The Nazi Quest for the Holy Grail: Otto Rahn’s Books and Col. Howard Buechner’s Imagination

The field of Nazi Grail lore owes its existence to Otto Rahn. Rahn was an adventurer, linguist, amateur historian, spelunker and member of the SS-Ahnenerbe.

otto rahn
Do any amount of research on Rahn and you’ll soon be confronted with the moniker, ‘The Nazi Indiana Jones’, but realistically, Otto was just a nerd who caught the attention of Heinrich Himmler after writing a dumb book about the Holy Grail. After this, Himmler gave him a job in the Ahnenerbe, the division of the SS that was assigned to try to use mythology to glorify the Aryan race. Otto was allegedly gay and half Jewish, but he took the job. (I don’t really blame him.) Once the SS got a better idea of who Rahn really was, they demoted him, and he ended up killing himself.

Rahn wrote two books, both of which I’ll review in this post. However, before looking at Rahn’s work, it was essential for me to read the book that almost all of Rahn’s work was based on, Wolfram Von Essenbach’s Parzival.

wolfram parzifal

The Holy Grail has been discussed on this blog several times before, and while researching for one of those posts, I read Chretien De Troye’s foundational grail tale, Perceval, the Story of the Grail. De Troye’s book is the first time the Holy Grail appears in literature, but he never describes the exact nature of the Grail. De Troyes’ Perceval was never finished, but a German poet named Wolfram Von Eschenbach rewrote it and added an ending. Von Eschenbach’s version, Parzival, is a more complete, lengthy and influential text, and it plays an important role in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Dark Gods, The Spear of Destiny and even The Werewolf’s Revenge. It is to my great shame that I admit to having reviewed those books without first slogging through the Parzival. I knew I’d have to read this before looking at Rahn’s stuff, so I borrowed a copy of A.T. Hatto’s translation from my library.

Jesus Christ, this book was so fucking boring. It’s so, so bad. The writing is dense, meandering and dull. The art of writing novels was clearly not yet perfected in the 13th century. A stupid lad ends up in a castle and sees a magic stone and some other weird shit but doesn’t bother to ask his host about it. Then he runs around for years trying to figure out what happened. Honestly, if you want more detail than that, skip the book and read a synopsis online; consuming this trash was a horrid experience. Yuck.

Crusade Against the Grail: The Struggle between the Cathars, the Templars, and the Church of Rome
Otto Rahn
Inner Traditions – 2006 (Originally published 1933)

Otto Rahn’s first book, Crusade Against the Grail, is the latest addition my list of unfinished books. I’m generally pretty obstinate when it comes to finishing boring books, but this one got the better of me. After spending months slogging through Parzival and Rahn’s other book, I simply could not bring myself to finish this. I got about three quarters of the way through before admitting to myself that I had no idea what Rahn was describing. I could either start again or read another 50 pages of text without having a clue as to what was going on. Fuck that. This is terrible, awful, boring, dull garbage.

As far as I can tell, the basic idea behind this book is that the Cathars of Southern France were gnostics and that they were in possession of the Holy Grail. (This idea became very popular with later occult/conspiracy writers.) Rahn believed that Wolfram Von Essenbach’s Parzival was actually a Cathar document, and that it could provide details on how to find the Grail, which he seemed to think was still hidden near the Cathar stronghold of Montsegur.

It’s not until his next book that Rahn makes clear what the Holy Grail actually is.

lucifer's court otto rahn Lucifer’s Court: A Heretic’s Journey in Search of the Light Bringers – Otto Rahn
Inner Traditions – 2008 (Originally published 1937)

Lucifer’s Court is Otto Rahn’s travel journal. He travelled around Europe, mostly Southern France, looking for details on the Holy Grail. The most interesting part of this book is Rahn’s thesis that the Holy Grail is nothing to do with the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper. Rahn believed that the Holy Grail was a stone from the crown of Lucifer that fell out during his fall. Rahn believed that Lucifer, the Light Bringer, is a source of goodness, and he equates the christian/jewish god with an evil demiurge figure, just as the Cathars supposedly did centuries ago. Otto Rahn was a self proclaimed Luciferian.

Honestly, this book is actually very boring, and it’s not very convincing. Rahn’s sources are mostly folktales, legends and works of fiction. The way that Lucifer’s Court is broken up into a journal format makes it significantly easier to read than Crusade Against the Grail, but this was still very dull.

Ok, so that’s three shit books so far, one of which is considered a classic of literature and the other two are well known in certain circles. Now I want to present to you something a little stranger, Col. Howard Buechner’s Emerald Cup – Ark of Gold. I first heard of this book in an episode of Myth Hunters years ago, and for some reason I can’t remember, I set my heart on finding a copy. I eventually found an affordable copy online and bought it, but it remained on my shelf for four years before I got around to reading it. I was pretty happy to discover that my copy is actually signed by the author.

emerald cup - ark of gold howard buechner Emerald Cup – Ark of Gold: The Quest of SS Lt. Otto Rahn of the Third Reich
Col. Howard Buechner
Thunderbird Press – 1991

The Holy Grail was given to Abraham by Melchizideck (a character from the Old Testament who some view as a proto-Jesus). It got lumped in with the treasure of Solomon at some stage but was later separated from this trove and ended up in some junk store until teenage Jesus saw it. Then teenage Jesus went to England with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea. He lived there until he was about 30. When he came back to Judea, he got to work on the whole Christ thing, and when he realised that the shit was about to hit the fan, he threw a party with his mates and decided to use his fancy cup. When Jesus died, his friend used this same cup to catch some of the fluid that was leaking from the hole in the side of Christ’s corpse.

