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PART ONE: A SPIRITUAL LOOK AT MODERN HISTORY

Adolf Hitler and the Heilige LancePartiby Roger Pearson

AbstractThere have been countless attempts to explain the perversion that was

Adolf Hitler. What were the forces that shaped his demented personality? From whence sprung his mystical vision of Germany’s manifest destiny? What was behind his initial successes in imposing his vision upon Europe? What led to the ultimate failure of his vision, and from that failure, his de­monic attempt at Gotterdaemmerung.

The Spear of Destiny, by Trevor Ravenscroft, addressed the question of Adolf Hitler in a rather singular fashion, in that he goes behind the accepted historical facts of Adolf Hitler’s formative years, rise to power, and subse­quent destruction as recounted by Alan Bullock, John Toland, and others. Behind the history of Adolf Hitler, says Ravenscroft, lies the power of the occult. Through the process of mind expansion, Hitler had unlocked the secrets that led to the acquisition of the power of the occult—secrets that led to the acquisition of the powers of ultimate good or ultimate evil. To serve his purposes of world domination he chose the powers of ultimate evil.

Any attempt to fathom the acts and motives of a character as inexplica­ble as Adolf Hitler, along with the irrational and perverted mysticism of the cult of Nazism, would naturally lead to some consideration of the illogical. Ravenscroft does not deny the accepted history of Adolf Hitler; rather he supports it by providing what he considers to be this history’s primal cause. Hitler had struck a covenant with the arch fiend Lucifer. He did so by unravel­ing the mystery of the Holy Grail as told in the medieval saga of Parsival by Wolfram von Eschenbach. Possessing the secret of the Grail allowed Hitler to grasp the significance of the Heilige Lance, the revered talisman of power that formed part of the Reichkleinodien, the sacred artifacts of the German People that reposed in the Hofburg in Vienna, Austria.

Hitler, like so many other despots in history, believed that he had a claim to rule through a belief in reincarnation. Hitler’s professed heroes were the titans of German history, Otto the Great and Frederick Barbarossa. He fancied himself as their latter day exponent, the claimant to their glorious rule of the Teutonic Race. However, there was a darker, malevolent side to Hitler’s belief in reincarnation. He traced his succeeding reincarnations back through the Teutonic Knights (1190-1400), Frederick II Holy Roman Emperor (1194-1250), Frederick I Bar­barossa (1123?—1190), to Otto The Great (912-973). One would expect that Hitler's sense of the grandiose destiny of Germany and his part in it would rest upon the legendary Saxon and Hohenstauffen. However, Hitler found his primal origins in the ninth century in one of the most sinister characters in German history—Landulf of

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Capua, Lord of Terra di Labur, an area that covered from Naples to Calabria. Landulf was a practitioner of the Black Arts that had their basis in sexual perver­sions and human sacrifice. Landulf's nefarious reputation and alleged influence over the secular Christian leaders of Europe ultimately led to his excommunication from the Church in 875 A.D.

Hitler’s research into Eschenbach's Parsival led him to identify the evil char­acter of Klingsor as that of Landulf. Likewise, Richard Wagner had the same perception in his operatic rendering of Parsival. Klingsor is the Anti-Christ, the ultimate evil, in that he is the perversion of the ultimate good. Klingsor, in both Wagner and Eschenbach wields the Heilige Lance as his talisman of power, Like­wise, Landulf embraced the Lance, having unlocked its occult power. Hitler had discovered in Landulf and in the Heilige Lance the historical basis of his identity and the talisman of power that would enable him to impose his identity, together with his design for world domination, that would culminate in the Third Reich that would last for a thousand years.

The Spear of the Roman Centurion Longinus which pierced the side of Christ. A nail from the Cross has been inserted into the blade and is held in place by gold, silver and copper threads.

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The vision of the Third Reich was born in June of 1933 when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. Shortly after he was proclaimed Fuhrer, making him a dictator of the German people. Hitler’s meteoric rise to power was the result of a blend of brutal politics and a messianic vision of the destiny of Germany. Hitler skillfully played upon the fears and the sense of ignominy that had resulted from Germany’s defeat in World War I and the imposition of the Versailles Treaty, to­gether with the ever present pulse of Germany’s historical greatness. Germany had lain prostrate in the 1920’s and early 1930's. Germany had been “stabbed in the back” by its enemies: the Jews, the Communists, the High Command, Austria. If Germany were ever to rise again, it would come from a Pan-Germanism that could unite all Germans against their enemies. To that end, Hitler founded the Nazi Party that inculcated the belief of German supremacy through the reunification of all German people living in countries other than Germany proper. Hitler invoked the mystical, cultural passion of the Teutonic Race—Lebensraum.

