Gothic origins of the Bloodline of the Holy Grail
"And Odin took with him a son of his whose name was Yngvi, who became king in Sweden, and from him are descended the family lines known as the Ynglings. These Aesir found themselves marriages within the country there, and some of them for their sons too, and these families became extensive, so that throughout Saxony and from there all over the northern regions it spread so that their language, that of the men of Asia, became the mother tongue over all these lands. And people think they can deduce from the records of the names of their ancestors that those names belonged to this language, and that the Aesir brought the language north to this part of the world, to Norway and to Sweden, to Denmark and to Saxony; and in England there are ancient names for regions and places which one can tell come from a different language from this one."
-- Snorri Sturluson, The Edda,(1220 A.D.)
If Dan Brown had read Snorri Sturluson's Edda (1220 A.D.), then perhaps The DaVinci Code would have taken place in Sweden. After all, do we really understand where this concept of a "Grail Dynasty" or "Bloodline of the Holy Grail" comes from? In olden times, however, it wasn't the Merovingians who were remembered as "demigods" through the blood of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. It was the Goths, children of Gaut, the gothic All-Father, who were legendary in their own time. The legendary Teutonic tribe of the Visigoths sacked Rome, the city of the gods. They were echoed in history as divine heroes, for having conquered the Eternal City, a place only the gods themselves could conquer. My first forays into such topics back in the early 1990s, however, were not met with lighthearted speculation. Ralph Levy, my professor for my Major Prophets class, was not amused. "This does not even remotely fulfill the assignment," was his comment on my term paper, affixed as it was to an "F" grade. Perhaps he was nonplussed by the paper's title, "The Messiah and Medieval Elvis Sightings." Or perhaps the seriousness of his graduate studies in the Hebrew language had left him with an impoverished sense of humor. Perhaps he was offended by the paper's thesis that Jesus sired a dynasty that ruled Europe for centuries and who could return to fulfill "End Time Prophecy." No doubt Bryan Hoyt, my professor for Daniel and Revelations class, was equally miffed by my exploration of the monarchist concepts of Dante's De Monarchia in light of the monarchist movement in Europe that I believed would restore the Holy Roman Empire. The paper was informed by correspondence with actual European monarchists such as the pan-European International Monarchist Union, Germany's Tradition und Leben, America's L'Alliance Monarchiste and the Constantian Society. Mr. Hoyt was furthermore put out by my reference to the "Grail Dynasty" concept made popular by Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln and Richard Leigh in Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Messianic Legacy. Like Dr. Levy, Hoyt also thought the notion that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and sired a bloodline was blasphemous. His grading, however, was more complimentary.
As a theology student at Ambassador College, in Big Sandy, Texas, many of us believed like Herbert W. Armstrong, founder of the Worldwide Church of God, that a revived Holy Roman Empire would herald the arrival of the Antichrist, the so-called "beast" of Revelation, who would rule with ten kings in the Last Days. My own pet theory held that the "ten kings" who would rule for one hour with the "beast" in Revelation 17 would be ten literal kings on European thrones. Hence, the international monarchist movement held prophetic implications. (Or so I thought.) And here was this "shocking" best seller proclaiming that an "ancient secret society" called the Prieure de Sion (Priory of Sion) was attempting to revive a "Merovingian" claimant to the thrones of France and possibly Austria-Hungary. I was already in contact with the "exoteric"-- the public or outer -- movement of European monarchists. Now the possibility of a hidden "occult" monarchist movement was thrilling. My reaction at the time was not unlike that of other fundamentalists in the late 1980s and early 1990s who read Holy Blood, Holy Grail with uncritical eyes and then ran with it in every paranoid direction. The phenomenon has been echoed in the release of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and the subsequent cultural debate. My conclusions, as much as I now hate to admit it, were similar to those of Oklahoma City fundamentalist J.R. Church in his book, "Guardians of the Grail... and the men who plan to rule the world!" There, Church breathlessly concludes: "When the true antichrist finally does emerge to establish a one-world government, he just might be of the Merovingian bloodline, claiming descent from the lineage of Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ." # The lipstick on my prophetic pig, however, was that my pig was dressed up in the more sophisticated clothing of the monarchist political theory of Dante's De Monarchia and correspondence with modern monarchist activists.