According to Buechner, this grail ended up in the hands of the Cathars after being brought to France after the crucifixion. Although Rahn described the Grail as a stone from Lucifer’s crown, to Buechner, it is the standard Jesus beaker. Buechner does acknowledge that some believe that one of the decorative stones on the Grail might have originally come from the crown of Lucifer, but he also claims that Rahn believed that there were two separate grails, the standard one and a separate German one. (Confused yet?) Although Otto Rahn’s name appears in the title of Buechner’s book, I was not convinced that Buechner had actually read Rahn’s work. It seems a bit like he read somebody else’s summaries of Rahn’s books. While he references several works of absolute nonsense (Holy Blood, Holy Grail, The Spear of Destiny, Morning of the Magicians), he acknowledges that at the time of writing Emerald Cup, he had not read Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism, the seminal academic work on Nazi occultism.

Buechner believed that Rahn (and our old friend Bérenger Saunière from Holy Blood, Holy Grail) had found the treasure of the Cathars. He claims that Rahn either would not or could not take the treasure to Heinrich Himmler, so Himmler sent in Otto Skorzeny to collect it.

Otto_Skorzeny Otto “Nazi Supervillain Extraordinaire” Skorzeny

Otto Skorzeny was a Nazi hero. He helped kidnap Mussolini, and he had a big scar across his face. There’s lots of bullshit stories about him. Buechner’s tale is is one of these. There is proof that Skorzeny was in Yugoslavia on the date that he was supposedly retrieving the Grail from France.

Buechner claims that after Skorzeny delivered the Grail to his superiors, it was shipped to Antarctica in a submarine so that it could be deposited in a magical cave that leads to the center of the Earth. (This magical cave also leads to a void from which the echoes of strange voices can be heard.) At the end of the book, Buechner admits that the package that was sent to Antarctica may well have been a map marking the current location of the Grail rather than the Grail itself.

I reckon that any speculation on the final conundrum of Buechner’s book is a complete waste of time. Absolutely all of his book is rubbish. Many of his claims are based on untruths. His sources are books of nonsense. None of what Buechner claims is remotely convincing. He never mentions Otto Rahn’s homosexuality, and actually claims that instead of dying, the young adventurer may have had extensive plastic surgery and changed his first name to Rudolf. Rudolf Rahn was a real person, and there is a record of his life before Otto’s death, so I don’t really understand how Buechner was willing to put such a stupid theory forth in writing.

otto rahn rudolf rahn

Throughout Buechner’s nonsense, he repeatedly references a book called The Occult and the Third Reich. A few years ago, this would have been enough to convince me to read this book, but I no longer have much of an interest in this crap. Buechner has a few other books about similar topics, but I have no intention of tracking them down either. Some of my blog posts are a breeze to write. I’ll read a novel in an afternoon and then write the review while I’m waiting for dinner. This post took a lot of time and effort. Reading these books was a thoroughly unpleasant experience, and I can’t recommend any of them to anyone. Do yourself a favour and read something good instead.

As for Otto Rahn, his reputation as the Nazi Indiana Jones is pretty silly. He seems to have been a lonely, tragic figure whose tendency to speculate wildy drew the attention of the Nazi Party and eventually led to his death.

Richard Jaccoma’s Occult Adventure Trilogy – Yellow Peril, The Werewolf’s Tale and The Werewolf’s Revenge –

The Werewolf’s Tale – Richard Jaccoma
Fawcett Gold Medal – 1988

“This book is quite awful. It’s about a New York detective who turns into a werewolf while investigating a team of vampires, a Nazi occultist from Atlantis and the mummy of an Egyptian black magician. There’s a few references to Lovecraftian entities, and the werewolf detective has sex with a lot of women. This might have worked as a series of comic books, but there’s too much stuff going on for this to function as a cohesive novel.”

I wrote the above paragraph in August, right after finishing The Werewolf’s Tale. Looking back, I think I might have been overly harsh. I had just finished reading Bari Wood’s excellent The Tribe, and that novel had enough in common with this one to make Jaccoma’s book seem awful in comparison. They’re very different books, but they’re set in the same place and both feature Rabbis as important characters, and I reckon these similarities made the shift from grim thriller to ludicrous adventure novel seem extra jarring.

richard jaccoma werewolf's revenge The Werewolf’s Revenge – Richard Jaccoma
Fawcett Gold Medal – 1991

By the time I got around to reading the sequel, The Werewolf’s Revenge, I found it much easier to enjoy Jaccoma’s supernatural parody of noir fiction. The events in here are even more sensational than the first novel, but I knew what to expect by this point and was able to enjoy the ride.

Honestly, it’s only been a few months since I read The Werewolf’s Revenge, but I can’t say that I remember much about the plot. It’s more of the same crap. It features all the characters from the first novel (the Atlantean sorcerer, the evil Egyptian mummy, the sexy Jewish vampire, the sexy Nazi werewolf…) but this one also features Jacques De Molay of Knight’s Templar fame, along with some Satyrs and other mythical beasts. Oh yeah, and at one point, one of the characters finds the Necronomicon. While I can’t remember the precise details of the complicated plot, I do remember enjoying it far more than I had expected. It’s not high literature, but it’s not unbearable.

