write the great Grail romance Parsival (c. 1200). According to Stein, von Eschenbach based Parsival on the key figures of the ninth century, who served as models for the characters in the romance. The Grail king Anfortas corresponded to King Charles the Bald, grandson of Charlemagne; Cundrie, the sorceress and messenger of the Grail, was Ricilda the Bad; Parsival himself corresponded to Luitward of Vercelli, the Chancellor to the Frankish Court; and Klingsor, the fantastically evil magician who lived in the Castle of Wonders, was identified as Landulf II of Capua who had made a pact with Islam in Arab-occupied Sicily and whom Ravenscroft calls the most evil figure of the century. (5)
Stein had first read Parsival while taking a short, compulsory course on German literature at the University of Vienna. One night, he had a most unusual extrasensory experience: ‘He awoke … to discover that he had been reciting whole tracts of the … romantic verses in a sort of pictureless dream!’ (6) This happened three times in all. Stein wrote down the words he had been speaking and, on comparing them with von Eschenbach’s romance, found them to be virtually identical. To Stein this strongly implied the existence of some preternatural mental faculty, a kind of ‘higher memory’ that could be accessed under certain circumstances.
His subsequent researches into the Grail Romances led to his discovery, one August morning in 1912 in a dingy bookshop in Vienna’s old quarter, of a tattered, leather-bound copy of Parsival whose pages were covered with annotations in a minute script. Stein bought the book from the shop assistant and took it to Demel’s Cafe in the Kohlmarkt, where he began to pore over its pages As he read, he became more and more uneasy at the nature of the annotations.
This was no ordinary commentary but the work of somebody who had achieved more than a working knowledge of the black arts! The unknown commentator had found the key to unveiling many of the deepest secrets of the Grail, yet obviously spurned the Christian ideals of the [Grail] Knights and delighted in the devious machinations of the Anti-Christ.
It suddenly dawned on him that he was reading the footnotes of Satan! (7)
Stein was repelled yet fascinated by the vulgar racial fanaticism displayed in the annotations, by the ‘almost insane worship of Aryan blood lineage and Pan-Germanism’.
For instance, alongside the verses describing the Grail Procession and the Assembly of Knights at the High Mass in the Grail Castle, there appeared an entry written in large letters scrawled across the printed page: ‘These men betrayed their pure Aryan Blood to the dirty superstitions of the Jew Jesus — superstitions as loathsome and ludicrous as the Yiddish rites of circumcision.’ (8)
To Stein, the annotations represented the workings of a brilliant but utterly hideous mind, a mind that had inverted the traditional idea of the quest for the Grail as a gradual and immensely difficult awakening to wider spiritual reality, turning it into its antithesis: the opening of the human spirit, through the use of black magic, to the power and influence of Satan himself.
Shaken by what he had read in the annotated pages of the book, Stein glanced up for a moment through the cafe window and found himself looking into a dishevelled, arrogant face with demoniacal eyes. The apparition was shabbily dressed and was holding several small watercolours that he was trying to sell to passers-by. When Stein left the cafe late that afternoon, he bought some watercolours from the down-and-out painter and hurried home. It was only then that he realised that the signature on the watercolours was the same as that on the copy of Parsival he had bought: Adolf Hitler.
According to Ravenscroft, by the time Stein found the annotated copy of Parsival Adolf Hitler had already paid many visits to the Weltliches Schatzkammer Museum (Habsburg Treasure House) in Vienna, which held the Lance of St Maurice (also known as Constantine’s Lance) used as a symbol of the imperial power of Holy Roman emperors at their coronations. (9) Having failed to gain entry to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and the School of Architecture, and growing more and more embittered and consumed with an increasing sense of his own destiny as dominator of the world, Hitler had thrown himself into an intense study of Nordic and Teutonic mythology and folklore, German history, literature and philosophy. While sheltering from the rain in the Treasure House one day, he heard a tour guide explaining to a group of foreign politicians the legend associated with the Lance of St Maurice: that it was actually the spear that Gaius Cassius had used to pierce the side of Christ during the Crucifixion, and that whoever succeeded in understanding its secrets would hold the destiny of the world in his hands for good or evil. ‘The Spear appeared to be some sort of magical medium of revelation for it brought the world of ideas into such close and living perspective that human imagination became more real than the world of sense.’ (10)
Intent on meeting the man who had written so perceptively and frighteningly in the battered copy of Parsival, Stein returned to the dingy bookshop and this time encountered the owner, an extremely unsavoury-looking man named Ernst Pretzsche. Pretzsche told him that Hitler pawned many of his books in order to buy food, and redeemed them with money earned from selling his paintings. (Apparently, the shop assistant had made a mistake in selling Parsival to Stein.) Pretzsche showed Stein some of Hitler’s other books, which included works by Hegel, Nietzsche and Houston S. Chamberlain, the British fascist and advocate of German racial superiority who frequently claimed to be chased by demons.
