Joachim of Fiore: From the Prophecy of Merlin to the Third Reich

Abstract

This article evaluates the profound structural impact of the 12th-century Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202) on the evolution of Western heterodoxy, occultism, and modern political chiliasm. By historicizing the Christian Trinity into a three-stage progressive timeline, Joachim introduced a revolutionary teleological matrix that predicted the inevitable dissolution of institutional dogmas in favor of universal, unmediated spiritual illumination. Tracking his lineage through medieval heretical mutations, Renaissance Hermeticism, and the 18th-century chivalric myths of high-degree Freemasonry, this study demonstrates a systematic process of secularization. This trajectory culminates in the 19th and 20th centuries, where his tripartite framework was stripped of its monastic context and sequentially weaponized by Éliphas Lévi into an occult social law, by Lanz von Liebenfels into an esoteric racial millennium, and by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck into a concrete geopolitical ideology.  

I. Introduction: The Teleological Architect

Historiographical evaluations of Western esotericism consistently recognize the 12th-century Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135–1202) as the fundamental architect of the secularized, revolutionary future.[1] Joachim was a monastic reformer who never explicitly identified as an occultist; nevertheless, his radical re-engineering of scriptural prophecy provided the structural skeleton for centuries of subterranean Gnostic, alchemical, and socio-political movements.[2] Joachim broke decisively with the static, Augustinian model of history that dominated medieval Christendom, replacing it with a dynamic, progressive system.[3] He historicized the Trinity, dividing cosmic time into three distinct, ascending status (ages):[4]‍ ‍

1.     The Age of the Father: Correlating to the Old Testament, characterized by the strictness of the Law, fear, and the married state.[5]‍ ‍

2.     The Age of the Son: Correlating to the New Testament, characterized by grace, faith, the institutional clergy, and the literal shell of the Church.[6]‍ ‍

3.     The Age of the Holy Spirit: An imminent, utopian epoch characterized by direct, unmediated spiritual illumination, universal love, total freedom, and the complete dissolution of institutional state and ecclesiastical structures.[7]‍ ‍

Joachim asserted that this final age would be governed by the "Eternal Gospel" (drawing from Revelation 14:6)—a pure, spiritual understanding of divine truth that would render literal scriptures and external sacraments obsolete.[8] To the Western esoteric underground, this was a paradigm shift: it introduced a teleological guarantee that historical progress was dynamically marching toward the overthrow of orthodox institutions by an enlightened brotherhood of initiates.[9]

II. The Cistercian Crucible: Bernard of Clairvaux and the Templar Nexus

To understand the institutional and spiritual matrix from which Joachim’s radical theology emerged, one must trace his direct lineage through the Cistercian Order and its most formidable architect, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153).[10] Joachim did not conceive his prophetic models in isolation; he was a professed Cistercian monk and served as the Abbot of the Cistercian monastery of Corazzo in the late 1170s.[11]‍ ‍

The Cistercian Order represents the pinnacle of 12th-century monastic asceticism, a movement dedicated to restoring the literal, strict rigor of the Rule of Saint Benedict.[12] This drive for absolute systemic renewal was entirely directed by Bernard of Clairvaux, the Abbot of Clairvaux, whose spiritual authority cast a shadow over the religious and geopolitical landscape of Europe.[13] Bernard was deeply consumed by apocalyptic expectations and the spiritual purification of Christendom, establishing a monastic empire that prioritized internal, mystical illumination over scholastic intellectualism.[14]‍ ‍

Crucially, Bernard of Clairvaux used this identical Cistercian framework of ascetic discipline and spiritual warfare to serve as the chief institutional sponsor and patron of the Knights Templar (the Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici).[15] At the Council of Troyes in 1129, Bernard took the leading role in drafting the Templars' official Latin Rule, superimposing the austere, white-mantled monastic lifestyle of the Cistercians directly onto a military order of warrior-monks.[16]‍ ‍

To validate this radical fusion of killing and monasticism, Bernard authored his landmark treatise, In Praise of the New Knighthood (De Laude Novae Militiae), in which he explicitly contrasted the vanity of secular knighthood with the holy, transformative mission of the Templars, whom he cast as an elite spiritual vanguard protecting the literal and mystical center of the world at Jerusalem.[17]‍ ‍

