The year is 1931. A young German man, a veritable Indiana Jones no less,
is looking around the ruins of Château de Montségur in the French Pyrenees.
He knows that in 1244, the castle was stormed by Catholic forces. A siege lasted for nine
long months, in which 10,000 troops went up against 100 Cathar fighters and a number of
civilians. There were some pacifists too, but those guys were not exactly effective in a scrap.
The Cathars lost, and after being told to renounce their faith,
around 220 refused. Each one of them was burned alive on a raging bonfire. As the
flames tickled the clouds in the sky above and the sound of screams filled the air,
some of the fighters escaped through the forest. One of them was clutching the Holy Grail.
What you just heard is a true story, although the last bit about some escaping with the Holy
Grail is what you might call an add-on. It might not be true. The rest is, though.
The Cathars were a kind of spiritual reformists in medieval Europe. They called themselves the “Good
Christians,” and as you’d expect, the Catholic Church was hardly very tolerant of people claiming
their sort of Christianity was better than theirs. The Cathars were persecuted, hunted, and tortured
by ruthless Inquisitors. One of the main reasons they were burned en masse on that
great big fire was that they had killed around 50 Inquisitors not long before.
Many centuries later, a handful of writers started saying that the ones that escaped
that day left with documents containing esoteric writings. They also said that
one of those Cathars took the Holy Grail. This brings us back to the young German
guy that rooted through the ruins in 1931. His name was Otto Rahn.
He was absolutely obsessed with the legend of the Holy Grail. He’d studied medieval history
and taken a degree in philology, so he'd read all those old writings about the Grail. Then
when he’d finished his search of the castle, he wrote the book “Crusade Against the Grail.”
Not many people read it, and many of those that did decided that its contents were
nothing more than balderdash. But there was one prominent figure who did like
the book. He was just as obsessed with the legend of the Holy Grail as Rahn.
His name was Heinrich Himmler. By the time he’d read that book,
he was already the commander of the Nazi Schutzstaffel, the dreaded SS.
The SS started out as the protection squad for the Nazi Party, a kind of security outfit that
harnessed the Nazi ideology of an Aryan race being racially pure. By 1932, it had around 209,000
members, each of them embracing the hateful ideology. Their solution to the so-called Jewish
Problem was to annihilate European Jews, which, as you know, became the Holocaust.
Himmler, who was fascinated with legends and the occult, had a thing for the ancient German
Teutonic Knights, as well as the legend of King Arthur. He wanted to surround
himself with a select group of men who were supposed to be noble, brave, and loyal. Yes,
these are the men that killed little children, but we won’t get into that today. All you need
to know is that to Himmler, and Hitler, the idea of a noble race living in past
centuries tickled their warped fancies. This is why in 1934, Himmler set up a kind
of home for the elites at Wewelsburg Castle near Paderborn in Germany.
It was basically a think tank for haters, a meeting place for killers. Himmler had plans
to make it the “center of the world” where Nazi ideology would spring from its bloody orifices
It’s where Himmler wanted something that resembled a round table based on the Arthurian legend. His
plans never really came to fruition. The Nazis lost the war, and one day the US 83rd Armored
Reconnaissance Battalion, 3rd Armored Division, walked into the castle to find
burning bookcases and a lot of missing Nazis. What’s important here is how seriously Himmler
took the Holy Grail. He really believed his Nazi Party would create a New World Order,
politically and culturally. And so he believed that the Nazis deserved to get their hands on the
Grail, an object of great cultural significance. For that reason, when he read Rahn’s book, he
didn’t waste much time getting in touch with him. Rahn was openly homosexual, but Himmler looked
past that because he very much wanted Rahn to continue his hunt for this most precious
object. Rahn certainly didn’t endorse Nazi ideology, but as he said to one of his buddies,
“What was I supposed to do, turn him down?” It should be said that Rahn also believed in
an ancient order of men who defied the Catholic church's power, although Rahn and Himmler had very
different reasons for wanting to find the Grail. Rahn’s story is tragic and one not without its
own mystery. Let’s just say working for the Nazis to find the Grail didn't really work out for him.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves here. We’ll come back to Rahn soon, but first, we think you
need to know why Rahn and Himmler were so consumed with this object. Maybe you don’t even know what
the Holy Grail is or if it ever existed at all. We usually think of it as a cup of some sort,
although it could also be another kind of receptacle. It might even be a stone.
In Arthurian legend, it’s protected by an immortal geezer known as the Fisher
King. An illustration dating back to 1330 shows the Fisher King with
the Holy Grail as the knight Perceval is coming to meet him on his horse.
One thing you need to know about those Arthurian legends is there
are many different takes on the story. Over the years, other writers developed the story,
but the main theme with the Grail is that it can give eternal life, power, abundance, and wisdom.
In the 13th century, a poet named Robert de Boron added something to the story that seems to have
stuck. In his “Joseph d'Arimathie,” the Grail is the jug or cup that Jesus Christ poured wine
from at the Last Supper, right before that snitch Judas ratted him out in the Garden of Gethsemane.
