The Bleeding Lance

Von Eschenbach's Parzival is at once the account of a spiritual quest, a love story (or several love stories), an entheogenic fable, and a tale of black magic. Quite an achievement. So far we have considered the first three items of this impressive inventory. This and the following essay will be devoted to the fourth item: black magic.

In Parzival, Klingsor is the evil magician who forges the weapon that wounds the Grail king, Amfortas. Klingsor is, we learn in the Gawain episodes, a castrated patriarch who castrates other men to render them as impotent as himself. He acquires power in a twisted way by making others powerless. This is the first lesson about the practitioners of black magic: they have no intrinsic power of their own, but they gain a perverted kind of power (read: the ability to control control, dominate, extort, etc) by disempowering others. Patriarchy retains control of society by repressing the sexual-hedonic drives innate to our species, and severing humanity's ecstatic bond with nature. Hence the sexually alluring baroness Orgeluse and the entheogenic plant figure centrally in the wounding of the Grail king.

The Catholic Church has been widely regarded as a crypto-fascist organization since the 12th century, but this view did not become openly and socially expressed until the Renaissance. (The decisive event that exposed the "Satanic" nature of Roman Catholicism to the European world was the Avignon Papacy, which lasted from 1309 - 1378.) Many people in Wolfram's time saw the Church as an instrument of immoral, anti-human, and downright evil forces. Joseph Campbell notes that the poet-knight may well have taken Pope Innocent III as the model for Klingsor:

The comparison of Wagner's Parzival to Wolfram's is telling, and we shall return to it below. For the moment, let's recall a basic insight of Mythbusting 101: the "decisive events of history" recorded in books and celebrated by the winners are always paralleled by intensive and intimate developments in human experience, events that bear crucially upon the fruition or frustration of human potential. In parallel history, we give due importance to the unrecorded, subjective events, such as the phenomenon of romantic love.

It may well be that unrecorded deeds determine the course of humanity, far more decisively than the recorded historical facts which provide a directive script for controlling society in ways that often deny and thwart the flowering of human potential. The life-shaping importance of unrecorded experience is an informing theme of these lessons. It is also a primary metahistorical insight.

As noted in the previous lesson, Klingsor cannot destroy the timeless pact between the human species and the psychoactive plants who have talked with humans for hundreds of thousands of years. What the necromancer can do, however, is attach a deviant, wounding power to the plant magic: he arms Gramoflanz with a lethal weapon. The bleeding lance of Grail legend is almost as mysterious as the Grail itself. The Grail can be traced back to the magic cauldrons of Celtic mythology, and likewise the bleeding lance, but the mythological provenance of the latter is not so clear-cut and evident. The lance has been compared to the spear of the Celtic god Lug, and associated with the thunderbolt of Zeus, but such parallels do not reach the complex meaning in assumes in Wolfram´s writings.

The legend of Celtchar, a leading figure in the Ulster Cycle of Irish myth, contains an archaic allusion to the lance. Celtchar is a formidable warrior, but unlike most Celtic heroes, who are stunningly beautiful—Cuchulain, for example—he is tall, grey-skinned, and hideous. Celtchar carries a lethal weapon, a spear that "possesses a life of its own: its strength has to be modified by dipping it into a poisonous bodily fluid; otherwise it will injure even the bearer himself" (Emma Jung and von Franz, The Grail Legend, p. 86). Here is a prototype of the bleeding lance in the possession of the Grail family, but there is more, something quite peculiar that Wolfram has added....

Today, one expects a scholar of comparative mythology to be able to cite the Ulster Cycle along with parallel material relating to the lance from other cultures, but we are apt to wonder if a German poet of the 13th century enjoyed a comparable scope of learning. It may well be that Wolfram knew the Irish legend through the widespread Breton-Welsh network of conteurs, Arthurian story-tellers and bards. I would contend, however, that he had intimate knowledge of the Irish motif through contact with surviving initiates of the Mysteries who intermingled with the conteurs and provided them with material and plots. Clearly, Wolfram was confident enough in drawing upon the Irish motif to modify it. In his version, the bleeding lance does not need to be dipped in "a poisonous bodily fluid," for the weapon itself bleeds like a suppurating wound. Applied to the wound it inflicted, the lance does not heal it but merely alleviates the pain—or, I would emphasize, gives the impression of doing so, the momentary illusion of a cure. The Grail company are hugely relieved at this spectacle: they are hooked on the temporary or vicarious alleviation of the patriarch's pain.

The bleeding weapon is Wolfram's unique twist, and what a twist it is. This is surely one of the supreme imaginative inventions of Western literature. Just think of it: the weapon that wounds is itself wounded. Wolfram followed Irish tradition when he made castration his motif for the Fisher King, and unified it with the lance. In the Irish material, Celtchar is also a castrated tyrant. To translate the symbol: the patriarchal tyrant (read: theocrat) is a wounded man with lethal power. He is a wounded weapon in human form. Oatriarchy is a wounded weapon, a force of domination and destruction unleashed upon humanity by emasculated men. This is one of the primary lessons of Mythbusting 101. The paternal dominators are orgastically impotent, as Reich would say, and the medieval legend bears out his diagnosis. Many (but not all) of the fascist tyrants of history are wounded wimps: Alexander, Stalin, Hitler, George W.Bush. A wimp can be the most dangerous of men.

