1960), and Hitler et la Tradition Cathare, also published as The Occult and the Third Reich (U.S. paperback edition, 1971), by Jean-Michel Angebert, a joint pseudonym for Michel Bertrand and Jean Angelini. These two books raised the specter of nebulous occult forces lurking behind the banal facade of the Third Reich. This largely mendacious mythology was codified and compounded in Trevor Ravenscroft’s The Spear of Destiny (1972), a book the author later admitted was based on channeled information achieved through his alleged astral communion with the spirit of late theosophist Walter Johannes Stein, erroneously positioning this mild mannered literary historian as Hitler’s occult initiator.

Despite the wildly contentious nature of his material, Ravenscroft’s popular bestseller successfully promulgated the unsubstantiated notion that the Reich had deliberately sought to gain control over a series of talismanic power objects including the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, and the Spear of Longinus, a spear literally believed to have pierced Christ’s side on the cross, a shopping list of lost relics that got longer as the tales grew taller. Ravenscroft’s opus doubtless served to fuel Lawrence Kasdan’s screenplay for Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), leaving us with the sticky problem of trying to determine whether there was any truth to the murky backstory behind Spielberg’s beloved classic.

I don’t know why Channel Four television picked me for the job. Perhaps it was just the hat. My field of study had been anthropology, and I had no real background as a military or medieval historian, despite considering myself widely read.

During the early phases of our research, Mike Dee had drawn my attention to a curious, pseudo-autobiographical memoir written by a retired Texan army officer and chili cook-off champion, Colonel Howard Buechner, a self-published book entitled Emerald Cup, Ark of Gold (1991). Buechner’s main claim to fame, that he was the "first Allied doctor to enter Dachau," has gone largely unchallenged, but these events take up less than a chapter of his very strange autobiographic account. Instead the former U.S. army surgeon unpacks an unlikely yarn concerning an obscure sect of heretical Christians, commonly known as the Cathars, who flourished in the south of France in the twelfth century and were said to have counted among their treasures the most high Holy Grail, a relic believed by Buechner to have been the literal emerald cup of Abraham.

According to Buechner’s claims, based on unsubstantiated oral testimony allegedly drawn from captured Nazis after the war, the Reich had dispatched their very own Grail hunter, a mysterious occult scholar and medievalist named Otto Rahn who succeeded in locating the sacred treasure in the French Pyrenees but died before it could be secured. Buechner was crucially unclear about quite how or when Rahn was supposed to have died, hinting that he had turned against his Nazi masters and either committed suicide or perished in the camps, suggesting he was held in Dachau until the latter stages of the war, only to be executed shortly before the arrival of the U.S. first army. The Holy Grail, Buechner insisted, was retrieved from the castle of Montségur in a daring commando raid, led by none other than elite paratrooper Otto Skorzeny.

At this stage, I was pretty much ready to throw Buechner’s book at the wall, given Skorzeny’s name tends to crop up in connection with every Nazi conspiracy theory, from dinosaur survivals to the Hollow Earth. It was true Skorzeny had rescued Benito Mussolini from the Allies in an extraordinary glider assault on the mountaintop fortress that held the fascist dictator in the fall of 1943, but virtually everything else written about the colorful commando leader usually turned out to be an exaggeration, if not outright fabrication. I suspected this tale would prove to be little more than another wild fiction. It certainly had all the elements of a pulp fantasy. It was all but impossible to believe in the existence of the Holy Grail as a physical relic and if this suggestion was not already far-fetched enough, Buechner went on to claim the "emerald cup" had been spirited to Antarctica in a secret U-boat convoy at the end of the war, apparently along with the "real Adolf Hitler."

In a psychotic variant on the myth of the eternal return, embroidered over the years by countless pseudohistorians and right-wing mythomaniacs, the führer was rumored to have survived the fall of Berlin, safe in the protective womb of a secret Nazi base hidden deep within the permafrost, presiding over the continuing esoteric struggle against the war’s exoteric victors from his lair within the Hollow Earth, apparently waiting for the stars to come round before rising like Cthulhu to conjure a victorious Fourth Reich from the frozen embers, a second coming symbolized by the black sun, the twelve-armed Merovingian rune wheel inlaid on the floor of the Hall of the Supreme Leadership in the SS order castle, the Schloss Wewelsburg, whose twelve radiant lightning bolts are believed by some to literally represent the dark light of the world within.

While entertaining enough in a Boys Own Adventure kind of way, I was only too aware that Buechner’s fantasy had a potentially dangerous downside. Since the assassination of their leader George Lincoln Rockwell in the sixties, the American Nazi Party had taken a subtle and insidious approach to the media, adopting the neo-Trotskyite policy of entryism, infiltrating pop cultural movements such as the UFO community or the New Age movement (via intermediaries such as David Icke and Nexus magazine) to sow the seeds of militant pan-Aryanism without drawing attention to their racist agenda. The so-called Nazi mysteries (i.e., Ravencroft’s spear, Kasdan’s ark, and Buechner’s emerald cup) had been adopted into the canon of these toxic beliefs and there is no doubt modern white supremacists have reaped some small benefit from old Indiana Jones in the process, something Steven Spielberg definitely wouldn’t like to consciously consider. All publicity is good publicity, after all. It was possible these seemingly harmless fantasies could inadvertently prick the curiosity of young minds, while simultaneously distracting from the cruel memory of the Reich itself by erroneously suggesting the Nazis were an interesting, potentially spiritual people with something to say rather than just a bunch of murderous common thugs.