Things got a bit uncomfortable for me when a character called John Weymouth-Smythe appears in the story. I recognised that name from somewhere. It turned out to be from the inside cover of the paperback I was holding. Aside from the two Werewolf books I’ve just reviewed, Richard Jaccoma had only written one other novel, the dubiously titled “Yellow Peril” The Adventures of Sir John Weymouth-Smythe. It quickly became apparent that while Yellow Peril and The Werewolf’s Tale are unrelated works, The Werewolf’s Revenge is actually a linking sequel to both novels. I had been looking forward to finishing the pair of Werewolf novels and being done with Richard Jaccoma, but when I saw Yellow Peril being described as an erotic occult adventure about a secret agent fighting satanic Nazis, I knew that I was going to have to complete the trilogy. It was quite annoying though because it was actually written way before both of the books I had already read, and I hate reading a series out of sequence.

richard jaccoma yellow peril Yellow Peril: The Adventures of Sir John Weymouth-Smythe – Richard Jaccoma
Berkley Books – 1980 (First published in 1978)

Ok, it’s currently 2020, so let’s just address the obvious racism straight away. This is clearly an outdated piece of writing that crosses all kinds of boundaries that don’t need to be crossed. Richard Jaccoma actually apologizes for the racist attitudes of the book’s characters in a short preface, but this apology falls short of what we’d expect today. While it is the characters in the book who voice racist opinions, the author was ultimately marketing these ideas as entertainment, regardless of whether he believed in them himself. This book was written 42 years ago though, and I don’t think that Richard Jaccoma was intentionally being a horrible person. The guy went on to write 2 books about a Nazi-hunting werewolf, and it’s actually the Jewish and Chinese characters in this book who actually turn out to be good, so I reckon he’s probably not a bigoted hatemonger.

Racism aside, is Yellow Peril any good? It’s pretty much the same thing as the Werewolf books, but here the narrator is British rather than American. He doesn’t have any super powers, but he works alongside the head of the Golden Dawn, a crew of Satanic Nazi paedophiles, a horde of Yetis and some very strange Asian occultists. The conflict in this novel is driven by the quest for the Spear of Destiny, and yes, I mean the version of the Spear of Destiny written about by Trevor Ravenscroft. The narrator is a bit of an idiot, and the story itself is pretty dumb, but it wasn’t absolutely horrible to read.

Richard Jaccoma used to work as the managing editor for Screw Magazine, a pornographic weekly newspaper, and he wrote the screenplay for a 1977 porno called Punk Rock. Yellow Peril advertises itself as “A porno-fairytale-occult-thriller” on the cover, but I felt like it actually had less sex than the Werewolf books. I skimmed over the sex-scenes, as I wanted to get through this quickly, but I couldn’t help but notice that one of these scenes contains a lengthy description of the protagonist anally raping an evil Nazi. As soon as he finishes raping her, another Nazi, who has been peeping on them, cums all over the rapists back.

richard jaccoma werewolf trilogy
I’ll just leave it at that. The fact that these books aren’t hugely popular isn’t really surprising.

The Doctor Orient Series, Books 5-8

I published a post on the first 4 Doctor Orient novels at the beginning of last year. If you’re not familiar with this series, you might want to read that post before reading this one.

The Priestess – Frank Lauria
Bantam Books – 1978

This one sees the Doctor getting involved in a voodoo cult in Florida while he’s on the run from a government agency. Owen Orient is alone in this book; his friends from the previous novels are entirely absent here. This is pretty much what you’d expect, lots of sexy ladies, cocaine and snakes. Pretty good. The previous owner of my copy seems to have been very knowledgeable on the subject of Cuban witchcraft; my book is filled with notes on Lecumi.

The Seth Papers – Frank Lauria
Ballantine Books – 1979

The Seth Papers is both the shortest Doctor Orient novel and the only epistolary novel in the series. I quite enjoyed the book, but it’s based around a rather strange idea. It’s about an Italian neofascist secret society that is attempting to retrieve the mythological Hand of Seth to take control of the Vatican. It was published in 1979, a good 2 years before the general public was made aware of P2, the Italian neofascist secret society that close ties with the Vatican and the Mafia. Did Frank Lauria come up with a plot that resembled reality by coincidence? If not, how did he know about this strange secret society? How did he publish a book about it and live? Those P2 lads hung a lad from a bridge for less!

Blue Limbo – Frank Lauria
Frog, Ltd. – 2001 (Originally published 1991)

Doctor Orient’s 1991 return sees him in Jamaica battling another High Priest of Voodoo. As usual, the plot involves the main character falling for an evil woman and getting himself into serious trouble. There’s a nuclear submarine, some zombies, a psychic albino and some Cuban agents thrown into the mix too. The plot of this one was overly complicated. There was also a character who only spoke in rhymes. That really pissed me off. It didn’t make him sound mystical or profound; it made him sound like an annoying little cunt. This was my least favourite entry in the series.

Demon Pope – Frank Lauria
Rothco Press – 2014

More than 2 decades after his last outing, the doctor returns to New York. Unfortunately for him, he gets involved with a group of Satanic immortal Nazi clones who are have stolen the Spear of Destiny and are planning to use it to take control of the Vatican.