This identification of patriarchal-paternal power as wounded power informs the symbol of the bleeding lance, and there is another key insight here as well. We must ask, What kind of weapon alleviates the pain of the wound it has inflicted by being repeatedly inserted into the wound? Considering this question, we need to bear in mind that the alleviation of the pain may be, as just suggested, illusory or vicarious. Rewounding can give a false sense of soulagement, solace, comfort, relief; but it neither cures the original wound, nor does it allow the suffering paternal figure to expire of his affliction. The reinsertion of the wounded-wounding weapon is a tactic of reassuring self-deception by the family of the Grail. It is a psychologically ritualized act, a blindly repetitive social compulsion, but not a genuine healing. The rite of reassurance—that is, excusing and legitimating, even honoring (vide the 4th Commandment of Moses), the perpetrator—leaves the Grail family deeply enmeshed in the original problem, and implicated ever more deeply in the paternal agony.

Reliving the wounds of war, commemorating battles won at great price, if these wars and battles are fought in the cause of paternal domination, is a way of reinserting the bleeding lance into the wound it caused. In any war there is true heroism when men and women face impossible situations and triumph by sheer courage. But the political and ideological lies that drive war are wrongly justified when they are associated with such heroism and relived in social rites of reassurance. Paternal and patriarchal aggression, legitimated by perpetrator religion, wounds humanity, and keeps rewounding it each time these acts of aggression are commemorated. The false sense of alleviation feeds upon a deep human need to grieve and to make sense of loss, so these ceremonies are genuinely moving, but self-deluding reassurance disserves the need to grieve. (Is genuine grief a form of closure, or is it acceptance of no closure?) No real healing of the collective psyche comes from these orgies of commemoration when they disguise the self-legitimation of the Paternal Lie: "God is on our side."

I may be reading too much into Wolfram's psychological insight, or reading too deeply, but perhaps not. The bleeding lance is his literary invention based on an archaic mythological motif, whereas the Grail is a numinous symbol of the Organic Light and there is nothing invented about it, or its magical powers. Yet I would say that Wolfram's genius was rooted in his experience as a knight, first-hand experience of violence and aggression, which allowed him to invent a martial symbol almost as potent as the Grail itself. The difference is, the meaning of the Grail is mystical, while the bleeding lance is a symbol of the genocidal and ecocidal pathology inflicted upon the world by the WMDs (white male demagogues) who enforce the theocratic program—the dominator agenda, as it has been called.

Theocracy is the political expression of black magic. It is the primary behavioral control tool of the Illuminati, the inner circle of paternal dominators. The members of the inner circle hide themselves, but they do not hide what they do—not exactly. Black magic works most deeply upon humanity, not where it conceals itself, but where it operates right out in the open, but under crypto-fascist guise. In CIA and military jargon, a covert operation such as the overthrow of a foreign government without the knowledge of Congress, the Senate, and the executive powers, not to mention the public at large, is a "black ops." Such missions are always carried out in deep secrecy, away from the public eye, without documentation, etc. Not so with the crypto-fascist program of the theocrats.

The most effective covert operation is the one that unfolds right in front of your eyes, and may even involve your willing collusion: black magic ops.

Consider for a moment the startling tactic of non-concealment. In the Grail legend, the display of the magical healing powers of the Grail occurs in the same scene as the rewounding of Amfortas. The two supernatural events are counterpoised, perhaps to emphasize that while the power of the Grail is eternal, the act of patriarchal wounding is repetitive and perennial. The showing of the Grail is a mystical event exposed to the Grail family. The display of the Lance is done openly, not hidden from anyone.

The wounded weapon in Wolfram's tale belongs to the intimate circle of the Grail family, and wounds the head of the family. I take this to mean that in Wolfram's understanding of the Waste Land, the evil spell cast over the land is black magic that emanates from the Grail family, the rich and privileged who belong to select bloodlines. They are victims of the evil magic and spread it to others. They harbor evil powers, even as they are served by the healing power of the Grail. This is not the dilemma of humanity at large, but uniquely of the privileged, socially dominant, owning class. The lesson here is that the pathology of evil has a niche with the rich. Black magic is not the game of Everyman, but of regents, bankers, politicians, and arms dealers.

The hidden controllers—Illuminati, if you will, but in a moment I will propose another term—not only work through non-concealment of their evil operations, but through concealment as well. One of their favorite tactics is to countervail: represent something they do in a false way so that they can conceal what they really do. One obvious, verifiable instance of the tactic of countervailing is demonization of the Mysteries and natural wisdom. At the dawn of the Middle Ages, Pan was turned into the Devil, nature was diabolized, and all that previously had been accepted as natural wisdom, natural healing, knowledge of the plant world and "animal powers," the arts of survival based on intimate relation to natural forces, and so forth—all this was turned into black magic to conceal the black magic that really was, and is, a threat to human survival.

