Lucifer’s Court: A Heretic's Journey in Search of the Light Bringers by Otto Rahn

Author:Otto Rahn [Rahn, Otto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

Land where I was born,

poor and naked land,

Your ground is stony

and your fields ungrateful.

When I lead

my old plow through it,

I feel your soft heart beating in my arms.

With you: It is my country!

Land where I was born,

poor and naked land,

Your dark forests

cry in the wind.

In a foreign country, and curiously through a French-Italian song, my fatherland has suddenly become so close, closer than it has been ever before. I can hear those dark forests crying in the wind. Those who have never experienced a misty forest in November do not know that the forest can cry. When the damp cold pervades it, the forest is like an old grandparent whose grandchildren, the leaves, are blown away and whose sons, the trees, are uprooted by the gusty winds. They do not know that the forest air, which is praised in song, contains a disturbing tragedy. They also cannot know that ancestral forests are at their most endearing and most communicative when they emit a loud groan from pain.

What I am now feeling is called homesickness; in view of Mont Blanc, I am thinking of Germany, Faust, and the poet Christian Dietrich Grabbe—his devilish character Mephistopheles built a magic castle on Mont Blanc. Faust, that most German of Germans, had a “tear on his eyelash, when he thought of Germany.” Through them, the memory of Germany came back to haunt me—and the most beautiful feeling a homeland can offer in foreign lands is that of homesickness that arises as soon as a traveler thinks of her. When abroad someplace, I once heard a radio play a song a German soldier wrote for young Germans. A soldier says to his captain upon returning to the trenches from furlough: “The farther one travels from Germany, the more near it is.” This apparent contradiction contains a deep wisdom, perhaps essential knowledge about Germany and the German spirit.

Germany’s autumn is evoked on Palm Sunday in my small room in Geneva. The dark forests cry. The November wind hums in the wires and poles that cross the country along prominent highways. I see and also hear a late apple from the tree falling to the side of the road. Perhaps the apple would also like to cry because a worm is eating away at it—but it doesn’t do so. It falls quietly, and so, with its fate nearly fulfilled, it needs only to decay to live again, provided its seed revives. If this fails, the apple will help life by revitalizing the earth nearby and aiding healthy, natural germination in other plants. My little Empire pendulum desk clock, which I brought along, strikes twelve times with its ting-ting. The witching hour has come, for the spirit spoke to our ancestors and Tiubel the devil appeared to people only around noontime, or so they believed in the late Middle Ages. A knight named Heinrich von Falkenstein saw the devil once around noon, because a warlock had advised him that he would appear at this time. Tiubel came out

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