Unlike other occult detectives, Doctor Orient is a powerful psychic, and at times throughout the series, this gives him opportunities to solve impossible problems. He’ll topple over a candlestick into a curtain, causing a distraction that allows him escape from a guarded room. He can also talk to people on the astral plane, and this allows him to track his friends and enemies down without GPS. The first Orient novel was published in 1970, and he uses these powers throughout all of his adventures. In Demon Pope, a novel published 44 years into Owen Orient’s career as a hero, he acquires a new skill. Now he is able to transform into a panther. Honestly, this was a bit hard to swallow.

Demon Pope is a bit of a mess to be honest. It’s very unclear as to why the stuff that is happening is happening. There’s a part at the beginning where a teenage girl is sacrificed that is never explained. Also, the text is full of typos. You’d have thought that somebody at Rothco Press would have read over Frank’s manuscript before printing it. That being said, this was still a fairly enjoyable read.

doctor orient complete The Complete Collection

The first 6 Doctor Orient novels were published in the 70s. After The Seth Papers, Doctor Orient kept his head down for over a decade. After returning in 1991’s Blue Limbo, he would take another two decades off before coming back for Demon Pope. Why such long waits? I’ve actually discovered the answer to this seldom asked question. In 1982, Doctor Orient made a brief appearance in comic book form. He was given several pages in both editions of Steve Englehart’s 1983 Scorpio Rose comics. This was supposed to have at least one more part, but the series was cancelled because it wasn’t very popular. The 3rd edition of Scorpio Rose was eventually published in a collection of Englehart’s work, but this did not contain a 3rd installment of Doctor Orient’s adventures.

scorpio rose doctor orient

So what happens in the Doctor Orient comics? Not as much as I’d have liked – they’re really short. The Doctor exorcises a young girl and ends up going back in time to fight with a Nazi called Von Speer. Sound familiar? It will to anyone who has read Demon Pope. It seems as though Demon Pope is the novelisation of the story Frank Lauria wrote or at least started writing in the early 80s for the Orient comics. While Demon Pope wasn’t published until 2014, Lauria had actually come up with the plot for it only a few years after finishing The Seth Papers.

Well, that’s that. It took me more than 3 years to collect and read the entire Doctor Orient series, but now it’s done. It’s a bit of push to classify these as horror novels; they’d be more accurately described as adventure books about occult phenomena. While Doctor Orient probably isn’t the greatest Occult Detective out there, these novels were very entertaining, and if there’s ever another published, you know I’ll be reading it. As of now, Raga Six (#2) was my favourite. I’ve also reviewed Frank Lauria’s The Foundling if you’re interested.

Nazi Poltergeists – Michael Falconer Anderson’s The Unholy

the unholy - michael falconer anderson.jpg

Roughly a year ago, I read and reviewed Michael falconer Anderson’s Blood Rite. It was an exceptionally dry, unimaginative, style-less piece of trash. If you had asked me then about the likelihood of me reading another book by the same author, I would have said it was extremely slim. But this was only because I didn’t realise that Michael Falconer Anderson had also written a horror novel whose cover featured a skull with swastikas for eyeballs.

A train crashes on its way into a small English town because its driver suddenly becomes convinced that he’s actually driving a train full of unfortunates to a concentration camp. A mysterious box belonging to the train’s most suspicious passenger is lost in the crash, and soon thereafter a troop of supernatural Nazis (they’re half ghost and half zombie) start killing, raping and possessing the locals. A newspaper editor and his psychic friend deduce that these horrible occurrences are due to the presence of some terrible talisman of power.

The major selling point of The Unholy is obviously its cover, but one glance at such will spoil the central mystery of the book for the astute reader. Once the protagonists realise who and what they’re dealing with, they have no choice but to find and destroy the most sacred relic of the Reich.

Preventing them from doing so is the mysterious occultist David Preese, a character clearly based on Aleister Crowley. Another character describes him thus, “You may remember about five years ago the newspapers were calling him “The Beast”. He’s involved in all kinds of things. He’s even started his own religion – the Priests of the Aryan Dawn. It’s some kind of mixture of old Indian religions and Teutonic myths…” Preese is soon thereafter depicted performing a sex magic ritual with two teenagers. He later turns out to have been the mysterious individual who lost the box during the train crash.

This book is quite bad – much like Blood Rite, the actual writing is like eating a sandwich with no filling. The plot of The Unholy however, is far, far more interesting. It’s like a mixture of Emmerdale, Evil Dead and Downfall. It only took a few days to read, and I actually quite enjoyed it. Shall I seek out and read Michael Falconer Anderson’s other horror novels? I might.

One interesting feature of this book is how it deals with the Holocaust. I doubt very much that this would find a major publisher today. Nazis are clearly presented in an evil light, but the victims of the Holocaust are also made part of the horror. At one point the protagonist watches as the Nazis gun down a herd of people into a pit. That stuff actually happened, and it’s scarier than any ghost stories. It feels a bit cheap for an author of horror fiction to exploit it.

The crazy thing about this novel is that I discovered it existed after buying it. I was glancing through my search history on abebooks when I saw a book that I didn’t recognise. I had ordered it a year previously, but it never arrived, and I had totally forgotten ever buying it. This has never happened before. I found a pdf copy online though, so at least I didn’t have to buy it again.

