Posts related to the medieval Cathar sect featured in Channel of the Grail.
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.
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.”
A bit over a year ago I completed the first half of a research tour planned so as to follow the footsteps of the protagonist in my current novel in progress, The Perfect. That portion took me through the castles, fortifications, caves and Pyrenean mountain passes of the Languedoc region of France, the Catalan province in northern Spain, and along the Mediterrean coast to Provence, winding up in Avignon, for a brief time the site of the Holy See. I had plans to push northward; but on August 27 I recieved the news that my 95-year-old mother had passed away, so I took a train to Paris and flew home to be with the family for Mom’s memorial service.
