[Heyworth]

There's a lot of wacky stuff when you start digging around in this occult Nazi lore. The problem is that a lot of the more extraordinary stuff is based on very thin evidence. I remember reading once that a whole bunch of Tibetan monks were found dead in the ruins of Berlin. There's another story floating around (no pun intended) that a scuba diver in a lake somewhere up in the Austrian Alps saw an entire SS unit, men and all, sitting on the bottom. There's a lot of stuff about Aghartha, the underground kingdom under the Himalayas. There's the whole Grail/Spear of Longinus stuff, the Thule Society and its connections to Aleister Crowley. The list goes on and on. If you want to read a mind-blower of a book (and one that will get the Fundamentalists wigging out), check out HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL, which manages to tie together, among other things, the divine bloodline of Jesus, the Merovingian Dynasty of 8th Century France, the Holy Roman Emperors, the Hapsburgs, the Nazi occultists, the Knights Templar, the Masons, and a shadowy bunch of Frenchman called the Priory of Sion who may be the real authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and an intriguing little mystery centered around a small town in Southern France and a mysterious fortune in the hands of the local priest. Great fun. Even more fun, just for parodying most of the above, is the ILLUMINATI TRILOGY by Robert Anton Wilson.

[nopardons]

You've hit the nail on the head, with one exception. The Thule Society had NOTHING at all to do with Crowley. LOL

Oh, and Wilson wrote those books before " HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL " was written.

[DensaMensa]

>HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL

I read the book, then visited the sites in France. More than a little interesting...

[Bill Rice]

One of my friends at work "loaned" me the ILLUMINATI TRILOGY a couple years ago. I never got around to reading it yet though.

[fnord]

ILLUMINATI TRILOGY by Robert Anton Wilson

Love those books. SO hard to find the distinction between the satire and the historical. I'm amazed that most of the book is based on actual beliefs. It's a wild, wacky world out there :-)