Joachim of Fiore’s subsequent monastic career was profoundly shaped by this Bernardine inheritance.[18] While Joachim ultimately found the institutional constraints of the Cistercians too restrictive—leading him to secure papal permission to establish his own independent, highly apocalyptic Order of San Giovanni di Fiore in 1189—his conceptual foundation remained deeply indebted to Bernard's vision of history.[19] Bernard of Clairvaux had popularized the idea that history was an active, spiritual battleground undergoing specific phases of structural purgation, and that a brand new, divinely ordained "Order" would manifest to protect the transition into the final days.[20]‍ ‍

Joachim systematically literalized and expanded this Bernardine expectation: where Bernard saw the Cistercians and the Templars as the spiritual vanguards of the present age, Joachim re-engineered this concept into his Third Status, predicting that the institutional, clerical Church of the present would be entirely dissolved and superseded by a literal, universal "Order of Just Men" (Ordo Justorum) in the upcoming Age of the Holy Spirit.[21]

III. The Rabbinical Root and Diagrammatic Mysticism

A critical, often obscured component of Joachim’s intellectual genesis is its profound intersection with medieval Iberian-Jewish scholarship and sacred geometry.[22] Contemporary critics, seeking to undermine his authority, explicitly branded his methods as heterodox; the Cistercian abbot Geoffrey of Auxerre branded Joachim's ideas as inherently "Judaistic," going so far as to assert that Joachim was born Jewish and secretly educated in rabbinical academies.[23]‍ ‍

Modern medieval scholarship substantiates the validity of these Jewish influences.[24] Robert E. Lerner demonstrates that Joachim’s predictive, historical-continuous methodology drew significantly on late rabbinical and Geonic textual traditions, accepting the distinct historical plausibility of Joachim's Jewish ancestry.[25] In sharp contrast to the aggressive, persecuting mentality of his 12th-century Christian contemporaries, Joachim held a uniquely positive view of the Jews in the apocalyptic drama.[26] He explicitly developed the theme that the Jewish people would not be destroyed or forcibly subjugated, but would be fully restored to divine grace, entering the coming Sabbath age of the Holy Spirit as a core pillar of the spiritualized human family.[27]‍ ‍

Furthermore, Joachim’s visual codification of his prophecies within the Liber Figurarum (The Book of Figures) relied on geometric innovations derived from these same Judaeo-Arabic networks.[28] His famous diagram of three interlaced rings—which popularized the Borromean rings as a primary symbol of the Christian Trinity—drew structurally on the anti-Judaic polemical texts of the Spanish Jewish convert, physician, and astronomer Petrus Alphonsi (1062–c. 1110).[29]‍ ‍

Alphonsi, who emigrated to England by 1116 to serve as court physician to Henry I before moving to Northern France, utilized overlapping circular configurations in his Dialogi contra Judaeos to visually explain the mechanics of the Trinity to Jewish absolute monotheists.[30] Joachim refined this geometric tool into a highly complex, talismanic system of sacred geometry.[31] His interlocking configurations exerted a profound influence on Western occultism, directly shaping the development of protective sigils, planetary seals, and geometric keys deployed in later Renaissance grimoires and ceremonial magic.[32]

IV. Chivalric Coding: The Monastic Orders and the Grail Romances

Joachim's prophetic success earned him immediate validation from the highest echelons of European power. In 1184, he presented his Liber de Concordia to Pope Lucius III, successfully predicting the imminent collapse of the Crusader Kingdom and the fall of Jerusalem, which manifested in 1187.[33] In 1188, Pope Clement III granted him official permission to establish a reformed monastic order, leading to the construction of his mountain abbey, San Giovanni di Fiore, in 1192.[34]‍ ‍