In the conversation that ensued, Pretzsche maintained that he was a master of black magic and had initiated Hitler into the dark arts. After inviting Stein to come and consult him on esoteric matters at any time (which Stein had no intention of doing, such was the loathsomeness of the man), Pretzsche gave him Hitler’s address in Meldemannstrasse.
Hitler was extremely irate when Stein walked up to him and told him of his interest in the annotations in the copy of Parsival he had bought. He cursed Pretzsche for selling one of the books he had pawned. However, once Stein had told him of his own researches into the Holy Grail and the Spear of Longinus, Hitler became more amicable, apparently regarding the young university student as a possible ally in the Pan-German cause. They decided to pay a visit to the Schatzkammer together to look at the Holy Lance. As they stood before the display, the two men responded to it in very different ways.
For some moments [Stein] was almost overcome by the powerful emotions which filled his breast and flowed like a river of healing warmth through his brain, evoking responses of reverence, humility and love. One message above all seemed to be inspired by the sight of this Spear which held within its central cavity one of the nails which had secured the body of Jesus to the Cross. It was a message of compassion which had been so wonderfully expressed in the motto of the Grail Knights: ‘Durch Mitleid wissen.’ A call from the Immortal Self of Man resounding in the darkness of confusion and doubt within the human soul: Through Compassion to Self-Knowledge. (11)
As Stein glanced at his companion, it seemed to him that Hitler was responding in a way which was diametrically opposite to his own.
Adolf Hitler stood beside him like a man in a trance, a man over whom some dreadful magic spell had been cast. His face was flushed and his brooding eyes shone with an alien emanation. He was swaying on his feet as though caught up in some totally inexplicable euphoria. The very space around him seemed enlivened with some subtle irradiation, a kind of ghostly ectoplasmic light. His whole physiognomy and stance appeared transformed as if some mighty Spirit now inhabited his very soul, creating within and around him a kind of evil transfiguration of its own nature and power. (12)
The inscrutable occult processes that were set in motion by Hitler’s discovery of the Holy Lance were consolidated on 14 March 1938, when Hitler arrived in Vienna to complete the Anschluss of Austria. While the Viennese people cheered the German forces’ arrival, the Jews and opponents of the Nazi regime faced a persecution that, while utterly appalling, was but a pale foreshadowing of the horrors to come. Seventy-six thousand people were arrested when the Nazis arrived, with a further 6,000 people dismissed from key ministries in the Austrian Government. (13) Jews of all ages, whether they were religious or not, were ordered to scrub anti-Nazi slogans from the streets; the water they were given was mixed with acid that burned their hands. Hitler’s SS Death’s Head squads and members of the Hitler Youth urinated on Jews and forced them to spit in each other’s faces; others were forced to dance on Torah scrolls. In less than a month, the deportation of Jews to the concentration camps would begin. (14)
While these atrocities were being perpetrated, Hitler (according to Ravenscroft) went to the Habsburg Treasure House to claim the Holy Lance. With him were Heinrich Himmler and Wolfram Sievers, whom he ordered to leave him alone with the object of his diabolical desire.
Although … the Spear of Longinus had been the inspiration of his whole life and the key to his meteoric rise to power, it was more than a quarter of a century since he had last seen it, and nearly thirty years since he first beheld it and heard of its unique legend.
Whatever Hitler’s visions on this occasion, the scene of the German Fuhrer standing there before the ancient
