Douglas Mercer
February 8 2025
The most commonly accepted etymology derives from Latin gradalis or gradale via an earlier form, cratalis, a derivative of crater or cratus which was, in turn, borrowed from Ancient Greek krater, a large wine-mixing vessel. Alternative suggestions include a derivative of cratis, a name for a type of woven basket that came to refer to a dish, or a derivative of Latin gradus meaning by degree or by stages applied to a dish brought to the table in different stages or services during a meal. It is also described as a wide and deep saucer.
Now that history, which is the mother of truth, is coming to a close it is well that we take in its long span and deduce its future. But make no mistake, this history is a secret history and cannot be gleaned from books which at best can provide some clues or hints here and there to light one along one’s way. No, the truth is a secret truth and glows with an inner intensity of a transcendent imagination and so can only be seen clearly with the eye of the pure and noble mind. And when this inner truth comes to its fore, when the two worlds collide, it can only mean catastrophe. For if history is the mother of truth the creator is its only begetter and it cures the world only by blood.
The talisman of the cross—what horrors has it wrought? What utter devastation? An alien world view had conquered Europe and with the germ of destruction inside of it the Aryan race traced a fitful path to its destiny. What happened in Germany from 1919 to 1945 is seen as the culmination of the German special path, the path which worked more or less outside of the Roman Civilization of Christendom and so, they say, worked its evil. But even the victors in World War 2 see this so called evil in human terms, as a psychological aberration or the darkness of man’s heart, but well within the normal confines of normal history. And so they reduce what was in fact a world battle of titanic proportions to just another event, however horrifying they deem it, in the long annals of the earth.
But this “eruption” as they will term it, this upsurge of German strength, was an emblem of much more than a mere turn of events. For the fate of the earth, and the struggle for global domination, occurs in spheres much longer and larger and grander than mere human calculation. From normal reckoning the quest for global rule is a quest for survival and is historical and political at most. But what this equation leaves out is that the earth, and the universe itself, has a destiny—a destiny to be worked out by men to be sure, but certainly not completely within our control.
And so in the fatal years we are considering occured the grand drama, or melodrama, played out in its first form. The Aryan race by then had long been known as the race which thrust men across the threshold of the earth and brought it into a cosmic perspective. This was the upward path of its people, but toward the close of the nineteenth century it was widely viewed that this upward path was facing a mortal threat, one that existed within the borne of Europe itself. For so powerful was the Aryan race that when the learning of the ancient Aryans was revived even the albatross of the alien religion of Christianity could not halt its progress. But even as the religion was shed by the advanced elites and intellectuals its inner logic, the logic of humanism, held fast its enervating grip. War was increasingly seen not as the logic of nature but as an aberration itself. War would come of course, as it always would and always will, in whatever form, but a millenarian vision of peace began to be seen as the normal state of life.
Adolf Hitler as always sensed this darkening shift:
For myself I have the most intimate familiarity with Wagner’s mental processes. At every stage in my life I come back to him. Only a new nobility can introduce a new civilization. If we strip Parsifal of every poetic element we learn from it that selection and renewal are only possible amid the lasting tension of eternal struggle. A world wide process of segregation is going on before our eyes. Those who see in struggle the very meaning of life always will gradually mount the steps, gradation, and degrees of this new nobility. Those who are in search of peace and order though dependence sink, whatever their origin, into the inert masses. The masses, however, are doomed to decay and self destruction. In our world turning revolutionary turning point the masses are the sum total of the sinking civilization and are its dying representatives. We must allow them to die and hasten their demise.
This of course is the law of the world, the law of the universe, the law of the cosmos; and only those who obey this law will prove victorious. And any man such as Hitler who subscribes to such a lofty view of time and fate will always seem jarring and uncanny to those who cling to the quotidian view of reality. For the talisman of the cross says otherwise—that the meek shall inherit the earth. For a long time the men of Europe, though often Christian themselves, acted as if this prediction did not exist. But at the revolutionary turning point the values were beginning to be transvalued in reverse---and the ones who did this put a humanism in place of the cross—but behind that humanism the cross lurked like an evil genie. For this battle, and that is what it was, was the ever present battle for the earth, and the sides and the forces and relations can only be seen by a secret knowledge, a seer’s eyes, one who can see that this is cosmic war and destiny can only be controlled by one who controls this inner vision, for he will possess what all men profess to want: the grail.