The Secret King: The Myth and Reality of Nazi Occultism – Stephen E. Flowers and Michael Moynihan

secret king nazi occultism flowers moynihan.jpg
The Secret King: The Myth and Reality of Nazi Occultism
Michael Moynihan and Stephen E. Flowers
Feral House – 2007

Of all of the books on Nazi occultism that I’ve read, this is the most limited in its scope. I don’t mean that as a criticism of the writing; I mention it because this book is probably not the best place to start for a person who doesn’t know much about the topic. That being said, the first section of the book on the Myth of Nazi Occultism is actually quite informative. The rest of book focuses on one man. This is not merely a biography of that man though; much of the book is made up of translations of his work.

The authors point out that while there were several mystical individuals who played a role in developing the myth of Nazi occultism, only of of these individuals was actually a high ranking member of the Nazi party. This individual was Karl Maria Wiligut.

Wiligut advocated Irminism. This belief system requires its followers to hold the notion that the Bible is largely true, but that it was originally a Germanic text written roughly 12,000 years ago. Over time, the text was corrupted by Odinists, Jews and Christians. The real Jesus wasn’t a Jew. He was actually Germanic hero named Baldur-Kristos.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Karl Maria Wiligut spent several years of his life in a mental hospital before joining the Nazi party. His wife had him committed because he kept talking about being a descendant of Odin. He was certifiably insane.

When he got out of the loony bin, he was introduced to Heinrich Himmler. Himmler, who was greatly interested in occult ideas, was impressed and made Wiligut a Brigadeführer in the SS. Karl did a few bits and pieces for Himmler, helping design the Totenkopfring and develop Wewelsburg castle as Himmler’s ceremonial heart of the SS.

totenkopf ring design.jpg Wiligut’s design on the cover of an SS magazine.

Wiligut didn’t write much, and what he did put to paper is horrible to read. This book contains a few poems that were translated for meaning rather than poetry (thank goodness!), a description of a picture, an essay about women’s role in society, and a few other bits and pieces about runes and astrology and the like. Yuck. There’s also an interview with Wiligut’s former assistant, but most of the information she gives has been covered in the book’s introduction.

The introductory chapters are interesting enough, but the primary sources included here will only be a valuable resource to those interested in understanding what a crazy old Nazi thought about runes and astrology. I can’t say I was all that interested.

(I’ve previously reviewed other books by both Michael Moynihan and Stephen E. Flowers if you’re interested.)

Lowering the Tone – Cameron Pierce’s Ass Goblins of Auschwitz

Ass Goblins of Auschwitz – Cameron Pierce
Eraserhead Press – 2009

Ugh… Hmmmmm….. Ehhhhhh…….

This book first showed up on my radar a few years ago when an uncle jokingly posted an image of its cover to my facebook wall. (I think I deleted his post so that my woke friends wouldn’t give me any hassle.) I came across the book’s title again when I was reading about Bizarro fiction for my review of Carlton Mellick III’s The Cannibals of Candyland. I found a copy very easily, and before I knew it I was actually sitting on the bus to work reading Ass Goblins of Auschwitz.

There were a few moments at the beginning when a part of me (probably a few parts actually) told me to stop reading. There weren’t any specific events in the text that prompted this; it was more the realisation that I was giving attention to a person who was shamelessly looking for attention. The book isn’t about the real Auschwitz or real Nazis, and while that’s fortunate in some ways, it’s a let down in others. Cameron Pierce wasn’t making a bold statement about human nature, resilience or suffering. He was using the word Auschwitz because that word would make people notice his silly book.

I used to work in a coffee shop. One day a man walked into the shop with a live parrot on his shoulder. Every single customer in the shop commented on his parrot. When the man got to me and asked for a cinnamon bun, I told him it would be 3 dollars and took his money quietly. I met his hopeful stare, but I refused to let my eyes wander to the colourful talking bird perched on his shoulder. I would not give him that satisfaction. I hate people who shamelessly look for attention. Shove that parrot up your ass, you stupid wanker. Seriously, what kind of a brazen dipshit has to resort to that kind of bullshit to start up conversations?

Anyways, the actual story in here is far too childish to truly offend. It’s just silly teenage nonsense. There was one part where a man absorbs a bike into his scrotum, and I wondered if this was a nod to Flann O’Brien’s Third Policeman, a real masterpiece of absurd fiction. The rest was forgettable garbage – big walking bums abuse children and shit out swastikas. There was one part that made me laugh out loud, but I have a remarkably childish sense of humour, so a single LOL from 100 pages worth of pooing bums is actually quite disappointing.

I’m not usually this harsh when it comes to reviewing fiction, but I can’t ignore these issues. In fairness though, this book was published when the author was only 21 or so. I wrote some fairly embarrassing stuff when I was that age too, so I won’t hold this book against him. He seems to have deleted/frozen his web presence in the last 2 years. I wonder if he’s still writing.

Black Sun – Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke

black sun nicholas goodrick-clarke
Black Sun (Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity) – Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
New York University Press – 2002
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism was one of the first books I reviewed on this blog. It was a good book, but I remember being mildly disappointed with the type of occultism I was encountering in it. I had read stuff on the internet about Satanic Nazis and Hitler’s UFO fleet, but this book was about Theosophy and Runes. The author had written a book about the actual Occult roots of Nazism and confined the silly conspiracies that developed after the war to a short discussion at the end of the book.