Accordingly, the Rhineland was occupied by elements of the Wehrmacht in March of 1936; Austria was incorporated into a greater Germany through the Anschluss of March 1938; the Sudentenland was the next victim of Pan- Germanism in March 1939. Hitler had successively abrogated the Versailles Treaty, the Locarno Pact, and the territorial sovereignty of three countries and had brought the world to the brink of war. Europe was either incapable or unwilling to halt Hitler’s manic, yet seemingly omnipotent, quest to superimpose his will of a greater Germany upon the world.

Hitler possessed an almost uncanny ability to face down in a test of wills any of Germany’s adversaries. Much has been made by Hitler’s biographers of his apparent powers of precognition in attaining his ends. John Toland in his definitive biography of Adolf Hitler terms Hitler a “Knight of the Hakenkreuz, a warped archangel, a hybrid of Prometheus and Lucifer.” In attempting to assess Hitler’s character, Toland unwittingly suggests what Trevor Ravenscroft flatly assets in The Spear of Destiny. Hitler’s "Satanic reign of terror” was based upon a demonic pact with the darkest forces of evil.

On Monday, March 14, 1938, Adolf Hitler made his triumphant entry into Vienna, Austria. The occasion was one of exhultation, underscored by a heavy measure of vengeance. After all, Vienna was the site of Hitler’s abysmal poverty and degradation some twenty-five years before. Hitler’s mother died in abject poverty, having been denied a government pension, while the Hapsburg Empire affected its glittering decadence. Hitler had been forced to live in a flophouse while scratching out a pauper’s living by selling postcards he sketched and performing menial jobs like shoveling snow in front of the Imperial Hotel. And was it not Austria that had participated in the infamous “stab in the back”? Yet, upon entering Vienna, in the late afternoon, Hitler chose to go directly to the Imperial Hotel rather than address the adoring crowds. He would only appear on the balcony of his room and acknowledge briefly the frenzied screams of the crowd in the street below. Hitler did not address his Storm Troopers and the people of Vienna until the following morning.

Instead, Ravenscroft contends, Hitler made a nocturnal journey with his per­sonal entourage, including Heinrich Himmler, Reichsfuhrer SS, to the Treasure House of the Hofburg to view the sacred artifacts of the German People, the Reichkleinodien: the Imperial Crown, worn by Otto the Great and Frederick Bar- barossa, the Imperial Sceptre, the Sword of St. Maurice, and the Heilige Lance— also known as the Spear of Destiny or the Spear of Longinus. These treasures of German history had long been a source of controversy between Germany and Austria because they had been spirited out of Nuremburg in 1796 to keep them out of the hands of Napoleon's advancing armies. In 1806 the Reichkleinodien were acquired by the Hapsburgs through the traitorous act of a Baron von Hugel who

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literally sold them to Austria. Efforts to have them returned to Germany proved fruitless for over a hundred years. Now Hitler had come to claim what was Germany’s. However, Hitler’s motives went further than mere nationalism. He had come to claim the talisman of power—the Spear of Destiny—the secret of which he had come by in a vision some thirty years earlier when he stood before the Spear, impoverished and rejected, possessing only the priviledged knowledge that he had derived from having solved the riddle of the Holy Grail in Eschenbach's Parsival. Hitler had made sure that the Spear would not escape his grasp, for a select squad of SS troups, led by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, secured the Hofburg imme­diately upon General Keitel’s troops’ entrance into the city.

The Heilige Lance was reputed to be over 2,000 years old, dating back to Phinehas, a prophet at the time of the Exodus. Joshua was alleged to have raised the Spear to signal his soldiers to shout the walls of Jericho to ruin. Eventually, the Spear had become a talisman of power, legitimizing the rule of those who pos­sessed it, comingled with the destiny of the Jewish People. It was embraced by Saul as a symbol of his kingship, and much later by Herod the Great who ordered the massacre of the innocents to protect his rule form the prophesied babe who would grow up to be the long awaited King of the Jews. Thirty-three years later the Spear would make its appearance at Golgotha at the crucifixion of the same babe who, grown to manhood, claimed his death to be the initiation of God’s New Covenant with the Jewish people.

