Sunday, January 25, 2015

Monkey's Marginalia, No 18

I know I've been mostly absent from the blog lately, and honestly it's been difficult lately to come up with topics.  It didn't help that events in the real world needed to be addressed and the book was put aside for awhile.  Also, I'm currently taking some college courses, so posting infrequently will have to continue to be my modus operandi for the time being. But I will continue to check the comments and blog email, just be patient if you don't hear back right away from me.

Anyway, while I'm trying to figure where to go next and which threads to pull, I thought I would at least gather all the random bits from my twitter feed and drop them here. 

1.  Otto Rahn, archaeologist, early on, became interested in the Holy Grail and the Cathars and had published one book on the topic, Crusade Against the Grail.  He ended up working for Himmler as a junior officer of the SS due to Himmler's occult interests.  He tried to resign from the SS in 1939 after a couple of troubling incidences including anti-Semitic statements appearing in printed editions of his last book.  He disappeared and was found frozen on a mountain near Soll in Austria.  To this day there appears to be some question as to whether he was murdered or committed suicide.
It should also be noted, that Otto Grahn, the director who filmed The Santana March, receives a scathing letter from Straka about the film.  Perhaps Rahn's fate is alluded in the name of the primary antagonist in The Santana March; a man who is named Jerry Frost.

2. Lewis Looper is almost certainly a homophone for Lucifer.  And Otto Rahn's last book, ironically, was titled Lucifer's Court: A Heretic's Journey in Search of the Light Bringers. (Sunnydags? Sola?)

3. Ivan Bunin, the first Russian author to win the Nobel Prize, once called Hitler and Mussolini "rabid monkeys."

4. I, the Supreme by Augusto Bastos contains 3 references to mouths sewn shut.  Also included are references to twins, alchemy and non-being.

5. Oscar Hammerstein's first play was titled The Light.  It opened on May 19, 1919 and was a failure.

6.  And lastly, there is Rhiannon, from the Mabinogion, whose magical birds could wake the dead and lull the living to sleep.