Black Sun, published 17 years after The Occult Roots of Nazism, is the same author’s account of the neo-Nazi conspiracies and ideologies that arose after WWII. They are mind-bogglingly insane. Featuring folks who think Hitler was a manifestation of God, groups who think that “the Jews” are an evil alien race that have willfully displaced the real Hebrews (who are actually the Aryans), and more flying saucers than you can shake a stick at, this book is overflowing with insanity.

esoteric hitlerism serrano This dude has Swasti-chakras on his ass.

Unlike many of the books about insane topics that are reviewed on this site, Black Sun is actually a well written and researched piece of work. Goodrick-Clarke explains the theories; he does not espouse them. Another crucial difference between this book and most of the others I review is that the ideas contained in here are not just bizarre; they are vile, hateful and extremely dangerous. While the material is off-the-wall and genuinely fascinating, this book will probably leave you feeling worried and uncomfortable. After a detailed look at various racist organizations and the ways in which these groups rationalize and manifest their hate, the book ends with this chilling sentence:

From the retrospective viewpoint of a potential authoritarian future in 2020 or
2030, these Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism may be documented as early
symptoms of major divisive changes in our present-day Western democracies.

donald trump

I try not to get overly political on this blog, and I know that lots of Trump supporters will probably roll their eyes at this allusion, but here is a video of one of the hate groups described in Black Sun campaigning for Trump’s election. I don’t believe that all Trump supporters are neo-Nazis, but the amount of neo-Nazis that support the current president of the United States should be concerning to everyone. If this book had been written 15 years later, it doubtlessly would have had a chapter on the alt-right and the Cult of Kek.

I’m planning another post that will discuss some of the specific issues that come up in this book, so I’ll leave this post quite short. Black Sun is definitely one of the best non-fiction books I’ve reviewed, and I don’t need to pick it apart like I normally do. I strongly recommend reading it for yourself. I was fascinated to read about the lengths that neo-Nazis have to go through to rationalize their hate. Hating a person because you believe that they’re the descendant of an evil satanic alien is far sillier than hating them because you’re not used to how they look and speak and because you’re afraid that they might take your stuff. If you’re going to be a racist piece of shit, at least be honest with yourself.

The Spear of Destiny – Trevor Ravenscroft

spear of destiny ravenscroft The Spear of Destiny – Trevor Ravenscroft
Weiser Books – 1997 (First published 1973)

I’m going to have to summarize this one before I comment about it.

In the late 50s, the author of this book, Trevor Ravenscroft, met a lad, Walter Johannes Stein, who had spent years researching the Holy Grail and the Spear of Destiny. Stein was going to write a book about the stuff he had learned, but he was dying, so he gave all of his information to Ravenscroft so that he could write the book instead. The Spear of Destiny, or the Spear of Longinus, is the spear that pierced Christ’s side when he was on the cross.

One morning, when he was a young man, Stein woke up and started reciting entire paragraphs of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, one of the seminal Holy Grail texts. Fascinated by his strange new ability, he decided to buy a copy of Parzival, presumably to compare with the passages he was reciting. Well, the copy he bought had some interesting notes in it. He tracked down its previous owner through his bookseller. The previous owner was Hitler. Hitler and Stein became friends (kinda). Together, they went to a museum in Austria to see a spearhead that some had claimed was from the Spear of Longinus.

When they were standing in front of the spearhead, Hitler started to glow and Stein realised that his friend was being possessed by Satan.

You see, Hitler was interested in the grail and spear because he thought they could provide him with access to the Akashic records. The Akashic records, for those of you who don’t know, are the imaginary library of memories of every human experience ever experienced by anyone. Hitler wanted access to these records for the purposes of gaining power, but he didn’t want to spend a lifetime of meditation to get there so he took a bunch of hallucinogenics in a black magic ritual to speed up the process. Unfortunately, while tripping on peyote, Hitler became possessed by the Devil. The Devil is actually one of the negative powers that came into being after some of the species that lived on the lost city of Atlantis evolved from stretchy mutants into Aryans.

Oh, and Heinrich Himmler was a zombie.

Ok, so Ravenscroft goes into a lot more detail than that, and I’ve left out all of the stuff about psychic time-travellers, but the above is a pretty fair summary of this book.

There are many, many issues that a student of history might take with Ravenscroft’s account, but there are two facts that are especially worth considering.

The Hofburg Spear, the actual, physical spear that the events in book revolve around, is definitely not the Spear of Longinus.

The Hofburg Spear is of medival origin. It didn’t exist until hundreds of years after the death of Christ. This single fact obliterates nearly all of Ravenscroft’s claims.

Ravenscroft never actually met Walter Johannes Stein, the supposed source for nearly all of his information.

Ravenscroft starts his book off telling his reader that Walter Johannes Stein, his good friend, deserves most of the credit for writing this book. The first chapter of this book describes, in detail, the pair’s first meeting. A few years after this book was published, Ravenscroft admitted that he never met Stein in person. He said that he had only ever been able to talk to his spirit through a medium.

When you take away the subject and the source, there’s really nothing left. It’s hard to find a footing for any meaningful criticism of this book. It’s too stupid a book to bother pointing out where it’s factually inaccurate. Ravenscroft is clearly attempting to be a part of the fantastic realism movement started by Pauwels and Bergier, but his book is one step stupider than the stuff they put out. While they encouraged speculation, Ravenscroft just tells lies. In Arktos, Joscelyn Godwin describes The Spear of Destiny as “the ultimate degradation” of the Frenchmen’s work and “blood-curdling work of historical reinvention”. A fair assessment.

