In the Middle Ages the Montsegur region was ruled by the Counts of Toulouse and the Viscounts of Carcassonne, noble houses sympathetic to the Cathar cause. Arguably the best known of Cathar castles, the Château de Montségur served as safe house, monastery, and finally military stronghold for the Cathar faithful and their defenders in the brutal last years of the Albigensian Crusade.
There was the sense that “the scenery was setting the stage literally…a dramatic change going south, from rolling hills to steep stuff, almost like driving west from Boulder [in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies]. I can see how these land configurations served as natural boundaries, why this area was a defensive position worth fortifying against invasion from across the Pyrenees.” I became quickly aware that I was approaching a region of multiple mysteries.
My next major destination, one where I booked a hotel for two nights, was the city of Carcassonne, second only to Toulouse as the center of military, political and ecclesiastical activity during the Cathar Crusade…
The Languedoc was forcibly annexed by the French during the bloody Cathar conflict in the thirteenth century, and Toulouse, its capital, was center stage as that tragedy played out…It became immediately evident that I had landed, as if I’d time-traveled, in the midst of the places and characters of the era I had come to study vis-á-vis The Perfect, and that three weeks would be precious little time to absorb even a fraction of the information and experience available.
I journal daily. Looking over the entries for the month prior to departure, July 10 to August 9, it’s interesting what had my attention during that preparatory period. Following are a few snippets from the couple dozen pages I wrote during that month, reorganized to make better sense. In the journaling process, insights never come packaged neatly; more likely they swoop in at odd times and from various directions, only later coming together in a pattern.
I conclude this account, as I closed the trip itself (click on link towards the end of this entry to join me for that moment at the Berlin Holocaust Memorial ), on a very personal note. Yes, I came to this part of the world as a writer following the footsteps of an historical individual—a mystic, a Grail hunter and a member of Himmler’s SS—quite focused on refashioning him into the protagonist in my novel in progress, The Perfect. And in this I succeeded well enough, although the bulk of the book, the proof, remains to be written.
On Monday evening I came up from the subway and stood in the Postdammer Platz. I paused to absorb my first look at the heart of Berlin. To my right, in the darkening city, gleamed a festival of commercial skyscrapers, the gaudy epitome of western capitalism; to my left, only stocky gray buildings staring lifelessly, monuments to the drab austerity of the East Berlin’s communist past. Beneath my feet was a line in brick, where, until November 1989, the infamous Berlin Wall separated the two competing ideologies, each with the intent to overwhelm the other.
The massive monument on Ettersburg hillside, completed under the German Democratic Republic (former East Germany) in 1958 and more a socialistic propaganda shrine than a memorial to the victims of the Buchenwald concentration camp, is visible from the city of Weimar, the so-called cultural capital of Germany, several miles to the south, proving that, during the Nazi years, the folks of that city could see and smell the incessant column of smoke that rose from the crematoriums consuming the tens of thousands of bodies of those who died from disease, starvation, physical exhaustion and outright murder.
In a startling, if sensational, statement in the Introduction to his 1973 book, The Spear of Destiny, author Trevor Ravenscroft states that Sir Winston Churchill “was insistent that
the occultism of the Nazi Party should not under any circumstances be revealed to the general public.” He explains further: “The failure of the Nuremberg trials to identify the nature of the evil at work behind the outer facade of National Socialism convinced him [Dr. Walter Johannes Stein, Ravenscroft’s source] that another three decades must pass before a large enough readership would be present to comprehend the initiation rites and black-magic practices of the inner core of Nazi leadership.”
Bear with me as I detour briefly from the travelogue to a personal reflection I had on leaving the serenity of Dornach for the mysterious and somewhat melancholic region of southwestern Germany where I was now headed. After all, every worthwhile journey, actual or virtual, pits our inner world against a further aspect of the outer world, and we come away changed by the experience.