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The special path of Germany, how much has been written on this subject! But always this special path is seen as a path of deviation, of evil—but it is nothing of the sort. It is a path that the Aryan race was on from the beginning as it began to work out its own special and specific destiny along its own lines. But on the way to paradise the Aryans met a foe in the Jews who over time were able to deflect the Aryans from this path. This religion saw man as made in God’s image—but the god of creation is an impersonal god and man, as such, holds no special place. Only the race which can align itself with the actual will of the creator, only the people who can be in tune with the cosmic light of destiny—only that folk is of concern to the creator and only then so long as they work alongside it to achieve its completion.
It was in Germany that this ancient lore began to be rediscovered. Glimpses of it naturally came from the mystery religions of the ancient world and in the Renaissance various priests of the sun began to recapture the knowledge; but as always the Christian authorities cast this natural resurgence as the work of the devil, as the work of pride in man, and likened it to the eating of the apple in the garden; and stake and the fire is how they tried to dispose of it.
But the creator and its truth work on the order of eons not centuries; man’s time is nothing to it. Nature is a pageant of creation and destruction and ever more creation; and within its hallowed frame man has no special rights. Indeed man as an end in himself is a non sequitur; only man as a steppingstone to the paradise of racial perfection has any meaning. For the orders of mankind who are unable to comprehend or divine the weaving of fate deserve contempt and misanthropy; they are unworthy of life and are expendable and will be annihilated as the botched failures of nature's ever renewing attempts to perfect itself. To the uninitiated these will always seem to be monstrous blueprints and recipes for disaster, but the god is a relentless god and an implacable god and what passes for sentimental is utterly foreign to it. It only sees perfection and all else is waste.
The Germans under National Socialism could not of course publish all of their values and aims; they had not been in power long and this ancient chthonic wisdom could only be understood and accepted by a select elite. So they worked under the auspices of politics and history and German Nationalism; but the spear heads of their people, the chosen few, the cadres of the secret knowledge knew that the meaning of the movement was not contained in political slogans; and living space was not an end but a beginning. The National Socialist believes in the love of beauty and the worship of force, as the twin realities of the natural world. They also believe in a technological superiority provided that it is enacted within the context of natural order and natural law; the mere ravening of Jewish capitalism which held the earth not to be sacred and treated the earth as a glorified gas station made the men who could perpetrate such a regime the scourge and offscourings meet only for death.
But in the guise of an historical actor, indeed as an actor proper, as a statesman, as a general or a diplomat our Fuehrer arose; Hitler used these as fronts for the thing he really was: a man of destiny in accord with time and fate; what he was was in human form the avatar of the cycle of the ages, the penultimate avatar; a man who due to the precipitate historical circumstances was a man against time who held out the promise of the man to come, or the being who will supersede man, and who will be with time. As such he was a being of cosmic significance and a divine being, the first born of god, a seer and holy man within the cosmic order, a supernatural figure whose intervention in the cycle of the ages was necessary to restore the Golden Age.
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Heine was the first to vaguely intuit this underground return, these fissure like tremors in the earth; as a Jew he quaked and quailed at what he sensed, casting it in apocalyptic terms of berserker rage, saying that once the totem of the cross was banished the Germans would put on a play which would make the French Revolution look like an idyll; Lawrence also in the dizzying gothic spirals picked up the vibration of recrudescence; he wrote that the Germans seemed crazy for peaky heights, saying he felt strange stirrings in the darkness, strange stirring in the primeval depths of the dark and shrouded Black forests; a sense of danger, of queer bristling danger. Despite his glorification of the blood he too like Heine cowered and cringed at the feeling of this awesome power. But what both sensed was no berserker rage, was no primitive upsurge. What both picked up on was nothing less than the universal primaling, of the earth for too long despised and used and objectified preparing and readying itself to use human vessels to rid itself of the pleurisy of its peoples. That is they had no idea of the forces with which they were contenting; and if it scared them out of their minds it’s no wonder.
For this was the great idea, the grand idea incarnated in human form. This was that battle of the titans and the battle of the gods, of gods and beast and the coming Great White Visitation which had been prophesied by our people from time out of mind. No wonder they wanted to view Hitler as a clown or an actor or a monster; anything but what he was: the conduit of the sacred on earth. For he was a man who was aware of his own divine mission though of course he could only divulge these secrets to those close to him. For he was in possession of the cup and the bowl and the spirit and spear of life itself in his own proper person; and he knew of the unfailing wisdom according to which nature creates and according to which nature destroys; the always impersonal wisdom of the dark forests and the ocean depths and the trackless wastes and the celestial spheres and the vast fields of interstellar spaces; this is not wisdom that one can pick up in a book but it is the power and the wisdom that all men have forever always wanted; for he had the wisdom of the grail.
Continued at Gail (Part Two)