Isaiah had prophesied as to the identity of the messiah: "A bone of Him shall not be broken.” (Ex. 12.46) It was the custom to mutilate the bodies of those crucified. It assured that the victims were dead, and the practice allowed the onlookers to sate their emotions upon those who were often the perpetrators of crimes that stirred the emotions of the Jews: murder, blasphemy, heresy, sedition, etc. Jesus was crucified the day before the sabbath. Caiaphas and members of the Sanhedrin were well aware of Isaiah’s prophecy and were anxious to put to rest any lingering belief in Jesus being the messiah. This could be done by assuring that those three crucified would be dead before sundown in accordance with Jewish Law that prohibited the execution of anyone on the Sabbath—the Sabbath starting at sundown. Accordingly, a party of the Temple Guard was dispatched to Golgotha to carry out the orders of Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin. The Captain of the Guard carried the Spear which was the symbol of authority granted by Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great.

The crucifixion was witnessed by a Roman Centurion by the name of Gaius Cassius. Failing eyesight prevented Cassius from carrying out his military duties, so he was assigned to inform on the Jews, particularly possible trouble-makers like this Jesus who claimed to be the fulfillment of the prophecies concerning an expected King of the Jews. He, like his fellow Roman soldiers at the crucifixion, had been impressed by the courage and dignity of this man. The Roman soldiers were revolted by the abominations that were being carried out upon the bodies of the two criminals who were crucified with Jesus, but they had to stand idly by because the Temple Guard carried the only symbol that gave them the authority to overrule any compunctions that the Roman soldiers might have—the Spear.

It is not clear how Gaius Cassius came into possession of the Spear at this moment. However, in a gratuitous act, Cassius rushed forward and pierced the side of Jesus between the fourth and fifth rib. If Jesus were dead, no blood would flow from the wound. If he were still alive, the spear thrust would settle the issue. In any event, Cassius’ act would spare Jesus’ body from being desecrated. The Gospel of John (19, 34) recounts the act and the fact that blood and water flowed from the wound. John also comments on the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy.

Legend has it that the sight of blood and water flowing from the side of Jesus cured Cassius of his failing sight. The act, the Spear, and the cure made Gaius Cassius a revered figure among the disciples of Jesus. Gaius Cassius the Centurion

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became Longinus the Spearman. Long after Longinus, the witness, would pass from the scene, the Spear, the symbol of the shedding of the blood of the New Covenant, would endure as a sacred relic of Christendom. Later, a nail, reputed to have come from the true cross, would be inserted between the blades of fhe Spear, enhancing its sancity in the eyes of the early Christians.

The Spear of Longinus spanned the Old and the New Covenant. It had become a means for those seeking personal ambition. Consequently, the Spear became the talisman of power for a succession of dictators who used its powers for both good and evil means. Christianity was the product of the New Covenant and as a sacred relic, it was used for the furtherance of Christendom. Mauritius, Commander of the Theban Legion, used the Spear to resist the orders of the Roman Tyrant Maximian to worship the Roman pagan gods. Mauritius and every tenth man of his Legion was decapitated rather than submit to pagan worship. The death of Mauritius and 6,666 Legionaires in 285, A.D. hastened the fall of paganism in the Roman Empire and paved the way for Constantine. Constantine wielded the Spear at the Battle of Milvian Bridge (312 A.D.). Thedosius used the Spear against the Goths (385 A.D.). Alaric the Bold claimed the Spear after he sacked Rome (410 A.D.). Legend also places the Spear at Troyes when Theodoric confronted Attila The Hun (452 A.D.). Justinian brandished the Spear when he banished the Greek scholars from his realm (529 A.D.), commencing the Dark Ages which would settle over Europe for five centuries.

The Spear then passed to Karl Martel who used it at the Battle of Poitiers in turning back the tide of Islam from Western Europe (732 A.D.) Charlemagne (800 A.D.) made the Spear the talisman of his rule. He attributed to it the clairvoyant powers that he claimed to possess. He carried the Spear in every campaign fought, and when the Spear dropped from his hands in his final campaign, it was taken as an omen that the end of his life and reign was eminent.