In the mid 1990s a "church quake" took place in the Worldwide Church of God when "Pastor General" Joseph Tkach Sr. admitted that certain doctrinal teachings of the church were flawed. The church dropped its emphasis on "end time" prophecy and its British-Israelism theory by which the U.S. and Britain were said to be Ephraim and Manasseh of the so-called Lost Tribes of Israel. The church lost about two-thirds of its membership as splinter-groups adhering to Armstrong's teachings coalesced and the remaining core of the WCG adopted more mainstream Protestant style teachings. While many from the Worldwide Church of God parted their ways towards church doctrines more to their liking, I dug deeper into the esoteric teachings of Europe's "underground."
Through contact with the "underground stream" of the Western Mystery Traditions, my view of Christianity changed radically with exposure to such writers as Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Gerald Massey, James Morgan Pryse, H. Spencer Lewis, G.R.S. Mead, among others. I was exposed to works such as the "Crata Repoa" in Richard Dawkins' Arcadia and the Arcadian Academy. Dawkins intimates that the "gospel stories" of the Bible may have their origins in ancient Egyptian mystery teachings -- a notion echoed ad nauseum by writers such as Kuhn and Massey. Simultaneously my notions of "Bible prophecy" were singularly exploded by the work of James Morgan Pryse in his 1910 Apocalypse Unsealed, which re-translates the book of Revelation in light of Greek mystery teachings. There the opening of the "seven seals" was akin to the opening of the seven "chakras" of Hindu and Tibetan occult teaching. As the Egyptian magi had done centuries before, the "Illuminati" of early Christianity used the astrological symbolism of the stars to illustrate phases in the unfolding of hidden alchemical aspects of the psyche. Pryse retold in great detail how the "12 gated city" of the New Jerusalem was the human body and the arrival of the soma heliakon (golden spiritual body) of Greek pneumatology. The Platonists likened aspects of the psyche to the sun and moon, and the soma heliakon (Solar Body) that Pryse referred to in the Book of Revelation as the "New Jerusalem" -- with its allegorical "streets of gold." It was the same as the augoeides ochema (radiant vehicle) or the astroeides (star-like body) written about by G.R.S. Mead in The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in the Western Tradition. # Because the spiritual body was believed to be made of star-like substances, the magi used the symbolism of star-constellations and planets to conceal their science of spiritual awakening, according to Pryse. At any rate, what became perfectly clear to me, however, was that the Book of Revelation originally had nothing to do with any prediction of the future -- and by extension, any revived and occult-controlled "Holy Roman Empire."
But it took many years to finally figure that out. And in the meantime I spent years in Internet message boards discussing the so-called "Priory of Sion," the alleged secret society that founded the Knights Templar, Rosicrucians and Freemasons. The alleged "secret society" were supposedly the "guardians of the grail bloodline." This supposedly was the bloodline sired by Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, according to a host of popular "occult" writers in the field of the "Mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau." Long before Dan Brown arrived on the scene with his extraordinarily popular novel and movie, The Da Vinci Code, researchers like Paul Smith had with meticulous care demonstrated that the claims brought by Pierre Plantard regarding the so-called Prieure de Sion, were almost entirely bogus. # While the knowledge that discredited Plantard may have been common knowledge amongst the specialists that gathered online, the popularity of the Jesus-bloodline ideas caught fire once Dan Brown's novel became such a public phenomenon. It remains, however, for researchers like Dr. Stephen Flowers, a.k.a. "Edred Thorsson," to inject more sanity into the public debate over the "bloodline of the Holy Grail" theory.
As Edred points out in Mysteries of the Goths, the whole notion that the Merovingians were the descendants of Jesus, was always just a diversion and obfuscation of the original "bloodline of the Holy Grail" concept. The "long-haired" Merovingian kings may have believed they were the descendants of the gods, but not because of some pseudo-Jewish dynasty notion, but because of wide-spread beliefs held by Germanic tribes. The legendary dynasty of old was the Volsungs, with "Sigurd" being the heroic slayer of the dragon Fafnir. The tales of this heroic dynasty began circulating amongst the Frankish tribes of France as early as the Fifth and Sixth centuries, according to scholars. Sigmund, son of Volsung, was said to have ruled Frankish tribes in France, according to the Fra Dautha Sinfjotla in the Poetic Edda. # Volsung was said to be the great-grandson of Odin, the Germanic All-Father himself. For it was commonly understood that a tribe of gods had come from the south and settled in Germany, and sired dynasties in Saxony, France, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. This was later explained in Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda (1220), where it was stated that the gothic gods came out of Troy in Asia Minor and settled in Germany and Scandinavia.