In the bible, Jesus poured the wine for his apostles, telling them it was his
blood. In the Gospel of Matthew, you can read the lines, “Drink this, all of you;
for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”
Joseph of Arimathea was said to be responsible for burying Jesus’s body. This is still biblical
writing, not part of the Arthurian legend. But Robert de Boron made it part of the legend when he
said that the Grail talked about in the previous King Arthur stories was the cup from which Christ
had poured his “blood,” and that had also been used as a container for some of His actual blood
during the crucifixion. Incidentally, the first time the Grail was ever talked about in the King
Arthur stories was in “The Prophetic Ecstasy of the Phantom,” written in Ireland around 1056.
Boron’s theme of the Grail being biblical caught on fire, and from then on, the Holy Grail,
the magic cup, the chalice that everyone wanted, had this biblical connection. In Wolfram von
Eschenbach’s 13th-century book, "Parzival,” the Grail story is taken even further. In it,
he wrote that the Grail was kept at a mysterious castle. Rahn read this story,
and that’s why he believed the Grail was hidden in a castle,
only he just took a stab that it was the castle where the Cathars had been cooked on a bonfire.
We can’t understate how much these stories affected European culture.
That whole chivalry thing was fashionable indeed, although the romance didn’t always
meld with the brutal reality of things. As you might have seen in movies and TV series,
the King Arthur tales involve his knights going on quests for the Grail. Get the Grail,
and things will be A-ok, goes the story. So, the Knights of the Round Table go looking
for it. In one story, it’s Galahad that gets the Grail, after which he can make blind folks see and
do all sorts of funky things. Another story has him ascending to heaven when he finally gets his
hands on the Grail. Sir Bors and Sir Perceval were also said to have fulfilled their quest,
while many other knights got themselves into a spot of bother on their mission.
Monty Python’s Holy Grail movie shows us what kind of trouble could befall a knight
while he was on his quest. This satire pokes fun at all the rather implausible
legends about valiant and noble knights. Right now, you might understandably be thinking,
how come those Nazis took the Grail so seriously when it was obviously a made-up
story incorporated into shapeshifting legends. Well, the truth is, even though the story of the
Grail in those old texts were works of fiction, some people still believe that the Grail was a
real thing. Some of them say it was once the property of the very real Knights Templar.
During the First Crusade in the 11th century in the city of Jerusalem, the Christians took the
city back from the Muslims. The Knights Templar came out of this, officially forming about twenty
years later. They went on more crusades. They grew in power and wealth, and sometime in between
it’s said that they acquired the Grail. Their story would come to an end as their influence
grew to such levels that it was later decided to bring them down. They came down with a bump,
that’s for sure, or at least some of them did. We should also point out that prior to the
Arthurian legends, there were stories about magical cups or dishes or even cauldrons,
which crossed different cultures and times. But the Grail we are talking about today is the one
which features in the Arthurian legends and the one which held Christ’s blood.
After those legends were written, the quest for the Grail became a real thing. From time to time,
people claimed they had seen the Holy Grail, but it was evasive to say the last. There was
another story that the Knights Templar got their hands on it after the Fourth Crusade.
According to that story, it was brought to France but went missing sometime
during the French Revolution. Some other relics have also turned up that might or
might not be the chalice that was said to have held Christ’s blood.
Now whether these artifacts have magical powers is another story. Sure,
some people venerate them as holy, but that doesn’t mean they believe Stephen
Hawking could have touched one and retired as a theoretical physicist to become an MMA fighter.
These relics might be important in terms of their historical background,
but we are not saying that lots of people believe they can be
compared to the Grail that King Arthur’s chivalrous hit squad was looking for.
We think you can now appreciate why some people have taken the Holy Grail seriously in spite of it
appearing in stories about men that never existed in real life. These folks really do believe
there is a cup, and some of them, including Himmler, may have believed in its powers.
This brings us back to Otto Rahn and his quest for the Grail. When he read the book “Parzival,” what
he saw before him was truth, not legend. This is why he went on his own quest for the Grail. It’s
also why he is arguably the biggest inspiration for the character we know as Indiana Jones.
Himmler was so impressed with Rahn that he not only paid for further expeditions,
but pretty much bankrolled his next two books. Rahn became a member of the SS himself in 1936,
although we’re not sure he was happy about this. He was certainly not an easy man to understand. In
an interview, the wife of his translator once said, “He was apparently haunted by demons.
Sometimes when he was alone, he would cry out. He had presences – things like that. For me,
he was a little like the Antichrist. A prisoner of the forces of evil…”
His friends later said that when he agreed to work for the Nazis, he knew he was making a Faustian
bargain. If he had said no, he’d likely have been imprisoned or even executed, but by saying yes,
he was shaking hands with the devil. He traveled the world for the Nazis,
looking not only for the Holy Grail but also for other legendary artifacts. In another book he
wrote called “Lucifer’s Court,” he talked about becoming the chief investigator for the Nazis
while searching for what he called “the ghosts of the pagans and heretics who were my ancestors.”
