Witches Hotline!

[font=Comic Sans MS]The Biblical source of the holy lance is John 19:34: "One of the soldiers, with a spear, pierced his side, and immediately came there out blood and water." The name of this centurion, Longinus, occurs only in the apocryphal Acts of Pilate. The legend had extensive currency in the Middle Ages, especially following the discovery of the relic at Antioch. Christian monarchs were keen to get their hands on it. So was Adolf Hitler. In Mein Kampf he described the moment when he first stood before it, during a guided visit to the Hofburg Museum (Hapsburg Treasure House) in Vienna. At the time he was barely twenty years old, a miserable street artist who peddled hand-painted postcards. One day he fell in with a group of foreign politicians on a complimentary visit to the Hofburg. When they entered a small exhibition room called the Weltliche Schatzkammer, Hitler found himself standing a few feet away from the object that was to become his consuming obsession:

"These foreigners stopped almost immediately in front of where I was standing, while their guide pointed to an ancient Spearhead. At first I didn't even bother to listen to what this expert had to say about it, merely regarding the presence of the party as an intrusion into my own despairing thoughts. And then I heard the words which were to change my whole life: "There is a legend associated with this spear that whoever claims it, and solves its secrets, holds the destiny of the world in his hands for good or evil."

From that moment, Hitler was convinced that he alone was destined to claim the relic, the lance of Longinus that had pierced the side of Christ (called the Maurice Spear, only the head preserved, in two parts). The first thing Hitler did upon the annexation of Austria in 1938 was to walk into the Hofburg and take the spear into his hands, nearly 30 years after he first set eyes on it.
It would perhaps not be an exaggeration to say that the "Spear of Destiny," as it has been called, is the most potent magico--religious relic on this planet. Today the spear figures in dozens of fantasy games fervently played out on the Internet. Google it.

After the fall of Berlin in 1945, the Maurice Spear was returned for safekeeping to the museum room where Hitler had first seen it. It rests there to this day.

Wolfram's bleeding lance can teach us a lot about paternal power, but its identification with the spear that pierced the side of Jesus is a consummate twist. It is more than likely that Wolfram had one eye on this Crusader relic and the other on the Irish prototype when he invented this prop. It would have been extremely dangerous for him to have made the literal identification with the spear of Longinus, for he clearly states that the spear is a weapon of black magic, forged by a necromancer from the East. This would imply that the healing power of the blood attributed uniquely to Christ was nothing other than a trick of black magic.

And just so it may well be.[/font]