(Matthew Hopkins, "Witchfinder General," in East Anglia during the English Civil War. He was responsible for many false accusations of witchcraft. From The Inquisition by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh.)

Wolfram includes in his story some allusion to contemporary agents of black magic. Joseph Campbell identified Klingsor with Pope Innocent III, or, by implication, perhaps, an Arabian advisor of Frederick II (1272 - 1337), King of Sicily, who was under Innocent's care. In Massacre at Monsegur, Zoe Oldenburg says that Innocent III "laid down as his prime axiom the Church's absolute supremacy, and saw himself as one called to guide kings and emperors, and compel them to serve God's interests" (p. 87). An absolute theocrat, he is widely regarded as one of the most powerful Popes of all time. Following him came Innocent IV (r. 1243- 1254), who proclaimed himself "the vicar of the Creator to whom every creature is subjected." Innocent IV made the Inquisition, founded by the Dominicans in 1233, the official institution of the Roman Church. (For those who are not following Vatican news, the Inquisition was formally dissolved by Pope Paul VI in 1965, but continued to function under the less menacing name, the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith—the Holy Office, for short. The current Pope Benedict XVI (Josef Ratzinger, b. 1927) was the head of that office at the time of his election. There is a direct line of executive power from Innocent IV to Benedict XVI.)

With the official launching of the Inquisition, countervailing went into effect on a massive scale, but almost immediately the instinctual sanity of the European people reacted. Many living at that time reacted to the nefarious influences and control games of the Church, but these stories tend to go unrecorded because they do not confirm the supremacy of the paternal powers. Blatant political moves and ideological ploys by the theocrats, set out in papal bulls and ecumenical councils, always indicate mounting resistance in the populace, and rebellion against control and manipulation. The resistance against the Church established by chivalry and the cult of Amor surged at the end of the 13th century, causing the split in the Papacy over a disagreement on how to beat down and deceive the general populace. As the evils of the ruling religious elite became more and more evident post-1300, repression and countervailing efforts went off the charts, eventually peaking in the Witch Trials, the scandal of the Rosicrucian Manifestos in 1620, triggering the Thirty Years War, and after that, a long series of bloody religious wars.

Crypto-fascism is the long favored guise of dominators who want to appear to be otherwise—devout Christians, social benefactors, and patriots, for instance—in the eyes of the world at large; not that genuine social benefactors and patriots do not exist. By the identification of Pope Innocent III with Klingsor, rCampbell suggests that the Roman Church has long been the pre-eminent instrument of crypto-fascism on earth. Recently, the neocon movement in American politics has come forward in world affairs as a primary tool of crypto-fascist intentions. The disguise it uses is precarious and barely credible, thus testifying to the neocons' flagrant contempt for the intelligence of people in the USA who believe they are living in a democracy. It is as if Jack the Ripper paraded in a Halloween costume as Freddy from Nightmare on Elm Street, pretending to be an anti-terrorist, and everyone finds his antics to be reassuring.

Parzival is a consummate work of psychological art. Such works cannot be plotted on a Cartesian grid that features arrows pointing from the plot motifs of "lance", "Waste Land, and "garland" to boxed paragraphs that explain in rigorous language exactly what each motif means. No point-to-point correlation is possible, for the symbolic and esoteric meanings are textured in a complex way, and interplay at different levels of reference. Amfortas is both our wounded humanity and the paternal domination (i.e., the theological father complex) that wounds it. Victims cannot be dissociated from perpetrators, and are often bonded to them. Gyn/Ecology (1978) by Mary Daly contains a scathing expose of paternal evils from the Witch Hunts to the Nazis, and offers some brilliant, indispensable insights for mythbusting:

In 2003 Cambridge University Press published a book titled The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945. The author is Richard Steigmann-Gall, assistant professor of history at Kent State University. The author's intention is not to propose how Nazism might be construed as a Christian redemptive ideology, but to show how it was actually regarded as such by the leading Nazis. Steigmann-Gall shows that men considered to be among the most monstrous who ever lived, shared the genuine spirit of Christianity common to all adherents to that faith. He does so by citing hitherto unpublished letters and verbatim records giving the Nazi view of Christianity in the words of those who embraced it. He lets the Holy Reich speak for itself.

The result is mind-opening, to say the least. Steigmann-Gall shows that all the leading Nazis except Ludendorff saw in Christianity the supreme expression of Aryan ideology. It is difficult to paraphrase or summarize his argument here, because it is so richly documented, and I will not go to the length of citing the same sources. By his use of the source materials, Steigmann-Gall demonstrates the total sincerity of the Nazi attitude toward Christianity. The Nazis sincerely believed they were devout Christians, true to the core meaning of that religion, which they interpreted as a program to establish a master race based on the model of the Aryan Christ.

