Excerpt from Otto Rahn's 'The Court of Lucifer - A Heretic’s Journey in Search of the Light Bringers'
“Night fallen, we are sitting in front of the fireplace. The countess is knitting. I open a book, which tells of tombs from Albigensian times that had been discovered, just nearby, in the black Mountain. One of them was a communal pit. Twelve skeletons were found there, disposed in a manner as to mark out a sort of wheel: the heads represented the centre, and the bodies the spokes. The author, in all probability with good reason, thought that this practise was linked to a sun-worshipping cult. Now, we engage in conversation. My hostess [“The countess Pujol-Murat, a member of the Polaires group.” (Quoted from page 26)] has long been aware of the legend that has it that Montsegur was the Grail castle. If, as she is convinced, the Grail was really conserved in this castle, then her ancestors were the knights who lost their lives defending it, because many of them fell in the siege of Montsegur, and some were burnt there. She tells me:
“I belong to the line of the great Esclarmonde. I am proud of this. I often see her in spirit on the platform of Montsegur’s dungeon, reading in the stars. The heretics loved the stars; they believed they could bring themselves closer to the divine state after death by orbiting gradually from star to star. In the morning, they would pray facing the rising sun; in the evening, in a state of total reverence, they would watch it disappear. At night, they would turn their gaze to the silvery moon, or towards the North because, for them, the North was sacred, the South, by contrast, was considered Satan’s abode. Satan is not Lucifer. Because Lucifer means ‘Bearer of Light’! The Cathars recognised him by another name as well: Lucibel. He was not the Devil! The Jews and papists wished to debase him by confounding him in this way.
As far as the Grail is concerned, it must be, as many believe, a stone fallen from Lucifer’s crown. This is why the Church vindicated it in their turn, to Christianise this Luciferian symbol. Montsegur’s pog was the mountain of the Grail, of which Esclarmonde was mistress. After her death, after the destruction of Montsegur and the extermination of the Cathars, the Grail and its castle were abandoned. The Church, perfectly aware with the Albigensian Crusade of leading, first of all, a war of the Cross against the Grail, let no opportunity slip of appropriating this new non-Christian religious symbol for itself and milking it for all it was worth. But this was not enough to explain that the Grail was the chalice that Jesus had shared with his disciples at the Last Supper and in which his blood had been gathered at Golgotha. No, the church had also to make believe that the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat, in the southern Pyrenees, was the Grail temple. After the Cathars — often referred to as ‘Luciferians’ by the inquisitors — had guarded the Luciferian Grail stone, in the northern Pyrenees, it was now the Catholic monks who claimed to be holding it, in the south of the same mountains, although by now they had turned it into a relic, conferred by Jesus, the conqueror of the Prince of Darkness, to his faithful.”
We both remained silent. Then the Countess continued: “I don’t have to remind you that the Basque Ignatius of Loyola was the founder of the Society of Jesus. But did you know that is was at Montserrat, near Barcelona, that Ignatius conceived his Jesuit ‘ Spiritual Exercises’, the organisation of the Jesuit Order and, if I am not mistaken, the cult of the Sacred-Heart of Jesus? You should look into these points. . .”