Some have claimed that this book was originally meant to be a novel but that Ravenscroft’s publisher convinced him to write it as non-fiction so that it would sell more copies. I’ve no idea if that’s true or not. The book is so inflated with shockingly boring details that have little relevance to the story that it’s hard to imagine how it would have turned out as a novel. The story here is rather anti-climactic too, so I’d hope that Ravenscroft would have come up with something better for a work of fiction.

As a work of non-fiction, this is seriously one of the worst books I have ever read. I know I say that kind of thing more often than other people, but this really was a turd. The Spear of Destiny was written in an era when it was considerably more difficult for people to fact check an author’s claims, but much of the stuff that Ravenscroft tries to get away with is so clearly rubbish that I can’t imagine anyone being able to believe this shit. This book makes Holy Blood, Holy Grail seem like a serious academic study written to impeccable standards. Batshit crazy books can be entertaining, but this one wasn’t. It was tortuous.

The Spear of Destiny is a surprisingly popular book (my copy is from the 9th printing!), and you’ll find plenty of other articles online that do a better job of discussing its specific inaccuracies. I liked this one, in which the author worries about how to write about this book “in a way that was not plain sneering.” I hold myself to no such standards, so here is a picture I made of Jesus and Hitler spit-roasting Ravenscroft:

jesus hitler

The Doctor Orient Series, Books 1-4

baron orgaz In March 2016, I was working just around the corner from my house. I came home at lunch one day, and as I was sitting down, waiting for the coffee to brew, I checked facebook. Will Errickson had posted a photo of a book featuring the above image on its cover. Let’s just take stock of the elements in that picture: a skull, some ritual candles, a semi-naked woman and a swastika. Needless to say, I had ordered a copy of the book, the intriguingly titled Baron Orgaz, before I had poured my coffee.

It was only after ordering that I realised that this book was part of a series. Now, as my readers well know, I don’t like starting halfway through, so I spent a few weeks tracking down copies of the preceding books in the series. By the time I had got through the first novels and was finishing Baron Orgaz, I had ordered the rest of the collection.

doctor orient books

I’ve hemmed and hawed about publishing this post for a few months. I was considering finishing the entire series before posting, but I have a lot on my hands at the moment, and it’s going to take me quite a while to get through the remaining four novels. Here, then, are my thoughts and feelings on the first half of the Doctor Owen Orient series.

Doctor Orient – Frank Lauria
Bantam Press – 1974 (Originally published 1970)
The first Doctor Orient novel seems to be a little harder to come by than some of the later entries in the series. While quite entertaining, it isn’t, in my opinion, quite as good as the books that follow it. Then again, if you were to imagine the series as one extremely long novel, this would serve as good introduction. You get to meet several of the characters who are going to pop up in later installments.

The most obvious point of comparison here would be the Devil Rides Out by Dennis Wheatley. Both books are about crime fighting occult experts doing battle with a black magician. The Duke De Richleau and Doctor Orient are both aided on their adventures by a motley crew of accomplices, one member of each group being temporarily led down the left hand path. The biggest difference here is that Doctor Orient is far less hesitant to use his own psychic powers than De Richleau.

The antagonist in this novel is a dodgy lad called Sesuj. He tries to use pop music as a form of mind control to bring young people over to Satan. Pretty cool stuff.

Raga Six – Frank Lauria
Bantam Press – 1972
Raga Six impressed me. It kicks off with a pair of weirdoes who seem to be going for fairly similar approach to Susej from the first novel, but this turns out to be a false start. The real adventure kicks off when Doctor Orient starts working for a drug peddler named Cowboy and ends up in exile after a particularly sketchy transaction. He meets a really dodgy lad on a boat to Tangier and has a threesome with this chap’s wife and a model. People start dropping off, and you get the idea that there’s at least one vampire involved.

Given that this is a book filled with sex and the undead, the writing is surprisingly good. The Doctor is a sensitive man at the best of times, and I enjoyed the existential crises that he goes through in this book. I was kept guessing right until the end of the novel too. It took me 5 months to start on Raga Six after finishing the first novel in the series, but it only took me 6 days to move onto Lady Sativa after finishing it. Raga Six might be the best known entry in the series.

Lady Sativa – Frank Lauria
Ballantine Books – 1979 (Originally published in 1973)
This one is about werewolves. It had all the sex, seances and outdated slang that I’d come to expect from a Doctor Orient novel. It contains one scene in which an irritable Doctor Orient unwittingly invites himself to a threesome. Once he finds out that another male is going to be involved, he violently assaults said male and calls him a “Gaylord”. LOL. I was expecting this one to go in a similar direction to Raga Six, but it doesn’t really. A solid entry.

Baron Orgaz – Frank Lauria
Bantam Press – 1974
Nazis, extreme sadomasochism, black magic and tennis… Really, need I say more?

Well, the only other thing that might be worth mentioning is that this very much is the fourth book in a series. While a person might well be able to enjoy the work entirely on its aforementioned merits, most of the main characters have previously appeared and played important roles in the series, so I would strongly recommend reading the first 3 books before this one.

doctor orient later books
I have these ones too, but I haven’t got around to reading them yet. Not pictured is Demon Pope, the last book in the series.