The Holy Reich dispells the entrenched notion that the religious ideology of Nazism was a pernicious form of Germanic "blood and soil" revivalism, calling for a return to the Nordic gods such as Woden. In short, that it was Teutonic paganism. The facts and records show that only Erich Ludendorff embraced this anti-Christian ideology, largely due to the influence of his second wife, Matilde von Kemnitz. The daughter of a theologian, she turned against her father and "came to hate everything associated with Christianity, creating in its place a philosophy she called Deutsche Gotterkenntnis ('German conception of God')" (The Holy Reich, p. 87-88). Matilde Ludendorff wrote a book entitled Redemption from Jesus Christ in which "she sought to replace Jesus with a pantheistic conception of nature... [In her view] Jesus was not the heroic Aryan leader, but an alcoholic Jew who did not even die on the cross" (Ibid., p. 89).

During Hitler's rise to power, Ludendorff followed his own program. In 1925 he founded the Tannenberg League a mystical-religious sect centered on Teutonic nature-worship. But in Mein Kampf, Hitler condemned the archaic Teutonic warrior ideal in no uncertain terms: "People rave about old Germanic heroism, about dim prehistory, stone axes, spear and shield, but in reality they are the greatest cowards that can be imagined." Two years after the Tannenberg League was founded, Hitler expelled Ludendorff from the Nazi party. In the version presented by many historians, the militant-mystical ideology of the Nazis has been mistakenly identified with Ludendorff's anti-Christian program, but Steigmann-Gall shows that Nazism was a fundamentalist Christian revival in the heartland of Europe.

If Steigmann-Gall is right, his book confirms my main thesis in Not in His Image: namely, the Judeo-Christian plan of redemption is the cover for a "chosen race" ideology of genocide and domination—perpetrator religion. The author of The Holy Reich explains how the Nazi ideologues went to great lengths to purge Christianity of Judaism and indemnify it as the true religion of the European peoples. Doing so, they drew upon Richard Wagner's spin on Wolfram's Parzival. Here is Joseph Campbell´s astute observation on that spin:

Steigmann-Gall's radical book on the Holy Reich contains not a word about the Holy Grail. To readers who follow my argument here, this will come as no great surprise. Adopting the Mystery tale of the Grail, the Nazis selected what mattered to their program of world domination: not the Grail, but the bleeding lance. In fact, Hitler's interest in the lance was a lifetime obsession. And not merely the lance in Wolfram's story, but the actual lance, the spear of Longinus. This was a Christian artifact that became a cult object in the 11th Century when the Crusades occasioned an epidemic of relic-hunting. As soon as the public became thirsty for holy relics, relics appeared to satisfy their thirst.

Among the Crusader battles, the second siege of Antioch in June 1098 marks a highpoint of blind, murderous violence. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852) by John Mackay contains vivid and detailed descriptions of the horrors in the Holy Land. At Antioch, men, women and children were "indiscriminately slaughtered," a scene recalling Old Testament genocide sanctioned by Jehovah. After the battle, plague and famine reduced the surviving 300,000 crusaders and pilgrims who occupied the town to 60,000. Many suffered from hallucinations and fits of madness. A priest from Provence, Peter Barthelemy, appeared before Count Raymond of Toulouse, a leading French crusader, and declared he had had a vision: the holy lance that pierced the side of Christ was buried in the ruins of Antioch. Peter claimed that the apostle Andrew appeared to him and led him to the exact place. "The apostle then descended into the ground and brought up a lance, telling him it was that very lance that had opened the side whence had flowed the salvation of the world" (Mackay, p. 394).

The Biblical source of the holy lance is John 19:34: "One of the soldiers, with a spear, pierced his side, and immediately came there out blood and water." The name of this centurion, Longinus, occurs only in the apocryphal Acts of Pilate. The legend had extensive currency in the Middle Ages, especially following the discovery of the relic at Antioch. Christian monarchs were keen to get their hands on it. So was Adolf Hitler. In Mein Kampf he described the moment when he first stood before it, during a guided visit to the Hofburg Museum (Hapsburg Treasure House) in Vienna. At the time he was barely twenty years old, a miserable street artist who peddled hand-painted postcards. One day he fell in with a group of foreign politicians on a complimentary visit to the Hofburg. When they entered a small exhibition room called the Weltliche Schatzkammer, Hitler found himself standing a few feet away from the object that was to become his consuming obsession:

From that moment, Hitler was convinced that he alone was destined to claim the relic, the lance of Longinus that had pierced the side of Christ (called the Maurice Spear, only the head preserved, in two parts). The first thing Hitler did upon the annexation of Austria in 1938 was to walk into the Hofburg and take the spear into his hands, nearly 30 years after he first set eyes on it.
It would perhaps not be an exaggeration to say that the "Spear of Destiny," as it has been called, is the most potent magico--religious relic on this planet. Today the spear figures in dozens of fantasy games fervently played out on the Internet. Google it.