The implication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, was that a claimant to the throne of Europe was about to appear on the scene and claim to be a descendant of a royal bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. # There was speculation that perhaps a recognized royal like Archduke Otto von Habsburg or a faux "secret" claimant like Plantard himself would step up to claim descent from Jesus. In time pretenders like "Prince" Michael of Albany (Scotland) would be implied as claimants to the grail dynasty by writers such as Laurence Gardner in his book, Bloodline of the Holy Grail and Genesis of the Grail Dynasty. In the latter book, Gardner claimed that a "Dragon Order" had existed since ancient Egypt and Sumeria to preserve a grail bloodline begun by the Annunaki, the "ancient astronauts" of Sumeria written about by Zechariah Sitchin, Erich von Daniken and others. Although the "grail dynasty" has been co-opted as a pseudo-Christian concept, from what was originally a "gothic" concept, you generally don't hear of Germanic claimants coming forward and saying: "I am the descendant of Odin and therefore I have the right to be king." For someone in the modern era to stand up and say, "I am the child of the gods," would be akin to saying, "I deserve to be king because I am the descendant of extra-terrestrials." (Perhaps that particular DNA test will have to wait the U.S. government releases of the bodies from the Roswell Crash.) Nevertheless, faux gothic royal claimants have already played a role in modern history, as pointed out by Stephen Flowers and Michael Moynihan in The Secret King. Just prior to World War II, Karl Maria Wiligut was hired by Heinrich Himmler to be the secret "Lord of the Runes" for the Nazi Reich, based upon an alleged noble family tradition. Ultimately, however, Flowers dismisses Wiligut as doing a disservice to the elder tradition of the North by distorting the surviving gothic teachings with a strange mixture of pseudo-Christian Manicheanism and runic theology.
Although the Rune Gild teachings do not imply any monarchist significance, the notion that humanity remains genetically linked to the gods has played a part in the modern revival of Asatru, the Germanic ancestral religion. The mystery underlying the Mannaz rune, according to Thorsson in Runelore, is that humanity shares a genetic link to divinity. # Within the Rune Gild philosophy, the runes are believed to act as cosmic codes to activate divinity within the descendants of Odin. The concept bears similarities to Nietzche's concept of using one's "will to power" to create the "Ubermensch" or Superman. It also stems from "Left-Hand-Path" concepts current in the Temple of Set regarding "divinization" or the elevation of humans to supernormal status through a magical will and practice. It was this concept of "divinization" that made the story of Jesus palatable to the Visigoths, according to Stephen Flowers in his book, Lords of the Left Hand Path. The heretical Arian Christianity that the gothic tribes adopted taught that Jesus was a man who attained divinization through spiritual practices -- a concept not at odds with their heathen Germanic religion. #
Ultimately though, a refined "gothic" bloodline concept stems from a different concept of creation. The well-worn Judeo-Christian concept is that Yahweh breathed life into the first man, and therefore humanity shares a mysterious link with the divine life force, spirit or soul. In the New Testament this is developed further into the notion that certain chosen ones may become the "children of God" in an allegorical sense. The Germanic tradition takes this to another level by stating that it is not merely our Soul that is god-derived, but our flesh itself. That humanity is ultimately the offspring of the gods. Underlying the fantastic tales of heroic dragon-slayers and supernatural "sons of the mist" (German, Nibelungen), is the notion that the olden gods were reborn through their descendants, much like the Yule-tide practice that children were given gifts because they were seen as the ancestors reborn. # Human DNA was thought to contain the mold that contained the form of the gods. The treasure that went with the divine descendants has been lost and must be re-won, much like Odin must re-win the poetic mead of inspiration that was his to begin with. The process of becoming and realizing that divine-mold-pattern within us is the grail that drives heroes forward on their quest to become who they already are at a genetic level.
By Corey Wicks
Corey Wicks is an award-winning journalist and author. He can be reached through email at rosencruez@yahoo.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Corey_Wicks
No comments:
Post a Comment