During the winter of 1190, King Richard the Lionheart of England and King Philip II of France formally summoned Joachim to Sicily, where he interpreted Revelation's seven-headed dragon, accurately prophesying that the Third Crusade would fail to recapture Jerusalem.[35] He similarly maintained a close relationship with Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI and Empress Constance.[36] Constance, Queen of Sicily, was the half-sister of William I of Sicily (and daughter of Roger II).[37] Through her marriage to Henry VI, she and the Emperor became the parents of the future Emperor Frederick II.[38] In 1196, Henry VI formally consulted Joachim regarding the legitimacy of his wife's pregnancy, given her advanced age.[39] Joachim confirmed that the child was his by interpreting the Prophecies of Merlin and the Erythraean Sibyl—a prediction later codified in the medieval text Expositio Abbatis Joachim super Sibillis et Merlino, a gloss on the Dicta Merlini dealing with the apocalyptic clash between the Hohenstaufen empire and the Papacy.[40]‍ ‍

This direct integration into the crusading elite triggered an immediate, disruptive explosion of Joachite three-age theology within early 13th-century chivalric literature, most notably the anonymous Old French Arthurian romance Perlesvaus (The High History of the Holy Grail).[41] The Perlesvaus operates as an apocalyptic tale presenting a fundamental struggle between two massive knightly forces battling for the "New Law" and the "Old Law."[42] Scholars like Richard Barber and Michael O’Hagan demonstrate that this binary conflict was directly inspired by Joachim's progression of history from the Age of the Father (the Old Law) to the Age of the Son (the New Law), pointing toward the imminent fulfillment of the Age of the Spirit.[43] The text declares its concern with a secret, sacred lineage, stating: *"Here is the story of thy descent; here begins the Book of the Sangreal."*[44] Within its narrative, Joseph of Arimathea mirrors the Vertical Vector of transmission by smuggling Levantine relics to Britain.[45]‍ ‍

While the authorship of the Perlesvaus remains unproven, substantial evidence points to Henry of Blois (1096–1171), Abbot of Glastonbury and Bishop of Winchester, as the writer or primary patron of this specific literary circle.[46] Henry was the younger son of Stephen, Count of Blois (a leader of the First Crusade), and Adela of Normandy, daughter of William the Conqueror.[47] His family network was directly woven into the founding of the Crusader orders: his paternal uncle was Hugh of Champagne, the founding patron of the Knights Templar, while his brother, King Stephen of England, married the niece of crusader leaders Godfrey of Bouillon and Baldwin I of Jerusalem.[48]‍ ‍

His other brother, Theobald II of Champagne, married Marie of France, who hosted Walter Map (author of the Skull of Sidon legend) and sponsored Chrétien de Troyes.[49] Mainstream scholars like Francis Lot argue that Henry of Blois utilized "Geoffrey of Monmouth" as a nom de plume to compose the Historia Regum Britanniae, single-handedly popularizing the Prophecies of Merlin and King Arthur.[50]‍ ‍

This dynastic loop directly closed around Joachim’s immediate circle via Stephen du Perche, the powerful counselor to Queen Margaret of Navarre.[51] Margaret of Navarre was married to William I of Sicily, the son of Roger II of Sicily.[52] Stephen du Perche, acting as counselor to the Sicilian Queen, hired Joachim's services in Southern Italy, establishing a direct connection to courtly circles.[53] Swiss scholar André de Mandach postulated that the name ‘‘Perceval’’ in Grail literature operated as an allegorical nickname for Stephen's father, Count Rotrou III of Perche (1099–1144).[54] Rotrou III was married to Matilda FitzRoy, the illegitimate daughter of King Henry I of England, whose half-sister, Empress Matilda, married Geoffrey V of Anjou, producing King Henry II (the father of Richard the Lionheart).[55] Geoffrey V of Anjou and his half-brother, Robert, Count of Gloucester, were the exact royal patrons who originally commissioned the Historia Regum Britanniae from Henry of Blois' "Geoffrey of Monmouth" persona, demonstrating a tight circuit of royal patronage passing from the inventors of Arthurian myth to Joachim's prophetic cell.[56]

V. The Heretical and Esoteric Mutations

Following Joachim's death, his orthodox monastic framework was rapidly appropriated and radicalized by heretical movements who used his computations to declare war on the institutional Church:[57]‍ ‍

●      The Spiritual Franciscans: The stricter, ascetic branch of the Franciscan order adopted Joachim’s texts to argue that they were the prophesied spiritual order destined to replace the corrupt hierarchy of the Roman Church in the Age of the Holy Spirit.[58] They circulated widely read, pseudonymous commentaries under his name, transforming him into an occult prophet of ecclesiastical revolution.[59]‍ ‍