After the fall of Berlin in 1945, the Maurice Spear was returned for safekeeping to the museum room where Hitler had first seen it. It rests there to this day.

Wolfram's bleeding lance can teach us a lot about paternal power, but its identification with the spear that pierced the side of Jesus is a consummate twist. It is more than likely that Wolfram had one eye on this Crusader relic and the other on the Irish prototype when he invented this prop. It would have been extremely dangerous for him to have made the literal identification with the spear of Longinus, for he clearly states that the spear is a weapon of black magic, forged by a necromancer from the East. This would imply that the healing power of the blood attributed uniquely to Christ was nothing other than a trick of black magic.

To understand the occult machinations of the Paternal Lie, it is essential to recognize the crypto-fascist disguises in play. I propose the term vector to describe how such disguises drive or entrain collective attention.

Disguise and vector are the same thing—in Gyn/Ecology Mary Daly calls them "subliminal embeds"—but the term vector underscores how the disguise works directively upon the intended subjects of religious-social-ideological conditioning. Christian ethics, for instance, is a crypto-fascist vector for victim-perpetrator bonding. The image of the god-man or superman, Jesus Christ, is a crypto-fascist vector for an alienist cult of domination. Those who embrace the image as the ideal of humanity become unwitting accomplices in an occult program... which sounds suspiciously conspiratorial, of course. Against the accusation that these lessons in Mythbusting 101 are leading into the familiar territory of global conspiracy theory, I must offer some rigorous distinctions (in five paragraphs):

1 The best conspiracy is not forced upon people by hidden manipulation: it is voluntarily embraced by those it is intended to harm and deceive. There is no conspiracy capable of ruling the entire world, and duping all the people in the world, but there is a core conspiratorial plot that operates in such a way that a program of mass-scale conspiracy, which would be extremely difficult to pull off, is unnecessary. Why? Because you don't need to foist a conspiracy on the world when people are willing to collude with your aims, yet without knowing how they do so.

2 A good example of such collusion is The Parallax View, the 1974 film in which Warren Beatty plays a reporter who attempts to expose a conspiracy, only to be become the fall guy in it. The logline for the film is ironically telling: "There is no conspiracy. Just twelve people dead." The planned assassination suspected by Beatty's character was set up by a plot, but he himself produced the conspiracy about the plot, and accomplished it. Thus, ee colluded in that plot, without having to be coerced to do so.

3 There is a conspiratorial set-up working in history, but not a full-blown global conspiracy as such. One purpose of these lessons is to describe the set-up. This is nothing like exposing an alleged or secret conspiracy. In fact, the approach I am developing here could be called counter-conspiracy theory. It differs from conspiracy theory in that it does not purport to expose a specific conspiracy by naming names and citing events; rather, it attempts to show how blind collusion arises automatically around a predetermined plot.

4 This distinction may not be clear at first, so it might be helpful to disengage the usual assumptions and associations attached to conspiracy theory exposés, and introduce two novel terms—to freshen the syntax, as it were. Instead of conspiracy, I will refer to the master scam (comparable to what Mary Daly calls "the Master Myth"). The scammers may be called Illuminati, but this term is charged with associations, so I propose another: the DC. In this new jargon, we can speak of "the master scam run by the DC" in order to show how it is not a conspiracy as such, but a collective fantasy that enables a core of truly evil activities to be perpetrated on the world at large. Because the master scam is a fantasy of the collective imagination, it does not need to be effectuated by a vast conspiratorial effort. It more or less invents and sustains itself as long as the collective imagination is not alerted to the plot and guided along other lines.

5 And there is a plot, a hidden agenda run by real people, a core group I am calling the DC. The initials stand for "divinely chosen," the directive belief of the DC. The core group of dominators all share a belief that they are more and better than other humans. Conspiracies such as the New World Order are collective fantasies that arise due to the human attempt to imagine what the DC are doing, how they operate. The DC then take advantage of the collective fantasy process and exploit it in extremely devious ways. At no time, however, do DC orchestrate a program of global manipulation. They don´t have to. They rely on humanity to dupe itself, to create its own prisons and invent the monsters that defeat it. The work of the DC is diabolically clever, a self-fulfilling delusion like a Kafkesque nightmare that comes to be acted out in blind, compulsive behavior by millions of people. The genius of the DC inheres in their ability to play the collective imagination against itself. They count on humanity to be entrained by its own delusions, or by beliefs attached to those delusions and "deceptive myths," as Mary Daly calls them—the myth of corporeal resurrection after death, for instance.

The DC believe they are the favored few of the paternal deity who works against humanity. HE, Yahweh, will reward them with physical immortality or a clone-like status of deathlessness, a similacrum of life, prefigured by the eerie figure of Melchizedek who is "withour generation." They can shrug off humanity, and pursue all kinds of measures to see that it poisons its habitat and destroys itself with sectarian violence, nationalism, racism, drug addiction, and other induced pathologies, because they are allied with the higher-than-human power of the off-planet father god. As far as I know, only the Gnostics of the Pagan Mysteries came out in public and explicitly challenged this anti-human pact by exposing the Demiurge, the demented god that works against humanity. This goes a long way to explaining why they were so brutally eliminated.