The real enemy, he said, had been the church. The heroes were the members of the forbidden
religions, such as the Cathars. These were the people who’d been oppressed, whose religion was
pure. This also gelled with Hitler’s fascination with the legends of the Middle Ages and some kind
of pure bloodline coming out of that period. Himmler loved the book. He bought 100 copies
and sent a leather-bound copy to Hitler for his birthday. Himmler was still hoping that
whatever Rahn would find would support his ideology of a superior Aryan race.
But Rahn found nothing. No Grail, no secret documents to support the Nazi theories about
racial purity. Himmler started to lose his patience with Rahn, especially because he
heard stories about him getting drunk and heading to rooms with men he’d found. That’s why Himmler
ordered him to participate in the Lebensborn program, where SS officers had to try and
procreate with women deemed racially pure. He also made him stop boozing and do some military
training, in his own words, to “toughen him up.” Around this time, Himmler visited the Montserrat
Abbey near Barcelona. He believed the Grail might be buried there, and if he could find it,
the Nazis would gain those phenomenal supernatural powers. According to a book on the matter,
Himmler believed the Grail could be there due to an old folk song about the abbey that contained
the lines the “mystical font of life.” Rahn fell afoul of the Nazis yet again and
was stripped of his rank. As punishment, he was told he had to become a guard at a concentration
camp. He was horrified by what he saw there. He became depressed, now understanding just
how dark these Nazi people were and how hateful their ideology was. He wrote a letter, saying:
“It is no longer possible to live in the country that my homeland has become. On
my return to Munich, it all came back to me. The bloody events to which I had
borne witness. I could no longer sleep nor eat. It was as if a nightmare lay upon me.”
He then resigned from the SS, only to be told that the Gestapo would be after him. No one
gets out that easy. He knew they would kill him, or at least enslave him and work him to death.
He was seen on March 8, 1939, at the Hotel Zahringer in Freiburg. Despite his situation,
someone remarked that he seemed happy enough and confident about his future. A few days later,
he was spotted walking through the snow near a cottage in Söll, Austria. That’s
the last time anyone saw him alive again. The person who’d seen him searched for him
months later once the snow had thawed a bit. He later wrote, “My brother and I found him,
sitting just there under the tree, covered by his coat. We recognized him by his coat and hat. It
was the man who had passed by our house. Next to his body lay two medicine bottles, one empty and
the other half empty. He was identified by his passport which was still in his breast pocket…”
The pills hadn’t killed him. He’d frozen to death. To this day,
no one knows what he was doing out there alone. It has been speculated that the Nazis had wanted
to eradicate him and so made his death look like something other than murder.
Still, there are other rumors that he had faked his death and then traveled the world looking
for esoteric artifacts for the rest of his life. There are more theories involving the Cathars. One
is that they knew the secret of the Holy Grail was that it wasn’t a Grail but the bloodline of
Jesus Christ. In this version of events, Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had kids,
hence the bloodline. This theory inspired the plot of Dan Brown’s book, “The Da Vinci Code.”
More interesting than that is what two historians said in a book published in 2014. The book,
called “Los Reyes del Grial,” claims that the Grail is in Spain right now.
This jewel spangled jug, they say, was used at the Last Supper, and it also collected some of
Jesus’ blood as he was on that cross. Its current home is the Basilica of San Isidoro
in the Spanish city of León. Those historians say they read Egyptian parchments that said
the Grail had traveled from Jerusalem to Cairo and was then handed over to an emir who ruled
an Islamic kingdom on the coast of Spain. That’s how it ended up in the Basilica of San Isidoro,
where it’s been since the 11th century. This cup is dated anywhere from 200 BC to
100 AD. The writers say they cannot prove that it once captured Jesus Christ’s blood, but they say
they are sure about it being worshipped like the Holy Grail we’ve discussed in this show today.
Still, they would say that. There are currently about 200 Holy Grails all over the world, and many
of them have convincing backstories. And while many people will tell you there is such a thing,
let’s remember that this whole drama was really kicked off by some medieval dude
who’d wanted to dress up the King Arthur tales. We can’t even be sure that there was a Last
Supper, but if there was, what’s the chance of the drinking vessel being ornate and also
tough enough to withstand two thousand and a bit years of being bashed around?
Researchers have said that if Jesus, the carpenter, did have a final get-together, there
is little chance that he’d have the best tableware consisting of tough stone or metal objects. As
one scholarly priest said not long ago, “I would think that since they were poor people, it would
be what the poor had used, namely a clay cup.” Try surviving thousands of years as a clay cup!
A clay one probably wouldn’t have made it in one piece to the resurrection, let alone for
centuries. As for why someone would have gone to the trouble of getting it across to Europe
in the 12th century, well, that’s anyone’s guess. In conclusion, we think the real reason why the
Holy Grail hasn’t been found is in line with what this Spanish historian said:
“You cannot search for something that does not exist.”
Now you need to watch “Medieval Knights Were NOT Noble, But Cold-Hearted Killers.” Or,
have a look at “What You Weren’t Told About Medieval Executioners.”