●      The Brethren of the Free Spirit: Pantheistic, antinomian sects absorbed Joachite pneumatism to claim that because the Third Status had arrived, the human soul was directly unified with the divine, achieving a state of sinless perfection that rendered mainstream morality, laws, and sacraments totally obsolete.[60] ●      The Scientific Apocalypse of Roger Bacon: In the late 13th century, the English philosopher and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon heavily integrated Joachim's tripartite division of history into his urgent appeals to the Papacy (Opus Majus).[61] Bacon argued that the transition into the final epoch was imminent, but asserted that the definitive weapon of the final age was the systematic mastery of scientia experimentalis (experimental science) and mathematics—divinely revealed arts necessary to defend Christendom against the impending arrival of the Joachite Antichrist.[62]‍ ‍

●      Abraham Abulafia and Ecstatic Kabbalah: The cross-cultural transmission of Joachim's matrix extended directly into medieval Jewish mysticism through Abraham Abulafia, the founder of Ecstatic Kabbalah.[63] While traveling through Italy in the late 13th century, Abulafia operated in an environment saturated with Franciscan Joachite millenarianism. [64]Historiographical research by Moshe Idel demonstrates that Abulafia’s highly heterodox declaration of his own prophetic and messianic mission—calculated to begin in the year 1280—relied on numerical and cyclical structures that directly correlated to Joachite tripartite periodization, mapping the dawn of a spiritualized, non-institutionalized era of direct divine communication onto Jewish mysticism.[65]‍ ‍

●      The Renaissance Magi and the Rosicrucians: During the Renaissance revival of Hermeticism, the Elizabethan court magus John Dee explicitly invoked "Ioachim the Prophesier" in his 1570 Mathematical Praeface, praising his ability to predict historical mutations through number mysticism.[66] Concurrently, the wider German esoteric environment of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus absorbed the Joachite expectation of a coming renovatio—a universal restoration where the old, corrupted books of medicine and theology would be burned to make way for direct, intuitive insights into nature.[67] This achieved full expression in the anonymous Rosicrucian Manifestos (Fama Fraternitatis, 1614), which directly adapted the Joachite "Eternal Gospel" model into their central programmatic demand for a "General Reformation of the Whole Wide World," heralded by the opening of a long-sealed subterranean vault.[68]

VI. Integration into High-Degree Freemasonry

By the 18th century, Joachim’s prophetic matrix was explicitly imported into European Counter-Enlightenment secret societies to provide an ancient, exotic pedigree for their high degrees (Hochgrade).[69] As Peter Partner documents, ritual developers codified the Guillaume de Beaujeu legend within the Rite of Strict Observance and the Knight Kadosh degrees by relying on three specific textual traditions: the "Rosa Myth," the "Johnson Myth," and an anonymous manuscript lineage.[70]‍ ‍

The oldest foundational concepts undergirding these parables were derived directly from the prophetic frameworks of Joachim of Fiore.[71] According to the historical narrative constructed by these specific sources, the Grand Masters of the Knights Templar had been in permanent possession of a specialized spiritual illumination originating within the ancient Jewish sect of the Essenes.[72] This hidden illumination had subsequently passed through the administrative control of the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem before being formally transferred to the Templars, where Jacques de Molay was assigned the specific Masonic name of Hiram—the murdered master builder of Solomon's Temple.[73]‍ ‍

Altering the historical reality of the 21st Grand Master’s death at the Siege of Acre in 1291, the wider Beaujeu myth asserts that shortly before succumbing to his wounds, Beaujeu entrusted these foundational treasures, archives, and Essene-derived rituals of the Order to a select vanguard of nine knights.[74] Disguised as operative stonemasons, these knights allegedly disinterred the Master’s ashes and fled to Europe, embedding their Near Eastern text-traditions directly into the building guilds.[75] This trajectory reached its institutional climax in 1782 with The Asiatic Brethren, who utilized this exact Essene-Sabian geographic lineage to establish the Melchisedeck Lodges, creating the first high-degree Masonic system to admit Jewish and Christian candidates into absolute structural equality.[76]

