the idea that the Templars had the goal of establishing an Aryan empire in the entire Mediterranean area. He interpreted the persecution of the Templars from 1312 as a triumph of racially inferior people whose aim was to undermine the rule and purity of the Aryan race. In addition, he was convinced that the Catholic Church had been suppressing true Christian teaching since that time, as the core of which he regarded his ideas of a racial struggle. He therefore saw his own order as a new beginning of the crusade against lower races that had been interrupted for centuries. In 1907 Lanz acquired the ruins of the small Werfenstein Castle near Grein in Upper Austria as the priory of the Order. In the same year he published a program of the Order, in which he described it as an association of Aryans whose aims were to promote racial consciousness through genealogical and heraldic research, through beauty pageants, and through the To promote the establishment of racially exemplary states in underdeveloped regions of the world. For the order he developed his own liturgy and ceremonies. The rules of the order stipulated that only blondee and blue-eyed men were allowed to join, who also had to meet other Aryan criteria, which Lanz described in his series of publications Ostara. A hierarchy was established within the order based on (supposed) racial purity. On Christmas Day 1907, Lanz hoisted two flags on the tower of his Order's headquarters: one with the coat of arms of the von Liebenfels family, an aristocratic family that presumably died out around 1790 and that he claimed to be descendants of, and one with a swastika, which was already a Volkish popular symbol. From 1908 public festivals were held on Werfenstein. Several hundred guests traveled by steamboat on the Danube, where the castle is located, and were greeted with cannon shots, after which they celebrated extensively in the castle courtyard. This found great resonance in the national press and stimulated interest in Lanz's publications. Lanz continued to work on the ceremonies and composed devotional songs and verses. He let the castle u.a. decorated with solemn representations of Hugues de Payens, the first Grand Master of the Templars, and with representations of the "monkeys" who, in his theozoology, were regarded as the origin of the lower races. In 1915 and 1916 a New Templar Breviary was published in two