Crucifix and Lance

Now, to conclude our investigation of this potent symbol of evil, the bleeding lance: In Wolfram's Parzival, the black magician who forges the spear is Klingsor. He comes from the region of the Tigris and Euphrates (Iraq), but his outpost in Europe lies in the mountains of Sicily. These details are most assuredly not Wolfram's inventions, nor are they mere fictional embellishments. Like other specific locales he cites, these are deeply significant. He certainly had Innocent III in mind with the reference to Sicily. Klingsor's stronghold, Calotte Enbolotte (in various spellings), is a hidden mountain retreat in Sicily where the Pope went to conduct secret meetings. It was discovered by Frederick II who used to convene there with his generals and councillers, including Magi, assassins, and alchemists from the Near East.

Iraq in ancient time was the land where theocracy first arose as a social control system, around 4400 BCE. As I have explained at length in other writings on this site, the sacred empowerment of kings requires agents of empowerment. In prehistory and down into historical times, secret priesthoods always mounted and directed the theocratic regimes in the Middle East, Egypt, China, Central and South America, and elsewhere. For instance, in Egypt the pharaohs, the designated theocrats or demi-gods, were set up and run by two elite priesthoods known as the Eye of Horus and the Eye of Seth. The priests advised the theocratic figureheads; and of course they did much more than that. In Egypt, they genetically engineered the pharaonic lines by systematic inbreeding—a fact acknowledged even by conventional historians such as Wallis Budge. They did likewise in many other theocratic regimes around the world. Genetic selection is a pet obsession of the DC.

Consider a current event: the Human Genome Project. This is not a project of the DC, nor the expression of an occult conspiracy, as some conspiracy-busters have claimed. It is a vast collaboration of scientists who are attempting to come to a definition of humanity on the belief that genetic coding absolutely determines who we are. This belief is purely human, and gives rise to huge projections of collective imagination. The DC observe how human imagination tends to go to wild extremes, and they cleverly vector or "embed" their plans into fantasies already in progress, so that the collective imagination endorses and facilitates their program. Without accomplished seers who can teach humanity to detect the deviance of mythological and imaginative processes, and guide such processes in ways consistent with human potential, there is no way to correct the fantasies that lend power to the master scam. The suppression of experimental mysticism, i.e., trained exploration of altered states with the aim to develop cognitive tools for directing human evolution, insures the success of the scam.

The crypto-fascist vector used by the DC to entrain the Human Genome Project to their aims is pro-life ideology, foetus-mongering. For instance, the American president's position against stem-cell research involves sentimental photo-ops and gushing statements about the preciousness of unborn children. But pro-life policy may be just the inverse of what it claims to be. Here is countervailing at work; pro-life policy is a mere posture to disguise the DC intention to cull the human species. Of course, many people passionately adapt the pro-life platform, and sincerely believe in it. Thus they unwittingly collude with people who do not respect life at all, for the DC are actively seeking to drive humankind toward total destruction so that they, the divinely chosen, can finally be culled from the rest of the human lot.

In a not-too-bad film with Arnold Swartzenegger, The Seventh Day, Christian fundamentalists make a big issue of opposing human cloning so that they can appropriate the technology for themselves in secret. The pious insistence on not meddling with God's work conceals the intent to play God. This is crypto-fascist countervailing in action.

Egyptian theocracy is a good example of how "the ignorant masses" support and even glorify a covert plot (pharaonic inbreeding) of the master scam. The DC (whoever they were in that time and setting) set up dynastic lines of genetic inbreds as part of a social control experiment that worked fantastically well for many centurie. Doing so, they exploited the collective fantasy of "living gods," counting on the people who believed in such entities to take the pharaohs for physical proof of their beliefs. This is how the DC orchestrated the conspiratorial program of Egyptian theocracy.

With these examples in mind, we may well wonder: What kind of vector is the bleeding lance? Well, in the first place, it is an instrument of suffering rather than death, and it even appears to work as an instrument that alleviates suffering. Wolfram plays this paradox brilliantly, as we have seen. I would suggest that the bleeding lance is a symbol of the mystified power of suffering. The cross or crucifix is also a vector of similar nature and intent to the lance. Every time believers look at the man crucified on the cross, they feel that the wound of suffering we all carry is soothed, as Amfortas' wound was soothed by the insertion of the bleeding lance.

Many people in the world are baffled by the necessity and purpose of suffering, and tend to believe that more suffering, or a particular kind of suffering—the suffering of a divine love god, for instance—can change the human condition and free us from the need to suffer. This belief gives inspires vast projections of the generic imagination of our species, and the power of these projections is entrained by crypto-fascist vectors like the crucifix. To many minds, anything will do to explain away suffering.