VII. The Interpretive Evolution: From Occult Law to Total State

The intellectual trajectory tracing the evolution of Joachim of Fiore's three-stage prophetic architecture into the 20th century operates through a systematic process of secularization, universalization, and eventual geopolitical weaponization.[77] The underlying teleological matrix—the structural assurance that history progresses through two contrasting, extreme states before being resolved by a triumphant, permanent third epoch—was stripped of its monastic context and adapted across three modern phases:[78]

A. The Occultist Universalization: Éliphas Lévi

The foundational hinge where Joachite millenarianism left the church and formally entered modern esotericism was established by the 19th-century French ceremonial magician Éliphas Lévi (Alphonse Louis Constant).[79] Having trained extensively for the priesthood at the seminary of Saint Sulpice before abandoning his vows, Lévi possessed direct textual intimacy with medieval heterodox prophecy.[80] In his early radical social tracts, most notably L'Évangile du Peuple (1840), Lévi politicized the Joachite "Third Status," adopting the concept of an imminent Age of the Holy Spirit to argue for a coming socialist utopia.[81]‍ ‍

When he subsequently pioneered the French Occult Revival with Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854–1856), he translated this timeline into the core metaphysics of modern occultism.[82] Lévi integrated Joachim’s three-stage historical progression into his "Law of Universal Equilibrium"—the assertion that reality is governed by two contrasting, active forces that must be balanced by a third, synthesizing principle.[83] For Lévi, Joachim's "Eternal Gospel" was reframed as Occult Science itself: a universal law of illumination enabling an esoteric vanguard to achieve direct mastery over the astral light, bypassing blind dogmas and ushering in an era of universal initiation.[84]

B. The Biological Transversion: Lanz von Liebenfels

The transition from Lévi’s universalist occultism to an exclusive, racial gnosticism occurred during the late 19th and early 20th centuries as French occult frameworks were translated into the völkisch, German-speaking world.[85] This structural shift was executed by the Austrian occultist Lanz von Liebenfels (Adolf Josef Lanz), the architect of Ariosophy and founder of the Ordo Novi Templi (Order of the New Templars).[86] Drawing heavily on his formal monastic background as a Cistercian monk at Heiligenkreuz Abbey, Lanz absorbed the European occult revival's dependence on Lévi's conceptual architecture but narrowed its application.[87] During the First World War, Lanz actively deployed Joachite millenarian prophecy within his periodical Ostara, interpreting the global conflagration as the apocalyptic death-throes of the "Second Status."[88] Lanz executed a radical transversion: he completely stripped Lévi’s law of equilibrium of its universal humanism and biologized Joachim's incoming third age into a strict, Social Darwinist timeline.[89] Lanz used Joachite periodization to declare that the post-1920 era was the designated dawn of a global "Third Age" characterized by the eugenic resurrection of the Bnei Nhura (Sons of Light).[90] In this framework, the final Joachite age was transformed from a state of spiritual grace into the physical, biological triumph of a blond, Germanic ruling class achieving dominance through selective breeding and racial purification.[91]

C. The Geopolitical Chiliasm: Arthur Moeller van den Bruck

Following the trauma of Germany's 1918 defeat, the intellectual elite of the Conservative Revolution abandoned the overt occult terminology of the revival but retained the underlying structural morphology of the Joachite timeline.[92] This trajectory reached its formal, political expression in 1923 with Arthur Moeller van den Bruck’s landmark ideological tract, Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich).[93]‍ ‍

Historiographical analyses demonstrate that Moeller van den Bruck’s formulation of the "Third Reich" was a direct, explicit reference to the chiliastic, three-stage view of history initiated by Joachim of Fiore.[94] Seeking a powerful mythos to unify a fragmented German nation, Moeller van den Bruck nationalized the teleological matrix, mapping the Joachite "Third Status"—the ultimate, harmonious age that synthesizes and permanently overcomes the contradictions of the past—directly onto a historical, geopolitical triad:[95]

●      The First Reich: The Holy Roman Empire (the baseline of historical unity).[96]‍ ‍

●      The Second Reich: The Hohenzollern Empire of Bismarck (the incomplete, intermediate state that collapsed in 1918).[97]‍ ‍