Overall, the Doctor Orient series is awesome. There are loads of cool little references to actual grimoires and conspiracies scattered throughout these books. The author, Frank Lauria, knew William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, he sings in a rock band, and he’s not a fan of Donald Trump. Also, his books are filled with sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and devil worship. Deadly. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of this series.

2019 Edit: I finally got around to reading and reviewing the second half of this awesome series.

Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival – Joscelyn Godwin

arktos joscelyn godwin Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival – Joscelyn Godwin
Adventures Unlimited Press – 1996 (Originally published in 1993)

I haven’t enjoyed a non-fiction book this much for quite a while. This is a scholarly, objective and insightful look at some of the most insane conspiracy theories and occult beliefs of the last few centuries. Any book that discusses the writings of Poe, Lovecraft, Robert Charroux, Helena Blavatksy, Edgar Cayce, Otto Rahn, Bulwer Lytton, Julius Evola, Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Grant, Charles Fort, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier is either going to be absolutely fascinating or absolutely idiotic, and I am happy to report that this book is the former. The overall scope of this work is enormous, but it’s essentially about several of the proposed causes and effects of the Earth’s polar axis shifting at some stage in the past.

The story begins with an Earth that is spinning on an axis that is perpendicular with its orbit around the sun. This state of planetary perfection ensures that there are no seasons, and days and nights are the exact same length in the same places all year round. This Earth is peopled by a race of god-like supermen that came from and mostly still live in the Arctic. After a little while, something catastrophic happens and the Earth goes wobbly. The Arctic freezes up, and the lads are forced to migrate southwards, although some of them stay put and live in the underground part of the Arctic, through which they are able to access the inner realms of the planet. (Oh yeah, I forgot the mention that this Earth is hollow!) The lads that have gone southward meet other races on their travels, but they’re not impressed by these lowly beings and often have to kill a lot of them. The boys who have stayed behind and retreated into the Earth manage to create airships that look a bit like saucers, and they occasionally use these bizarre contraptions to scope out the the outer realms of the planet. Some day these subterranean supermen will emerge to join their relatives, and together they will rule the world.

Just some of the Hollow Earth models as described in this glorious book.

Sound a bit off the wall? Well, this story, or a story very similar to it, is partly to blame for the ideology of the Nazis; the super race from the North are none other than the Aryans. The Nazis are a magnetic target for conspiracy theories, and it would be silly to presume that every Nazi believed in every part of the above story, but it is possible to trace the origins of the notion of Aryan supremacy to some very nutty characters. This book concerns itself with more with where these ideas came from than it does explaining how they were adapted by the Nazis (Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s Occult Roots of Nazism is a better book for that topic.), and Godwin does a really good job of objectively discussing some fairly ludicrous ideas. I never got the sense that he was bullshitting or stretching the truth for his own agenda.

Writing this blog post is a bit slower than usual because I don’t have many bad things to say about this book. There are a couple of chapters in the middle where Godwin discusses his interpretations of the metaphysical and spiritual significance of the poles and pole-lore that are a bit airy-fairy, but they don’t detract from the good stuff. I think the only other part that I wasn’t impressed with was when Godwin refers to Dennis Wheatley, one of my favourite authors, as “a purveyor of rollicking adventure for teenage boys and adults of arrested development”. Other than that, this book is delightful. I mean, it’s heavy going; you have to pay close attention to what’s being discussed if you want to understand it, but I found it hard to put down once I had opened it. It’s 200+ pages of dense text and denser ideas, and it only took me a few days to finish (quite a feat when you’re also responsible for a 3 month old baby).

I’m not going to go any further into the theories contained in this book. I don’t like summarizing books. When I have done so in the past, I have only done so to show how silly the writer has been. This book basically does a far more elegant job of what I try to do with this blog, and so the ideas presented herein have already been broken down and explained very clearly. If you’re interested enough in this blog to have made it this far through this post, you’re almost definitely going to enjoy reading this book. It is, without doubt, one of the best sensible books about crackpot conspiracy theories that I have ever read.

Is Donald Trump in league with eternal Hitler’s subterranean, spaceship-flying Aryan super troops?

The poles do actually shift, and we now know that global warming is currently contributing a few centimeters per year to this tilt. Recently, the international community was ashamed, embarrassed, and appalled by Donald Trump’s rejection of the Paris Climate Agreement. (Seriously America, put down the hamburgers and guns and get your act together.) Despite the glaringly obvious proof that the world is over-heating, Trump and his posse have claimed that they don’t believe in global warming. Now we all know that Donald Trump is a walking, talking piece of solidified diarrhea, but a fool he is not.

How can a man, smart enough to wrangle himself into the most powerful office in the world, possibly think that global warming isn’t happening when everyone can see that temperatures are going up? Let’s not be naive people; Donald knows full well that global warming is occurring.

Donald Trump is not ignoring climate change, he is purposely encouraging it. Why? Because he knows that as the temperature rises, the Earth will readjust its surface to make up for the melted ice-caps and rising water levels. This should draw both the Arctic and Antarctic closer to the equator/ecliptic, thus further speeding up the melting of the ice-locks above the once polar openings to Agartha and Shambala. As soon as these portals are cleared, fleets of Vril powered UFOs filled with the troops of Aryan demigods that the Christ-Hitler has been training shall fly out and take their rightful control over the rest of the planet. After this, Trump can sit at the right hand of der Führer and enjoy the commencement of Kali Yuga.