(Alchemical cartoon of Melusina piercing the side of Christ with the lance of Longinus. Reusner's Pandora, Basel, 1588. In the attempt to align themselves with Church dogma and escape execution for heresy, some alchemists proposed that the blood spilled from the savior's wound was a magic balm that poured into the atmosphere of the earth, thus endowing nature will healing properties— properties it already had, of course, but which had been condemned as demonic aspects of nature under Christian law.)

To suffer pointlessly and without any way to rectify the causes of suffering is intolerable, utterly unbearable, to most people. I wonder, though, if this might not be the best way to suffer. By which I mean, the way to undergo suffering that would lead to the best outcome for humanity? Faith in a higher power to redeem suffering may be the single, overriding, and most potent element of the collective imagination that works against our humanity.

Supernatural Healing

I am not suggesting that Wolfram used psychological symbolism in a crypto-fascist manner. Make no mistake, the image of the bleeding lance clearly does not work like the crucifix which displays the suffering of a superhuman figure whose anguish is salvific for humankind. Campbell pointedly notes that Parzival is not in any respect a Christian tale of blood redemption. Amfortas is totally human, and his suffering does not end with the sacrifice of a superhuman martyr, rather by the supernatural healing power of the Grail, of the Earth itself. Wolfram's story offers incomparable insight into the Paternal Lie about Christ and the redemptive value of suffering exemplified in the savior/victim complex. Parzival points away from the cross as a healing totem. At the same time, and in the same mystical imagery, it points toward the Pagan Grail as the source of regeneration, healing, ecstasy, and eternal youth (not eternal life).

The bleeding lance may be regarded as a symbol of evil because it is evil (read: against life) to promote and glorify the power of suffering and make it look like it can be the divine medicine that ends suffering. Humanity has been caught in this psychotic bind for thousands of years, ever since the genuine healing powers of the Earth were first put under taboo. Without access to the planet medicine provided by Gaia, we infect the entire planet with suffering. The infection is largely imaginary, yet comes to be enacted in the most gruesome manner. This horrific situation is totally human, a tragedy for our species, and not the doing of the DC. But the DC construct their master scam on a profoundly intuitive insight into our "deceptive myths" (Daly) about suffering, and our mystification of it. In particular, they support and embellish that mystification at every turn.

The DC champion and excite the lust for blood redemption in every possible way, including the incitement to war, territorial conflict, sectarian violence, and racist division of peoples. The dogma of the Real Presence of Christ in the wine drunk at mass (Fourth Lateran Council, 1215) served them well, as anything does that will keep humanity drunk on the thrill of blood-shedding. The crucifix, often pictured with the victim bleeding, is the crypto-fascist vector that entrains humanity to the anguish of mystified suffering. It does exactly the inverse of what it claims to do. The crucifix does not alleviate suffering but intensifies and legitimates it, glorifies it. Those who believe they are relieved by redemptive magic of the Blood of the Lamb are like Amfortas who is temporarily soothed by the insertion of the bleeding lance into the wound it inflicted.

In Not in His Image, I wrote: "The divine victim mirrors to humanity, not the solution to our suffering and a way to overcome it, but our total, consuming enslavement to it. Victimage works because it makes the force of suffering look stronger than the life force itself" (Chapter 19, "A Unique Message of Love").

Conspiracy buffs and conventional historians alike recognize that Adolf Hitler claimed on several occasions to be controlled by "secret chiefs." The Fuehrer was like a dynastic figurehead run by a secret priesthood. One of the consistent methods of the DC is to advise the designated leaders of the world. Doing so, they remain in the background and retain the incalculable advantage of those who empower the people in power. If you think the American president is dangerous, think again, because the people who advise him are far more dangerous—and powerful—than he is. This is no great revelation to many people around the world today.

Some well-meaning people who understand the covert power structure of the master scam tend to believe in a benevolent counterpart to the DC, an antidote if you will. The most well-known historical example of this antidotal fantasy is Swiss psychologist and spiritual guru, C. G. Jung (1875 - 1961).

In 1916, when he was coming out of a serious personal breakdown due to separation from his mistress, Sabina Spielrein, Jung produced an odd piece of channeled material which he titled Seven Sermons to the Dead. It is known that Jung greatly admired the 2nd century Gnostic Basilides, to whom he attributes the Sermons, suggesting that Jung was, or thought he was, the reeincarnation of the Gnostic master. In other words, the source of the channeling was Jung's former identity in a previous lifetime.

The Gnostic fantasies of Jung were not his alone. He shared them with a close circle of friends including Hermann Hesse and Miguel Serrano. In Jung and Hesse, Serrano explains the significance of the Gnostic signet ring Jung always wore (on the third finger of his left hand in photo). It represented Jung's belief that he and others he knew participated in a Gnostic or Hermetic circle of advanced souls who reincarnated together in different epochs of time. Jung never came out and said so explicitly in his writings, but he may have believed that intuitive knowledge and symbolic-archetypal motifs carried through time in the collective unconscious might be transferred by reincarnation.

