The Archives

The Tower of Basel – BIS a power behind the scenes

The world’s most exclusive club has eighteen members. They gather every other month on a Sunday evening at 7 p.m. in conference room E in a circular tower block whose tinted windows overlook the central Basel railway station. Their discussion lasts for one hour, perhaps an hour and...

CDB, The world’s most powerful bank

September 2011 Hugo Chávez, resplendent in crisply pressed fatigues and paratrooper boots with red shoelaces, had a very special guest. Meeting him that mid-September day in Caracas was the world’s most powerful banker, who had lent Chávez’s government at least $40 billion over four years, or about $1,400...

German & Celtic Women at War

Tacitus gives us some fascinating details in Books 7 and 8 of his Germania, written in about 98 CE, relating to the role of German women in war and battle. He points out that a major contribution to German military success lay in the fact that their fighting...

Lithuania at war with the Soviets (1944-1948)

By 1945 World War II had ended, but in Lithuania the war against the Soviet Union had only just begun. One of the bloodiest battles of the Lithuanian armed resistance, the battle of Kalniškės, was fought only days after “VE day”. Lithuanian farmers, school teachers, university professors, university...

Hess and the most controversial event in the History of World War II

Without doubt, the most bizarre and controversial event in the History of World War II was the parachute jump by Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess into Scotland on May 10, 1941. Hess was supposedly on a peace mission to negotiate a peace between England and Germany. Hess was allegedly...

The Arabic Idris and the Alchemical Mercury

The name of Hermes, whether or not qualified as Trismegistus, henceforth served as guarantee or signature for a host of esoteric books on magic, astrology, medicine, etc., throughout the Middle Ages, and this despite the fact that, with the exception of the Asclepius, the Corpus Hermeticum was unknown....

Discover the engaging and complex Greek Hermes

Just as the daylight penetrates at dawn through every crack and crevice, says the author of the Homeric Hymn, so Hermes slipped silently in through the keyhole of the cavern which gave him birth. How plastic, mobile, and ambiguous is the nature of this god, whose feminine companions...

The End of the American Empire? Its destruction from within.

Depending on where one dated the irreversible decline, it took the Roman Empire almost two centuries to collapse. By the first months of the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, it looked as though it might have taken the American Empire, the self-proclaimed American Century,...

What poets used to know – the sacred art

Poetry, in our time, is not only a misunderstood art, but one that has been subject to a systematic program of denaturing and falsification, at the hands of those Andrew Harvey has characterized as “official tastemakers who have outlawed the sublime, and… a contemporary poetry world addicted to...
Gral Relic

The mysterious relic — The Gral

The mysterious relic —which could be at one and the same time a chalice, a book, a stone, or a person— was seen as existing both on the earth and at a remove from it. In the poem The Later Titurel, it hovers above the world, untouched by...

Good? — by what standard? by Ayn Rand

John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged: “Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood...

Jehan’s Last Steps – a remarkable mysterious story

In 1934 the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung published in Issue 48 an article by Otto Rahn entitled: Jehans Letzer Gang (Jehan’s Last Steps). The piece told the story of one Jehan Tessenre, a young family man moments away from his execution by Hugeunot troops in reprisal for the death...
Maier files books