Ravenscroft testifies to no less than forty-five emperors, kings and assorted despots who possessed the Spear of Destiny from Charlemagne to the fall of the Old German Empire almost a thousand years later. The Saxon kings, including Frederick Barbarossa, were legendary rulers who evolved the myth of Teutonic supremacy. The greatest one was Otto I, the Hohenstauffen of Swabia. It was men like these who awakened Germany’s sense of its past and who provided an inspiration for its future. Hitler realized through his own tracings of the history of the Spear of Destiny, the correspondence of these larger-than-life rulers with the talisman of power. It is of no small significance that the Anschluss of Austria was code named “Operation Otto," while the invasion of Russia bore the code name Operation Barbarossa.” While Hitler publically attested his relationship with the

glorious figures of Germany’s past through the code names of his military ventures, his relationship with the sinister Landulf was privately manifested with the likes of Dietrich Eckart, a satanist who initiated Hitler into an organization of occultists called the Thule Gesellschaft. From this secret group eminated the race hatred that would result in the pogroms against the Slavs and Jews. The Thule group had been preparing for a messiah, and Dietrich Eckart divined that messiah to be Adolf Hitler.

Much of what Ravenscroft has to say about this other side of Adolf Hitler, his conspiracy with the powers of evil through the Spear of Destiny, comes from a man by the name of Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, a Vienna-born scientist who knew Hitler in Vienna in 1909-1913 and who later fled Germany after Hitler came to power rather than be forced to serve in Hitler’s SS Occult Bureau. Dr. Stein served as Winston Churchill’s personal advisor on Adolf Hitler during World War II. Ravenscroft had been attracted to Stein through Stein’s Das Neunte Jahrhundert (The Ninth Century). The book, published in 1928, was Stein’s attempt to examine world history through the lens of The Holy Grail. Ravenscroft was convinced that

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Stein’s perception of the myth of the Grail was derived from something more than the usual devices of historical research, but rather was the product of transcen­dent knowledge that came from an occult faculty and mind expansion. Stein told Ravenscroft of his doctoral dissertation on Parsival at the University of Vienna. He experienced one evening a dream in which he had been reciting entire passages from Parsival. He had only just begun to read the complex work, and yet he found himself capable of rendering, practically verbatim, Eschenbach’s difficult ellipical style when he wrote down what he had recited in his dream. Thus began Stein's lifetime pursuit of the true meaning of Parsival, an undertaking that had defied scholars of the medieval Minnesinger’s riddle for centuries.

In the summer of 1912 Dr. Stein found himself in a rundown bookshop in the old quarter of Vienna. He came upon a nineteenth century version of Parsival with a brilliant exegesis scribbled in the margins. However, there was a sinister element to the critical leaps and lucid deductions written in a rather singular hand. Inter­mingled with textual commentary were obscene comments, virulent anti-Semitic diatribes that were countered with a fanatical worship of Aryan blood lineage and Pan-Germanism. Whoever had written the exegesis had done so through the appli­cation of the black arts. One commentary stated that Parsival lived in the Ninth Century, “around 860-870." Another note stated that the Grail, described by Es- chenbach as a Precious Stone, was actually an alchemical symbol for the pineal gland which is situated within the brain and often referred to as the Third Eye. The search for the Grail is the search for the secrets that are revealed through the Third Eye, the secrets of power attained through a knowledge of the primal forces that determine the events of history.

Stein had retired to a cafe to read through the book that he had purchased. Upon leaving the cafe, Stein was confronted by a ragged artist who was selling paintings. The artist had been peering in the window at Stein, much to Stein’s discomfort, while he was reading the copy of Parsival. Stein bought a few paintings from the artist. He examined the paintings when he arrived home, and discovered that he had bought a painting of the Heilige Lance, and that the signature on the painting was the same as that on the inside cover of the text of Parsival—Adolf Hitler.

Dr. Stein traced Adolf Hitler first through the owner of the bookshop,then through Hitler’s fellow inmates of the flophouse where he resided. At first Hitler resented Stein, but then, thinking Stein a sympathetic colleague, what could best be described as a reserved relationship evolved between the two seekers of the Grail. Hitler respected Stein’s scholarship on the subject, and their meetings be­came a mutual exchange of views on Parsival.