The Gnostic circle fantasy looks fairly benevolent. In fact, Jung and his friends were not the only people who have entertained the chummy scenario of group reincarnation. The group comeback theme was lavishly developed by Rudolf Steiner who revealed to close friends that he had been Aristotle, Schionatalunder (a slain knight in Parzival), and Thomas Aquinas in previous incarnations. In Karmic Relationships, a series of talks delivered from his deathbed, Steiner elaborated cases of serial reincarnation, citing historical examples such as Plato, Raphael, Goethe, Marx, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Other groups in Europe at the same period, in particular the Modernist circle centered on D. H. Lawrence, A. R. Orage, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, and H.D., also indulged in reincarnational replay. Among Orage and his friends, it was routine to talk and joke about their previous lifetimes together. H.D. develops reincarnational memory of late poems such as Hermetic Definition. Orage's outrageous girlfriend Beatrice Hastings made good play out of the way they switched sexes in succeeding lifetimes (Lives and Letters of the Modernist Circle, John Carswell). Not a bad practice for gender-balancing, that. (In ancient Celtic society, past-life recall was also considered normal. So confident were Celts of this connection that it was considered acceptable to promise to repay a current debt in the next lifetime. This fact goes some way toward explaining how continuity was understood in the liebestod of Tristan, with love as the power that would reunite lovers in the next lifetime, not in the "afterlife".)

Serrano's memoir on the Gnostic circle of Jung and Hesse is quite charming, leading one to wonder how it might be to cook up a comparable scenario. Other books by Serrano "treat of Yoga and Tantra, mystical love, and his own travels as a seeker of wisdom in India, South America, and the Antarctic" (Jocelyn Godwin, Arktos, p. 70). Again, these look like pretty innocent fare. New Age spirituality at best, or at worst. But look a little further and you come to Serrano's masterpiece, a 600-page opus titled Adolf Hitler, The Last Avatar, published in 1984. In this book Serrano reveals his fanatic allegiance to the ideal of the Aryan Superman, embodied in Hitler. He propounds the "Hitler survival myth," claiming that the Fuehrer left Berlin in a UFO and took refuge in an underground bunker in the Antarctic.

It turns out that Serrano, who so idolized the latter-day Gnostic Jung, also idolized the Aryan Superman—but then so did Jung, in his own way. In The Jung Cult and The Aryan Christ, Jung biographer Richard Noll describes how the famous psychologist cum mystic was captivated by the same Christian Aryan myth that motivated the Nazis. In Noll's analysis, Jung's theory of the Self is a crypto-fascist disguise of the superman complex. That Jung was a crypto-fascist Nazi sympathizer rather than a profound and compassionate humanist will come as a shock to many people, and totally unacceptable. The Jung family fought a hard legal battle to have Noll's work suppressed. I would argue that Jung was a great humanist attracted by the spiritual glamour of the superman complex. In The Grail Legend, co-authors Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz state a classical Jungian proposition: "It is practically impossible to differentiate between an experience of God and an experience of the Self" (p. 99). With the God-Self equation (as I call it) accepted so unequivocally, it is no wonder that Jung and his colleagues were prone to embrace the superman complex. What happened with Jung also happens to many other genuinely spiritual and compassionate people, so strong is the lure of the equation.

For Jung and his circle, the Grail is "the unitary God-image," not the body of the Goddess, and the human reflection of it is Christ, believed to be God incarnate. Conceived in this manner, the God-Grail-Superman imagery serves beautifully to host the crypto-fascist element. But in Wolfram's Parzival there is no trace of this deific "inflation" (to use a Jungian term). Why not? Let´s recall the entheogenic fable encoded in the Gawain episodes. By a masterful feat of imagination, Wolfram gives us the bleeding lance, but he also gives us the magic garland.

The bleeding lance is about the temptations of power, including spiritual power, but the magical garland is about the heroic path of the surrender of self and its craving for power.

In Not in His Image, I argue that egodeath leading to selfless perception of Sacred Nature, rather than the sense of becoming one with God, was the mark of initiation in the Mysteries. The claim that "it is practically impossible to differentiate between an experience of God and an experience of the Self," is just a claim. One may well wonder, on what basis did Mrs. Jung and Professor von Franz make this statement? Their own firsthand mystical experiences? Their interpretation of Teresa of Avila of Jacob Boehme? Jung´s private testimony about his own mystical experiences? Or was it simply a theoretical conclusion? Whatever the case, it is an unwarranted claim and, in my view, flat wrong. The mystical experience offered by ingestion of psychoactive plants does not lead to God-Self identification but to wholly other realms of experience and identity. Overcoming human egotism and its deific pretences, including Jungian inflation, is one of the primary benefits of entheogenic practice—a benefit that cannot be had without the aid of non-human allies.

It may be objected that one can embrace the God-Self equation in the spirit of the Bhavagad Gita (Tat Tvam Asi, "thou art that"), or some other such benign formulation, without turning into a Nazi. Well, fine, but I'd like to see how you work it out imaginatively. You can write to the site and let me know.