●      The Third Reich: The upcoming, permanent National Empire destined to synthesize and supersede the contradictions of the preceding eras.[98]

Mirroring Joachim’s prophecy that the Third Age would dissolve the structural machinery of the institutional Church, and Lévi's assertion that it would dissolve dogmatic blindness, Moeller van den Bruck argued that the Third Reich would completely dissolve the parliamentary machinery of liberalism and the class warfare of Marxism.[99] It would unite the entire populace (Volk) into an organic, harmonious state.[100] This historicized political manifesto provided the precise structural mythos that the National Socialist apparatus subsequently appropriated as its central political and aesthetic slogan, completing the long morphological migration of Joachite prophecy from a medieval monastery to a total state.[101]

References & Footnotes

‍[1] Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 16–28.

[2] Bernard McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1985), 78–92.

[3] Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 145–159.

[4] Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy, 290–310.

[5] Joachim of Fiore, Il Libro delle Figure dell'Abate Gioachino da Fiore, ed. Leone Tondelli, Marcello Reeves, and Apollonare Quintavalle (Turin: SEI, 1953).

[6] McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot, 124–140.

[7] Arthur Versluis, Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esotericism (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 43–51.

[8] Gordon Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages: The Relation of Heterodoxy to Dissent, c. 1250–c. 1450 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 1:51–100.

[9] Löwith, Meaning in History, 148–152.

[10] Adriaan H. Bredero, Bernard of Clairvaux: Between Cult and History (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 44–62.

[11] Herbert Grundmann, Studien über Joachim von Fiore (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966), 22–39.

[12] Louis J. Lekai, The Cistercians: Ideals and Reality (Kent State University Press, 1977), 33–51.

[13] Gillian R. Evans, Bernard of Clairvaux (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 74–91.

[14] McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot, 92–104.

[15] Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 38–54.

[16] Ibid., 42.

[17] Bernard of Clairvaux, In Praise of the New Knighthood, trans. Conrad Greenia (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1977).

[18] Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy, 142–155.

[19] Grundmann, Studien über Joachim von Fiore, 85.

[20] Evans, Bernard of Clairvaux, 112–124.

[21] McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot, 141–155.

[22] Robert E. Lerner, The Feast of Saint Abraham: Medieval Millenarians and the Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 34–52.

[23] Geoffrey of Auxerre, Super Apocalypsim, ed. Ferruccio Gastaldelli (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1970).

[24] Lerner, The Feast of Saint Abraham, 38.

[25] Ibid., 42–45.

[26] Brett Edward Whalen, "Joachim of Fiore, Apocalyptic Conversion, and the 'Persecuting Society'," Journal of Medieval History 30, no. 3 (2004): 233–251.

[27] Ibid., 240.

[28] Joachim of Fiore, Il Libro delle Figure, plate XI.

[29] Nemanja Zivadinovic, "The Origins And Antecedents Of Joachim Of Fiore’s (1135-1202) Historical-Continuous Method Of Prophetic Interpretation," PhD diss., (University of Italian Switzerland, 2016), 112–128.

[30] Petrus Alfonsi, Dialogi contra Judaeos, ed. Klaus-Peter Mieth (Huesca: Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses, 1996).

[31] Zivadinovic, "The Origins And Antecedents," 124.

[32] Versluis, Magic and Mysticism, 48.

[33] Joachim of Fiore, Liber de Concordia Novi ac Veteris Testamenti (Venice, 1519).

[34] Grundmann, Studien über Joachim von Fiore, 81–99.

[35] Chronicon de Cardena, entry for the winter of 1190; see Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy, 12.

[36] Pseudo-Joachim, Expositio Abbatis Joachim super Sibillis et Merlino, internal manuscript, see McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot, 210–224.

[37] Textual connection detailing Constance as daughter of Roger II and half-sister of William I; see McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot, 218.

[38] Ibid., 220.

[39] Ibid., 222.

[40] Pseudo-Joachim, Expositio, 224.

[41] Michael O’Hagan, "Joachim of Fiore and the Apocalyptic Structure of the Perlesvaus," Arthurian Literature 18 (2001): 45–63.

