The Great Game, the Vril-ya and Theosophy

[Helen Reyes]

Jan: ghastly. It could also be a post-war torture scene, with an SS ritual as good enough cover. Or it could be what the Ukrainians reported, but it does sound a wee bit sensational. I'd like to see more physical evidence, medallions and so on. If it's a single SS belt buckle, that could've fallen off while Jews were being butchered in sadistic ways by Nazis.

David: the first link in your post mentions Ebionites and the second mentions archbishop of Lyons, St. Ennemond. This is significant for catharism. The Ebionites were an early gnostic sect. GRS Mead in Fragments of a Faith Forgotten devotes a chapter to them:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/gno/fff/fff13.htm

THE EBIONITES.
Epiphanius would have it that the Christians were first called Iessæi, and says they are mentioned under this name in the writings of Philo. The followers of the earliest converts of Jesus are also said to have been called Nazoræi. Even towards the end of the fourth century the Nazoræans were still found scattered throughout Cœle-Syria, Decapolis, Pella (whither they fled at the destruction of Jerusalem), the region beyond Jordan, and far away to Mesopotamia. Their collection of the logoi was called The Gospel according to the Hebrews, and differed greatly from the synoptic accounts of the Canon. Even to this day a remnant of the Nazoræans is said by some to survive in the Mandaïtes, a strange sect dwelling in the marshes of Southern Babylonia, but their curious scripture, The Book of Adam, as preserved in the Codex Nasaræus, bears no resemblance whatever to the known fragments of The Gospel according to the Hebrews, though some of their rites are very similar to the rites of some communities of the "Righteous" referred to in that strange Jewish pseudepigraph The Sibylline Oracles.

Who the original Iessæans or Nazoræans were, is wrapped in the greatest obscurity; under another of their designations, however, the Ebionites or "Poor Men," we can obtain some further information. These early outer followers of Jesus were finally ostracized from the orthodox fold, and so completely

[p. 127]

were their origin and history obscured by the subsequent industry of heresy-hunters, that we finally find them fathered on a certain Ebion, who is as non-existent as several other heretics, such as Epiphanes, Kolarbasus and Elkesai, who were invented by the zeal and ignorance of fourth-century hæresiologists and "historians." ... The Ebionites were originally so called because they were "poor"; the later orthodox subsequently added "in
intelligence" or "in their ideas about Christ." ...

The great anti-gnostic heresiologist also happened to be archbishop of Lyons, Iranaeus, but around 400 years earlier than St. Ennemond. You probably know about the Egyptian motifs in certain early Christian churches in the south of France. So you've got a group of Franciscans calling themselves Ebionites supposedly guarding the arma Christi in France and the theory that the Third Reich had something with which to blackmail the Vatican into compliance.

And then to tie it back into Jan's Ukrainian report, there's that Templar legend about John the Baptist's skull in Jerusalem, in some underground chamber under the Temple Mount, with the hint that the human skull is the Grail, with the implication that human sacrifice is involved in the Grail quest. There's some kind of inner coherence in that, but I'm not sure where the truth hides.

Well, just to mix it up some more, I just ran across this: Taeufer, Johannes - Vril - Die Kosmische Urkraft (1930, 25 S.).pdf