On a day in 1912, Stein accompanied Hitler on a visit to the Hofburg to view the Heilige Lance. Lacking its shaft, the spear consisted of the blade only, within which was the nail from the true cross. The blade fitted into a silver sheath and was bound by silver and gold threads. Stein had stood before the Lance on many occasions and had always been moved by it. This time he realized a transcen­dence. His studies of Parsival, together with his exchanges with Hitler, had brought Stein to a realization of the secret of the Spear of Destiny. After a time, Stein turned to Hitler to find him mesmerized by the Spear. Possessed, his eyes brilliant, he swayed on his feet. Hitler had taken “possession” of the Spear of Destiny. Of course, Stein had no premonition at that time that Hitler had realized himself as the Luciferic Landulf of Capua and that he would twenty-six years later return to the Hofburg as the Fuhrer of the Third Reich to claim the Spear of Destiny as his talisman of power.

Upon returning to Germany after the Anschluss of Austria, Hitler made quick to legally return the Reichkleinodien, including the Spear, to its historical and sym­bolic repository at Nuremburg. On October 13, 1938, the Reichkleinodien was transported by armored train from Vienna, Austria to Nuremburg, Germany to be placed in the Hall of the Meistersingers in St. Katherine’s Church. A national holiday was proclaimed by Hitler to celebrate the event. The vision of Pan-

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Germanism had been realized; the sacred artifacts of Hitler’s vision had been returned to the sacred site of the German people and the Nazi Party. It could be said that October 13,1938 marked the zenith of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, for although many conquests lay ahead that would extend Germany's dominion from the coast of France west to the Don on the plains of Russia and from Finland south to Greece, these conquests would produce the seeds of Germany’s ultimate destruction.

In 1945 Nuremburg came under the bombsights of Allied bombers. Patton’s 7th Army took Nuremburg on April 20, Hilter’s birthdate. Patton knew of the Spear of Destiny; its legend struck a responsive chord in the man who, likewise, believed in reincarnation, sensing that he had fought with the legions of Hannibal and Napoleon. The Reichkleinodien had been removed from St. Katherine’s church to a bank vault and then to a secret hiding place in a shaft dug into a nearby mountain. The Reichkleinodien would be moved again, but the Spear of Destiny was mista­kenly left behind in a battered leather pouch. Ultimately, it would be found by a special team of investigators whose task it was to find the relics so that they could not be used to rally a fanatical partisan opposition to the occupation of Germany.

Ravenscroft makes a point of noting that when the Nazi possessors of the Spear of Destiny were brought to account at the Nuremburg Tribunal, a deliberate decision was made to exclude from consideration the role played by the occult, the role played by the evocation of Lucifer through the use of the Black Arts, the role played by the Spear of Destiny in Hitler's conscious choice to use it as a source of ultimate evil. That Hitler believed he possessed mystical powers, his use of astrol­ogy, his sexual perversions are historical fact. His relationships with Dietrich Eckart and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, both known satanists, are also historical fact. Those who sat in the dock as Hitler’s associates, shared Hitler’s philosophies and corruptions of character, otherwise they would not have carried out his demonic policies. Nevertheless, the Nuremburg prosecutors chose, instead, to limit their proof of guilt to the more tenable questions of plotting and waging all out war and committing crimes against humanity.

Ravenscroft’s care for the Spear of Destiny covers some 3,000 years. Much of his proof rests on historical fact; however, the greater part rests on legends that are many, many centuries old and alleged happenings that are omitted by Hitler's biographers. Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, who died in 1957, is Ravenscroft’s princi­pal source of the relationship between Hitler and the Spear of Destiny, and Dr.Stein insisted that Ravenscroft not tell the story of the Spear until after he died. The Spear of Destiny, be it fact or fiction or a combination of both, still adds a fascinat­ing dimension to an unquestionable reality—Adolf Hitler and the calamity he produced.

BibliographyRavenscroft, Trevor, The Spear of Destiny. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972.

BiographyDr. Roger L. Pearson is currently Dean of the School of Continuing Education

at Providence College, Providence, Rhode Island. He is also a member of the English Department. He holds a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Rhode Island and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

PART II: The Rudolf Steiner Connection will be published in a future issue of MetaScience Quarterly.

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