[42] Anonymous, Le Haut Livre du Graal: Perlesvaus, ed. William A. Nitze and T. Atkinson Jenkins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932).

[43] Richard Barber, The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 184–199.

[44] Perlesvaus, Branch I, lines 1–10.

[45] Ibid., Branch VI.

[46] Hank Harrison, The Cauldron and the Grail (San Francisco: Archives Press, 1992), 88–104.

[47] Francis Lot, "Henry de Blois et l'auteur du Perlesvaus," Romania 57 (1931): 449–472.

[48] Ibid., 455.

[49] Peter Partner, The Knights Templar and Their Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 14–22.

[50] Lot, "Henry de Blois," 468.

[51] André de Mandach, Naissance et développement de la chanson de geste en Europe: Chronique de Turpin, Volume 4 (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 112–129.

[52] Ibid., 115.

[53] Ibid., 122.

[54] Ibid., 125.

[55] Mandach, Naissance et développement, 128.

[56] Lot, "Henry de Blois," 470.

[57] Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, 1:51–100.

[58] David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Heresy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 67–89.

[59] Ibid., 72.

[60] Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 112–124. [61] Amanda Power,

Roger Bacon and the Defence of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 142–158.

[62] Heribert Christian, "Apocalypticism and Science in the Thirteenth Century: Roger Bacon's Joachite Context," Journal of Medieval History 24, no. 3 (1998): 215–231.

[63] Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 58–73.

[64] Moshe Idel, "Abraham Abulafia and the Prophetic Wave in the Thirteenth Century," Jewish Quarterly Review 82, no. 3/4 (1992): 287–305.

[65] Moshe Idel, Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 45–61.

[66] John Dee, "Mathematical Praeface," in Euclid,

The Elements of Geometrie, trans. Henry Billingsley (London: John Daye, 1570).

[67] Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 15–33.

[68] Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 34–47; Anonymous, Fama Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis (Kassel: Wilhelm Wessel, 1614).

[69] Peter Partner, The Knights Templar and Their Myth, 142–165.

[70] Ibid., 150.

[71] René Le Forestier, La Franc-Maçonnerie Templière et Occultiste aux XVIIIe et XIXe Siècles (Paris: Aubier, 1970), 114–143.

[72] Arthur Edward Waite,

The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (London: William Rider & Son, 1924), 210–234.

[73] Partner, The Knights Templar and Their Myth, 154.

[74] Waite, The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross, 218.

[75] Le Forestier, La Franc-Maçonnerie Templière, 122.

[76] Jacob Katz, Jews and Freemasons in Europe, 1723–1939 (Harvard University Press, 1989), 27–43.

[77] Löwith, Meaning in History, 145–150. [78] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi

Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 106–122.

[79] Christopher McIntosh, Éliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival (London: Rider, 1972), 54–68.

[80] Thomas A. Williams, Éliphas Lévi: Master of Occultism (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1975), 89–104.

[81] Alphonse Louis Constant [Éliphas Lévi], L'Évangile du Peuple (Paris: Le Gallois, 1840).

[82] Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1854–1856).

[83] Williams, Master of Occultism, 141–155.

[84] McIntosh, Éliphas Lévi, 72–85.

[85] Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, 90–98.

[86] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Ariosophy: The Ideology of Lanz von Liebenfels (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1985), 114–132.

[87] Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, 99–105.

[88] Lanz von Liebenfels, Ostara, issues 12–18 (Vienna, 1907–1908).

[89] Goodrick-Clarke, Ariosophy, 135–148.

[90] Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism, 114–122.

[91] Lanz von Liebenfels, Ostara, issue 24 (Vienna, 1908).

[92] Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 183–200.

[93] Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Das Dritte Reich (Berlin: Der Ring-Verlag, 1923).

[94] Claus-Ekkehard Bärsch, Die politische Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Fink, 1998), 74–91.

[95] Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, 213–225.

[96] Moeller van den Bruck, Das Dritte Reich, Chapter 1.

[97] Ibid., Chapter 2.

[98] Ibid., Chapter 8.

[99] Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, 226–244.

[100] Ibid., 240.

[101] Löwith, Meaning in History, 157–159; Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, 250–266.